Delphinium Books Blog

This is one of those times when everything seems to converge, when upheaval – war, pandemic, environmental collapse, scorching political unrest, racism, wrenching economic and social disparity – shines its searchlight not only on our world but on our lives. In crisis we either shut down — metaphorically pull the covers over our head — or go on high alert. We turn off the television and stop reading our newsfeeds and instead binge on the Gilmore Girls or on one British police procedural series after another or we scrutinize not just global events but our immediate environs and our daily interactions, taking a hard look. For some of us, perhaps in self-defense, this chaos brings an intensity to our focus on the everyday. And what could be more quotidian for a female than the subject of menstruation?

My granddaughter has just been “visited,” as they used to say well before my time, by her first period. An event marking personal change and disorientation in a world that is changing at a disorienting rate. My lens abruptly shifted from examining the overwhelming chaos around us to the more familiar chaos I imagine my granddaughter navigating through.

I mentioned to a well read and much-movied friend teetering on the brink of eighty that I was thinking about writing about menarche, expecting his patrician nose to crinkle and his forehead crease in the way I’ve observed when I have brought up topics he found distasteful. But instead, he encouraged me, saying he had never seen a treatment of the subject in novels or in film except in the horror movie Carrie, based on the eponymous Stephen King novel.

Now there’s a depiction of a girl in the throes of hormonal eruption/disruption that could arrest anyone’s development.

The title character is very much a late bloomer, retarded in her social and physical development, a senior in high school when she begins menstruation. Menarche comes upon her – overtakes her – while she’s at school. She is showering in the locker room when she discovers she is bleeding and panics, believing that she (rather than her childhood) is dying. Her classmates turn on her, reveling in her ignorance and fear, and bomb her cowering, naked body with a barrage of tampons and sanitary pads while shouting, “Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!”

When that Brian de Palma movie came out in the 1970s, I was taken to see it by friends. I had no idea what to expect.  Sitting through that film led to a resolution that was easy for me to keep: never to read a book by Stephen King or see another de Palma movie. No fan of the horror genre, I also felt that this was a work of stark misogyny. I was repulsed not just by the “mean girls” trope, but by the girls in the film being depicted as sadists on a par with the forces of the SS. The climax of the movie shows two of these vile teenagers giggling as they jerry-rig a bucket of pigs’ blood so it will cascade onto the unsuspecting, white-gowned Carrie while she is on stage being crowned queen of the prom. (At least that’s the way I remember it these decades later. I’m not willing to put myself through a second viewing.) Seriously? As if the audience had not already grasped that puberty was the ruination of Carrie, unleashing forces in her (telekinesis, the ability to control objects with psychic power rather than by physical means) that will end in mass destruction. But a bucket of pigs’ blood? Did we – as well as Carrie – have to be hit over the head with the metaphor?

When I was ten years old, I went into our household’s guest bathroom, which was also the bathroom closest to the bedroom I shared with my aunt and the chamber the family called the “powder room” in those euphemistic times. On my way I observed my mother and her friend at the kitchen table talking and drinking coffee. When I emerged from the bathroom, trembling, I announced, “Mom, I’m hemorrhaging.” (I was a word person even at the age of ten.) I felt no embarrassment, only a sense of medical urgency. I was relieved the other woman was there as my mother didn’t drive and someone had to quickly transport me to the hospital. My words were greeted not by the concern and bustle I expected but by silence. Then my mother calmly told me to go back into the bathroom and clean myself and she would meet me in my bedroom. I was bewildered, but I obeyed. When I again came out, the friend was gone and my mother was sitting on my bed, something she never did in my shared bedroom. Next to her on the bed were laid out an enormous white cotton pad, some kind of strap, and a package insert on the proper way to wear a sanitary napkin. She told me that what I was experiencing was normal, that it would happen regularly, that it was something that happened to all girls. And then something preposterous about eggs, but I knew girls weren’t chickens. This was impossible to believe. There was no corroboration. At age ten, it hadn’t yet happened to anyone else I knew. But even at that age I was savvy enough to realize that normal was over, that this was something else.

And that was pretty much all my mother told me.

Life was so unfair. I had four brothers. I had no sister. Because I was a girl, I had to share a bedroom with someone forty years older. And now this. Regular bleeding from somewhere in one’s toilet parts that none of my brothers would ever have to experience.

And of course, I didn’t know the half of it.

In fairness, I must say that many of my contemporaries were not treated to a much better version of The Talk. And in my mother’s case, my early menarche – not to mention my startling announcement in the presence of a third party – must’ve been fairly discombobulating to a person who placed such a high value on discretion.

My mother was not one to indulge in conversation about either one’s physical or emotional interior. Her sense of propriety prevailed. One kept things to oneself. One didn’t recount one’s dreams (she was always turning down my offers to share mine). My mother didn’t engage in gossip and she didn’t mind silence. Restraint was a virtue that perhaps exceeded faith, hope, and charity.

Justified or not, I got my revenge over and over again.

As a teenager, I routinely punished my mother for her reserve. On the occasions when I was afflicted by my period and a young gentleman caller showed up at our door, I would find a way to work my current state into conversation. Going out for an afternoon at a Lake Michigan beach I’d inform the boy who’d come to collect me, “I’ve got my period, so I won’t be going in the water today.” I would delight in the ashen look on both my date’s and my mother’s faces. I talked about cramps (mine were bad and lent themselves to vivid description) and the heaviness of my flow. I could even introduce the topic in the absence of my period by reflecting on how in the days immediately preceding onset I would transmogrify into a clutz, dropping things, bumping into furniture. I’m sorry now for torturing my mother, but of course, it wouldn’t have been torture if we were able to comfortably discuss such things. If The Facts of Life were treated like facts of life.

I did a better job when my own daughters went through menarche, but I don’t know how much better. My older daughter used to stick her fingers in her ears and make lalalala sounds to drown out disgusting talk about the changes she could expect. Her sister was young enough to be intrigued rather than grossed out by the words her sibling was trying to keep from penetrating into her consciousness, so she probably assimilated what she needed to know well before she needed to know it.

While many parents today work purposefully to acknowledge and incorporate puberty into a holistic view of family life, menarche and the onset of bodily changes and the uninvited hormonal tides that accompany the menstrual cycle are still delicate, difficult subjects.

We think we have whisked away the cobweb of taboos, but even the ancient prohibitions remain with us. In Nepal, there is still the custom of chhaupadi where women take up residence in menstrual huts during their periods. The Quran forbids sexual intercourse during menstruation. Jewish law’s term for a menstruating woman, niddah, signifies one who is unclean. Traditional Hinduism teaches that menstruating women are impure and polluted. An international organization, Flo, that offers education and outreach to women, including supplying feminine hygiene products to women who don’t have the cultural or economic resources necessary to manage their periods, reports that many girls in rural India, Africa, and Indonesia drop out of school once they experience menarche. But this is not a third-world problem. Period shaming is still prevalent around the globe.

So I was delighted to learn that there is a new film — the anti-Carrie film?— just released by Disney — Disney!— that tackles the subject of female puberty. With Pixar animation! How cool is that?

I learned of Red Panda by way of hearing about an influential film critic who — if he did not exactly trash the movie — dismissed it. He couldn’t relate! Picture alternating emojis here: a laughing-with-tears face and an exploding head.

The summer I was eleven my father delivered me to the house of a classmate on his way to work and gave me my bus fare and a little extra for the trip home, so on my return, I stopped at the small grocery store wedged in near the bus stop to buy a pack of Black Jack licorice chewing gum. Inside, I crossed paths with two boys from the class above mine. I was able to summon the courage to greet them as I was dressed in one of my favorite outfits: slim white capris pants below a boxy, beribboned crop top that stopped at my waist. The boys snickered in reply. The only other shopper was staring at me. I looked down and saw what they saw: the patch of red blooming against the white. I dropped the gum and ran out of the store. I still had to wait there, exposed on the street corner. I still had to board the bus, ride the bus, and walk the unbearably long mile home from the bus stop. I was dying. Not from hemorrhage, from shame.

My daughter tells me that I will be relieved to learn there is now Period Underwear that protects the wearer – everyone’s granddaughter — from such ignominy and she is right—I am very happy to hear it.

And I am looking forward to seeing Red Panda with my granddaughter.

“The Unknown Woman of the Seine” is one of those images, one of those phrases, one of those characters you can go most of your life never encountering – or never noticing, at least – until you do, and once you do, you start seeing her everywhere.

Hers is the tale – or two tales really – the first about the young woman whose body washed up on the banks of the Seine some time in the late 1880s, was taken to the city morgue, publicly displayed, never claimed, but whose face bore such a lovely and beatific expression that a caste was made – and this becomes the second tale: of the plaster mask that went from being an artist’s study tool to a poet’s muse, to the subject of short stories, novels, movies, and photographic essays, before eventually winding up as the template for the first CPR dummy, Resusci Anne, thus rounding these two narratives into a singular, circular whole – of the drowning victim whose surviving image served to teach us all how to save each other from, among other things, drowning.

For me, the discovery of this diptych – of woman and mask – took place about a decade ago, maybe a year or so before I started writing the book, which I did for the same reason I write any book: because my mind keeps returning to it, and to the questions it poses. In this case (and assuming any part of the origin story is true), what life could account for the expression we encounter on that mask? Maybe more to the point, what death?

Without entering too much into process, research followed. And surmise. Certain resemblances asserted themselves, and by their lead, the beginnings of an answer started to take shape around other secondary questions having to do with the acute effects of longstanding physical and psychological trauma, the Sino-French War, the recurrence of certain specific bodhisattvas, the annals of 19th century French (and Swiss) crime, the fin-de-siecle anti-absinthe movement, and the World’s Fair of 1889, of course, whose final three days serve as the story’s squarest frame.

Inevitably, as I grew more familiar with the history, the place, and the various available characters, the book began to take on the romantic, ornate, gas-lit atmosphere of its setting. At the same time, however, and just as inevitably, I became aware that my actual storyline – that is, the investigation into the life and death of the Unknown Woman — was leading me down some very dark alleys, and that lurking in the shadows of this world were more sinister elements, specific exhibits of racism and acts of violence that were as grotesque and disturbing as anything the human imagination could conjure. Only they were true, indelibly etched into the record of the period.

I cannot say that this dissuaded me. For a writer, the knowledge that your present course is liable, at certain turns, to shock the conscience of an empathetic reader isn’t necessarily bad news. It means you may be on to something, in fact, and especially these days, when the ways we talk about our deepest communal faults and fault-lines have begun to feel so pitched and so prescribed, there’s value, I believe, to opening the mind’s eye and seeing these demons in action. And in effect. That’s what novels do.

So I proceeded, aware however that certain crucial questions were out in the open now, and would hover for the remainder of my effort – questions not just about how I should address the more upsetting features of this landscape, but about whether I should. And why.

Now in addition to being a writer, I am also a teacher, which means that I currently find myself in a moment of upheaval, wrought by the confluence of a technological revolution and a socio-political reckoning that calls upon us – happily and necessarily – to revisit the most basic questions about what we think we’re doing, which in my case means teaching literature. In the brave new world of boundless bandwidth and vanishing attention spans, what does it even mean to be a reader, or ‘culturally literate’? Is this an idea we want to preserve? Is reading novels, say, a behavior we want to continue encouraging? And if the answer is yes, then on what basis do I choose to model that behavior on this book here as opposed to that one there?

I’d like to think that all English teachers are wrestling with such questions, and I expect that our answers will vary, depending upon the paths that led us to the classroom, and the paths that led our students there as well. Obviously. But for me, and for now, my own answer to that last question in particular – what makes me most excited to share a text with my students, and to read it with them – is this, and if this sheds light on my creative m.o. or why I feel not just emboldened but obliged to take the hazardous trail when it presents itself…fine.

First, I should admit that I’ve never considered it to be the purpose of a novel – or a song, a painting, or any work of art for that matter – to offer remedies, solutions, or instructions. I’m aware of the counterarguments, but it’s my experience that ideology flattens art, and I’m not interested in agendas. I can get those easily enough online. When I smell one in something someone has created, my tendency is to think it kinda stinks.

What doesn’t stink – what stays fresh, that is, and what I, therefore, trust in most — is the Particular. The Singular. The One-and-Only-ness of whatever the writer has set their sights on. And that quality can apply to any aspect of the work – to the situation, a feeling, or to a character, of course – that’s always the best. The effect is the same no matter where you find it, though, and harkens to the old idea that the more precise the detail – or focus of our attention — the more universal the resonance will be. So it doesn’t matter that I’m reading about a Chinese farmer in a rice field 2500 years ago. If the language captures that moment, the moment will capture me, and in so doing, expose all those boundaries that supposedly divide that farmer and me for what they are: the real fiction.

But I’ll go a step further and admit that my favorite of these moments, the ones that really make me sit up in my chair, or maybe even put the book down and take a quick walk of gratitude – are those in which an author manages not only to distill the essence of the thing, but the antidote as well.

What do I mean?

I mean that passage where, even as the protagonist appears to be having their grand epiphany – is actually pronouncing the truth inside their head (and an admirable truth at that!) – the author manages to tilt it just a fraction, just enough to let us see that this too is vanity, of course, it is (e.g., Tolstoy, Woolf). Equally, as stirring is the lunatic’s street corner rant, which for all its frustrating loops and arbitrary digressions still glimmers with moments of divine light. This makes me very happy (e.g., Nizami, Nijinsky, Morrison, Kanye). That glance in the mirror reveals the villainy of the hero or the heroism of the villain. Anything, really, that challenges or confounds the reader’s reflex to make an easy sense of what just happened or to relax into obvious assumption about who’s reliable and who isn’t, or what the moral of this story surely must be (e.g., Shakespeare). I like a good kōan. I like the parable that makes no sense (e.g., Buddha, Jesus). I like the composer who, having written the most beautiful melody he can think of, can’t resist smearing it just a little with his thumb (e.g., Prokofiev, Waits). Or that author who for some reason saves her clearest, tenderest prose for the most gruesome image in the book (e.g., Allende).

These are my heroes, my mentors and masters, who teach me not to be so quick, or ever to think I know. All meaning is a double-edged sword. Ego cloaks itself in noble deeds every day. The lotus grows from garbage heaps. And literature is never more vital – or more consoling, it seems to me – than when it reminds us of this, the gorgeous moral ambiguity of human being.

Do I say all this to suggest that The Unknown Woman of the Seine actually achieves such an effect? Or to justify the paths I finally chose in trying to solve the mystery of that young woman’s face? Hardly. Not my place. Not my interest really. But I will happily admit that this is why I read; this is why I teach; and that by implication, sure, this is why I write.

 

Crying in the Park, Climbing in the Window: Two images helped me imagine the story of a woman scientist

 

When I was a young woman trying to figure out how to be a mother and a writer, I read an interview with cosmologist Vera Rubin. In 1951, after completing a master’s degree in astronomy, Rubin moved to a new city because of her husband’s job, giving up her studies to care for her newborn son. It was a hard time. She loved her baby, but she was lonely. She missed science.

Rubin’s lifeline was the Astrophysical Journal. When it came in the mail, she would take it to the park, pushing her son in his baby carriage, then sit on a bench and read it, weeping.

Eventually, Rubin figured out how to get herself into a PhD program. Twenty years after that, she discovered that the universe largely consists of dark matter, an insight that transformed our understanding of the cosmos. Ultimately, Rubin had a successful and celebrated career. But the image of the young mother with the baby carriage reading an astrophysics journal through her tears remains burned into my mind.

*          *          *

When I was a kid, I wasn’t interested in science. My father, a molecular biologist, would sometimes take me to his lab on Saturdays. Mostly I played with the paper clips in his desk. Other times he would take me into our Maryland woods and show me butterflies, wildflowers, and the dam a pair of beavers built across our stream one year. I would lag behind, impatient to be back inside: to trade the palpable world for the imaginary ones inside books.

Nonetheless, scientists interested me. Or maybe it was the idea of scientists: how they burrowed underneath the skin of the world to find out how it worked. Their seriousness of purpose stirred me. I read the books my father had read as a boy that had helped inspire his interest in science—Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters—and came away with a romantic notion of a Life Dedicated to Truth. But in high school science classes, as in the woods, my mind often drifted.

In college, I met a boy who loved stars. We got married when he was in astronomy graduate school, and suddenly there I was, surrounded by scientists again! I had never wondered why so few of my father’s colleagues were women, but now I was struck by the fact that my husband’s classmates and professors were almost all men. What was up with that?

Of course, women have long faced obstacles in many professions, but there is something particularly galling about antagonism to women in a calling that’s supposed to be about objectivity and the pursuit of truth.

It’s also interesting. It occurred to me that the travails of a woman scientist might be good fodder for a novel. I started reading, trying to see what I could learn.

There are lots of compelling (infuriating!) stories about women scientists who struggled because of men. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery of what stars are made of was initially disbelieved, and the man who discouraged her from publishing her result was later widely credited for the breakthrough. Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray photograph of DNA was used without her knowledge by the men who later won the Nobel Prize for solving the molecule’s structure. These women, and others like them, overcame many obstacles to bring us truth from the far reaches of the galaxy and from inside our infinitesimal cells. How did they do it? What sustained them?

One morning, reading the New York Times, I encountered the obituary of a geneticist I had never heard of, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992). One paragraph in particular caught my attention:

Modern genetics has known no figure quite like Dr. McClintock, who worked alone and chose not to publish some of her revolutionary observations for years, explaining later that she thought no one would accept the findings. She never gave lectures, as most scientists do to build their careers. Instead, until her last days, she worked in her laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor twelve hours a day, six days a week. Until 1986, she did not have a telephone, requesting that anyone who wanted to talk to her write a letter instead.

I clipped the obit and put it in a file. I didn’t think I knew enough yet to write that story—not enough about novels or science or life. That would take a couple of decades.

*          *          *

In 2014, I finally felt ready. To prepare to write the novel, I did a lot of research about McClintock. I read biographies, had conversations with scientists (including my dad), and visited archives. One moment from her life particularly stood out to me: as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, McClintock once climbed into her office through the window because she’d forgotten her key. Somebody saw her do it, and she got in trouble, apparently because it was considered unladylike.

I could see the scene so vividly: a slight, strong woman clambering up a stone wall on (perhaps) an early Sunday morning. Tackling the problem at hand in an effective, unconventional way! That scene was one of the first I wrote. During revision, though, I realized I had to cut the whole Missouri section. That was okay (you always have to cut), but I hated losing that scene.

A few drafts later, I decided to begin the book with the main character wandering the streets of Ithaca, New York, late at night after an ill-conceived and alcohol-fueled kiss with her housemate, another girl. Where would she go at such an hour? I followed her across campus as she tried various locked doors, lugging her heavy suitcase and her shame.

When she got to the biology building, its door was locked too. She looked up to the classroom where her bio lab met, and I thought: What if the window were slightly open? What if she decided to climb up? Transformed, the anecdote from Missouri became just the tool I needed. (The metaphoric overtones—that a woman may need to find an unconventional way into a male-dominated field—did not occur to me until later.)

In the course of writing a novel, it’s often some indelible picture stuck in your head that gets you going, or that helps you through a dark wood when you’re stuck. The woman climbing in through the window helped me solve a problem and gave me an opening chapter. But it was the image of the young mother reading the physics journal and weeping that started me on the journey. I could not have written In the Field without both of them.

In February of this year, a doctor I’d gone to see about a painful, swollen knee told me some unpleasant news:  the problem was arthritis and would be with me for good. She said I could begin work to ease the pain and to keep possession of my biological knees, in a number of ways, but the most important one—she was not unkind, saying this—was that I needed to lose weight, and keep it off.. Like a lot of people, I’d been eating too much while isolated during the COVID epidemic, and I hadn’t been a small person to start with. I nodded, looked in the proverbial mirror, and got started on a course of dieting and physical therapy.

Now, in July 2021, I’m down thirty-five pounds and am on track to lose another twenty by the time I turn 50 in November. My knee feels better.

Nevertheless, I am cautious about optimism. About assuming I’ve fixed what ails me. I’ve been here before, and I know myself a little too well.

In 1999 I was twenty-seven years old. In October of that year, I lost my first wife, Joellen, to bone cancer. When she died I was very heavy—280 pounds or thereabouts. (I’m 6’4”, and had grown up skinny; in my twenties, however, after my metabolism slowed to a crawl, I never learned to change my eating habits, and when Joellen grew sicker and sicker, I was in no state of mind to stop eating for comfort.)  A little over a year after Joellen died—a year I spent monomaniacally working out and dieting—I had lost nearly 80 pounds.

A success story, right? Not really. By 2006 I’d gained a lot of it back. Disgusted with myself, I joined a gym and lost 45 pounds. I slowly gained it back. In 2012-13, I learned how to count calories with an app on my phone, and I put 1400 miles on a road bike, and I lost 40 pounds. And then I slowly gained it back.

And so on, and so on.

I calculate that in the last two decades, I’ve lost around 250 pounds of aggregate weight. I weigh less than that at the time of this writing—around 239 or so. I sometimes marvel that I have gained and lost an entire other large human being’s worth of weight. A whole other me, consumed and then gone.

When I lost 80 pounds, that terrible year after my first wife’s passing, I did it out of desperation and fear. My wife had met and fallen in love with me when I was smaller, and I figured I’d need to be small to meet and ever be loved by someone else. In 2001, when I weighed 205 pounds, I started dating again, and I convinced myself I’d been right: I needed a “normal” body in order not to be lonely. I was exorbitantly proud of myself for having done this. I bought into the notion that losing weight was a heroic thing to have done—an act of steely will, and not a reaction to grief. A fundamental change of self subsumed within the physical transformation.

And if I took that to be true, then, when I gained the weight back, well—wasn’t that a sign of weakness? Of failure? (Never mind that in that same span of twenty years I married again; I began and maintained a writing career; I became a professor and earned tenure and founded an MFA program and saw many students of mine succeed. I was loved and had friends. Yet all that while, I was judging myself, alternately growing and shrinking, stuffing myself and starving in what seemed like a never-ending cycle.)

In 2017-18, finally, I began thinking differently about this cycle, and these emotions. That was, not uncoincidentally when I began writing the novella “Big Guy,” which anchors my story collection You Would Have Told Me Not To. I am not someone who believes that writing fiction is automatically therapeutic. I am someone who writes in order to think about complicated ideas, to see how imagined people might succeed or fail at the trials which have so bedeviled me and others. Maybe that I was thinking differently brought “Big Guy” into being, or maybe that I started writing it caused me to think differently. Both are likely true.

The novella isn’t about me—I write fiction, and “Big Guy,” and all the other stories in You Would Have Told Me Not To, are about made-up people. But Doug, the protagonist of “Big Guy,” could fairly be described as an alternate me, someone I could have been. The version of me who chose to become a high school English teacher, maybe, instead of going to graduate school (twice!) to study creative writing. (Or maybe he’s the aggregate me—the other person’s worth of weight I’ve gained and lost.) This man, Doug, decides, in the wake of a sudden and painful divorce, that he needs to lose 100 pounds in order to be happy, to be loved. He sets about doing it. He thinks that if his body is healthy, all the rest of him will be too.

(A spoiler that really isn’t: he’s mistaken.)

 

I didn’t know I was writing a story collection until I was halfway through “Big Guy.” I realized, writing it, that the novella was going to be about some of the same ideas that concern several short stories I’d already written, most of them between 2015-2019. That means almost all of this book was written after the election of Donald Trump; and written during the #metoo movement, which showed me that I (and every other man trying to pay attention) knew a lot less about what the women in my life have suffered than I’d ever supposed. The stories I was writing, I saw, were largely about the type of men who cause that suffering, and the fallout from their choices. And maybe I could shape them all together into a book.

Not all of these ideas were new. I’m the son of a violent alcoholic, himself the son of a violent alcoholic. I grew up knowing that my dad’s ideas about masculinity weren’t the ones I wanted to uphold. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be a different sort of man, and in many ways, I have succeeded, and my earlier fiction reflects that thinking.

But the last few years have caused me to rethink everything. I’m nearly fifty, as I’ve said. Old enough to have succeeded, but also to have failed, a lot…and I’ve been writing about failure, too. About trying to change, and not changing. About how—for instance—the way I think about my body, and other’s bodies, has everything to do with the ways I’ve been getting my thinking about masculinity wrong. That these ways of thinking don’t exist in a vacuum. That our interior struggles, even if they seem minor, can often cause major exterior harm.

The finished collection ended up full of stories about couples, men,and women trying to navigate that harm. Several of them are still trying to reckon with past mistakes, to figure out whether they have changed, or ever can. A violent day laborer, willingly staying out of the eyes of society, meets a man who might be his illegitimate son. A privileged college boy spends a summer cheating on his absent girlfriend, while in thrall to a rich lothario who visits the mountain resort where he works. A woman has to reckon with her complex feelings about her adult son—and the son’s father—in the wake of the son being shot outside a bar. The last story I wrote for the book, finished around one minute before my editor Joe Olshan’s deadline, is about a woman who encounters, by chance, a man she’d hoped never to see again: her alcoholic, abusive ex-husband, now apparently sober and reformed, and engaged to be married again. He’s changed, he says—everyone says. So has she. And yet her hurt remains.

Can we change? I wrote “Big Guy,” learned a great deal, and then ate myself into the doctor’s office again. I write this post aware of the irony. But I also write it in the spirit of optimism, the same way I wrote the stories in the collection. Change, growth, reconciliation, forgiveness—these are hard to accomplish and getting harder. Nevertheless, they are what we all have to undergo.

I wrote this book believing—and believing still—that

New York City, where I’ve lived for decades, has been, for me, an endless source of inspiration for my novels and short stories. The things I’ve seen and overheard—while in line at Whole Foods or while sitting in the waiting room in a doctor’s office or standing in a subway car next to a teenager watching a TV show on his phone—have often found their way into my fiction. The shoes my characters wear, the tattoos ornamenting their wrists or ankles, the frustration they unleash as they shout into their iPhones at friends or relatives who’ve disappointed or angered them—sometimes nearly every bit of it has been inspired by people sitting across from me on the Lexington Avenue bus. Or walking past me along 86^th Street, phone in hand, as they reveal surprisingly intimate details of their lives in the loudest of voices. And my natural instincts as a fiction writer always lead me to pay close attention, to write down whatever I find poignant or hilarious or astonishing directly into a small notebook I keep with me whenever I leave my apartment. As the T-shirt given to me by a friend warns: .

The idea for my new novel, The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love, came to me in an instant one spring afternoon eight very long years ago, as I was heading homeward from the subway. I was less than a half-block from my apartment when I saw, for the first time in precisely forty years, a man I recognized immediately, a former college teacher of mine who looked rather as he had when I’d been his student, though he was now an elderly man, his hair thinning and white, his formerly bearded face now mostly clean-shaven. And in that moment I thought, I know what you did, Professor X. I KNOW what you did.

Then I stopped him on the street and introduced myself. I’d been his student decades earlier in the philosophy class he taught and, as I could have predicted, he had no idea who I was. But we chatted for a few minutes about our mutual time on campus, and talked about what a coincidence it was that, in fact, we now lived directly across the street from one another, our apartment buildings a mere fifty feet apart.

I know what you did, Professor X. I KNOW what you did.

What I knew was that forty years earlier, this geeky-looking married guy had been sleeping with a sophomore in my dorm, a serious-minded teenager who was a student in the small ethics class Professor X had taught in the Philosophy Department.

In the next moment, as we went our separate ways, the earliest seeds of my new novel were planted. What if my protagonist/narrator (a bereft, emotionally unstable middle-aged woman who’d once been the professor’s student) strolled into the lobby of the professor’s high-rise apartment building, talked her way past the concierge, went up to his apartment, and rang the bell? What if the professor’s wife—to whom he’d been married for over half a century and who knew absolutely nothing about her husband’s betrayal—answered the door, and the former student announced, “You don’t know me, but there’s something I have to tell you…” What would it do to this couple’s relationship, to the betrayed wife who had never doubted, for even a moment during their fifty-year marriage, her husband’s faithfulness? Or…what if, instead, the narrator confronted her former professor and threatened to tell his wife unless he immediately wrote her a check for five thousand dollars? And a few months later demanded ten thousand? And then twenty thousand? How far would he be willing to go to preserve his marriage?

Though I wasn’t at all sure where, exactly, these ideas would lead me, the one thing I knew with certainty that afternoon after running into Professor X was that somewhere in that briefest of encounters was a novel I was going to write. And I found myself thinking, as I do nearly every day, of my favorite quote from Mark Twain: “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”

I find my urge to disbelieve in concentration camps, and in what is done to the people in them, is quite strong. Maybe “disbelieve” isn’t quite the right word. We call reacting to made-up events and people as if they were real, the way we do when we read fiction, “suspending disbelief.” What I’m thinking about is the reverse of that: I’m perfectly capable of acknowledging horrible truths about concentration camps, but I can hold them in my mind as though they were fictive – I can read about real, suffering humans as though they were characters with no claim on me. So, the urge isn’t to disbelieve, exactly: it’s to suspend my belief.

You would think, having spent the better part of a decade writing a novel set in the Gulag, I’d have pretty well exhausted this urge to ‘suspend belief’. I regret to say I haven’t. The years writing and researching The Body Outside the Kremlin trained me to believe deeply in the history of the Soviet camps (at least enough to fictionalize them; more on this below); still, I had to endure the process again last week as I read Amelia Pang’s Made In China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods.

Pang’s book is an overview of China’s laogai system of “reform-through-labor” camps, woven together with the story of Sun Yi, a laogai prisoner who managed to smuggle notes describing the conditions of his imprisonment into the products he was forced to manufacture for sale in the US. When a K-Mart customer finally found one of his letters in her Halloween decorations in 2014, it led to a modest amount of national coverage here in the states. This certainly isn’t a review, but I can say it’s a good book on an important subject, worth the read for anyone. Even so, I think it must have taken a hundred pages before I stopped quibbling doubtfully with it as I read.

Quibbles such as: Well, Sun Yi was a falun gong practitioner, and aren’t they notorious for supporting ultra-rightist causes? Pang had even written for the falun gong newspaper, the Epoch Times, home to some of the US’s most noxious Trumpist conspiracy-mongering. Were she and her subject really so credible? And later, Pang’s points about the US consumer’s culpability in creating the conditions that made Chinese forced labor profitable: Was I supposed to believe that my choice of t-shirt really had critical moral consequences? Am I really guilty?

I expect anyone who’s read a well-sourced book that pushes them to reassess their own comfortable place in the world will recognize my pseudo-arguments. They’re deflections, ultimately beside the point. Whatever you think of falun gong’s commitments, it’s undeniable their practitioners are brutally repressed in China. By the same token, worrying about the Epoch Times’s credibility ignores Pang’s solid journalism. In the end, whether you believe in the efficacy of consumer activism or not has no bearing on whether US consumption drives laogai labor practices. It does. That’s a fact.

So why didn’t I want to go along with Pang’s book? Where does the urge to ‘suspend belief’ come from?

Partly, it’s a kind of horror-fatigue. My wife joked, after Kremlin was published, that she was relieved we were finally being released from Solovetsky, the camp where it’s set. And it really has felt like a liberation to move on to other research, other stories. It used to spoil my appetite to imagine the consequences of starvation for Russian prisoners: night blindness, pellagra, death by heart failure. My appetite is gone again as I think about what happened to Sun Yi when he started a hunger strike: The guards at his laogai cuffed him to a bed by his wrists and ankles and force-fed him salty millet through a tube run through his nose and down his throat. This lasted for months. When they finally removed the tube, Pang reports, the part that had hung down into his stomach was black.

Cheap irony that one set of camps tortured with starvation while the other tortures with feeding. (Not that laogai prisoners are fed particularly well when they’re not hunger-striking.) But for the most part laogai and Gulag regimes are uncannily similar. At times, I felt like I was going down a list of details the two had in common. Prisoners sleeping head-to-toe to fit into the tiny space they had to lie down? Check. The maddening difficulty of working while holding your pants up when you’re forbidden to have a belt?  Prisoners mutilating themselves with tools to escape impossible work quotas? Check and check.

Easier to turn all of that into a litany than to stop and dwell on what each item means for you if you are imprisoned. That’s what I mean by horror-fatigue.

Pang spends a couple of chapters discussing the ways that the moral and cognitive burdens that the laogai system imposes on US consumers keep them from grappling with their responsibility for it. I won’t rehearse her arguments here, but I know this is part of the urge to ‘suspend belief’ as well. Like most people, I don’t like to feel guilty, but I don’t like to have to work too hard to avoid guilt either. If I don’t force myself to think about it, allowing what I know about laogai to float into the fictive zone of my mind conveniently excuses me from having to do either.

So far the feelings I’ve described could apply to anything horrifying and morally uncomfortable, but I do, finally, think that the ‘suspension of belief’ is particularly relevant to our experience of the camps. Certain basic facts of their structure render them dream-like, otherworldly. They are often remote, and when they aren’t (as is often the case for laogais, which need to be more or less convenient to manufacturing centers), they are at least inaccessible. Within them, the usual rules of life are suspended, as in a dream or a game. A prisoner might, like Sun Yi, find that the only way to object to his captivity is to starve himself or to slip a note into a package of Halloween decorations. He might, like my character Tolya, find that the only way to investigate a murder is to cut off his little finger. Or she might, like so many, find that regardless of how much she would like to sleep, she continues to do hard labor for eighteen hours a day, day after day. One of the things I find hardest to make real to myself about the camp experience is just how little a prisoner’s daily routine is influenced by their intentions or desires; we’re accustomed to thinking of human activity as an index of human mental states, but the evidence of the camps is that that need not be true.

Distance and strangeness push camps away from our usual sense of reality and into the realms of fiction. A concentration camp is a frozen planet, a city of ghosts, an x-zone, a dark kingdom under the hill. And to live under a regime that sends people away to them is to live with the threat that your reality might dissolve into such a state-sponsored fantasy at any moment. That assault on your sense of what’s real and what isn’t, so that you learn to suspend your belief in everything until the state has endorsed it — that has to be part of the point.

Writing The Body Outside the Kremlin always felt both important and morally hazardous to me. Important because I, like most people who love fiction, still believe in its power to be true in ways that make reality more real, ways that might be able to fill life back up when concentration camps and other systems of repression drain the reality out of it. But always hazardous as well, since for all my research and cultivated sense of Solovetsky’s truth, I was also creating a fictional version of the place, turning it into an outpost of my imagination. There’s the risk, doing that, of turning a camp back into one of those realms of fiction. You might make it a dream for your reader, or a game, in ways that mirror the totalitarian project you began by condemning.

I could say that I hope The Body Outside the Kremlin affirms reality as only fiction can while succumbing to moral hazard as little as possible. But that just amounts to saying that I hope it’s a good book, and the time for me to make that judgment is well past. Instead, I’ll say I’m glad Amelia Pang wrote her book, and that Sun Yi managed to get his note out. It’s healthy to be reminded how strong the urge to ‘suspend belief’ can be.