Four score and several discourses ago, before Lena Dunham, before Lindy West, before SHY GIRL, before Sean Manning abolished blurbs and we all forgot he did that, before Madeline Cash and the guy who was mad at her, there was this shit:

And we all went, “hmmmmmmmm interestinggggggggggggggg.”

Savage argues that, “The literary pipeline for white men [is] effectively shut down.” It’s important to note that Savage is not talking about about queer male writers or writers of color—I can easily think of several of those. It is true that I can’t say we have any contemporary white male counterparts to Sally Rooney or Raven Leilani or Emma Cline, Brit Bennett. The question is, do we care?

Like any journalist worth her salt, I decided to go straight to the scene of the crime: I decided to text some young white male writers.1

Savage name-drops millennial men, but I went further and spoke to two Gen-Z white men currently trying to break into the publishing industry. You can send my Pulitzer in Journalism in the mail, thanks.

aneurin:

I met Nye through a mutual friend. We all went to see Heat at the movies. He’s a 6’3 communist who doesn’t watch T.V, drinks hot black coffee every day and wears wool trousers in 95 degree weather. He’s ridiculously sweet and often silently appears in places I also happen to be, calmly saying my name from a dark corner in the back of the room. I almost stabbed him at AWP over that shit. He’s actively querying an incredible upmarket campus noir mystery about a reporter investigating the disappearance of a notable left-wing student activist and a bunch of Shit Goes Down. We’re both part of the Conn Ave scene. You can find him on here at Get Literate. This is what he has to say for his People:

I’m open to the idea that young straight white male writers (YSWMWs) might be underrepresented in traditionally published literary fiction. But a lot of the discourse around it is gender-panic nonsense or ‘notice me senpai’ writing.

If you look at the census data for 2020, you’d expect about a quarter of young literary fiction writers would be YSWMWs, in a perfectly representative industry. I haven’t seen anyone crunch numbers on this outside of Jacob Savage’s reliance on awards data and newspaper mentions, which fails to prove YSWMWs comprise less than a quarter of debuts.

Savage writes: “Those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition…have had a powerfully chilling effect [lol].”

That assertion by Savage is pretty much an admission of cowardice on the part of the YSWMW mourners. I’m vaguely sympathetic to complaints about the bloodlessness of some American LitFic—its unerotic sexuality, its unromantic romance, its anti-political politics—but if a couple years of workshop sessions and Twitter beef are enough to sand your work down, you weren’t going to make it in the first place.

Have some self-respect.

If there is a problem, it’s a two-sided problem of audience engagement making YSWMWs irrelevant as sales drivers and economic forces that deter YSWMWs from entering the field.

There is a reciprocal (or dialectical) process where audience engagement by writers and publishers causes disparate groups of readers to cohere and, eventually, to become market forces. FanFic did this with many young women readers and many young queer readers, while serving as a stylistic training ground. BookTok, Substack and Bookstagram are also doing this work. Dimes Square tried to do this with Manhattan transplants whose downward mobility manifests cognitively.

I’m not convinced that the Big Five know what would engage straight young men as a group. Nearly every young man I know reads literary fiction. Granted, these men are college-educated, overwhelmingly higher-income and often politically left-leaning, but that’s a potential audience in the thousands in any major city; the guys who knocked doors for Zohran are reading LitFic; they are not a coherent audience for any specific subgenre.

I suspect that publishers do not need YSWMWs to reach these consumers; YSWMs do not exist as a coherent market demographic.

The production side problem stems from the decline of the writer’s socio-economic fortune.

The downward mobility of the creative professions, prevailing since the Great Financial Crisis, corresponds with the disappearance of the YSWMW. The pressure to make more money and find economic security drive educated young white men towards higher-waged professions at the same time sociological barriers to women and people of color in creative professions are eroding somewhat. Why would a financially insecure member of a socially dominant group pursue a profession with an extraordinarily high barrier to entry where 80% of people never earn out?

B2B software development might be mindnumbing, but the money is almost certainly better.

The YSWMWs who are trying to break into the industry are in it for the love of the game. There’s no coincidence that the dudes Haili got to talk for this essay (sorry Haili) are politically left-wing men from the greater Rust Belt, professional journalists of lower-middle class, ethnic white backgrounds.

We write because it is fun, not because it pays. Money never lasts anyways. The ruin of industrial New Jersey, New Haven, and Upstate New York will eventually come for California and Manhattan and Texas and all those cushy software jobs will go the way of steelwork, except the B2B SAAS guys don’t even have a union.

That said…agents, editors, if you’re looking for a book about a bunch of socialist 20-somethings fucking and/or killing each other, I have a 90,000 word manuscript ready for you. And if you want a clique of D.C. insiders who convince themselves they need to do a coup d’etat against the president, I’m working on that book too.

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matt

I know Matt through Nye. He’s also a Conn Ave scenester <3. My friend Lauren and I recently spent two hours talking to him about all our diagnoses at a friend’s party (that friend was supposed to be the third subject in my experiment, but sadly he’s dead to me now.) Matt has a boisterous laugh and always clarifies, with a twinge of apology, that he doesn’t writer litfic but genre fiction. It’s okay, Matt. Genre is a construct. Genre fucks, too. Here’s what he has to say about All This:

I’ve been chewing on the question of why there aren’t any young, white male writers for a while, partially because I’m not sure it’s entirely true.

It is accurate in the sense that we’re not seeing any contemporary Jack Kerouacs or David Foster Wallaces or whoever else popping up at the top of NYT bestseller lists for any lingering period of time.

Part of it is the result of a culture, particularly among young white men (younger than 30) about the pursuit of fiction and reading overall. Most of the straight white male friends I have that aren’t specifically writers barely read fiction. Many gravitate toward nonfiction. Many don’t read at all.

Our education system bears a large part of the blame. The arts are being strangled. A lack of funding across many public school systems for arts programs is making this phenomenon worse. Without being introduced to it earlier, it’s harder to get into the trade overall. I myself didn’t really start to write on my own until after grad school.

But why is this? In my opinion, a shift in what young white men view as “important” or “worth their time.”

A lot of people in this demographic view literature as a less masculine pursuit. They view the tradition of writers like Hemingway, Sinclair, Joyce as something “less than” and a frivolous endeavor that gets in the way of life’s real goal — making money.

You can see this in college enrollment. More women are completing college than men. This is true across all backgrounds, though it varies. Men are placing less value on education and literacy overall, which leads to a significant part of the problem. I think white men need to look inward here and figure out what they want out of life, because a lifetime of grinding fucking sucks.

I’d also like to take pains to say that writing is not a gendered pursuit. It’s important to create stories that address all aspects of life across time and space. But I think young white men don’t see it that way.

I do think that people crave stories about lives that aren’t specifically a middle class white guy. That makes sense! I want different stories too! But that doesn’t mean that young white male writers don’t exist in general —- I think we just need to work harder to figure out where we fit in.

Particularly in this moment we find ourselves in (Trump, the genocide in Gaza, authoritarian power creeping into every facet of our lives with disturbing speed) we should be learning about how white men see themselves, I think. But we need to find a way to tell that story in a new way, and one that accurately reflects the power white men hold in this society and the cost that can inflict on everyone around them.

To sum it up — these writers do exist. These stories need to be told. But the decline is real. Many young white men don’t want to write, and they’re not interested in telling these stories to begin with.

(Sidenote: I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t mention I find myself in this camp — all of the novel projects I’ve written are either fantasy or speculative fiction, though I have written short fiction of a more lit-fic variety. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself gravitating more toward lit-fic, but up to this point, my entry into the genre is limited.)

postscript

Needless to say, I fuck with both Nye’s and Matt’s takes. And for all this talk of progress (and how this progress has boxed white male writers out of publishing), we are actually in a period I like to call The Great Divestment. We are living in the photo negative of Summer 2020. I’ve talked briefly on here about the decline of The Black Female Breakout Novelist (where was the Brit Bennetts, Raven Leilanis, Yaa Gyasis, Kiley Reids from 2023 onward?), which to be sure is not the average experience for most authors, let alone ones of color. But I do wonder if the huge success we saw between 2015 and 2021 (note the political timing too, please) among Black female authors is because there were very smart investments being made in them (and not just from publishers, but from the literary ecosystem writ large). I wonder, too, if this kind of investment was seen as less ‘risky.’ When companies tighten their belts, Black folks are the first to go.

To continue that thread, under this administration, companies have been given permission to stop pantomiming fucks about diversity. Publishers, for all the ire they receive from some would-be white male authors trying to break in, are not the only institutions involved in ‘making’ a book. There’s all these other major players—book critics, magazines, book subscription boxes, celebrity book clubs, trade reviews etc. etc. etc.—who anoint a novel, an author. When the number of books balloons and the space for them to breathe in the market shrinks, again, who gets cut first? You’re worried about breaking in and I’m worried about staying in.

My mom, who was among the early beneficiaries of affirmative action in the 1970s, told me: “I’ve been through this cycle of investment and divestment many times before. It’s a very real cycle. They don’t see it as taking anything away from us. They see it as they were doing us a favor in the first place.”

What white male would-be authors haven’t acknowledged much is that it’s one thing to break into the publishing industry—it’s quite another to succeed in it.

What greater warmth is found than from the flames of a white woman’s burning marriage? The marriage doesn’t even need to end for us to make snow angels in its ashes. We’re not intruders. She’s invited us into the fire by way of a novel, an essay, a memoir. Like moths, we flock to read it.1

In 2024, that marriage was Molly Roden Winter’s, the author of More: A Memoir of Open Marriage. Winter was a virtual unknown, but her story alone catapulted nonmonogamy into the zeitgeist. Even in a media landscape atrophied by layoffs, it was reviewed in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker. She and her husband were even guests on the NPR show I work for. The book became a New York Times bestseller, a rare and charmed outcome for a debut author.

Earlier this year, the marriage story we swarmed to was Belle Burden’s: Babe Paley’s granddaughter and author of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (There’s a pattern even to the titling of the books in this genre). The memoir traces the decline of Burden’s twenty-year marriage after her husband suddenly walked out on her. An instant New York Times bestseller.

Lindy West is now the white woman whose marriage has inflamed the internet for weeks. Her memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, was released last month to manic debate. It documents West’s cross-country road trip as she reckons with the fallout of fame from her years as a feminist icon and battles depression. But the frenzied reaction around the book is not about those themes: it’s about her open marriage, particularly the way her spouse behaved inside of it.

I’m not here to litigate the content or merit of West’s book or the others. I’m here to talk about the space these stories claim in our cultural terrain, the way they dominate discourse. I’m naming a phenomenon that, year after year, holds true. West is famous (And Burden, wealthy), but still the equation feels infallible: White woman + bad marriage + nonmonogamy (or infidelity or both) = the book everyone’s talking about.

It’s practically the fate of every big book that contains a nonmonogamous thread to invoke the polyamorous equivalent of gay panic in the media: Polyamory Isn’t Progressive, cries The Wall Street Journal. Say It With Me Now: Open Marriages Never Work, shouts The Free Press. Don’t Tell The Internet You’re Polyamorous, chuckles The New Statesman. Love Is Never Having To Say You’re Polyamorous, squawks The Times. I’m all for people living as their ‘authentic selves.’ I just don’t think we need progressives trying to convince us that polyamory is normal, whines this weird subtitle to a USA Today opinion piece.

I don’t know, guys, it feels like some of these calls are coming from inside the house. But I’m here to assure you that nobody wants your husband with his crossed-out face on Feeld.

In the case of Winter’s memoir, many of the headlines sound like jokes, like satire: How a Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself or The English Teacher Who’s Become the Face of Polyamory or Is This The End of Monogamy? (penned by Winter herself for Elle UK).

The question that’s asked every time a book about nonmonogamy is published to any fanfare is the least interesting one: But does it actually work?

Haven’t we run that inquiry ragged? Jean Garnett, who wrote the only white-woman-open-marriage-story I recognize for The Paris Review, said after her divorce:

“…A newspaper editor got in touch with me asking if I would care to join the buzzy conversation around West End Girl [Lily Allen’s album] by spitting out a thousand words on “why open marriage doesn’t work.” I did not care to; I do not see open marriage as an unworkable model—certainly no more so than monogamous marriage.”

A new formula emerges: one ‘failed’ marriage + nonmonogamy = parade of polyamory hit pieces.

Every time we ask the same tired questions, we prevent the discussion from becoming something deeper. What we should be asking instead is why we’ve pinned our entire understanding of this sprawling and splintered identity on a few books by white women? Why do their stories have the power to force an entire romantic paradigm into question when millions of bad monogamous marriages get to simply be that: bad?

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The backlash to West’s partner, Aham Oluo, has been loud. Oluo cheated on West with at least two women.2 Her consent to ENM, at least in the beginning, is murky. Oluo claimed West did not grasp concepts of ownership the way they did because they’re Black and West is white (note the lack of articles saying interracial marriages never work—y’all not brave enough to go there)3. The memoir ends with West in a throuple with one of the girlfriends Oluo was seeing behind West’s back. They all share a home. Most nights, West allegedly sleeps in the guest room where she can hear the other two having sex. West says she’s happy. We can’t know if this is true. We only know Oluo’s actions are heinous to many of us, and West’s inability to see them as such is unsettling.

But all that has nothing to do with some inherent evil lurking around the corner of every nonmonogamous relationship. The awkward framing of West’s memoir as polyamous self-discovery journey, as subversive feminist character arc, reminds me of another book I wrote about. Liars by Sarah Manguso (reviewed in the LA Times, The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian) is about a terrible marriage and a white woman with means who cannot manage to leave it. The husband cheats, cusses at her, cannot keep a job, leaves the room while she’s speaking to him. The novel is positioned as a feminist send-up of heterosexual marriage which Manguso has argued is simply a ‘bad choice’ “We are impelled to make.”

In Liars, the husband ultimately leaves the wife after sixteen years for another woman. She doesn’t exert agency to extricate herself from him. The heroine, Jane, is cast as the everywoman (hence their vanilla names Jane and John—your average couple). She’s a professor, a writer, living in the US in the 2010s. I always think of NYTs book critic Parul Sehgal’s response to Manguso’s claim that this kind of marriage is inevitable for most women, that heterosexual marriage is, in a way, fundamentally an unconsensual act because we are so socialized to perform it: “As the product of generations of arranged marriages, a number of them coerced,” Sehgal, who’s Indian-American, writes, “I find that such claims feel strange, if not obscene.” As a descendent of enslaved women, I have to agree: I don’t really want to hear about a white upper-middle class woman in the 21st century acting like she doesn’t have any choices. Manguso is telling one story. Sehgal is telling another. Imagine a world in which we hear only Manguso’s.

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My position is a weird one, riddled with conflicts of interests: I identified as polyamorous for years but am not sure if I want to keep practicing.4 I wrote a Modern Love essay about my decision to break up with my boyfriend and pursue solo polyamory. In it, I mis-defined terms, I sounded wiser than I was, I fucked up as people who stumble into being spokespeople for an entire community do. I was hated on the internet for a while, not nearly on the scale of West, but enough for others in my life to notice. I am a steward of stumbling over yourself in public, trying to make your decisions legible to others while they remain illegible to you. Stories are mirrors of ourselves, portals to other people and places, yes, but they can also have a distorting effect; they are not neutral.

My own book, They All Fall In Love At The End, is coming out in June; it’s a novel about a young Black woman tripping through an open relationship, falling for all the wrong people, trying to write herself a happy ending. Why else would I write this piece if I didn’t have a forthcoming book? This is how you handle an atrophying media landscape, you slip in when there’s an opening. And so I’m calling out the glut of white women marriage and nonmonogamy books at the same time I’m piggybacking off of their success like a flea clinging to the back of a dog. The glut, anyway, is an illusion: there are exponentially more books about monogamy. Those searching for nonmonogamous stories are still trekking across a narrative desert. Where are the ones involving relationships between non-white people? Where the woman instigates opening the relationship? Where polyamory is something one is, not only something one does? Not an antagonist or answer to monogamy, but simply a different logic? Where it’s not that big of a fucking deal when it gets released into the world, just another story?

The canon of nonmonogamous stories is still too spare and therefore the discourse stays stuck, endlessly orbiting the worlds of white married women.

The bad ones stick up like thumbtacks. The rope is too thin, we’re hanging too much on it. No wonder it’s falling down.

My post about losing my virginity, gynecological trauma and pelvic floor dysfunction has become my most popular one to date. Sadly, I’m not surprised it resonated with thousands of women and others with vulvas—the medical misogyny, the paltry discourse around penetrative pain—but I’m grateful it did.

At the end of that essay, I wrote a postscript explaining that that piece was originally written years ago, when I was 26. I talked about how I’d recently gone to the OBGYN for a pap smear. It hadn’t gone well, the pain of the exam haunting me hours later. The frustration of still having Pussy Problems at 30 when I was supposed to be passed All That Shit.

So much has changed since I first wrote that essay, I wrote, not knowing I was in the middle of more change.

I now look at that declaration and laugh/scream.

Reader: so much has changed since I wrote the postscript to that essay.

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I’m writing this from beneath a weighted heating pad, lying in bed on a towel, panty-free, on my side with a pillow wedged between my knees because it’s too painful to sit, because I lose my breath standing and walk now with an lopsided gait. Beside me: a box of pink medical gloves, a roll of almost used-up toilet paper, Q-tips, a donut cushion, creams, muscle relaxer. You’re probably wondering, Bitch are you okay???

I’m not okay, not really. After that pap smear, the pain didn’t leave. This has never happened before. My pain was alway connected to penetration; it did not persist once the object was removed, certainly not for weeks. But days after the exam, my vulva began to feel raw and overexposed, chafing against my pants.

Why had I moderated a panel at AWP even after wandering the conference’s book fair feeling like my clit was inflamed? Why had I masturbated even after knowing there was something off down there?

I didn’t pay attention to my body. Now I was paying the price.

By the third week, I’d developed UTI symptoms. I’d never had a UTI but what else could it be? It felt like a infection, one that was spreading with great speed.

I went to C.V.S to pick up an at-home test, mortified to see a cute guy in the same aisle as I reached for it. I told myself I shouldn’t be mortified though. It was my right to have a UTI, fuck him! Men went around instigating UTIs all the time! I screwed up the test but it came back positive anyway. The relief of that pink square. Just a round of antibiotics. I’d be back to normal in a week.

I made my whole personality having a UTI. Joked about how all the hot people suddenly appeared the second I got one, that my UTI gave me a new lease on life. I was finally part of the cohort of women and vulva-owners who’d had one. I wanted a hoodie with UTI on it like it was a college I’d attended.

Reader: I did not have a UTI.

I had to go to urgent care to discover this. They tested my pee. No signs of infection. They were sloppy. They didn’t care. They gave me antibiotics anyway. Never have I wanted an infection so badly. You do not want to be a medical mystery. But I had a feeling that’s what I was going to become.

The antibiotics did nothing. My symptoms worsened. My mom and I called my primary care doctor. It was Friday night so I couldn’t see an OBGYN. My doctor told me to go to the ER so my mom took me to the ER.

Another hot guy waiting to humiliate me, a nurse: “Where should I put my pee?” I asked. “Oh, I can take it,” he said. The camera zoomed in on his lovely hands accepting a plastic cup filled with my yellow piss. Perfection. He, the guy in the C.V.S, and I could now be in a throuple rooted in my vaginal trauma.

The waiting area was crowded: a lot of young people coming from parties. There was too much laughter. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t sit but my muscles were too weak to stand. I curled up on two chairs with one of the hospital’s blankets. My bull of a mother was at a loss. She tried to get me seen but this was America, this was the emergency room. If you weren’t dying, fuck off. It was seven hours before I got a room. Three hours before a nurse walked into it. My mom couldn’t sleep because she had her contacts in and didn’t have her case so she just stared at me through foggy eyes.

The nurse did a pelvic exam with a speculum. All I could think was, They’re doing the same thing that landed me here in the first place. Everything looked fine. They tested my pee. Fine. They wheeled me to the sonogram room, stuck a wand inside me while I gripped the bed rail like a life raft. I felt like a young girl in that flimsy cotton gown. They pressed on my ovaries. She has a long cervix, the tech said to the nurse. What does that mean? I asked. It just means you have a long cervix.

The sonogram showed nothing, just a benign cyst that likely wasn’t causing the pain and that I already knew was there.

Back in the hospital room, I self-swabbed so they could test for other vaginal bacterias. They sent me home with some painkillers, told me I should see an OBGYN. They did their job, they ruled things out. The bacterial swab came back normal. I had deja vu. The pain stayed.

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I’d already been here before and so I knew. The carousel of doctor’s visits that came with no diagnosis.

I Googled my symptoms and found the likely culprit with ease. Vaginismus, it turns out, is a generic umbrella term for any pelvic or vulva pain linked to penetration that is not physiological. In short, it’s too vague a diagnosis to really understand what’s going on.

I was convinced, then, that I had a condition called vulvodynia:

A type of long-term pain or discomfort around the outer part of the female genitals. It lasts at least three months and has no clear cause. The pain, burning or irritation linked with vulvodynia can make you so uncomfortable that sitting for a long time or having sex becomes unthinkable.

The condition is often mistaken for a UTI because there are overlapping symptoms.

That Monday after my trip to the ER, my mom and I called the OBGYN my primary care doctor recommended. She had an opening at the end of April. LOL. Yeah I just won’t sit for another forty fucking days, it’s cool.

I decided to try the university hospital I always go to, the one where I received the pap smear. Voila. They had an opening later that week.

Remember that clinic I mentioned at the end of my last post? The one that opened in 2022 to deal specifically with these kinds of pelvic and vulva pain conditions? The earliest appointment they had was in July when I called after my failed pap smear. But when I showed up for my Thursday appointment, the doctor I saw was one of five OBGYNs who worked in that clinic. It turned out there’d been a cancellation, that the clinic wasn’t a separate building, just a collection of specialists working in the gynecology department. There was a flyer about vulvodynia right on the doctor’s wall. My mom pointed it out, awed by our luck.

The doctor was convinced I had vulvodynia too, specifically vestibulodynia, pain at the vaginal entrance. I am naming these terms because I bet you’ve never heard of them. I also bet you know someone who’s experienced this or who will.

To show you just how maladaptive our medical system is, the doctor didn’t have enough time between patients to give me a proper consultation and so she came back to examine me on her lunch break.

With a long Q-tip, she gently tested the sensitivity of my vulva. The closer she got to my entrance, the more I flinched. She located the spot causing the pain. She said she didn’t have to touch it if it was too distressing. I told her to. I needed the final piece of this awful puzzle. She touched it lightly. My hips lifted off the table.

She pulled out a diagram of a vulva and started taking notes. Vestibule: an entryway, “This body part was named by a man,” she said. At the top, she scribbled likely causes to my condition: hyperactive muscles and heightened nerve activity. At the end, she gave me the picture.

When she left, my mom was in the corner cradling all my stuff—bag, scarf, coat—on her lap. “I had a 60 year-old man looking at my vagina when I was 17,” she said. “Thank God for these young women. They’re changing things.”

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I left with several prescriptions: Gabapentin topical cream, cyclobenzaprine, diazepam suppository—the kind I used to take when I was in pelvic floor therapy that made me high and loopy. My insurance only covered one of the drugs.

The doctor told me I’d likely have to go back to PT. The PT clinic in D.C that specializes in pelvic floor disorders is out-of-network. An evaluation cost $360 dollars and $240 for each subsequent visit. I’ll have to take all this up with my insurance company. If I were a guy who got in a car accident and broke my leg, they’d cover PT, I’m sure, without question.

I admitted in my last post that I wasn’t at peace with this yet. Not only am I not at peace, I’m passing through an uneasy paradigm shift, one of understanding myself anew as a person living with chronic pain, as a person with an invisible disability. I’ve had this condition for years but now it’s acute, now I can’t ignore it.

After I received my pills and creams, thinking they’d be a magic wand, I pushed myself to go to a friend’s party. I knew I was going to have to bring a cane, but who cared, people with pain were allowed to leave the house.

I took a shower, did my makeup, curled my hair. I’d never been more exhausted in my life. It was like I’d run up five flights of steps. I was short of breath. I was getting upset. I had to sit down but sitting was uncomfortable.

My friend drove me to the party and did all the things a good friend does. I was not myself, but I managed. It was important to me to try. Only two people asked about my cane. My friend and I laughed each time she tripped over it.

Later that night, I took my first suppository. I went limp like a rag doll but my sleep was restless. I woke up and cut on the lamp. There was a bug on my water bottle. I groped around the floor for my Raid but the cap broke off and rolled away. The muscle relaxer was so strong I couldn’t move. I cried watching the bug crawl down my nightstand, feeling helpless.

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I move slowly these days with an uneven gait when I get coffee up the street in the morning. When the timer on the walk sign ticks down to five seconds, I can’t rush across the street anymore. I wait until the next one. Bending down to pick up things I’ve dropped is a nightmare, the way I have to contort to do it. I’ve started my period but pads are too abrasive so I just bleed in my underwear.

I only understand how slow I’m moving because of how fast I move normally. There’s a lesson here about capitalism, burn out, illness, workaholism that I don’t feel like learning right now. I just want my life back.

I’m writing all this to say: if you were one of the many people who commented on my last post about your painful experiences with penetration, don’t wait until the condition becomes acute. Get a diagnosis, don’t accept less than one. You can brush it off it when it’s not affecting your daily activities but without tending, one day it might.

Some things have been helping me through this. First: LOVE & OTHER DRUGS with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, a RomCom we don’t talk about enough!!! Some of you are aware of all my Big Plans to find Love. That’s not happening in my critical state but as I heal, I’ve desperately sought out stories about young women with chronic pain finding love and having hot sex.

Hathaway is beautiful from every angle in this movie which is a bit depressing; I’m not that pretty when I’m sick. There’s a critique here somewhere about the eroticism of fragile white women, but I won’t be leveling it. Hathaway’s character struggles to do her art and refuses help and lashes out and sobs after her lash-outs and has trouble getting her meds and it’s all a satirical take-down of the pharmaceutical industry and health care in America and I love every second.

I also listened to IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD on audiobook by a fellow 2026 debut author.1 It’s about a chronically ill woman who meets a guy in her chronic pain support group. I love that both of the main characters have disabilities. The title makes me think of something the OBGYN told me with a cheeky lilt: “No, it’s not all in your head.” I knew she was referencing this specific phrase used in medical gaslighting. This novel digs into that, too. The way care and medication are withheld from patients that doctors deem overweight, the way you’re spoken to when your illness doesn’t have a clear cause.

My romantic fantasies are smaller than before—someone to help me change the sheets on my bed, walk down the three flights of steps in my building to wash my clothes, to hand me my heating pad when I’ve tossed it too far away. I’m still watching pick-a-card tarot readings on YouTube about love predictions for April, even though I’m struggling to imagine a future.

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At the doctor’s office, there was another flyer on the wall for a group called Tight Lipped, a grassroots movement for people with chronic vulvovaginal and pelvic pain. They have a podcast, a zine called ‘Opening Up,’ chapters across the country. They are fighting for vulvovaginal and pelvic floor disorders to be a standard part of OBGYN training so that every gynecologist in the U.S is equipped to diagnosis and treat vulvovaginal and pelvic pain conditions.

While I was trying to find the strength to attend my friend’s party, I listened to one of their podcast episodes about a woman named Gabriela:

“I could still find joy, even if I was feeling pain. I think I used to see them as separate. So if I'm in pain, there's no possible way that I could also experience joy simultaneously. And now I have stories of when, well, maybe I shouldn't have, but I go out with a flare. I said, you know what?…If I'm going to be in pain, I might as well be having a good time.”

I’m writing this post from the frontlines so I have no good way to end this. I’m instead forced to find an ending when there’s none in sight.

This is the one I’ve chosen: I’m writing a RomCom. For months, I didn’t know what the heroine’s problem would be. She needed a hurdle, a central struggle. I decided I would give her my pain, and then I would give her a happy ending.

I lost my virginity to a shiny metal speculum a month before I went away to college. My mom insisted I get on birth control because even she understood that college is as much about fucking as it is about getting an education.

The OBGYN was a smiling white woman whose high, measured voice was meant to telegraph trustworthiness. But I found neither among this landscape of large needles and other apathetic tools designed to prick and pry open my body.

“She’s a virgin. I don’t think she’s ever even used a tampon,” my mom said. “Is an IUD still okay for her?”

The OBGYN nodded. “There might be some discomfort, but it should be fine.”

I draped a cotton gown over my body then laid on my back, my legs propped awkwardly on the cold stirrups. The doctor put on blue rubber gloves and retrieved the speculum. It looked like an instrument of torture. She told me something along the lines of, “You’ll feel a small pinch and some discomfort,” though there was no way for her to know what I’d feel.

I didn’t even know what I’d feel. Nothing had ever been inside of me. All I had was a collage of cultural images portraying first-time penetrative sex in which a woman’s pain gives way to pleasure. Pain: a mere curtain through which the body must pass to get to the real show.1

The OBGYN gently pushed my knees apart. “Just a small pinch,” she promised.

My mom held my hand. The speculum was cold, suddenly no longer an indifferent tool but something invested, sharp, pushing through me. I cried so loud it felt like the sound was coming from someone else. Pain pulls you out of character, shutting off the part of your brain responsible for decorum, social grace, so you can pay full attention to the instruction of survival. But the parts of me that were still online were speaking. It would take me years to understand what they were telling me.

Unable to compete with my squirming and pleading, the OBGYN gave up and removed her hand like removing something from the oven.

When I looked over, my mom was crying as much as I was.

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Years later, this incident sits inside a different frame, one informed by how medical professionals treat Black women. All the evidence that suggests white doctors believe Black patients experience pain differently. How the field of modern gynecology was founded on Black female pain.

In 2018, NPR covered the removal of the statue of J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,” from Central Park. According to this piece, “Sims perfected a technique to repair fistulas, which are holes between the vagina and the bladder or rectum and can lead to incontinence, by repeatedly conducting painful experimental surgeries on enslaved black women without using anesthesia.” Sims claimed that these women had consented to the experiments, yet these same women didn’t have ownership, authority, autonomy over their bodies. They were possessions. A thing can’t tell you what it does or doesn’t want. Or rather, you don’t have to listen it.

A study published in 2016 on NIH’s website explores the presence of racial bias in pain assessment. The authors of the study explain two ways that racial disparities in pain evaluation may happen, the first being, “That physicians recognize black patients’ pain, but do not treat it, perhaps due to concerns about noncompliance or access to health care. The second possibility is that physicians do not recognize black patients’ pain in the first place, and thus cannot treat it.”

However Sims was aware of the pain he was causing his “patients.” In his autobiography, he describes the reaction of one woman during his experiment: “Lucy’s agony was extreme. She was much prostrated, and I thought that she was going to die...After she had recovered entirely from the effects of this unfortunate experiment, I put her on a table, to examine.”

Were my OBGYN’s warnings of discomfort her attempt to manage my fear? Was it simply the euphemistic language of bedside manner? Or did she look at me and really believe that that’s what I’d feel, a ‘small pinch?’

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I may have lost my virginity to a speculum, but I didn’t have my first kiss until college. The guy’s lips were cracked with dryness. I didn’t find him attractive. Pressed into mine, they felt like air, like absence.

When I think of my Eighteen-Year-Old Self losing her “real” virginity, it’s not a clear transaction that appears neatly on a receipt, but a saga, a series of failed attempts. No one—not her, her friends, her partners—can make any sense of it inside the narrative of sex and virginity with which they were raised.

Rooms are entered and left with no evidence of intercourse. Things are started, then abruptly stopped. Pain does not give way to pleasure, it looms over the room like a rot. Men throw up their hands, knowing not the first thing about her pleasure, afraid or indifferent toward her flinching body. Wrapped in one boy’s sheets she laughs and says, “I want to but my vagina won’t let me.” He doesn’t understand why these are separate things. Neither does she.

She decides when she’s fingered in a vacant classroom and bleeds for three days that she’s not a virgin anymore. She simply decides because she’s tired of trying, even though it’s not the story she wants to tell when people ask. It’s not the way she wants to lose it.

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I have good reasons not to trust gynecologists. A gynecologist told my Grandma she needed a hysterectomy when she didn’t. This same gynecologist molested my mother in her teens. Remove a woman’s womb, rob her of desire. Reproductive assaults are how you make sure a community doesn’t exist in the future.

During this period in college, when sex was at times painful, at others impossible, I saw several gynecologists. One stuck her finger inside me and said, structurally, nothing was wrong. Another did an ultrasound of my vaginal cavity. When she inserted the wand-like device, I jerked, my bottom scooting away from her touch. “How do you even have sex?” she asked with snark.

I flushed, humiliated. A woman who can’t do the only thing a woman is good for. I knew there was no truth in that, but shame doesn’t need truth to survive.

She stuck the wand in again and I forced myself to move past the pain. I didn’t want to be embarrassed anymore. Eventually my fantasies about penetration were no longer about pleasure, but about ease. About feeling nothing.

After graduation, I started looking for answers. I don’t even remember what I put into the search bar but I remember what came up: a pelvic floor disorder called vaginismus or, “The body’s automatic reaction to the fear of some or all types of vaginal penetration. Whenever penetration is attempted, your vaginal muscles tighten up on their own. You have no control over it.”

The only time I ever saw vaginismus portrayed in popular culture was in the 2019 Netflix series Sex Education. One of the supporting characters, Lily, cannot bear penetration and shoves her partner away during intercourse. I watched the show years after I learned about the condition, but the prickle of recognition was no less sharp. Lily is desperate to have sex but, as she explains, “My vagina is like a Venus flytrap.”

I didn’t need a doctor to tell me that this is what I had. But anyone living in the U.S knows that a diagnosis is only the beginning of a new kind of nightmare—one of medication, bills, appointments and insurance.

I began pelvic floor therapy in the summer of 2019. My doctor was a Black woman in her late-thirties with short twists and soft-looking arms. For an hour every other week, I’d lie on a cot breathing from my belly while she hooked a finger onto my sit bone and gently tugged. At some point, she began inserting her finger and resting it there while I exhaled from my diaphragm. Once she started using lidocaine, the numbing agent in Icy Hot, she was able to move her finger through my vaginal canal like an adept archeologist while I laid there feeling like a cave.

At night, I did the stretches she gave me before slipping a valium inside my vagina. Even after cutting it in half, it still numbed my whole lower body. Sometimes I’d call a friend to talk about how high I was, smiling in the darkness, trying to stop my head from rolling back. Whenever I wanted a glass of wine before bed, I’d darkly remember a side-effect of mixing the two was death.

I was in therapy for seven months when the pandemic hit and the clinic closed. When it reopened, I saw my doctor two more times before she abruptly left the practice without saying a word. All I know is that I had an appointment with her and then the receptionist called to say the appointment would have to be canceled. She told me I could never make a new one with that doctor.

I wish I could say I walked into that office and left with a vulva that didn’t undercut my own desires. That’s not what happened. I’d paid for the entire thing out of pocket because my insurance wouldn’t cover it. At the time I was living at home. I wouldn’t be able to afford a treatment like that now with my mortgage.

I have never known where to place that incident with the OBGYN on the spectrum of sexual trauma. I’m not a survivor of assault but I’m a survivor of something. I just don’t have a name for it.

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During my research, I read about second-hand trauma, a phenomenon in which a person sees, hears, or reads about a traumatic experience and recalls it as their own. I remember reading an article when I was ten in the hair salon about a thirteen-year-old girl who was r*ped in the back of a van. She’d just gotten into an argument with her mom before storming off into the cold winter night. I remember what the man said to her before he abducted her, that he’d never been with a pretty girl before. I remember her shirt was red. I remember this story as if it were my own. Even now my heart pounds at the memory.

My mom used to send me articles about young women who were r*ped by Uber drivers, just so I’d be ‘aware.’ My dad would tell me never to let the number of guys outnumber the number of girls in a group. In mainstream porn, it’s erotic to see women sobbing, screaming, not wanting it but deep down wanting it.

What does it mean that sex for me was about reenacting porn for so long? A place where my pleasure doesn’t exist and my pain is glorified? What does it mean to have been brought up bracing myself always for violence and violation?

My body is doing what an animal’s body does: reacting to the danger crowding around it. Shutting off a part of me so all of me can survive.

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The last thing I ever wanted to say is that Gwyneth Paltrow changed my life.

My friend told me to watch Sex, Love & Goop. Goop, Paltrow’s wellness and lifestyle company, has been criticized for its pseudoscientific, late capitalist approach to women’s health. The shop is also ridiculously expensive. But I watched the show anyway.

In one episode, a sex expert named Jaiya discusses a concept called “Erotic Blueprints,” centered on five Primary Types: sensual, energetic, sexual, kinky, and shapeshifter. She describes them as the, “Language you’re most fluent in speaking when it comes to sexuality. It is the language your body understands and responds to immediately, with ease.”

Of course, there’s an online quiz you can take for $18 to discover your Primary Type. Of course, I took the quiz.

I don’t know what I expected but I didn’t expect to feel like the dust had been cleared from my eyes. My Erotic Type was energetic meaning my arousal has little to do with physical touch. Instead, it’s cultivated through anticipation. Jaiya explained that for energetics, “Sometimes touch can feel like pain as opposed to pleasure...You may leave your body, due to dissociation, and not actually be present during sex. You can be deeply mistrusting and feel a lack of safety in sexual situations.”

Moments that defined by deepest erotic enjoyment were always in the form of unspoken sexual possibility: a hand on my low back, barely there, a meandering three-hour conversation.

Did I ever have vaginismus or was that all I knew to reach for, this paradigm of pathology and disorder, in the absence of a language for emotional and erotic difference?

Jaiya said she created the Erotic Blueprint because, “I felt like in our culture, we have this messaging of, ‘This is what sex looks like. This is how you are supposed to respond.’ What I was finding in my own personal clinical practice was that that wasn’t the way people responded...This person is turned on by not having direct touch to their genitals or to their body. This person over here loves that. This person over here is turned on by a slap to their inner thigh. Well, those are all completely different.”

It’s deflating to realize I could’ve avoided years of physical and emotional pain had the different doctors and experts I went to see had a shared language. They all dealt with the body, specifically the reproductive organs, but they did not have a unified way of talking about them.

But perhaps this was a conclusion I had to draw mostly on my own. Maybe that’s the lesson, the victory, that I can rely on myself, more than I believed.

In her book, “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” writer Saidiya Hartman draws from the real intimate lives of Black women in the early twentieth century. Here, she imagines the sexual awakening of one teenage girl named Mattie who fled Virginia for New York in 1915, still in the shadow of American slavery:

“There were so many lessons to teach a girl who knew nothing, so much for her to discover. What to do? How to hold him? How to not be embarrassed by her naked body or ashamed of her smells and the things she wanted to do? First she had to breathe deeply and let go of the body armored in anticipation of insult and attack, surrender in consequence of pleasure, allow the body to yield to another, to be entered, joined, bridged, to risk all defense, yet not be made into the mule of the world.”

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The friend who told me to watch Sex, Love & Goop taught me other things about desire. The first time we had sex, we had to stop because it was too painful. When I cried, he placed a sympathetic hand on my arm, “It’s okay,” he said. I felt the reckless thump of desire in my chest when we spoke on the phone for hours. I understood the words traversing the city through cell towers were building toward something. These conversations had the power to make touch feel soft and electric. They created the context I needed around penetration, an act that so often felt performed in isolation, something that took place in a matter of minutes instead of over a period of slow, sinuous months. My body stopped clenching and began to melt instead like a lozenge on a warm, wet tongue.

Pain is a warning that something is wrong. But what if it’s also a map leading you toward what’s right? My pain made me attuned to my body, it’s likes, dislikes, in a way I might not have otherwise been. How many times did unpleasant encounters that would’ve likely gone on end because of my pain? My body has always known what it does and doesn’t want before I’ve known it. I might’ve thought leaving my body was normal during intimacy had pain not brought me back to it.

Not long after I began writing this, I was with a guy who had tried to pressure me into a position I knew would be painful. He thought he could coax me with empty reassurances. What he didn’t know is that even if I had said yes my body would’ve said no. My body has gone to absurd lengths to protect me, why should it stop now? Its sole desire is to preserve me even when that’s not my sole desire. I see now that this is its true power.

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There is no clean break between the time I suffered from painful penetration and the time I stopped. The possibility of pain still pulses through every sexual encounter I have, every gynecological exam. These moments are all scrambled together like shuffled cards in a deck.

Oxford Languages defines penetration as, “The action or process of making a way through or into something.” Here, penetration is delicate, a series of actions rather than one swift event. It doesn’t promise resolution, only a way forward.

postscript:

Hello from Future Haili!! I originally wrote this piece in 2022 when I was 26 (Obviously I was young bc who quotes the fucking dictionary). I had entirely forgotten about this essay until I recently got a pap smear. In the bathroom before, I told myself, you’re 30 now. You’re a grown ass woman. You can do this. I couldn’t. We had to stop. The OBGYN, in the end, referred me to a special clinic for People With These Kinds of Problems that ironically opened in 2022 (#progress). This doctor was incredibly kind, warm, understanding. “You did great,” she said. But I felt the same shame leaving the doctor’s office I’d thought I’d wrestled into submission. I felt silly in the new wool coat I bought, something I thought said Real Adult Here, yet I couldn’t even make it through a doctor’s appointment. Hours later, I was still in pain.

I’ve been *abst!nent* for (mumbles number) while I get clear on the things I need before I Do That with another human again.2 For that reason, I’d been particularly worried about this visit. Solo sex has deepened my sense of control over my body, it’s also tightened my grip on it.3 Anyway, I called my mom afterward and we talked about that first OBGYN appointment when I was seventeen and then I remembered the essay above, how I already worked through all this Shit before, if Shit is a thing that can even be worked through.

My mom was like, “Honestly I should’ve been the one to teach you this stuff.” She often flippantly takes full accountability like this in casual conversation. I was like, “I know.” She was very happy to hear about this new clinic, said it was a happy ending to the story even though they likely don’t have an open appointment for another six months bc Health Care <3.

So much has changed since I first wrote that essay: that relationship with my “friend” ended on absolutely terrible terms (BWHAHAHA, so mid-20s-core). My definition of feminism now is basically me not having to do shit ever again. I discovered low-quality audio porn and will never go back. I have a novel coming out that originally included bits about painful sex and pap smears that I decided to take out because it detracted from the story (L O L).4 But I still believe Young Haili was onto something even if that something didn’t turn out to be a solution.

I don’t know how to end this postscript. But it felt dishonest not to say that I’m still not at peace with any of this. I also can’t believe I ended that first essay with a definition of penetration, like actually where is my Pulitzer Prize???

If you want to escape into a calamitous love triangle starring an unhinged heroine who’s basically me set amid America’s crumbling democracy hit me up BWAHAHA.

You’ve probably heard about the ravenous appetite among readers and publishing professionals alike for escapist books. Leigh Stein talked about it here, literary agent Alyssa Morris talked about it here.

Before I begin—Clears throat loudly: THIS IS NOT A POST LITIGATING THE VALUE OF ESCAPIST FICTION. If we didn’t require escape routes from our lives, there’d be no such thing as vacation. You can put your sword down, Susan.

But I’ve been thinking about the concept of escapist fiction ever since, years ago, a major literary author said during an interview that ‘escapist fiction’ wasn’t art. I didn’t know how I felt about this comment then and I still don’t know how I feel now. It struck me as elitist. Even though I balked, a part of me was sympathetic to the assertion. Mostly, I was like: Isn’t all good fiction on some level an escape?

After seeing escapism on nearly every 2026 publishing prediction list, I wanted to wrestle with it. I’m in a unique position: I turned to escapist fiction in the beginning of 2025. By year’s-end though, I failed to find escape in it. More on that soon.

But first, we need to get something out of the way:

what we mean when we say ‘escapist’ fiction

It’s actually not entirely clear what is escapist fiction and what isn’t. Or really, it’s broader than we give credit (Dark romance is showing us it doesn’t simply mean light and fluffy).

We often think of escapist literature as having the following qualities: a story that goes down easy, that makes us forget our own strife. Mostly uncomplicated, unchallenging. We judge this based on its subject matter, its tone and its depth.

Subject matter, in my UNPROFESSIONAL BUT CORRECT opinion, has an outsized influence over what we see as escapist and what we see as “serious.” (I don’t love this dichotomy, but let’s keep it for simplicity’s sake?). Oh, it’s about dragon sex? Escapist. Oh, it’s about poverty? Serious.

But, as Leigh also argues, I think escapism is less about what the story is and more about what it does. Escapism and immersion are only a stone’s throw away. You can get lost in about anything. In my world, execution is queen.

There’s also the feel-good quality that is almost always associated with escapist fiction. And this is what I struggle with most: is escapism the right word then? Because you can escape into a 600-page family drama set during the Great Depression. You can emerge from it, fourteen hours later, with that foggy-feeling characteristic of successful storytelling having forgotten your surroundings.

When people muse that escapist fiction will continue to rise in 2026, I think they’re more often taking about easier, feel-good reads, books that offer an antidote to the awfulness of this moment. But here’s my thing:

a light read doesn’t mean it must lack depth

LESS by Andrew Sean Greer, to me, is a light read but it’s far from a surface-level story. It’s tone is light, it’s heart beats warm. It’s worldview is ultimately a generous one. But the question it raises about how to turn 50 as a gay man who watched thousands of queer men die of AIDS before they could reach mid-life isn’t an easy one.

The most escapist reading experience I’ve had in recent years was DEMON COPPERHEAD, a fucking 500-page book about an orphan in Appalachia. But here’s where the element I haven’t talked about yet comes in: optimism.

A lot of people find this book depressing but to me the tone, the humor, the ending, make it the opposite. It’s sad but it’s hardly hopeless. Even Barbara Kingsolver herself admitted to being a big baby: she wrote a retrospective narrative so we knew that Demon would make it out alive. He must; he’s the one telling us his story from a safer place.

I think about this quote: “Happiness isn’t about feeling good all the time.”1 I don’t think escapism has to be about absolute avoidance.

Sometimes life is so fuck-all-awful you just need to stand in a bright spot for a second. Years ago, I attended a romance conference at Yale. I’ll never forget the opening speech, how the host said romance helped her reconnect with her sexuality after sexual assault. Romance here wasn’t about escape, it was about bringing her back to her body, returning to her a feeling she’d been robbed of.

Some groups (BLACK PEOPLE, GAY PEOPLE, hello!!!!) need fun, light escapist stories because we’ve been systematically starved of them, absent from them, handed instead the most traumatic reflections of our experiences.

Alex Chee discusses this necessity in his wonderful post on Heated Rivalry:

We are, of course, and have been, under attack via a method known as resiliency targeting. If you feel like you can’t catch a break, if you feel exhausted, it may be that you can’t because of the way that method of assault goes after our ability to recuperate.

Those predicting the rise and reign of escapist fiction in 2026 are talking mostly about readers wanting to flee a political moment that has translated itself into certain groups being harmed and hurt disproportionately more than others.

And so we also need to ask ourselves:

who gets to escape?

Early last year, I was binging commercial romances. I would just download them onto my e-reader and basically black out. It was comforting, it was numbing. I felt the same thing again and again like running on an endless treadmill. It was the kind of escape that didn’t necessarily move me closer to my humanity, after a while, it just turned it off.

At the end of 2025, I tried reading these books again but this time felt aggravated. Light and fluffy escapist fiction was a painful contrast to my lived reality. It was too jarring. My cynicism had calcified into a stone these books couldn’t pierce.

Troubled, I told this to my Very Practical/No-Nonsense Capricorn Mother. She said: “Congratulations, you’re like the rest of us.” By ‘us’ she meant a jaded adult. She worked for the federal government for 38 years before retiring last May.

Other things happened that made me consider the function of escapist fiction more deeply. I told a wealthy white woman about my book and she told me she didn’t do books with politics in them.2

Do you think Aliya Rahman, the disabled woman in Minneapolis who was dragged from her car and detained by ICE agents had a choice to not “do politics”? Politics happened to her while she was driving to the Traumatic Brain Injury Center for a doctor’s appointment. What about Alex Pretti? Renee Good? For some of us, there’s no such thing as minding your business. You’re minding your business and then your face is on the pavement. You escape, they catch you.

In his post, Chee says Heated Rivalry director Jacob Tierney chose a Canadian streamer because U.S companies wanted to sanitize the sex in the story.3

I keep thinking about this line from this fantastic book I’m reading about the history of sitcoms:

A generation forged in the fire of the war sought placidity and sameness on the home front: stable nuclear families, a nation of identically constructed Levittowns. Television was a product of the same enforced consensus. It would mirror America, not necessarily as it was, but as it should be: peaceable, middle class, eternally unchanging.4

But who ceases to exist when we seek sameness? Who’s shut out of Levittown?

I recently produced a show with a panel of Congressional reporters who were at the Capitol on January 6th. One the journalists said: “The company I work for now requires survivor training, hostile environment training…sadly, I’m a lot more skeptical and cynical about where we are and I don’t know if that part of me can be put back together again.”

Escape how? You look away but the world is still unraveling around you.

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the quality of the place you escape to matters

What I found, though, was that there were stories that did break through; but they had to strike with more impact.

In December, I watched When Harry Met Sally along with the rest of the world and I’m happy to report my stone-cold heart thawed just a little.5

When Harry Met Sally is light but it isn’t depth-less. It goes down easy but it sates your appetite in the end.

And now everyone knows the story of its ending: it wasn’t originally a happy one. Rob Reiner had to fall in love with his wife on set, had to live his full life, to reach this conclusion. So yes, in the film, that ending really was hard-earned, was not guaranteed, as in life.

WHMS does what it does (romance, humor, New York) singularly well and this, this, is what has felt missing to me in what we so often call escapist fiction. Escape to me isn’t the problem, but where are we going?6

what else might we want from fiction now?

One of the most instructive and strangest reading experiences I’ve ever had happened a few years back when I read a blockbuster upmarket novel (though that wasn’t a term I knew then). It was high-stakes, propulsive. I read it in a night. But when I was done, I didn’t get that expansive, wistful, glassy-eyed feeling I get at the end of a book I’ve just devoured. I felt hollow. It was like I’d run my fingers through air for hours. I understood then there was a type of enjoyable story that could leave you empty-handed. It had mimicked depth without ever achieving it and this was uncanny to me.

I’m not one of those people who believe a novel has to give you more than a great story. But God do you have to be a special kind of writer for that. What I’m trying to say is there’s a kind of escapism that offers rest and revival and another kind that makes you aware of the void you’re trying to fill with it. What I’m trying to say is living inside an empty fictional world does nothing for me when most days I already feel gutted.

Out of all the book predictions for 2026, literary agent Anna Sproul-Latimer’s is my favorite:

Readers—like yours truly—are exhausted, spiritually hungry, and aching for deliverance. If last year they wanted ease, candy, a snack—that is, a kind of band-aid—next year I believe they’ll be ready for something more profound, if also more challenging. I believe there are only so many days left for hiding under the covers.

Jenka Gurfinkel calls stories like Heated Rivalry “anti-dystopian art,” arguing that “Dystopia at its core is about cynicism.”

But the opposite of cynicism isn’t escapism, it’s optimism. Optimism is not one note or easy.7 It doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It rises in response to something, has meaning because it’s aware of the alternative, not ignorant of it.

I admit, I’m a total maximalist. I think the great stories do it all: light here, heavy there. Our world but also that heightened energy of make-believe. Fun and profound. Humorous and wrenching. I enjoy a bit of whiplash, a sense of range. That’s the real triumph to me, a story that contains it all.

And as Chee reminds us, escape doesn’t have to mean running away:

One week before [Heated Rivalry] aired, GLAAD published statistics showing the number of queer characters being taken off shows. Another recent study said many of us are planning to lead less public lives as of last month. This is part of resilience targeting, depriving us of the comfort of living publicly without fear or finding our stories in stores, on television, on film, in books. The meteoric rise of the show, the return of the novels to the bestseller list, and the intensity of fans, all are reminders that the regime’s attempt to use political power to enact cultural power was not equal to the task of keeping this from us.

What books are you escaping into right now? Or are you seeking something else in literature these days? I want to hear what escapism means to you!

As I watch what’s happened with romantasy—that is, publishers scooping up a shit-ton of these books after noticing an appetite for them—I keep wondering why, after the success of writers like Sally Rooney and Lily King, publishing hasn’t appeared to put any true weight behind filling what I see is a different hole in the market: literary romance.1

The romantasy and commercial romance spaces have become increasingly oversaturated. Can you name the number of romantasy or commercial romance novelists on one hand? Sure, if you had, like, 10,000 hands (super bad math, I know, whatever). But I bet you’d be hard-pressed trying to name more than five literary romance writers. Not upmarket (see: Emily Henry) but literary.2

Part of the problem is the market in general is leaning more commercial but also: no one seems to agree on what contemporary literary romance even is??? Because it’s a category that doesn’t really exist??? At least not in the way romantasy or horror exist. The kind of books I’m referring to you’d find on the “Fiction” table at your local bookstore which, idk why it’s called that, it just is, okay!!!

The other problem I think is many literary writers don’t self-identify as romance writers, including our Lord and Savior, Sally Rooney, but hold themselves apart from the romance community. At minimum, they don’t entirely see themselves as writing the same thing as their romance counterparts in a different register. We call theirs ‘love stories’ instead. More on that, well, now:

a romance and a love story are not always the same

I AM NOT AN EXPERT BUT, in my mind, romance is a genre whereas a love story transcends genre. A love story has more to do with the subject matter than with conventions. Like any genre, romance is partly defined by its conventions, constraints, or expectations: the love story in a romance must be the A plot and there usually must be either a Happily Ever After or Happy For Now. The latter is like a dangling clause to me, leaving room for myriad possibility.

Something that is not really an explicit convention of romance but that I personally find distinguishes a romance from a love story is the swooning element. We are swooning, for instance, over Connell Waldron’s silver chain. We are kicking our feet when he picks it up with his teeth. There is some fantasy buoying the story even if it’s not operating in the same dreamy or escapist register that a commercial romance might (enter shit I love like the door lean or fist biting which, I’m sorry to report, most people don’t do irl :’( but maybe they should!?)

There’s plenty of literary love stories where, for example, an older guy is just kind of a dick to a younger woman but she loves it for a while or a married couple is going through some bullshit. These are not romances even if they contain moments of romance and it’s because they contain no fantasy. The guy is a dick in the end, the married couple gets divorced.3

what is literary romance then?

It’s easier to start with what I’m not talking about when I ask (somewhat cheekily) Where Are All The Literary Romance Writers?4

I don’t mean literary writers who’ve dabbled in writing romance like Curtis Sittenfeld’s ROMANTIC COMEDY or literary writers who often pivot from project to project. I don’t mean literary writers who write about love. I don’t mean commercial or upmarket romance writers who pen beautiful prose.

I mean literary writers (who most agree are literary) who’ve made this their lane, who are writing with some general awareness (conscious or subconscious) of the romance genre; this doesn’t mean they are purposefully gesturing at the genre but that gesture is there in their work and they keep doing it across multiple books. We expect this from them. We go to them for this. Holly Brickley, who wrote DEEP CUTS, could be a fixture in this genre but it depends on her next novel. I think you often see literary writers who go on to write something else.5

Literary fiction is a bizarre genre to begin with because it’s more a category of writing—a way people see, engage, and talk about a work—than a more easily classifiable genre like horror. But it still operates as a genre with (albeit mushier) conventions. Someone once said that in commercial fiction, it’s about moving the story forward and in literary fiction, it’s about moving the story deeper. This is a generalization, of course, one upmarket fiction blows open, but it feels loosely true.

The ideal literary romance, to me, draws on the best parts of literary fiction and romance in the same way a great romantasy isn’t either/or but a seamless blend. Two genres that became one <3 (how fucking romantic!!!)

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the problem of positioning

Atria editor Sean deLone recently wrote a great piece defining upmarket fiction (ie. the lovechild of commercial and literary fiction. Think: THE WEDDING PEOPLE, SUCH A FUN AGE, MY BOOK (teehee).

He talks about upmarket fiction as a spectrum and how, where you fall on it, often comes down to the author’s intentions, the style and sophistication of the story, and how the book is positioned in the market. I think this is exactly right.

I also think author intention and positioning are two big reasons why literary romance as a robust category barely exists.

As I’ve said: what literary writers are coming out and calling themselves romance writers? They may acknowledge the influence of romances on their work (See: Kelly Link’s THE BOOK OF LOVE) or discuss their affinity for exploring relationship dynamics or writing about intimacy, but again, there just aren’t enough making this explicit connection between their own work and the genre at large to make it a thing.

And, oh, the positioning and marketing of it all! I can hear people screaming the names of their favorite upmarket romance writers at this post, asking, Why don’t they ‘count’? Lily King, for instance, actually doesn’t read to me as that much more literary than the best of Emily Henry, Carly Fortune or Rainbow Rowell.6 But who publishes an author makes a big difference in how that author is read and understood, whether or not readers grasp the nuances between different imprints. It’s their packaging. Does the cover have cartoon characters on it or eyes crying white flower petals?7

Rooney’s last book was published by FSG. That’s about as literary as you can get. Remember, though, the uproar over the CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS cover? The ‘omg it’s litfic but it looks like fun women’s fiction’ discourse? That helped court a different audience of readers.

A Berkley romance, there’s no question it’s a romance. Berkley has the established infrastructure to position and launch a romance. Even readers outside of publishing know the name, it’s that well-branded.

is ‘happily ever after’ incompatible with literary fiction?

In her review of Lily King’s new novel, HEART THE LOVER, writer Leigh Stein says the reason she thinks the book is so popular is because it’s really a romance novel “disguised” as a literary novel. I think literary writers who take love as their subject totally benefit from the pre-existing enthusiasm for romance. I ALSO think the word “disguised” is doing a lot of work here. It gets at another central problem: romance and literary fiction, at least contemporarily, are often viewed as incompatible. How romances tend to end, I think, has something to do with this.8

I love the debate around commercial v. upmarket v. literary fiction because I am a weird loser! Endings though, for some reason, are often omitted from this debate, but they’re often one of the ways I discern how literary a book is or isn’t.

I don’t want to fall into the trap that assumes literary novels MUST have endings that fuck you up emotionally in a bad way. LESS has an extremely heartwarming ending. I mean, fuck! NORMAL PEOPLE has a happy ending. I can think of dozens of literary novels that end with hope. But for me, the difference is that the ending feels realistic, not like a fantasy.9 The debts introduced in the story must be paid on some level. This might be divisive to say, but if there’s no cost to the character, everyone gets out of the plot’s binding home free with no losses, no consequences, I don’t think that’s a literary novel.10 I focus less on beginnings when evaluating the literary potential of a book; they don’t tell you what the book ultimately becomes, what it can be. The story hasn’t grown to its full height.

But back to Leigh. In her review of HEART, she says that she thinks literary romances have more flexibility in how they end. It doesn’t have to have a HEA (Happily Ever After) like a commercial romance must.

Hardcore romance readers on Goodreads are throwing their phones right about now. They’re also reporting me to the local authorities.

But I actually side with Leigh here! I have ALWAYS been torn by the requirement of a HEA as defined by the characters getting together in the end. I know that technically without one, it’s not a romance. My hope though is not that literary romance discards the concept of a HEA or HFN, but expands what it can be.

there will never be another sally rooney or: the singular talent trap

Finally, I think literary romance hasn’t really blown up because someone like Sally Rooney is primarily seen as an isolated phenomenon rather than part of a larger community. Same with Lily King. It’s just, Lily King is Lily King. Or Sally Rooney is Sally Rooney. Literary writers writing alone, siloed. They’re not writing genre, they’re just writing what they feel like and what they feel like writing about is love.

The takeaway from Rooney’s success seemed to be more millennial fiction or sad girl lit and, I don’t know, I always felt like that wasn’t the right takeaway.11 The takeaway to me was that people are hungry for elevated romances that court fantasy but the kind of fantasy that still exists within the limitations of our world or at least gives the impression of adhering to those limitations.12

Emily Henry is her own phenomenon, too, but she also revealed (or at least affirmed) an appetite for upmarket romance that opened up space for more. Tia Williams, Carly Fortune, Cara Bastone, B.K Borison, Kate Goldbeck—that corner of romance has blossomed. Same with Rebecca Yarros re: a massive phenomenon, but no one (that I know) threw up their hands like, welp, can’t do that again.

Commercial and upmarket romance feel more communal. Literary romance feels like a scatter plot graph that no one has taken out a pen to draw a line connecting anything.

My dream is that literary romance gets its own boom, naturally smaller than the romantasy one, but as enthusiastic, as nurtured.

No more “disguising” romance as literary fiction. No more Litfic slipping through its bedroom window at night to meet Romance by the creek. Just let them be together already.

Americans have a uniquely weird relationship to celebrity and I’m fascinated by how this rigged contract between fan/famous-person is playing out amid all the drama about Taylor Swift.

Let’s catch you up: she has a new album out. A lot of people think it’s bad. Some lifelong fans are butthurt about the fact that she is a white billionaire who is also a Victim. She sings a lot about Travis Kelce.

I am not a Swiftie and have never been. I like some of her songs but not more than I like the music of her contemporaries. If I’m building an army of breathy white girls, I’m recruiting Lana, Sabrina, Billie, Clairo before I’m recruiting Taylor.

But what I keep returning to as I read elegiac posts by Swiftie defectors is this one maybe unkind thought: you all helped create her though?? You lined her pockets, bought every iteration of her albums, bought her sweater at Walmart or whatever. So yes, she is a billionaire now and out of touch as billionaires are. The whole trajectory seems inevitable to me but few people are pointing to the other side of this capitalist equation: the people generating demand.

I’m not trying to sound above the fray when I say I’ve never understood celebrity culture. By celebrity culture, I mean this logic that raises people (celebrities) above the non-celebrity person i.e I am sobbing my body weight in tears at the mere sight of you on the street even though I don’t actually know you. I am waiting in digital lines for seven hours so I can get the new skincare product you’re dropping at midnight because you've created a false sense of scarcity to manipulate me into feeling that I must have this thing now. I am rampaging against strangers online and music critics at the New York Times who critique your bloated album because an attack on you is an attack on me even though you have nine houses and I can’t afford rent.

In the past, I might’ve accepted feminist arguments claiming that dumping on celebrity culture is an attack on an interest largely shared by women and queer men. But as a woman who loves romance novels, pink, and what I call hyperfemme bratty bitch pop music, I’m not fielding that claim today, file it with someone else.

Celebrity culture runs on worship. It maintains a dynamic where one person is the worshipped and another is the worshipper. Or put in more crass terms: the salesman and the one being sold to.

Because celebrities are almost always selling you shit, whether that’s a product or an illusion, and this is part of my issue with the whole idea of them. It’s one thing paying to license an artist’s work, paying to attend their concert. They’ve made a thing you find valuable and now you’re paying them for their labor. I’m all for supporting a creator you cherish, I’m all for allowing yourself to feel awe by what they’ve made.

But a celebrity is not the same as an artist. Celebrities can be artists but, to me, a celebrity is someone for whom fame is the main currency. Fame is a machine printing money, bill after bill slipping out of its green mouth. Fame is a deeply designed story crafted about someone and repeated again and again to an audience that keeps growing, keeps investing with their attention, money, emotions into this story that was not written by mistake or without the support of a PR firm whose job it is to lull you with narrative. I’m not saying we should abolish celebrity, I’m just saying it’s a con.

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I recently wandered into the SKIMS in Georgetown (this is Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand). I’m a fan of SPANX which I thought SKIMS might be similar to. I touched some of the items and the quality didn’t feel much different to me than Forever 21. But best believe the prices were different. The store was packed with teenage girls. All I could think exiting the shop, like someone’s angry grandpa, was that all this was a sad scam but so many people will happily spend money because a pretty person has told them to.

This is a problem not just for pop culture but for politics. The swathes of Americans who just want someone to tell them how to think, what to be angry about. Who believe a person with a large platform must have legitimate, well-sourced information. They want to believe someone has been selected by Jesus to lead us, idk, somewhere, which is the crux of celebrity. You must believe this person has some quality you don’t and can’t possess.

It is other people, en masse, that confer celebrity to another person. And that’s what makes it so weird to me. That this person cannot be famous without you and yet they are somehow positioned as being above you. This dynamic in its extreme can manifest as entitlement, a fan wanting unlimited access to the celebrity in ways that are maladaptive. But also: anyone who’s ever met someone remotely famous or has friends who have famous friends, you know that these people are usually not that great in person. I don’t mean this as a dig, I mean this as a blunt statistic reflective of human nature.

And it’s their right to be fucking average!!! We’re the ones wanting them to be more interesting—funnier, smarter, more talented—than the actually are. You’ve heard the saying, Never meet your heroes? The question I’m posing is why are these people our heroes in the first place, what have they done?1

Americans and our preoccupation with celebrity reveals an inverted value system: we care about the prettiest people, the wealthiest, the most (sometimes) talented, the people with ‘more.’ These are the people we want to hear about. My own most popular Substack posts are about literary celebrities and I find this telling.

How then, can we be so shocked that this country elected a celebrity? A person whose value system rewards worship, who’s whole body bends towards the spotlight.

I think this is why people are deeply uncomfortable with Taylor Swift’s, “Life of A Showgirl,” in this particular moment. The album feels so uncannily disconnected from our current reality as to be an insult to everyone who has to see the National Guard on their way home, the federal workers keeping our government running without pay. Swift is dreaming about the whole block looking like Travis Kelce meanwhile the whole block is looking like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I’m not saying people can’t care about their favorite stars, I’m asking why do you care about them more than the immigrant being pulled from their apartment in the middle of the night, ziptied, and driven away?

Be mad at Taylor Swift, whatever, but also be mad at the logic that allows her to keep metastasizing without actually growing.

People expect too much from that woman. But that’s what celebrity wants, for you to expect more than it can ever deliver, for you to keep believing indefinitely that maybe they’ll turn out to be exactly who you want.

I remember reading a review about a popular novel a few years ago whose headline read, “A Book Made For T.V.” It was the L.A Times so they would know. This declaration was a dig, one I couldn’t out of my head because it didn’t immediately feel like one.

And it was far from the last time I’d hear something like this. The other day, I read a post that described a different novel as “Netflix realism,” or:

a style of fiction that doesn’t attempt realism in the sense of making a lifelike illusion with words, but a realism that we are all used to from television.

Stick around in spaces where Literary Discourse breeds and you hear a lot of breathy lamenting: how literary fiction is dying, how the blurb industrial complex needs to die, about whether MFA programs have crushed creativity (no), about romance readers being a slice above porn addicts (stupid), about white male novelists not getting the attention they deserve (lol). About autofiction (shut up).

You’ll also hear about how books feel more and more like they’re made for T.V and, what’s implied, less like novels.

I understand this critique at the same time that I don’t really understand it. Here’s what I mean: film and television have now been a part of the culture for, what, seventy years? (remember, I can’t do math). Long enough that the form would bleed into other forms. And why shouldn’t we steal from other mediums? Why shouldn’t they mix? What should a novel feel like?

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Sally Rooney’s earlier writing often feels as much like a screenplay as a novel. This isn’t a defect, it’s a style.

DEEP CUTS by Holly Brickley feels like a 2000s RomCom during the golden age of the genre, which makes sense since RomCom conventions cut across both books and movies.

BUNNY by Mona Awad is shot through with cinematography. Her follow up, WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY even more so to the point where I kept thinking as I read, this would make an amazing movie. I didn’t mean that at all as an insult.

One tick I love about BUNNY is the way Awad exploits (and assumes) our shared experience of movies and TVs to craft her descriptions:

“Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.”

“A couple of Wes Anderson-type girls stare at me through their hipster frames. Little silky French shifts with an understated pattern.”

At one point, Awad describes a character’s black mesh gloves as reminiscent of a goth at an 80s prom. Maybe this is because I wasn’t around in the 80s but in my mind, this is gesturing as much at the lived experience of being in high school in the 80s as it is at the 80s high school movies most of us have seen. In short, we know what’s she talking about with these references. The image becomes immediately available. And aren’t words in books meant to connect us to images? Isn’t there meant to be some form of a film flickering in our minds when we read?

But I don’t think this is what people are complaining about when they complain about a novel feeling too much like a Netflix show. I think what they mean is the rendering of real life feels thin and sketched, it doesn’t make use of all a novel can do, that it somehow insults the form, is lazy about it. If it’s mimicking it’s mimicking bad T.V. or at least it doesn’t translate well, fully, or with complexity.

Like books, movies and T.V contribute to our repository of cliches: the wide shot of someone waking up in the morning, the close-up of someone crying on a park bench. Cliches are not just platitudes, their images like these. I think it’s the reaching into that repository without thought or interrogation that’s the problem here, not that one form feels like or steals from another. And there’s a difference, obviously, between a book emulating a good movie and a bad one.

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Not long ago, I read a novel that opened with a scene of a young, pretty woman in a major city who was late for work. She’s hungover, mascara striped across her face, stumbling around for her pants. She runs for the train, makes it just in time. It’s the birthday of her late sibling. We know this because it appears on her phone’s calendar. She tries to ignore her grief. Reading this, I had the uncanny feeling that I was watching a movie but there was nothing cinematic about it. By ‘cinematic’ I mean the sweeping beauty telegraphed by skilled camera-work, smart scoring, all the visual, sonal, thematic, pieces of a scene clicking together.

This novel felt like a movie because that’s where we’ve seen this opening a million times. It tells us nothing, it’s a blandly comforting, well-worn establishing shot. It only works in a novel if the sequence it’s so beautifully written, smacking with specificity, some sort of surprise or subversion around the corner. Otherwise it feels placeless, characterless, void. It feels like, Who cares.

You can find this abuse of cues and shorthands to storytell in films and fiction both. It’s all just janky craftsmanship in the end.

I don’t need to tell you this because you, dear reader, are not a fucking child, but one of the main differences between films and novels is that in a movie, the images are directly offered to the viewer while in a novel the reader must conjure them themselves. A novelist has a different kind of job.

But I do think writers can learn from film and T.V to complete this job. And sometimes a writer is actually aiming to copy what we see on-screen.

I’m working on a novel some of you may know colloquially as White Baby Daddy HBO Drama Novel. Part of it is set in the mid-2000s at a private California high school. It’s the age of Abercrombie, Hollister and American Eagle. High School Musical and Justin Bieber’s swoopy hair; The Hills, Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries. I wanted parts of the novel to feel like, to embody, those high school movies and T.V shows because they upheld the lie of unattainably beautiful white teenagehood that wrecked the self-esteem of a generation of middle-class Black girls.1 And yet many of us, including myself, are lulled by, nostalgic for these same movies with their social hierarchies and hot teen stars. It’s a contradiction I’m playing with, but I have to put you in that cinematic world with all its vacant visual cues.

I think we have to accept that novels—what they’re meant to or can do, how they feel—will likely keep changing alongside our technologies and, more importantly, alongside how those advances alter the lens (or screens) through which we understand and engage with our world.

You can’t divorce the novel from other modes of consumption. Writers are people who are a hodgepodge of what they read, watched, listened to growing up and beyond. And yes, we should avoid the hollow replication of movies that turn characters to mannequins, settings into cardboard sets in Hollywood lots.

I always think about my writing teacher who once called out a student for making a character vomit after seeing something sad/gross. She asked, “How many of you actually physically throw up when we see something gross?” No one raised their hand. This is a reaction we’ve captured from T.V, not from real life.

But the books that feel like movies and fail I don’t think fail only because of this. They fail because that’s all they offer, these empty regurgitative gestures severed from actual character motivation, void of fought-for texture and knowledge of the world in which the story is set. These books aren’t learning from films, they’re simply plagiarizing them.

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself embroiled in several debates about hardback books vs. softcover ones. Before your eyes glaze, this post is not about that. But it is about the cost of books and a book’s physical form is very much a part of that.1

A bit of backstory: the economy is fucked up. The most recent jobs numbers were trash. You don’t need a nobody on the internet to tell you this. You know this.

You also know that you’ve probably considered buying a new release in the last year or so and flinched when you saw $30 on the price sticker ($10,000 if you’re in Canada. Sowrrey).

This whole saga really began for me when I went to the bookstore a few weeks ago and picked up a paperback that felt like (my apologies) Scott’s toilet paper. (No offense to Scott-users. I am praying for your ass though).

Because I’m privy to the goings-on in the bookworld, I knew this decision was likely a financial one. Paper costs have been rising for a while, then you have the tar*ffs of it all (many of which are probably illegal but whatever, I digress).

I am not really knocking the publisher for this flimsy book, and I’m certainly not trying to come for the writer. But I am making an observation.

More books are being released in paperback instead of hardback first, then a paperback later. Now, a paperback release is typical for most commercial fiction. This hardback —> softcover arc is primarily the trajectory of upmarket/literary fiction and select uber-popular romances (like Emily Henry or Abby Jimenez).

A paperback release, I’ve heard, can have implications for how the book is received within the literary world (reviews, prestige, blah, blah, blah). But most readers don’t care, don’t even know that this is a thing. I actually think, at least anecdotally, most readers prefer paperbacks. They’re easier to carry around, some people like being able to bend back the cover for more accessible reading (evil).

I’m a hardback whore to the bone and that’s because I beat my books up. I am wrestling with them—underlining, dogearing, screaming, writing ‘wtf bitch <3!!!’ in the margins. When I was a kid, I ate a page out of a book.2 Reading for me is physical and so I need a steady sparring partner. Case in point: the cover of my paperback copy of The Goldfinch has entirely ripped off (more on this later).

The only paperbacks I recognize are courtesy of Graywolf Press—they have delicious, hearty softcovers. (I praised the quality of their books over the phone to poetry editor, Jeff Shotts, and he actually told me the type of paper and its weight).

But this post is not about whether to paperback-release or not paperback-release.

As I was flipping through that Scott-toilet-paper-softcover though—and I say this as someone who will drop Money on books because I believe in them—I did wonder, is this worth $18? This thing I’m probably going to accidentally rip up before I’ve even finished it? That just flops out of my hands like it doesn’t want to be touched?

So: what are books really worth? And are they worth what they cost right now?

This is not the same as trying to ascertain whether a pair of boots is worth the money. You put them on, walk around. They’re comfortable, they look cute, you take them for a spin, they don’t fall apart. Okay, great, those were worth $40.

That’s because we want our shoes to do maybe two or three basic things, to complete obvious and designated tasks.

But a book? A book is different. How do you calculate its value? Well, first you’d have to read it to truly know if the story (because it’s the story, not just the object holding it, that is then main tool of evaluation here) is worth what you paid for it. A book (like a play or a movie) is a product you must buy before you understand what you’re buying. It’s a risk.

What is a story (which is not a product the way a book is) worth? If it’s a shitty one, maybe not much. If it’s a transcendent one, maybe your soul.

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Do you see the problem? Let’s step back and do some math (God, I can’t believe you guys are making me do math, wtf!!!).

My first copy of The Goldfinch, that I fucked up and which I’ve owned for about seven years, cost $20. (The new copy I bought last year was $22.99). This is more than many paperbacks but 1). it’s Donna Tartt 2). This is post-Pulitzer Prize and 3). It’s 771 pages which is a lot of paper.

20 dollars divided by 7 years is $2.80 a year. 20 dollars divided by 771 is 0.026 cents.

I’m so bad at math that I actually don’t even know what these calculations are supposed to represent but both the outcomes are cheap.

Since we’re talking about today’s market (not the market in 2013), let’s go with the $22.99 version for the rest of this thot exercise. Most people in major cities in the book-buying demographic would easily blow $22.99 eating out. In most cities, that’s a pretty affordable dinner. That’s two glasses of wine at a restaurant. That’s an Uber ride on a bad day in D.C and a good one in New York.

If you’ll allow me to scream at you for a second, part of this is that we don’t really value books. Or rather, because we can’t measure what they gives us (because capitalism involves a clear exchange), we can glibly say, $28 is too much while spending $700 to see Beyonce WHICH fair, but also COME ON.

People are allowed to spend their money on what they want!!! I KNOW! I know!

And this is also why Amazon owns the market. It can sell people a book for $1.99 because readers think that’s fair. They don’t think the book you spent twelve years writing while raising your seven grandkids that’s 500 pages and that you went into a depression over is worth $28, love3. It’s not worth the price of a cheddar burger and a side of yukon fries at Silver Diner.4 Respectfully.

But I didn’t come here to shame. I came here to make a point.

My book is supposed to be coming out in hardback for $28. (JUNE 2 (allegedly) LOCK IN, HOES). And even though I know what it took to create, I’ll be the first to admit the question of worth is so shifty, so slippery, when it comes to literature that it’s forced to inhabit extremes just to accommodate it.

I’m absolutely blazing if I buy a hardback for $28 and hate the book. I feel cheated, slighted, slapped in the face, How dare you do this to me? The hopes I had for you!

But when I love a book, I don’t remember what I paid for it. Unlike meals or car-share rides, books are things you can keep for years. The experience of the story is ephemeral, but the object is not. The cost is irrelevant when the story gets inside you. At risk of sounding pat (too late) it’s priceless.

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A publisher nor a writer can control for this variable, this essential instability that is native to subjective art, ‘products’ that are not designed to do any one thing like a hair tie or a skin cream or boots. The book is worth what the reader feels it’s worth to them. What then are you really paying for?

To inhabit a different body.

To kick your feet with a giggling glee.

To revisit childhood, when your mind felt deliciously elastic and open.

To hide your sobbing face even in the privacy of your bedroom.

To feel a fire in your chest that propels you to motion.

To become part of a web the ties you to every other person whose read it.

To stop time.

To move backwards, forwards, through it.

To lose hours.

To find something better.

To feel known.

To forget yourself.

To remember.

To run your pen ragged over the pages out of love.

To be crushed when you reach the end.

To flip to the first page again.

Very few products that you can fit in your bag can do all of this. You’re paying for the possibility that it will.

The other day, bright-eyed, joyfully caffeinated, I opened my inbox to find this weird shit waiting for me:

Discordia Review

"[Vuong begins to cry]": The beginning of the end of Ocean Vuong

The Vibe Shift has come cataclysmically for Ocean Vuong. Really, he should have seen it coming. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was an extremely pre-Vibe-Shift book—a queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw…

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8 months ago · 410 likes · 97 comments · Eris

Oh? My first reaction was: well, there’s a lot of shit to cry about. My second: this is a bizarrely melodramatic way to frame a thing I’m unconvinced is actually happening, but let’s see what this person has to say since Substack has gone out of its way to stick it in my inbox.

Here’s what this person had to say:

The Vibe Shift has come cataclysmically for Ocean Vuong. Really, he should have seen it coming. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was an extremely pre-Vibe-Shift book—a queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up, and of course it sold like Vietnamese banh xeo…I mean, the title alone put me off, because it’s just so fucking poncy, and the book itself was as much of an overwritten mess as that title would suggest, filled with empty-headed philosophizing. I put it down after maybe a couple dozen pages and then never picked it up again. The critics, on the whole, seemed to lap the stupid thing up.

um…………BAYBEE, who bullied you in middle school??? This all sounds very (excuse my French) bitter. More than that, if he’s blaming Vuong’s rising star on the conditions created by a previous vibe we should now be condemning, what are the vibes now? Fascism? Genocide? What are the vibes now?!?!

I really didn’t want to be back here but here I am.1

This isn’t a piece about Vuong’s new novel (I haven’t read it), or his prose (purple or otherwise). I was a fan of his first poetry collection, I enjoyed his first novel, too. And I want to make clear, I am not anti-review, anti-literary criticism. I want people to engage rigorously, furiously with Art! I don’t want the already-shrinking book coverage to feel too coherent, boringly frictionless.

What I’m saying is, I support the right to dislike a book, to feel slighted by bad writing.

But this?

I can’t ignore the things that actually come out of Vuong’s mouth, which reveal that the man isn’t really an influence I’d like on a burgeoning literature-reading renaissance, for the simple reason that the man is a fucking illiterate bellend.

That’s nuts.

I was glad to see the post’s top commenter, Freddie deBoer say, “I really, really distrust these moments when everyone turns on a writer at the same time.”

This seems right to me. It all feels very cheap.

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But: I want to talk about Substack planting this cheap take in my inbox. I want to talk about cruelty and mean-spiritedness online. Vitriol, ragebait, takedowns.

I recently took a webinar for writers trying to learn TikTok. As a journalist, I couldn’t believe it when the instructor suggested appealing to people’s anger for views.

It’s not that I couldn’t believe it because what she said was untrue. This is the ethos of these platforms, hooking you to them at the expense of everyone’s humanity.

What I couldn’t believe was that we were still trying to disappear the connection between cruelty online and cruelty off of it.

Do you know that a shooter opened fire at the CDC headquarters last week in an attempt to make the ‘public aware of his distrust in vaccines?’2

Do you know how conspiracies about the Covid-19 vaccine circulated? How they spread nearly as fast as the virus itself?

Do you know when we write these hate-pieces, when we click on them, we are telling the algorithm who we are?

Do you know that it uses this data to make us who it wants us to be, which is people who click on hate-pieces?

Do you know a screen is only the illusion of a veil?

Do you know what happens on the internet doesn’t stay on it?

And: do you know that this mf post gets even worse?

….the much-publicized support for Trump among some “POC” communities and the lack of support for Kamala from black men3 (though I think expecting black men to vote for a former DA is some next-level insult) exposed sheltered whites to the novel conception that minority communities are pluralistic. This means that not only is identity politics politically useless, “Voice Uplift” is even less than useless because, surprise surprise, no one subjective experience can stand in for the complexities within a group. In fact, Vietnamese people in particular, Vuong’s demographic, are stalwart Republican voters and always have been, so listening to Vuong will in no way “enlighten” you about a community Vuong stands apart from.

That DA comment is crazy because also sexism but moving right along. The point is taken but the anger is misplaced. Why are we blaming Vuong because white people are looking to him to learn how to feel about Vietnamese people, that sounds like their fucking fault. Why are we blaming him for a phenomenon that happens to every writer of color who “makes it”? That is, the phenomenon of You Failed To Represent Us, How Dare You. See also: You Fucked Up, How Dare You. Because you aren’t as smart as they told us you were, you never deserved to be here in the first place.

It’s fair to question why the literary world (like the rest of the world) is so enamored with the idea of winners and losers. Winners who absorb a level of celebration and scrutiny that they don’t even seem to want it in the end. Losers who are so burned by the system they resort to nihilism.

Trashing the so-called winners who are frankly just shinier cogs in the machine won’t remedy this problem.

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Not long after waxing poetic that, “minority communities are pluralistic” (thanks by the way, I def needed you to explain that to me <3), he writes this:

I used the phrase “intellectual himbo4” when I profiled Simon Wu a while ago, and I think that Vuong very much fits the same shoes. In fact, Vuong and Wu have a lot of identity tag overlap—well, okay, namely they’re just both gay Asian guys.

I don’t even know what to say.

Would you allow me to make things about myself for a moment?

The tone of this piece reminds me of comment some white man left a couple of weeks ago on a post I wrote about selling my debut novel:

“I mean, look: Congrats on the book sale. But, you basically admit it mostly happened via insider connections a la NPR/NYT and then add a very basic-bitch common trope sexual triangle angle as the plot.5 All that AND the book isn’t even coming out until “summer 2026.” A year! I’d rather self-publish with artistic integrity and freedom.”

So much of what I hear when I see remarks like this is, you don’t deserve this.

When I press my ear to them, listen really closely, I hear: You don’t deserve this. I do. You’ve taken what I deserve from me.

Questions about who is or isn’t deserving are a tricky, tricky thing. Let’s just say outright what a big part of this discourse is about: people feel like Vuong doesn’t deserve what he’s gotten. He doesn’t deserve the MacArthur grant, the glowing reviews. The praise. The accolades. The money.

Who are you to say what someone fucking deserves? Who am I to say what someone fucking deserves? Most people don’t get the minimum of what they deserve: like food, like getting to stay in their home country, like not being a casualty in someone else’s war. My great-great-grandfather was a slave, my grandfather was a sharecropper, my dad was stoned each morning on the bus ride to school in the segregated south.

Do you think they got anything they fucking deserved?

Let me draw your attention back to this line:

“A queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up.”

Remember, though, when writers of color were getting paid pennies in advances compared to their white counterparts? Remember how this was the case for award-winning Black authors, those thought to be anointed? Remember there can only be one big Vietnamese author and a million white ones? Remember that when there’s only one, this load placed on that one body of work will become untenable? Remember who put that load there?

This piece landed in my email in a year when my inbox is spilling at the seams with the worst shit imaginable. Maybe that’s why it found me, it recognized something of itself in me. The utter disgust at injustice.

I’m in the process of asking writers more famous than I’ll probably ever be for favors. I decided to take a break from this post to work on a note to one of them instead. Can I tell you how good it felt? Not the asking for favors but the writing something nice? Writing what their work has meant to me?

This is not about whether Vuong’s work lives up to the expectations. That’s a fine and fair debate. This is about the mousetrap set on marginalized writers: you are always writing about the wrong thing. When you write about your community, when you write something entirely different, when you write through a rosy lens, when you write from a place of pessimism, you are always letting everyone down.

The white literary establishment crowned Ocean Vuong the spokesperson of the Asian American immigrant experience. It’s slipping, you’re celebrating that tilt, even though it was a crown designed to fit no one.

Did that headline get you? It’s exactly the kind of hook I’ve learned to put at the beginning of my TikTok videos. Grab them in 3-5 seconds. Offer a valuable insight, advice, a controversial opinion. Cut your breaths out, they slow you down. Matter of fact, stop breathing altogether. You don’t need to be alive for this.

Not everyone operates this way on TikTok, of course. A new friend of mine (Hi, Aneurin!!!) does deeply researched, long form videos (well, long for TikTok) on niche historical and literary topics. There are always exceptions.

But let me step back for a second: I decided to start posting on TikTok a couple of months ago. If you’re wondering if it’s because I have a book coming out next year, you’d be TOTALLY FUCKING RIGHT!!!

Despite being a Zillennial (petitioning to get this term outlawed), I was very afraid of TikTok. Why did shit start playing whenever I opened the app even though I didn’t ask it to? It was like I was being attacked. What was I supposed to get from this video of people shaking hands to that PinkPantheress song? I liked that song, but I didn’t want to keep hearing it, not while people were shaking han—oh look, that 22-year-old just knocked his girlfriend in the head with his ass on beat and magically changed into a suit. That old Taylor Swift is playing in the background beneath an explanation about why you look happier. But are you happy? Are you?

I still don’t entirely get it. But I’m on it now. I’m in it. And I plan to stick out this beautiful, miserable internet k-hole hellscape.

Here’s what I’ve learned about one of the most powerful social media platforms ever.

TikTok Is Your Daddy: On The Algorithm

I’ve heard people say that TikTok owns the most advanced algorithm of all the social media companies. It’s an algorithm that watches you, learns you, knows you, internalizes you. Reduces you.

As a creator, I’ve been told that it tests you. If I push her videos to 200 people, will it perform well enough to push it to 400? If I stopping pushing it, if I let her views fall, will she show up the next day with a new video?

It’s also a powerful search engine. It’s where people find out where the best Thai place is in town. What book to read next.

And I was so, so excited about TikTok during those early weeks! I thought I understood it. I felt good about my posts. I believed I had cracked some hard shell.

And then I started wanting to grow. I’d moved on from messy experimentation, a fumbling kind of play, and started considering strategy.

But whatever the opposite of skyrocketing is, that’s what happened to my views.

They plummeted, my views plummeted.

As of writing, my most recent video is my worst performing (top left corner, if you please. Look how cute I look in it. But TikTok doesn’t care about my cuteness).

I didn’t understand. I was honing my hooks, paying more attention to the titles on the cover. I was getting better at editing, better at showing my personality. I even used one of Justin Bieber’s new songs, like, what the fuck was going on?!?!?!

The endeavour started to feel vacant to me. Maybe because I started to realize that showing up, “being myself,” probably wasn’t going to do much in the end. There was a game. And I was going to have to play it to win.

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GROW GROW GROW, YOU FUCKING HO!

Determined to sell my body to Daddy TikTok, I binged 27 videos of this one content strategist coaching creators on how to grow 100k followers in 100 days. Her videos were compelling! Hopeful! She called her followers, intimately, BookieBoo. And I believed her.

She screamed at me, “LOW VIEWS????? CONGRATULATIONS!!!! TIKTOK IS TESTING YOU!!!!!

Fuck, but what was the test??? How was I supposed to pass this invisible exam designed by this corrupt corporation in kahoots with the Chinese government???

I felt reinvigorated consuming all these TikTok strategy videos. They started popping up on my feed. The algorithm was learning me as I was trying to learn it, but I had to be captive to the algorithm to get close enough.

One morning, after a regrettable binge, I woke up bleary-eyed, intellectually hungover and thought, why tf am I here?

Recently, I saw a video of a girl talking about an influencer who posted 35 times a day before blowing up. The girl spoke about this influencer with admiration. We were supposed to want to be like the influencer who posted 35 times a day. Instead, this made me want to blow up, but physically. Someone commented, “35? I’m over here struggling with my 3-5 videos a day.”

Am I insane? All of this feels like too much to me, even the 3-5 videos a day.

Or no. This feels like an app whose goal is to keep you on it. A drug company that wants you addicted, a healthcare system that wants you sick.

The thing is, you’re going to have trouble succeeding on TikTok if you’re not a consumer of it. TikTok knows this. It set up this symbiotic relationship. Content like trends expedite this expectation. If you’re not on it, you’ll miss it. That’s what trends do, make you feel late to them, make you feel like next time, you can be first. But you’ve got to already be in line to be first. All incentives are structured around keeping you scrolling.

Although I was pained by my plummeting views, I asked myself a clarifying question: how would you feel if you got the views, if you got 400k followers tomorrow?

My stomach turned at the thought. Now I had to show up for 400k people. Show my face, project my voice, keep posting, keep commenting, keep pretending. The hate comments, the mean remarks. My first reaction was, that’s too many fucking people. I don’t want to talk to 400k people. I want 400k people to buy my book and then we both go on about our totally separate days.

This is the rubix cube insanity trap of trying to be a Writer on TikTok.

Is there a way to be known without being seen? Few authors can have it both ways.1

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Selling Out Doesn’t Sound So Bad When You’re Trynna Sell Books

You might recall my last post was about how I sold my novel in a week. The choice to write about it was a wrenching one. The whole framing of it made me squeamish. But I felt like Substack was enough space to contain the nuances I wanted, and I did my best to make it helpful rather than navel-gazing.

It seemed like a good video to make after incorporating everything I’d learned from Screaming Strategist about strong hooks and valuable advice.

So, I sat down and tried to make the video. This is what happened:

I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth without looking stressed. Because I was stressed, my whole body was tight. I kept thinking, Who is this helping, really? This is not going to help any writer on here. This is a bullshit ploy to get views. There’s nothing I could say on this topic in under a minute that wouldn’t wind up being reductive and lacking important context. There are no 4 steps you can take to replicate my experience.

The thought of wasting this super cute outfit on something dumb made me ashamed. I had just bought this poncho. Was this really the first time I was going to debut it? In this dumbass video?

I’d bumped against a boundary, I saw, a line I wasn’t willing to cross. I would keep posting on TikTok. But only videos that didn’t make my mouth sour simply speaking in them.

Bleach Blonde Bad Built BookTok

The biggest problem I had was an existential one: I’m not a genuine Booktok consumer.

I don’t go to TikTok for book recommendations. I already have five trillion books I know I want to read, I don’t need to hear about anymore. I don’t go to BookTok for reviews, I go to Parul Sehgal at the New York Times. This does not mean rigorous reviews don’t exist on TikTok, it just means I don’t seek them out.

So how the fuck was I going to be a part of something I didn’t believe in?!?

Subconsciously, I felt, why the hell would someone turn to me on here? Besides being cute, funny, with an oddly comforting and intimidating presence, I wouldn’t even turn to me, so why would Naomi in Upstate New York??

Weirdly, my genre homelessness also felt heightened in this space. I found that many of the Booktokers I’d come across were either too literary or too romance-heavy for me. The ones in between showed me the following: Sally Rooney, Coco Mellors, Emily Henry. Writers, books, I know like the back of my hand.

ALL UP IN YOUR MIND ft. The Chinese Government

I mean, we all know this. That our data is being farmed, we’re being watched, privacy is a thing of the past, our minds are being warped, manipulated.

Even knowing this, it’s insane how fast this app can change your brain.

I had this mantra before I decided to start a TikTok: this platform is a tool. I use it, it doesn’t use me.

But if you’re trying to expand your audience, this boundary can get mushy. The app is telling you how many people watched what, for how long, their age, gender, when they’re most active. If you’re using any kind of strategy, you’re probably going to listen to what the app is telling you.

And that’s what TikTok wants after all. Your attention.

The One Where I Talk About My Most Popular TikTok

Here’s why, after absolutely laser-blasting this platform in this post, I haven’t lost hope in it: my most popular video is the one I did announcing my book deal. It’s me narrating a video where I’m just sharing my life. There’s some shots of my beautiful coworkers, a shot from a small Hands Off protest.

There’s no hook in the first 3-5 seconds, no 5 things I’ve done, read, learned. It just starts with, “This is Haili.”

It’s the opposite of the girl staring dead-eyed at the camera saying, “This is how I sold my debut novel in a week. Here are 5 ways—”

When I initially imagined myself on TikTok, this is what I saw—getting to be silly, being a touch dramatic, playing with video editing. It’s the most ‘me’ video I’ve done.

Maybe that’s the lesson in all of this. There’s the algorithm. But then there’s your audience. And what is an audience but regular people searching for each other?

Or maybe I’ll just try my luck with Instagram.

At least three different white men have said to me this year something along the lines of, “I’m a white straight male, I’m going to be fine.” Or, “I’m a white straight male and even I’m afraid right now.”

The conclusion is different but the belief rises from the same wrong place. They announce this, I think, in an attempt to name their privilege, which to be clear, exists in spades. It makes them at most a passive ally, but more notably it fails to capture the entire truth about their condition: white men are not as safe as they think. Or rather: the lie of whiteness is what’s keeping them safe and a lie can never offer total safety unless it keeps getting told.

I’m thinking of this line from writer Alyssa Cole’s novel, “An Extraordinary Union” in which a Black woman and a white male detective serve as spies for the Union army—her, undercover as a slave, him, as a Confederate soldier:

He was able to play many roles and she was only able to play one. But what would’ve happened had he been found out by that Confederate family?1

Sitting in a coffee shop across from the first white guy to say this to me, I was baffled, amused:

“You do realize white people were lynched in this country?” I said. He nodded, but it wasn’t clear to me that he had known that.

I wasn’t trying to center white pain or diminish the scale of his privilege, but to clarify what privilege actually means here: it means more opportunities to fall in line for the chance to attain safety. That line reads jumbled and convoluted on purpose. If you’re safety is contingent on a trait over which you have no control, relies on arbitrary rules not changing, on you doing your part to uphold the illusion that keeps you safe, then you are safer but never safe.

The safety of whiteness depends not only on maintaining meaning but refining its definition. It needs to let more people in (Irish, Italian, Jewish) to have new groups investing in it, but keep people out to protect its meaning. Similarly with maleness, the definition must be restrictive to carry power.

What happened, though, to the Northern Irish, what happened to the Jews? Whiteness means everything until it suddenly means nothing.

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White progressives are grappling with this as their privilege proves shakier than they’ve previously understood. And yet, they still say this puzzling thing, full of confidence, having read the right books, internalized the right lessons, “Well, I’m a white straight male. I’m fine, but I’m worried about [insert nonwhite, queer, women]. In other words, worried about people like me.

The irony is, if they were out with me in the wrong state in the 1950s, they might’ve gone to jail. It’s not enough to be white, you also have to behave white.

It’s a snappy headline: All you have to do is be born white and male. But the fine print says that’s just the first thing you have to do.

You’ll likely get away with your insurgent ways for a time, that’s the privilege. But the problem with chances is you never know when they’re going to run out.

By now, we’ve all seen this poem by Martin Niemoller on Nazi Germany:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

It’s “they” who are the only safe group named. But that safety comes with a clock. Don’t forget how this story ends: with trial, execution. Don’t forget that Hitler shot himself in the head. All “they” did was make everyone unsafe, even the narrow group they violently protected using the most extreme weapon: genocide.

There’s many lessons from this, but here’s the biggest one: anyone promising a safety that relies on the extermination, enslavement, oppression, domination, of another group is a snake oil salesman, a vampire offering you immortality in exchange for your humanity, satan offering you power in exchange for your soul. This is a trade that can never keep you safe.

If you believe you are truly safe because you’re a white man, then you are going to move like someone who thinks their safety is guaranteed. This may mean you’re willing to take more risks on others’ behalf. More likely it means your sense of urgency around the question of safety will always be impaired, not-enough.

No one moves faster than a person who is being chased. And no one moves slower than someone who thinks no one’s coming for them.

When I finished Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley the other night, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write about it. That’s how overwhelmed with emotion I felt. I’m a person who gets paralyzed with delight. But I have to set that 3.74 abomination of a Goodreads rating straight. Time to start screaming.

But before I do, here are the deets on the story:

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night. Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice? Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.

Hilariously, weeks ago, I picked up a copy at P&P before putting it back, unsure. Did that blood-red cover mean it was going to be a tragic story, dark, gritty but not in a fun way? Or another literary novel teasing romance, only to swerve from it, withholding the pleasure of watching the characters have each other? I even Googled, there in the middle of the storeroom floor, “Is Deep Cuts a love story?”

The answers were weird and vague: something about it being complicated. Something about someone not really understanding the main characters’ relationship to each other. Idk wtf these readers were talking.

This is a fucking love story.

The plot hums to the tune of a classic 2000 romcom, hitting all the right beats but with surprising force and at unexpected angles. Some critic somewhere is holding this against it. A Novel Made For The Movies. But maybe you didn’t hear me. Deep Cuts doesn’t embody just any romcom era but the golden age of them. It’s a dorky Ashton Kutcher and grungy Amanda Peet groping each other, total strangers, in an airplane bathroom only to circle each other for years before surrendering to the obvious in A Lot Like Love. It’s a partygirl Cameron Diaz and a cool Christina Applegate hunting down a man they met at a club to ruin his wedding because Diaz wants him, climbing San Francisco’s suicidal hills in halter tops in The Sweetest Thing. It has shades of Before Sunrise in that the act of falling in love is really the act of conversation, in this case, about what the two main characters love most: music.

And the descriptions OF that music are just…fuck me!

“The Drummer bangs hard on the snare to kick it off—one, two, three, four, one. The Singer receives each snare hit like bullets to his torso, staggering, arms draping off an invisible crucifix. And then he sings.”

Or:

“with that melody and his warm voice and all the lush instrumentation sprouting up around it like wildflowers, a whole ecosystem of beauty.”

I’ve been in a reading slump for a year at least. Underwhelmed, disappointed, bored. But it’s also my fault! One curse of being a controlling woman/writer is, every time I read a book, I know exactly how I want it to be written, I know the story I want and rarely is the story that departs from this as satisfying to me. This is also the curse of rigid tastes, vivid and intense desires, a constantly daydreaming brain—I always have an idea, another path that could’ve been taken instead. In this way, I’m a writer who reads rather than a reader who writes.

When I stumble on a juicy premise, my mind draws up a map on how to deliver on it. Many times the actual novel takes a different route, drops me off at what I feel is the wrong destination—which is the novel’s right! Some might even argue its purpose! But it can disrupt the dream for me. It’s like, you told me we were going to Paris but now we’re going to fucking Busch Gardens?

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Incredibly, Deep Cuts somehow scratches every narrative itch, makes every plot turn, lands every emotional beat that I want it to. It’s like my map and Brickley’s could be laid perfectly on top of each other’s.

To be clear, I didn’t know what was going to happen in the novel. I didn’t know if Percy and Joe were going to get together in the end. It often felt like they wouldn’t. The story kept me in suspense and also gave me what I wanted from it.

What makes this novel so good is that the scenes I knew would happen, I didn’t know how. For instance, once Percy and Joe have sex for the first time, I knew a fight had to happen right after, that’s the literary law of tension. But I didn’t know how fucked that fight would make me feel!!!!

Picture: Joe running off with another woman to his hotel room after having sex with Percy earlier that night. Picture: an ignorant Percy knocking on his door for the C.D with his new songs, the one he’s asked her to listen to. A giggling girl. A shouting Percy. Joe sliding his C.D under the door. Percy snapping it in half, sliding it back under, wondering aloud how much that girl would be giggling if she knew her favorite song of Joe’s wouldn’t exist if Percy hadn’t helped him rewrite it. Percy can’t sing or play music herself, she needs Joe for that. Joe is talented but is an undisciplined songwriter, he needs Percy. Picture: two friends, then, who know exactly which knife to use on each other.

I didn’t need to be a musician to know the stakes. Any artist understands the eroticism of artmaking. Creative collaboration draws from the same well. I’ve had creative soulmates before but I was never fucking or falling in love with them. Like, sit back and prepare to be blown apart. The power they’d have over me. Having a person all up in your art like that, the same one you’re pining over? Baby, are you in trouble.

This is the problem at the novel’s core: Percy and Joe can’t make music together and be together. Too messy, too painful. But they can’t choose just either one.

How could they write the song, “Bay Window,” about watching the Twin Towers collapse in Percy’s house, without that wretched longing? How could they, in a New York piano showroom, come up with this bridge for it: “She tries to kiss me as the sun goes down—I only give her my cheek. I promise friendship and we face the screen again—what a day to be so weak.”

Years later, Percy turns up to one of Joe’s shows in L.A, when a super fan recognizes her as the girl in the “Bay Window:”

“That is the best ‘fuck you’ in the history of ‘fuck yous.’ Like, okay, you don’t want to kiss me? I’m gonna make you sing about this mistake for the rest of your life, dude. You’re going to be singing about this at the fucking Troubadour in a fucking decade.”

This is my understanding of the relationship between love and art. To occupy someone forever and ever and ever.

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The writer Naomi Kanakia has lamented the way some literary novels promise to put a twist on genre but really just wind up undermining the reader’s trust by ignoring their genre expectations: the murder in the murder mystery doesn’t get solved. The love interests in the romance don’t fall in love. I also find this annoying UNLESS you’re going to give us something else, something better in its place, beyond a total let-down.

I’m so glad Brickley just gives us the romance because why fucking not? We don’t get this in real life. We don’t get the musician who sees directly into our souls. We don’t get the best friend after years of pining. We get the asshole with a hole in his sock who lives two hours away but doesn’t have a car.

The novel is filled with the rote disappointments of life, but it gives us our reward, which I see as a kindness.

I don’t know if I’m brave enough to declare Deep Cuts a perfect novel. The Great Gatsby is a perfect novel; I can argue that one easily, using a measured, literary logic. Deep Cuts is flawed. I rebuke its 3.75 stars on Goodreads but I can understand why, on some level, it has it, even though that level is beneath me.

But I do think that Deep Cuts is perfect for me. Like that person you’re entirely enamored with, it doesn’t matter that you know your friends aren’t swayed by their lopsided grin, their big ears, their one dimple, oddly placed.

Near the novel’s end, Joe and Percy are in a bar—the same setting that opens the novel—listening to the song, “Heartbeats” by Knife for the first time together:

“It’s a mysterious song about an intense romantic encounter, a true and astonishing episode of love—but something goes awry in the bridge, and all Dreijer is left with is a conviction that after this experience, divinity will never come from above. Not for her. Only earthly bodies, pressed so close they’re sharing heartbeats, could ever be divine…It was a song I understood only because of Joe, and now here he was.”

I often think that if I ever become a Big Writer, I will almost certainly exploit this opportunity to make sure everyone understands how hot I am. I’d be lying if I said I don’t often long for an era when writers were seen as hot, sexy. This is not about conventional beauty, this is about mythology, shaped by things like personal style, taste. But enough dicking around. Let’s talk about Katie Kitamura’s $24 lip gloss.1

Who cares!!! That’s my thesis, raw. But some context for you: there’s an essay out there criticizing Kitamura for doing a New York Magazine interview during which she’s asked about 15 items she can’t live without. Two of the items she supplies are $54 hair clips and a $24 lip gloss from Clinique.

Let’s do some quick math even though I don’t feel like it: The lip gloss is $24. You might wear it four days out of the week. This might last you like a month or two. That’s like 80 cents a day.2 The hair clips, $54, I don’t know how many are in a pack, but assuming you don’t lose them, could last for years.

Yes, I’m outraged whenever I watch celebrities in Vogue flippantly talking about a $60,000 scarf in their twelve bedroom estate amid a worsening housing crisis. This is not the level of wealth we’re discussing. Kitamura is still a literary writer and professor in America.

As other people in the essay’s comments pointed out, Kitamura also mentions tea, tape, and a charger in the interview. One perceptive commenter asked, why only focus on the traditionally feminine items on her list?

Well, because feminine things are unserious, duh.

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I get what the essay is trying to say—that in the face of extreme economic uncertainty and inequality this article is tone deaf. That asking writers about their cosmetic purchases is a distraction from their work. That for writers to be asked to even turn up for these kinds of interviews is degrading to people who, at the end of the day, are just trying to be artists.

But it’s also an interview in a style magazine.

We romanticize cheap shit at the same time we lament its true costs.3 Had Kitamura said she’d paid $24 for, like, a microwave, this detail would be cast as quirky and charming. She would suddenly become a beautiful low-maintenance woman. Had she listed “hope” as a thing she couldn’t live without, as one commenter suggested which, to be clear, would have been cringe, I think many of us are living without hope right now, then she’d be a morally aspirational woman.

Instead, she’s a hot one. Boo hiss, or as one random guy in the comment section put it: “She just came waaay down in my esteem scale.” That’s so cool, Thom, you just lost your 1 aura point.

Another commenter suggests a $6 alternative gloss which the post’s author cosigns. Listen, I am the Queen of Cheap Shit, but who and what allow this product to be $6? Let’s not climb too quickly on that high horse.

The post’s writer argues that it was okay for Joan Didion to model for Celine because Didion was 80 and therefore challenging ageist stereotypes. As if Katie Kitamura is a white, blonde, rich-coded woman—or even young. She’s a 46 year old Asian American woman.

But back to Didion. One of the most mythologized writers in America for her taste and style. I hear this complaint a lot, why are people asking writers questions that have nothing to do with their writing. Well:

Wtf does Joan Didion’s packing list and her leaning against a corvette have to do with anything?

Wtf does James Baldwin casually chain smoking in interviews, pretentious leg cross and all, calling the interviewer, ‘baby’ have to with anything?

Wtf does Jack Kerouac being fine as fuck have to do with anything?

It has to do with EVERYTHING!! Because when we talk about these writers, we also talk about these iconic qualities. Their style. We care, we’ve always cared, about the person behind the craft. Not every writer has to feed this curiosity. But some are born to be in the spotlight. Cunt is their calling.

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No one would be talking about this if Kitamura had bought a $24 hardback book because we expect hardbacks to cost that much, if not more, and also, we think books are important. They are a moral purchase that reveal something about ourselves that we want revealed: intelligence, depth. We understand books as being particularly relevant to the writer’s life, as if all writers do is read and write.

We don’t think makeup is important. Or fashion. Those things are vapid, empty, consumerist, wasteful. They’re beneath the serious writer.

Though even books aren’t entirely spared in this essay:

Kitamura’s choices serve no such higher purpose, unless you count that she recommends a few books. Two of the books are “about the size of a deck of cards,” too small for most libraries to carry, and—you might argue—at $16–$18 are as “obscenely priced” as her hair clips.

UM, the higher purpose is now her lips are poppin. But also, we put writers in this weird position where most of them don’t make any fucking money for years and it’s like, we should pay artists a fair wage, but when they make a fair wage it’s like, you out of touch asshole.

Who decides what a serious writer does or doesn’t look like? What should she have put on that list? A fax machine, graph paper? I actually don’t know.

A few years ago, I spoke to an incredible fashion historian for a show I was producing. One of the things she talked about is how no one really questions paying millions for a Picasso, but we question paying large sums for fashion. One is art, the other is a hobby. She told me this is because the making of clothes—sewing, knitting, weaving—has traditionally been women’s work, often poor women’s work, and so we don’t value it. We don’t think we should have to pay that much for it. She also explained there are so few fashion history programs in the country for the same reason—fashion isn’t taken seriously as an academic discipline. Fashion and makeup are the domains of women and queer men.

There are plenty of subcultures, demographics for whom investing in your appearance is part of a tradition, a point of pride and dignity. The gays and the gworls are not turning up to the function looking the fuck terrible. Black women are not attending the soiree with their hair in shambles—and hair can cost hundreds—braids, weaves, relaxers. There’s a kind of white middle-class person who likes to pretend to be broke to show symbolic solidarity with people in actual poverty (weird), then shame other people for not also doing this. Folks, I don’t know any Black people who do this. We’re still over here trying to get back pay for slavery.

They want us out here giving nothing. But who does it serve not to serve?

Katie Kitamura happens to eat in all her author photos. She’s also an excellent writer. Let her be hot. Let her have her lip gloss.

The question of whether interviews like the one in New York Magazine actually sell books came up again and again. As a steward of pomp and circumstance, that thinking is myopic to me. Few interviews neatly translate into x number of sales. It’s all a bit mushier than that. And are we simply looking to sell a couple copies, or are we trying to carve out a space in the shared cultural imagination, far beyond a book’s pub date?

I’ll leave you with the question the author of that essay leaves her own readers:

What would you have done in Kitamura’s situation? Declined the interview? Listed only books among the things “you can’t live without”?4 Recommended your mascara and eyeliner in addition to your lip gloss?

One person commented that they would have declined to do the interview, even if they were an artist starving for sales.

Another said they would’ve disintegrated in embarrassment if they’d done what Kitamura had done.

I would’ve turned up to that Zoom interview in giant Gucci Hexagon glasses, full blow out, a beat face and, let’s be honest, probably jacked up nails.

Good thing none of us are or will ever be the fabulous Katie Kitamura.

About a month ago, I told my mom that this year felt like the end of my adolescence. I’m 29. Most transitions in life aren’t marked dramatically this way, but in this case, I viscerally felt a door closing on my younger self.

If you’ve been following the news, you know the context.

Amid sweeping layoffs across the federal workforce ripping through the fabric of my city, the investigations into several news organizations—including NPR—it seemed clear to me how I lived my life in my mid-twenties couldn’t hold anymore.

In many ways, the end of adolescence is personal if not murky, less about a numerical age than a string of (or one defining) events. Religious ceremonies like Bat Mitzvahs and Quinceañeras symbolically mark the end of childhood. But for some, adolescence extends well into adulthood (I’m looking at you 30-something manchildren!!). While others are never afforded the luxury of an adolescence at all.

My point is, if the age at which you’re an “adult” isn’t really 18 anymore, what does that mean for how we define the parameters of coming-of-age novels today?

My friend Kat (hiiiii!!!) recently wrote about the challenges she faced trying to sell her novel in the adult market:

There are a lot of reasons why it took five years to sell my debut novel, Good People, but one of the biggest hurdles to overcome was the book’s age category. Jo—the protagonist—is twenty-years-old and in the no man’s land between YA and adult fiction. I had written the novel as an adult book, but it explored coming-of-age themes that are commonly associated with YA.

Something that stuck out to me in Kat’s essay is how her old professor distinguishes between an adult novel and a young adult one:

YA stories are about a protagonist leaving home whereas adult stories are about a protagonist returning home. Throughout my novel, Jo—as a college student—is constantly leaving and returning home.

Kat’s point about her protagonist leaving home then coming back, leaving home, coming back, to me, gets at how much things like the ongoing housing crisis, the pandemic, and now, the economic, social, human fallout of Trump’s second term complicate the makers of adulthood.

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I’m not going to take you through the long tradition of coming-of-age novels because A) I’m not a literature scholar and B) I don’t feel like it rn. But! I am going to share my thoughts as someone whose debut is about a twenty-something protagonist coming-of-age in 2025 aka a hell of time to become an adult (take it from someone who just became an adult three weeks ago).

I’m sure Kat’s professor’s comments contained more nuance. But I also think by now many people know that the beginning of adulthood is no longer attached to moving out of your parent’s house. (This is also very American. In other cultures it’s typical to stay home and live in a multigenerational household).

Like Kat’s protagonist, Jo, I’m thinking about the college students who moved on campus, then back home during the pandemic, then back to campus, then back home after graduation.

My protagonist, Catherine, is a 24-year-old who graduated college at the start of the pandemic, just as classes were going online. But since then, she’s lived at home. And she doesn’t move out of her parent’s house at the end. In fact, it’s clear that the she won’t be moving out anytime soon in part because of everything happening in the world (It’s 2025, she lives in D.C, there’s a lot going on).

And even though she’s 24, an age which theoretically puts her outside the “no man’s land between YA and adult fiction,” she’s childish as fuck!! She dicks around with her best friend at her restaurant job. She bickers with her academic rival in her graduate program in the middle of class. Her mom comes into her room and is like, you need to change these sheets. She even thinks at one point, “I feel like the opposite of an adult, like I just fell out of my mom’s uterus an hour ago and landed in this random apartment.”1 In other words, she’s 24.

Although Catherine doesn’t achieve economic independence by the end of the novel, she does solidify her political identity. This to me feels like part of the transition from young adulthood to adulthood: seeing yourself not simply as someone the world acts upon, but as someone who also acts upon the world.

The 20-year-olds who protested the war in Gaza on their college campuses may not be paying their own phone bills, but when they are expelled from their universities or detained by I.C.E, they are moving through the world as adults.2

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I should note that Y.A and Adult are legitimate market categories that, like any other category or genre, have certain expectations. So I’m not really here to talk about what should or shouldn’t be considered Y.A because, well, I don’t read or write Y.A (though I do watch a ton if it <3).

But the coming-of-age piece is interesting to me. I think that defies age categories.

Maybe one way of thinking about it is in buckets: there’s the concrete symbols of adulthood—turning 18, getting a driver’s license, moving out. The emotional—falling in love, first heartbreak, first loss. The cognitive maturation—oh fuck, I’m actually responsible to people other than myself!!

But all of these (save for turning 18) can happen at any age.

There’s also how an individual absorbs and responds to these events rather than the events themselves. If losing your virginity was fine and smooth and went exactly as you expected and you forgot about it the next day, maybe it isn’t part of your coming-of-age story.

We can’t forget the Gen-Z/Alpha of it all either—a demographic plagued with anxiety and other mental health challenges, who’ve lost crucial developmental and educational years to the pandemic. We’re still learning what social media does to the developing brain, but surprise!! it’s probably not that great.

I’m wondering how all this will change what it means to become an adult, especially in a time as turbulent as this. When abortion access is being corroded but childcare costs are higher than some people’s rent. When American democracy as we’ve understood it is being radically tested, the world order since WWII reorganized virtually overnight.

As far as the heartbreak, awkwardness, fumbling desire, I’m not sure that coming-of-age stories will feel so different from a decade ago—but they’ll certainly look it.

A big thanks to Kat for sharing her story and inspiring this post! You should ABSOLUTELY CHECK OUT HER SHIT!!!

Like many of us, I’ve been distracted and drained. I’m working on a new Substack project that I hope to share with you soon-ish—one connected to what’s happening in the country and world.

But until then, I’ve dug up a post I wrote back in December from the trash about my most-hated romance novel tropes!

Let’s go:

I have two months to pull together this random work project that doesn’t make any sense with the help of my professional rival!

Y’all, I cannot tell you how much I do not care about these little work projects romance novel characters be doing!! First off, a lot of times they don’t make sense. “Ok, so me and Lydia are going to have to come up with a marketing plan to save her dad’s brewery and the annual July Bar Crawl Onion Festival is the PERFECT time to put this plan in action. We’ll make an Instagram reel with the two us drinking as much beer as we can, post it by next month, and set up our booth for the festival.” What? The plans never make sense to me! All of us understand this is a ploy to bring the love interests into proximity so why are we pretending to care about this marketing plan or this onion festival.

I’m not saying romances involving work are inherently uninteresting. I’m saying, work is often treated as a vehicle for the romance and therefore feels like just that.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW (not a romance) is a great example of how work can be as compelling as the central relationship AND help propel (or hinder) the relationship.

My boss is old-fashioned and I really want this promotion. Would you pretend to be my fiancé at our work holiday party?

No. Because this is dumb. And also fuck your boss! You should get a promotion because you’re a hard worker (she’s a hard workaaaaaa).

It’s not that I don’t like fake-dating. I love fake-dating!!!! I just want a more sticky reason for doing it. Not wanting to go to your ex’s wedding alone/wanting to make them jealous at their wedding, to me, is always a safe choice. Better yet, BOTH love interests exes are going to be at the wedding so both parties have motive to fake date. In the “I want a promotion” scenario, a lot of times I’m like, so, why is the person who doesn’t need a promotion doing this? And also, is your boss not going to notice when y’all break up if this is a determining factor for them offering you a promotion? If your boss is THIS invested in your romantic life for you to feel cornered into fake dating someone, would they go so far as to revoke your promotion when you break up? Of course, the idea is that the fake dating will turn into real dating. The reader knows this but the love interests don’t! I just hate this trope lol I feel like there’s better reasons to fake date like, it’s your father’s dying wish to see you happy with someone so you do it because you love your dad or something idk, any boss who operates like the ones in these romances is a walking HR violation.

OR make the person chasing the promotion genuinely in need of the money! They have no family or financial support. Most times, these people seem like they’ll be financially fine if they don’t get this promotion or it’s like, I’ve wanted this since I was a kid. Idgaf what you’ve wanted since you were a kid!! Like, can they not pay their heating bill? Have they gotten an eviction notice? And not in a funny, “omg I’m SUCH a mess” way, like, I want to see them collapsing on a street curb to cry over this shit! I want to see the hesitant fake-dating candidate hearing the heroin groveling on the phone with the goddamn debt collector over some egregious medical bill and be like damn, I didn’t know it was this bad, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t help them? Make it so it’s life or death that they stay in their asshole boss’s good graces!

When the characters have history but it’s random and confusing. Exhibit A: that’s my best friend’s brother-in-law’s old bodyguard who I made out with when i was drunk in a 7-Eleven parking lot after our history teacher’s funeral.

WHAT? Please just make these people childhood friends or classmates or coworkers or something, why are we doing all this??? I LOVE when the love interests have history (LOVE), but not when their shared history is stupid!

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“Ghost” isn’t a verb you hoes

“His lips ghosted over my skin.” NO. I love a unusual verb, great poetry is riddled with them, but y’all overdue it with this one. I have never seen this as a verb in anything but romance. And it sounds creepy! I don’t want a man’s fingers ghosting over my ass!

Let me make you jealous in every party scene even though I’m gonna go home and think about you tonight

Babe, why? You got maybe two times to kiss somebody else and make that man lose his mind, but after that we’re just playing games. It’s tew much.

I’m a crazy aLphA mAle and I do shit like stab mattresses

If you can’t tell, I’m thinking of a really specific example. This sequence actually takes place in a book I really enjoyed, but this part was just so…weird. TLDR: the heroin has moved in with her love interest who had a fiance before her. He and his ex-fiance were going to move into the house he now lives in with the heroin. The heroin doesn’t want to sleep on the bed that his former fiance picked out, even though the two never slept on it—I’m like, that’s a perfectly good mattress, but whatever, y’all got money to toss out new shit. Okay. Now. To show the heroin that he no longer gives af about his ex or the mattress they never used he stabs the shit out of it…and the heroin is like…that’s so romantic. Do you know how gone I’d be if I saw a man stabbing his mattress? Like why are you fucking up good furniture, man, just donate it.

Time to rehash the scene we just read about with the friend who's only there to propel the romance plot

Give me you edges. You don’t deserve them. I hate this. Please give your friend something else to do.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Why am I thinking about my best friend’s brother so much? I HATE Jared. Then why can’t you stop thinking about his hard-on, Mindy? I shake my head as if to clear it.

I will never understand this. Why are you thinking about him?!?!?!?? Because we established on page 7 that he’s a 6’4 wavy-haired Cowboy with a snake ring, a bad attitude and giant thighs made for riding horses, like, what? How does everyone but you know why you can’t stop thinking about Jared? You are a protagonist in a romance novel, you were literally invented to think about Jared. Can we please give these people more complex thoughtssss.

I can’t fuck you because I’m scared of getting hurt but I’m going to ruminate about fucking you for 150 pages and almost do it three times but also pull away at the last minute and whisper, “we can’t.”

I don’t understand how so many people in romance novels have this level of self-restraint and impulse control, like, YES, we love a slow burn, but the tension has to be both taut and have a long tail.1 It can’t just be the heroin has daddy issues that literally 80 percent of the population has and has learned to deal with.

I ruminate about fucking you for 100 pages and when it finally happens…the scene fades to black.

This is a felony in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

“It’s okay, I’m clean.”

ugh. There’s always a moment when the main characters are about to have barrier-free sex and one of them is like, “It’s okay. I clean.” If HIV/AIDS taught us anything, it’s that STD stigma comes with life or death consequences. Just say STI-free, people, or like, it’s cool, I’ve been tested.2

Hang on to the world as it spins around / Just don't let the spin get you down / Things are moving fast / Hold on tight and you will last

I’m thinking about my dad, 8 years-old on the school bus, getting rocks thrown at him by white teenagers in South Carolina.

I’m thinking about how, at 74 years-old, my dad hates South Carolina to this day.

I’m thinking about the woman in Starbucks this morning speaking frantically into the phone, “Do you still have your green card? What are you gonna do when you get out?”

I’m thinking about the plane crash over the Potomac, the 67 people who perished. How it feels not only like the death of 67 people but the death of all of us.

I’m thinking about this scene from Ava DuVernay’s Origin: a little Black boy wanting to swim with his white teammates is told he can’t unless they all get out. I’m thinking about the white kids climbing out of the pool, the Black boy lowering himself into it. The agonizing length of this scene, the painful logistics, the hushed sound of him alone in the water, the joy of swimming, lost, foreclosed to him. Robbed. The dozens of eyes watching him wade in silence.

I’m thinking about what Kiese Laymon wrote on Instagram: “They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we’ve shown exquisite grace, an enemy we’ve tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.”

I’m thinking about how Barbie was nominated for eight Oscars and Origin was nominated for zero.

I’m thinking about this one story my mom tells about when, as a young woman, a white man cut in front of her in line. How my grandfather grabbed him by the collar and shook him: “Do you not see her right there?!”

I’m thinking about how angry he was.

I’m thinking about all those conversations of reckoning in newsrooms the months after George Floyd’s murder.

I’m thinking about how, five years later, newsrooms are singing a different tune.

I’m thinking about how, five years later, corporations are singing along.

I’m thinking about all the white feminists clamoring for Margot Robbie, for Greta Gerwig, to be recognized by the Academy.

I’m thinking about Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor handing out fliers for Origin outside an A.M.C theater in Los Angeles.

I’m thinking about this line from an essay about the 14th Street bridge plane crash forty years ago, about the man who drowned in order to save his seatmates:

“…we ought to come again to the conclusion that people are powerless in the world. In reality, we believe the reverse, and it takes the act of the man in the water to remind us of our true feelings in this matter. It is not to say that everyone would have acted as he did…Yet whatever moved these men to challenge death on behalf of their fellows is not peculiar to them. Everyone feels the possibility in himself. That is the abiding wonder of the story. That is why we would not let go of it.”

I’m thinking about Ava DuVernay choosing to make Origin outside the big studio system because she wanted it released before the election.

I’m thinking about 1913. About the thousands of Black civil servants President Woodrow Wilson confined to corners, forced behind screens, away from their white colleagues. How he fired 15 out of 17 Black supervisors. How the federal government began requiring photographs with job applications shortly thereafter.

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"Should I become President of the United States, they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing for everything by which I could assist in advancing their interests of the race.” These are words Wilson said during his campaign.

I’m thinking about the great-grandchildren of those Black civil servants.

I’m thinking about how sometimes words are just words even though they’re all I have.

I’m thinking about this one story my mom tells about how, as a child, she loved the drive home to D.C from her grandma’s house in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the summers. How her parents would wake her and her brothers late at night, how they’d drive for hours and hours.

I’m thinking about how my mom learned the reason they left Tennessee late at night, drove for hours and hours, was because there was nowhere they could stop.

I’m thinking about that Donny Hathaway song she loves, “Someday We’ll All Be Free.”

I’m thinking about all the hundreds of thousands of people throughout this country’s history who believed at one time or another that Someday was soon.

I’m thinking about how it wasn’t.

I’m thinking about all the people letting people swim alone.

I’m thinking about all the people watching others drown.

For Christmas, I received a Politics & Prose gift card for an amount so exorbitant that, when the bookseller scanned my receipt for the remaining balance at the register, he said, “You have…a lot left on here.” The point: your girl had money to blow on books. I was also diving into my last big round of revisions for my novel and there were books I felt I should read, books that would propel me to push my prose further (that would wrestle away the crutch of on the nose alliteration. Or overused maxims like “on the nose.” Or reveal the definition of “maxim.”)

So: on December 26th, I barged into P&P bundled in my finest winter wear, armed with hundreds of dollars I could only use at that one place—not, for instance, to fix my toilet or my dripping A.C unit or get my radiator bled…

I moved around the displays, eyeing books I’d contemplated purchasing before but had failed to for one reason or another. One of those books was James by Percival Everett.

You’ve seen it: as a #1 New York Times bestseller, as reviewed in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, as shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the National Book Award, soon-to-be feature film produced by Steven Spielberg, sitting pretty with 4.5 stars on Goodreads—a charmed life for any work of literary fiction.

This novel, no doubt, could teach me Something.

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I picked up a copy and read the flap as if I didn’t already know the hook—a retelling of Huckleberry Finn but from the perspective of the escaped slave, Jim. I tucked it under my armpit to purchase. But fuck! I didn’t feel like reading a retelling of a classic novel I didn’t care about. There was a time when I didn’t have a choice but to read Huck Finn but now I could read about people getting railed for ten pages straight instead and no one could stop me.

I agonized before that silly display, torn between obligation and desire. (Huck Finn retelling/people getting railed. Huck Finn retelling/people getting railed.) I compromised and bought Everett’s The Trees which was a supernatural detective story (also shortlisted for the Booker—I was still on track to learn Something).

But fuck! I got home and didn’t care about learning anything anymore. I wanted to read about love, sex, desire, longing, people pretending they’re not horny then tossing the performance out the window. All I cared about was tracking down that tall dark-haired guy with glasses on the red line who looked like a Daddy Long Legs spider. I wanted to read a Percival Everett-written fan fiction about me and Daddy Long Legs, not Huck Finn’s friend!

I closed the novel about twenty pages in, which I’d done a bunch that year, realizing I had a bigger problem on my hands.

I was a fucking traitor.

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It’s a bit too late for coal in my stocking but y’all, I’ve been bad this year. Well, technically I was bad last year, though I imagine my insurgent reading habits will carry me well into 2025 on a gilded throne resting on the thick shoulders of two 6’3 men—sorry.

The problem isn’t that I’ve been reading more romance. I am pro-romance, pro-genre. It’s that I’m a literary fiction writer and I should be reading literary fiction—it’s my job. Many writers have the books they read in service of their writing and those they read for entertainment and sometimes (hopefully) there’s healthy overlap. But something has been happening to me for months: my writer self and my reader self are becoming increasingly estranged. It’s like the ground’s ripped open beneath me and I’m the cartoon character standing wide-legged over the gap as the two ledges move apart, Litfic on one side, romance on the other.

Before you clobber the assertion that romance and Litfic must inhabit opposite sides of the literary spectrum, hear me out: I’ve made amany random ass appearances on this platform—in comment sections, notes, posts—arguing that literary fiction and romance aren’t inherently at odds. In fact, my whole creative mission is to revise this notion. Litfic (like commercial or upmarket fiction) isn’t, to my mind, an actual genre. Horror is a genre. Mystery, Sci Fi, Fantasy. In the market, though, literary fiction operates as a genre.

But Litfic as a genre has looser parameters. It’s more a style of writing, an approach to storytelling. There are expectations but they’re less sharply defined. These expectations can be paired with other genres without friction, the same way romance and fantasy don’t undermine each other when combined. We see literary speculative fiction all the time! Kelly Link, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. But who, really, is writing literary contemporary romance? The challenge is romance as a genre is often positioned as commercial while literary fiction, by definition, is not commercial (though it can of course attain commercial success: see Mz. Rooney).

Because of this, I’m constantly feeling caught between the two genres. Not even upmarket romances can soothe this existential ache.

This year, romance beat literary fiction by a wide margin—a wholly new development in my reading life. I want to know why.

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Earlier this month, I came across a post called, “The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction.” The title is self-explanatory. It was…interesting. I don’t think literary fiction is dead—and even so things are resurrected all the time, like paranormal romance, remember that?

I thought agent Danielle Bukowski wrote a great piece on the current state of Litfic and agent Anna Sproul-Latimer wrote an important response piece too. I agree with Courtney Maum’s contextualization of the first article:

“I’ve been thinking about this article [“The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction.”] for a while and it feels important to me to offer up another angle in to this debate.

Publishing, like any industry, creates, sells, and pushes what people are buying. If we are seeing the Big Fives pushing out more romance, thrillers, romantsy, crime and easily digestible “happy ending” fiction, that’s not because that’s the Big Five’s current jam, it’s what readers are buying…

I have witnessed, personally, deep care and commitment to many of my peers’ work from their Big Five publishers and I’ve experienced care and professional nurturing there, myself. But if readers continue to only buy downgrade commercial fiction, publishers will continue to seek it out and acquire it. That’s the law of supply and demand. So change the demand! You have the power to do that. Slowly. Purchase by purchase.

Want more literary fiction from Big Five publishers? BUY MORE LITERARY FICTION FROM BIG FIVE PUBLISHERS.”

I am part of the gang of readers jumping literary fiction in the lunchroom even though literary fiction and I made each other friendship bracelets the year before!

Yes, I’ve bought a lot of literary fiction in the last year. So much!! More than I could afford pre-gift card, like, wtf, I live up the street from the library, why not go there some time? But I haven’t read much of it.

And oh, the shame! Of course I want Litfic to do well!! In the gaudy indulgent plays of my mind in which I’m a successful author, I always cast myself as a Literary Writer.

So why am I struggling so much to read a genre I’ve always championed?

Here are some reasons I think I read less literary fiction last year (Imagine me pulling out a disgusting, crumpled piece of paper from my coat pocket):

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I’M BURNT OUT LIKE EVERYONE ELSE:

Articles abound about why readers turned to romance and romantasy in droves during the pandemic, a trend that’s persisted. As a journalist, I’ve covered the Charleston church shooting, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, several elections, including the last one, hurricanes and other climate disasters, a spate of school shootings, the war in Gaza. Things did not become hard in 2024, but maybe I finally felt the burden of it then. Romance is the genre of hope, love, connection—why not gravitate towards those things when they feel most absent?

I KNOW TOO MUCH:

No, I’m not an evil robot from the future. What I mean is, I know too much about how the sausage is made. I’ve spent the last few years heavily revising my novel and so I’ve been thinking about craft—and the publishing business—with an intensity atypical of the average reader. I’m aware of literary tricks (I see what you did there, fellow writer), I don’t simply dislike a story, I can pin down why, which is worse because then I drum up solutions (the pacing problems in the first half could be fixed by combining chapters 3 and 4…). I have even—oh God—on occasion whipped out a pen like a little prick and physically edited a novel I’m supposed to be enjoying. In other words, I’ve won at creating a miserable reading experience for myself.

And to this point…

ROMANCE AND LITFIC HAVE DIFFERENT EXPECTATIONS:

It’s not that the bar is necessarily higher for literary fiction than for romance, it’s that the bars sit in entirely different places. When I pick up a romance, I’m not expecting to be blown apart by its sharp philosophical observation or moved to underline paragraph after paragraph of stunning prose. I would love that, but that’s not why I read romance. I read it to feel my heart hammering with delight, to invest unhealthily in the fictional relationship, to read about people getting railed. I know how it ends and therefore the question is not that but what will the characters do to reach that inevitable end. In some ways, the bar for Litfic is higher because I’m a litfic writer—I don’t have a neutral relationship to it, but a charged one. Because it has loose conventions, literary fiction has the tall task of having to surprise you without alienating you. Surprises, after all, are risks.

PERSONAL TASTE: I JUST WANT A MUFFIN, HONESTLY

As a reader and consumer, I tend to reach for humor and heart, avoiding darker realist1 dramas: think T.V shows like New Girl and Bob’s Burgers. I was also this way as a kid reading books like Captain Underpants and A Series of Unfortunate Events. You will probably never see me reading A Little Life. I am not readers on TikTok crying into their cameras. I don’t seek stories that evoke sadness or that inflict emotional pain, I can just go to work for that. Sometimes literary fiction gets shoved into this bucket called ‘serious’ fiction which I think is a bit wrong-footed. There are certainly lighter literary works. But we often deem what delights us as unserious while things that makes us miserab—I mean make us confront difficult issues—get crowned as ‘serious.’

I’M A HORNY HUMAN BEING:

Huck Finn retelling<people railing.

I know deep down in my horny little heart that I don’t have to choose (I mean I’m literally poly so I know all about failing to choose between loves).

When I think of litfic novels that scratch that itch only romance seems to reach in me, I think of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a hilarious almost-not-quite love story unfolding over bizarre emails on Harvard’s campus circa 1995. I think of Danielle Evans’ and Carmen Maria Machado’s stories. I think of Mona Awad’s Bunny—one of the few litfic novels I read this year. It was so decadent and strange and…now that I think about what binds all these literary works, I mean it seems so silly that I missed what I’ve been missing, what swallows the distance between the feeling these works give me and that offered by romance: they’re all fun.

One story in Evan’s The Office of Historical Corrections ends at a waterpark. The titular novella is a historical mystery. Her forthcoming book, according to publisher’s marketplace, is a pop star novel called Look Back At It. Carmen Maria Machado with that fever-dreamy Law & Order: SVU fan fiction in the middle of Her Body and Other Parties. And Bunny: a different kind of fever-dream featuring a stag that turns into a hot guy:

“I really don’t know what my face is conveying as I stare at him. Leaning against the doorframe like he is not at all the spawn of my wildly wavering emotions and one furred little fist. But a human man, always was. And not just any human man, a cool one. Sexy. Scary-sexy. Whose name apparently is Max. A cool, sexy man named Max2 who, with his smoky eyes and his tall, slouching grace and his ripped-up black clothes full of pins, makes leaning against a doorframe his own.”3

literary fiction is so vast, which is why to call it a genre somewhat fails it. It’s too difficult to contain. We don’t always actually know what we’re talking about when we say something is literary fiction. There are few hard and fast conventions, if any. What is it really beyond “elevated” prose that “sing,” a narrative that “says something” we haven’t heard or at least not in that way. A “masterpiece,” a “rare, thrilling confidence,” “subversive,” or “marvelously, unexpectedly, endearingly funny.” These are all blurbs describing different literary novels by the way.

Literary fiction is a pop star looking back at it, it’s Benson and Stabler in a haunted Manhattan, it’s bunnies being turned into exploding boys, it’s the enslaved Jim telling his side of the story.

And maybe that’s the gag, what I’ve been choking on all year: romance always centers fun, it must. Romance: a big man biting his fist, a woman who tastes impossibly like cinnamon. It’s camp, it’s exaggeration, it’s fantasy, it’s fiction, it’s giving us what we came for.

It’s harder to know what we came for when we pick up literary fiction—or the job in part is to give us something different, to satisfy some hidden appetite, to birth new ones in us.

Literary fiction doesn’t have to be fun because it can be whatever it wants. That freedom is something we should defend, love. But—just like happy-endings—maybe we should also be a bit suspicious of it.

The first writing workshop I ever took was a short story class when I was 25. The class ran late, past 9pm. When I think of that time, I think of my dad picking me up in the January dark, the two of us winding in silence through Rock Creek Park.

I had two poorly researched historical novels under my creative belt by then, a short story about someone getting dementia that for some reason involved Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and a half-finished novel inspired by this guy I sort-of dated that turned into a mystery midway through. What I’m saying is, I entered that workshop with no clue what the fuck was going on.

The first story I put up for workshop was based on a date I’d gone on the previous fall. In memory, the night unfurled like an infinite hallway runner—to reach the café where we were meeting, I walked an hour in the waning sunlight, briefly slinking into a nearby liquor store for a miniature rum that, on the filthy sidewalk, I tipped into my piña colada Snapple.

My date and I paraded around the city: to a dingy restaurant serving bagged Thanksgiving meals, a dim velvety bar, a Mediterranean spot we got takeout from to eat in his car. Rum-tipsy, I read him a Tracy K. Smith poem while he peed on the side of the road. We wound up at a house party, throwing back White Claws.

At the end of the night, I grabbed a spare napkin from his glove compartment, held it up to his mouth. “Spit out your gum,” I said and kissed him. I thought I was in a Richard Linklater film.

The next morning, I transcribed the night. It wasn’t a story, but a bulk of clay that needed carving, shaping. I didn’t understand story then, only moments that flared red like patches on a heat map, an instinct to follow that heat.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing like getting ripped a new asshole in a room full of people.

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The comment from workshop that juts out to me now came from an older woman. “So the protagonist goes home with him on the first date? I don’t believe that,” she said.

Another woman, possibly the same one, added, “Honestly, this just feels like a story about a boring, uneventful date.”

I might’ve cried on the ride home, I can’t remember. What I do remember is this was the only, the only, time I ever considered giving up writing.1

Now, I see that—even though this feedback wasn’t constructive—my story was bad. A story requires more than transcribing life. But this doesn’t mean life is not worthy material for a story. The problem wasn’t that I wrote about my experience, it was that I didn’t use narrative tools to spin it into a compelling story.

There’s a criticism often leveled against young or female (or both) writers whose first novels are based on their lives, casting it as expected, unrigorous, too easy.

Well, I’m in the mood to feed a gun into that argument’s big mouth.

A few weeks ago, I was reading critic Andrea Long Chu’s piece on Zadie Smith’s authorial evolution in Vulture. The following line came early on:

“Critics celebrated her [Smith] for breaking “the iron rule that first fictions should be thin slices of autobiography, served dripping with self-pity,” even as the author’s biographical details — her age (24), her race (Jamaican mother, white father), her looks (good) — would make her an object of fascination.”

That original review is from 1999. That was 25 years ago, who cares! Shit is diFFeREnT now.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I actually don’t know the difference between autobiographical novels and other novels beyond the obvious: the former steals its material from life in ways the author has alerted the reader to and the latter steals its material from life in ways the author has not alerted the reader to.

Am I missing something?

Also: what rises to the level of autobiography? If the protagonist and author share a job title, birthday, a hometown is that autobiographical fiction even if their stories don’t align? Brandon Taylor once said he gave Wallace, the protagonist of Real Life, his surface-level identity traits (gay, Black, former science PhD candidate in a Midwestern college town) so he could focus on other things that were more interesting to him as an artist.

When we say a novel is autobiographical, are we saying the events of the novel hew closely to the events of the author’s life, even if names, dates, details have been changed? What if the protagonist shares the author’s actual name, as in Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (Which is a self-proclaimed Novel From Life). What makes a novel from life versus a novel from imagination? Isn’t all fiction an indiscernible blend of stuff from life and from the writer’s imagination?? Wtf am I missing?!?!

(Haili is humoring this struggle to define exactly what’s meant by autobiographical fiction when her real point is who the fuck cares)

If a story based on an author’s heartbreak is uncompelling, it’s not uncompelling because it’s a story based on an author’s heartbreak. It’s uncompelling because this heartbreak is poorly executed as a story.

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I recently finished Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain which, to my knowledge, draws upon Greenwell’s own experience being hospitalized for an aortic rupture. I don’t know how much of the narrative is based on his life, how much is fictionalized. But this novel seemed to be a meaningful site of sense-making for Greenwell following the senseless experiences of sudden illness after decades of good health, of isolation during Covid, experiences which deeply trouble one’s self-concept. How is that endeavor—moving towards these kinds of experiences by assigning language to them—not what art-making, if not art itself, is about?

These criticisms of autofiction appear to rise from the assumption that writers write for others—critics, readers—when in reality, I think most writers write for ourselves, if not entirely, at least fundamentally. We are our first audience, our primary critic. We write to work out on paper what we struggle to work out away from it. And it isn’t about writing what you know. Just because I’m a Black woman doesn’t mean I ‘know what it means’ to be one—its’s not a flat, unchanging existence. How much do we actually know about what’s happened to us without the scaffolding of story? How much do we know about ourselves without a reflective surface against which to observe it, be it a mirror, be it language?

I think writers write towards what we want to know. We write into the void of a question. Many of us are a question to ourselves that we want answered, regardless of if our literal selves are the subject of our work or not. Because, let’s be clear, when we write what fascinates, disturbs, obsesses us, we’re writing about ourselves. Parts of our biography are present simply in the subjects we choose.

And maybe you’re writing autofiction because you’re tired of reading novels in which you’re lived experienced is absent. Or dully rendered. Or peripheral.

The other week, I stumbled upon part of a lecture delivered by Claudia Rankine described in one of Alexander Chee’s post:

“The talk was on new methods for documenting “the poetics of being,” and how some “modes of (auto)biographical practice recapture the complexities of lives that have been flattened by narratives framed by historical trauma.” Many of us there, if not all of us, needed this.”

But: this is probably not a problem white male critic #4,505 is concerned with.

No, let’s instead celebrate these young Black female novelists, not simply for stories well-executed on a craft-level (as we do for white novelists). Let’s applaud them for not writing about their lives when there’s so much more important matters at hand. Because, to be honest—and we would never say this—who fucking cares about their lives anyway?

There’s this odd preoccupation with how difficult, or not difficult, it is to perform a particular creative act. It’s not hard to write a commercial romance and so…You didn’t actually make up that thing that happened in your novel and so…

And so…what? What’s meant to follow this accusation? And so it’s not…good? And so…who fucking cares?

The idea that the creative labor expended in making up a novel from so-called scratch is more legitimate than that involved in making one drawn from life is stupid. Where does this logic leave memoirists? Biographers? Is the work of sculpting reams of solid, fixed material into the shape of a story not hard? As if the hardest part of writing is figuring out where a person is from, what happened to them in the 7th grade, rather than how to telegraph this information to the reader? As evidenced by all the people who feel passionately that they have a book idea—just because you know the story doesn’t mean you know how to tell it.

And just because the material is preexisting doesn’t mean its structure is a given. As Megan O’Rourke recently wrote2 about her nonfiction book The Invisible Kingdom, finding the best way to tell a story is difficult work:

“…it couldn’t be the story of dramatic overcoming of illness, because I was writing about uncertainty and the kind of illness that doesn’t resolve. But without structure, the book would have been unreadable; the experience I was writing about was anti-dramatic, an experience of repetitive pain and suffering. I needed something that would carry the reader through. So what would it be? I was able to write The Invisible Kingdom when I finally realized it was an account of setting aside one idea for another. I wasn’t writing about getting better. I was writing about letting go of an initial, deeply held goal…in order to to think differently about disease—more fiercely, more honestly, more clearly—in a society that was pathologically uninterested in my experience.”

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I’ve been using the word “steal” to talk about the real life details found in autofiction, but that isn’t quite right. Your life is there to be used in your art as you wish.3 It’s not robbery. Or rather, all writing involves some kind of plunder—from your emotional life, from other writers, from what you’ve read, watched, heard. Writing isn’t a pure act. Our words, characters, settings, are wrung from some patchwork cloth. There are experiences that are too domineering, too consuming—grief, love, desire, illness, heartache—to not filter into the work whether we intend for it to or not. What’s juvenile about being concerned with the people, communities, questions closest to you?

I didn’t feel like wading through all the autofiction discourse online to write this post, but I did read this New York Times essay called “Our Autofiction Fixation” by Jessica Winter.4 I love the way she talks about the chasm between the self that writes the book and the self forced to go back and understand what’s been written:

“To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you.”

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Trying to get your work into the world as a writer is strange. You write for years, mostly terribly—that novel you started when you were 18 about some guy who was an asshole. That historical novel you presented to agents at SLICE’s Literary Conference in 2018, which got interest, but that you never sent because the manuscript was nowhere near ready even to your amateur 22-year-old eyes. That other historical novel (why so many historical novels?) you started when you were 23 and jobless for which you did zero research required of historical fiction.

But then, tired of your terrible writing, at 25 you begin enrolling in workshops—The Writer’s Center, Catapult.1 Your writing is still bad and for some reason historical even though you don’t read historical fiction, but it gets better.

You get accepted into an “advanced” fiction workshop after being rejected the year before. You get accepted into an M.F.A program. Professors start to tell you things like, “This is the best story I’ve ever read by a student,” and “You could send this to The New Yorker tonight.”

And you do. You send that story to The New Yorker that night. But surprise! The New Yorker doesn’t publish it. Nor does [Redacted], [Redacted], [Redacted], [Redacted] or [Redacted].

But The Paris Review, your dream publication, does offer you a hopeful rejection:

We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we like your work and would like to see more of it.

You send them a second story. They don’t publish that either.

In December 2020, about to move out of your mom’s house and needing the extra cash, you search for gig work on top of your day job. You consider delivering DoorDash on foot (you don’t have a car). Everyone who cares about you tells you this is a bad idea. You remember then that you have a skill: you can write, sort of.

Scouring the internet for writing opportunities, you stumble upon Modern Love. You’ve heard of the podcast, but have never read the column. Not understanding that Modern Love is kind of a Big Deal, you read a handful of the column’s essays, internalizing the style and structure, then write your own in a week. You submit it, hoping the $500 will mean a new couch from Wayfair.

In March, you get an innocuous email in your Gmail inbox:

Hi Haili,

I like this piece - both what you're wrestling with and how you don't oversimplify in wrestling with it. I'm booked up for the near future but hope to work with you on it within the next couple of months, if that works for you? Let me know.

Thanks, and best,

Daniel Jones

Modern Love editor 

Because you’re for some reason still living in your mom’s house even though you have your own place, you run down the hallway to her room to tell her. You understand that it’s a big deal for your first publication to be in The New York Times. But you do not actually understand the big deal it will become once it’s out.

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Feeling energized, you send that short story from before to more places. You are pummeled with form rejections.

Your Modern Love essay is published in April 2021. You’re warned about the trolls that will find you, especially as a female journalist of color on then-Twitter. But the first few days are all praise—the surprising cohort of married women who identified with the piece, the Hollywood writer who wants to turn the essay into a T.V series à la Sex & The City. “A la SEX & THE CITY?!?” Yes, à la Sex & The City.

But then, Men On The Internet come marching in. Whatever. You ignore them. You can’t, however, ignore the member of the solo polyamory community who tells you they are disappointed in the piece. This message stays with you for years.

You read about how Modern Love can change writers’ lives, about how sometimes agents reach out looking to sign them based on 1,500 words. Ha! you think.

Then, you get an Outlook email with the subject line: Hello from book agent.

The message asks if you’ve ever wanted to write a book?

BWAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!

You want to say, are you interested in two poorly researched historical novels and a half-finished novel about an asshole whose name no one remembers?

After a delightful phone conversation, the agent signs you based on 1,500 words.

You think, this happened to Brit Bennett, this happened to Sally Rooney. You will probably never be a Brit Bennett or Sally Rooney, but this one big, dumb-luck thing has also now happened to you.

For several months, you work on a since-shelved reported memoir, but in secret, you work on a novel loosely based on your misadventures in polyamory, a product of your supreme lost-ness in a landscape in which you’ve encountered almost no stories with Black poly heroines.

You send it to your agent who wants to work on it with you. Over three years, you revise it, turn it inside out, spend eight months rewriting it from scratch. But it’s the novel of your heart, written for the younger self you’ve since aged away from, so you’re willing to do anything, everything for it.

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In September 2024, submission still feels lightyears away. You feel stuck, stalled.

But on the day you feel capital “d” Done, having forgotten all that big, bright luck years earlier, you get an innocuous email in your Gmail inbox:

Dear Haili, 

In honor of Modern Love’s 20th anniversary, we have selected essays that we think would be ripe for an update for a feature we are tentatively calling "Letter to My Younger Self." 

Do you have the time and interest to participate?

You are a woo woo, tarot reading, failed Buddhist, bad Christian, sometimes vegan Sagittarius, so for you this is a Sign.

The Sign says: Your career is not dead. There’s Nothing until there’s Something. Here is Something.

It turns out you are one of 12 essayists selected to write a follow-up. The column has at least 500 essays which means, once again, you are lucky, lucky, lucky.

The piece is published two days before you send the final draft of your novel to your agent, the one who found you because of that first essay. That messy, grasping polyamorous piece that planted the seed for that messy, grasping polyamorous novel.

“The timing is kismet,” your practical Capricorn mother tells you over the phone.

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The stories you’ve slaved over for years in workshop, that were ready for The New Yorker, have yet to be published anywhere. Meanwhile, your three published pieces were all written in under a week, none of them ever workshopped.

You laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

You also think: maybe this is what it is to be a writer—subjected to the whims of fate and randomness and stupidity and luck. Or simply what it is to be alive.

At 28, you still write badly—that romantasy novel set at a witch college. That Manhattan murder mystery in which a Carrie Bradshaw-coded private detective flounces around the city solving murders in Ferragamo. That novel regretfully saved on your Google Drive as “White baby daddy HBO drama novel."

Bad, good, rejected, chosen, painstaking, pulled from your ass—you keep writing.