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“That house has become a mausoleum,” Idris Nasr tells his daughter, Ava, as he breaks the news that he is selling the family’s ancestral home in Beirut. In Ava’s mind, the house comes to life through memory: she feels the swampy summer heat and visualizes walls speckled with the blood of mosquitos. But Idris sees it differently. “The life has been taken out of it,” he says.

Home is a tenuous concept in Hala Alyan’s second novel, The Arsonist’s City, a sweeping family saga that examines the insidious long shadow of war. The Nasr family—made up of a Lebanese father, Syrian mother, and three American children—live in far-flung places: Austin, Brooklyn, Beirut, and Blythe, a small town in California. However distant they are from one another, and however far they might be from Beirut, they cannot escape the histories of violence that have left their family reckoning with intergenerational trauma. When they return to Beirut to mark the sale of their family home, long-held secrets and difficult memories begin to unravel, and political tensions in Lebanon escalate into thawra (revolution). 

An award-winning Palestian American poet, clinical psychologist, and writer, Hala Alyan brings her talents to examine the ongoing crisis of Palestinian displacement in The Arsonist’s City through deeply imagined characters, place-based descriptions that teem with life, and attention to conflicts from past to present day. Over Zoom, we talked about how Alyan’s work as a clinical psychologist serves her fiction, the idea of home, the intimacy that secrets can offer, and the effects of intergenerational trauma. 

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Jacqueline Alnes: There is a line early in the novel, “They’d hurt that young man for no reason other than that people were hurting people.” One of the most poignant parts of this book for me is the ways you so deftly capture both the immediate impact of violence as well as the way that trauma radiates outward, oftentimes for generations. What draws you to write about all these different wounds?

Hala Alyan: The ways in which sociopolitical turmoil, occupation, and war trauma have spidered their way through my family’s history is something that I definitely keep gravitating back towards. It is a story that I feel the reverberations of on a daily basis, even as someone who is so privileged and so sheltered. I’m in Brooklyn now, I’m in a safe place, and my family is safe––thank God––but there are ways in which I see traumatic histories play out in myself, my family, and my community, in the anxieties that people have, in the ways that people are waiting for the other shoe to drop, in the ways that there is a deep mistrust of history, of certain institutions, of certain countries, of certain parts of the world. There’s a defeatedness in a lot of people I know around certain countries in my home region who wonder: Will those places ever be revived? Will they ever be actual options of places to live? 

It’s also something I see a lot in clinical work. As a therapist, I work a lot with immigrants, children of immigrants, and folks that have been displaced. A generation later, you see how traumatic histories have trickled down to the folks that never lived in a war-torn zone or have never actually directly interacted with their parents’ house or their grandparents’ house. You see how that intergenerational trauma can touch even the most sheltered, comfortable, suburban kid. If a part of the world has been occupied or colonized, you never fully shed yourself from those shackles. You have the shadow of that for many generations.

JA: Having a safe place to live is a theme that resonates so powerfully throughout the book. Something that I kept thinking about is that homes are often viewed as concrete or permanent in some way, but in the book, some of them are the last vestiges of a wealth that no longer exists. Or, they’re structures that are beautiful and laden with generations of money, but they are located in precarious spaces. 

HA: They aren’t safe. That’s something I think about a lot. You can have these ancestral homes that are gorgeous and so meaningful and such a part of your lineage, but if they are in a place where you can’t safely live or visit, then what are they but walls and plaster?

JA: When you mention working with people in the suburbs who still carry intergenerational trauma, I found it interesting that in the book we visit such a sprawl of places: Austin, Brooklyn, Beirut, and a small town in California, Blythe. How do you approach writing about place and home? 

HA: I constantly lament the fact that there isn’t enough life for any of us to spend our youth in like ten different places. I am someone, for example, who always felt like I was supposed to live in Boston. I’m very attached to the idea, and I don’t know why. Same thing with Santa Fe and Tucson; I feel like I’m supposed to be in the Southwest. I’m someone who thinks a lot about factored timelines and the way that if you took this turn and you ended up in this place, you’d live an entirely different life. Not only would you have a different history, but your children would have a different history. Place colors the texture and the fabric of everyday life and zooming out also changes the entire trajectory of what happens to you: the opportunities you have, the people you fall in love with, where you go to school, etc.

This book feels to me like a love letter to Beirut. 

JA: The novel alternates between present day and the 1960’s through the 1980’s. What drew you to those time periods? 

If a part of the world has been occupied or colonized, you never fully shed yourself from those shackles. You have the shadow of that for many generations.

HA: I knew I wanted it to end in present day and I knew I wanted it to span the civil war, so in some ways, those became logistical markers; if I had a character coming of age as the civil war is happening, I would have to adjust the years accordingly. You see this in writers who write about things close to home, I’m fascinated with my parents’ generation. I’m interested in folks who moved to the States in the ‘70s and ‘80s. My parents didn’t move until ‘91, but people who moved during that era fascinate me. It was a time when there was still a high demand on assimilation. You got rid of your accent, taught your kid English; those were values that were being prioritized and communicated to immigrants and people seeking asylum. It’s interesting to really get inside the families that had that pressure. If they had moved to Chicago or New York City, it would have been a different story. But in a small town, the pressure to assimilate is higher.

JA: I felt like the present was a place in the novel where you could lean into queerness. 

HA: Naj was one of the first characters I wrote and it was interesting to think about these different tension points of a queer character who is living very authentically to herself, but is in a position where telling her family doesn’t feel like it’s feasible. Playing with that tension also was important for me because there is this narrative––and it’s mostly a Western narrative–—that coming out is the graduation of queerness, that the end goal or destination of being queer is to come out, and I don’t think that’s something that resonates with people in different cultural backgrounds. 

There are certainly people who are Muslim and Arab who want to ultimately come out, but imposing that narrative on people gets dicey. Writing a character who does live in this borderland space––and in a lot of ways is fulfilled in it––was really interesting.

JA: The book opens with Zakaria, who lives in the refugee camps outside of Beirut, and an epigraph from Svetlana Boym: “the main feature of exile is a double conscience…a constant bifurcation.” You have written about the Palestinian diaspora in your previous work. What aspects of this ongoing crisis did this book in particular allow you to explore?

HA: In some ways, Palestine is the shadow of the book; Palestine trails story. It’s in many ways the most central plot and one of the most central characters, but the book doesn’t center straightforwardly Palestinian characters or take place in Palestine. I was called upon to research these other countries and conflicts in the rest of the region. I have put a lot of attention on Palestine, and I always will, but writing this book enabled me to learn more about the Lebanese Civil War. I lived in Lebanon for a long time, I’ve taken all the classes, I read all the books, but there is still so much that is incredibly nuanced. The version of history you get depends upon the person who is telling it. Because it was a conflict so marked by sectarianism, many people, even now, will tell different stories of who started the civil war. It enabled me to research that more, to speak with people from different groups, and it also enabled me to think about that region as a gestalt. 

These borders are arbitrary. The land kisses each other, these places are close to each other, and what happens in one happens in the others. What happens in Palestine spills over to Lebanon, spills over to Syria. What happens to Syria––I mean, we just saw this in the last decade. Their fates feel inexorably linked. This book allowed me to dig deeper into the history of the region as a whole and just to think more about this relationship between sister countries that have this reciprocal, sometimes mutually symbiotic, and at times a really divided dynamic. It let me dig into it in a way I hadn’t before.

JA: Why was it important to you to write this book now? 

HA: When I finished writing this book, the revolution in Lebanon had not begun. The publication date got pushed back, which enabled me to go back and write things in. It was tricky. There was the inflation, the hunger, the poverty that people are experiencing, and I kept needing just one more paragraph; I felt an intense responsibility to capture what was happening in Lebanon. The publishers were very accommodating and generous, but they reminded me that at some point the story has to end; you’re not going to know what happens next. 

JA: That’s so interesting. In fiction, I feel like there are varying degrees to which you have to be married to “truth,” however we want to define that. How much of an allegiance did you feel toward representing the world accurately in this book, even though it’s a novel?

There’s a defeatedness in a lot of people I know in my home region who wonder: Will those places ever be revived? Will they ever be actual options of places to live?

HA: I’ve got to be honest with you: I’ve never had any issues playing fast and loose with things in fiction. But, what happened in Lebanon post-thawra (revolution) starting, was such a different chapter. It set such a different tenor for the country, and set into motion so many unprecedented things, that I knew I had to allude to it. If I didn’t, it would have been really odd to anyone who knows anything about Lebanon. 

Normally, I try to get the facts right so I speak with historians, and I do my research, but the past is much easier; the past is static. Writing about something that was dynamically shifting as I was doing edits was a whole different experience.

JA: They vary from being trivial to not, and some are only revealed when a body can no longer physically hold them. What intrigues you about this withholding of information, which, in itself, seems like a kind of an intimacy?

HA: I am fascinated with why we keep secrets and fascinated by how people decide what the truth is. I’m less interested in how people lie to other people than I am in how people lie to themselves. I am interested in how people decide what needs to be hidden and how it’s almost always tied to some narrative or some story they have about what will be accepted or loved. It’s very rarely tied in reality. It’s connected to their own story about what’s okay and what’s not okay. Writing that out is so gratifying to me.

I’m also, particularly with families, fascinated by the ways that the secrets we keep in families trickle down across generations. So the secrets that my great-grandmother might have kept, have impacted me. They have shot out backwards and forwards. They did something with the trust that my great-grandmother had with her mother and how that trickled down to my grandmother and mother. We learn how to hide things from the people we grow up with. We learn how open we are or how guarded we are from our families or caretakers. This idea that something that happened way before you were born can have a direct influence on you and how you move through the world –– what you share and what you don’t –– is such fertile territory to explore.

JA: I was going to ask if that’s why you love writing these rich, intergenerational stories.

You can have these ancestral homes that are so meaningful, but if they are in a place where you can’t safely live or visit, then what are they but walls and plaster?

HA: Totally. I think this is where psychology comes in. Something that happens to you is going to impact like three generations later. It just is. There is the epigenetic passing of trauma, but then also these subtle things that we pass down and inherit. This isn’t exclusive to people you’re genetically linked to; it’s also caretakers. We inherit things emotionally and psychologically from people. The fact that that is something I really believe means that the idea that something can go wrong at some point and then fast forward to see how something plays out means that it requires a family to really explore. You have to have several generations to see how a secret plays out so that’s why I think I end up writing these sweeping, long stories.

JA: I’m sure you are asked this often all the time, but you are a clinical psychologist who specialized in trauma and addiction work while earning your PhD. How does that inform your writing and the stories you’re drawn to? 

HA: The training that you have to do in order to be a psychologist has been super useful to me as a writer. When you meet somebody for the first time as a therapist, you are taking a few fragmented, unconnected pieces of a story, and someone’s history, and over the few months or however long, you’re trying to help that person create a cohesive narrative. That’s very similar to writing a story: fiction, nonfiction, whatever. You have pieces of interests, hypotheses, interests of characters, and then you’re trying to create something that’s whole.

That kind of sleuthing feels very similar, as do the questions that you ask yourself when you’re doing therapy that have to do with client motivations: why do people do the things they do? People are constantly doing things that don’t make sense from the outside. Both you and I, in the span of the next two days, are going to do things that seem super irrational to people outside of us. There are such multifaceted, complex reasons for why people do things. To write good characters, you have to ask those questions about what moves somebody and what are a person’s desires and feelings and what they are moving toward.

The post War Is a Trauma That Follows Us from Home to Home appeared first on Electric Literature.

Greek and Roman mythology has been a constant source of inspiration for poets down the centuries. Whether it’s tragic figures or love stories, or tales of magic and the supernatural, classical myths have retained their power down the millennia, and poets have often made use of these memorable tales when […]

I bought the wrong type of yoghurt the other day, which, in the quantity I buy yoghurt (1kg tubs, rather than measly 500g pots; sometimes I buy two tubs, good for about eight days of breakfasts, to save myself an unnecessary run to the shop, because as we both know going to the shop right now is about as lethal as hopping across a minefield, and also because there is something very stark and depressing about a trip to the shop for a singular item, something that speaks of emergency – note the face lone men pull when queueing with just a single four-pack of toilet paper under the arm – and also because yoghurt is most often a breakfast foodstuff, and knowing you have run out of it, before breakfast, necessitates a solo run to the shop, before breakfast, which is something that I am unwilling or at least unhappy to do until I have eaten, breakfast. So you see how buying two kilogram tubs of yoghurt sidesteps a situation where I either have milk with my granola or go to the shop in my pyjamas for yoghurt only, either way spoiling my day before it has truly begun), has the potential to ruin my entire week. The yoghurt I had bought was strained Turkish yoghurt; the yoghurt I had intended was smooth Greek-style. As I portioned it out, I was struck by the micro-level difference between the two yoghurts – more or less the same recipe, bisected by the Aegean Sea – which should be identical but, for whatever cultural reasons, are not. Turkish strained yoghurt, I observed, tends to coagulate in a firm clump, and accrue a green-yellow ‘sweat’ on top of it when left to sit overnight in the fridge; Greek-style, creamier and richer somehow, has a more clotted cream mouthfeel I personally prefer, but lacks that same smack of tang. ‘Hmm’, I thought, as I stood at my kitchen island and marvelled at the differences between two yoghurts, ‘the difference between Greek and Turkish yoghurt: that is very interesting.’ I was wrong about this: nothing is fascinating about yoghurt.

Here’s the thing that reading The Mezzanine (or re-reading: this was my third trip through¹) quietly convinces you: that every thought you have is deeply profound. On its surface, it’s a book about a man going about chores on his lunch break, buying shoelaces, milk, a cookie and a hotdog, having a piss and then going back to the office up a sparkling and newly cleaned escalator. And that is it. But obviously that’s not it, because beneath that, in between all that, are frenzied and fluttering trains of thought that weave in and out of each other, on everything from straws (paper vs. plastic) to shopping bags to the gurgling horror of chewing food and drinking milk at the same time, to marvelling, earnestly, at how beautiful the rust and dust and garbage of our world can possibly look against a clean background. It’s about following that particular flavour of thoughts – the ones that occupy a bored or chore-doing mind, but never become concrete enough to say out loud, that never accrue enough significance to explain to another human being – to their natural conclusion. It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either. No matter how smart we are, no matter how many master’s degrees we earn or philosophy we read, we are just animals that evolved enough anxiety to worry about whether the man at the urinal two stalls over has noticed we haven’t started peeing yet.

One thought I have raised – jewel-like, from the thought-swamp that is my brain – is this: The Mezzanine is a coming-of-age novel, and arguably one of the best.² Baker’s protagonist Howie is at a teetering stage of young adulthood – three years out of college, at his first job and in the early salad days of his first ever big relationship, friendless and stranded in a mediocre office position that seems to offer no opportunities to either go up or down – a sort of beige morass of life, one you get to when you finally escape adolescence and education and realise, after your 36th straight paycheck hits, that you haven’t graduated instantly into a vibrant and exciting adult existence, but instead the same mediocrity that made your dad zone out in front of the telly for an uninterrupted hour when he used to come home from whatever bullshit he did for work. The titular mezzanine on which Howie’s office is set is a viable metaphor for the stage he’s at in his life during the book: a sort of shelf to pause on, a halfway step between the electric first few days of Technical Adulthood and a year or two of experience away from the realities of Actual Adulthood, caught in a limbo in between.  He is obsessed with the idea of scrubbing out childhood and emerging smoothly into an adult brain, as if it’s ever been that easy. It’s coming-of-age by choice: a hardcore rejection of childishness, by having grown-up thoughts like, ‘That janitor has found an interesting way of cleaning an escalator’.

This is what makes The Mezzanine both (i.) deeply funny and (ii.) oddly reassuring: it’s hard to think of any example in the vast archives of literature that so effortlessly characterise those half-thoughts we all have when our mind starts to wander. When I was a kid – and I’ve obviously never told anyone this, because it is insane – I used to have this game I would play with myself when the school bus would run through the last ten minutes of the route, through the busy streets up to my school: seeing other children walking along in their backpacks and holding their huge cased instruments, I would imagine I was holding a huge samurai sword firmly out of the bus window, which – with the momentum of the bus, plus the exquisite sharpness of the sword – would (painlessly) of course slice every person it came across (plus the metal roofs of any nearby cars, scraping open like a tin of fish being peeled apart) neatly in half. If I had ever vocalised that thought to anyone – a school nurse, perhaps; a diagnostic professional – then I would probably be typing this to you with the single fingertips allowed to jut out of the ends of my straitjacket, from the deep inner core of a secure facility. But in The Mezzanine I see these thoughts made flesh, given legitimacy: when Howie hums and rumbles up the escalator he’s spent the best part of two chapters being obsessed with – watching as it is cleaned, dreading an interaction from a half-colleague travelling down the other way – he plays an internal game to see if he can travel the entire length of the trip upwards without anyone stepping on to the stairs at the bottom, and receives a self-inflicted psychic wound when he loses. We are all doing stupid humdrum nonsense like this, every second of every day. But no other book comes close to actualising it.

I was worried that, dipping into The Mezzanine for another (a third!) read, that it would start to creak and feel dated: that, in the particular moment of the attention economy we are living through, a book celebrating the beauty of a wandering mind on a clear-skied lunch hour, something no one has really had since push notifications were invented, would feel as musty and ancient a book about ‘petticoats’. Instead, the opposite: The Mezzanine still feels like a current, real account of the human brain even now nobody can go for a walk without listening to a podcast, nobody can work without listening to music on headphones, nobody can enjoy a meal without showing everybody they’ve eaten it and no one can watch TV without also looking at their phone. Your best and most honest thoughts still come in the shower or while you’re doing dishes. The best way to tempt a brain into the beautiful thinking it is truly capable of is to occupy 40% of it with a menial task. It also acts as an artistic study in the quiet misery of a mediocre office life (I first read The Mezzanine while working one of the worst jobs of my life, and as a result found the sections where Howie stamps his hand with a date stamper out of the sheer need for something to do particularly affecting), but also revels in the joy of life as it forms around us, when we just slow down to notice it: yes the world is scary, yes death is inevitable, yes work whittles away the best hours of our day and the best years of our lives, yes the best thing many of us can ever dream of is the quiet serenity of a middle-class domestic life. But look! Sometimes a clear day and a good cookie come along. Sometimes a vending machine elegantly twists a bag of peanuts your way, and sometimes you whistle a cheerful tune in a gent’s toilets and, later, someone whistles it right back. The Mezzanine finds Howie at a frustrating loose-end moment of his life, but it is still a life filled privately with joy, and there’s something hopeful to be taken from it. It’s just the act of doing so will make you think too hard about for example ‘yoghurt’ for ten or twenty days following that.

 

¹  I toyed here with the idea of saying ‘third or fourth trip’ through The Mezzanine here, because, when talking about a 130-page book, one I frequently describe to people as “my second-favourite book ever written”, only having read it a few times seems underwhelming, somehow. And casually hinting that I might have read it, not three times, but four, seems deeply stylish and intellectual (imagine losing count of the times you have read a book! How chic!). But then also note the difference between having read a book three times (a lot, but still within the range of normal) and four times (the behaviour of an obsessive): something weird tips over the small inch between those two numbers, changes my absorption of the book from healthy to unhealthy. Think of it like movies (even a short book takes longer to read, by a number of hours, than a movie): how many films have you watched – really watched – four times? I tried to reach back into my memory palace and figure out which films I have seen four entire times, and came up with only two: Pulp Fiction and, bizarrely, Shrek 2. And two of those instances of Shrek 2 were on the same hangover. Nothing, truly, needs to be relived four times. I don’t care how smart you think you are.

²   There are notable similarities between The Mezzanine and the classic C.O.A.N., The Catcher in the Rye: both are slender volumes that are incredibly difficult to find with a non-ugly cover. With the zig into YA in recent years, where every teen protagonist has to find themselves via a strange new form of dystopian combat, there is a dearth of classic coming-of-age novels about the actual world we live in, but if you wanted to write one you’d do worse than to follow the aesthetic rules set down by Catcher and The Mezzanine: short and very ugly. Except the new 2021 Granta reissue! Obviously!

 

Photograph © Randal Whitmore

 

 

The Mezzanine is available now, reissued as part of Granta Editions, a collection of outsider classics.

The post <em>The Mezzanine</em>, or: The Most Important Book About Nothing You’ll Ever Read appeared first on Granta.

Bestselling author Syed M. Masood shares his top 5 tips for how to handle a controversial topic in your work.

I might not be the right author for this piece. I just want to admit that upfront.

Yes, my work is considered controversial in some quarters. I mean, my next book is called The Bad Muslim Discount. Obviously, that was always going to raise some eyebrows.

(Syed M. Masood: Let Your Characters Surprise You)

But I truly don’t set out to be controversial. My fictional worlds are based on the truths I know and have experienced. My goal has always been to tell these truths in the most entertaining way possible. That’s it. It just so happens that there are people—holding a wide variety of beliefs on the ideological spectrum—who find these truths uncomfortable. That, so far as I am concerned, is more of a ‘them’ problem than a ‘me’ problem.

So, what I’m saying is that if you are at your keyboard cackling like a supervillain because you’re looking to piss people off for the sake of pissing people off, I really have nothing to offer you. We’re not writing from the same place. But most authors, I believe, are just trying to tell the stories they know best and, sometimes, these stories happen to deal with controversial subjects.

So, for those kindred spirits, here are some tips on how to write—and perhaps cope with having written—something controversial.

1. Offend with Purpose

There is nothing wrong with offending the right people. When you’re making a point, especially about complex, sensitive, or painful topics, you are going to irritate some people.

If I say, to use a simplistic and clear-cut example, that “racism is evil,” and that offends racists…well, good.

What you want don’t want to do is give offense unintentionally. You don’t want to offend people you aren’t trying to offend. Mean what you say without being mean as often as possible.

2. Ask Yourself “Why”

Know the reason you are writing about a difficult subject. Have a purpose behind the story you are telling.

In The Bad Muslim Discount, one of the issues the characters grapple with is what it means to be Muslim and what it means to be American, and not everyone is going to agree with the conclusions my characters reach. That’s totally cool. The purpose is to have the conversation, to see some of the different sides of it, to appreciate that reasonable and good people can disagree.

Obviously, I’m personally invested in this discourse. It is important to me. Make sure what you’re writing about is important to you. That’ll help you treat it with respect.

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3. Write with Love

My YA novel, More Than Just a Pretty Face, deals with a very different set of issues. It addresses, among other things, issues within the desi, Muslim community that I feel need to be addressed.

I have a great deal of affection for the people who make up this community. I am from them. So, when I do point out areas we need to work on, I’m not doing so with malice, but with hope.

This also allows you to write characters who disagree with your points of view with more empathy and accuracy, by the way. You can side with a son who wants to pursue his dreams and be a chef. But you don’t have to make the father who worries about how viable a career that is for his kid a villain if you at least attempt to understand him.

4. Write the Truth

Yes, all fiction is fiction. And, no, I’m not saying not to write fantasy or sci-fi worlds. I’m saying that if you write about controversial topics, tell the truth as you understand it. You might be wrong, but you’re going to have an easier time dealing with questions that are posed to you (and, more importantly, an easier time living with yourself) if you did your best to be honest in your writing.

Also, you’ll have an easier time selling your work, in my opinion. People say “sex sells,” and that’s true, but earnestness—even if it isn’t as much fun—also sells.

(Tips for Writing About Controversial Topics in Fiction)

5. Be Balanced

Don’t worry about what people say about your themes. Worry about what they say about your craft.

When More Than Just a Pretty Face came out, I was a little surprised by some of the criticism I got. I knew that my novel for adults, The Bad Muslim Discount, had the potential to stir the pot a little, but my sweet YA rom-com? I was not expecting any backlash.

But I did get some. I don’t read reviews anymore (a practice I highly recommend), but even then, people will tell you things. Sometimes they’ll even tag you on social media. Sometimes your mom will go on Goodreads and want to know why some people think the Muslim representation in your book isn’t accurate.

Don’t worry about it. I know that is easier said than done, but it is also easier if you’ve followed Tips 1 through 4. Find peace with your work. You told the truth, you told it with love, you were precise, and you had a purpose. You did good.

One of the highest compliments I received was someone saying they were offended by More Than Just a Pretty Face but couldn’t stop reading it. I am absolutely, completely good with that, and I think you should be too. 

Click to continue.

There’s nothing more thrilling than a good nemesis. A bad nemesis is like a bad bagel—better not to have one at all, than have one that falls short of the mark. But a good one shines a spotlight on your deepest fears about yourself. A good nemesis is a mirror for your aspirations, since whatever qualities you’ve given this person are markers of what you value. If someone’s very name inspires in you nauseating self-loathing tinged with ecstasy—congrats! You have a nemesis. In due time, a proper nemesis may even spur you on to acts of insanity revealing your long-buried desires—for example, if you’re Patricia Highsmith, killing your wife. (Somehow Patricia is always killing the wives.)

In my novel We Play Ourselves, Cass is a playwright who finds herself obsessed with Tara-Jean Slater, a playwright a decade younger who is sweeping up awards and acclaim with nonchalance. Tara-Jean exists as a focal point for Cass’s hungry jealousy, as she provides a window into what Cass believes she wants—in fact, believes she deserves. More than that however, Tara-Jean becomes a shining example of what cultural gatekeepers so often require of a woman before they let her succeed: bare your soul, sell us your trauma. Don’t tell us what you think, tell us what you’ve been through. Tara-Jean is more than willing to weaponize her trauma, whereas Cass—who often has a hard time articulating her own pain to herself—is electrified by a grotesque mix of resentment and admiration. Cass’s relationship with Tara-Jean catalyzes the career-ending scandal that drives Cass from East to West Coast, but also—when they meet again—jump-starts a series of revelations. Cass must begin to acknowledge the machines of culture that are behind which stories get told—and how, and to whom, and in what way. 

In writing this book, I’ve been asked a number of times if I have a nemesis. To which I can only reply: Shouldn’t we all? Below are some of the books and plays that show how deliciously shattering a good nemesis can be.

Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

This book is mesmerizingly strange, a fragmented landscape of reinventions across which two nemeses chase each other: Mr. Fox and the witchy, uncanny, possibly-unreal Mary Foxe. With sly wit and a mind like no other, Helen Oyeyemi manages both a ruthless investigation of gendered violence, and an upending of all those old and-then-she-gets-killed stories as Mr. Fox and Mary get closer to something new and true.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith has no use for humans, but she does love their weaknesses. Also she used to store snails in her bra so she could carry them across international borders, but that’s an obsession for another day. Look, you have to read this book. There’s a train. Two men meet and make an unspeakable pact. And things just get worse from there…

The Treasurer by Max Posner 

An elegant, wry and constantly surprising play in which a man’s nemesis is his aging mother—and he feels terrible about it. But also, she’s making his life a living hell. Produced by Playwrights Horizons and published by Dramatists Play Service, this is as much a beautiful read on the page as it was a beautiful production. 

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

You know what’s worse than a regular nemesis? An immortal one. Doro pursues shape-changing Anyanwu across countries and centuries, as their relationship shifts from lovers to enemies to something more familial and complicated. This book is not a comfortable read (cue: consent issues, slavery, and weird body-snatcher sex), but let me put it this way: during the week I read it, I was fully captivated by something other than rising COVID numbers…

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

I read this book like falling down a well: quickly, and with a great fear about what was waiting at the bottom. An American writer-in-residence at an increasingly bizarre German arts institution develops an unsettling obsession with a far-right cop show… and then with the man who is making it. Smart, scary, and compelling.

The Skriker by Caryl Churchill

For my money, Caryl Churchill is one of our greatest living playwrights—and this play is pure Churchill, a blending of genres that redefines both style and language. The play is about an ancient and malevolent fairy pursuing two teenage mothers in 90s London, and it manages to be funny and chilling at the same time. 

The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway

Oh listen. Whatever you’re going to say about Hemingway, I know, and you’re right, and I would never have dated him. That said, this book is the trashy seaside love-hate threesome you always wished would transport you far far from reality. Is it problematic? Sure! Is there a great nemesis? More than one! Do I feel like, as a queer woman, I got something very different from this than what Hemingway intended? Absolutely. And therein, my friends, lies the power of literature.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

This collection of poems is searing, riveting, and deeply human. The nemesis is alcohol. Or it is God. Or it is the poet himself, who comes up against his own limitations again and again; who sees both his divine potential alongside the brutality of his failures. A line from the poem “Exciting The Canvas” is both in the front materials for We Play Ourselves, and a good summation of 2020: “Odd, for an apocalypse to announce itself with such bounty.”

The post Get Yourself A Nemesis appeared first on Electric Literature.

In the epic words of Phoebe Bridgers: “I want to live at the Holiday Inn, where somebody else makes the bed.” Don’t we all, Phoebe—especially after months of various travel restrictions and working from home on top of crumpled sheets that need to be washed. But if it’s looking tricky to stay in a real-life hotel anytime in your near future, there’s fortunately an overwhelming number of books suitable for your fictional getaway. 

It’s not surprising that the hotel novel has become a literary genre in its own right—hotels have proven to be fascinating settings for fiction: a mixture of the intimately private and corporate conglomerate, the foreign and the mundane. Going beyond well-known classics like The Shining and Grand Hotel, here are 11 novels to immerse yourself in the world of hotels, hospitality work, and bed-making. And you won’t need to check out of these fictional hotels by 11 a.m.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

What does it cost to craft a pristine hotel experience at an “exotic” location? Here Comes the Sun takes place at a luxury resort in River Bank, a fictional Jamaican town. 30-year-old Margot is a worker there, trying her best to support and protect her artistic younger sister. Although she has sex with the wealthy white guests for extra income, Margot is forced to keep her love for Verdene, the village’s ostracized lesbian, undercover. However, Margot and her community must reckon with imminent destruction when developers plan to build another resort that will put many villagers out of work. Dennis-Benn’s unflinching yet compassionate debut is a searing look into the tourism industry and its effects on women’s communities. 

The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg

This psychological thriller skulks through ghostly hotel bedrooms and Havana streets, written in Van Den Berg’s signature propulsive, elegant, and unsettling prose. A recently-widowed American woman, Clare, travels to Cuba to attend a horror film festival in memory of her late husband, Richard, who was a horror film scholar. When she arrives in Havana, however, she finds the allegedly dead Richard standing outside of a museum—setting off a chain of surreal events as she attempts to track him down. If you love The Shining and Psycho, this contemporary hotel novel is a must-read. 

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita 

The I Hotel (short for “International Hotel”), a Bay Area landmark in San Francisco’s Chinatown, is the centerpiece of Yamashita’s kaleidoscopic novel. Separated into ten novellas on different groups of Asian American activists from 1968 to 1977 (one novella for each year), I Hotel is an ambitious exploration of the Yellow Power Movement, when Asian Americans fought for representation and economic equality. Yamashita uses a diverse array of narrative and structural choices, including forms such as graphic art, stage dialogue, and philosophy; her cast of characters is as equally diverse, including a whole range of hyphenated Asian identities. (And for another book that connects hotels with historical Asian American events, check out Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, which addresses Japanese internment camps during WWII.) 

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride

Strange Hotel addresses the strange, surreal feeling of uniformity in hotels, of how one big hotel somehow feels exactly the same as another. Check-ins, check-outs, room service, one-night stands, buried memories of home—all blur together for McBride’s unnamed narrator, a middle-aged woman constantly hopping from one hotel to another. Along the way, she grapples with her sense of identity. McBride, as always, is inventive and challengingly illuminating with her use of language; in modernistic, fragmented prose, she probes at the connections between words and bodies.

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

This 2020 Booker Prize nominee starts in a run-down youth hostel in Harare, Zimbabwe. Tambudzai (or Tambu), Dangarembga’s protagonist from Nervous Conditions, has just left her stagnant copywriting position and a stable place to live. After various jobs and one humiliation after another, Tambu winds up working in ecotourism in her childhood home; she must constantly deal with both the pressure of imminent poverty and the claustrophobia of Harare society. Dangarembga points out the acute effects of capitalism and colonialism, showing how this toxic combination seeps into every element of Tambu’s fight for survival.

Hotel Iris by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Ogawa’s 1996 novella centers on a sadomasochistic love affair between a teenage hotel receptionist and an older foreign guest, exploring the many ways of articulating—and translating—desire, power, and control. 17-year-old Mari and her mother run a dingy seaside hotel in coastal Japan. One evening, they have to eject a guest and his prostitute from a room, and Mari becomes captivated by the guest’s voice. He turns out to be a mysteriously widowed Russian translator, and the two fall into a complex relationship of pain and pleasure. Through Mari’s sharp observations and gritty details of hotel service life, Hotel Iris shines a spotlight on the grotesque, macabre nature of human relationships.

Hotel World by Ali Smith

A hotel is both the main catalyst and the setting for Smith’s postmodern novel about grief, in which five female characters, each with a differing relationship to the Grand Hotel, all end up spending a night together. Sara, a chambermaid who falls to her death in a dumbwaiter, is still lingering there as a ghost; her younger sister Clare has come because of the tragedy; Else is a homeless woman who is invited to stay one night in the hotel by Lise, the receptionist; Penny is an established journalist who is reviewing the hotel. Smith’s inventive novel uses the idea of “hotel”—a homogenous corporate entity that people are constantly checking in and out of—as an extended metaphor for our society and life. 

When All is Said by Anne Griffin

Inspired by a real-life hotel conversation, Griffin’s debut novel takes place exclusively in a hotel bar in Ireland over the course of one night; sitting alone, 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan raises toasts to five people from his life: his children, his relatives, his wife. The five individual monologues, which tell the story of his entire life in conversational, engaging prose, are connected through the precious Edward VIII Gold Sovereign Coin, which Maurice unthinkingly took from his abusive employer in his youth and never gave back. Griffin paints Maurice as a flawed but deeply honest character, crafting a warm-hearted portrait. 

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Glass Hotel’s protagonist, Vincent, takes you to the other side of the bar–her story begins as a bartender at a luxury hotel in Vancouver Island. One night, shaken by a message scrawled on the hotel lobby’s glass wall (”Why don’t you swallow broken glass”), Vincent chooses to leave the hotel for the “kingdom of money.” She becomes involved with an international conman, Jonathan Alkaitis, posing as his wife. But when Alkaitis’s schemes collapse, Vincent also disappears. Mandel’s intricate narratives blur the lines between the past and present, living and dead, reality and self-delusion.

Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, translated by Brian FitzGibbon

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, Hotel Silence is about a middle-aged man who flies away to a mysterious hotel. Jónas Ebeneser, after finding out that his daughter is not his biological child and reeling from a recent divorce, is contemplating suicide. However, he gets caught up in the logistics (what if his daughter finds his body?) and decides the best course of action is to disappear. Hence, a reservation at Hotel Silence, located in an unnamed country that is recovering from the aftereffects of a brutal war. Jónas travels with just one change of clothes and a toolbox, intent on ending his life. However, his stay at Hotel Silence leads to an unexpected turn of events, as he winds up as the resident handyman of the ravaged town. Ólafsdóttir’s novel is a touching meditation on new beginnings, both as an individual and as a community. 

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Sparks 

This classic focuses on a group of young girls living together in a ladies’ hostel in war-devastated London, 1945. Their temporary home, the May of Teck Club, is a hostel established for girls underage 30 with “slender means” in Kensington. The girls try their best to act as if everything is as it was before the war; they gossip about love interests and practice their posture. In true Sparks style, though, the novella is layered with flashbacks and hiding a tragedy that the girls are trying to forget, framed by a research storyline set in 1963. 

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