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.