Our author event with Rachel Eliza Griffiths was incredibly powerful—I’m still turning over many warm stones of revelation in my mind. Thank you to Eliza, and to our amazing members in the room on Sunday! And in case you missed the announcement, I’ve got some great news:

REPLAYS are HERE! Starting this week, replays will be available to members who register and can’t make it! I’ll record the first part of each event, so you’ll get to experience the author reading some of her work and more.

Eliza opened our session with a candle lit for the ancestors whose presence guided us—in her book, in our conversation, in our lives. We roamed from trauma and mental health to healing the inner child, from literary lineages to the power of archives, music, and dance, from honoring grief to putting our shame down for good.

I am so happy to be able to offer you a preview of our time together.

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Your Replay with Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Since you didn’t have much time to register for the replay, I’m sharing it with all paid members this time. I know you will be deeply touched by Eliza’s reading from The Flower Bearers.

Enjoy…

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ memoir The Flower Bearers ends with a trip to Nashville and Atlanta to honor her chosen sister Kamilah Aisha Moon, and the “literary foremothers” whose lineage they both carry forward. The trip comes almost three years after Moon’s sudden death on the day of Griffiths’ wedding to author Salman Rushdie, and two years after Rushdie was near-fatally stabbed while onstage at an event.

When I first conceive of a creative project about my grief for Aisha, I deceive myself into believing I will write a formal book about women and friendships. … As I hear myself repeating my ideas to various librarians and friends, I soon grasp that I will never write the book I am busy describing.

I’m not a scholar. I’m not an academic. I’m a madwoman.

…

Audre Lorde knew all about it: and when we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard / nor welcomed / but when we are silent / we are still afraid.

I can’t just lean against the surface of the work and lives of other Black women’s journals, letters, and drafts. For me, the time I spend with these archives will be as simple and necessary as the times Black women sit alone together, sharing themselves with each other.

I have to come to them, to us, with my entire being.

And so she does, alongside a close friend of hers and Moon’s. In Atlanta, Griffiths sits with Lucille Clifton and Alice Walker’s papers at Emory University, and with Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde’s at Spelman College. The pages she explores bring resonance, comfort, and power.

Griffiths recalls an unexpected meeting with Lucille Clifton in 2009: “‘Do you want to be a seeing woman or a blind one in this life? Because that,’ [Miss Lucille] said quietly, ‘is a choice women make.’” Every part of this journey, this book, is a choice that Griffiths makes to see: To see the unthinkable pain of loss and violence, to see the many ways in which words and witnessing beget the possibility of new life.

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In Nashville, Griffiths and her friend visit Moon’s grave and discover the lines of Moon’s own poetry engraved on her headstone:

I am light again
My arms reach from heaven
Rays of love streaming
through your dreams

In a hotel that night, Griffiths dreams of flowers.

Sometime after midnight, I wake up from a dream where the scent of flowers is so sharp it stirs me from my sleep. In my dream, there is a young girl, one of my inner selves, who tells me that she is a Flower Bearer. Her sweet voice is accusatory: You’ve been confusing the meaning. We’re not pallbearers or flower girls. We’re Flower Bearers. Do you ever give flowers to yourself?… Do you always give your flowers away, or do you save some flowers for yourself?

At this point in my reading, tears had been streaming down my face for many pages. Griffiths’ tenderness in emotional nuance acts as a catalyzing agent for those of us carrying griefs of our own—and aren’t we all? I cried for her, for myself, for all of us women making the choice to see or be blind.

I cried, too, for the transcendence Griffiths finds as she makes her way through crippling loss to a kind of healing.

I hope you’ll join us next week to meet Eliza in all her luminosity, hear her read from the book, and talk about this richness in community.

Register for Sunday August 30th with Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Register now so you can add the Zoom link and date to your calendar.

The Flower Bearers Author Event: August 30th, 2026 at 7pm EST

Join Lilith Lit readers, me, and The Flower Bearers author Rachel Eliza Griffiths for a reading, conversation, and Q&A. Come whether or not you’ve finished (or even started) the book—just bring your curiosity.

NEW: The beginning of the event will be recorded and shared with paid subscribers who register for the event but can’t make it that day.

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One of my dearest writing professors, Deb Margolin, once taught that there are really only five kinds of stories we tell:

1) I love you.

2) I want you.

3) I’m dying of love for you.

4) I’d love to die for you.

5) God be near me.

I thought of this as I inhaled Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ The Flower Bearers, which, at its heart, is a love story braided from these narrative strands. It is a memoir of deep intimacy with self, with creative and spiritual sisterhood, with the romantic beloved, with ancestry and future. There is loss, yes. There is grief. But the clarity of Griffiths’ love radiates in her prose.

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This week in my Q&A with Eliza, we talk about the power of lineage, sisterhood, and Lilith.

I’m also sharing some exciting changes for Lilith Lit members, based on your feedback. (Spoiler alert: Author event previews are happening!)

And make sure to register for our author event with Eliza on August 30th. All below.

On Mutual Witnessing

Griffiths and poet Kamilah Aisha Moon meet as graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College, and swiftly bond reading submissions to a poetry anthology dedicated to the life of murdered Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ngoni Nine. Aisha is “one of the greatest loves of my life, my chosen sister,” Griffiths writes.

Meeting Aisha allowed me to be both child and woman in her presence. We recognized each other immediately in a way I had never experienced because I’d assumed that friendships were like weather fronts, arriving and departing in semi-predictable forecasts. But Aisha was nothing like anyone I had ever met.

They grow and write and share music, and revel in the poetry scene of New York City in the 2000s and 2010s. Later, once their geographies diverge, they will spend “thousands of hours” talking on the phone.

Griffiths and Moon speak and write to each other with a reverence that transforms.

“EXCERPTS FROM EMAILS, JULY 10-13, 2006”:

ME: When I think about you everything good in me radiates and I blind people with my smile. You are goodness and just think we have like a couple of lifetimes or so to love each other. Today is going to be a good day . . .

AISHA: what a beautiful thing to say. you’re one of those people who gets more and more beautiful every day. most people fade or tarnish upon closer inspection, but each new corridor in you reveals a new loveliness. i treasure this, i treasure you.
keep enjoying yourself, keep shining.

These are friends who witness each other—hearts, lives, words, and more—with remarkable depth, clarity of purpose, and connection.

As their writing is tinged with righteous fury and sorrow in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, they find new levels of direction in their work:

Our tears and anger inscribed our poems with afterlives, sanctuaries, revolutions, and prophecies. The trauma of our generation was attached to our ancestors, too. Each killing took a piece of us into its history, dragging us to the bottom of the slave ship, to the cradle of the Atlantic’s cemetery, and we could neither forget nor forgive this. The memory of poetry itself served as our jury and forbade us to look away.

They celebrate each other’s joys, too. Later that same year, Griffiths has an opportunity to share her writing with Toni Morrison at Morrison’s induction into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. In response to Griffiths’ eager nervousness, Moon writes:

“The evening will be perfect. This meeting is destined. … She will know that you are a sister-daughter spirit before she even turns a page of M & P…”

Here, Moon refers to Griffiths’ third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear, which was dedicated to Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Griffiths hand-delivers Morrison a copy of the book that night.

In the years to come, the friendship between Griffiths and Moon blossoms through mutual witnessing and the desire to heal. Griffiths weathers suicidality and a brutalizing hospitalization, marries, loses her mother, keeps writing. She carries her “…camera everywhere, traveling across America and into Mexico and Europe. Slowly, I shaped drafts of new poems but often threw entire manuscripts into the garbage. I continued to struggle with my novel, forming new ideas, only to set them aside.”

An awakening self unfolds:

I had to keep going in a new direction that made me nervous. The path ahead of me insisted that I focus on my writing, my art, and my healing from childhood trauma. I searched for inner wisdom and quickened my steps towards a clear, kind voice inside of me that was filled with trust. Inexplicably, I knew that it was time to leap off the cliff, defying the gravity of memory. If I held fast to my dreams, to my need for freedom, I would not plummet to the rocks beneath me.

Mini Q&A with Eliza

LD: Lilith was one of our earliest feminist ancestors, written about in the Babylonian Talmud as a woman created simultaneously to Adam. In one telling, she chose to leave Eden and was demonized for demanding equality and refusing to have an eternity of missionary position sex with Adam. Do you see aspects of Lilith in yourself, the women in your life, your story? If so, how?

REG: I'm not sure I have the capacity to ponder Old Testament Sex but in terms of other parallels or comparisons to Lilith, I think that kind of insight would be for someone else to form about my work. There is something more ancient before her that dreamt of her becoming human. We’re all attached to that.

The ancestral, mythological, and living village of women who love me and whom I love is where I’m most deeply rooted and (re)born—we are storytellers, warriors, mothers, daughters, villains, healers, seers, teachers, witches, ghosts, singers, aliens, madwomen, outlaw women, and much more. I care about the stories and dreams that make women feel most connected to ourselves.

At one point I refer to myself in The Flower Bearers as a “madwoman.” And I still am—I'm “mad” to believe I deserve a fully created and embodied life. Internally, I once demonized myself and that was worse than what any religion could do to me.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes! Lilith Lit improvements.

Thanks to those of you who shared feedback about your Lilith Lit experience so far. I’d still love to hear from you: Bop over and take the quick survey.

Based on your responses, I’m making a couple exciting changes!

Take the Survey

• Virtual Meetings: Instead of two meetings each cycle, we will have one author event each reading cycle, and change our community meetings to a seasonal frequency. This will allow more of you to connect with our incredible authors, and give us a chance to gossip about lots of books all at once when we meet seasonally.

• Author Event Previews: For those who can’t make the author meeting time, I’ll be recording the first part of each meeting to share! You’ll get to hear a bit of discussion and the author reading from the book. Like cozy storytelling time at the library when you were a kid!

  

Register for Our Virtual Event with Rachel Eliza Griffiths

The Flower Bearers Author Event: August 30th, 2026 at 7pm EST

Register now for our virtual reading, discussion, and live Q&A with Eliza. You’ll get the Zoom link and can save the event to your calendar.

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I gasped when I first saw Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ The Two Elizas, 2009 (shared with her permission, alongside its accompanying poem, below). Discovering her visual art and writing while she was visiting The Merwin Conservancy here on Maui last year, I felt a core resonance: Here was an artist, a woman, plumbing the depths of her psyche to create works in dialogue with family, history, legacy, her place in the universe. I was in awe.

Now, reading Griffiths’ debut memoir The Flower Bearers, my appreciation for her ways of witnessing and understanding self and self-expression through various artistic mediums (poetry! fiction! nonfiction! photography! painting!) has only expanded. Her writing and visual art, its depth of feeling and insight, are mirrors that reflect past, present, and future in a weave of personal and collective truths.

Speaking of: Many of you reached out wanting to explore Griffiths’ poetry and photography. This week, I feel lucky to share The Two Elizas, 2009 with you. The photographic element is above, its corresponding poem—and its context in the canon of women artists—further down.

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This week in my Q&A with Eliza, she shares why she chose to write this story of love, friendship, trauma, and transformation as a memoir, and how she left behind shame in favor of truth.

Plus: There’s still time to win a free copy of The Flower Bearers!

And of course, scroll down to register for our author event with Eliza on August 30th.

Mini Q&A with Eliza

LD: The Flower Bearers is an astounding portrait of you as artist, daughter, friend, lover, human—and especially of how your artistry evolves over the decades. How did writing this memoir change your sense of who you are as an artist? Did you feel closer to one modality when you started writing, and another by its end?

REG: I felt very distant from everything I once was and what I thought I knew when I began to write this book. Also, for the first time, I needed to employ every genre I’ve ever explored. At first, I didn’t know if it was possible for me to salvage any elements of the identities I once thought were essential to me. My voice in language and body was altered and in shock.

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The Flower Bearers is the first book of our series that I’m reading for the first time right alongside you, and what a thrill it is. It’s been wonderful to hear how deeply you’re enjoying Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ powerful voice and soaring prose, the heft of this story. I am with you in tears and awe.

This week, Eliza tells us about her writing process and I have a survey for you to complete and enter to win a free copy of The Flower Bearers. The survey is short, but will help me understand how I can best show up for you and our book club community as we move forward. You’ll have the opportunity to offer direct feedback that shapes what comes next.

And of course, scroll down to register for our upcoming author event with Eliza in August.

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Mini Q&A with Eliza

These mini interviews allow us to step into Eliza’s world. Today: On her artistic process as she wrote The Flower Bearers, and the art that accompanied her. The book is steeped in the music, poetry, and art of so many genius contemporaries and ancestors, and I was curious how their presence intersected with her work.

Lily: Can you share some of the books, music, and other works of art that were guiding lights for you as you wrote The Flower Bearers?

Eliza: During the writing process, I curated a kind of “museum” of memories and influences. Some of the objects I kept close were objects that literally connected me to individuals in the memoir. I remember the day I looked at my wedding dress, which I hadn’t looked at since my wedding day. Unzipping that garment bag and reaching inside it to touch the dress felt like I was touching the body of a dead woman I could barely remember. There were still pieces of grass and sticks stuck in the tulle and hem of the skirt.

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“A howling proclamation of survival. Lovers of memoir and of achingly beautiful prose should not miss The Flower Bearers.”
— mónica teresa ortiz, BookPage

“Griffiths brilliantly conveys the relentless power of grief and of enduring love…An extraordinary testimonial to an extraordinary friendship.”
— Lesley Williams, Booklist (starred review)

“Elegant and juicy…gratifyingly lush.”
— Danyel Smith, New York Times Book Review

“In prose as luminous as her verse, Rachel Eliza Griffiths has written a testament to the human spirit’s ability to withstand a sundering—and to emerge with a heart made wider by the breaking.”
— Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms

“This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“With a poet’s precision, Rachel Eliza Griffiths renders two interwoven tragedies few others could have lived through, much less written about with such clear-eyed candor.”— Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars’ Club

“With grace and soft humor, Griffiths charts a path through devastation: poetic, heartbreaking, and life-affirming.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Rachel Eliza Griffiths has knitted together, from grief, rage, and love, a remarkable memoir: searching and tender and filled with something like grace.”
— Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths was the very first author I invited to join this inaugural season of Lilith Lit, and I had the privilege of extending the invitation to her in person. We met last winter here on Maui, while Eliza was an artist-in-residence at the lauded Merwin Conservancy. For two hours one evening in November, she held a room of us riveted: by her photography, her poetry, her stories, the soaring pitch of her words, her heart.

Eliza did not flinch as she spoke about the grief of losing her mother, the traumas and joys of being a Black woman and an artist in the United States, the shock of losing her best friend on her wedding day, and the horror of, just eleven months later, weathering an attack on her husband Salman Rushdie’s life.

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As Eliza—the award-winning visual artist and author of five books of poetry and one novel—was preparing to publish her first memoir, The Flower Bearers, I knew I had to invite her to join us. After the reading and Q&A, while I waited in line to buy a copy of Eliza’s collection of poetry and photography Seeing the Body, I psyched myself up to invite her to be a part of Lilith Lit. I was nervous, but to my absolute delight—and soon yours, too—she said yes.

A Video Message from Eliza!

Over the next six weeks, I’ll share mini interviews with Eliza as we explore this beautiful memoir and the lives it honors.

To begin, a special message from Eliza to you:

Register for Our Virtual Meetings

Register now. You’ll get the Zoom link and can save the date to your calendar.

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One of my best friends once told me he thought I was destined to be an archivist, which explains some of my fervor for Lisa Ko’s novel Memory Piece. I save cards, letters, photos, text message threads (watch out! I’ve got receipts), email exchanges, voicemails, Facebook memories. I’m an innately nostalgic person, and that sentimentality is compounded by having experienced a smorgasbord of grief in my twenties. Experiencing loss, death, the end of someone’s living body-as-archive, made me an even more dogged archivist than before.

And thanks to Memory Piece, I have a whole new way of thinking about archival material. Lucky for us, Substack served me this delightful piece of brain candy last week:

Which begs the question: Is anything that exists in the time-space continuum not an archive?

In Memory Piece, Ellen asks: “What would I remember; what would I be remembered for; who would remember me?”

This feels like the central question of the archive, a device that reflects both outward and inward. These questions are especially critical during times of collective cultural forgetting, when governments and technologies are working to distract us from the truth, the remembering of our lived experience.

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In the final section of Memory Piece, reality zooms ahead to the 2040s and our three friends are now in the 70s. Ellen describes:

Online, entire sections of the world were omitted, entire years lost, histories inaccessible. Reem once liked a post that was deemed politically sensitive and was charged with defamation. … Schools were under pressure, no one wanted to lose funding. You couldn’t teach certain subjects, only particular narrative and heroes, other things wiped from curricula completely. We had access to selective nostalgias, our devices funneling us into the appropriate memories for our age groups and locations, no tanks, no hiding places, no how-tos on removing an ankle tracker.

Pausing here to take a moment for the phrase “selective nostalgia”—oof.

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Hello readers!

This week we’re reflecting on the future, as depicted in Lisa Ko’s novel Memory Piece. I even got to ask Lisa about the book’s intersections with today’s sociopolitical climate in our mini Q&A. Make sure you scroll down for Lisa’s insights—and to register for our meeting with Lisa on Sunday, July 19th.

Ellen, the activist.

Before Memory Piece, I wasn’t aware of the rich history of squatting in New York City, its existence a decades-old “radical response to housing injustice” (Katie Heiserman, 2025). But Ellen Ng, our third character in the novel’s triad of female friends, chooses the squatting life: Forging chosen family, building community rooted in activism, constructing a home inside an abandoned building in Manhattan. From Ellen’s activist heart and years of work with coconspirators, Sola squat is born.

As adults, Jackie (the budding tech mogul), Giselle (the glitzy performance artist), and Ellen (the grass-roots activist) continue to orbit each other’s lives. Yet it is Ellen’s ethical viewpoint that forms the book’s moral core. (I find it interesting that her section is the only one written in first person, implying a closeness and centrality to her narrative—to be discussed!)

From Jackie’s section:

There’s an inquisitiveness in Ellen’s expression, a hidden pliableness that keeps Jackie tied to Ellen, because within its accusation is a type of love, tough or not, that says Jackie should know better because Jackie is better, and that Ellen is the one who can see Jackie’s true potential, Jackie’s true self. Jackie wants Ellen’s approval as much as she feels her own inadequacies, trapped between her automatic defense of Wonder and her not wanting to let Ellen win, though it’s not a contest. Not everything is a contest. Ellen makes Jackie crave Ellen’s reassurance, Ellen’s absolution, even if Jackie doesn’t always approve of Ellen’s choices.

For a time, Jackie lives at Sola squat—and she loves it. She blooms within the sense of connection, of purpose.

Jackie lets the sounds wash over her, the din of conversation and laughter. She doesn’t know the people they are talking about, but it doesn’t matter. All she has to do is sit, eat, listen. She wants, desperately, to be surrounded by other people, to not have to think about Wonder or Lene.

But the building, their home, is perpetually at risk, either from government eviction, the looming threat of gentrification-fueled real-estate development, unpredictable weather, fire, infrastructure failures, or a combination of all the above.

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Again, Jackie’s perspective:

The squat is dangerous, with spotty heat and plumbing, Ellen and her friends always have colds, and it’s not as if Ellen couldn’t pay rent and live in a real apartment, get a real job, make the choices that Jackie and everyone else have been forced to make. Why shit into a bucket of newspaper if you can afford a toilet? It’s like choosing to be homeless if you didn’t have to. What happens if the house collapses, burns down, if you get tetanus or a rat bites you? You still need savings, a safety net. Hearing this vestigial trace of her parents in herself disturbs her. But she could never say these things to Ellen, because there is always the prickling what-if: What if she, not Ellen, is the one doing the wrong things?

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Remember the analog screech of dial-up? The thrill of cloaked identity in an AIM chat room? The wonder of custom coding HTML? Jackie Ong does, and so do I.

Hello friends: It’s Memory Piece o’clock, and today we’re going deep on the novel’s portrayal of the early internet.

How’s your reading going? Are you still in Giselle’s section, or have you moved on to Jackie’s, or perhaps traveled all the way to Ellen’s? I love the way Lisa Ko writes these friends’ stories, intertwined yet maintaining a chronology that allows us to track subjective variations in their experiences, their distinct ways of finding meaning in the world—in art, online, in activism. It recalls recent conversations I’ve had with lifelong friends, dissecting seminal or quotidian past events from each of our points of view, each of us discovering something new in the telling that remained subterranean until now.

This is fertile territory for change, for cultivating a collective understanding of how we can live and grow together, how we can continually make ourselves anew. Which is exactly what Jackie discovers the internet lets her do each time her dial-up modem logs on.

Let’s get into it on Sunday, on Zoom, at 7pm ET, at our Community Meeting. Scroll down to register and get the link to join.

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Online, You Can Be Anyone

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Jackie Ong is director of web technology for a New York City Silicon Alley startup called Wonder, which delivers everything from donuts to video tapes. But at night, at home, she works on her passion project, a blogging platform called Lene, named after a crush-worthy elementary school teacher of Jackie’s.

Like so many of us who grew up in sync with computerized realities, “Sometimes [Jackie] felt more kinship to machines. Online was an underground club; there was a relief in not having to be yourself. Online, you didn’t have to have a gender or race or body.”

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This week, author Lisa Ko talks to us about what it means for the women of Memory Piece to be “allied in the weirdest parts of themselves”—and how that intersects with Lilith Lit. I do, in fact, believe, that all of us here are allied in the weird, holding space and strength for each other in the strangeness of creativity and imagination. More and more, it feels like making room for art and truth is its own kind of radical act.

Memory Piece reminds us of this on every page, especially as it relates to being allies in the weirdness of imagining new futures.

I can’t wait to discuss it all with you in our virtual Community Meeting on July 5th. Make sure you’re registered at the link below.

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Mini Q&A

This week, I asked Lisa about how Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen’s characters intersect with Lilith Lit’s namesake.

Lily: Lilith was one of our earliest feminist ancestors, written about in the Babylonian Talmud as a woman created simultaneously to Adam; she chose to leave Eden and was demonized for demanding equality and refusing to have an eternity of missionary position sex with Adam (yes, literally).

I see aspects of Lilith in Giselle, Jackie, and certainly Ellen, but from your perspective, how do you see the threads of defiance and equity fueling these characters?

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Welcome to your Lilith Lit weekly reader for Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece! Each week of this cycle I’ll share thoughts from my reading, a mini Q&A with the author, and some questions to deepen your read.

Let’s dive in.

Wait, So What Is Art?

We begin Memory Piece with “The Lost Notebooks of Giselle Chin.” Which is to say, in middle school, in New Jersey, as Giselle meets the friends who will shape her life: Jackie Ong and Ellen Ng.

By high school, Giselle knows that she wants to be an artist. She announces her nascent vocation to her parents, who don’t want to “‘help pay for college if she wanted to do something pointless that didn’t make any money,’” and to Jackie, who “didn’t laugh or roll her eyes.”

Instead, Jackie wants to know what kind of art Giselle will make, and Giselle tells her it will be something, “‘that hasn’t been invented yet.’”

From their posts at different high schools, Giselle and Jackie, “didn’t talk on the phone; they sent each other art mail.” Collages of sliced up report cards over ads for Stridex acne pads. Logs of conversations and word art. “Sometimes they wrote to one another as made-up characters.”

In other words, they began collaborating as artists.

One day as she trawls the radio, Giselle hears, “a DJ talk about two performance artists who tied themselves together with a rope for one year. That was the art piece; that was the art.”

She never found that station again but couldn’t stop thinking about the piece, the idea of art being a performance, the performance itself so ordinary and therefore so absurd. It was a situation! There were no tickets for it, no audience, or was everyone the audience? You could make something that wasn’t a picture or a movie, create a dare for yourself and live it every day, going to work or school, sleeping and taking a shower, and that could be art. It offered a comfort: she didn’t have to be a famous adult to be an artist. It lobbed a challenge: If she was to create a performance, what would it be?

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Who Gets to Be An Artist?

Do you remember the moment you first had some tingling sense of who you were, and who you wanted to become? My proclivities as a writer emerged young, and I regularly spent after-school hours inside the square glow of our Macintosh Classic computer, writing short stories. I didn’t grow up with siblings and my closest neighbors were cows, so I often wrote the best friends and cousins who I wished lived nearby. The stories were a lifeline, a way to imagine a different world while affirming the identity I clung to: Could I be a writer simply because I wrote?

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“Adventurous...Lisa Ko’s socially astute and formally innovative second novel, Memory Piece, takes readers back to the dawn of the Internet...gritty and refreshingly girl-centric...It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination.”
— The New York Times

“A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.”
— Vogue, Best Books of 2024

“Limber, ambitious...Memory Piece asks what hopes are worth clinging to, what parts of society are worth participating in, what powers are worth putting in the energy to fight.”
— The Atlantic

“A poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified, and what it means to find purpose.”
— Electric Literature

"The novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian.”
— Booklist

Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

Do you remember summer in the 1980s and 1990s? My own memories from those decades are lush and hazy: saltwater, sunscreen, CapriSun juice pouches, braiding friendship bracelets, the metal of braces and headgear, memorizing lyrics from Mariah Carey CD liner notes in my bedroom. Those were years when friend group dynamics felt like a matter of life and death—who wrote in your yearbook, who you imagined your future with.

Enter Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece, which stretches from the heat of a 1980s New Jersey summer to the chill of an imagined New York City in the 2040s. Its protagonists, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng (clearly I have a thing for books about trios of powerful women), are in middle school, then high school, and then adults. They are a performance artist, a tech-world coder, and a community activist. As the best of friends do, they mirror, refract, and infuriate one another as they discover themselves, come together, and fall apart.

Except that as time marches on, as the internet becomes its own ouroboros of possibility and terror, as art shudders under the influence of capitalism and technocracy, as people find it increasingly difficult to make rent, trust each other, and build community, the risk of true friendship heightens.

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It is in this world that Memory Piece unfolds. This novel rearranged my brain, helping me to understand my past and imagine a new kind of future.

I am so excited that Lisa Ko is joining us this summer to share her brilliant work, and I cannot wait to dive in with you!

A Note from Lisa + a Time Capsule!

First up: A note from Lisa, just for Lilith Lit readers—featuring a virtual Time Capsule replete with playlists, video, and visuals that guided her seven-year writing process.

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We’re just a few days away from our virtual community meeting, where we’ll take a collective deep dive into Three Women with author Lisa Taddeo. We’ll talk sex, desire, love, power, manipulation, fantasy, trauma, justice, internalized patriarchy and misogyny, fear and control. Our meetings are never recorded, so you’re welcome to share openly and listen with compassion.

Scroll down to register for this Sunday June 7th at 7pm ET (4pm PT) so you can add the link to your weekend calendar.

And no: You don’t need to finish the book to join us. All you need is your curiosity and willingness to honestly explore the topics at hand.

Is My Desire My Own?

In Three Women, Taddeo offers a trio of portraits of desire, each examining the external and internal realities of want and longing in one woman’s life. These are true stories of women who courageously offered up years of their lives, their journals and text messages, court records and secrets, families and relationships. In turn, Taddeo tells their stories, helps make sense of their hearts, their bodies, their loves and lusts. These portraits ultimately teach us readers something about ourselves, too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about one question that came up in our meeting earlier this month: How much of my desire is really my own, and how much is the result of my conditioning, grooming, and acculturation?

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How do the legacies of desire and fear we inherit and learn from our families of origin, our schooling, our experiences—what we grow up believing to be normal, what we learn sex and love ought to look and feel like—become internalized to the point of feeling uniquely our own? Like we came up with them sui generis, rather than as a byproduct of neuroplasticity and sociocultural imprinting?

And tangentially, how do those wants become so internalized that we lose track of reality along the way to seeking their fulfillment? With each of these women—as with myself, and perhaps with you—we see how their yearnings are often born of teenage fantasy and trauma. These seeds of unfulfilled imagination often get planted down the road, as adults, in the soil of men who have little interest in, understanding of, or capacity to tend to their blossoming.

For me, one of the book’s most gasp-inducing moments happens in a late Lina chapter. She has just recounted how her time that day with Aidan was “the only thing she has ever wanted,” how his “kiss is the most unbelievable one she’s had in her life.”

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Hi you,

Our second community meeting was last Sunday, and the power and vulnerability of our conversation blew me away. Thank you to the hearts who showed up; for those who couldn’t make it, there’s a recap below.

And: I’m very excited to discuss Three Women with you and author Lisa Taddeo at our virtual author meeting on June 7th at 7pm ET (4pm PT). Scroll down to register so you can add the date and Zoom link to your cal.

Women Seeing Each Other

Last month, this Substack Note went viral:

I chuckled at first, then noticed a familiar blur of shame at the edges of the humor as I read it a second time. Reliably, someone commented that if they did this they’d be shouting all day long. I smiled. And again came the sting of how barraged we women feel—not just by the external judgment of other people, media, and the internet, but by our own self-talk. We are on guard from the moment we wake to the time we sleep, and sometimes in our dreams, too.

In our Sunday meeting, one Lilith Lit member observed that Maggie, Lina, and Sloane’s stories in Three Women all begin at the point when there is a dramatic and negative change in the way their peers and/or family members see them. For each woman, this shift is the result of a sexual encounter, trauma, or assault with a boy or boys, a man or men. In its wake, they are suddenly and irreversibly marked, mocked, gossiped about. For example, of Maggie, Taddeo writes: “Everybody cares so much that she lost her virginity that everyone forgets to care that she just lost her virginity.”

And thus begins the lifelong practice of a woman seeing herself not just through her own eyes, but through the eyes of anyone who cares to have an opinion.

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As a pre-teen and teen, I spent hours assessing myself alongside the girls in my dance company as we changed into leotards and leg warmers in front of dusty backstage mirrors. At least five days a week and on the nights we performed, I was part of a clan of girls who vocally picked apart their own bodies and each other’s. I rarely spoke, and my friends often mistook my silence for confidence. It was more like terror: I worried that if I began to catalog the parts of myself I feared made me undesirable to men, I might never stop.

I heard it at home, too: My parents were lithe and fit and had no qualms about expressing their belief that this was how everyone should be. To be overweight, to them—as to mainstream heteronormative media and culture in the 90s—was to be both physically and maybe even spiritually corrupt. On the radio, in magazines, on television, in movie theaters: a parade of often eating-disordered thinness.

There was one right way for a girl to be attractive, it seemed. But who was it that determined this right way to be? And through whose eyes were we really looking?

At some point in our upbringing, conditioning, and grooming, we internalize someone else’s gaze to the point that it coexists with or overpowers or own. Often, it’s the perspective of family members or authority figures: caregivers or parents, siblings or friends, teachers, celebrities, or other public figures. Their view of us transforms our sense of who we are, how the world perceives us, how we see ourselves, and who and how we should be.

The Male Gaze

Which brings us to the matter of the Male Gaze. British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term in 1975 to describe how women in literature, cinema, and the arts were predominantly depicted from the perspective of the heterosexual man. For centuries, works created by men and women alike objectified, hyper-sexualized, and fetishized women across all intersections of race, class, and sexual identity. Moreover, those works were usually designed for male consumption and pleasure.

This is part of what makes a work like Taddeo’s Three Women so important—not only is it written by a woman, it also tells the story of women’s desire and sexuality through their own lens, for the benefit of other women (and men, too). While women (and some men) writers, artists, and film-makers have been subverting the reductive and manipulative approach of the Male Gaze for decades, it still thrives in all sectors of society. The 2000s introduced us to the Manosphere: a varied web of media promoting men’s rights, misogyny, and so-called masculinity that powerfully influences culture, politics, and interpersonal behavior to this day. Yet as with patriarchal thought and action, it’s not just cis straight men who serve as agents of the Male Gaze: Sloane, Maggie, and Lina’s stories show us how women internalize and uphold this split-screen way of seeing ourselves.

Imagine: You, a self-proclaimed feminist woman attracted to men, are getting ready for a date with a man. Perhaps it’s a second or third date—you know you’re attracted to him, and want him to find you attractive. In fact, you want to be irresistible.

In your mind, a hundred tv shows, pop songs, rom coms, and Instagram / YouTube / television ads play simultaneously, each one proffering a different way you should look, think, be. A thousand TikTok influencers tell you how to moisturize, do your makeup, avoid microplastics, dress, flirt, set boundaries, heal your inner child, be a cool girl, make him want you. Perform femininity.

You run down the checklist of everything you should do to become irresistible as a straight woman:

• exfoliate so your skin is soft & supple like a newborn babe’s

• shave your legs

• shave your armpits

• actually just remove as much body hair as possible (also, concerningly, like a child), no matter the cost in dollars or pain

• administer multi-step skincare routine and/or rejuvenating procedures & injections prior

• apply makeup so your eyes look large & fawn-like, lips plump & juicy, cheeks flushed with pleasure, skin free of pores, blemishes & wrinkles (child-like preferred!)—but also make it look like you’re not wearing makeup at all

• style hair so that it’s perfectly coiffed yet redolent of future orgasm

• wear something carefree, chic, sexy & respectable because god forbid you come across as wanting it too much

• perfume yourself so you smell more like something edible than like an animal with a body

• laugh & smile even if nothing is funny, just to be safe (literally)

Perhaps one day, maybe today, you begin to wonder why and how and when you agreed to all of this. Perhaps you ask yourself who actually benefits from your participation in this fantasy of the hyper-sexualized woman-slash-newborn child. Perhaps you begin to consider what’s being sold to you and who makes money off of your feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps you recognize that you’ve been seeing yourself through someone’s else’s eyes.

And maybe then you realize that though there will be socioeconomic and even political consequences to opting out of performing femininity for the Male Gaze, the only way you really need to be is just…yourself—with every hair and wrinkle and pore and animal smell. As a pregnant Cardi B once decreed: “Let me fat in peace.”

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Every Woman, a Split Self

In the epilogue to Three Women, Taddeo sits by her dying mother’s hospital bed awaiting wisdom.

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Hello Lilith Lit readers (accepting your suggestions for what to call us! Lilith Lit-ers doesn’t quite do it for me),

This Sunday at 7pm ET is our 1-hour virtual community meeting for Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, and I’m excited to drop in with you and discuss. On the table: Sex, desire, internalized patriarchy, women’s health and physical pain, power, patriarchal grooming, manipulation, the justice system—and whatever else is on your mind. Join us by registering at the link down below.

Today: On Sloane Ford’s sleek, sex-drenched, control-strung East Coast reality, a mini Q&A with the author herself, and some FAQ about our meetings. Let’s dive in.

Sloane

“It was typical of Sloane to see the promise of something before everyone else did,” Taddeo writes of the third woman she spent nearly a decade studying. In other words: Sloane is in possession of that ineffable, universally coveted quality called cool.

As Sloane’s coolness unfolds, with her ease as a mother, wife, and restaurateur, her apparent freedom to desire women and men, to be someone who both “respected decision-making” and “liked it when decisions were made for her,” who “always did the perfect amount of every drug” and “had been told throughout her life how beautiful she was,” we chart her longing to live in a “world where juices could run down her chin.”

Like Maggie and Lina, Sloane is a woman in touch with her own fantasies, sexual and otherwise. But unlike the other two, Sloane has access, resources, caché, a confidence that seems to magnetize those fantasies to her without leaving her injured in their wake.

What is it, we slaver to know, that lets life glide across Sloane without seeming to wound her? Perhaps it is her degree of remove, of self-possession, that does it—a distance born of taking control.

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Hi you,

Are you in the world of Three Women yet? And crucially, are you registered for our virtual community meeting on Sunday, May 24th + our virtual conversation and Q&A with author Lisa Taddeo on Sunday, June 7th? Scroll down to register so you can get the Zoom links and add them to your calendar!

And now, this week: Lina. Indiana. Our thirty-two year-old housewife, married eleven years to a man who won’t French kiss—let alone touch—her, mother of two, riddled with the pain of past sexual assault, fibromyalgia, and endometriosis, pining for another man.

Lina, who tells her secrets to a women’s group as they sip Chardonnay and nibble roasted red pepper hummus in the back room of their small-town doctor’s office. Lina, who knows: “Women shouldn’t judge one another’s lives, if we haven’t been through one another’s fires.”

Lina, who’s been judged by women and girls and boys and men since the truth of her trauma got twisted into high school gossip. Lina, who is so lonely her bones ache.

Her hormone doctor has told her what he believes her problem is. He has said, Lina, you come from a place where women are taught that their only value is what they can do for someone else. When you are actively living for yourself, you feel less pain. He sits down so that he is at eye level with her. Lina, he says, this may not be the most clinical thing I can say, but I’ve had many a fibro patient cured with a good orgasm.

That place where Lina is from is, most likely, a lot like the place where you and I grew up—in the way that it views women. Here, in most places around the world, under patriarchy, girls and women are taught that our value primarily lies in what we can do for others. We are groomed for obedience.

After enough years living this way, it can be hard to name our desires. If we’re able to admit our wants to ourselves, locating the courage to share them with someone else can be terrifying.

Have you ever wanted something you were scared to ask for? Have you ever known in your bones, like Lina, that the thing you long for could be the thing that cures you?

Let’s get nerdy today, fodder for my mini-interview with author Lisa Taddeo about “patriarchal women.”

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It’s Three Women o’clock, and your Lilith Lit weekly reader is here! First up: Scroll down to register for our virtual community and author meetings so you can add the dates and links to your cal.

And before we get to a very personal edition of the reader, something fun: Will you hit reply and introduce yourself to me? Just drop me a few lines about yourself and what brought you to Lilith Lit. I’d love to make this community feel a bit smaller—and that begins with saying hello.

For each of the next three weeks, we’ll focus in on one of the women author Lisa Taddeo spent eight years researching as she wrote Three Women. Today, we begin with twenty-three year-old Maggie Wilken.

First Love

Do you remember your first love, or the infatuation and limerence that you thought was love at the quaking age it passed through you? Close your eyes. Breathe into the place where its ghost lives in your body, if it still does. Is it the side of your mouth, your ribcage, the hollow of your clavicle, “the smiling bone of your hip,” as Taddeo writes? That place your lover made their own.

Do you remember their touch?

For many years, I thought my first love was the man to whom I lost my virginity. He was twenty-nine, and I was eighteen. He worked at my high school, and we knew each other for years before he seduced me over the winter break of my freshman year of college.

Dear reader, let me be clear: I wanted to be seduced.

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“A riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance.”
— The Washington Post

“I can’t remember the last time a book affected me as profoundly as Three Women. Lisa Taddeo is a tireless reporter, a brilliant writer, and a storyteller possessed of almost supernatural humanity. … This is a nonfiction literary masterpiece.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

“Three Women is an astonishing act of imaginative empathy and a gift to women around the world who feel their desires are ignored and their voices aren’t heard.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)

“If it is not the best book about women and desire that has ever been written, then it is certainly the best book about the subject that I have ever come across. When I picked it up, I felt I’d been waiting half my life to read it; when I put it down, it was as though I had been disemboweled.”
— The Guardian

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

When I started to dream up the books I wanted to read with you in this inaugural year of Lilith Lit, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was always at the top of the stack.

I first read Three Women on my phone in the fall of 2018, nine months before the book came out. A screenwriter friend had received an ARC (advance reader copy) and he secreted me the PDF, noting: “Something about it just told me you’d be into it.” He was right, though it wasn’t just something; it was everything.

To begin: I’d never before encountered a work of nonfiction like Three Women. Taddeo spent eight years researching Maggie, Lina, and Sloane, whose stories unspool on the book’s pages. In two cases, she moved to the towns where these women lived to study their lives. Taddeo weaves journal entries, text messages, interviews, memories, and observations into prose so story-rich that it reads like a novel.

And then: There was the subject itself. Taddeo sets out to interrogate the shapes and textures of sexual desire. Though her initial query focused on men, her lens quickly shifted focus to women’s experiences. As I read, I saw myself in each of these women, in ways both explicit and unexpected. Their desires helped me understand my own.

As a woman who loves writing and talking about sex, maternal legacies, desire, and the ways men and women meet each other in the space of need, Three Women utterly had me.

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Taddeo begins by examining her own legacy of sexuality and desire:

I think about the fact that I come from a mother who let a man masturbate to her daily, and I think about all the things I have allowed to be done to me, not quite so egregious, perhaps, but not so different in the grand scheme. Then I think about how much I have wanted from men. How much of that wanting was what I wanted from myself, from other women, even; how much of what I thought I wanted from a lover came from what I needed from my own mother.

!! Whew.

I’m interrupting a single paragraph because each idea Taddeo introduces here merits its own spiritual and psychosexual consideration. She holds a mirror to the ways that our longing for connection and intimacy are fragmented, refracted, complicated over time. Yet our central desires may be as primal as what we need(ed) from our own mothers.

She goes on:

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Hey you,

Back on page one of ’s novel All the Mothers, we’re let into main character Sandy’s psyche:

This is not the life I dreamed of when I was a little girl, [she] thinks.

Desperate, alone, besmattered with breast milk, grieving her mother’s death, and Instagram-stalking her ex’s ex, Sandy is at a low. Which can only mean one thing…

Two hundred twenty-eight pages later (no spoilers!), there is relief:

This is not the life I thought I would be living ten, five, even one year ago, Sandy whispers to her mother, wherever she is. It’s so much better than I could have imagined.

What a joy it is to experience Sandy’s hard-won transformation from an anxiety-riddled people-pleaser (as so many women are groomed to be) to an embodied woman choosing who gets access to all the love, care, and brilliance she has to give. Perhaps even more importantly, we also witness Sandy learning to receive the care and love she deserves—romantically, platonically, sexually, and familially.

Sandy’s process of becoming—the way she learns to move towards what feels good instead of what she thinks her life is supposed to look like or what her trauma tells her to do—is a liberating mirror.

What did you find in its reflection?

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A Message from Domenica

In the midst of juggling her own blended family, writing, teaching, and more, Domenica shared a message for Lilith Lit readers ahead of Sunday’s meeting (character hot takes included!):

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Hi friends,

Our Lilith Lit community just celebrated its one-month birthday, and we’re now over 450-members strong. Thank you 💛: I love reading with you, I love writing to you, and I love how we’re moving through so many powerful questions about womanhood together.

Yesterday was our first All the Mothers community meeting! It was energizing to hear from everyone there, to explore some of the thornier topics the novel sets forth. For those with timing conflicts (you have a life outside of Lilith Lit?! wild), I’ll share a brief recap below.

And of course, make sure to register now for our community meeting with author on Sunday April 26 at 7pm ET (4pm PT).

This week, we’ll explore community-making as antidote to the “petrifying vulnerability” of single motherhood / generally being a human under capitalism. Plus there’s a mini Q&A with Domenica on the mythical figure Lilith and our book’s protagonists. (No spoilers, promise.)

If you’re just joining us, there’s still time to get your copy of ATM (+ a discount code for Bookshop below, too). You can also check out last week’s post to catch up as desired.

Community: The Future We Want

Last year, before All the Mothers came out, Domenica shared this about the book on Instagram:

I wrote a book not about the world as it is but as I want it to be. We have to imagine new futures for ourselves, and that starts with the basic building block of community—the family. “Traditional” nuclear families are struggling big time (because capitalism) so maybe it’s time for something bigger, something messier, something strong enough to hold all our complex needs and loves. One mom is not enough—we need All the Mothers.

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