Hardly had the pandemic begun, and already I saw people wondering, or worrying, about the novels that would emerge from this era: the stories that would serve as cultural artifacts, how we’d make meaning of it all. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the pandemic, the internet often chirped. But for most of us, the pandemic wasn’t a writing retreat, or even a collective struggle, thus automatically imbued with artistic pathos: in truth, it was isolating, enraging, pathetic. Some of us tore into each other on social media. Some of us despaired. Some people lost loved ones, or became disabled by long Covid —- other people were just fine. Probably the worst people you knew. It didn’t lead to sweeping reform in America or the mending of our social fabric. There was no closure. Suffering was meaningless. We endured it once, and it sucked — so why, by reading about it, would we live through it again?

I had ample warning, when writing my debut novel Unprecedented Times, that publishing a pandemic novel would be a tough sell. “So you want to write a COVID novel? Here’s an idea — don’t,” proclaimed the LA Times, citing editors who were already tired of the second-hand suffering. “Publishing a novel about COVID would, at this point, emotionally feel like giving yourself COVID,” one editor claimed. “Which is callous to say, except that I’ve had COVID.” Even when the manuscript was complete, I was encouraged to change the title of Unprecedented Times to not discourage readers. And it certainly seems, based on the general consensus of my Goodreads page that I try not to look at, that many readers are turned off by the pandemic. But I published this novel anyway, and I think you’re ready for it, and it might be exactly what you’ve needed all along.

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“What was lockdown like for you?” I started asking friends who I met in postgrad adulthood. The responses are always revelatory. I was an eighteen-year-old freshman when the pandemic began, and twenty when I returned to college afterwards, with no language to account for the void between. In retrospect, I wish my university had hosted some kind of gathering or grief ritual —- corny as college icebreakers can be —- to help us process our grief. University, after all, is a strange stage of in-between-adultness, where adults are responsible for getting young people up to speed on the business of healthy living. My university offered mandatory first- and second-year curriculums, diversity programming, and bonding activities, all meant to foster social cohesion, morale, and belonging (and, in the case of consent education courses, minimize harm) between students from wildly different backgrounds. But they decided, for whatever reason, to skip through the pandemic. The unspeakability of Covid, it turned out, began almost as soon as the pandemic ‘ended’ —- by which I mean, the powers and levers of money and authority in America decided we needed to move on. (As many disability activists remind us, the pandemic never really ended.)

This experience shook me to my core. At an age when I needed reassurance, my sense of perspective returned, there was none: I would have to find it myself. Gen Z had been told to put our lives on hold to protect older generations, simultaneously blamed for being too sanctimonious about masks and for spring-breaking in Florida, asked to sit tight and wait as the world crumbled around us. Young people in the workforce got laid off, or else couldn’t find jobs in a rapidly shrinking economy. Those of us who were in school saw quickly how our universities protected their finances over their students. Some schools even increased tuition. Others invited students back into on-campus residences, but instituted impossible Covid-19 rules, like “snitching” mandates against rule-breakers, to put the safety burden on touch-starved students, and possibly also conceal the fact they’d risked outbreaks in order to collect tuition checks. Unsurprisingly, the mental health toll was horrific. I spent quarantine seeing Instagram tributes to college students who’d died by suicide. Time nicknamed us Generation Pandemic, painting a gloomy portrait of college graduates frozen in childhood homes, predicting a future filled with “permanent disillusionment and widespread despair.”

We’ve seen the downstream effects of this — loneliness, ennui — but we’re strangely reluctant to discuss its source. I wrote Unprecedented Times as a portrait of a young woman raised in the twin hellfires of the pandemic and internet. It historicizes, among other things, the long afterlives of #MeToo and the failed potential of the climate movement. The lazy-river, slow-motion erosion of our psyches at the hands of the tech platforms that ruled our social lives during quarantine. The alienation of realizing that your neighbors, on separate algorithms, might not care if you lived or died. For years since Covid, seemingly alone, I was mourning a life that I had never really known. More specifically, I was mourning a vision of America that probably never existed: one that protects life and liberty, or live, laugh, love, or whatever Thomas Jefferson said. I wanted to write a novel to account for that disillusionment. Covid-19, to me, was the defining experience of my generation. It was Gen Z’s personal 9/11, as the meme goes, except death tolls surpassed that of the terrorist attack on a single pandemic day in winter 2020 — one that was later ranked among the deadliest days in U.S. history. What kind of psychological consciousness is forged in these conditions? I wanted to write a novel of ideas, one that renders, honestly, the seeds of politicization that rooted in me and my friends’ hearts, at an age when we could’ve become anybody at all.

It’s a shameful but understandable literary consensus, that most Covid-19 novels so far aren’t great. The first wave of literature skews towards autofictional diaries from established writers: basically, people who had the know-how to get their novels published first, and fast. These novels tend to stick to a particular milieu and political ethos, which can be less than inspiring. “We Still Haven’t Processed the Pandemic,” argued Current Affairs this year, pointing out, as New Yorker critic Katy Waldman put it, that COVID novels have tended to depict the experiences of the “idle rich,” people retreating to their second homes to ruminate on society’s ills. Two major pandemic novels, Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea and Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, feature cautiously conservative, aging female writer protagonists who find themselves puzzled and threatened by the surging social mores of the younger generations. COVID novels written from the top tend to shy away from uncomfortable topics, a tentativeness I view as a hangover of 2020 wokeness — as if the authors are anticipating Twitter backlash. As if they cannot stand on what they say.

The good thing is, when writing my novel, I felt like I had nothing to lose. Unprecedented Times is a portrait of extremely spoiled and privileged young people —- a group of Stanford freshmen, to be fair —- but also earnest ones, who are seeking to contribute positively to a world that might end before they’ve had the chance to enter it. The title came to me first, an ironic pandemic catchphrase, except to me it rang true on a deeper level. At the age of my protagonists, nothing ever felt precedented to me about growing up in America. I set out to write a time capsule of my friends in college, the first-gen ones, the queer ones, the mouthy ones, all of us fucking around and finding out. Then I read this interview with James Baldwin: “You think that your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” In fact, he said, “the things that tormented [him] most were the very things that connected [him] with all the people who were alive.” (Oh shit!)

I love this Baldwin quote because it reminds me that nothing about our experiences are isolated, and that joy lies in finding connections. There are definitely unique things about this book: it’s among the first literary releases by a Gen Z writer, and, as I’ve said, I think it is a good pandemic novel. Readers my age have told me UT is the first place they’ve seen themselves rendered in literary prose, a collective consciousness previously only captured by disquieting doomscrolls on TikTok. But also it’s an attempt, following generations of writers before me, to make render abstract concepts like love, kinship, identity, complicity, and agency in specific social conditions, using the beloved tools of fiction: character, plot, circumstance. It’s a gay romp as much as it is an earnest work of theorizing on what it means to co-exist in the internet age, to overcome historical baggage, to stand tall when shit hits the fan. I’ve written a period piece of an American decade we’ve insisted on calling “unprecedented times” —- now I am ready, as Baldwin put it, to connect with the others who are (still) alive.

Unprecedented Times is out next week, and you can order here!

I really hope you will consider reading it! ✰

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I went to Mexico City alone for three weeks to write RAGE BAIT, my first collection of essays. That book is my mind palace of year 25 on earth. I knew that writing a nonfiction book would require an intensity of time and brain power that I can’t always muster up in New York City, where I live in a state of constant executive dysfunction and want to spend all my free time loving on my friends. I wrote UT, too, in rented apartments outside my normal life as a college student, in London and Berlin and one summer sublet in Brooklyn, not-yet-home. So I quietly excused myself.

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My friend K taught me about body-scanning, where you wake up each morning and feel for what your body needs. Then you do what you want! This practice has guided each day in Mexico City. Walks and cafes and fresh fruit. Midafternoon nap with the balcony doors wide open. The soft animal of my body wants what it wants. It succumbs to the homosexual urge to ride a Citibike without aim. Sometimes to a skinny cigarette, which is allowed as a treat in a foreign country, so long as you don’t make it a habit of it in real life.

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Mexico City is a place I love, have visited three times, because of how it reminds me, in a Worldwide Latina Belt way, of home. Mangos and tamarind and chilis and lime. Pastel sunsets and a fearlessness of color. I did not cook all month and instead subsisted on fresh corn tortillas and beans and fruits from street vendors and because I’m right with God my gringo tummy never got sick. There is something silly about living in a country that is not your own but where you still physically blend in. I lived mostly in the present because that is my strongest tense in Spanish.

What a privilege, as American borders exert violence on those at its margins, to travel freely. I thought often of the June Jordan essay “Nicaragua: Why I Had To Go There,” specifically this line: “How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?” That is a feeling I am sitting with: entanglement. American freedom and its price. What I know is the most free I have ever felt was at my brokest, this time last year, when I was unemployed and babysitting and not getting paid a traceable salary. It would have broken my brain, for the money I earned caring for children to go some way towards the funding of killing other children. (This story for The Guardian, on Americans refusing to pay their taxes this year, I found particularly moving.)

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I reread Adrienne Rich’s “On the Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” I have been thinking about it continually amid the war. I keep a running list in my iPhone notes of potential epigraphs for RAGE BAIT and so far it’s remained a top contender.

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I was worried I would be lonely in Mexico City, but I wasn’t. I forgot how much I enjoy the company of my own mind, and how deeply I trust the version of myself that shows up when I am alone, which everyone else experiences as my writing voice. I remembered that I can make friends anywhere, especially in delightfully queer cities. Hoes, as they say, in every area code …

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I beat FOMO by calling my friends every day. Their lives proceeded apace with actual plot, but the plot of my life was the plot of RAGE BAIT, lol, which consumed my entire waking hours. I talked the arguments aloud with my friends. I felt so relieved to finally email them a first draft of the third essay, White Boy of the Month, and confirm that I had not dreamed it up. Their anonymous animals popped up like a menagerie on Google Docs the next morning. God, let me never forget how I am loved …

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I have not cried in months. One afternoon I was reading in Parque Alameda Central and a normal-looking man sat next to me and chatted me up. Since it was too late to pretend I didn’t speak Spanish, I turned back to my book to politely end the conversation, which is why I was totally caught off-guard when he tried to kiss me. Luckily I swerved and he missed and his dumb fish-lips only kissed the air. I jumped up like I’d been electrocuted by the park bench and moved near some women. It was broad daylight and I knew I was totally safe. I thought I would finally cry, my nose even started rabbit-twitching, but no tears came. While I was getting cybermobbed online that month, one of my mentors advised me to not act too tough; if I don’t metabolize pain by admitting it to friends and crying sometimes, things will catch up to me. I felt stupid and suddenly up against a wall. These small instances of harassment have been happening a lot lately, and the logical explanation it’s the statistical reality of being a 5’0 woman who spends a lot of time alone in public, the realm historically owned exclusively by men, but still.

Instead I walked to MUNAL and roamed around the palatial architecture and looked at five centuries of genius Mexican paintings. I felt some sort of churn in my heart looking at the landscapes. The achey feeling swelled and then I felt okay. I felt I’d found a different method of metabolizing small indignities, something like meditation, even if I rarely cry. But the semi-regular harassment is starting to cramp my style. I don’t know how to bring it up without making jokes. Dreaming of baby pink Glocks and a magic jellybean that would make me seven feet tall. After I got potentially roofied in December my friend C gave me pepper spray that looks like lipstick. I have been trying to jog. If I had more free time I might dream of a revenge more extreme.

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In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell takes time to describe the physical studio in Oakland where she wrote her book, because she believes in living-in-place. The life of a book is strange, because I wrote UNPRECEDENTED TIMES in places that no longer exist: in summer sublets with girls I no longer talk to, in a college dorm that’s since turned over three times. I can pre-emptively imagine RAGE BAIT, which you will only read in 2028, as its own time capsule. It was written in a smoke-filled room in rural India where my mother employed an army of priests to ritually uncurse me. In my first Brooklyn apartment. On a flight from California as I cried, red-eyed and gut-spilled, over a situationship. Now, in a studio in sunny CDMX, where I fled during an ICE- and ice-ridden American winter, convinced, like Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, and many theorists before me, that I could not objectively critique the beast from inside its belly.

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But also, with my belly full of fresh mangos slathered in chamoy, and agua pepina, and vegan tacos al pastor. With female rappers and trap music in my headphones, percussing my brain. Over long walks and in conversations with friends. Despite the heavy subject matter, I hope you will feel the pleasure with which I wrote RAGE BAIT. In 2028 I hope it travels, like a long-distance, telepathic, cross-continental love letter, from my mind to yours!

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Your loving reminder to please preorder UNPRECEDENTED TIMES! I’m also reading my first excerpt from RB live at a reading series (coincidentally also called RAGE BAIT!) on Sunday 3/22 in Brooklyn. Come say hiiii …

I have been reading a lot in order to write! I am an amalgamation of everyone I read — writers whose words are guiding lights for mine, writers who I wanna tussle with lol, both of which are impulses of study and care. This past Pisces season, I worked on two big projects. One was my essay for New York Magazine on whiteness in contemporary internet novels. That essay was actually inspired by a longer essay I was simultaneously writing for my forthcoming collection RAGE BAIT, called “White Boy of the Month,” which approaches the historical and terrifyingly contemporary question of how to metabolize young white male rage.

I love a works cited page more than anything, the long game of telephone connecting me with thinkers before me. In that vein, here are some of the works that shaped me this Pisces season! A mix of contemporary and canonical, long-form and self-published on Substack, where the smartest writers are sharpening their knives. I challenged myself to read two epic 1000-page tomes this month and I loved them both. Shoutout to the Brooklyn Public Library, which waived $277 of fines after I checked out tons of books and then fled the country for the month. I am their proudest patron!

Thanks for reading! The next essay I’m working on for RAGE BAIT is called “Trauma Porn” and is about the saturation of trauma in the internet age, rising mental illness among my generation, how to regard the pain of others, what is to be done, etc. I’m actively building my syllabus now — send me your recs!

Please consider pre-ordering my novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES! I will publish a syllabus soon of all the books that shaped this one, too…

Last week I published my first literary criticism essay in New York Magazine, “How Should A White Woman Writer Be?” It explores the invisible white racial politics in Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, Honor Levy’s My First Book, and the Dimes Square literary scene more broadly! Whiteness, to me, was a central preoccupation of these novels, and I was shocked that no mainstream reviews seemed to clock it, so I decided to write the analysis myself. It received a much bigger response than I was expecting, especially as a newer writer! I love essays as a form, standalone, but also because of their capacity to generate conversation, so I thought I would continue that conversation here and share some thoughts on criticism, race, and the future of Gen Z and internet literature more broadly.

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To me the point of book criticism is, primarily, to entertain. At least, that’s why I read it! It’s been a hard news cycle (it always is), and I wanted to give the girls something to giggle about in their groupchats. My goal was not, as some commenters put it, to “cancel,” an allegation so overused that for many Gen Z writers, including the ones I critique, the statute of limitations has long expired to take it seriously! I have a sense of loyalty to young women, and while it’s possibly un-feminist to hold punches just because someone’s a woman, I did exercise judgement on which authors might have the infrastructure to withstand friendly fire. There is a well-documented literacy crisis afflicting my generation, and I think it’s overall a good thing that books like Lost Lambs are getting the girls gassed up. Despite the title, which I did not pick (it is a clever reference to Sheila Heti, who also catches strays), I know it’s not my place to tell anyone what they should write. I have never listened to anyone who told me how to write, anyhow …

But what I do think is my place, as someone who cares deeply about literature, is to widen the terms of engagement with it, open more doors and windows for people to consider their relationship to our shared narratives. My essay was inspired primarily by Toni Morrison’s text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in which she calls for more critical assessment of whiteness, too often treated as default or invisible, in American literature. Morrison asserts that seemingly race-neutral American literature is nonetheless shaped by an “Africanist” presence, a self defined against the Black other, and to ignore race “risks lobotomizing literature.” She’s not asking necessarily white people to falsely overextend their imagination: for them to “situate black people throughout the pages and scenes of a book like some government quota, would be ludicrous and dishonest.” But she can’t help but contemplate how their literature is nonetheless shaped “by its encounter with racial ideology.” “It requires hard work not to see this,” she adds.

I wanted to expand Morrison’s argument for 2026 to argue that the other is now a more nebulously-defined force, comprising people of color and queers and women who’ve been drafted into algorithmic coalition together, and are now collectively dog-whistled towards with words like “woke” or “DEI,” which are pretty much slurs when coming from certain mouths. I have some skin in this game because woke people are, in all our annoying-ness, my people. I remain painfully alert to how the specter of wokeness is addressed in contemporary literature — maybe you will now, too!

There’s a passage in Playing in the Dark I found particularly inspiring, when Morrison describes her transformation from reading as a reader, to reading as a writer:

“It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl — the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white … and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives, my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project.”

I wanted to try criticism because I am a writer, not just a reader. I can see, and enjoy, the fishes, but I can’t un-see the fishbowl, which I have been banging my head against for years. I felt I had a certain understanding of Cash and Levy’s writing processes, as a young (although solidly Gen Z, not zillennial) female novelist and internet native who is swimming in a similar soup as them. As a Gen Z reader, I came to criticism with the suspicion that the politics of self-presentation are at the core of writing and receiving novels. (Let’s be real: even as older generations die on the hill of separating art from its artist, younger writers know that ship has sailed. With digital footprints, it’s part of the fun!)

I became interested in the internet of it all while researching my forthcoming collection of essays, RAGE BAIT. Online, it’s been well-documented by researchers and journalists that certain tactics, such as shitposting, irony, and provocative jokes, delivered in a way that covers your ass while weeding out anyone who doesn’t have the tolerance for racism, are used by the far-right to shift the terms of internet discourse. It’s been wildly successful: online meme warriors reconfigured the Republican Party from one that avoided racist allegations, to one that runs on them. I was struck by the parallels between this far-right internet project and the aesthetics bubbling up in a certain crop of novels. I had my suspicions of which side of the internet, which FYPs and algorithms, these books were marinated and ideated in conversation with. I knew which echo chamber these girls had jail-broken from; I loathed which politics lay in the opposite direction.

That was, if anything, the moral impetus behind my essay (although fun was still the #1 priority.) I wanted it to be said aloud that this rightward shift in literary aesthetics does not exist in a vacuum. I didn’t think the politics of Lost Lambs were subtle, but they nonetheless evaded the notice of most mainstream reviewers, not to mention the well-meaning liberal millennials who are currently the gatekeepers of literature. Right now, edgy whiteness is like a high-pitched frequency that certain people are likelier to hear — maybe young wokes and queers, like me, who grew up alongside it online. I’m interested in how our cultural products, like memes and books, bring us home each night to see that our collective furniture has shifted three inches right, until one day the house we share is unimaginable.

But ultimately I did not seek to write from a place of moral authority. (Ironically, I was getting cancelled the same week that the piece came out, but by a totally separate community — online queers of color, lol.) Just as edginess, I’ve argued, is the least interesting aesthetic for white women to take, I think that self-righteousness is the most boring, cramping aesthetic for writers of color — what Morrison refers to as “rallying gestures at fortress walls.” I don’t think writers of color should only feel comfortable running our mouths if we are totally morally unimpeachable, or writing from the credentials of victimhood or trauma. (That’s the essay for next time, lol!) The fact is that no Americans, not even woke ones, have clean hands.

Agency, complicity — these are the questions that vex me as an American writer. My personal opinion on how a white woman writer should be is also how I want to be. For what it’s worth, I’m not too different from these writers (my essay was Zoomer-on-Zoomer crime), and I occupy a similar ambivalent middle-spot as white women in America’s privilege hierarchy. A practice I’m cultivating in my nonfiction: I try to read it through the POV of every person who might encounter it, including ungenerous or evil people. I want my choices to withstand both friendly and unfriendly fire. I consider how specific lines might look as tweets, taken out of context, which inspires an economy in language; every sentence needs to bang, because it could get written on your gravestone! These might be the crazy acrobatics of writing in the internet generation, but I think it strengthens my writing. I can no longer assume a default POV from my reader, white or woke or otherwise. If this is mental gymnastics, I am training to become an Olympic athlete. (Is that not a writer’s job?)

I know the karmic boomerang might come to get me; I am steeling myself to face the merciless gendered reader-projection spectacle when my own debut novel comes out in August. (The author is no longer dead, as Roland Barthes put it, but chronically online!) But I’m not too worried. My villain origin story, as some of you might know, is that I used to face off against evil Republican politicians as a teenage gun violence activist in Florida. My sense of stakes, and nervous system, were permanently shaped by this experience, and now few things online bother me anymore, let alone bad book reviews. (But I do like getting nice emails from readers — thanks to all who contacted me. I, too, am a shameless cold-emailer of writers I admire. I notice men tend to cold-email me more, which is a credit to them … also time for more women in male dominated fields, as they say!!)

If you liked this, please consider pre-ordering my novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES! It’s a Gen Z campus novel taking place during the pandemic. It also grapples, FWIW, with the specter of the internet, crumbling American dream, all manners of woke!

Hi friends!

Soooo — my lesbian essay has gone viral again. When I wrote my essay for Autostraddle last June, it was with a heart full of love; I thought my personal journey of rejecting comphet and growing into my lesbian identity might be interesting, helpful, entertaining, or affirming to readers. And it was! I just didn’t expect it to also accidentally cause the worst online war our community has seen in a while. While my essay was met with hope the first time it went viral, the second time it popped a blister of pain. What I heard, loud and clear, from a portion of the sapphic community: people were terrified, offended, and hurt by what the essay could mean.

It is a scary thing to open our identities and desires to political analysis, especially when the queer community stays ruthlessly under attack. It is scary to veer into rhetoric that potentially cedes intellectual ground to homophobes. When each day feels like a new earthquake in America, I empathize with people feeling panic when the ground of lesbian identity beneath them — fiercely guarded by “Born This Way” and labels discourse — seems to shake. When the structural forces oppressing queer life are vast and unresponsive to our critiques, it can feel easier, even cathartic, to take out our pain on strangers online. As a five-foot Tamil woman with the temperament of a twink, it was never my intention to make anyone feel afraid or attacked, but that was the impact, and I pinky-promise I’ve taken time to sit with it.

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This newsletter is my attempt to respond to good-faith critiques. I’m writing in rejection of the spectacle of collective internet punishment, including personal harassment, that I have faced; while dogpiling women is perhaps the only thing that unites every faction of the internet, nothing can prepare you for a deluge of strangers telling you there’s blood on your hands, telling you to kill yourself, or threatening to kill themselves (fucking terrifying). I’ve reserved my vulnerability during this period for those who know and love me in real life. I’m not writing this for those who hoped to stress me out, shut me up, or just get something off their chest. But if you are someone who wants the pain and fear my essay sparked acknowledged and addressed, I am writing this as a love letter to you.

I am not a celebrity, important (or rich) enough for a PR team; this was workshopped in conversations with trusted friends and mentors. But how we disagree with each other, one mentor reminded me last week, is a sign of how much we value community. I love and value lesbians, young women, and queer people, and I see this as an opportunity for reflective conversation. Pain demands acknowledgment if it’s to be healed — as a survivor, I know this intimately. I have compiled some of the most common, non-KYS comments into an essay here. I’ve limited my accessibility on socials (which might block some good-faith folks, sorry) and I will not engage with harassment, but if you seek dialogue and repair, this Substack is a place for you.

Okay, here we go!

THE PERSONAL

“You lowkey like men and are trying to deny it. Just call yourself bisexual!”

My essay is not a forum on whether I like men; rather, it’s about my choice to stop engaging with that question altogether. Doing so has opened up wide sunny windows in my mind, allowed new possibilities to grow and flourish. I opened my essay by describing my experiences with compulsory heterosexuality in order to open the door for others who experienced the same. Ultimately I chose to defect from the unwinnable war of making a dignified life in their presence.

The bisexual label does not feel right to me as someone who has always felt ambivalent and alienated around cis men. If I desired to date men, I would not call myself a lesbian. As a rule, when someone says they’re a lesbian, especially given how contentious that identity is, I respect and believe them. The same goes for respecting folks’ pronouns. Healthy queer discourse rests on the shared norm that we respect people for who they say they are.

“You are a political lesbian, and therefore you’re probably transphobic/biphobic/lesbophobic.”

For what it’s worth, I did not identify myself in that essay as a political lesbian, and I remain committed to a vision of queerness that centers and protects trans people above all. I similarly affirm everyone’s individual lesbian and bisexual experience. Political lesbianism is a historical project that tried to apply a political lens to desire, imperfectly so. Transphobia has always been a big blind spot and pain point in a variety of queer political projects, and political lesbianism is no exception. But I am never too angry at people who experiment, publicly and imperfectly, in trying to build livable alternatives to patriarchy. At least, I’m never angrier at them than I am at patriarchy itself!

Okay, now onto the juicy stuff.

THE POLITICAL

“You can’t call yourself a lesbian because lesbianism is a biologically determined condition from birth.”

Let’s get through this one first, because I think if this is a non-starter for you, you probably won’t enjoy the rest of this, and that’s okay.

If you’re still here — hi!

I do not subscribe to this biological argument, sometimes called “born this way,” because there is, to my knowledge, no ‘gene’ that makes you gay. What’s more, all sexualities, including heterosexuality, have looked very different at different points in history. If you were born a lesbian, I’m not denying your identity. I understand why the “born this way” argument is important to some people as a psychological protection against ruthless familial denial, religious homophobia, or state violence. But I think the cost of this rhetorical shield is too high, because it only makes us protectable if we’re totally helpless, “perfect victims,” to borrow Mohammed El-Kurd’s phrase.

I’m also wary of any argument that binds identity to biology because it strips us of agency, humanity, and nuance. The truth is, many baddies who identify as lesbian did not always feel they were born that way; some even identified as (TW) bisexual first. To deny their validity strikes me as cop behavior and — dare I say — boring! Rigid policing of identity, and resistance to the idea that sexualities can evolve, is exactly why comphet is so effective and devastating. I envision lesbian identity as a wide house with many entrances, but insisting on “born this way” is like locking (almost) all the doors.

I was initially shocked by how passionately some lesbians online defended biological determinism, to the point of wishing death for me, but I understand that it highlights some deeper points of pain in our community, which I’ll get into in the next comment.

“Lesbians who previously dealt with comphet, or dated men, do not belong in the same category as lesbians who identified as such from birth, because they’ll never understand our pain.”

All of us who are gender-marginalized suffer under patriarchy in some way. I have deep empathy for people who have always known, in their bones, that the life ahead of them differs dramatically from what society intended. I can imagine the loneliness, trauma, and pain this prompts. For what it’s worth, I, too, laid up in my bed as a fifteen-year-old girl down south when I felt my first twinges of desire, praying to God to make me ‘normal.’ I empathize with out-the-womb lesbians’ desire to protect their experience. But, as a lesbian from the latter category — one who is also a survivor — I know I’m not alone in my truth that comphet has felt corrosive, compromising, and confusing, and cost me something too. It took me years to learn the difference between arousal and fear, validation and genuine attraction. This doesn’t make me less of a lesbian — it just makes me different.

What if our differences allowed us to compare notes, to strategize, to learn from each other, and be better allies to those unlike us, instead of shutting each other down? Could we band around the shared joy of loving as we love? I’ve noticed, happily, that gay men are less dramatic about policing who counts as what, probably because they weren’t socialized to self-scrutinize like ‘women’ are. (One of my favorite parts of lesbianism, besides the obvious of dating baddies, is the possibility for joy, collaboration, and friendship with other sorts of queers — but that’s another essay.) Onwards!

“Your essay made lesbianism all about decentering men, instead of loving and desiring women/queers.”

Truthfully, I think the essay does both, but if you wanted more of the latter, that’s fair. I invite you to check out my wide breadth of writing about lesbianism: my Lesbian Dating Wrapped, my personal essay from Lesbian Oil Wrestling, and my reported profiles on queer elders and trans leaders, which celebrate lovey, gushy, IRL queer joy. I am a fiction writer committed to rendering lesbian tenderness and intimacy, grateful to be among many writers working today. My favorite writers about sapphic desire include Audre Lorde, Kristen Arnett, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Natalie Diaz, Carmen Maria Machado, and more. Send me your recommendations!

THE EXISTENTIAL

“You harm and endanger lesbians by claiming we can choose who we are, and so glibly too.”

I’ve received feedback to the effect of, What if my homophobic parents / men / Republicans / my opps read the essay and use it to justify attacks against me, delegitimize my sexuality, or claim I can be converted? My first instinct was to make a joke, that if the forces of evil are actually influenced by my Substack, I would do something better with that power. (If you can’t tell, humor is my annoying gay vice of choice — at least it’s not ketamine!) But when I sat longer with these accusations of harm, I understood that people were speaking from a place of pain. When people that blamed or equated my essay with violence, it was possibly because it awakened the same fear response in their bodies.

It’s true — the language of choice can be, and is, weaponized to justify conversion therapy. But what I’ve decided, as I’ve grown older, is that I ultimately do not allow fear of homophobes to dictate how I act. I cannot name a single marginalized group in history that has convinced its oppressors to treat them better because they perfectly minded their Ps and Qs. I refuse respectability politics because it serves nobody but our oppressors. People who love and support you will do so in all your messy contradictions; people who are hell-bent on oppressing and denying your self-expression will do so regardless. Conversion therapy is torture, and people who support it cannot be reasoned with, nor should they be cops in our heads telling us what we can say. Trust me, I’ll kick their ass when I see them in hell.

To that end — I understand that a lot of people who would otherwise be somewhat on board with my argument were turned off by the ‘rage bait’ headline, or my irreverent tone online, even though the essay was earnest. (I was twenty-five years old when I learned that hundreds of people hate the sound of my vocal fry!) I have heard this feedback loud and clear, and while social media incentivizes the hottest takes, I am committed, in this essay and others, to writing with nuance and intention.

When you blow up unexpectedly, you can get portrayed out of context, but I want to affirm my commitment to protecting lesbians, to loving us loudly, to writing us into novels and reporting and archiving our joy in magazines and creating in-person spaces for queer community and mutual aid. If you live in NYC and have some mutual aid dollars to spare on a sliding scale, consider this your invitation to let me cook you dinner.

“You should not make lesbian desire political.”

All queer identities have been politicized, and by the very people we should be uniting against. I cannot accept that queerness is not political in the same month that Kansas literally stripped trans people of their IDs.

But more broadly, we live in a politically created matrix of desire. If you think desire is not political, consider a dark-skinned woman who is routinely treated as the last option in the dating pool. Consider any fat, trans, disabled, non-white, or otherwise non-normative person who is excluded from our society’s images of desirability. I would never accept “born this way” apolitical discourse if it were used to justify people with supremacist sexual preferences; that means I have to be comfortable taking political responsibility for my own desire as well.

If that’s a bridge too far for you, that’s okay, but consider that queerness has long been the political house of refuge for people cast-off by society, asking us to push the boundaries of what is imaginable. Feminism, the philosopher Amia Srinivasan has argued, is where you historically turned to find a political critique of desire, sex, everything we take for granted. (I suggest her book The Right to Sex for more!) Marginalized people have launched psychological and political warfare against the narratives that they are undesirable, including internalized self-hatred, from the historic Black is Beautiful campaigns to today’s body positivity.

The question of politicizing desire has historically been the open, flaming wound at the heart of feminism. Political lesbianism, celibacy, and separatism have been extremely divisive, especially when inflamed by trans-exclusive factions. So too, at various points, have been pornography and sex work, because they raise questions about agency, complicity, pragmatism, and desire that are sometimes too painful to confront. I hate that the question of desire consistently turns feminists against each other, makes us sometimes treat each other worse than men. I did ask myself whether it was worth poking this controversy, instead of solely rallying the girls around material causes, such as reproductive access or gender-affirming care. (FWIW, I work professionally on those too.)

To explain why I risked it, let me close on a note of perspective. On the right, young women similar to me — influencers, creators, writers — are also trying to inspire a political project of desire, even if they don’t call it that. But they’re trying to push young women in the opposite direction — towards sexual conservatism, traditionalism, heterosexual marriages that result in the births of as many white babies as possible. Conservative women have been working overtime to subtly influence their followers in the direction of trad-wives, romanticizing boyfriends, financial dependence on men, getting off birth control, and other deeply political stuff. I believe that it is equally important for those of us who believe in feminism and queer liberation to serve up our own counter-offer of life. The role of an artist, Toni Cade Bambara said, is to make revolution irresistible! I viewed my essay about my journey to lesbianism as a contribution to this project, alongside many other experimenters and dreamers, some of whom I agree with, some of whom I’m happier to watch from afar. Being a woman, let alone a queer woman of color, doesn’t come with a guidebook, so I’m always appreciated when other people share their stories vulnerably, because it gives me options for my own life. As a writer, I hope to pay this forward.

It is the forces of evil I hope to make myself enemy to — not deep-feeling, loving, complex queers whom I ultimately know are my comrades, even if we loudly, publicly disagree. To this end, I will continue to write, to love, to strive. I hope you will consider joining me for the ride!

in community,

Mal

Note: If you made it this far, thank you! This is the last I’ll write on the subject for now. For more, I invite you to read my forthcoming book, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES. It uses my preferred medium, fiction, to untangle the nuances of queer Gen Z identity. If you don’t want to buy it, get it from your local library. They, too, are under attack!

✧˖°

At the start of Aquarius season I was heartbroken. Feeling so dogged-out that every song made me emotional and the only one I didn’t mind was, inexplicably, Future’s 2017 guided meditation “Mask Off.” Lol. I listened to it on loop for hours, up late at the gym. Lord, inject me with flute, the bass, both hard and light! I haven’t done molly or percocet, but I find the lyrical lives of rappers surprisingly relatable to lesbianism. (Today it occurred to me that I have never felt an original emotion that wasn’t first described by Lil Wayne.) I am lucky that the most common problem in my adult life (recurrently falling for well-meaning, if badly behaved, queers) is silly and within my pay grade, not a profound moral injury. My heart reopened, as it always does. I could listen to my full playlists again. I felt prepared for new experiences that will reignite music with memories.

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✧˖°

It snowed fiercely this winter. I was afraid the snow day would make me sad, but like a gift, I got a text from my friend L announcing that we were going sledding! I skip-slogged over to Prospect Park and sledded for my life. Wet socks and pink ears, hot noodles in my belly, bubble bath and champa burning and a joint back home, how lucky am I! In the following days, the city became a group project, an obstacle course of piled-up snow. Someone in my local Facebook group said, if you feel pent-up rage about ICE escalations, get a shovel, dig out your neighbor’s path. I slipped in slush at an ICE protest and literally a dozen hands shot out to catch me. I was delighted to see a man I once had a threesome with in a previous life helping protesters cross the street. My neighbor took my hand and swooped me over a snowbank — chivalry is not dead!

✧˖°

Aquarius season, if you cannot tell, is my birth season. I turned twenty-five this month, thank God! I am already finding myself in pickles that are testing the capabilities of my newly-developed prefrontal cortex. What I love about myself at twenty-five is my courage, creativity, and capacity for love. I have never once passed up an opportunity to go all out, take a leap, open my heart, or run my mouth. I am exactly who I hoped to be as a little girl except I never grew taller than 5’0!

✧˖°

On my birthday, a man stopped me on the train to tell me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and presented me with a portrait. I look like a woman who’s seen some shit. I think the eyes are accurate: I can never look casually at anything.

✧˖°

My birthday was the happiest day of my entire life. In the morning I woke up from a sleepover with my best friend and we set up my apartment for my birthday party. I turned my tiny Brooklyn studio into a matcha cafe. I hope heaven is all of my loved ones sitting on my Persian carpet enjoying my home-cooked treats. My friends kept bringing in fresh reinforcements of pastries and plant-based milks. A and J DJed. The snow-sun was bright and turned my house into a jewel box. I got a Biblical hangover from matcha-alcohol-weed but I couldn’t stop dancing. Afterwards I laid on the carpet and ate dips with my friend D. Zohran said to stay inside, the temperatures were Antarctic, but my hips and booty felt like it was summer. My friend C picked me up in her car and we went to the Brooklyn Museum for Black History Month and sweated and line-danced and my friend A poured what felt like pipe-cleaner straight down my throat and I sat dazed on my carpet and ate leftover cake out the box.

✧˖°

Galleys of UNPRECEDENTED TIMES arrived. They are beautiful, bright, demand to be looked at. For the first time ever, after a reading this month, someone shook my hand and called me Rishi, the pet name of my protagonist. This is an easy mistake to make, but Rishika Kumar is actually my daughter and evil twin and alter ego and she possesses me every time I act a fool and have to wear a demon dog mask on my face.

Me & my babies on film, by Christine <3

A beloved Valentine from my dear friend!

✧˖°

I wrote many things this month that stirred the pot. I wrote a takedown here of the Ivy League to Palantir pipeline that probably got me landed on a surveillance list. I got ‘cancelled’ because my lesbian essay went viral (again.) The reception on Instagram last summer was encouraging, mostly because I have a strong relationship / street creds with my audience there, but TikTok/X are merciless! The pile-on got so personal + nasty that numerous people texted to check on me (thank you), but I am a Florida woman with a nervous system of steel. That essay is the gift that keeps giving and taking, lol. (I have gotten my heart broken twice by people who slid on me after they read it!) I have a totally unrelated controversial essay locked and loaded for Pisces season, and I am literally writing a book called RAGE BAIT, so I am taking this as exposure therapy for a long career, inshallah, of talking my shit.

My official statement to haters <3

✧˖°

I was commissioned to write Teen Vogue’s new sex advice column, an enormous honor. Reading the questions from young women and queers made me weep; what’s the hype about sex, am I sexy, how do I come, am I worthy of love, etcetera — questions that admittedly still plague me. I am 25 and I have far more tricks up my sleeve but I have wanted the same thing in my heart since I was 15 years old. I dream of a world where sex is safe and love is easy and nobody ever gets hurt and this is the entire reason I write.

✧˖°

My friend A and I went to see the Audre Lorde documentary, A Litany for Survival, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Audre Lorde is a canonical figure, Final Boss, word-of-God type writer for me, but the documentary re-introduced me to Audre the human, whose friendship I first felt extended when reading ZAMI at twenty. ZAMI was the first time I saw a bracing blueprint for my life as a lover and writer; I still turn to Lorde for guidance on weathering American winters. Her generation of activists endured real shit. Lorde taught at a college down South back when white supremacists were shooting at the outskirts of campus. Organized at the nadir of the civil rights movements, as leaders were assassinated and progress rolled back. Fought cancer twice, married two white people, including a man, but died in love with a Black woman far away from cold New York winters, having moved to a warm island country that was gentler on her body. Behind Lorde the moral authority is a woman who made continual choices in pursuit of moral alignment with herself.

✧˖°

At some point this month I realized I was unbelievably happy. My weapons in the war against seasonal depression: many hours spent at the sauna and baths, or running and biking. A winter mercy is the feeling of my own sweat. My best friend’s partner was sick for his non-refundable Valentine’s Day massage so I went instead and got my ass Swedish-beat. I cooked a lot of meals for friends. I am spending the next month in Latin America, a part of the world that has always reminded me of home in a Global Latino Belt, Bad Bunny God-Bless-America typa way. Audre Lorde, it turns out, also went to Mexico in her twenties because the political situation in the U.S. felt unliveable. I am thinking of her as I travel to focus on my book, to escape the American winter (although the joke with my friends is I was cancelled and forced to flee the country. Don’t hold your breath for a Notes app apology; I seldom repent!)

✧˖°

Please preorder UNPRECEDENTED TIMES! (P.S. If you discovered my writing because of the lesbian essay, UT explores similar themes. In fact, if you hated the essay / felt things were missing, I think you will find UT is a much richer, nuanced, and more relatable portrait of detangling comphet and learning how to love women than I could achieve in that short essay. Ask your library to preorder it if you are mad at me / don’t want to personally enrich me / don’t have the money — fair.) Much love, and more soon. That’s a threat!

My beloved friends came to watch me read at Limousine!

I first looked evil in the eye at the Stanford University student career fair. By this I mean, I encountered firms like Palantir and McKinsey in the fall of my freshman year. Career fairs are vexed, deeply political projects, I’d quickly learn — while the army used to recruit students from my majority-minority public school down South, it’s the CIA who historically recruited at Stanford, a school with a dark history of entanglement with American military operations. But these days government agencies like the CIA, despite their cool matching outfits and sunglasses, cannot compete with the allure of private corporations. That’s the evil beauty of industries like defense tech: if you can get rich off of military contracts, you don’t have to choose between patriotism and profit.

It’s not ground-breaking for me to tell you that most Stanford students care a lot about profit. In 2021, 54 percent of graduates went into careers in the lucrative industries of technology, consulting, and finance. It’s an embarrassing statistic, the result of a decades-long, well-documented project of “career funneling,” wherein evil companies lavish resources on recruiting students from elite colleges, before these nerds have even had a chance to become cool. Stanford was one of the first universities to establish corporate partnership programs — small surprise at a school where buildings are named after entrepreneurs like Hewlett-Packard and Gates. At one point, the most coveted positions for a Stanford graduate were at the companies lovingly referred to as FAANG — the now-archaic pantheon of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. (The newest loser-magnets, I’d say, include Anthropic and OpenAI.) It’s corporations like these that have my Stanford classmates in a chokehold, casting their spell over a campus so blue and bright that people joke Bill Gates controls a weather machine.

But it’s a relatively new phenomenon, I’d argue, that the Stanford student’s pursuit of profit has dovetailed so freakishly with the nefarious aims of the American government — or that these students can warp our internet generation’s language of morality to justify their choice. By far the most notorious tech company recruiting from Stanford right now is Palantir. It’s our very own chicken come home to roost. Founded by deranged libertarian and Stanford alumni Peter Thiel, Palantir has contracted with ICE on surveillance and targeting systems since 2011; its stock exploded after the second inauguration of Thiel’s friend Trump. Palantir has been rightfully subjected to public scrutiny in 2026, as a wave of horrifying ICE escalations have resulted in a record spike in inhumane detainments, a major American city under occupation, and multiple people murdered. Palantir technology has also been used by the Israeli military to target and murder Palestinian journalists. Where imperial evil gathers, Palantir is likely to be found — and the public is catching on. In 2025, The Cut broke the news that the popular Gen Z event app, Partiful, was founded by former Palantir employees, an association so toxic that many quit, or at least stopped trusting, a platform that is suspiciously keen on social surveillance.

Salman Toor, The Joke (2025.) Toor is a queer Pakistani painter I adore!

This isn’t the first time Palantir has gotten smoke for its misdeeds. During my freshman fall, 2019, student organizers across the country launched #NoTechForICE, a concerted movement to oust Palantir from college campuses. That year, Stanford students demanded that the school stop accepting Palantir’s money — the company paid $24,000 a year for access to its talented tech students, including me, who cries if a printer won’t connect — and that Palantir end its ICE contract. There were, to be fair, some small successes: Duke and Yale’s hackathons dropped Palantir as a corporate sponsor, and Palantir had to cancel its recruitment session at Berkeley, the superior Bay Area school. And yet, by the second Trump presidency, the vibes had shifted. In 2025, the SF Standard reported that defense tech was the trendiest up-and-coming field for Stanford grads. Palantir, in particular, is having a resurgence, launching an ominous campus billboard campaign warning that “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West … We build to dominate. Join us.” Many are heeding the call.

(A note before we proceed — while this essay does not name names, it does critique ex-classmates whose actions are high-impact and/or egregious. I have focused on those who have presented their affiliations openly on their platforms as public figures, citing from their own websites and public statements. I think this is more than fair game, given the stakes.)

Some of Palantir’s recruits, or apologists, include women my age who believe themselves to be progressive, or are at least invested in being seen as such. “My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,” an Indian American student and founder of Stanford Women in National Security told the Standard. “In great power politics, people die. Often more impulsive, less pragmatic men make those decisions, and as a well-educated woman, I’d rather be in the room.” (#Feminism!) This student was rightfully flamed, though she later doubled down in a Stanford Daily op-ed.

She’s not the only young woman I might otherwise relate to whose moral compass has warped beyond legibility in the past half-decade. There’s one Stanford acquaintance I first met in 2018, when we were both teenage girls picked up by a well-meaning funnel of capital-backed fellowships for Gen Z “change-makers,” many of us mobilized into action by the first Trump presidency. (This pre-professional ecosystem has since been critiqued as a Gen Z Youth Activist Industrial complex, but that’s another essay.) At the time, this classmate, a young white woman, had founded a nonprofit dedicated to combatting “cultural intolerance and the exclusion of immigrants and refugees,” citing a spike in post-2016 election hate crimes as her awakening. For this, she was rewarded liberally, from a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 to partnerships with major clothing brands.

During college, I started to grow disillusioned with that genre of social change — and I wasn’t the only one. Many had become quietly aware of growing rifts in our progressive cohort’s values, which culminated in a 2020 summer of dramatic generational in-fighting online. If you’re lucky not to remember, here’s the summary: the Gen Z activist label forged in the first Trump presidency, applied to or claimed by everyone from shooting survivors to Greta Thunberg-style climate strikers to suburban social entrepreneurs to ambitious influencer-politicians to disgraced nonprofit girlbosses to self-proclaimed Gen Z marketing experts, fell apart as we untangled and staked the differences between diversity and anti-racism, neoliberalism and leftism, self-serving opportunism and solidarity. As I witnessed the vibe shift, there were relationships I chose to let fade, peers I chose to unfollow online — which is why I got totally jumpscared by my immigrant-loving classmate’s post-grad pivot. As of 2026, she works as a Deployment Strategist at Palantir, a company responsible not merely for “intolerance” and “exclusion” against immigrants, but straight-up stalking, targeting, deporting, and sometimes murdering them. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the vibe shift, but I was. Sometimes you can’t make this shit up.

How did Palantir have such a dramatic character development arc, to the point that progressive young people can declare, with their full chests, their allegiance to its deportation mission? You can declare it on your full chest, too — Substack’s Brendan Holder just reported on Palantir’s latest sold-out merch drop, which includes T-shirts with slogans like “SOFTWARE THAT DOMINATES.” Holder interprets the merch as a PR effort by Palantir to normalize itself as a lifestyle brand, an everyday part of Americanness itself. “By initiating communication with a set of people who share its vision through merchandise, Palantir can limit future reputational damage and build a base of passionate stans rather than a secretive cult,” Holder writes.

Are we going to let them get away with it?

One could argue that the kind of young graduate who goes into defense tech is too morally compromised to save. But while only the truly amoral (or delusional) might openly attach their names to Palantir in 2026, I believe that many of my former Stanford classmates, especially those employed at more benign companies, don’t actually consider themselves evil. (It helps that the margins of evil have been shifted considerably by evil themselves — Palantir’s PR flip is proof of it.) I’ve been reflecting on my recent college education, which was supposed to instill my moral values and prepare me for the real world. Those four short years before the kid gloves came off, and our choices became adult ones, with adult consequences.

It’s fair to say that most colleges do not prepare their students well for post-grad life under capitalism. At Stanford, there was a career center, where I learned how to write cover letters. There were hook-ups for fellowships and internships, including ethical ones. There were my wonderful professors, who patiently and generously pumped out recommendations for me. There were Stanford’s excellent literature and history classes, which helped address my existential questions of being: what do I owe society, and is it necessarily different than what I owe myself? But nobody answered my follow-up question: how does this translate into a job? The anti-war protests ripping across campus my senior spring, 2024, made me think often of the “right side of history.” It’s a phrase bandied about in our unprecedented times: What would you do during XYZ atrocity? How should a person be? What to do with your one wild and precious life?

I had to confront the fact that many of my classmates would choose to become, like, consultants.

✧˖°

This is a well-documented vibe shift taking place in the priorities of elite young Americans, tracing back half a century. Writing about the hated yuppies — the generation of young urban professionals who overtook US cities in the ’80s — historian Tom McGrath notes: “Fifteen years earlier, graduates of the country’s most elite colleges had often been concerned with trying to improve the state of the world. Now, the focus was different: How can I be as financially successful as possible?” McGrath could easily be talking about elite graduates today. Why is it that previous generations were more likely to cite civic heroes and politicians as inspirations, while today’s young people are more likely to name-drop entrepreneurs and CEOs? Many cite the a philosophy known as neoliberalism, the bitch-ass belief that the government and public sector should be as small as possible, and profit-driven companies should rule our lives instead. Under neoliberalism, it falls to corporations to offer and assure a quality of life for Americans, shrinking our expectations for what we can collectively achieve.

We’re not old enough to remember, but history teaches us that neoliberalism didn’t always have such a gorilla grip on youth. In the 20th century, America was far from perfect, but our civic structures worked better, and there were powerful leftist alternatives to capitalism capturing young people’s hearts and minds. In the 1980s, conservative governments launched a full-on attack on the public sector, cutting social safety nets. The Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama wrote a stupid, famous book called The End of History where he claimed that capitalism was the ultimate and logical resolution of human history — the Final Boss. Or as conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in the ‘80s, the decade that capitalist countries beat communists in the Cold War: “There is no alternative.”

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, where we are “deep in the capitalist matrix,” as historian Naomi Klein puts it in her 2017 book No Is Not Enough. Multiple generations of Americans have had our brains so rotted by neoliberalism that it feels harder to resist it. Think about the 2008 financial crisis, which you might remember from an era of skinny family holiday seasons or your childhood home getting foreclosed. People should’ve revolted — and some did, famously occupying Wall Street — but overall, Klein writes, “utopian imagination had largely atrophied” from the wild and optimistic revolutions of the sixties. “Many people knew the appropriate response to the [2008] crisis was moral outrage,” she writes, “yet generations who had grown up after neoliberalism struggled to picture something, anything, other than what they had always known.”

Rather than bullying the rich people causing inequality, Klein explains that elite liberals have spent decades “looking to the billionaire class to solve the problems we used to address with collective action and a strong public sector.” This is called “philanthrocapitalism” — hoping rich people will help us out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of attacking them with pitchforks. Think of the endless charitable foundations started by squillionaires, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (I was in the same graduating class, 2024, as the famous youngest Gates child, who has since gone on to found a VC-backed AI-powered shopping assistant app with her Stanford roommate. Her co-founder is a world-famous climate activist who once publicly partook in a Black Friday strike with Jane Fonda against consumerism in 2019. Again, you cannot make this up!)

Anyway — Melinda Gates gave our commencement speech, small consolation to a class who’d had two consecutive graduations shadowed by cataclysmic world events. (Admittedly I didn’t catch Melinda’s speech because I participated in a mass anti-war walkout to disrupt it — but I doubt I missed much.) That Melinda Gates was chosen to inspire us graduates is proof of how successful our elites are at branding themselves as role models. Not only do corporations get to avoid the consequences of their actions, but they actually look good doing it! And you could look good working for them, too.

It’s a tactic known as “reputation laundering,” a con that writer Anand Giridharadas spelled out in his 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Saving the World. A former McKinsey consultant, Giridhiradas is no stranger to the psychological tactics corporations use to mold idealistic young minds. His opening chapter profiles a 2014 soon-to-be Georgetown graduate who finds herself enchanted by McKinsey, which promises her the opportunity to “change the world.” “She had absorbed the ascendant message, all but unavoidable for the elite American college student, that … best way to bring about meaningful reform was to apprentice in the bowels of the status quo,” Giridharadas reports. “The age-old youthful impulse to reimagine the world was now often molded and guided by one of the reigning ideas of the age that if you really wanted to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism.” When she realizes that the world-changing work amounts to little more than spreadsheet-shuffling and drudgery, she despairs and thinks of becoming a rabbi.

What astounded me, reading Giridharadas’ book a full generation later, is that some corporations seem to have softened, or totally abandoned, their promise to be forces of social justice. It’s more common to promise to be a force of American might, which is the exact opposite of that previous thing. When I looked at the Palantir recruitment site to research this essay, the first several passages focus on the working perks — small team sizes, fellowship opportunities, covered relocation costs — and it takes several scrolls to get to ‘Impact’: “Our technology helps organizations distribute lifesaving food aid and resettle refugees. Palantir platforms are used by governments in the fight to protect democracy, and to help critical military operations succeed.” (So the quiet part is said aloud. But why wouldn’t they say it — who are they trying to fool? We already tried and failed to kick them off campus once.) What’s really ended, I think, is the rosy optimism of a bygone age — maybe the Obama era, Trump 1.0, or a different world entirely — where it was cool to try for collectivesocial change. In the era of Trump 2.0, with our psyches marked so clearly by ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ what corporations offer my classmates is no more noble than the opportunity to be on the winning team.

Fear of being a loser is a potent thing. Nobody knows this like the companies themselves. You can see it in their recruitment tactics, which prey on young peoples’ fear of post-grad risk and uncertainty — incidentally, the very conditions in which bad bitches are made. Consulting firms often recruit students well over a year in advance of graduation, locking them in with enormous starting salaries and sign-on bonuses, sparing them from — or denying them — the experience of exploring options, weighing choices, and generally fucking around and finding out. They promise a seamless transition into post-grad adulthood, even offering built-in social networks via incoming “classes” of consultants that resemble college cohorts. Uncharitably, it’s a great deal for any young person who lacks a vision for life but is too afraid to seek it themselves. Generously, it’s refuge from an incredibly turbulent economy. That feeling, precarity, is the defining feature of capitalism, where millions live in fear of losing their employment, health insurance, and homes. But it’s also just a feature of being a mortal on earth. Is the fear of precarity a good enough reason for my classmates to sell their souls? Or can they be bullied out of it?

A tweet I laughed at: “Your ancestors’ wildest dreams was not to work at lockheed martin stop lying on them folks.” I can’t presume to know my ancestors’ dreams: I can only speak for mine. My dream, since I was a child, was to become a writer, and I’m happy and grateful to be one now. I know that, in doing so, I am not fulfilling my Shiny Stanford Earning Potential. And yet, in conversations with corporate peers, I’ve found that my career prompts responses of comparison and defensiveness. Like voting habits — and perhaps even more so — career choices reveal our existential values. To be clear, there are degrees of precarity that shape what career paths feel possible to us.

But precarity is often exaggerated by young elites, who misappropriate wokeness to pre-empt criticism. There’s this frequent rhetorical move where people claim that career choices are above rebuke because people’s financial situations are complicated and personal. And it’s true that some young graduates shoulder heavy financial burdens, such as student debt, medical expenses, or supporting family members — the exact reason many advocate for a stronger social safety net. People of color have been barred for generations from accessing the riches of the American imperial pie. (Whether that is something to aspire to, of course, is between you and God.) But it’s worth noting that few low-income students statistically go into fields like consulting. And more often, when my peers speak of accepting certain jobs, and act though the alternative were honest-to-God homelessness, what they actually mean is that they cannot imagine slumming their twenties on less than six figures a year! I have had to physically resist bullying people who have said as much to my face. The reality is that certain jobs don’t merely offer an honest living, just enough to get by without fear — they offers lots of money, enough to ensure elite status.

Palantir employees might be undeniable winners in the game of capitalism and American imperialism, at least for now. (If and when future arbiters ever hold them accountable for their crimes, I blame nobody who wants to bring the popcorn.) In the meantime, what if we reminded them, and ourselves, that by all other metrics — morally, culturally, spiritually — they live like losers?

✧˖°

“The margins of refusal,” Jenny Odell once put it, are closing before our very eyes. Fascism is creeping, its agents are moving out into the open, killing dissenters on camera, and their corporate supporters are not embarrassed of themselves. For now, some of them still do pretend to care what we think. They still hope to make a moral appeal to our hearts. Soon, they will not: American conservatives, for example, quite openly outlined their dystopian plans in Project 2025, even as Trump denied it on the 2024 campaign trail, just as Israeli government officials make no secret of their genocidal intent, even as their accomplices in American media scramble to cover for them. Normalcy is eroded by the day.

When I say we should bully Palantir employees, I mean that it’s worth holding the line against them. (The exact line may be different to different people — could we stand against Amazon? Or Meta? I would happily discuss this for hours! But I do think not harming children is an obvious place to draw our line, for now.) I mean we should vocally and spiritedly resist every narrative attempt they make to legitimize themselves as reasonable, decent people. To refuse to ignore the link between their post-grad paychecks and the little boy turned into human bait by ICE. Not because I care to punish them (I’m not God) or because I think I can change their minds (I can’t), but because I think it’s important to psychologically offer those who remain, including myself, alternatives to normalizing what we know in our bones is unconscionable. Bullying the forces of evil is an act of moral clarity. I will not let them laugh all the way to the bank. If needed, I vow to never close my mouth.

This Substack contains excerpts from my essay collection-in-progress, RAGE BAIT, which is about, among other things, Gen Z, power, language, and complicity, forthcoming from Atria at Some Point Soon (I literally just started writing it!) If anything in this post resonates, I’d be grateful for comments, comradeship, further reading recommendations, conversations.

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A June Jordan poem will govern my actions this year. Lately I’ve learned that my love and attention is a very potent thing and I must exercise judgment before emptying the clip. At almost-25, I am reaching the age where nothing is happening to me for the first time anymore. By now I have language for most feelings. What will I do?

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I opened my year being ritually uncursed in a small village in South India at the behest of my mother. She believed a female ancestor put a bad mark on me and had to be appeased. (The curse might just be homosexuality: only time will tell.) How old will I be when holidays with my mother no longer feel like an A24 film... Later that evening, I opened my phone to see that Doechii (!!) read and liked my writing about lesbianism. It feels like a career milestone, to have a sexy rapper acknowledge your work. God works in mysterious ways. Perhaps I was blessed after all.

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I am fighting a love hangover. I hate a hard feeling I cannot think my way through, especially one that roots deep through your body, runs all the way down to your toes. Sometimes when I am struck by emotional pain, I chant in my head: LOBOTOMY, LOBOTOMY! until it subsides. My ancestors invented yoga but this is the processing mechanism I devised. There has to be a rational psychosomatic explanation for why it works — it just does.

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Pyaari Azaadi’s solo exhibition in New York City, “Talking ‘Bout a Revolution,” is perfect and vicious. It addresses caste and race supremacy in our diaspora, and is a visual love letter to the artists and activists working to heal those wounds. I have seldom seen Asian American artists write towards their womanhood through the language of guilt and complicity, as opposed to victimhood. There’s a crazy sculpture of a wilting lotus that shames its namesake, Kamala Harris. There are paintings that implicate our mothers too. I want more art that treats brown women as knives.

Pyaari’s collection of photographs from queer South Asian NYC nightlife from 2003-05.

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Once a month I fall asleep next to my childhood best friend V. He and I started the sleepover ritual a few months ago: we make dinner, smoke some weed, talk our shit, fall asleep. While he’s at my house, he’ll handle heavy man tasks I can’t do myself. I love romance, but I have rarely encountered intimacy deeper than a friend who loves you washing your dishes, which you protest only half-heartedly because it is your least favorite chore on earth.

✧˖°

I am learning a new literary language, which is the long-form essay. Although the subjects are often hateful, my nonfiction voice is that of a lover. I want to express gratitude, almost filial piety, to the writers who came before. I want the reader to feel that I care deeply about their experience. I want to take them in and out of rabbit holes and open up to them and make them laugh. I write essays like a moodboard, but curated by a real live woman and not an algorithm.

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A fat stack of books that literally have my name on them, courtesy of Brooklyn Public Library.

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I’ve been thinking deeply about history lately. We are living in yet another “unprecedented time,” except I am not eighteen anymore so I’m falling for nobody’s tricks. I’ve seen lessons from our era drawn from Black and White Americanas who fought the Fugitive Slave Act. I went to a talk about attention activism where a scholar compared our era to the dawn of empire, when a small group of men declared the world open to colonization, except in the 2020s the frontier for conquest is our minds and attentions. I am thinking of the sixties, a similar time of youth discontent with American culture, whose visual language I explored at the Whitney’s Sixties Surreal exhibition with my friend B.

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The more I read and study towards RAGE BAIT, the more I discover that I have never had a thought that James Baldwin didn’t already articulate half a century ago.

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I have been living alone for three months. Only once did I call 911, after I got too consumed by a gripping nonfiction book (Zeynep Tufecki’s Twitter and Tear Gas) that I accidentally left my literal gas stove on for hours. I could have blown up the building! My neighbors had to wait outside in the cold while the firemen tested my gas levels. I am a lesbian but even I felt weak for these gruff and competent men. They told me to air out my apartment so I went with my friend A to a bar and cried. A drunk man asked me if I hadn’t actually been trying to kill myself. Sir, I will never kill myself. I have too much to say.

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I’ve been lounging in my apartment, of which I am the sole creative director. My mom describes my aesthetic style as “kacha macha,” an onomatopoeic Tamil expression that means straight chaos and clutter, but I require material comforts. You could entomb me in my collection of paperback books. I would fistfight a man three times my size to defend my plants, many of them lovingly rehomed from neighbors. I have been a collector since I was a child and it seems too late to change this about me.

Street report from my mom, who decided to clean out my childhood bedroom…

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What would it mean to be strong? Something I shelved in the LOBOTOMY! category from last year, that I am unshelving now, is facing numerous casual instances of transgression in nightlife. Not too recently I potentially got roofied. A woman grabbed my throat at the club. I am okay, I have the support system to deal with these indignities, but I have started using influencer perks to go to the gym. Not because working out prepares you for anything. But just for the reminder that my body is mine.

✧˖°

My goal this year is to become a better foe to fascism. The ICE takeover in Minnesota, alongside many books I’ve been reading, like Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, have convinced me of the importance of building stronger roots in my physical surroundings. It sounds obvious, but most people my age spent our formative years quarantined and/or online, and there’s a muscle that needs rebuilding. Some of my specific quests have included hosting more gatherings for friends to combat isolation, volunteering in my neighborhood, and befriending all the tenants in my building.

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The girls vision boarding at mine. My crib is Fairytopia for femme lesbians!

A fuck-ton of fried rice, fried by me and not a shrimp, on shift with Feed the People Bedstuy

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I hope you will pre-order my novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES. It is priced at $18.99, a full ten dollars cheaper than most brand-new fiction, because my publisher has correctly projected that my target readership is broke. What can I say, I write for the baddest bitches!

There are some things so insane they only could have been invented by the showrunners of a pre-woke early aughts TV show, and lesbian oil wrestling is one of them. It features in Season Five of The L Word (RIP), permanently altering the brain chemistry of a generation of queer viewers. Now it’s found a new life in Lez Get Physical, the internet-famous sapphic spectacle drawing crowds of 1000 to warehouses in Brooklyn, LA, and Toronto to watch lesbians wrestlers slip, slide, and fight for their lives in an oil-filled kiddie pool. Combining elements of drag, burlesque, and MMA, the events are replete with a Jumbotron, live commentators, ring girls, and Costco-sized jugs of olive oil. There are recurring fighters, elaborate storylines surrounding the matches, ever-growing myth and lore. It is beautiful and absurd.

My friend Zhane Stimpson, the 26-year-old lesbian community organizer and content creator behind Lez Get Physical, once told me she started the tournaments to give lesbians a chance to “experience a night outside of traditional norms. They’re transported into a different world.” She said, “A lot of people are like, This is the best event I’ve ever been to.” I attended the last wrestling match in my IRL capacity as a journalist; I reported on how, as political attacks intensify against queer and trans people, this year has seen a renaissance of queer live-fighting events, from T-Boy Wrestling to Lez Get Physical, queer-owned boxing gyms, and more. But this time, I signed up to fight.

Girllllll why, said some of my friends, and I joked that I am sort of homophobic and needed an outlet to express it; to others I explained, seriously, that it feels like an honor and imperative to participate in this innovative, explosive Gen Z lesbian and trans culture while we still can enjoy it. Plus, all year I have been fighting for my life on the lesbian streets. It is not unlike wrestling, dating women — getting into the ring, over and over, to confront the entirety of another person, whose wants and needs might be different than yours, to hold them in your hands. Even though signing up for Lez Get Physical was an impulse decision, I felt like I’d been training spiritually for some time.

But the other reason, the private promise I made to myself, was to build strength and certainty in my own body. I’d been experiencing a lot of sexual harassment that summer, from men on the subway and the block to even women in the club and my DMs, and while I never take it personally, it is hard to ignore the reminder that I am small, an easy target, prone to being approached and gazed on and touched without my permission. I went into the ring to feel the aliveness of my body, the non-apology of it.

The night of the tournament was cold, the first portent of fall — I love this time of year, how, when the temperature drops below 60 degrees, I know the plot is going to thicken. The fighters’ call time was two hours before the match. In the green room we all were giddy, gorging ourselves on snacks, like theater kids before a show. We introduced ourselves by our fighter names, but our real names too, like admitting a secret. “Is this your first time?” people asked; old-timers gave bracing advice. Fighters helped each other zip up their costumes. Someone sprayed glitter on everyone’s skin; when the bottle ran out, the girls rubbed up on each other to share the love. “Mutual aid,” we joked. The producers, Zhane and Grace, had a team huddle to explain the rules, emphasizing safety, boundaries, and consent. This wasn’t real fighting, they reminded us — this, like queerness itself, was performance. That was why we slipped into campy and fantastic alter egos, leaving our real bodies behind. Mine, that night, was Curry Bradshaw, intrepid queer journalist, curious about what brings her fellow lesbians to the ring, and what queerness looks like for a generation discovering ourselves in an increasingly hostile world.

Queerness, to me, is filled with erotic possibility because there is no script. When I was younger, I’d had a very binaristic view of gender, even among the non-men I dated. There were people who topped, and people who bottomed. Those who threw ass, and those who caught it. Only later, and especially during oil wrestling, did I discover the power of expressing your gender like a costume, one with breathing room, a role you play and modify each day. Fighters could show up however we wanted — alter egos included Stone of Arc, Kitty Whip, Pussy Piercer. “You’ve been handpicked to embody the D.Y.K.E. spirit, our golden rule and performance standard,” Zhane emailed us before. D was for Dominance: “Confidence. Presence. Power. Control the room without saying a word.” Y for Yearning: “Create tension. Build chemistry. Let the crowd ache for what happens next.” K for Kink: “Play safely. Explore edges with curiosity, consent, and control.” And E for Entertainment: “You are a performer first. Every movement, glance, and fall should make the audience gasp, cheer, or blush.”

I had spoken to my assigned wrestling partner, Bri, on the phone earlier that day. We planned out a few moves; we wanted to give the people a show. For the rest, we agreed, we’d let the spirit move us. It was like we were having elaborate phone sex except we were laughing very hard.

Still, I became unbearably anxious before it was time to fight. I realized the line outside was going down the block. My friends were texting me good luck messages, and I started spiraling about horrific outcomes – seeing an ex. Having a nip slip — my digital footprint, God! Forgetting my moves. Doing Bri, my partner, wrong.

“Do you want to kiss right now?” Bri asked me, sensing my nervousness. We didn’t want our first time to be in the ring. “Yeah,” I said, and it was as simple as that. I felt my entire body sigh with relief. Then it was time to fight.

I’m not gonna lie: I blacked out in the ring. Partially due to the tequila sunrises that had been pressed into my hands by beautiful women to bring me luck before my match. Also, adrenaline — the very same fight-or-flight nervous system that my ancestors used to outrun tigers, or whatever, was now on overdrive before a screaming crowd. Those same ancestors channeled themselves through me, or maybe muscle memory took over. I remember things in snatches: locking eyes with and placing my cigarette into the mouth of a girl on the side of the stage. Slipping out of my fur coat, feeling the cold air suddenly kiss parts of my body that I rarely have exposed. A woman slipping a twenty into my bra, which I promptly lost. Accidentally spooking myself by looking at the jumbotron, where my body was blown to ten times its size. Who is that, I thought, like a bird banging its head against its own reflection. The crowd reminded me by screaming it back: Oh, right. I am Curry Bradshaw.

My partner Bri shimmered onstage next in her alter ego as the irresistible island fairy, Fine Gyal Tink. Some of the moves we’d planned, although every ounce of preparation vacated my mind when we were covered in oil, the ring far slippier than I’d imagined. I rode her; she topped me. Brittney’s thigh, like a strobe light, sweeping, landed on me. I didn’t use a single brain cell. I was suddenly deeply grateful for my own body, how it always knows what to do. And I felt trust for my partner, too, even when she was pinning me down. This is what I love about lesbianism: that we can surrender our softness like prayer. Is that submission? Or, like a portal, an opening? That we can make one another feel safe always strikes me as a precious thing.

For our finale, we kissed, and the crowd roar hit my ears like someone had popped a bubble, or unmuted a TV, and I suddenly remembered where I was. What is life, I thought. I am oiled up and making out in a Brooklyn warehouse to the adulation of literally one thousand lesbians.

I did not end up winning the match. I succumbed to the tequila and a bad bitch – an honorable way to go. What’s more, my girl Bri defeated every competitor afterwards to achieve a well-deserved victory as that night’s lesbian oil wrestling champion. I tumbled off the stage into the loving arms of my friends, who didn’t mind that I was covered in olive oil, made me feel like a winner anyways. A lot of people, brown girls especially, came up to congratulate me. I wondered if this is what it’s like to be a popular athlete in high school — it’s lucky I wasn’t, because if I got this kind of validation all my life, I would be a menace! Indeed, I achieved a long secret dream I didn’t know I had of signing a woman’s chest.

The truth is that outside of my wrestling alter ego, I am not always so confident. Sometimes it feels like all of my friends’ pontificating about lesbian sex, its erotics and pleasures, happens in an alternative universe, like Barbieland, or the oil ring — utopic realms where nothing hurts. In reality, my sexuality has been shaped by fear as much as desire. I am a sexual violence survivor, and though I’ve had a long, proud journey of reclaiming my inner sense of safety, sometimes I wish that dating could feel as easy as wrestling: a clear-cut discussion beforehand, deep trust and humor, agreement that it’s never much deeper than mutually feeling good. But that is the beauty, sometimes the gag, of dating: the feeling of vulnerability, of going into the dark. That is what takes strength. The thing oil wrestling trains me for.

I am getting more comfortable in my own body. Sometimes I feel fear like a third lung in my chest. I breathe it in and out. I’ve learned that when I breathe with my fear, I let it soften me. Open up new ways of living in my skin. I can do anything, even fight. In the lesbian oil ring, I understood that this body of mine, which I spent years taming, wrangling into submission, was available for me to love all along.

At the same time, the world has gotten actively worse in the past 365 days. Each day the world asks me which fresh horrors I can abide. I’m saying ‘abide,’ but the more precise term would be ‘abet,’ for that is exactly what I do by virtue of waking up each day, gay and gloriously alive, in a city where the sun shines by blotting out the sky of another. This year has been one of seriousness, preparing myself for a narrative reality in which life gets harder for everyone, including Americans, and not just those whose suffering has protected us so far.

Recently I reread Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, patron saint of lesbian diarists. In one scene Alison, aged eleven, runs into an existential problem. She’s just started keeping a diary, at the suggestion of her father, who tells her to “just write down what’s happening.” The first three words, “Dad is reading,” actually appear in his — Dad’s — handwriting! But Alison’s crisis emerges when she realizes that she can’t be certain the things she’s writing are totally true. All she knows is her own opinions, reflected back to her — “and perhaps not even those,” she concedes. “My simple, declarative sentences began to strike me as hubristic as best, utter lies at worst.” To cope with uncertainty, and continue writing with honor, Alison decides to start writing “I think” at the start of every sentence. She even develops a symbol, a little pointy arrow, as shorthand for “I think.”

Oh, Alison. I am thinking of you now, one year into adult life. I have had many experiences in this past year that I could summarize with declarative sentences — I moved to New York, I quit my job, I’m writing new books, I’m trying to build serious practices of living that will guide me as an adult — but the experiences were not mine alone: they’ve existed in conversation with friends and loved ones. My sense of self has been shattered and re-built continually by contact with newness and difference and other people’s perspectives. Sometimes life has delighted me, sometimes vexed me, sometimes taken me out to dinner before it totally fucked with me, but I find I can write with less certainty in each subsequent year.

Still, this is a list of lessons and resolutions, small and large, that I’ve developed between August 2024-2025, my year of becoming a serious person. It is, like Alison’s diary, simply what I THINK! It is manifestation more than anything: signposts towards the person I THINK I hope to be.

FRIENDS & LOVERS

• I treat friendship like dating. I shoot my shot and court new friends on the regular. Romantic dating is fine but only deserves 20% of my social battery; the rest goes into friendships. I think too many young queer people get the ratio wrong.

• Friendship is my highest practice of care, not romance. (In fact, it’s often when I start having sex with someone that I start to act irrational or outside my values. If someone hits it too good I CAN lose my mind.)

• Two of my now-closest friends bought my drink/snack on the first friend date, an act of generosity that floored me — they knew I’d get them next time. “We are not Venmo warriors,” a dear friend told me. Hell no we’re not.

• I can repair friendships. Hands down the best part of adult friendship is that we now have more skills to work things out. Conflicts that would have been friendship-ending for me in college have now been mere seasons in friendships I hope will last forever.

• Outside the shielded bubble of college, where everyone’s lives are the closest to equal that they’ll ever get, structural realities of race & class really do impact my friends’ everyday lives, and I want to be mindful and act reparatively whenever possible — until I can with money, with other types of effort.

• Friendships are a rare, generous, generative relationship where we can show enormous commitment, but I THINK because they’re less “exclusive” than romance, they are uniquely suited to accommodate identity and power differences. It’s why, for example, I have close white friends but don’t really seek a white partner. That is beautiful!

• Having a sapphic brain trust of platonic queer friendships has saved me more times than I can count.

• Dating women & queer people requires me to continually self-evaluate and improve myself because I can’t assume I’m the victim every time something doesn’t work out.

• I love flirting and queer dating. I’ve found that I’m really good at it — 16-year-old Mal would be geeked lol. But I will NOT fall for dick-swingy queer roster culture which is both a blessing and curse of living in a large city.

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MONEY & JOBS

• My priorities are making art, tending to my friendships, doing minimal harm, pleasure, and leisure, in that order (first two tied). I prioritize making money only so far as it supports these goals — at some point capitalism does actually impede them.

• My greatest skill in this life is my ability to alchemize the world around me, confidently and quickly, into language. It’s not the most lucrative skill, but it’s cunty, and it’s mine. Knowing this takes the pressure off me to have to be amazing at other jobs.

• $20, imo, is the ceiling at which a meal doesn’t get any tastier or better no matter how much more you pay for it.

• If I can’t understand how someone my age is affording their lifestyle, I THINK it’s either a corporate job, rich parents, or overextending their credit card.

• Being able to have fun and build community without spending much money is a skill and a valuable inheritance from my immigrant community.

• People I knew at Stanford, especially, are choosing different paths — some are indeed joining the world-destroying tech & financial elite that we were educated to aspire towards. Choosing between money and working an ethical job can be complicated. But I THINK it’s not AS hard to pay your bills without enacting horrors as people claim it is. I’m no moral authority, but we start gatekeeping woke.

ART

• My biggest flex of post-grad is that me and my artistic practice have stayed like this: 👯. I love my writing. I’m like a pro athlete with my stamina for long-form projects and I can now bench like 1000 words per day. I take my novel out on dates to cafes and lavish her with attention.

• Even as I have to start thinking more about the mechanisms of capitalism and public reception, I’m fortified by the loving responses of my friends to my work. Being seen deeply by friends through my art is an intimacy unlike anything. I call it 5th base!

• I write to process difficult feelings — as of late, complicity, guilt, corruption of living in the belly of empire. “Girlhood” does not interest me artistically anymore: we are grown women & adults in the most powerful country on earth, and I seek agency, to fight back.

• My job as an artist is to help people stand on business. Create the language that will normalize the kind of world we need to build. Talk directly to the gays. I am infinitely grateful to every person who entrusts me with this task.

THE WORLD

• As the world heads towards major change, I am actively working towards becoming a serious person who can reliably rise to an occasion. This includes: my ability to cook, rustle things together, organize events, check in with friends, decenter myself, move through conflict. I should probably also go to the gym lol.

• I must keep my heart soft. Confronting the world’s horrors is like staring every single day into the sun. I close my eyes from time to time. But as a former gun violence organizer, this is not a new feeling. I’m fighting to retain my ability to feel. And to act.

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Thank you for reading!

brief garden, 1936 by shyama golden

Recently, many millennials have taken to the internet to agonize over the fact that my generation, Gen Z, is not having enough sex. From Jia Tolentino’s smug provocation "Are Young People Having Enough Sex?" to allegations that "puritanical Gen Z was horrified" by Sabrina Carpenter's new album cover, to a recent panel at McNally Jackson about Gen Z and sex — which had no Gen Z panelists, I’m sad to report — older generations have identified an enormous problem. To which I respond: Grandma, you’re a victim. Gen Z women like me aren’t choosing have sex the same way older generations did, not because we are incapable of vulnerability or connection, but because we’re simply not impressed with the sexual state of affairs that older generations were conditioned to accept, even desire. Gen Z is the first generation to see systems ranging from hookup culture, to heterosexuality, to electoral politics, to the entire American dream, exactly as they are — flops — instead of the idealized versions they are purported to be. Can you blame us for not being in the mood?

It’s easy for millennial writers to critique Gen Z. They don’t realize the critical eye goes both ways. I’ve read the millennial feminist syllabus. This generation of women who call themselves “girls,” all pink and potential, now approaching midlife in a crisis-ridden world. I feel that for many millennial women writers it is very important, even virtuous, to appear sexy, and to love sex. It’s a badge of honor for feminist writers to spill their sex lives in columns; everyone’s a Carrie Bradshaw. This is the generation of the confessional essay, opening their most famous memoirs with scenes of getting fucked in the ass. Good for them, genuinely! I benefited greatly from reading such candid millennial accounts of sex — particularly because I grew up in Florida, a state without sex ed. I think the tides are turning against millennial choice feminism, but I do think it is often a great choice to have consensual sex, and lots of it. Sex and intimacy is one of the pleasures of life, and I strive for a safe and caring world in which everyone can enjoy it. I just don’t think that having sex is necessarily better than not having sex — or that a lack of sex calls for panic. In fact, I think that any social obsession over people’s sex lives feels weirdly aligned with fascism, which we should be beating back at all costs. It’s already breathing down our necks.

But let me engage now with the argument in good faith. The fact that Gen Z is having less sex is framed as a “problem” because it’s supposedly symptomatic of a larger crisis of disconnection and alienation. (Both “Gen Z” and “sex” tend to be loosely defined and prone to slippage, the former a catch-all for any young-ish person online, but I’ll let that lie.) I’m only partially convinced by this argument. The crisis part, that’s real. Many parts of our daily lives, thanks to capitalism and technology, have become more online and alienating, from shopping to school to working, as well as socializing and connecting. Are relationships — including sexual ones — fostered or conducted via the internet of poorer quality? Most likely. (I’ll make an exception for queer youth like me for whom the internet was a lifeline.) I won’t lie: people my age are struggling. It will take us some time to bounce back from the pandemic, and the economy makes it very hard for us to party, move out, have the sort of twenties you can reminisce on when you’re old. Capitalism is the culprit that makes it harder for us to connect, including sexually.

But also, not all the change in sexual behaviors has been negative. The truth about generational change is that we build on the knowledge of generations before, and perhaps the greatest gift of our forebears, besides the aforementioned personal sex writing, was #MeToo. #MeToo did little to make the sexual landscape materially safer for Gen Z, or improve the behavior of men, but it did make women aware of our reality. It gave us language to interrogate our desires, to understand that the fantasies we indulge late at night are sometimes products of forces of evil and propaganda preceding our birth, that even our own minds aren’t a safe space from the male gaze, that patriarchy corrodes everything. Thank God I didn’t come of age in an era where we were gaslighted into thinking sexual violence was our fault. Thank God I wasn’t Stockholm Syndrome-d into thinking hookup culture is the best thing on earth! I’m relieved some millennial women escaped their sexual coming-of-age unscathed — I’m particularly happy for Tolentino, who brags in her article that she found her husband from fucking around. But it is disingenuous to tell Gen Z women to dive into shark-filled waters and hope for the best, simply because you emerged unbitten.

Instead, there are increased opportunities for young people, particularly women and queer people, to have full lives outside of the pressure to have sex, particularly with men. Rarely amid the moral panic is it acknowledged that the same generation that is having less sex is also the queerest generation to date, and that queer culture is sometimes associated with slow and intentional self-discovery and self-shaping. That is not giving conservative or puritan to me. Rather than a crisis, I think the de-escalation of pressure and "hype" around sex is a good thing, and doesn’t even preclude Gen Z from experiencing sexual pleasure. Just as women no longer are financially reliant on men to survive, we’re no longer sexually reliant on men to come. Rose toys exist, babe. Cue “Downstairs DJ” by Megan Thee Stallion. Porn is widely available and fictional men tend to be more appealing to Gen Z women than real ones anyways. Sex, in short, is less cool and sexy to us, particularly when we understand the power dynamics and danger baked in. There’s this meme I like: “Sex is good, but have you experienced ___?” For me, there are a thousand ways I could fill in that blank.

The truth is that having lots of sex is not always good, or safe. It’s not puritan for me to say this. I’m a lesbian now, but my early experiences with straight hookup culture, a cornerstone of millennial sex positivity, never actually felt empowering – at best, they felt like  equal-opportunity exploitation. My sense of budding crisis – that I’d been invited to roll the dice in a game that men always won – intensified when I got sexually assaulted when I was twenty. It’s never sexy to admit, but sexual violence has been an inescapable part and occupational hazard of my entire sex life, even in queer spaces. I have been violated by young men and women, acting — I think — out of ignorance and inexperience. Sex is often worse when you’re young. The beginning of freshman year is considered a “red zone” for sexual assault. I want to affirm to my young readers that it is okay to proceed with care, and on your own terms. Besides, like, some random millennial writer for a legacy publication, nobody can judge you, or tell you what you’re missing out.

For Gen Z women, is sex worth the risk? For me personally, I say yes. Good sex — by which I mean, sex that makes me feel tapped into my aliveness, and connected to the humanity and wonder of other people — is among my favorite things on earth, and what I write whole-ass novels about. Its pursuit has, of course, caused me pain and trauma. So I cannot look any young woman in the eye — post-Roe of all times — and tell her she’s deficient, or part of a generational problem, if that cost is too much for her to bear.

Ultimately this sex panic is nothing new. I am 24 years old and have already outlived multiple battles in the age-old saga of generational warfare. At various points Gen Z has pissed off all the generations before us. In my teens, especially after my friends and I began leading historic movements against gun violence, some people started prematurely crediting us as saviors. “Gen Z is Already Changing the World!” proclaimed a 2019 Forbes article. (New York Times was more ambivalent: “Will Gen Z Save the World?” mused noted dinosaur David Brooks, whereas a subsequent fellow white male columnist opined, more pessimistically, that “Gen Z Will Not Save Us.”) This celebration of Gen Z totally ceased after the ass-handing 2024 election results, when a majority of Gen Z men voted for Trump, and Gen Z leftists got uncomfortably critical of the status quo. (Think of Greta Thunberg, once a liberal darling, abandoned for her support of Palestine.)

Now that millennials are on our dick — literally — I miss the Inspiring Gen Z era. Change is scary, and nobody wants to feel like their time is past. And yet. Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to become the sex-policing villain.

For my Substack subscribers, here is an annotated cut of a very controversial piece I published in Autostraddle this weekend. I posted it on Instagram with the following caption: “this is an essay about my year of refusing to negotiate with terrorists — aka choosing to be a lesbian (which to me includes everyone except cis men, terfs stay back 🔪🧿), and stepping up to terrorize patriarchy back. This is not actually meant to be rage bait, let alone bisexual erasure or prescription for other people, but a naming of possibilities that have opened in my life. TLDR: comphet has hands, but so do I!”

While I’d written the story to speak only for myself, in the hopes it might offer a warm hug, or a wink, to those who related to it, I was surprised by its massive, vibrant, occasionally vitriolic response from queers in all walks of life. Never have I written something so personal, and it prompted equally personal responses from readers, far more thoughtful, complex, and deeply-felt than, “Good for you, girl.” If I were to categorize the responses, they’d fall into the following categories:

• Bisexual women of all ages feeling anxiety and self-consciousness. I think discomfort, when not created maliciously, can be a productive feeling to sit with, and I’m grateful to those who were open to my story!

• Bisexual women feeling a sense of hope and possibility, a portal opened in their heart.

• Gen Z lesbian women, born or chosen, who were grateful and impressed that I said the quiet part out loud.

• (Often older) lesbians resentful that a younger woman could seemingly skirt the suffering, oppression, and even self-hatred that they were subjected to in their youth. I grew up in the South, and it wasn’t all rainbows for me either, but I feel gratitude for these elders, and I understand how crushing it feels to be ahead of your time. I view these responses as coming from a place of pain, and not really an indictment of my choices at all.

• (Sometimes older, but not always) lesbians feeling defensive that the label could be, essentially, gentrified, by those who weren’t O.G. lesbians out the womb.

• Conversely: people of all ages who feel that the queer community is too touchy, defensive, or otherwise precious about the boundaries within our community, and want to have different conversations.

I was deeply honored to have been read so thoughtfully and critically by the baddest bitches in the game. I wrote this article because I think fascism is at the door, liberal ideas of gender and queerness have run their course, and I am willing to do whatever it takes to envision a better world. Lesbian dating is not utopic — far from it — but in worsening times, I will fight to choose agency and power, every time.

—

Lowkey, I Chose to Be a Lesbian

I’ve been queer for as long as I can remember, but my earliest crushes were definitely on boys. Of my first crush in the fifth grade, I wrote in my diary, “When he smiles at me I feel like he is lighting up the dark side of the moon.” That feeling of attraction was real (and foreshadowed a lifelong practice of loving and writing from it!). I am not opposed to the bisexual label or here to negate its validity. I dream of a world without labels at all. But some time ago, I chose to start identifying and living as a lesbian. I was empowered by a rising tide of lesbian visibility to take the plunge into an identity I had previously believed was lonely, restrictive, or puritanical. (I fell for some propaganda, I fear.) Becoming a lesbian opened new portals in my heart and life. I knew what I was rejecting — men — but I couldn’t have imagined what I am accepting instead. I am still untangling its beauty.

It sounds silly to say, but my last straw was a pregnancy scare. I’d had numerous negative experiences with men in college, some even traumatic, but I managed to recover from them, to keep an open heart. Although I primarily dated women, I had, in some way, accepted occasional violence as an occupational hazard of dating men, of the sexual liberation I was lucky to have. I thought I could roll with the punches, stay in the ring. But I had to take a Plan B because of a dumb man who had bell hooks on his bookshelf. My stomach was cramping like an omen from God, and I thought, never again. This was shortly after the fall of Roe v Wade, putting everyone with a uterus at the mercy of men and the state, and I felt, with sudden certainty, that men were no longer worth it. I did not want to play this incredibly rigged game. (I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed by women calling for a 4B movement after Trump’s re-election.) That’s why I stepped away.

When I moved to New York, I was determined to be gay, as a lifestyle. To join a long lineage of women and queers who make tender love and mischief, build worlds against violence, towards equality, until even the slurs hurled against us lose wind, can be recast, joyously, like confetti. I enjoy the gender buffet in a way that feels similar to my enlightened bisexual sisters. I have dated the whole range — the ones with long hair and shimmery lips that proudly claim the word “dyke.” The loping, boyish ones, the ones who’ve shorn their hair or breasts, wearing their difference like courage. The ones who move with a touch of the otherworldly, their gender alien — they make you look twice. I love when people don't fit in and have probably never tried. I love the push-and-pull of courting and being courted. The mercy of the first kiss. I discovered lesbian culture online, through screens, but it is different when you can touch, feel, thumb through lovers like the pages of books. Indeed, this world I previously only read about, it has scooped me in its jaw, stuns me with its vibrancy. I love women and queer people, but the things I love about them could feasibly belong to any gender. There is little these people have in common — not their bodies, energies, or personalities — except the condition, in some way, of refusal.

It is a condition of existing in opposition to patriarchy — as its victim, or mortal foe, depending on who you ask, rather than its perpetrator, or beneficiary — that I find incredibly hot. This is why (I’m happy to report) I have never crushed on a straight woman in my life. Not all women are enemies of patriarchy. There are many women, sometimes due to race or class identities, whose interests feel unsexily oriented towards the patriarchy. There are, similarly, men who have a stake in dismantling it, or at least can recognize its effects, and with these men, I can usually catch a vibe.

To be clear: I don’t hate men. Decentering is not demonizing. Although you will not catch me spilling ink over men — at least not since my pre-pubescent diary — I see their humanity. The dignity of fathers in Palestine, protecting and grieving their children amid unfathomable violence. The sort of grown men who give their seats, speak up, help carry heavy things. My sweet, ridiculously handsome gay male friends. This morning, I saw a group of long-legged teenage boys at the subway station. Gracefully, one of them stepped over the turnstile and then opened the door for the rest of us. I had never seen such a casual display of chivalry. There are moments I am taken by the grace of men, even as I choose not to center them.

I understand why people are often outraged at the idea of “choosing” your sexuality. For a long time, gay people were criminalized and ostracized (we still are), and the way you’d insist you were still worthy of care and protection was by claiming you couldn’t help who you were. “Born this way” discourse had its moment, but I think it frames queerness as an unhelpable accident of your birth and not a wonderful, principled choice you could make for yourself. I choose to loudly and decisively align myself with other women, because I think it helps all of us, especially straight women. Far from gatekeeping, I want to open the wide house of queerness to them.

The truth is, my straight friends are struggling. There’s been a “crisis of heterosexuality” among my generation, a widening gap between young men and women in metrics like political views, education, and achievement. Gen Z women are uniquely screwed, because we’ve experienced enough material advancement that we don’t need men and can in fact demand better of them. But Gen Z men haven’t caught up and shifted their behaviors accordingly. What’s more, movements like #MeToo, rather than nudging men towards the decent people we need them to be, have provoked profound backlash. I’ve seen the smartest minds of my generation, as the saying goes, taken down by the impossibility of reconciling their feminist principles with the reality of losers in their DMs. For many of my dearest friends, the solution, more or less, is decentering men. Close female friendships and rose toys must do the job, at least for now. Many generations of women prior, we suspect, would have chosen celibacy and a career over being bound to wifehood. For their sake — and ours — some straight women are trying to hold the line. Can we have a little honorary lesbian commotion for them?

It’s easy for me, at 24, to hold out in my principles. I wonder what will happen when I get older. Our society has made it very structurally difficult for me to envision a life outside of partnership with a man. Unless a squillion of you buy my books or I get hit by an MTA bus and sue, I don’t think I can ever raise a family by myself in New York, my chosen home. I don’t blame those who can’t hold out: Being a lesbian is not for the weak. Most often, we speak of the financial disadvantage when you refuse male money: My friends joke that you need an actual line-item in your budget for lesbian dating. But also, there’s an erasure of your humanity when you step out of patriarchy's blinding searchlights. Recently, a masc friend of mine described a humbling interaction where a man totally looked over her, only addressing her more femme friend. Since she clearly wasn’t for him, it was like she didn’t exist at all. (I’ve heard women describe a similar devaluing when they start to visibly age.) I’ve felt it too, even as a young feminine woman, the door that shuts in a man’s face when I reveal, mid-conversation, that I’m gay. My opinion matters less to him now. That shit hurts.

I wish there were more spaces to name and strategize the realities of lesbian existence. To truly, joyously, commit to the bit. We are under attack. An Indigenous man was murdered this very Pride Month, and authorities won’t categorize it as a hate crime. The endless discourse each year about bisexual erasure, splitting hairs between bisexual and lesbian identity, strikes me as selfishly concerned with cosmetic questions of “inclusion” and “validity,” the politics of who can post up online, enjoy our parties, or profit from the culture versus who is boots-on-the-ground, taking risks, advancing, and protecting us. (Previous generations didn’t care very much about the distinction between sapphic labels, but I suspect that as queerness has become a less political, more palatable identity, an insistence on individual queer identities, personal comfort, and self-labels arises to water us down). Either way: the queers I align with don’t have time to bully your boyfriend if he comes to Pride, because we have bigger fish to fry. Babes, we’re building a better world.

My mid-twenties have been characterized by continuous moments of refusal to systems and mindsets I cannot abide. My proudest quitting moment, more than quitting men, was swearing off Amazon because of how it mangles our relationship to consumption at the cost of the environment. Movements like BDS have taught us the power of refusal and redirection, collective pressure to make change. I have the privilege to ponder and mold a life in accordance with my values. Against all odds, I am 24, hot, financially independent, living in the Global North, beholden to no authority but my mom. I want to use the tools at my disposal to put up a fight. What we tend to grows, and I choose to pour my immense creativity, love, and care into uplifting women, especially the ones I love platonically – not people I deem my oppressor. As my dear friend recently told me, in a gay appropriation of George Bush: “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” Patriarchy is the terror. I want to terrorize it back.

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I take pleasure in being a hater of fellow Asian Americans. We make it too easy! To be a first-generation Asian in America is to be caught in a perpetual state of puberty. There are growing pains and awkward phases, like obsessing over white romantic partners (see: the collective ouvre of Mindy Kaling), or appropriating Black culture (hello Awkwafina), or else writing so-called mango diaspora poetry romanticizing the homeland. (One could also go far-right, and join the ranks of billionaires, oligarchs, or Republican politics, but such Asian Americans are likely beyond saving.) It’s often very graceless. To be clear: I can afford to be a hater because I am in the second generation of queer South Asian American writers. (Each day I get on my knees and thank God for the brave Gen X and millennial writers who came before.) Despite the title of my own novel, I am not brave or unique or unprecedented, but I am lucky to have grown up with Asian American literature so plentiful that I can spend this essay telling you to read less of it.

Last month I read my way through the collective Asian American pandemonium over Ocean Vuong. The discourse was less about his new novel — which I am still on the library waitlist for, lol — but the space he carves for himself as an Asian American writer, which for some reason impacts what is possible for the rest of us. I was particularly taken by Song-Mai Nguyen’s argument that Vuong’s greatest crime is “blunt-force ethnic credibility” — falsely claiming to be a spokesperson of a culture he doesn’t really know, and ends up fetishizing for outsiders. Andrea Long Chu similarly critiques Vuong’s obsession with his white audiences: what does it mean when Asian Americans insist on writing from the margins, when in many ways, we are also at the center?

I empathize with Vuong’s diasporic melancholy. There is a real heartbreak among diasporic Americans, who feel their lives wrenched out of context by forces prior to their birth. There is a deep confusion, after this rupture, as to what comes next. In her novel Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian describes first-generation Indian Americans as “conceptual orphans.” “We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being,” her narrator explains. “What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America?”

These are deep and worthy questions. And having a cohesive narrative of who you are is probably an essential component of psychological well-being. Indeed, ethnic American literature is preoccupied with finding belonging in America. An entire field of Asian American studies arose to map out a legible Asian American history, from Chinese exclusion to Japanese internment camps, staking a claim to American identity through its national past. These narratives can get sticky, particularly when they seek equivalence with other minority American narratives – think, for example, of the weird competitiveness between #StopAsianHate and the pre-existing #BlackLivesMatter movement – but it brings many Asian Americans comfort to insist that we’ve been part of America’s fabric all along.

To be fair, many Asian American writers are critical of the circumstances that made them Americans. “I am here,” Cathy Park Hong insists in her now-canonical memoir Minor Feelings, “because you vivisected my ancestral country in two.” Hong goes on to position her country, Korea, as “just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States.”

Indeed, the danger of an Asian American artistic identity lies in the name: American. In the past years, as I’ve entered my twenties, I’ve found myself questioning this tendency to see America as an end in and of itself: “the third and final continent,” as Jhumpa Lahiri once described it. American identity becomes vexed for those of us who see the webs of oppression connecting our belonging and comfort here with the exploitation of others abroad. As a novelist I could (and admittedly do) wax poetic about my Asian parents’ struggles to build prosperous lives in America. But I must also contend with the fact that my parents’, and my, tax dollars are accordingly funding the genocide in Palestine, which is also in Asia. As the cracks in the American Dream reveal themselves, many diasporic Asians are looking for alternate ways to situate ourselves. It means “millions of people look[ing] at the West,” as Omar El-Akkad’s (life-changing) new memoir puts it, and saying, “I want nothing to do with this.”

“I came into political consciousness around Asian American causes, which were framed as an issue of anti-racism, access to the United States, and belonging to this country,” the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen told me in an interview for The Emancipator earlier this year. “Over the last couple of decades, I’ve [begun seeing] all those things as subsidiary to a greater cause of decolonization.”

Like Nguyen, my coming-of-age as an Asian American writer led me to think closely about decolonization. An important shift I made was choosing to read writers from the South Asian subcontinent, not just the diaspora. Not a South Asia “as written for its diaspora—the longing for an imagined homeland—or written for a colonial imaginary,” as the Indian writer Richa Kaul Padte explained, but a world that exists in conversation with ours, but also on its own terms. I try not to have rules, but if I did, I’d say that South Asian writers are usually more interesting, critical, and creative than South Asian American ones. Ladies, they’re running laps around us. Eating us up.

Reading South Asian women writers awakened me to the legacies of colonialism; of the interplay of systems of domination such as race and caste; of the potency of environmental movements in the Global South. As much value as I find in stories by “conceptual orphans” like Vuong – and I am guilty of being one of them – I encourage more diasporic readers to make a literary homecoming journey. I am begging us to leave Ocean Vuong and his ilk in peace and redirect our attention towards non-American books. When we do so, we are less likely to seek a “single story” of existence, to quote Adichie, or style ourselves as “voices for the voiceless.” The truth is that Western readers have enormous power as gatekeepers and champions of literature from our homelands, which are far from voiceless — it’s our job, and joy, to seek them out. A prize like the International Booker, or translation published in English, shifts the axis of attention, and enables more non-Western literature to become accessible to us.

This is a list of writers from India whom I recommend to readers seeking stories beyond the literary infrastructure of the West. This list is sort of arbitrarily limited to India but I am grateful for other recommendations. Many, but not all, of these books were originally written in regional languages and then translated into English, to challenge the stereotype that India’s only serious literature is written in English. This list is a starting point, non-exhaustive. The joy of reading, to me, is the rabbit hole of it, the exploration; the long game of telephone played between writers from different contexts, in the shared project of translating how it feels to be alive.

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

Mushtaq recently won the International Booker Prize for her collection of stories chronicling the lives of Muslim women and girls in South India. Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada, has been celebrated for its richly spoken language, humor, and attentiveness to interpersonal and community dynamics. Mushtaq, herself a lawyer and journalist fighting against religious and caste oppression, has faced death threats for her work. And yet she believes in the necessity of literature to amplify Muslim women’s struggles. “In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages," Mushtaq said in her Booker acceptance speech. (Shoutout also to Meghna Rao’s writing on on this book!)

The Weave of My Life by Urmila Pawar

This is my favorite book of all times and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on it. Pawar’s sweeping coming-of-age memoir, translated from Marathi, is an intergenerational portrait of Dalit women breaking cycles of trauma and an account of finding her voice as a writer and activist. Pawar is among the first generation of women from her community to have access to literacy, and she writes with an enormous sense of stakes as a result. Pawar’s commitment to community ethnography and attentiveness to the richness of women’s interior lives will resonate with readers of my other favorite writer, Zora Neale Hurston.

The Crooked Line by Ismat Chungtai

Ismat Chungtai, born in pre-Independence North India, chronicles the lives of Muslim women, power and freedom within the family, and the obliterating nature of desire. I first discovered Chungtai through her lesbian love story Lihaaf (The Quilt), considered pornographic upon its publication; The Crooked Line returns us to her world, a semi-autobiographical tale of a young Muslim woman coming of age with her nation. You already know I love a vaguely autofictional novel about a brown girl on her come up ;) Banger, babes. Trust me here.

When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Kandasamy is an essential voice in contemporary Tamil feminist literature. When I Hit You is a portrait of the young writer’s escape from a physically abusive marriage to a Communist activist, and explores the misogyny underpinning even progressive spaces. Kandasamy cites a wide range of women’s narratives, from Hindu mythology to Ntozake Shange and Wislawa Szymborska and Sandra Cisneros, because she rightfully envisions this as a universal experience. Kandasamy writes and translates widely between Tamil and English; translating poetry, to her, has “no limit, no boundary, no specific style guide — you are free to experiment, you are free to find your own voice.”

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree

Shree’s Hindi-language novel about an eighty-year-old woman who travels to Pakistan to face her unresolved Partition trauma, was the first Indian-language novel to win the Booker Prize, prior to Heart Lamp. Partition was a catastrophe in South Asian history, displacing upwards of 12 million people and leaving lasting wounds along religious lines that South Asians are still healing from, not even a century later. Despite its heavy subject matter, the Booker judges celebrated the novel as “enormously charming and funny and light.” I adored this novel as well for its portrayal of a transgender character, which I thought was very fun to read.

Quarterlife by Devika Rege

Rege’s coming-of-age portrait follows a group of young Indian millennials discovering themselves and their political identities against the rise of the Hindutva right-wing. It was originally published in India in 2023, and I probably would never have heard of it— but luckily for us, it was published for American audiences this year, I saw it on Merve Emre’s instagram, then gobbled it up. QUARTERLIFE is a hefty novel, which I always appreciate — Rege has a lot to say about this country that she loves and fears, and uses the wide toolkit of fiction at her disposal (an entire ensemble cast of characters!), culminating in an epic and terrifying climax of religious violence in Mumbai. The dark underbelly of national progress and change will resonate with American readers processing our nation’s own descent into xenophobia and fascism. Quarterlife is ambitious, a sweeping opus that tries to capture the churn of a nation in change, both critical and empathetic towards its privileged protagonists.

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Ok that’s all for now! Thanks for reading <3

I first began emailing my friends during the pandemic -- arguably the most brutal, disillusioning, undeniably literary era of all my friends’ lives thus far. I write to my friends all the time: in texts, voice memos, memes that encapsulate our experiences with terrifying algorithmic specificity, but there is no pleasure deeper, for me, than experiencing my friends’ hearts and minds in the long form. Emails, in particular, are a dying art, a rare chance to share your thoughts, uninterrupted, intimate, taking the time to process and refine your ideas (as opposed to speech or text, which happens in real time), all for a reader who knows you, knows what your real voice sounds like. (A fun fact about me is that I have had three women in my life profess a crush over email, so now I associate the medium with love.) I love to write emails to friends, and I love to receive them.

QUARTER LIFE CRISIS is a newsletter written as emails with my brilliant friends in our twenties, to process our experiences now, in the 2020s, living inside the heart of an empire, amid the crumbling of American institutions, a financial recession, and political vibe that is free-falling. (Although we are doing our best to raise it.) You will hear from a range of Gen Z writers, artists, and activists I admire, love, and am grateful to count as friends. We will write about our love lives, friendships, politics, personal and shared histories, what we’re reading and thinking about, and the questions on our minds. At worst, it will read like the blind leading the blind. At best, I hope it will map the currents of energy and change we feel around us, and offer some direction for where we can go next.

This newsletter is epistolary because I love collaboration; but also because, while I’m still early in my career, I’ve sensed an underinvestment in Gen Z writers across the board. We are living in a thought daughter recession, perhaps: although my friends and I are approaching or past our mid-twenties, I can name few peers who are consistently getting paid, well-respected opportunities from mainstream media to write seriously about what we’re observing. The best Gen Z cultural criticism is happening, independently and rigorously, on platforms like TikTok and Substack, which is great, except that (1) most writers here are doing labors of love (unpaid) and (2) we’re getting curtailed by algorithms into only reaching a limited, likely agreeable audience, and (3), we can do better, more nuanced work when we are afforded editors, fact-checkers, outside expertise, and — I’ll say it again — a check.

This underinvestment in smart, serious young people does not only afflict writers. It’s happening across a lot of fields that consider themselves civically-minded. I think often of something my friend Deja Foxx, who is running for Congress in Arizona, and whom I recently profiled for Teen Vogue, has pointed out: the Democratic Party is stubbornly short-sighted when it comes to energizing young voters, let alone tapping young politicians to run for office. This is a shame, because my friends have been around the block, and we have a lot of energy and wisdom to offer. I am starting this letter project because I want to take my friends’ analysis seriously, even if few others will. I hope it will be an honest, funny, vulnerable archive of where we are now, and where we might go.

My friends write from a tumultuous mix of deep, queer hope, as well as total disillusionment. Most of us can’t remember a time before the election of America’s first Black president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the #MeToo movement, and an era of increasing media representation. On the other hand, we’ve lived through an era of mass shootings, two recessions, two Trump presidencies, the Covid-19 pandemic, and an ongoing genocide, all before we turned thirty. In the past decade, particularly after we started leading political movements around gun violence, racial injustice, and climate change, people started prematurely crediting some of my friends for saving the world. At the same time, a lot of Gen Z men are basically Hitler youth, at best, or shooting up schools, at worst. There is a lot going on, and my friends are taking notes, processing, observing. Anything could happen to us all.

This newsletter is born of the belief that interpersonal relationships are the core unit of both good writing and politics, and that my friends, most of us queer, can use our relationships – the transgressive power of our love – to imagine a different world. These days it feels like everything’s constantly accelerating, getting exponentially worse, spinning out of our control. I often wonder if there will be a chance for redemption. I, for one, have eight months left until my brain reaches peak maturity. We’re still in early chapters; so much could change for us. Things might improve considerably. Or, more likely, we might descend into free-fall. Regardless of what happens, I know I will rely on my friends to expand my sense of grace, resilience, and resistance. I will root my dignity in my ability to care for and champion the people around me.

Thank you so much for reading & joining along!

Exactly one year ago, I finished the draft of my debut novel UNPRECEDENTED TIMES, a Gen Z campus novel set during the pandemic. I was in my Stanford dorm room — all great things begin in a twin XL bed — finishing my senior year of college, a year later than planned. I’d taken a gap year due to Covid, but now many of my friends had graduated, and I felt lonely, unmoored. As senior year drew to a close, I wrote my way out of my novel, out of college, like a bad hangover from a previous life.

Fast-forward to last week, when I spent the first gasps of my post-grad spring furiously editing UT. I have not outgrown my college tendency to push deadlines to the last minute, so I brought my laptop everywhere — outdoors; to cafes; beneath the cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, my new home. I did it as my phone pinged with alerts about deportations and new fascist policies from Trump’s first 100 days; as a genocide continues to rage, and a friend had a scary surgery, and another left a violent relationship — still I tried to pin down reality as it continued to morph. I chased my moving target as diligently as I could, right until my deadline of May 1. I am very proud of the final draft I submitted (at 12:44 AM). In editing UT I was reminded of my own ambition, my capacity to process enormous tides of historical and personal change — a moment in time where it felt like the structures of meaning were crumbling around me — into a coming-of-age novel, written relatively quickly, that is (I think) funny and beautiful and true.

I began writing UT in the fall of 2021. It was my first month back at college after higher powers decided the pandemic was Over, and I was deeply afraid. I didn’t have a lot of friends on campus. My freshman year friend group had dramatically imploded during our year of quarantine; the sort of gradual grow-apart you’d expect from college friends was accelerated, instead, by the early onset of apocalypse. Shit had gotten real. In the ferocious year online, my classmates had dragged each other across the internet — the summer of 2020, in particular, was carnage — and awakened to the inequality and total systems collapse that created our vastly unequal pandemic experiences. It felt like we’d aged a million years, and as I said awkward hellos to people I’d met in freshman year, it was like greeting fellow veterans of a war. Where did you serve? Who did you lose? Who did you become?

I sometimes wonder what would have happened, in the fall of 2021, if we’d had an opportunity to collectively grieve what had transpired. A moment of mourning for Covid, the young people we had been. It was a hazy new world we found ourselves in, wet, like a freshly-popped bubble. We had changed in those black-hole years, we survivors, some of us became gay, or trans, or conservative. We returned to college, searching for pieces of ourselves we had lost. This cataclysmic event had just happened — millions dead, countless more still dying — and there was no language with which to speak. As we were still wearing masks, there was no way to look one another in the face. It didn’t occur to me until now that most of my classmates were as traumatized as I was, because nobody admitted it. This was Stanford, after all, home of the high-achieving and maladjusted, and most people soldiered on.

But I couldn’t. When I began writing UT, it was because the pandemic was still a gaping maw, a door I had to close. I had always longed to write a campus novel; I worshipped at the altar of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, which I discovered during the pandemic, and attuned me to the profundity of a young woman’s interior life. But I couldn’t imagine writing about self-discovery and student life without also writing about the encroaching threats of violence — by pandemic, by climate change. I couldn’t imagine another way a novel about your freshman year could end. The pandemic was a limit on my imagination, stealing away other possible plotlines, alternate futures. Writing my pandemic novel was an artistic exercise, but also a coping mechanism.

real live footage of me finishing my novel in bed

I made a small technical decision when drafting UT, which was to write it in the present tense. I was inspired by the use of present tense in Weike Wang’s Chemistry, another campus novel I adore. I made this decision when I was already 50,000 words in, which meant the edits were laborious. But the past tense, which I’d initially believed was more serious and literary, required me to conjure a sense of wisdom and retrospective towards the pandemic that I simply didn’t have. When I felt I couldn’t offer profundity, I’d catch myself slipping into irony, or worse, fatalism. The present tense, I realized, reconnected me with the earnestness of my 18-year-old self, fresh out of the gun violence prevention movement and eager to change her life. An age where no possibilities had been foreclosed, and I could’ve been anybody at all. The result is a narrator who can’t see five feet into the future, is earnest to a fault, and disintegrates in real time.

I am thinking of her now, as I edit the novel, now six years older than my narrator. In 2021 I thought the unprecedented times were over, and I could start processing them. We had a new president — a boring and stupid one, to be sure — but Trump was defeated, and the narrative had steadied its course. Then, of course, came October 2023. And the election of 2024. I sold UT in that empty, humming period between the ass-handing election results and Trump’s second inauguration. I was six months into my post-grad adulthood and suffering through my first New York winter. I had quit my first job in gun violence prevention, the cause to which I dedicated myself at sixteen. The first anniversary passed of the genocide in Palestine and I didn’t want to grow desensitized — I had before. (School shootings, for example, no longer make me weep.) The gag, of course, is that this year post-grad has also been the happiest of my life — how can these things coexist? I caught myself, while editing UT, feeling embarrassed by my own earnestness. Resisting the urge to inject hindsight I have now. The bigger gag is that violence was never unprecedented — it’s the equator around which our earth spins, and while I’m not dispirited, I am now old enough to understand this.

I feel angry, that I have just turned 24 and I am already seeing history repeat around me. If there was no way for me to write a campus novel free of the trauma of the pandemic, I can’t imagine a campus story now without the encampments, the webs of bloody complicity that link the education and self-discovery of spoiled American freshman with the murder of children abroad. I participated in Stanford’s encampments my senior spring, the same month I finished UT. I’ll admit, when the first tents came up, I felt hopeful — or maybe I’d just been lonely for a long time. To see my college classmates gathered on a lawn, in righteous and recklessly large numbers that I couldn’t have imagined in 2020 — it reminded me of how I felt, at sixteen, to join my Florida classmates in a march against gun violence. How invincible we were, strength in numbers, even as we marched against our own deaths. But then, when I watched the documentary The Encampments last month with my best friend Elie (she’s been organizing for Palestinian liberation since the mid-2010s, before it was mainstream), I felt hollow. I understood I was watching another attempt to narrativize a campus crisis before the dust had even cleared. I felt the documentary was struggling at the end, as the music swelled, to reach for a happy ending, even as there was none. Columbia is more militarized and bitch-ass than ever. The genocide goes on.

I also told Elie, “The camera is focused on the student activists, but there are even more students in the background who keep walking and going on with their day.” This had been my experience with the Stanford encampments too; for every student activist who made the headlines, even more didn’t care. Some people don’t have entire novels’ worth of anger roiling in their guts. I hope I am never so burned out to become one of them.

Later Elie and I read a review explaining that The Encampments’ release had been rushed because its protagonist, Mahmoud Khalil, has been seized by ICE. Since then, Mahmoud is still in detention and has missed the birth of his child. Elie and I held hands and cried in the theater. I felt proud of Elie, who has been a principled anti-Zionist Jewish advocate for a very long time, and had a lot of interesting context and insight to share with me from her own history in the movement. I felt grateful to share that moment with her, even if we couldn’t make meaning of it. In a strange way, as we rode the train home together, I was very happy, even though we had just seen the most depressing film of all times. I was with my friend, and we understood one another, if nothing else — how could I have asked for more?

I was aware, again, that we were experiencing that moment in the present tense. We still are. I don’t know how much it is appropriate to panic. I more or less asked this question in an interview with the great Asian American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, who kindly assured me that this is not the worst the world has ever been. (But then again, he was comparing it to slavery.) I have submitted my novel that is a time capsule of the past, and I hope it will make people feel less lonely. If naming the pain is a first step for healing from it. There is a long and very precedented history of collectively healing from trauma. I hope my book becomes a part of it. Even if it is only downhill from here.

me with a celebratory pizza the night I submitted UT. Feeling grateful and loved

For Joysauce, I recently had the privilege of interviewing Misha Sattar, one of my favorite young artists working right now. Misha exemplifies a lot of what excites me about the rising tide of Gen Z artists, among whom I count myself — an insistence on collaboration over competition; a joyful queer belief in our agency as individuals to manifest a better world; a delight and curiosity in blending traditions, imagining intersectionality as a source of inspiration, rather than oppression. Misha is the creative mind behind Chappell Roan, one of the biggest pop culture phenomena right now, and a distinctly, IMO, Gen Z one as well. This felt less like an interview than a journalistic queen out with one of my favorite young artists at work, and I am grateful for my editors at Joysauce for giving it a home 🪩💗🪷🌈💫 For my Substack subscribers, I’m sharing an extended cut of the interview, so we can live a little longer in Misha’s world.

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I feel like I’ve known Misha Sattar forever, even before she steals those exact words from my mouth on our first Zoom call. Misha is known publicly as pop star Chappell Roan’s best friend and creative director, the collaborative mind behind the biggest queer pop phenomenon in America. (“She’s just as much Chappell Roan as I am,” the pop star said of Misha, whose influence can be found in Chappell’s star-making SNL debut, iconic merch, and Pink Pony Club music video.) And yet looking at my computer screen feels like looking into a mirror: Misha is from Nebraska and Texas, and I’m from Florida. (She identifies as a Midwestern princess, although she has strong, loyal roots in the South.) We developed our artistic voices as teenage girls up way too late, way too young, on the Internet. We slide into strangers’ DMs to build life-altering friendships. Misha’s work reminds me of the Ocean Vuong line my friends quote, sometimes jokingly, to each other: “Queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. It made me curious; it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?” By which I mean, Misha is curious and imaginative in combining her South Asian and American roots, building a world that is entirely new.

The world Misha has co-created is exuberant and fantastical and dreamy, deeply camp and unserious, but also has a strong moral core, offering refuge and building power for queer fans who are increasingly under attack. Her inspirations come from drag queens who know how to laugh loud and also raise hell, Bollywood heroines who navigated patriarchy to achieve star power, both soft and strong. Now Misha is wildly successful, but her love remains her craft. She is a hard worker who knows she can make anything happen – she calls it a “living in the moodboard” mindset. For Misha, this is quite literal: when we chat, Misha is sitting in her craft room in her family’s home in Texas, which looks like the inside of her brain, spilling with posters and magazines and art supplies. Here, her mom is prone to interrupting her Zoom calls with gifts of cut fruit. (“They don’t comprehend that I’m working. It looks like I’m playing,” Misha jokes, showing me the tangle of art around her.)

In our conversation, I find that we use the word “fun,” or “love,” in every other sentence. I can’t stop smiling. There is so much that feels uncharted, or existential, about making queer art right now – but there’s also so much fun to be had, so much love to be made, and I want to live in Misha’s world. I have no doubt that she is just getting started.

We’re both from red states with really grim headlines, and yet our artistry was nurtured there. What was it like to come into yourself artistically as a brown girl down South?

MS: I feel like I found a lot of connection through the internet and spaces like Instagram, Tumblr, and We Heart It. The internet is how I was creative throughout it all. I think Florida and Texas are so similar! Luckily Dallas is super, super Desi, my college had so many brown people, but growing up in Nebraska, I feel like if I didn't have the internet and, like, crafting, I don't know if I would have been as creative as I am today.

I love that regional girlies are having huge artistic moments. Florida, we have Doechii. You guys in Texas have had Beyonce, and now we have Chappell Roan. It’s been so cool to see the ingenuity and artistic production coming from the South. Are there particular parts of regional American culture that inspire you?

Yeah! I love the music. I love the graphic design, the fonts, the architecture of old Western buildings. And also fashion: I love all the details on Western clothing. It sometimes feels very similar to Desi clothing, like how intricate the embroidery and everything is. I reference a lot of Western stuff in all my work.

On the subject of Desiness – my friends and I often joke that the two worst things you can do to your Desi parents is be gay and an artist. And yet here we are making gay art. What is that like for you?

My parents don't work in creative fields, but they've always nurtured creativity. I was always going to art class and being creative as a kid, and then eventually, when I graduated, I got a job in design. There was never a moment where I was like, I think I'm gonna tell them I'm gonna do art. I've always known that. I even found my old notebooks from kindergarten. It said: when I grow up, I want to be an artist, and I drew a picture of a painter. I think it would have shocked my parents more if I was like, I think I'm doing pre-med.

That's so funny. You didn't have to “come out” as an artist.

No, yeah. It was just like, Oh, I've just always been making. I've always been crafting.

Do you have other crafters in your family who you look up to?

I learned how to sew when I was in elementary school from my mom. But this December, I went to Kachchh, where my grandparents are from in India, and I did an art retreat where I learned all the local crafts my ancestors could make. Artisanship is something that gets lost when our families emigrate. I reference these [Desi] textiles all the time because I grew up around them, but I never knew how they were made. [In Kachchh] I did a lot of block printing and embroidery classes, which is something I grew up surrounded by, like the pillows in our house are from there. It was so fun to actually meet the people behind them.

What prompted your journey back home to study textiles?

There’s something so intimate about textiles. I wouldn’t want to do it for work; I love to knit and crochet, but when you knit a sweater, you pour days of your life into it, so at the end, I’m like, I would never want to sell this. I would make it as a gift to a friend or family member, but it’s fun to just do it for yourself. I wanted to go to India, it was on my bucket list. And I was like, if I’m going there, I’m obsessed with blockprinting, and I need to take every class, meet every person there.

Something I love about your work is how much permission it gives me to tap into what is queer and joyful about my two cultures that I have traditionally viewed as separate. You have such a recognizable – I guess in writing, we would say, voice. How did you arrive at your current visual voice?

MS: It's just combining different things that you like, that you wouldn't expect, and seeing how they mesh together. I feel like it happened so gradually. Doing riso prints was fun to find colors that resonated with me, because you have to be so intentional about color theory, and that's how I found palettes that really spoke to me. Playing with photo work has been really fun because it's cool to see what you can source and what you can do with it. Like, for example, when I watch Bollywood movies, I am constantly like, I need to rewind that and pull that screen grab, because it would be so cool riso-printed. But I think it all comes down to the colors and the mood. I want my art to be happy and silly, to feel like a little dream land that you can escape into. My art is just not that deep. It's like, very unserious, and I think it's so fun.

It’s incredible to hear how your practice developed, because you’ve been instrumental in creating the visuals in the biggest queer pop culture phenomenon right now. And I know you just said your work isn’t that deep, but that doesn’t feel fully true to me. Your work, to me, is deep and significant and critical in whose voices it centers. We’re obviously in a different era than when Chappell Roan blew up – queer and trans people are increasingly under attack, and I’m curious if you’ve felt this reflected in your artistic practice at all.

I think my art is a reaction to that. I feel like it's like, okay, the world is so crazy, and like, so much is happening, but I just want to spark joy and creativity, and be a little place to escape from that. And also encourage people to be creative. Because I think so much of processing the crazy stuff that's always happening in the world is just sometimes just picking up a pencil, whether you're journaling or writing something down, or just sketching out how you feel. Not a lot of people have that outlet.

That's something I talk about with my friends: that regardless of what's going on in the coming years, we need to know how to ground ourselves, like, touch grass and make things for each other and have physical means of self-soothing. And in this safe world you’ve created that is Chappell Roan, what is it like to be a collaborator?

We have more fun stuff coming up soon! Kayleigh [Chapel] has such a strong vision for all the art. So when we get together, we just bounce off of each other's ideas, and we'll end up with things that are like, really silly and fun and also just really detailed and intricate. I always knew this project was going to blow up. I never doubted that this is gonna be everything, because she’s incredible, there’s no way it won’t be. It felt like the perfect domino effect of all these big moments – it was just like, it’s happening, oh my God! I think it’s really fun to collaborate now because there’s more eyes, more impact. A lot of it is just us crafting and being silly, and then someone will say, We should put that on a t-shirt. But the other half is, we have a big event coming up, and we get to put on a spectacle – what will it be? Kayleigh is so creative and the visuals and campiness is such a big part of the project. The visuals and music go hand-in-hand.

I love the word “spectacle” that you used – because Chappell Roan is a whole aesthetic. An unapologetically queer world that exists on the mainstage, but is also an intensely personal project that knows its audience. What is it like creating for queer Gen Z specifically?

I think one day I just looked around and my room was crazy messy. I think my art is like the inside of my brain. So the things I am consuming and loving just accidentally end up in my art. And I think that’s what all art is about: you are constantly referencing something, even if you don't know you are. Like, there’s no thought that is original. I think everything has been done before, so just reimagining and combining things is so fun. It’s like when you were asking me how to find what’s common between South Asian and Western art – it’s just a happy accident, it reappears in its own way.

I love being unoriginal. As a writer I think of myself as part of a long game of literary telephone, just picking up a bit of what the previous person said and running with it.

You mentioned you source a lot from Pinterest, but we’re living in a time where a lot of people feel oversaturated by the Internet and tired of their screens. How do you co-exist in the online and physical world?

\The internet is a great tool to find resources you’re looking for, but you don’t ever want to create an entire moodboard based on stuff curated by an algorithm. It’s making sure you’re keeping your ideas sharp, going to bookstores, reading books, looking at old magazines, going on weird corners of the internet, looking at archived vintage ads from the twenties, just being intentional with what you’re sourcing to find things less curated. Sometimes companies will make something and you can tell exactly where it came from, what was on their moodboard. When I was in India, I found this guy who has archived all the old Bollywood magazines and movie posters in a warehouse – I got his number, Whatsapp called him, and said, I have to look at your magazines. I got to sort through his archives, some of the last copies of certain things, which I would never get to find on the internet. My friend and I went, sat on the floor, and flipped through five hundred magazines. I thought I needed to be in that warehouse for a week.

What’s on your personal moodboard in 2025?

Oh my gosh, I love this question. I love the font Roboto Mono, I love polka dots, bad drawings, fun frames, old infomercials and postcards, the Victorian hair wreaths, doilies, Polaroids, gingham is so fun, and sparkly gel pens.

On the subject of moodboards: earlier, you mentioned you’d once drawn a prediction of yourself becoming an artist in kindergarten. You work at an astrology app, and you’ve talked in past interviews about feeling guided in the universe. I’m curious what role manifestation plays in your artistic practice.

I have this mindset like, I’m living in the moodboard, if I say things enough it will just happen. I can do whatever I want to do, nothing is ever out of reach. If you really want something to happen, you can make it happen – obviously there’s financial constraints – but generally if you want to learn to do pottery, you can do it!

You’re a big collaborator, and there’s a lot of lesbian or girls-n-gays artists coming up with unique visuals these days. I can’t count how many Brat x Pink Pony Club parties I went to last summer. I’m curious, what is your relationship with being part of a larger cohort of queer artists coming up?

Oh my god, love. I think it’s so fun. It feels like this is such a good time to put out this music because everyone loves it. It doesn’t feel competitive, it feels inspiring. There’s a space where people are leaning into and loving this and different art is getting grouped together, it all complements each other.

Okay, and now some fun questions: if you could be a guest creative director for any artist past or present, who would it be?

Oh my God, Spice Girls. That’s where my username is from – if I was a Spice Girl, I’d be Misha Spice! There’s nothing more fun than pop music.

If you were stuck on an island with only three art supplies, which would you bring?

A glitter gel pen: the silver Pentel SparklePop. A cute stamp, maybe a strawberry. And an ink pen.

What’s on your book and playlist rotation right now?

The Secret Life of Color. The Art of Memory Collecting by my friend Martina Calvi. There’s one season every year where I remember and love Bangerz by Miley Cyrus. And everything by Britney.

Hello friends! Recently, one of my favorite magazines, The Emancipator, gave me the life-altering chance to interview Viet Thanh Nguyen, a man who needs no introduction, on his forthcoming craft & lecture book, To Save and To Destroy. That interview is live here. I have been warned not to meet my heroes (and I have been disappointed a handful of times) but VTN is the real deal: principled, imaginative, generous, an educator at heart. I believe, quite openly, in provenance and I felt that Viet’s answers spoke directly to questions I am grappling with in my own writing practice, as if he could read my mind. I am grateful for intergenerational wisdom, to exist in the same timeline as him, which I hope is the timeline in which we get everything right.

I am still pretty new to the game of interviewing, but even I know that it is a blessing to interview someone as thoughtful as VTN. His is more than a fountain of wisdom — a conversation with VTN is like drinking from the firehose. The whole time I was geeked. We managed to say, according to the transcript generated by my iPhone, 6500 words in our 32-minute interview. For my Substack subscribers, I’m sharing the extended cut, including VTN’s longer answers, plus off-script, nerdy questions about Asian American contemporary writers, genre, and craft.

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MK: A lot of your writing draws from a coming of age experience as a Vietnamese American son and a student — and now you are a professor and father yourself. For the young people who are coming of age now, in historically unprecedented times – with two Trump presidencies, a pandemic, and genocide in Palestine – what advice would you offer us?

VTN: Age is something that makes me realize that when you’re young, the world is open to you. But even if you're seeing all this devastation, it helps to know that these things have happened before. If we look at the history of the United States and what has been done to Black people and indigenous peoples and the kinds of warfare that the US engaged in, it helps to know that we've collectively survived all these kinds of things. That doesn't alleviate the danger that we face today, but it gives us a lesson that the things that we cherish – things like diversity, equity, inclusion – are the results of collective struggles of solidarity that have taken place over centuries. That that gives me hope that collectively we will survive what we're going through right now, if we do what our forebears have done, which is to refuse to be divided, to seek constantly solidarity, to recognize that people have been through this and survived, to recognize their real perils that we faced, but also recognize real possibilities in resistance in community.

MK: This is really great to hear. My friends joke that we were told that, when we grew up, we'd get more conservative, but really we’re just more historicized.

But let’s talk a little bit about the peril right now. There’s a full-fledged war on what you described in the book as “symbolic values of otherness,” whether that’s so-called DEI, up to total first amendment violation of protesters and weaponization of American border security. You’re calling for literature of dissent at a time when dissenting free speech is under attack. What is the role of the student, the scholar and those who would defend freedom of speech in times like these?

It's unfortunate that we turn collectively as a society to students to give us moral leadership! It doesn't make being a young person any easier, but it does make you realize that one of the benefits of being young is a sense of fearlessness. During the 60s, the slogan was: Don't trust anyone over 30. Now that I'm over 30, I think it's up to people like me to prove that we're the exception, hopefully. There's no doubt that, when you're over 30 and you have property and status, your ability to be fearless is greatly reduced. This is one of the ironies where we see that the universities being attacked by the Trump administration are not willing to fight or sue, but there are individual students who are actually suing the Trump administration. We wouldn't see this level of repression unless free speech and advocacy for everything from Palestine to trans rights to queer rights were actually threatening and powerful.

I remember, when I was a student, I was very proud to graduate from UC Berkeley with two majors, three degrees, and four misdemeanors. I was arrested a couple of times in student protests for things that we would now call diversity, equity, inclusion. Back then, it might have seemed trivial that we were protesting for multiculturalism, faculty diversity, and curricular diversity, especially [because] the previous generation had fought against apartheid in South Africa. But the culture wars, as they were called back then, are the same culture wars as today, and they're being weaponized by the Trump administration. There's no way at this point to separate culture wars from actual wars, which is why we're seeing pro-Palestinian advocates being detained and threatened with deportation.

MK: You’ve achieved a great deal of success writing about the legacy of a war that, to many Americans, belongs in the past, and you’ve also written quite troublingly about contemporary racial injustice within the US, but you’re increasingly vocally pointing to colonial violence abroad, as with Palestine. I read an interview in which you discussed MLK’s most radical speech on Vietnam — and pointed out that this speech was erased, and he was assassinated a year later. We are already seeing retaliation against scholars, students, and public figures who speak out. Do you have fear in transgressing some of the oldest presumed boundaries of what is “okay” to say in American liberal discourse?

VTN: My personal war, the Vietnam War, is now regarded as ancient history – but connecting it to other wars, now, that's threatening. You can talk about your civil rights, you can talk about your particular identities, but to connect those to the larger operations of American empire, like our support for Israel, that's connecting the dots in a way that structural power doesn't want you to connect. When I say structural power, I don't mean just the Republican party, but also the Democratic Party. Learning to speak up for Palestine in my own minor way did draw a retribution greater than anything I'd experienced before. I came back from Italy a couple of days ago, and I have to say, sitting in my hotel room in Milan, wondering if I could possibly get back into the country, filled me with a sense of dread that I hadn't experienced in a long time and gave me just the slightest inkling of what it might feel to be someone who has been deported or exiled or in some way separated from their family. Given the work that I do, I do feel trepidation, but I also feel it's beholden on me to speak out, because that burden should not be on the younger people or students. The burden really should be on the people who, like, older people like myself, who have more resources to try to weather any kind of storm that comes our way.

MK: I wanted to return to something you said, about how threatening it is to call our struggles interconnected, linking racism and colonialism. You’ve been writing about colonialism for a long time. Do you see the narrative shifting here? What does it mean when colonialism returns to the foreground?

VTN: I came into political consciousness around Asian American causes of rights, identities, and recognitions, which were framed as an issue of anti-racism, access to the United States, and belonging to this country. Over the last couple of decades, I've gone from that position to being someone who sees all those things as subsidiary to a greater cause of decolonization. We're living in a very long history of struggling to get rid of the structures and legacies of colonization, which took millennia to build up. It's gonna take a long time to take it apart. But if we recognize that the political struggles that we’re engaging in should be around the cause of decolonization, then we can recognize how these seemingly disparate identities and histories, like Palestine, are actually really connected. That is why it's threatening to connect the causes of civil rights and minority empowerment in the United States to the cause of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian advocacy, because it reveals how colonization deploys all these things in order to exploit and separate us.

It’s been empowering for me to make this journey. It makes one realize that wedding oneself to one particular political cause, especially around one's identity, can be limiting in the long run. There are perils to such things as identity politics. The way we inoculate ourselves against that is to constantly understand that we're in a web of relationships. We need to keep up these connections of solidarity, and we need to realize that sometimes we are disempowered and exploited, and other times we might be on the side of power. This is why, again, the issue of Palestine is so unsettling, because many people are being forced to realize they might be disempowered as so-called minorities in the West, and yet they are also a part of an imperial machinery that exploits and oppresses Palestine.

I’m curious what you hope literature will look like in response to current events, conceptually and formally. Literature changed and was written in response to the first Trump presidency. What were some of your takeaways from that literary moment? How do you feel writers should respond differently this second time around?

With the first Trump presidency, we witnessed a moment of optimism that multiculturalism had triumphed. We looked back upon American history and we realized it's not a white Christian nationalist nation, it's also a very diverse nation and we need diverse storytelling. And the apotheosis of that, obviously, was the Obama administration. President Obama was a very likable gentleman, I'm sure, but also someone who authorized enormous numbers of drone strikes, increased the imperial power of the presidency, and deported enormous numbers of people. Multiculturalism and liberalism are invested in the global hegemony of American power, too. And so if there's a shift in the literary landscape, I hope it's a recognition that simply telling diverse stories isn't gonna be enough. Is the price of diversity going to be inclusion in imperialism? I hope contemporary literature – especially literature written by people of color, queer people, trans people, anybody who identifies in some way as minority – can grapple with a fundamental contradiction. What does it mean to want to belong to an empire? That's such an enormous ethical, political, moral aesthetic challenge that I think should be invigorating for contemporary literature.

That makes me really hopeful to hear. That's something that I talk about with my friends all the time, like, we didn't choose this wack-ass country, but we're here now, so how do we engage with it? You suggest in your book that we could try writing with a “capacious grief.” What does that mean?

The book is about my personal relationship to literature, shaped out of my refugee experiences. I like to say that history ripples through us through our emotions, which means that a lot of people are really messed up by these histories of settler colonialism and war and migration. For me, the personal consequences were that I was numb to myself. So for me to be able to even learn how to feel was crucial for me as a human being, as a son, as a father, but also as a writer, because I don't think anyone can be a very good writer if they can't feel. Learning how to feel grief for what my family had been through, for the people we had left behind, was enormously important to me. But what was also important was this idea of capacious grief, this idea that our grief is not singular.

When we've been devastated by history in some way, it's very tempting and normal to feel that we're the only victims in the world, and that what happened to us is absolutely unique, but that's simply not true. What it means to have capacious grief is to understand other people's grief and not just our own, because if we only understand our own grief, we turn ourselves purely into victims, and unfortunately, the line between victim and victimizer is really thin. We saw that after 9/11: the United States felt victimized, got the world's sympathy, and what did the United States do but turn around and just bomb a whole lot of people. Victims who are focused purely on their own grief, but don't have a capacious grief, are actually very dangerous people.

In To Save and to destroy, you call on Asian American artists to work towards creations that trouble, rather than reinforce, national narratives. There is no shortage, at least among people my age, of slander against so-called stinky lunch or mango diasporic poets. Are there any contemporary Asian American writers or artists whose work you find exciting and instructive in this regard?

I recently read Ed Park's Same Bed Different Dreams, which is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It's a skeptic novel about the Korean War, but also the Japanese colonization of Korea and being an Asian American, and it's this fantastic mind-boggling work which I would really recommend. The work of Gina Apostol, someone I refer to as a comrade, a Filipina novelist. Her work is formally experimental grappling with the problem of Spanish colonization and Filipino history and the Filipino diaspora. The works of poets have been really inspiring to me, too. Even though I'm a novelist and nonfiction writer, I read a lot of poetry in order to remind myself that I need to be conscious of the the potential intensity of language, and the fact that poets can do whatever they want on the page and everybody's like, oh, yeah, they're poet, of course they can, but if a prose writer decides to do anything outside the convention, people are like, oh, that's experimental and we don't know what to do with that. There is Mai Der Vang, whose book Yellow Rain is such an incredible indictment of American warfare in Southeast Asia, and Don Mee Choi has an incredible trilogy dealing with the Korean War, Japanese colonization, and American intervention. So that hopefully is a capacious group of people to start with.

I'm curious, because now we're talking a little bit more about genre. How does your fiction practice differ from your work as a memoirist or scholar or critic? How do you understand which tools are required of which project?

My feeling has been that my overall identity is that of a writer. Writing is what's most important, and then I'll figure out the question of genre after that. And the reason I put it that way is because related to the question of being a writer is the question of authenticity and voice. You know, these are very sort of mythical concepts for writers. Part of the the the discipline of being a writer for me has been spending decades just writing as much as I could, not just to learn the technique and the craft, which are important, but to access my interiority, to find out what I really believe in, politically, personally, aesthetically. This is why so far, I haven't had writers' block. If I'm working on a novel and I can't continue, I'll go write something else, like an article. I see a continuity between my nonfiction and my fiction, like A Man of Two Faces is definitely nonfiction, but it incorporates poetry and narrative devices from from fiction. My novels, The Sympathizer and The Committed read as if they could be autobiographies or confessions. I've so appreciated reading writers who seem to have a singular vision. It doesn't matter what I'm reading from them, what genre they're writing in, I know it's them. I know it's their voice, I know it's their style. And that's always been my aspiration personally, to have that kind of singular sense of what I wanna do, because my voice is also my vision of who I am, how I live in the world and how my art connects to the world itself.

I love this decades-long quest you went on to find your voice, which to me sometimes feels like chasing like a shifting goal post. Have you felt your voice change in the past decades, or imagine it will change in the future?

I think it's quite probable that it'll change. In fact, I'm writing a foreword to a reprint of a book that I published in 2002, Race and Resistance, my first book. I would never write this book again, so it's really interesting to reread it and go, oh, my God, that was me 20, 30 years ago. This decades long quest has been a quest to not just find the authentic voice, but to develop the maturity and the artistic capacity to realize ideas that I've known for a long time, but couldn't figure out how to execute. Many of us have these grand visions in our head of the stories we want to tell, the ideas we want to grapple with, but turning that into a story as a whole other problem. You know, s my first book of fiction, The Refugees, that was the best I could do. A lot of people like that book, but those short stories were the best I could do over my 20s and 30s. I wanted to do more, but I couldn't. I had to write The Refugees before I could write The Sympathizer, which is a more formally ambitious and provocative novel. Some people like it less than The Refugees, so probably it’s a matter of taste, but I think the point is that hopefully we grow as human beings, but then we also grow as writers.

Writing doesn't become easier, and I think the reason is because our ambitions grow as our capacity grows. And if we talk about it at the personal level, as you grow older, hopefully, you grow wiser. And when you grow wiser, your sense of your own problems, and the world's problems, changes as well. I don't think I could have written The Sympathizer, the book I'm still best known for. If I hadn't grown as a person. The Sympathizer changed me as a human being, and the sequel to it, The Committed is quite different, because as I wrote The Sympathizer, I realized things about myself that I didn't quite know. Being a writer is is, again, not only about the art and the craft, it's also grappling with oneself.

I cannot tell you how heartening that is to hear. Like, I always thought that growing as a writer simply meant narrowing the gap between your vision and your talent, but the gag is that both just keep growing larger.

To end with a more hopeful question: You write a lot about otherness. The corollary to that is belonging, which, as you urge, can come from building community in expansive and unexpected ways. What are the places that you have found belonging in your life, especially recently? Are there spaces where you feel you have successfully created belonging across differences?

You know, when October 7th happened, it was not a political cause I had been very active with before. There was some controversy around the things I said, certain invitations were rescinded and all that. But it felt to me that as much as I might have lost in that respect, some friends or allies or some opportunities, a whole other world opened up as well, a different kind of belonging, with people committed not just to Palestine, but to greater anti-colonialism. And that to me was such a beautiful trade off. I would do it again without hesitation. Becoming more vocal on the Palestinian cause helped me grow as a writer and as a thinker. But to end on a very happy note, and and possibly a sentimental note, I am a father. I don’t think everyone should be a parent, but I became a father, and so far my kids seem to be pretty happy with me. I have discovered all kinds of emotional depths to myself, a greater capacity for grief because I have a greater capacity for love as well. And if I've never felt completely at home in the United States, I know I feel completely at home with my family. And, you know, we should all have that opportunity to form our own kin, and our own communities. And that's the greatest belonging that we can form, I think. We should be taking care of each other, the people that we’re closest to.

That reminds me: as someone who went to college recently, during the pandemic, the encampments were the first time that I felt that sense of dynamic community that I thought college was all about. It's sad that those were the conditions under which kinship was fostered again, but also beautiful. Thank you, thank you so much for talking to me.

Hello friends!

Some of you know that I have been hard at work on a novel for some time. I’ve referred to it as my Big Girl Book, the story I wrote because I lived through something — we all did — and it turned out afterwards that I had a lot to say. Zora Neale Hurston said it best: there are years that ask questions, and years that answer. My literary novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES, was born of one of the most bewildering years of my life, 2020, and is a long, inconclusive answer to questions I’ve had about how to grow up and take ownership of a world that is actively burning down around you.

The resulting book is like The Idiot meets the lesbian masterdoc meets the end of the world. It is a novel about queer Gen Z identity, desire in a post-MeToo world, the revelatory power of the Homoerotic Female Friendship, weird attachment styles with your mother, whether we can overcome our historical circumstances, and what we owe each other when shit hits the fan. I am so grateful and proud to share that UNPRECEDENTED TIMES has found a home at Henry Holt and will be yours in the summer of 2026!

What it’s about: UNPRECEDENTED TIMES follows eighteen-year-old Rishi Kumar, who arrives at Stanford with the vague goal of living a life worth writing about. With the dual recklessness of a budding writer and a homosexual, she dives head-first into first loves, complex female friendships, and literature classes, seeking to conquer the amorphous, amoral project of adulthood in a world that might collapse before she’s gotten a chance to change it. But no sooner has Rishi’s own world ignited than the rest of the world is shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Stanford closes its campus, prematurely ending a chapter of Rishi’s life — these are unprecedented times, authority figures keep announcing. Cast unexpectedly into the real world, Rishi moves into a farm commune with her college classmates, desperate to salvage the original plot of her story. Faced instead by a year of unbridled joy and unexpected violence, Rishi freestyles her way through a painful, tender coming-of-age journey.

oops!

Getting to write a novel is the greatest gift on earth, but getting to publish it is something else entirely. I know I have been lucky once already, with All the Yellow Suns, but this feels different — not just because this is my first novel for adults, or because I wrote it as an adult, but because I wrote it on purpose. When I wrote ATYS at nineteen, my main goal was to have fun. I did it because it was 2020 and I was stuck in my childhood bedroom and I wanted to write so I wouldn’t lose my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me then that the book would mean something to other people, would offer insight or tenderness or blow kisses on behalf of queer people in Florida. I sort of had to adopt all these lofty goals last-minute when it was time to promote the book. Pretend I’d been so serious all along.

(Never not thinking about this one-word review of ATYS).

But with UT, I was locked in. I had read many more books and studied the lives of writers to the point that I could imagine myself as one. I actually submitted it as my honors thesis at Stanford in 2024, for which I was required to create a bibliography of the works it conversed with, all the books that had subtly or massively made an impression on me. I realized that what happened, between ATYS and UT, is that I had become aware of the context in which I existed, the literary and political trends that were shaping the world around me, and with UT I had many artistic goals of my own, and made continual and conscious choices to execute them. Here were some of my goals:

• to write a good Gen Z novel (I assume there will one day be one because there is such a thing as a “millennial novel,” supposedly marked by alienation, detachment, self-awareness). I have observed quietly as people my age came into consciousness, developed our capacity for great activism and great evil, forged by the twin hellfires of the Internet and pandemic. When you are told repeatedly you are going to save the world, but then it shuts down before you’ve had a chance to change it, and meanwhile everyone is fighting all the time, it results in a particular, earnest aesthetic that I’ve noticed most readily on TikTok. I wanted to create a literary voice that feels quintessentially Gen Z, writing the way my friends think and talk. (Emotional excess, pathological over-sharing, characters so anxious to connect with others that they leave claw marks behind.) I’m curious about how hyper-awareness of political injustice impacts my characters’ ability to form relationships. My protagonists are earnest, proud women raised by the post-#MeToo internet, trying to navigate a sexual terrain they know is not built for them, aware of histories of injustice that impact their abilities to connect. To what extent can Gen Z characters, at a malleable point in their lives, alter generational circumstances and imagine alternate futures?

• to make sense of a very confusing, painful year of my life and that of my friends’; to write a time capsule of a historical, political, and personal moment that challenged me, an age where we could’ve become anyone at all

• to contribute thoughtfully to genres of fiction I adore, specifically the campus novel, but also the sad girl novel and Asian American / South Asian diasporic novel. UT is an accumulation and reimagination of many of the genres that shaped me, which I have great love for and also quibbles with. I will reflect more on these soon.

• to write an overpowering first-person narrator whom the reader can see through and around, disagree with, pity, but hopefully also root for

• to challenge the female coming-of-age genre, which skews straight and white, raising the stakes to reflect the literary sensibilities of queer Gen-Z readers. I started writing this novel shortly after my Sally Rooney diss went viral and I realized a lot of people were hungry for new stories.

• to explore the power of self-narrativizing for queer women of color: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.

Anyway, I had all these goals. I don’t know if I achieved them — I guess, in 2026, you will tell me. Mostly I followed my own instinct and did what was fun for me. I like finding language for specific feelings that visit my heart. Right now, the feeling I write from most readily is bewilderment, because I am still very early in my life, and I don’t know that much about the world. ATYS was a book born out of 2016, the year of the first Trump election, the summer I came out and also when 49 people were murdered in a gay nightclub in my hometown. It is a coming-of-rage novel about being a teenager, searching for ways of living in your new skin, and realizing you are totally at odds with the world around you. And UT is my 2020 book. (At this rate if I am writing novels about being existentially confused during election years, maybe another one is due soon?)

I am very, very grateful to have sold this book. I am excited to transition from YA to literary fiction, the genre I read and love most. (At first I called it my “adult novel,” but then people said it sounded like I’d written porn, so I stopped. Though no shade to porn — this book has its share of sex scenes. One very nice rejection for this book noted that I am a “tender and perceptive” writer about sex!!) Full disclosure: I am still learning what it means to carry myself as a serious writer of literary fiction. I feel a large gulf between myself and the literary writers I admire, mostly because I am twenty-three and haven’t really been around the block yet, but I have eighteen months to start acting like it. The day I sold the book, my dear friend V, who is also an emerging artist — an actor — looked at me very seriously and said: “In 2025, you start running up cringe mountain. No excuses.” By this he meant, this is the year I begin investing in myself. Sharing my work. Telling people, hey, I have a book! I hate self-promotion, I hate whatever Industrial Complex it’s called when young female novelists market their book and their personas as a joint, shiny “it-girl” package that blurs the writer and character, I hate capitalism, whatever. But I also want this book to reach people who’ll like it, and to have the opportunity to write books for the rest of my life. I don’t really have a backup plan.

I repeat this to myself often: When I leap, a net appears. This book is both the leap and the net.

If you want to support me, I would be grateful if you reshared the announcement post, as widely as possible, so that everyone who’s ever wronged me will find out about it and confront the fact that I’m balling right now. Just kidding — so that this book reaches more queer women, survivors, oldest daughters, the girls for whom I wrote this book. Preorder links will come much later. Right now I am emailing the manuscript to my trusted friends with very specific instructions (mark out anything that doesn’t bang) — thankfully I still have a few months to salvage it. I am hard at work to bring you the very best book possible. I hope you will feel that when you read it.

Thank you for reading this, and more soon!

2024 was the biggest-brained year of my life. This year I wrote a thesis, finished writing my big girl literary novel about being a college freshman in 2020, and taught a class about South Asian American pop culture at Stanford. Whenever I embark on a new project, I create a syllabus of bangers in that genre. I read up and take notes like I am studying for a test. All year long I prepared long lists of books and articles, like visionboards, to shape my thinking on the topics I was working with — gender, caste, modernity, love, identity. I worked through them with a tiny library pencil in my hand, leaving notes to myself, sometimes just a heart, sometimes, WOW. 2024 was a patient year of running up that hill, setting my own gold standards of books I admired, slowly narrowing the gap between my skill level and vision to produce the caliber of writing I wanted to read.

Literature, to me, is like getting to peek at another person’s answers to a big, existential test. I read because I am nosy, I want to know how other people have answered the questions that vex me in daily life: how can I be a good friend, honor my parents, cultivate love, persist despite horrors, become more grateful and generous? This year, I read an interview by James Baldwin, fifty years after it appeared in 1963’s Life Magazine: “You think that your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” (Oh shit!) Baldwin cites two literary greats, Dostoevsky and Dickens, for helping him understand that “the things that tormented [him] most were the very things that connected [him] with all the people who were alive.” I found Baldwin’s quote moving, sobering, and true; in 2024 I have been grateful and humbled to read literature, often by South Asian and Black women, that has given me language and context for my experiences.

I was very sad when I lost my Stanford library access in June. I am grateful to now live a short walk away from the Brooklyn Public Library, which has not one but two copies of All the Yellow Suns, which my parents discovered when they came to visit me in my new apartment. (I feel funny to think that two small pieces of my heart reside half a mile down Eastern Parkway from me, and are also scattered all over the world.) My other main source of intellectual discourse is TikTok — the smartest girls alive are yapping straight-to-camera — but it’s not luxurious; there’s a comments section, context is collapsed. I think reading is an act of humility: it is a long, one-sided conversation with a person you can’t interrupt, and yet my favorite literature is well-researched and referential, chatting excitedly with all the other books that shaped it. I love Works Cited pages, understanding references, treating literature as a group project, realizing how many ideas I thought were originally mine actually arrived to me through a long game of literary telephone.

Here are ten of the books I read this year that did these things I loved — served as a blueprint and reference for my own work, connected me with all the people who are alive, waved hello from a different world. In no particular order:

The Weave of My Life by Urmila Pawar

My Stanford Honors thesis focused on environmental aesthetics and politics in autobiographies by Dalit women, and my favorite book I wrote about by far is Urmila Pawar’s. Pawar is a Marathi language writer and activist — roles she described as “two sides of the same coin,” whose memoir Aaydan, translated from Marathi as The Weave of My Life, narrates her coming-of-consciousness as a Dalit girl, then woman, wife, mother, and activist, alongside her family and community. The Weave of My Life is a tender, earnest portrait of Pawar’s life, from her childhood spent in a rural village in the Konkan region, to her coming of age as a writer amid soul-crushing casteism. The most comparable memoir I’ve read is Audre Lorde’s Zami: it’s inquisitive about the world, hopeful and humanistic, often laugh-out-loud funny, tender towards the author’s past self, staggering in its insights about patriarchy and caste. I spent hours with this book, can quote passages by memory, and think it deserves more hype.

I chose to write my thesis about Dalit feminist environmentalisms because I found it was difficult to think about, let alone articulate or agitate against, the impending climate catastrophe without a sense of crippling doom. South Asia is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to the impacts of global warming, compounded by the systemic environmental injustices wrought by colonialism, capitalism, and casteism. Some people think that our hope lies in narrative and cultural change, shifting the way we talk and think about climate change. The great South Asian novelist Amitav Ghosh, for example, in his call-to-action The Great Derangement, laments that “imaginative failure” of contemporary literature, which lacks narratives of the collective, and leaves existential or apocalyptic threats outside of ‘realist’ world-building. We need narratives, he insists, that lean into the “uncanny,” the “terrifying,” and the “improbable” nature of cataclysmic events.

And yet I can’t help but insist these narratives already exist. These terrible realities of a future apocalypse that the West must slowly wrap our minds and hearts around area already realities for Black, Indigenous, and Dalit women across the world, who have survived enslavement, mass genocide, dehumanization and degradation across generations; for them, the apocalypse has already arrived. I am grateful to Dalit women for their unflinching analysis of society, a diagnosis of its patterns of domination and exploitation that implicate all of us, even me, writing a thousand miles away from rural India in my senior dorm room in California.

In her memoir, Pawar writes that, upon the publication of her short story “Kavach,” that her work was assigned in a B.A. program at the University of Mumbai. She notes: “I had studied so many authors’ books while doing my B.A. And M.A., and written critically on them, saying, “according to the author,” and so on, and therefore, I was quite proud that students would be learning and writing about me in the same way, referring to me as the author!” I hope she would feel happy with the ways I read and wrote about her work.

Karukku by Bama

Bama’s was another other memoir I spent a lot of time with for my thesis. Bama (1958-) is a Tamil Dalit writer whose debut memoir Karukku focuses on her village childhood and a series of lost, crushing years searching for belonging as a nun. (Bama’s religious narrative echoes that of many Dalits who converted to Christianity in an attempt to escape caste discrimination.) I’ve never read a book like Karukku: fragmented, non-linear, circling, searching. It also has a gripping sense of place. I realized that when Dalit women write their memoirs, they also write a map. Theirs are not maps in a traditional sense, with delineated boundaries, hierarchies, and claims to ownership; rather, they map out the life-worlds of Dalit communities. Bama’s Karukku, credited as the first major Tamil work of Dalit autobiography, takes its name from the “saw-edged palmyra” plants that Bama recalls from her childhood village. Karukku offers a cartography of Dalit consciousness that encompasses the fields, villages, convents, and other key sites of Bama’s life. Karukku claims witness to sites of exclusion and oppression, as well as sites of survival and cultural formation. It depicts an earth, fertilized by the blood and sweat of generations of exploited Dalit laborers, from which sprouts a global movement for liberation. It articulates an environment where a disenfranchised, generationally landless Dalit girl can claim kinship with the local lakes, or cactus plants, with the intimacy of an old friend.

I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader

I worship at the altar of Zora Neale Hurston, a complex and certifiably insane fellow Florida woman who writes about love, femininity, and desire with total courage and conviction. I first fell in love with Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, about a free-loving Florida girl, the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, who yearns to become a “delegate to the big ‘ssociation of Life” and falls in love not one, not two, but three times, in pursuit of total pleasure and self-fulfillment. (As Charli XCX would say: again and again!) Although Hurston was writing about young Black women finding their way in the aftermath of slavery, I’ve nonetheless felt a deep kinship with her characters in my own journey of becoming a delegate. I was so thrilled to devour this collection of her works and writings, edited by Alice Walker, that helped me understand Zora as a person, how her lovers and politics shaped her writing, how she honored her Southern roots while building a new life telling stories about and on behalf of her community in New York — sometimes I wake up and thank God that I’ve never had to have an original experience.

All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

In All That She Carried, the historian Tiya Miles traces the journey of Ashley, an enslaved woman who was sold away from her daughter Rose, but left Rose a sack as an act of love and defiance. Her great-great-granddaughter Ruth treasured that sack, but it ended up getting lost and circulating through flea markets before finally going to a museum, where Miles wrote a book about it. This book made me feel hopeful and grateful in the way that I have only felt when confronted by massive gifts of nature: mountains, the ocean. Maybe because this book feels monumental in its insistence on maternal love and its power.

All that She Carried is a courageous effort to honor the bravery and love of Ashley and her descendants, even though they were buried in the historical record and never got the opportunity to express themselves in something more durable than a sack. I was very impressed by Miles’ creative methodology, structuring each chapter around a small detail from Ashley’s sack — the cloth it was made of; the hair and handful of pecan nuts she left inside — to find more details about Ashley’s lived experiences. The research was so creative that I was at times just awed, such as by the effort it took for Miles to comb through plantation and sale records to find an Ashley and Rose that overlapped. Sometimes, where historical materials weren’t available, Miles used her own empathy and imagination to supplement, extrapolating based on what she knew about Ashley’s material circumstances. There is so much creativity and resourcefulness in how all of the Black women storytellers in this piece — Tiya Miles, but also Ruth and Ashley — worked against the odds to have the story told.

The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On by Franny Choi

Asian American literature gets a lot of slander; I’ve participated in it. I’m continually braced for self-serving melodrama, trauma-dumping, tokenizing histories of pain that you know vaguely but perhaps were insulated from yourself. Too many Asian American writers can be ahistorical — we feel existentially lonely, ungrounded, and act as if we are giving birth to ourselves, simply because there is no immediate representation for us in US culture. It is easy to forget that, despite our loneliness, we are literally part of the global majority, and our identities are changing, not static — we could really become anybody at all. Franny Choi’s poetry collection makes me inspired of what Asian American literature can become: not losing sight of the coconut tree for the context, thinking hopefully about how we can be agents of change, building solidarity, weathering apocalypses together. This is a collection born out of 2020, of looking inwards and to the past, situating Asian America in a global racial landscape that exists alongside Blackness and other people of color. It moves gently yet confidently between personal and global scales of change, pain, and havoc. Her collection moves through atrocities of past wars that her ancestors experienced directly — World War II, the abuse of comfort women — as well as atrocities that in some way, her American identity depends on, such as slavery and colonialism, working its way to present-day crises like the pandemic. I turned to this collection often for wisdom and guidance as I worked on my own 2020 project, my own attempt of making sense of the violent times we live in, and whether we can stand together when shit hits the fan.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

I read Stay True during my senior spring at Stanford. Hua Hsu’s memoir of a college friendship is one of the relatable novels I have read about friendships in your late teens, how intense and precarious they can be. The author describes a campus ecosystem of aspiring young Asian American artists that — although taking place at Berkeley in the ‘80’s — felt weirdly similar to my own at Stanford. What struck me about Stay True, in addition to its thoughtful insights on friendship, grief, identity, and loss, was the retrospective tone of its narrator. I have not read many novels about college, and even those that I have are coming-of-age journeys whose narrations hew closely to the perspectives of their young protagonists, breathless and in-the-moment, with enormous stakes but little perspective. I love these novels because I relate to them; they give language to my anxieties. But rarely do I read about college from someone who has survived it. The grown-up Hua writes lovingly about his college self, his dreams and aspirations, how pretentious he used to be, how little he knew. He writes with the benefit of years of growth and hindsight, of what it felt like to be my age, to fall in love for the first time. One passage that stood out to me was about a college person’s sense of time:

“At that age, time moves slow. You're eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.”

I thought about this often as I closed a chapter of my life, finished a novel about a college friendship of my own. It made me aware of my power to process and fit things into their larger context, all of these disparate and accumulative and seemingly life-altering experiences I had in college, until finally it all made sense. I felt affirmed in my decision to write a time capsule of a specific moment in my life — my freshman year, 2020 — something that felt honest, like a hug for who I used to be.

My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar

I spent a lot of this year thinking about history, rooting myself in a lineage of South Asian writers who write about the stories of selves and societies, interweaving the personal and political. I find these books are an antidote to the feeling of unprecedented-ness that Baldwin describes, the sense of helplessness of being in your early twenties, coming of age in a world that feels like it is failing before you’ve had a chance to really live in it. I adored Amitava Kumar’s MY BELOVED LIFE, a thick, ambitious novel following a man’s entire life, from birth to death, in postcolonial India, and also the life of his daughter who immigrates to America. I found it refreshing that in this multigenerational, transcontinental story, the center of gravity doesn’t inevitably anchor in America. I was braced to anticipate certain conventions of the immigrant fiction genre, such as an obsession with one’s place in America and crises of identity, but this book doesn’t do any of that. America is just backdrop; India is the main character.

MY BELOVED LIFE is about histories of the self and society in India, interweaving personal and national narratives. The father, Jadu, himself is a historian who lives self-consciously through a ton of historic events, including being arrested during Emergency. When I described the plot to my own father, he said, This book sounds like Forrest Gump, but in the body of an Indian dad. This book does a LOT: it follows Jadu’s trajectory from village poverty to college boyhood to becoming a global citizen and scholar to even becoming a Hindu nationalist in his old age. His daughter, Jugnu, gets a full backstory in India before she begins her new life as a journalist in America, going on to cover women’s issues in India. In addition to crossing so many historical events off the checklist, and referencing everyone from Tagore to Mississippi Masala, the author addresses a LOT of social issues — caste, gender, class, corruption, diaspora tensions, racism and interracial love in the US. It is really ambitious but pulled off well.

It often felt, delightfully, like two different novels were combined: Jadu’s story is written in a reserved third person that struck me as very classically Indian Dad, whereas Jugnu’s is in a candid first person that is more familiar to contemporary American fiction. I love when fiction allows us to reprocess the same events from different characters’ perspectives at different points. The final sequence, set in the present day, made me cry, interweaving George Floyd’s murder with the Covid surge in India with climate change. I never felt more connected to my Indian literary heritage as I did reading this book.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

If it is not obvious by now, I love stories about real people’s lives, their self-making and world-building amid incredible and terrible historical circumstances, the way the past bleeds into the present, and nobody is a master of individual and national histories quite like Isabel Wilkerson. Her second book, CASTE, was foundational in how I think about my own power and identity, but I was grateful to read her first book for an African American history class in college. THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS is a lovingly-researched work of nonfiction that reads like a novel, following the journeys of three different, complex Black characters as they left the South in search of a new life. It’s a grand and refreshing addition to a beloved narrative of migrants and strivers building a world in America, yet incredibly sobering in its assessment of how slavery continues to haunt us. One of the characters profiled in the novel flees white supremacist violence in Central Florida, where I am from, although we never learned this history in school. I proudly write books about Florida, but there is no way to write about the South without being in constant conversation with and gratitude and awe towards the Black Southerners who built, (and sometimes left but), continue to shape the place. As I grow up as a writer and thinker, I want to become like Isabel Wilkerson, with her generosity, thoughtfulness, commitment to human connection across place and time.

Near the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

Every handful of years, like clockwork, I read a book that makes me want to write a book, and this is the newest one. NEAR THE WILD HEART expanded my imagination of how we can use language to distill particular, feminine, and minor feelings like alienation, desire, and dissatisfaction. The plot is spare — it’s just about a weird and unhappy girl who grows up and is constantly told she is weird (by her family, husband etc — they call her cold and compare her to a viper). She just vibes her way in and out of an unhappy marriage. The inscrutable, incessant stream of consciousness technique reminded me of the Virginia Woolf I read in college. With the meandering prose that switches randomly between 1st and 3rd person, there were many moments I felt lost in the sauce, but also so many crystal-clear lines I wanted to write down that felt like revelations. So many lines that I could imagine giving birth to a book of their own. I thought a lot about the fact that Clarice wrote this novel at 23, my age, and I felt a long-distance kinship with her in our shared decisions to write books that focus on a single girl’s inner life. I wondered whether she also felt like she was faking an assurance that she didn’t have in real life, how it felt to write so confidently about one woman’s life, with the conviction that her interior narration is interesting enough to steal the show.

All Fours by Miranda July

ALL FOURS is a weird horny novel about a 45 year old artist entering menopause and having a new sexual awakening. I am always suspicious of widely-lauded books by white women, and I read and gratefully agree with critiques of the book’s fatphobic register and weird colonial undertones. Nonetheless, on first reading, I was thoroughly inspired: the narrator does insane stuff and at no point in the novel did I feel like I could tell what (or who) she was going to do next. As someone who often reads novels about women in their twenties, it was terrifying and bracing to look a little further down the line and see that the experience of constant, destabilizing queer desire doesn’t just end once you’re happily married and have kids. I found the depictions of 21st century family building (open marriage, a child who is raised with they/them pronouns) to be super fascinating. I read ALL FOURS during my graduation backpacking trip through Mexico, where I met a lot of women in their late twenties and thirties who demonstrated a really anarchic, polyamorous view towards love. This free-handedness initially terrified me as someone who was very recently a Baby Gay, but I am now warming up to (four months into the Brooklyn queer scene, LOL) — especially since I’ve seen it so tenderly explored and passionately defended by this book and others. The only woman in her forties I know, besides some of my professors from college, is my mom and her friends. It was only very recently that I realized that my mom has continued to grow and change in her forties and you don’t become some static being when you become a mom, or whatever. Good to know that being a woman is going to be a ride probably until I die.

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I am very grateful to be where I am right now. The finish line is in sight. All my life I have viewed the future in steady, four-year-long increments — high school, college — but here is where the sidewalk ends, and in two months, I could become anybody at all. It’s senior spring, baby! Stanford in the spring is so lovely that it makes me want to weep. The sun is so gentle that I can’t imagine anyone who could deserve it, aside from little children. On top of everything the California poppies open like skirts and wildflowers grow out of every curb. This spring I have downloaded this plant identification app, Seek, to learn the names of the wildflowers around me. Now when I see the stalks of baby blue eyes or arroyo lupine, I feel like I am being winked at by a friend.

My last senior spring was in 2019, my final year of high school. I was eighteen and full of melancholy and rage. (I feel a genuine need to apologize to anybody who knew me then!) I felt that I had served my time, eighteen years in Central Florida (a place I have now grown to love), in a public high school of four thousand where nobody was out as gay, where I often felt like the designated political loud-mouth in my classes, and where I was determined, by any means necessary, to never, ever peak. I could not wait to go to college, somewhere far way. I could not wait to unfollow everybody on Instagram. That semester I was barely in school. Already my heart was half out the door. Almost every other week I took a plane: to walk at the Women’s March, where I was a teen organizer, to lobby with other youth gun violence activists, to perform at a youth arts summit, to visit colleges, and, most memorably, to take a picture with the president. I made a lot of my still-closest friends in these programs for weird, high-achieving, extra-ass seniors. I didn’t get to go to prom, but I didn’t feel super sorry about it. I was leaving Florida, and I thought I was never coming back.

The next spring, of course, I was back in my childhood bedroom, like a reverse fairy-tale. Two thirds into freshman year, all of my friends were sent home unexpectedly by what became The Pandemic, with no warning to pack up our clothes, fully expecting to return after spring break. I remember that I had just — just! — mutually confirmed a crush with someone, and I was about to act on it, just in time for spring cuffing season, and it felt like the biggest cock-block from the universe. I longed for nothing more than to return to campus. What I daydreamed of, for those lonely spring months of the pandemic, was the life I am living now: wandering campus with my friends in the warmth. Packing, arm-to-arm, into auditoriums, to see famous people tell us from podiums that we can be anything we want to be. Going to literature seminars with the same rotating cast of (let’s face it, queer) classmates. Running into friends in the dining hall. Watching people in the library. I was missing a life I barely knew, but had already taken for granted. I understood then that I could never take such things for granted again.

Like I said, I am very grateful for where I am now. I was always aware of what a privilege it is to attend Stanford (what’s more, for the express purpose of reading books and hitting on girls!) but the pandemic made me extra-grateful for my college experience. College is such an unbelievably good place for girls like me. I get why so many children’s novels take place in boarding schools, in weird little castles and summer camps for troubled kids. I have learned so much from this bizarre, ludicrously well-endowed institution. So much that I could write a novel about it (and lowkey I will!) For four years my entire life existed inside Campus Drive, my heart belonged to the quirky and smart (and occasionally war criminal-esque) people who live here. It felt like the center of the universe. I couldn’t imagine life outside of it.

I haven’t felt that way this year, though. This senior year I have felt, just like last time, half-out, adrift. Part of this is because I am graduating a year later than planned, at 23 instead of 22. Like hundreds of other kids in my class, I took a gap year for the pandemic. The circumstances of the gap year were less-than-ideal, but it ended up having some positive outcomes for me, some of them in roundabout ways. The first was that it taught me, in a trial-by-fire sort of way (which is how most life lessons are taught, I am gathering) to feel comfortable standing on the only support system I am guaranteed on this earth, which is my own two feet (though sometimes these are shaky, too.) What I mean is that it taught me how to exist as a person outside of school (which provides a lot of built-in personhood), and on top of that, in so-called ‘unprecedented times,’ outside of any historical context that felt recognizable to me. It sounds ridiculous to say it aloud — like, millions of people on this earth don’t go to college, and have a full life and identity outside of a traditional educational path. But still! When everything I took for granted fell apart in a single spring — the linear progression of my life, a unified ‘college’ ‘experience,’ whatever that means, the protection of institutions that give you community and belonging and purpose in your life every day — I realized that, wow, most adults are freestyling it. I learned I could do it, when the time comes.

Another reason I have felt half-out of school is because, last summer, I decided to test-drive adulthood by moving, on my own and without a plan, to New York. That summer (amid a booklaunch and heartbreak) I got to hang out with lots of women in their late twenties and early thirties, many of whom are queer women I’d admired forever, who were kind enough to answer my fan-girl DMs, and who have given me a model for what my adult life could look like. How to find belonging as an artist, activist, community member. All my life I have looked for examples of how to exist, and as a Gen Z person I am grateful for the half-generation of millennials (as much as we like to shit on them) who took that leap before us, thanks to whom I can see a path ahead.

But right now, I am still in school, at least for another seven weeks. Last weekend my mom came to visit me on campus. We ended up both sleeping in my Twin XL bed because neither of us could keep the air mattress from deflating. It was nice. My mom looks very youthful and whenever she asked people to take our photo in the tourist-y parts of campus, like the Quad and the Oval, they assumed we were friends or sisters. That made me feel good about, at least, the genetic portion of my post-grad prospects. The whole time, my mother was talking about the last time the two of us came to campus, five Aprils ago, when I was deciding where to go to college. I had never thought seriously about Stanford and only applied because of a fee waiver. I was busy dreaming of chunky sweaters, brick buildings, and freezing my ass off in New England. But when I got in, my mom said we could do a mother-daughter trip for the visit weekend. I complained about the cross-country flight. I complained some more when my mom made me visit a million Bay Area aunties who promised to be my “local guardians” when I enrolled. A fun fact is that when my mother immigrated at 23 — which is incidentally my age — she came to the Bay. To her, it must have felt like coming home.

I am thinking about visit weekend because preparations are underway for it right now, when I look outside my dorm window. It happens, like clockwork, on the last week of every April. One of my friends remarked today that Stanford intentionally hosts their visit weekend two days before the decision deadline, so that you don’t have time to change your mind. People joke that Stanford conspires with Bill Gates to get the weather so perfect, the sky so blue. That was what charmed me when I visited: the grass, the warmth. The kids lounging in fountains, seeming genuinely at peace. Already I suspected that I had a mental predisposition for anxiety, and I thought, if I am going to be anxious anywhere, it might as well be under a motherfucking palm tree. I made a pros-and-cons list of coming to Stanford, the farthest school from home, the school known least for its humanities, the lazy heat and leisurely bicyclists the opposite of New England, whose schools had given me a bad feeling when I visited, and somehow I decided to go. I think it was the right choice for me. But of course I can’t know that for sure.

I am comparing this senior spring to my last one because it’s my only point of reference. But I have a lot of different, wonderful stuff in my life that I couldn’t have dreamed of then. A lot of things that I already know I will miss. For example, I am writing my second Big Girl novel (a campus novel hehe), which I am going to submit as my senior arts thesis. I know how special it is to write in campus coffee shops, to build an internal world that mirrors the world around me. I am also writing a second senior thesis, which is a literary analysis about Dalit women’s autobiographies, because I have always loved reading as much as I loved writing, and I realized in undergrad you could do that professionally, too. (I have been told that if you complete your undergrad thesis and you don’t hate it, you might be destined / doomed to go to grad school. I think I want to be a literary academic someday.) I am also teaching an Asian American Studies course I designed as an opportunity to nerd out about South Asian American pop culture, diasporic identity, and power structures. To top off the senior vibes, this year I am an RA and get to keep bowls of candy and condoms outside my door. I am 95% recovered from my first breakup. I am feeling quite competent and good.

I just finished reading Stay True by Hua Hsu, which is one of the most relatable novels I have read about college friendships, how intense and precarious they can be. The author describes a campus ecosystem of aspiring young Asian American artists that — although taking place at Berkeley in the ‘80’s — felt weirdly similar to my own. It is probably going to be one of my top reads of the year.

What struck me about Stay True, in addition to its thoughtful insights on friendship, grief, identity, and loss, was the retrospective tone of its narrator. I have not read many novels about college, and even those that I have are coming-of-age journeys whose narrations hew closely to the perspectives of their young protagonists, breathless and in-the-moment, with enormous stakes but little perspective. I love these novels because I relate to them; they give language to my anxieties. But rarely do I read about college from someone who has survived it. The grown-up Hua writes lovingly about his college self, his dreams and aspirations, how pretentious he used to be, how little he knew. He writes with the benefit of years of growth and hindsight, of what it felt like to be my age, to fall in love for the first time: One passage that stood out to me was about a college person’s sense of time:

“At that age, time moves slow. You're eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.”

It was in moments like these that I felt read for filth by Hua Hsu! How did he remember what college used to feel like? How did he put it into words? (It helped, I think, that he had a whole archive of college diaries, letters, and writing projects to draw from.) It occurred to me, then, that one day this era of my life will be in the rearview mirror, and I will look back on it and be able to talk about it like he does: tender, knowing, with both ridicule and empathy for his younger self. I will process and fit things into their larger context, all of these disparate and accumulative and seemingly life-altering experiences I have had in college, and finally it will all make sense. I felt this way, on a much smaller scale, when writing All the Yellow Suns, which, while not a memoir, depicts a high school experience similar to mine. With ATYS, which I wrote during the pandemic, I felt like I was finally able to answer the questions that plagued me at age 16 (is it okay to be gay? Will it ever be okay with my parents?) Like I had made a time capsule of a specific moment in my life, something that felt honest, like a hug for who I used to be. I got what I needed out of writing it, which was understanding, and by publishing it I hoped it could be useful for somebody else, too.

All this is to say: I am grateful to Hua Hsu for writing the literary companion to my senior spring, giving me a sense of closure and shifting perspectives. I still think it is insane how books can do that.

I don’t know exactly what I want for my life after graduation. I know the qualities of it: space to read and write, an apartment with plants and kitchen appliances, the opportunity to do good for people, whether that’s through my job or outside of it, friends I can love on, preferably living in walking distance, and ~just~ enough structure and legitimacy so that my parents don’t worry about me too much. I know in this horrible post-grad jobs economy (like, even the CS girlies are suffering) even this might be a lot to ask. But I am hopeful I can figure it out. I am going to do what I have done in all points of transition in my life, which is to open my heart, full-send my desires, and take lots of notes, leaving bread crumbs for myself in case I stray too far from what is good for me and need to find my way back to myself. I feel very lucky and grateful.