Aside from her countless recordings of Irish traditional music, my grandma’s CD collection consisted mostly of Dolly Parton. I spent weekend mornings in her kitchen as a child eating wonder bread with mayonnaise, dancing to Dolly while my grandma geared up for the day with a coffee and a smoke. When I think about my childhood now, I think about those mornings. The way my grandma smelled, the cool tiles on my feet, and Dolly Parton’s crystalline voice welcoming the day.

For years, Dolly Parton was the soundtrack to my life. She was there on weekend mornings and in every car ride. I fell asleep to her movies. She was even the angel on our family’s Christmas tree for a while. Dolly was such a large part of my childhood that she felt like a member of my family. Now people would probably call this feeling parasocial; I think it was simpler than that. Just love.

I used to wonder why this Appalachian superstar appealed so much to my Montreal-born grandmother. I think it has something to do with getting through. My grandmother was born into a working-class Irish Catholic family in a neighbourhood that’s now been replaced by a speedway. She had her first child at nineteen, got married to a man who tried to force her to be a housewife, and then refused to be one. She left him—no small feat for a Catholic woman in the 60s—and raised her sons by herself while working at the local newspaper.

These stories were never told with the tone of a grandparent telling you they had to walk to school uphill both ways. My grandma was someone who never, ever, not even for one single moment, did anything that she didn’t want to do. She found love and joy in everything. I think that’s why Dolly’s music spoke to her. Dolly made love and heartbreak and enduring equally beautiful.

Growing up, Dolly Parton was the most beautiful woman I could think of. I loved her over-exaggerated femininity, her pink dresses, her eyelashes, her rhinestones and, of course, her huge blonde hair. I wanted to look like that. This desire wasn’t limiting in the way that the need to look a certain way usually is. No - in Dolly, I saw someone who found being a woman fun. I wanted to have fun too.

Dolly modeled her took off her hometown’s local “tramp,” telling the Guardian that:

“She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’”

Dolly’s style points to a kind of intentional femininity: femininity as performance, as art form, as high intensity sport. She was known for saying that if she was born a man, she would have been a drag queen. In many ways, Dolly’s persona was always and already a kind of drag.

Even before having the language to call myself femme Dolly was my guiding star, a kind of patron saint of femininity. Here was one of the most creative, compassionate, and brilliant artists of our time, and she was as over the top and done up as I wanted to be. I loved the way her independence and her drive went hand in hand with her look. Her femininity was not something that held her back, but was a central part of her art.

Growing up with Dolly taught me some important life lessons: be bigger, be louder, be gaudier. More hair, more makeup, longer nails, tighter skirts, and you best have a good time with it, too. Dolly showed me that femininity could be something that actually belonged to me. She taught me how to find myself within it, how to nurture it, how to make it my own.

I don’t think I would be a writer if I weren’t femme. Femininity was my first artform, and my gender expression is as carefully constructed as my literary voice. Being femme taught me to write. It has given me a kind of aesthetic and social sensibility that I want to translate to the page. The two—writing and femininity—will always be connected for me. Dolly was the first person to show me what this could look like.

Of course, being femme isn’t only about being feminine. Femme is, first and foremost, a social and political identity. Femme is a working class identity, and it is and always will be rooted within lesbian communities. Femme is a way of relating to others, a specific way of holding yourself within larger systems of power, and caring for the people you love.

This is really where Dolly taught me to be femme. Dolly took the joy and glamour of femininity and used to to do real work in the world. Dolly never betrayed her roots in Appalachia, showing immense pride in her home. Her Imagination Library has donated 330 million books to children around the world (I had to take a moment to pause with that number). She helped to fund the COVID 19 vaccine. And she has always espoused an ethic of love even and especially, for the people on the margins.

We all talk about love a lot, but I think we can sometimes lose sight of what love means. Dolly’s love was tangible and unconditional. It had no limits. It showed itself in her outfits and hair, in her music, in her philanthropic work, and in her unwavering dedication to her home.

When I’m in an especially Christian mood, my favourite song to listen to is Dolly’s Travelin’ Through. Many of Dolly’s spiritual songs have helped guide my personal journey with faith, but this one is up there with Ave Maria in terms of religious expression for me. I reach to it often, especially when I’m feeling lost and need to lean on Jesus a bit.

Yesterday I learned that Dolly wrote this song for Duncan Tucker’s 2005 film, Transamerica. I had no idea that this song that I had leaned on so heavily as a spiritual anchor was written intentionally for the queer community. Something clicked when I found out about the origin of this song. I think that Dolly understood what it was like to be a searcher - “a weary pilgrim trying to find what feels like home,” as she puts it in the lyrics of Travelin’ Through. She took this feeling and made something beautiful about it.

I opened this essay by talking about my grandma because, through everything that I have learned and that I love about Dolly Parton, she was, first and foremost, an artist that made me feel at home. Her music connects me to my grandmother and, with her, to a legacy of incredibly strong and brilliant woman who did good in the world and looked great doing it.

The hardest part of writing isn’t the craft itself. It’s not self-doubt, or writer’s block, or even getting people to read your work. The hardest part of writing is trying to get paid for it. August has been lovely, but my head space has been taken up by financial concerns because I’m at the end of my writing grant. As I’m bracing myself for a return to real work, I’ve been thinking a lot about an anecdote from Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, where a handful of writers and artists pooled their money together to save T.S. Eliot from his job working at a bank. There’s a silver lining behind every cloud, and I think in this situation, the upside is that I’m taking part in the long tradition of authors scrounging for cash. Basically T.S. Elliot and I are one and the same.

Anyways. Enough whining. Here’s what I’ve been up to this month.

Writing Updates

Hushmarrow Press

I‘m overjoyed to announce that I am now a contributing writer to , an independent publisher based in NYC that focuses on dark fiction, strange stories, and literary culture. I’ll be publishing bi-weekly essays on queer and feminist fiction. If you like the work I publish on here, you will definitely like the work I publish with Hushmarrow. The themes and topics are similar, but the essays over there are—gasp—edited. My first contribution is on queerness in the haunted house genre:

Hushmarrow Press

Queerness is a Haunted House:

My favorite work of art is Jordan King’s Untitled Polaroids series. These photos show King, dressed as if she is about to go onstage, in an apartment in New York’s East Village, where the legendary drag performer International Chrysis had lived thirty years earlier…

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12 days ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · O.H.B.

Hushmarrow has a growing editorial side with a number of brilliant writers who work within the general scope of horror and weird fiction. Please go check out the press and support their work! If you’re in NYC, the press is hosting some in-person events soon, including a trauma-informed writing workshop. I’ll live vicariously through you while holding it down in Canada.

Publication News

My short story, Babes!, was recently published with . Babes! is about an eighteen year old girl and a woman in her eighties who psychologically torture one another. You can check it out here:

Shit Butt Quarterly

Babes!

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9 days ago · 65 likes · 12 comments · Shit Butt Quarterly and O.H.B.

Everyone I know in real life is ruthlessly making fun of me for this but I wear the Shit Butt contributor badge with pride. Funnily enough, this publication makes me eligible for arts funding that I wasn’t previously eligible for. Thanks Shit Butt!

August Reads

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I’ve written before about how some of my favourite books are written with a “femme sensibility.” These stories are driven forward by minute details and social niceties: what characters are wearing, how they sit at the dinner table, the unspoken social dynamics within a group. The Age of Innocence is perhaps the best example I can give of this kind of writing.

This book takes place within the upper echelons of 1870s New York society. Newland Archer, the protagonist, is engaged to be married to a woman named May Welland. When May’s cousin, the recently separated Countess Olenska who spent time in EUROPE (!?!?!?!), comes back to town, Newland becomes obsessed with her and longs to break through the rigid social rules that governs his life.

If you like Gilded Age aesthetics, the language of flowers, and burning but unconsummated desire, you’ll probably enjoy Wharton’s book. I loved it up to midway through the novel, when Newland, who is insufferable from the start, really started to grate on me. The last bit dragged, but some moments in this book are so expertly crafted that it felt worth reading regardless.

Heated Rivalry - Rachel Reid

Is a lesbian not allowed to read crazy MLM erotica? Leave me alone.

Yesteryear - Caro Claire Burke

There’s been a lot of buzz about Yesteryear. Is it revolutionary? Is it misogynistic? I’m happy to report that it was... fine. If you somehow haven’t caught wind of this book, it’s about a trad-wife influencer who gets transported to an 1850s homestead. The premise is so achingly zeitgeisty that I went into it fully expecting something as unintelligible as most online feminist discourse. But, as a piece of feminist criticism, I actually thought that Yesteryear had some interesting things to say about social media, conservatism, and women’s labour. The writing wasn’t great - the ending totally fell apart for me - but overall, I sped through this book and enjoyed it well enough.

I’m going to write a full review of Yesteryear soon, so do keep an eye out if you’re interested!

Afterparties - Anthony Veasna So

Afterparties is a short story collection that explores the lives of Cambodian-Americans. It took me a while to get into this collection. The stories are all expertly crafted, but I felt a bit of a distance between myself and So’s world while reading that I can only attribute to an MFA glaze.

While at first I felt like the writing was circling something, by the middle of the collection I was dropped right into the heart of So’s stories. These stories felt lived in, raw, and real. They served as a beautiful exploration of intergenerational trauma and the complicated love between family and community members.

Thank you…

For continuing to read and support my work! It means the world to me. My substack articles are all free. The best way to support my work is to share my publication and comment on my articles!

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And before you go, check out these recent pieces:

I’m currently undergoing the hardest creative challenge of my life so far: writing a character who doesn’t smoke.

As far as character work goes, this choice is pretty benign. It should be easy. I am, after all, not writing something, which should theoretically be easier than the opposite. It isn’t.

In my first novel, my characters are smoking constantly, to the point where I accidentally outed myself as a smoker to my oblivious father when he read a draft of my manuscript. In my current project, it didn’t make sense for the protagonist to smoke. This novel is about class dynamics in academia and the main character is an outsider, a working-class character who cannot relate to her peers. She’s also the only character who isn’t a smoker, a choice I made intentionally as a way to subtly differentiate her from the other characters. I wanted her to be the only person at the party who doesn’t join the smoke circle. I needed her to stand in the corner with nothing to do with her hands.

The thing is, if someone doesn’t smoke, they probably shouldn’t have the inner monologue of a nicotine addict. I think about smoking with the kind of erotic intensity I usually reserve for lesbian sex. Even now, ostensibly writing a craft essay, I want to describe the feeling of sucking smoke into your lungs, letting it trickle out through your nostrils, the taste of tobacco, the... okay, sorry. This kind of addictive intensity about cigarettes runs throughout my work in progress. If someone doesn’t have any interest in smoking, they probably won’t spend a hundred pages longing for a cigarette. But it’s so hard for me to imagine not being addicted that I’ve given my non-smoking character the inner monologue of someone who goes through a pack a day. In trying to write a character has a different experience from my own, I’ve inadvertently written myself.

Writing a non-smoker has been a practice in freeing myself from the tyranny of auto-fiction. By this I mean autobiography told through the thin veil of fictional abstraction. In practice, this genre results in a lot of novels about failing writers living in New York or LA, who have a lot of ethically questionable sex.

You may have clicked on this essay, titled as it is, hoping for a deconstruction of this kind of story. I’m not going to give you that. I could care less what other people write. I’ve read auto-fiction that I enjoy and auto-fiction that I don’t enjoy. At the end of the day it has very little to do with the genre and everything to do with the author’s storytelling ability. But, what I’ve noticed, is that the impulse to write about myself is slowly creeping into my own work, even and especially when I’m making a deliberate point not to write about myself. I want to interrogate why that is.

When I first started writing, I thought the only interesting thing about myself was my sexuality. I took this up as a subject for my fiction, writing lot of short dream-like stories about people I was obsessed with.

The first piece I ever finished was the canonical break-up short story. The writing process was strange and difficult. I felt like I was preserving my worst moments behind a museum glass for other people to look at. The story got rejected from every place I submitted it to. I was gutted. I had, after all, spilled myself onto the page, and it wasn’t good enough to publish in even the sketchiest literary journal.

Reading the story now, with a few years’ perspective, I know why it was rejected: it’s really bad. The sentences are mostly fragments, the metaphors are overblown, and only thing moving the plot forward is my own stupidity.

The story also felt oddly vindictive, in a way that I dislike. At the time, this breakup felt like the end of the world, and I wrote about it with equivalent melodrama. In reality, we were both nineteen and, far as breakups go, the details were pretty boring. We both messed up. We were in love, we got over it, we don’t talk any more. Once I stopped feeling the need to make a point about the relationship, the impulse to write about it left me. Now I look back on that short story and feel embarrassed.

I think that a large part of maturing has been learning to accept that I’m not all that interesting. Every day, I wake up and write, go to the gym, do some housework, and read. If I’m feeling particularly adventurous I’ll go on a walk or have coffee with a friend. Most nights I’m in bed by nine. If my life were a novel, I’d stop reading at the first page.

Accepting the truth that my life is dull has done wonders for opening myself up creatively. In recognizing that I don’t want to write about myself, I’m able to write about anything else. Stepping outside of myself has been the main creative challenge at this point in my life as a writer. There are times when I can’t do it—see my smoking dilemma above—but I want to be aware enough to recognize when I’m inserting myself where I don’t belong.

A lot of the people I follow and admire on this platform write in the memoir/autobiography genre. And please don’t get me wrong—I love this kind of personal essay. I’m a Gemini and, in my heart of hearts, a nosy bitch. When I first started writing on Substack, I tried to mimic this style. I failed. The pieces where I tried to write about my life are the weakest I’ve published. I think that the key to this kind of writing is the ability to interrogate yourself, an ability I do not have and that I’m not very interested in developing. In other words, please don’t read anything I’ve published on here before June. Go raibh maith agat.

While I love a lot of the personal works I’ve encountered on here, there are very real limits to auto-fiction that we need to acknowledge. The most basic limitation: real life is often boring. published a biting essay on this last year in which she bemoans the “recycled noise” of Substack essays that focus on beauty and romantic relationships:

“It’s like you’re locked in a tiny box that you’ve mistaken for the entire world. there are a thousand other things happening every second. grief. joy. politics. art. family. loneliness. actual life.”

In this essay, Rinascera points out that the proliferation of this kind of writing is, in part, due to the fact that the algorithm encourages easy, digestible pieces, rather than pieces that have anything difficult to say about the world. This brings me to the deeper limitations of auto-fiction: first, only some people are represented in writing spaces. Second, some writers feel as though they have no choice but to write about themselves. I see these issues as co-related.

I think a reason why so much writing feels the same is that the people writing it have similar experiences. Writing is a very hard field to break into if you do not come from a place of relative privilege (more on this here). This is reflected in fiction. How many books can you name that focus on middle class, educated, white people living in New York? As puts it:

This is the class of people who can most easily break into the industry, and as a result the industry becomes dominated by stories that centre narratives of wealth and privilege. For more on this topic, I recommend reading Naomi Kanakia’s article, “Contemporary Literary Novels are Haunted by the Absence of Money”, where she argues that the literary landscape is dominated by middle and upper class writers who determine what kinds of stories get told.

At the same time, there’s a way in which writers from marginalized groups who do break into the industry feel constrained by the market. As a lesbian writer, all my work draws, in one way or another, on my experience of queerness. And, while I do think that writing by and for queer people is politically important, I wonder if I’m constrained in some way by writing about my identity.

As a white, educated, middle class queer woman, I simultaneously feel at home in the writing world and as though I need to prove that I belong here. The fact that I have any sort of platform or writing training is an outcome of my privilege. In many ways, the industry caters to writers like me. At the same time, I do feel as though I need to justify my presence as a writer by proving that queer stories—especially stories about women—are interesting and worth taking seriously. In many ways, I feel as though I can only write about queerness and womanhood.

I wonder if writing beyond yourself feels easier for people whose social location is treated as the default. Why is women’s fiction a specific genre, when stories about cis men are not? Would people be interested in my work if I didn’t write about queerness? If a woman wrote The Road, would anyone read it? Or are our perspectives only valuable when placed within the narrow box of something called “women’s issues?”

On one hand, marginalized writers have something vital to offer the literary world. On the other, writers who do not fit the dominant image of what a writer is may feel as though we need to justify our writing by proving that we have a specific take or point of view that should be valued.

Cis-het white men do not need to prove that their perspectives are valuable. Their value is taken for granted. And I think—obviously, I cannot know—that it is easier to write from a position where you do not need to prove that you are allowed to take up space. Literary expansiveness is granted to some writers and not to others.

Writing about myself and my experiences has opened me up creatively. And, at the same time, I feel that I’m held back by the impulse to write about myself. I don’t know where this impulse comes from. Part of it, I’m sure, is self-obsession. I think another part of it is the belief that my work isn’t valuable if I’m not writing about queerness or womanhood. These forces feed on each other.

I don’t want to spend my life externalizing my own experiences. I don’t want my writing to become a kind of content creation in the vein of tik-tok story times or blog posts. I spend too much time with myself as is. It’s time for me to write about someone else.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a piece of writing advice from Toni Morrison: don’t write what you know. “You don’t know anything,” Morrison would tell her students, “I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends.”

Would this bore the shit out of Toni Morrison has become my litmus test for good writing. Most of my work fails it. That’s okay. I’m learning how to leave myself at the door and enter into the world of my stories. It’s a skill I’ll gain with practice. I’ll start with getting my characters to quit smoking.

“There is something about the summer, where the bright light brings the shadows into stark relief.

And as we enter the dog-days of summer, the sun in decline, there is space for those things that lurk in the inky blackness to linger longer. The days draw shorter with each cycle and those that distain the sun feel the summer ebbing, parasols that protect pale skin dropping sooner.”

A Girl Writing The World

Gothic August Prompts

There is something about the summer, where the bright light brings the shadows into stark relief…

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a month ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Emma Steel

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to pick up any of these prompts this month, but I love this theme so much that I wanted to jump on it somehow. And so, I put together a list of books that capture the feeling evoked by the theme of Gothic August.

These books don’t necessarily take place in late August, but, in my opinion, they capture the feeling of grasping on to short, hot days, and lingering in the growing shadows. These books feel like something beautiful coming to an end; or like picking up a perfectly ripe peach to find mold on the other side.

Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney

My fiancée and I had a mutual obsession with Heaney’s poetry in high school, and so a small part of me always attributes our relationship to him. The poems in this collection all explore the juxtaposition of beauty and death in one way or another. Heaney’s poetry draws on his childhood landscapes in the north of Ireland and they capture the late summer feeling of something coming to an end.

My favourite poem in this collection is “Blackberry Picking.” This poem so perfectly captures the beauty and decay of late August, that it is what inspired me to write this piece!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

In my humble opinion, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the perfect work of Gothic fiction. The story follows two sisters and their uncle who live in a decaying manor house after the mysterious death of their other family members. The three live a happy, quiet life, until a stranger appears and throws them all into danger.

This book has everything you could want from a late summer gothic: sprawling gardens, intense isolation, a beautiful house, corrupted wealth, co-dependent sisters, family secrets. Jackson’s writing is evocative and beautiful, which makes this the perfect late summer read.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Something about Jackson’s writing gives undeniable late summer vibes, so I’m including this as another recommendation. Hangsaman is loosely based off the disappearance of a university student in the 40s, and the book is as dark and beautiful and sensual as all of Jackson’s writing. Think dark academia before dark academia was a thing. I would especially recommend Hangsaman to anyone going to school in the fall - although, actually, maybe I don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book put you off going to university all together.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Jane Eyre transposed to the Caribbean. Quite literally. Wide Sargasso Sea is told from the perspective of “the mad woman in the attic,” before she meets Mr. Rochester and moves to England. The book explores themes of madness, colonialism, and the legacy of slavery, against the backdrop of a doomed romance.

It by Stephen King

Sigh. I hate to put Stephen King on here but, unfortunately, he is popular for a reason. It captures the feeling of summers when you’re not-quite-a-child and not-quite-a-teenager, mixing together excitement and freedom with a growing awareness of life’s dark underbelly. I have my critiques of this book - I do think that King is a raging misogynist, to say the very least - but there’s no denying that It is perfect for a late-summer horror read.

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

This story is so fucked up, and like We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it is one of my favourite works of gothic horror. Flowers in the Attic is about four siblings who are locked in the attic of a big house in Virginia to keep their existence a secret from the rest of their family. I’d call it a late summer read for the way that beauty and violence are so inherently interwoven.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

The Robber Bride is a work of realistic literary fiction, but there’s something fairytale-like about the writing that throws this book into the dark, fantastical liminal space of late August. The Robber Bride is about three friends who all have their lives ruined, in one way or another, by the same woman.

This book feels like late summer in Toronto. If you live in Toronto, you’ll know what I mean. It’s hot and heady and sexy and obsessive. If you have the fortune (good or bad, depending on how you look at it) of living in Toronto, I recommend taking a day trip to the island and reading Charis’ chapters by the ferry docks. You’ll see why.

Brother by David Chariandy

Another Toronto summer book! I think a lot of people will see their own teenage summers reflected in Brother. The movements of the characters are defined mostly by trying to kill time and escape the heat. This book is set over the course of a sweltering summer in 1991 and follows two brothers, each trying to make a future for themselves. It is a stunning exploration of masculinity, race, family, and queerness. Brother is heartbreaking, but there is so much beauty and love and tenderness there. For example: in my favourite scene, a character feeds his mother from one of those frozen condensed juice cans after she comes back from a long day at work.

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman

This is a stunning queer coming of age novel set in a Pakistani-American community in NYC during the 80s. Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion grows with the main character as she discovers her queer identity and as her relationship with her family, religion, and community begins changes. The first few chapters focus on her childhood “amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens” and reminded me viscerally of childhood summers in the city. There’s a simmering tension beneath the childhood exploration - that feeling you have as a kid when you know that adults have a world outside of your own that you don’t yet understand. That world is the lengthening shadow to the summer sun of this book, and, much like the impending autumn, it grows longer as the book goes on.

The Deep Dark by Lee Knox Ostertag

I think this book might be perfect. The Deep Dark is a graphic novel about a highschooler who has grown up with a monster living in her basement. When her childhood best friend comes back into town, the protagonist is forced to confront this secret.

There’s something very nostalgic about this book, what with the main character finishing high school and blooming romance between childhood friends. Much like the end of summer, The Deep Dark is full of contrasts: the tenderness between the main characters vs the violence of the monster, the darkness that the monster is kept in vs the searing heat of the New Mexico desert, and so on. The artwork is beautiful, the story includes a sweet butch/femme romance, and the main character is basically .

What are some of your favourite late-summer reads? And if you have a hyper-specific category of books that you’d like recommended, comment below! It just might provide inspiration for my next article.

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Please note that this work includes mention of domestic abuse, reproductive violence, and incest. It also contains spoilers for Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and AMC’s TV adaption.

In the TV show, Gabrielle has been renamed Gabriella. I use Gabrielle throughout this essay for the sake of consistency, and will indicate when needed where I am referring to her character in the books and where I am referring to her character in the TV show.

There’s nothing I love more, in literature, than a bad mother. A mother who resents her children. A mother who tries to escape the role coercively imposed on her. A mother who responds to patriarchal violence by enacting violence herself, on the only people she has control over. I’m not interested in reading about the Virgin Mary. Give me Medea.

The violence of motherhood is elided by the romance of the family. A good mother is supposed to love her children. She is supposed to give up her life and her body for the sake of someone else. There is no greater feminine ideal. The vision of the self-sacrificing mother is imposed, constantly, on women. And so it’s particularly delicious when this ideal is ripped to shreds, when the curtains of love are pulled back, and when an author forces us to confront motherhood in all its blood and violence.

Anne Rice’s relationship to motherhood forms the moral heart of The Vampire Chronicles. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after the death of her daughter, and the book is ultimately about the ideal of the family and the violence that this ideal imposes.

Claudia, of course, is the locus of many of the themes around violence and the family in TVC. She is the moral heart of this series, even when she is not explicitly on the page. The ideal of the family dissolves around Claudia. Her character exposes the way that the family enables and reproduces patriarchal abuse. Claudia deserves her own essay. In fact, she deserves many essays, and I’m going to write two of them. But, before I dive into how Rice writes daughters, I want to look at how Rice treats motherhood. So, let’s step back a few generations in our vampire family tree and look at Lestat’s mother, Gabrielle.

Gabrielle is a cold, cruel, calculating woman. There are no maternal comforts here. For this reason, Gabrielle is one of my favourite characters in the Vampire Chronicles.

Despite my critiques of the most recent season of AMC’s adaption, I do think that the show is doing a good job with Gabrielle’s character. Well, an okay job. I have my critiques, of course (you wouldn’t be reading this if I wasn’t a killjoy). But overall, I appreciate that this recent adaption is not afraid to look the brutality of motherhood in the face. Okay, yeah, let’s put it out there early. We’re gonna talk about the vampire incest thing.

Violence, motherhood, and the Vampire Gabrielle

We first meet Gabrielle in The Vampire Lestat. She is introduced as the wife of a Marquis, the mother of seven children, only three of whom lived to adulthood. She is a woman deeply confined by her life and she sees, in Lestat, a means of escape. In many ways, Gabrielle lives vicariously through her son, giving him the opportunities for escape that she did not have, like funding his education and giving him the means to move from their town in Auvergne to Paris.

Before Lestat is turned into a vampire, there is an intense intimacy and understanding between himself and his mother. At the same time, Gabrielle fails, in many ways, to mother Lestat. She is distant from her children, always absorbed in her books, has no interest in teaching her children, and only reaches out to Lestat when he is in pain (37).

And yet there’s a sense that Lestat and Gabrielle are cut from the same cloth, that they have similar experiences and desires, and that Lestat is an extension of his mother. At the start of The Vampire Lestat, after Lestat kills the pack of wolves that terrorized his town, Gabrielle is the only family member who comes to comfort him. She says that nobody understands what he has gone through, just as nobody understands the ordeal that she went through in childbirth:

“’It was the same the first time I bore a child,’ she said. ‘I was in agony for twelve hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own death. When it was over, I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn’t want anyone else near me. And it wasn’t because I blamed them. It was only that I’d suffered like that, hour after hour, that I’d gone into the circles of hell and come back out. They hadn’t been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness” (37).

In this scene, Lestat confides that he has fantasies of killing the rest of his family. Gabrielle replies with her own fantasies: to abandon the family and take pleasure in whoever she wants, without a thought of her familial attachments. Gabrielle longs to be: “Purely myself. I belong to no one.” (39).

From the start, the reader is shown that Gabrielle fails in her role as mother. She is unable to parent her children in the way that she is expected to, and Lestat resents her for this (37). At the same time, she does love Lestat. This love, however, is the love of an equal, not the love of a mother for her son.

This scene, where Gabrielle confides her sexual fantasies to Lestat, finally ruptures the mother son relationship that was precarious from the start. She does not want Lestat to see her as a mother; she wants him to see her as a person. To be a mother is inherently to belong to other people – a mother is expected to live for her husband and children. Gabrielle’s deepest desire is to belong to nobody but herself.

Later in the book, Gabrielle visits a now-turned Lestat when on her deathbed, and Lestat gives her the gift of vampirism. Gabrielle takes to vampirism like a fish to water. It is only in death, transformed, that Gabrielle can finally be free of the confines of her life as a human woman.

Now that she is a vampire, Lestat calls Gabrielle by her name. She is no longer only a mother to him. On her first night as a vampire, Gabrielle kills a man and steals his clothing. She cuts her hair short and screams in terror when it grows back overnight. As a vampire, Gabrielle moves through the world as a man. Vampirism has allowed her to let go of the burden of womanhood. The disruption of the mother-son relationship is part and parcel of this release.

Whenever I read Rice’s depiction of Gabrielle, I can’t help but think about Anne Rice’s own relationship to motherhood and gender. Rice has spoken endlessly about how her characters transcend gender. In many ways, Rice’s characters provided her with an escape from the confines of her life as a woman. Writing served the same purpose. In her spiritual autobiography, Rice describes the way that writing freed her from the restrictions of womanhood. When writing, she was no longer only a wife or only a mother, but a fully fledged person, appreciated, at last, for her own ideas and not for her relationships to others:

“In the main, I ceased to be somebody’s wife. I became the author Anne Rice, and generally when people spoke to me, they had something to say to me and it was about my work. And that meant it was about my mind – this genderless and oversensuous mind … I was that person now in the eyes of the world that I had always been in my own eyes. Personhood had come at last. The goal of my life had been attained.”

Just as Rice’s writing allows her to be seen as a person, Gabrielle’s vampirism allows her to transcend womanhood. I see an analogues transformation occurring in the narrative of woman-turned-writer and woman-turned-vampire, a sudden power and freedom that accompanies being seen, for the first time, as a person in their own right.

The incest question

Gabrielle represents then, a subversion and rejection of motherhood, both through her rejection of femininity and her disruption of the mother-son relationship she shares with Lestat. As a vampire, Gabrielle is no longer a mother. And the ultimate rejection of this role takes the form of her incestuous relationship with Lestat.

Because Anne Rice’s vampires do not have sex, the incestuous underpinnings of the relationship between Lestat and Gabrielle are not explicit, just as the homosexual underpinnings of the relationship between Lestat and Louis are not explicit. But it would take a particularly obtuse reader to not catch the sexual intimacy between Anne Rice’s characters simply because she does not include any explicit intercourse. Rice writes the relationship between Lestat and Gabrielle with an undeniable eroticism. They French kiss while exchanging blood from their mouths, for god’s sake. That’s more sexually explicit than actual sex.

That the relationship between Lestat and Gabrielle is romantic is iterated explicitly by Lestat. At one point he describes the two of them kissing in explicitly sexual terms, saying, “We were lovers kissing. And that was the picture we made together, white-faced lovers.” (169).

Unlike vampires in the book, vampires in the AMC adaption have sex. Lots of it. And so, I wasn’t surprised that they made the relationship between Gabrielle and Lestat explicitly sexual in the TV show.

I have mixed feelings about Gabrielle’s portrayal this season. In some ways, I feel as though the adaption misses a lot of the commentary on gender inherent to her character. Gabrielle in the TV show does not reject femininity in the same way that she does in the book. The show also cut her speech about the violence and loneliness of childbirth, including only the section of that scene where Gabrielle confides her sexual fantasies in her son. The show’s depiction of this scene shows a woman trying to seduce her son, rather than a woman attempting to relate to her son as a fully fledged, autonomous, person. Both seduction and personhood subvert the expectations of motherhood, but one is less explicitly subversive than the other, and it does feel, somewhat, as though AMC is beating us over the head with their incest commentary instead of letting the unhealthy, inappropriate dynamic between these two characters speak for itself.

What the show gets right, I think, is taking seriously the disruption of the ideal of motherhood inherent in Anne Rice’s work and exposing the violence of motherhood in all it’s bloody glory. There are no maternal illusions in Rice’s book. There are even fewer in AMC’s adaption. And it is through Gabrielle that the show picks up themes of familial violence. These themes were displayed, in seasons one and two, by Louis and Lestat’s failures as parents to Claudia. Gabrielle’s portrayal in season three shows us how deeply rooted these failures are.

Gabrielle is the victim of patriarchal violence – stripped of her autonomy, forced into a role she does not want, and subjected to the brutality of unwanted pregnancy and childbirth. In turn, Gabrielle is violent towards Lestat. Where else could she possibly find control, except in controlling her children, the only group that have less power than mothers within the nuclear family? Lestat, in turn, enacts the same kind of violence that traumatized him, and that traumatized his mother, onto Claudia. The family is not a refuge in this series; it is the primary site of violence. This speaks to the brutal reality of patriarchal violence while also paying homage to a longer tradition of the violence of the family in Gothic literature.

Incest in gothic fiction

In her article “Incest as the Meaning of the Gothic Novel,” Ruth Perry argues that incestuous violence within the family is at the heart of gothic literature. She theorizes that a:

“shift in the basis of kinship has been effected by the later eighteenth century, from a system in which… blood relations were thought to be foundational in determining which family one belonged to, to a system in which affinity or conjugal relations primarily determined family membership” (261).

In other words, in the late eighteenth century, family, for the first time, was defined by love and affection, rather than mere bloodline. The specter of incest arose within the late eighteenth century literary imagination because, when the concept of “family” began to indicate a specific form of regulating sexual desire. Women were seen as “sexual property” (262. The family was now seen as a site where women’s sexuality was protected. But, as a site of regulation and protection of sexuality, the family also provided a site where protection could fail.

Incest represents the ultimate subversion of the familial ideal. Perry argues that “incest implies the violation of genealogical principals and hence the short-circuiting of true succession and the perversion of history” (269). Themes of incest represent a danger inherent to our concept of the modern family. The ideal of the family functions as a place where sexuality is legitimized and protected. Incest shows that this protection was never real. Literary depictions of incest show that the specter of sexual violence was built into the familial structure from the start. Incest as a theme in Gothic fiction, then, represents a breakdown of the family. The family is supposed to protect sexuality. Incest represents the failure of this protection

Violence in Gothic fiction does not come from the outside. The horror of the genre comes from the disillusion of safety. The institutions that were meant to protect you are the very institutions that make you vulnerable. Your home has never been safe. Violence does not come from the stranger, from the outsider, from the specter of the other - it comes the people who are supposed to protect you. Building a defense against the violence of the outside world is, ultimately, what puts you at risk. This is the ultimate terror of the Gothic. Love turns to violence. You must wonder if there really was any difference between the two.

Familial violence, and familial breakdown, is at the heart of The Vampire Chronicles. The violent relationship between Louis, Lestat, and Claudia (which has its own incestuous undertones in Rice’s writing) demonstrates the failures of the family. The love between these characters is supposed to protect them from an outwardly hostile world. Instead, it is this love, this imposition of the family structure, that leads each character to their demise.

We see the same themes in the relationship between Gabrielle and Lestat. Incest between these two characters shows the fundamental instability of the concept of the family, revealing the violence at the heart of the institution. The fact that this particular form of violence takes the form of mother-son incest further complicates the depiction of the family in Rice’s work. Gabrielle rejects motherhood in all its forms. And the ultimate rejection of motherhood is imposing sexual violence on her son.

Mother-son incest occupies a particular place of horror in the literary imagination because it represents a form of sexual agency that defies the very concept of womanhood. In her essay “Queer Mothers: Female Sexual Agency and Male Victims,” Jenny DiPlacidi argues that mother-son incest represents “a failure of women to act according to their biological nature as a consequence of social conditions that enable (or force) them to… abdicate their maternal obligations” (245). Women are supposed to be nurturing. Incest represents the opposite of this presumed biological impulse – it is both violent and sexual, thereby disrupting the ideal of mothers as nurturing and non-sexual, as people whose desires will always be dictated and controlled by men.

Nothing disrupts the ideal of motherhood more than mother-son incest because it epitomizes “heteronormative fears of maternal sexuality” through the “idea that mothers could use sexual agency, in a socially disruptive way, to seduce, force or coerce their sons into a sexual relationship” (248). Women’s sexual agency is a threat to the institution of the family. Mother-son incest looms as a specter of sexual agency, the ultimate threat to an institution that requires women to be non-violent, non-sexual objects.

The incestuous relationship between Gabrielle and Lestat, then, represents the ultimate rejection of the role that has been violently enforced on Gabrielle. Through incestuous abuse, she embodies the power and agency over men that was denied to her in her life as a wife and mother.

This is not to say that incest acts as a happy ending for Gabrielle. The only way for her to gain control is through sexual violence – Lestat, as her child and therefore as someone with less power than her, is her victim. The sexual violence inherent to the family does not disappear, it simply manifests itself in a subversive way. This is the moral of incest in gothic fiction. Violence is built into the very institution that is supposed to protect us from violence. In one way, Gabrielle’s abuse of Lestat represents a subversion of the familial ideal. In another, she is doing exactly what the family was designed to do: creating and reinforcing a hierarchy of sexualized violence and control. True triumph over this system would involve letting go of sexualized violence all together. This is not what happens for Gabrielle and Lestat, and the violence between them is reproduced in Lestat’s relationship with Claudia.

How does AMC’s version measure up?

There are two things happening in Gabrielle’s seduction of her son. First, she is rejecting the role of motherhood that has been violently imposed upon her by the patriarchy. Secondly, she is reproducing patriarchal violence by reinforcing the power structures of the family through sexual violence towards her child. These two themes must exist in dialogue with one another. I see, in Gabrielle, both a longing for freedom and an inability to grasp it. Incest is a failed subversion of the family. So long as the family exists, violence will be produced and reproduced. Gabrielle’s relationship with Lestat shows this violence for what it is.

In some ways, I think that the most recent season of AMC’s adaption is doing a good job putting Gabrielle’s longing to escape violence and her inevitable reenactment of violence in dialogue with each other. The series displays reproductive coercion as the violence it is. In season three, episode two, Lestat tells the viewer that,

“Escape was not an option for Gabriella Vecce. The Marquis had promised her preservation and delivered her ruin. She sacrificed her youth, squandered her intellect, and paid the midwife to nick her in the womb so he couldn’t humiliate her anymore.”

While the historical flashbacks in this season are limited, the show does use the space it has to show the ways that Gabrielle is deeply confined by her life, and consistently violated by her husband. I also think that the show is making a point of exploring Gabrielle’s rejection of womanhood, even as they have erased the transmasculine aspects of her character. In season three, episode four, Gabrielle declares, “I’m not a Vecce anymore, not a marquise, not a wife, not a mother, not a woman… I’m a fever that comes in the night and kills by the morning.”

I’ve seen people online split about AMC’s treatment of Gabrielle’s textual gender non-conformity. Many feel as though the audience has been denied trans masc representation. Others argue that, in this political climate, it’s a good thing that AMC decided not to make a sexual predator explicitly trans and/or gender non-conforming. I can see both sides of this, and ultimately it isn’t my place to speak on the ideal form of trans masc representation. That said, given this season’s treatment of trans side characters (specifically, misgendering used as a punchline in the first episode), I don’t know if AMC should get any laurels either way.

If anything, I wish that AMC did a little bit more to show Gabrielle’s humanity. I wish that they took more time to show the ways that she has been victimized by the patriarchy and the ways that incest is a failed attempt at escaping the violence that was imposed on her.

I think that the reason that Gabrielle’s humanity feels shallow so far is that there isn’t a lot of breathing room in this season. Everything is constantly worked over through Lestat’s narration. The show seems very self-conscious about its representation of incest. Lestat is constantly talking about it, making jokes, trying to justify it, and so on and so forth. In some ways I like this choice. I do think that it’s an interesting way of showing the effect that Gabrielle’s abuse has on Lestat. At a certain point, however, it gets tiring. I want the show to give us a little space to think about and interpret what’s happening on screen before rushing into the next scene.

All I’m asking for is a bit more subtlety in this season’s writing. The audience knows incest is wrong. We know that it is a form of violence. The question is what this means for the story as a whole. What does incest tell us about Gabrielle as a character, about Lestat as a character, and about the family as the site of violence in this narrative? I wish that the writing wasn’t so self-conscious. At a certain point this portrayal of abuse should be allowed to speak for itself.

And all that said, I love Gabrielle – both Anne Rice’s version and the far more disturbing, violent version that we get in the TV show. The series is ultimately about the way that violence in built into family structurers, and I can appreciate that the show treats this theme seriously.

At the end of season three, episode four, Gabrielle abandons Lestat. We learn that this is something she does – she disappeared in the past, she is disappearing now, and she will disappear again. Lestat is heartbroken over this. Despite it all, he loves his mother. Thematically, however, I see this disappearance as a kind of triumph. As long as Gabrielle and Lestat are bound to one another, Gabrielle will enact the violence of the family on her son. As long as they are together, they will never be able to be fully human. They will always relate to one another through the roles imposed on them: as mother and son, as victim and perpetrator. Perhaps the truest form of love between them – the only kind of love that isn’t drenched in violence – is letting one another go.

What a perfect way to describe an addictive book. My favourite books pull you in and won’t let you go until you’re finished — time of day and real-life responsibilities be damned.

A book that feels like a 4AM TV binge needs to grab you from the very first page. It needs to be fast paced, interesting, fun, and a little bit messy. The books on this list are all intensely readable. Many of them have layers of meaning that I didn’t discover until a second read, and all of them left me with a bit of a “hangover” afterwards—the same kind of empty, searching feeling you have after finishing your favourite show. These are all books that I’ve finished in less than a day, glued to my spot on the couch, unable to move or eat or drink anything until I’m done. I read them with a frenetic intensity and they made the world around me disappear for an evening.

“Just one more page, and then I’ll go to bed, promise!”

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn

This book is about a self-destructive writer who dates people she shouldn’t. It’s fast paced, campy, and incredibly fun. Bonus points for a kind of femme sensibility to the writing that pulls you right into Dorn’s world of messy SoCal dykes. It feels exactly like watching The L Word at 4 AM on a school night.

Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis

Dykette has been described as a kind of “lesbian love island.” The reading experience is a lot like watching trashy reality TV and I mean this in the best way possible. This book is all about lesbians having sex with each other in a variety of different outfits. It’s one of my all time favourite works of lesbian fiction. You can read my full review here:

How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

This one is a bit more literary than the other recommendations on this list. How It Works Out consists of interlinked short stories that explore the same relationship (and break-up) in different realities. In one story, the main characters raise a baby together, in another one is a CEO and the other is an employee, in another they become addicted to running marathons, and so on and so forth. LaCroix’s writing is intense, addictive, and darkly funny. Some of the stories are especially fucked up and surreal. It’s hard to look away.

This book feels like a 4AM binge because it is so obviously about a real life relationship. Reading this book feels like meeting LaCroix in person and gossiping into the wee hours of the morning.

Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters

Detransition Baby is now such a part of the queer zeitgeist that I picked it up thinking, “you know, it’s about time I read Detransition Baby,” without even knowing the premise. And then I started reading, figured out the premise, gasped, and was completely hooked. The story, at its core, is about the relationship between trans identity and parenthood. This rather tender thematic premise is filled out with punchy, declarative sentences and musings on the kind of confusing and interlinked relationships that most people will be familiar with if they’ve spent any time in a major city’s queer scene.

I write about Torrey Peters’ work and Detransition Baby as a modern comedy of manners in this article, for anyone interested:

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

Juliet Takes a Breath is a YA novel, and, being a YA novel, is a fast read. It’s fun and accessible while still being politically interesting. The story follows a Latina lesbian from the Bronx who moves to Portland for the summer, where she meets other queer people of colour for the first time and finds a home in her community.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki

This one is for the graphic novel lovers! This One Summer is about two best friends who discover their sexuality over the course of a summer vacation in a tiny beach town. There is no explicit sapphic romance in this book, but it perfectly captures the feeling of being a teenager in the throes of a co-dependent homoerotic friendship. There was a while when I would read this book cover-to-cover every time I took a bath — much to the chagrin of anyone hoping to use the bathroom. This book is The Summer I Turned Pretty for depressed Canadian dykes.

That’s all from me, but this list isn’t exhaustive! What are some of your favourite sapphic books that feel like a late night streaming binge? And if you have a hyper-specific category of books that you’d like recommended, comment below! It just might provide inspiration for my next article.

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Coming back to real life after a vacation feels like going to work hungover. My partner and I spent a good two and a half weeks in Ireland this month, weeks spent walking around and visiting bookshops, going to museums, and discovering the wonderful world of the Tecso meal deal. We went to Dublin, Cork, and Galway, before spending a few days relaxing on the Aran islands, where I became obsessed with tide pools. Readers who live by the ocean – do you ever get over tides, or is it that magical every single day?

The highlight of the vacation was a day trip to Cobh where… we got engaged! It almost happened in the middle of the titanic memorial garden, but thankfully my new fiancée had the good sense not to implicate the, er, titanic, into our love story, and so it happened a little ways down the beach. Cliffs yes, ocean yes, titanic no.

I’m thankful that we had some time to ourselves to celebrate alone, because since coming home, we’ve been bombarded with the responsibilities of a newly engaged couple. I think we’ve visited someone ever day since coming back, and I’m still not over my jet lag.

When I was dreaming about getting engaged, I never expected to receive so much casual homophobia from people who are otherwise incredibly accepting. My fiancée and I have received some baffling questions about the engagement, such as whether we’re going to wear rings or have a ceremony.

The most controversial part of it all seems to be that we want to get married in a church. Anyone who knows me knows that my faith is one of the most important parts of my life. Having a church wedding was never up for debate for me – it’s simply been a question of finding an inclusive church that performs same-sex-marriages, of which there are many. But for some reason, as soon as we say that we want to have a religious ceremony, people’s brains seem to short circuit. It almost feels like they don’t want to confront the fact that our relationship is legitimate, not only legally but also spiritually. The way that people look at us when we say that we want to have a church wedding, you’d think that we’re planning to piss on a crucifix and call it a day.

At the end of the day, I’m just sad that it feels like we’re spending all out energy attempting to prove that our relationship is legitimate, rather than simply celebrating the fact that we’re going to spend our lives together. Even though gay marriage is legal where we are, and even though we’re able to find a church that would happily marry us, it still feels like we’re staking a claim to an institution that we don’t belong to. I feel so self conscious about doing things like planning an engagement party and looking for venues, like the world is humoring us while laughing behind our backs. I’m not sure how much of this homophobia is real and how much is internalized shame. Either way, I hate the way that it puts a damper on what should be one of the most exciting seasons of our lives.

Writing Updates

Publication News!

I’m overjoyed to announce that my short story, Subway Saints, has been published in the Summer 2026 issue of the Lesbos Library Zine! I’m honoured to be included alongside so many incredible writers and artists, and the printed publication looks absolutely stunning.

Please go check out the most recent issue of the zine and support lesbian writers! - the publication’s amazing editor - also has a substack page with lots to check out for anyone into lesbian lit. Copies of the zine can be purchased here. All profits will be distributed between Gaza Funds and Cosecha.

General Updates

This month’s vacation was the first time I’d taken a break from work since… forever, possibly. If it isn’t writing, it’s editing or querying, or schoolwork, or teaching, and so on and so forth. I’m the kind of person who feels a lot of guilt whenever I’m not working, and so it took a lot of real effort to stop myself from pulling up one of my projects while away. But I managed. And now I understand why people sing the praises of taking a break!

Around halfway through our trip, I got the overwhelming urge to write. I began to think about my characters in a way that I never do when I’m in the middle of everyday life. I left Ireland feeling incredibly creatively invigorated.

A large part of the inspiration I’m feeling comes from the amazing arts and cultural scene that I dipped my toes into in Ireland. My fiancée and I spent a full day visiting literature museums in Dublin and it felt like we only scratched the surface of what was around. My favourite museum was definitely the James Joyce Centre, which had an amazing collection of artwork inspired by Joyce’s writing. We were in Galway for the International Arts Festival and got to check out some exhibitions and performances, including Saoirse, an Irish-language musical. And that’s not to mention the five million art galleries we visited. I left with lots of inspiration and a real desire to write which is, I think, almost more valuable than writing itself.

July Reads

Early Irish Myths and Sagas - Translated and Edited by Jeffrey Gantz

This book is exactly what it says on the cover – a collection of pre-Christian Irish Myths and Sagas. I’d been meaning to read this for a while, more out of academic interest than anything else, and figured my trip to Ireland was the time to do it.

It’s hard to write a review of this book because the standards used for assessing a translation of an early text is entirely different from the standards that I would use to assess a contemporary novel. I found the stories confusing and hard to read, but I do think this was rather inevitable. They include a lot of eating and drinking and fighting, and people turning into various animals. The stories in this book were originally part of an oral tradition which were then transcribed with bits and pieces missing. I think I would have enjoyed them a lot more if I’d found them as they were intended to be received, i.e. told drunk and over dinner, instead of in a penguin edition, read on the train.

I had a horrible time reading this book, but the fault is ultimately my own. I found Gantz’s introduction and marginal notes very helpful. I especially liked the way that he traced out the origins of various motifs used in the stories, and the impact that each tale had on later Irish literature.

The Wren, The Wren - Anne Enright

Sometimes I read a book by a well-established author that just feels like they’re showing off. The Wren, The Wren is one of these books. This book reads as a study in narrative voice. Nothing really happens in it – it’s about a mother and a daughter who talk to each other, sometimes – but the prose is beautiful and Enright gives each of her characters a distinct voice and perspective that makes the book worth reading. I recommend this highly to anyone who loves plotless fiction and wants to get lost in someone else’s life for a little while.

Dubliners - James Joyce

I have a tumultuous relationship with James Joyce. I really, really want to love his work, but I can’t seem to stomach it. I’ve been working through Ulysses for an embarrassingly long time, and I approach reading it more as a religious obligation than something I do for enjoyment.

Dubliners redeemed Joyce to me. I found the stories, which are all little vignettes of life in Dublin, surprisingly accessible and moving. You can see Joyce’s ambivalent relationship to Ireland coming through in these stories – the way he simultaneously loved his city and felt suffocated by it. Everyone in this collection is paralyzed in some way. They long for something that they can’t reach through no fault except their own. Joyce was right to say that that if he could get to the heart of Dublin, he could get to the heart of all the cities in the world.

My favourite stories in Dubliners are Eveline and A Painful Case. And, of course, The Dead, which was the first story I’ve read in a while that made me pause. I finished the collection on our last day in Dublin and spent the rest of the afternoon walking next to the Liffey running The Dead through my head.

Kindred - Octavia Butler

One of my greatest shames is that I’ve been avoiding Octavia Butler up until now. I read Dawn when I was way too young to understand it, and unfortunately since then I’ve always associated Butler with intellectually dense alien sex… which, in hindsight, sounds spectacular. Kindred made me want to revisit Dawn, and read the rest of Butler’s opus.

Kindred follows Dana, a Black woman who inexplicably time travels to 1815 Maryland to save the life of a young boy. While there, Dana is forced to make difficult choices in order to survive the brutality of slavery, and the book acts as an exploration of the legacy of slavery today.

Butler’s writing is incredibly lucid. Her language is simple, and I think that simplicity is part of the reason why I felt this story so viscerally. I felt intensely anxious for Dana throughout the whole book. It was the kind of full body emotion that only the best writers can bring out of me.

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July Articles

It was the Autumn of 2025. I was writing full time for the first time in my life, and I was having a hard time adjusting. I was excited to fully dedicate myself to my work. I’d be longing for this. Time, space, and energy to write. No more waking up at five AM to squeeze in a few paragraphs before my commute. No more daydreaming about writing while in a meeting. No more projects stalled because the only thing I had energy for after work was bad television. I was about to live my dream. And I was woefully unprepared for it.

Nobody told me that, if you are a neurotic person, your neuroses will translate to whatever it is that you’re doing at the time. Somehow, I thought that writing full time would cure my anxiety and self-doubt. All it really did was make writing the locus of these feelings, when before it was an escape.

It doesn’t help that writing is solitary work. It felt like I spent every day going crazy, alone in my apartment. I needed someone to confide my fears too. What if my work isn’t worth anything? What if my novel is unreadable? What if I’m deluding myself about the possibility of making a living in an industry governed by the whims of a TikTok algorithm?

In hindsight, I should have been talking to a therapist. Instead, I turned to Reddit.

R/Writing is where good writers go to die. You enter with a concern or an idea or a question about the craft. You leave as an empty husk of yourself. Your aspirations have been crushed like a pop can in a recycling machine, your dreams are vanquished, and you realize that, not only are you a bad writer, but you are also ugly and a virgin and your wife should divorce you.

You receive feedback from someone who brags about being a published author. You look at what this person has published and find one hundred unrated books on Amazon, all of them with AI generated covers. This person has called you a slur. This person says your work is unreadable because you used a metaphor. This person calls anything with more than a single clause a run-on sentence. They claim their writing is on the same level of Cormac McCarthy. It’s always Cormac McCarthy they reference. Or Stephen King. Or Brandon Sanderson. One wonders if they’ve ever read anything else. Anything, God forbid, by a woman.

No, I’m not bitter. Why would you think that?

This article is for the girl in the same boat as me. Hey you! I see you! You’re bright. You’re a good writer. You have awesome ideas, a good grasp on plot and language and all the bits and bobs that make a piece work. But you’re just starting off and you’re a little bit unsure. Maybe you’re lonely and want to talk to other writers about how hard the craft is. You think, for a moment, about going onto r/writing. I’m here to tell you. Don’t do it.

You are better than this. And to convince you to never, never, set foot in this internet cesspool, I have answered all the questions that are asked, over and over and over again, by people on r/writing, in hopes that it will satiate your curiosity and convince you not to waste your one precious life listening to feedback from a stranger who spends the rest of their time on r/blackpill and hasn’t read a book since high school.

Do I have to read?

Yes.

Okay, but do I really have to read?

Still yes.

Everyone is saying that I have to read. But I hate reading. I watch TV sometimes. Isn’t that enough?

Yes, you need to read. Reading helps you see how established writers use and subvert writing rules. It helps internalize the mechanisms of plot, character, setting, and so on. It helps you develop your taste. It can inspire new ideas. If you want to be published, it’s important to understand the market, to know what sells, and to know where your work fits in larger cultural discourses.

But I don’t want other people’s work to influence me. Won’t reading make my work unoriginal?

You need to learn how to stop worrying and accept that other people’s work will influence you. See this for the blessing that it is.

Good writing requires some familiarity with the canon, regardless of what that canon is. All art – writing included – takes place within a larger tradition.

Try this: pick a random book off your shelf. Read it through, with an eye to the themes, allusions, and symbolism that the author uses. If this author writes in English, I will bet you ten dollars that the story includes at least one of the following: themes of sin and redemption, two brothers in competition with each other, a character who is (symbolically or actually) reborn, a fall from grace, garden symbolism, snake symbolism, a flood, a beautiful virgin or a maternal figure, a struggle between good and evil, a character who sacrifices themselves for the greater good. I wonder where these themes come from. Any guesses? Now throw in a few references to Shakespeare or the Odyssey and you’ve got most of the English canon covered.

If the book you pick up is written by someone working in a different cultural context, they’ll most likely make different references. The fundamental idea is the same. You cannot escape your literary inheritance.

The mistake that a lot of writers make is believing that recycling other people’s ideas and themes makes their work worse. Really, what makes a work fail is the attempt to be completely original. It isn’t possible. Instead of pretending that you don’t have influences, try engaging with these influences thoughtfully. You can still write innovative, creative work while engaging with the cannon. Think of Ulysses, one of the most groundbreaking works of the 20^th century that has a biblical or classical reference on nearly every line. Creativity isn’t a spark in a void. It comes from thoughtful engagement with the world, including other people’s ideas. Everything is a response to everything else, and this is a good thing. It means that your work is in dialogue with the world around it.

Ultimately, however, all this argumentation is blowing hot air because when you are editing, you will have to read your own work about five hundred times. And if you don’t like reading? Well, good luck with that.

How do I write a woman?

It’s easy. Write a man. Then give them huge tits. I mean huge. The bigger the better. And you have to reference them constantly, or else your reader will forget that this character is a woman.

This is the most common advice I see. Just write a character and give her a female name. And tits.

I don’t want to sound like I’m defending some kind of biological essentialism here. I don’t actually think that women have any inherent traits that separate them from men. But it’s foolish to say that a person’s gender doesn’t impact the way that they move through the world.

Can you name an experience that isn’t coloured, in some shape or form, by your gender? If you can – you are probably a cis man and you have not considered that your default is, in fact, a gendered experience. Many men do not see their gender as importantly shaping their everyday lives. This is because the world is designed for them. Cis men have the option of not thinking about their gender. Not everyone has that privilege.

The infuriating thing is that the question never goes the other way around. People who want to write men are never told to write a woman and give her a male name. To be a man is to be the default. Everyone else is simply a man + some trait. This trait is usually incredibly reductive.

The implication here is that being a woman is only a question of chromosomes or genitals or expression, rather than the complex experience of moving through the world in a particular social and cultural location.

Here’s how you write a woman. Find a woman. Get to know her. Ask her thoughtful questions about her life, her interests, her childhood, her day-to-day concerns. And – now this is key – LISTEN TO HER.

This means:

1) Not talking over her.

2) Not jumping in to share your own thoughts.

3) Not correcting her.

4) Not going into the conversation with some preconceived notion of what it is to be a woman and then imposing your ideas onto what she is telling you.

And, of course, read books by women. This doesn’t mean reading books by men about women. Surprisingly enough, there is a difference. Yet another reason why, if you want to be a writer, you can’t get away with not reading.

Should I name my chapters or number them?

You’re giving this question more thought than it’s worth.

I used Chat GPT to give me story ideas/outline my novel/generate the text (but the ideas were mine!)/fix my grammar. Is this okay?

That’s between you and God.

If you’re posting about this on Reddit, maybe you feel insecure about your use of AI and you should interrogate those feelings. Are you worried about the fact that AI steals other writer’s work without their consent? Are you worried that AI would generate a bad story? Are you feeling guilty about the environmental impacts of AI or the fact that it’s trained on the backs of underpaid workers in the global south who have to spend hours looking at violent videos and child pornography in order for you to generate a middling idea for a fantasy book that will probably never be published?

I’ve written before about why I want to gouge my eyes out every time I see AI discourse in writing communities. I am firmly anti-AI. I don’t think it will ever write better than a human being, because it simply isn’t equipped to do the real work of writing (i.e. having experiences, thinking about those experiences, and creating something out of those experiences). But ultimately, AI is a tool and every tool has drawbacks and advantages. It is up to you to weigh these drawbacks and advantages, figure out what it is that you want to achieve in your work, and make a considered decision about whether this particular tool would help you meet your goals.

Questions like these point to a moral laziness. To get through life, you need to have a set of values and make decisions based on those values. So, what do you value when it comes to your own work? Consider whether AI use is aligned with your ethical code. You are a moral agent. Act like one.

What writing program should I use?

It doesn’t matter. Use whatever’s available. Use your notes app. Use a notebook. Use the back of a receipt. You do not need to agonize over this.

How do I get my book published?

This is easily googleable. There are lots of books out there about the publishing process. I like Patricia Westerhof’s The Canadian Guide to Creative Writing and Publishing. Obviously, this is most helpful to writers in Canada.

Nobody knows your vision, your context, or your needs like you do. Advice from a stranger, who may be working in a completely different genre or region of the world, will never be as helpful as doing your own research. Please. We do not need a new thread on this question every other day.

How do I come up with character names?

Name Databases.

Random Name Generators.

The Bible.

Alternatively, you can name your characters after people in your life. This is especially helpful if you have any personal grudges. I once named an antagonist after the director of a department that rejected me from their PhD program.

Can I still be a writer if I go on anti-depressants?

It makes me sad to see how many variations of this question exist out there. I sympathize; I really do. I went years unmedicated because I thought it would squash my creativity. And then I went on anti-depressants, my mental health improved, and my writing got better.

I don’t want to speak for everyone’s experience with medication. Psychiatry is a fucked institution. I’m lucky that going on medication has been overwhelmingly positive for me. This isn’t the case for everyone. The thing is, the root of this question often isn’t a concern about side-effects or effectiveness of a particular treatment. The root of this question is the belief that you need to suffer to make good art. This isn’t true.

The image of a good writer is that of tortured genius. Inspiration descends upon you from nowhere, and getting treatment for mental health concerns will close you off to this inspiration, thereby numbing your genius. Here’s the thing. I don’t think genius exists. Writing is a craft that can be studied and improved systematically. Inspiration is a discipline. You don’t need to be tortured to be a good writer. You just need to put in some effort. Try to get better and you will get better. Then you’ll try some more and get even better than that.

Going on anti-depressants has vastly improved my work. I have more energy. I am more disciplined. I get less frustrated when something doesn’t turn out well. I can look at my work with emotional detachment and assess it objectively without spiraling out.

Depression numbed me. When I got better, the world opened up. I am braver, less self-obsessed, open to new experiences, and I can feel a full range of emotions. I used to only write about feeling numb. It’s not an interesting topic.

Even if none of this were true, even if recovering from a mental health struggle did ruin your creativity, you should still try to recover. Suffering doesn’t make you good. It just makes you suffer.

Can I write _____?

Insert whatever you’d like into the blank. Can I write a fantasy world without a monarchy? Can I write a story that’s really a dream? Can I write a gay character who doesn’t date anyone? Can I write a character with X superpower?

Sometimes you need to have an idea and stand by it. Stop asking for permission.

Will I ever make money off my writing?

Probably not. But you should write anyways.

Ultimately, my advice is this: Most things aren’t as important as you think they are. Stop worrying. Close your eyes. Put pen to paper. This will be a hundred times more productive than asking for permission from people you don’t know.

You can do it. I believe in you.

Note: This article contains discussions of domestic violence, reproductive violence, and suicide. It also contains spoilers for Colleen Hoover’s Verity.

We need to put the collected works of Colleen Hoover in the Smithsonian.

Not because they’re good, per se, and not because they are particularly bad, but because they serve as fascinating cultural artifacts. I truly believe that, to understand the contemporary condition of heterosexual women, we need to take Hoover’s works seriously.

I’ve noticed that many of the people I consider my intellectual peers have a distaste for Colleen Hoover. By this I mean, queer writers who read a lot of Foucault and rely heavily on blood/meat/pomegranate/dog imagery in their work. I cannot count the number of YouTube videos and Substack pieces I’ve read that take Hoover’s work apart, piece by piece and sentence by sentence. The consensus is that Hoover’s work is a kind of literary junk food: nutritionally void and ultimately bad for you.

I’m calling misogyny.

There’s a lot of bad writing out there. None of it gets torn apart and dismissed like work by women. This isn’t to say that women are incapable of bad writing, but it is telling that women like Colleen Hoover have begun to represent some looming figure of anti-intellectualism when anti-intellectualism has always existed. Society isn’t falling apart because of women reading smut.

Your work is not inherently better because it addresses a different set of concerns. My work, for example, is written by and for lesbians. I want to discuss lesbian experiences. To do this, I read a lot of lesbian fiction and the themes and tropes that appear in these works (again, blood/meat/pomegranate/dog imagery) appears in my own. This is what it means to take part in an intellectual community – interpreting and reinterpreting other people’s ideas in your own work, and having your ideas subsequently interpreted and reinterpreted by others.

Colleen Hoover is writing for heterosexual women. And I think that, in a real way, her works speaks to the desires and anxieties of this demographic. We need to take this fact seriously. Colleen Hoover would not be as popular as she is if her work did not resonate with her audience.

I must admit, I have always felt estranged from womanhood. If you were to hold me at gunpoint and ask what my gender is, I would say “femme,” or, maybe, “dyke.” Ask me to define those terms and you’d have to shoot me. They both represent some connection to womanhood, at least vis-à-vis lesbianism, but I cannot quite put my finger on what that connection is or why I still cling to it.

“Woman,” to me, is a shadow behind a pane of glass. I still don’t know what it means for me. In many ways, I think that my obsession with femininity is a way of holding onto a gender identity that doesn’t feel as though it belongs to me. “Femme” allows me to escape from the rigidity of “womanhood”. I like that the term points to a kind of self-conscious performance. I’ve always felt like an artificial woman.

All of this is to say that I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a woman, as someone who is simultaneously a woman and not a woman, or, someone who doesn’t know what it means to be a woman, or, someone estranged from womanhood who longs for it anyways. And a large part of thinking about womanhood involves consuming cultural depictions of women. I don’t know what woman means; I don’t know if the term exactly applies to me; and so, I’m trying to understand what a woman is by looking at how womanhood is iterated around me. Ergo, I read a lot of Colleen Hoover.

I’m mostly interested Hoover as a cultural phenomenon. And, being a cultural phenomenon, how her work presents a regulatory ideal of womanhood.

What do Hoover’s books tell us about contemporary womanhood, about our desires, our experiences, about the way that the very concept of “woman” is worked over?

A note on terminology. I’m going to use the terms “ethical” and “moral” a few times in this essay. In this context, these terms refer to normative standards that are used to regulate behaviour. Let’s put questions of moral realism to the side for the sake of this conversation. I’m not interested in the Platonic Form Of The Good or what have you. When I talk about what women “should” be, I am not referring to any moral truth. Instead, I’m referring to the social expectations that accompany womanhood; womanhood as regulatory ideal.

Literature both responds to and constructs reality. As cultural objects, books take up and re-interpret the concerns of our time. And the central concern of Hoover’s books, I will argue, is the concept of “womanhood.” As the most popular writer of contemporary women’s fiction, I think that the way Hoover takes up gender in her work indicates larger ways that we contest and negotiate the meaning of woman.

Obligatory Philosophical Navel-Gazing Section

(You can skip this part )

Can you define woman for me?

Can you give me an answer that isn’t reductive?

I know womanhood is not a question of chromosomes, or genitals, or secondary sex characteristics.

I know it is not a question of expression – there are butches taking testosterone who feel more of a connection to womanhood than me with my dresses and lip gloss and long hair.

Is it the way I am treated by others? Does being sexually harassed make me more of a woman? That would imply that I was more of a woman at thirteen than I am at twenty-four.

There’s some TERF who puts up posters in my neighborhood who thinks that they have it figured out. We’re waging a silent battle against each other. In terms of political action, tearing down these posters is fairly meaningless. Still, I don’t want them to ruin my walk to the grocery store. The most recent poster was simple. Black text on a white background. “Woman. Noun. Adult human female.”

Transphobes and Christian nationalists are obsessed with this definition of woman. They cling to it as if it will save them. And the thing is, I understand the appeal. We long for definitions and easy answers. There’s a comfort to being able to point to something – chromosomes or genitals or an item of clothing – and saying, once and for all, that this thing defines me.

You are born a certain way, and you are told who you need to be. You appear one day in a hospital room, and a doctor declares you female. Your parents put you in the clothes they think they should put you in and give you the toys they think you should play with. You grow up. You look the way you should look; you date the people you are told to date; you conform to the role that was given to you, rather arbitrarily, on the day of your birth. And it’s fine. Unless it isn’t.

The certainty of this definition of “woman” makes life easier. It sets up your options. Defining yourself on your own terms is incredibly difficult and often uncomfortable. Conservatism offers a way out by providing a life that you do not have to choose. The sacrifice is one of autonomy for certainty. This is not a sacrifice that everyone is able to make.

As soon as you abandon the comfort of a definition, you begin to wade into a philosophical and social quagmire. No identity is a given. Everything is the product of social relations on social relations. It’s social construction all the way down, love. And I can understand why this idea is frightening.

The issue is that “adult human female” is as much a social construction as anything else. Our notion of adulthood is subjective – am I an adult at 13 when many religious coming of age ceremonies take place, or at 18 when I can vote, or at 21 when I can drink, or at 25 when my brain is supposedly fully developed, or at 30 when I get married, or, or, or…? “Human” is also subjective - are we referring to biology, to a soul, to some particular form of intelligence, to personhood as a moral category? What are your defining criteria for naming something human and what social forces go into those criteria? Don’t even get me started on the concept of “female.” Sex is just as constructed as gender is. Bodies do not have any inherent meaning. Genitals only indicate sex insofar that we have agreed they do. There is no brute reality that the terms male or female refer to.

Identities are discursive. Terms like “male,” “female,” “gay,” “straight,” are simply forms of expression. Platonic ideals do not exist. There is no place beyond the earth where the Form of a Woman exists. Women are not derivatives of the one ideal Woman in the sky. When we say “I am a woman,” we are situating ourselves within social discourses. The statement is a way of making ourselves interpretable, of locating ourselves within larger systems of meaning making.

In this way, the statement “I am a woman” is a performative utterance. Language does not merely describe reality; it constructs it. Every time we make some claim about our identity, we are simultaneously referring to the way that term has been used in the past and re-defining the meaning of that term. Declaring “I am a woman” makes it so.

Okay, you are probably exhausted at this point. You are here to read about popular woman’s fiction, not to read a badly done recap of a century’s worth of feminist philosophy. Let me summarize the above for you: The concept of womanhood is socially constructed. Moving on.

Gender is Discursive; Literature is Discourse

If we see womanhood as something that is actively culturally negotiated, rather than simply given, contemporary women’s fiction takes on a new layer of meaning. Works of fiction are not simply describing women’s experiences but are instead actively shaping our concept of womanhood.

I’m not saying, here, that literature forms reality. That would be overstating the influence of literature in a world where, increasingly, people cannot read past a fourth grade level. What I’m trying to get at is that there’s a back-and-forth relationship between our world and our representations of that world. “Woman” has a preexisting social meaning. This meaning makes its way into a text. We read the text, and the text informs our concept of womanhood. The concept shifts, slowly, based on the ways that we reinterpret and reiterate it.

Womanhood has always been a highly contested subject. The precise meaning of “woman” depends on your location, time period, class, race, sexuality, and so on and so forth. I don’t think that current discourses about womanhood – seen in TikTok tradwives and girlbosses and images of Carrie Bradshaw and thot daughters versus thought daughters and whatever else is being chewed up and spat out online – present anything new. But they are worth analysing, because they tell us something important about the way that the concept of “woman” is being worked out culturally.

This is why I think it’s important to read Colleen Hoover.

When I think about contemporary women’s fiction, I think about Colleen Hoover. She has sold around 20 million books. She has been named one of the top one hundred most influential people in the world. The film adaption of It Ends With Us made $350 million. She’s a big deal. And even if she weren’t, I still think that her books are worth taking seriously because they are cultural objects where the meaning of womanhood is being actively worked through and worked over.

I’ve read four Colleen Hoover books so far. And every time I’ve read her, I’ve been struck by the particular moral worldview that Hoover’s books reflect. Her protagonists are women. They usually have some job that lends itself to a plotline. They fall for a big, surly man who makes them feel tiny. What is the appeal of this kind of story? And what do they tell us about “woman” as a social, political, and ethical concept?

What I want to emphasize is that depictions of gender largely serve a regulatory function. To make some claim about gender is to make a claim about social behaviour – and so, in each cultural depiction of womanhood there exists some underlying ideal about what a woman should be. Beneath the prose and the characters and the plotline, Hoover’s books are making a moral, regulatory claim.

My original plan for this essay was to analyze all four of the Colleen Hoover books I’ve read. Then I had a bit of an identity crisis (see above), and my word count got unwieldly. Instead, I’m going to focus on Hoover’s 2018 book, Verity – my personal favourite and, also, the most carceral in terms of its depiction of womanhood.

Gender as Coercion in Hoover’s Verity

Verity follows Lowen, a struggling writer who is asked to ghost write for a well-known author, Verity Crawford, who is incapacitated after an accident. Lowen goes to Verity’s home to look through her notes for inspiration. While there, Lowen begins to fall for Verity’s husband, Jeremy. As Lowen and Jeremy begin an affair, Lowen sorts through Verity’s journals and discovers that Verity played a central role in the deaths of two of her children, and orchestrated her own accident.

Verity’s journals reveal a cold, cruel, calculating woman. Her story begins on the night she first met Jeremy at a charity events that she attends to “get drunk off free booze and find a rich investor to fuck” (51). After their first night together, she becomes obsessed with Jeremy. The two share a co-dependent life filled with sex and writing, and they are happy for a few years until Verity becomes pregnant with twins.

Verity does not want to be a mother. Her main concern during pregnancy is the effect it will have on her figure. She feels as though her unborn children are sucking up all the love in her marriage and resents Jeremy’s excitement over the kids. After Jeremy confesses that he loves his unborn children more than he loves his wife, Verity attempts to abort the children using a wire hanger. The abortion fails and Verity gives birth to two healthy daughters.

Verity rejects motherhood. She doesn’t want to breastfeed, she is exhausted by the twin’s constant crying, she leaves her babies alone in a room with the baby monitor unplugged while she sleeps, and she tries and fails to kill one of her daughters as an infant. A few years later, Verity and Jeremy have another baby, a boy this time. Then tragedy strikes when one of the twins dies after an allergic reaction. Verity is convinced that the other twin killed her and decides to murder her in retaliation. Jeremy begins to suspect that Verity had a hand in their daughter’s death, and to escape his anger, she attempts to kill herself by driving a car into a tree, the very accident that precipitated Lowen’s ghost writing.

When Lowen finishes reading Verity’s journal and learns that Verity was responsible for the seemingly accidental deaths of her children, Lowen tells Jeremy the truth of what happened. They then kill Verity, who, it is revealed, was faking her injuries, and Lowen and Jeremy run off into the sunset.

I think that a lot of women can see themselves reflected in the essence of Verity’s story. Here is a woman who has artistic aspirations and falls in love with a man that she believes will support her. Then she becomes pregnant with children that she doesn’t want and is forced into the role of wife and mother. Verity’s story is about a woman whose life no longer belongs to her because she is being forced into motherhood. It’s a violent portrayal of a woman who is robbed of her autonomy.

Many of the mothers I know have been forced into a similar situation. Motherhood, if it is not actively desired and freely chosen, robs women of the capacity to make choices about their lives. Pregnancy is physically brutal. Unwanted pregnancy is a form of violence.

I come from a big, Catholic family. My grandmother was one of seven children; my great-grandmother was the eldest of twelve. Whenever I hear stories about the women in my family, I can’t help but wonder who they would have become if they had access to birth control and abortion. Who would they be, if they had been treated as people with their own goals and desires, instead of empty vessels waiting to be filled with children?

The question of consent is fraught here. I’m sure, in some way, that my great-grandmother wanted children. But in what way can you meaningfully want something if you don’t have any other option? Were her endless pregnancies an active choice, or an inevitability of her time, her class, her religion? Who would she have been if she was allowed to be something other than a mother?

If I were to ask my great-grandmother, dead now, if she wanted children, I wonder what she would say. I wonder if she even knew she could say no.

All of this is to say, Colleen Hoover captures something important and real about reproductive violence and the coercive nature of motherhood. And yet, she refuses to give Verity a modicum of empathy.

The implication of Hoover’s story is that Verity should want to be a mother. Motherhood represents the height of feminine goodness, and Verity’s rejection of it is a failure of her womanhood. Verity is punished by the narrative, and we are told that this punishment is deserved. Of course Verity’s husband is justified in killing her; she failed in her role of being a wife.

Hoover’s novel tells us that the worst thing a woman can do is reject the role of wife and mother – a role that, for many, is violently imposed on them.

If Colleen Hoover were a different writer, Verity could have been a very rich and layered novel about reproductive violence and the burdens of motherhood.

There’s something delicious about a bad literary mother. Here’s a woman who is subjected to patriarchal violence and, instead of submitting to it, replicates this violence in the way she knows how. Here is a woman who has no control over her life and responds by controlling others. The only people less powerful, in a heterosexual nuclear family, than a mother, are her children. And so, her children will receive the brunt of her rage because they are the only people she has any power over.

Think of Medea, who, abandoned by her husband and having no other recourse, murders her children in retaliation. Is she not Verity in another costume? Is she not every suburban mother who abuses the children she doesn’t want because it is the only way that she can gain control over her life?

I have empathy for Verity. Fuck those kids. You never wanted them anyways! But Colleen Hoover never displays this kind of empathy for her character. She never treats Verity’s pregnancy as the form of violence that it is. We are supposed to cheer when Verity, finally, succumbs to the ultimate form of patriarchal violence – being murdered by her husband and his new lover.

Near the very end of the novel, Hoover comes close to a kind of moral engagement with the themes of this book. A few months after Verity’s death, Lowen comes across a letter that Verity wrote to Jeremy, hidden in the floorboards and learns – surprise, surprise – the journal was entirely fabricated. Verity’s cruelty and her hatred towards her children was nothing more than an exercise in creative writing. She wanted to get into the head of a villain by “writing journal entries from my own life… things that really happened… but to make my inner dialogue in the journal entry be the opposite from what I was actually thinking at the time” (224).

Verity wanted her children, she always loved her family, she played no hand in orchestrating their deaths. She was a good mother after all. Innocent. A victim of domestic abuse.

With this ending, Hoover was attempting to humanize Verity. She was trying to add a bit of nuance into her incredibly black and white book. Ultimately, however, this ending simply drives home the moral that she’s been leading us to throughout the entire novel: There are good women and there are bad women. To be a good woman means being a good wife and mother. To be a bad woman is to reject these roles, and, if you do reject these roles, you deserve to be punished for it. The ethical question at the heart of Verity is not whether this distinction holds – it is where Verity fits in it.

The reader is never asked to question the premise that some women deserve to be punished. We are simply asked to question whether or not Verity is that kind of woman.

The book concludes with Lowen and Jeremy leaving the house. We learn that Lowen is pregnant now. And, as she reflects on whether or not to tell Jeremy about the letter she found, Lowen thinks:

“Even if Jeremy really was the reason for her wreck, I can’t blame him. He believed Verity maliciously murdered his child. I can’t even blame him for ultimately following through with her murder when he found out she had been deceiving him about her injuries. Any parent in his position would have done the same. Should have done the same.” (237)

We’re left with this moral: Women deserve to be punished if they fail to be a good mother. Because to fail as a mother is to fail at womanhood. Domestic violence isn’t bad, so long as it is directed towards the women who deserve it. Because what, ultimately, makes a woman valuable if not her capacity to serve and please and cater to the men in her life? If a woman fails in this regard, she deserves to be punished.

Looking at Verity from a high-level, we can see that womanhood functions in this story as a class position that is created and violently enforced. Verity’s worth is determined by her ability to fulfil a social role: the social role of wife and mother. These are economic positions – they describe a way of relating to others through labour. These roles are not naturally given but socially enforced. Verity only becomes a mother because she feels as though she must. It is a role that is violently imposed on her.

In her essay, “One is Not Born a Woman,” Monique Wittig argues that womanhood is a political and economic category rather than a natural one (249). She writes,

“what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (‘forced residence,’ domestic corvee, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.)” (250).

Womanhood, then, is not naturally given but created, and if it is created, it must also be enforced. In the plotline of Verity, womanhood is enforced violently. But the object of Verity – I mean, the book itself, the contents of the book, the manner in which it is taken up and distributed – also serves as a kind of enforcement of womanhood as an economic and political class. By punishing Verity for failing in her role, Colleen Hoover is making a moral statement about what women should be. Her readers see a woman punished for failing at her role. They are told to cheer for her ruin. The underlying message for the reader is a moral one: you must conform to your social and economic position. If you do not, you have failed. And if you have failed, you deserve what’s coming.

Contrast Lowen and Verity. Lowen is maternal and loving. She cares for Jeremy and his surviving child in a way that Verity cannot. Her final triumph is becoming a mother. In Lowen, we see the inverse of Verity. Here is a woman who is doing womanhood correctly. We are told to root for her. The narrative rewards her for her compliance.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that works like Verity are becoming so popular at a time when women’s rights are facing backlash. Political changes work together with cultural changes; abortion rights are rolled back at the same time as women with seven children make bread on TikTok. If we uncritically consume these depictions of womanhood, our moral definition of womanhood changes. Deviations from womanhood as a class position are punished in the real world just as they are punished in literature.

This is why I think it’s dangerous to dismiss Colleen Hoover’s work. Her writing reflects something true about the world today – about the way that womanhood is understood and imposed. Critiques that focus on her writing style, her terrible naming practices, or her strange plot twists are dismissing work that is actively shaping our conception of gender.

You may not like her work. That’s fine. But you cannot dismiss the cultural impact that it has, just as you cannot dismiss any aspects of discourse on womanhood. Her work has a message. It is part of larger mechanisms of coercion that seek to impose a constructed position onto women, so that we will continue doing the reproductive labour that we have been told makes us valuable. We need to look at these mechanisms of control. We need to dissect them. We need to understand their cultural significance and see them as the forms of coercive enforcement that they are.

All of this to say: take CoHo seriously. Her work reflects something important about our conception of womanhood under the patriarchy, and we should be listening - even and especially if we disagree with what she has to say.

For years I believed that my family came to Canada because we had an uncle who ran a Republican newspaper in Ireland. The story goes that, one day, the British burnt down his printshop while he was getting lunch. A political collaborator found him, told him he was a wanted man, and gave him a boat ticket with the advice to get out of the country or die.

I grew up listening to this story and, being a child in the thrall of my particularly charismatic grandmother, had no reason to doubt it’s veracity. I’ve told it to many friends over rounds of drinks, I’ve told it to girls I want to impress (you’d be shocked how far an IRA connection gets you at the local dyke bar), I’m telling it to you, and I will probably carry on the family tradition and tell it to my own grandchildren.

When I asked my father about this, fully expecting him to corroborate the story, he laughed and said it wasn’t true. I asked him what the real story was. He shrugged. Why does anyone immigrate? There are lots of reasons, most of them banal, none of them particularly romantic.

“They were poor,” he said, “And I don’t think there was much to do back home.”

Poverty and boredom. What’s that compared to the illustrious revolutionary history that my grandmother’s stories painted? I can see why she lied. Embellished. Whatever you want to call it.

As a fiction writer, I don’t need to make any claims to truth telling. I see my chosen career as a kind of genetic inevitability – if I weren’t a writer I’d find some other outlet for it, like lying to children at family gatherings. At the same time, there is a kind of responsibility to the truth that we have as writers. Take “truth” here in its broadest sense. All writing conveys something to the reader. Sometimes this is historical fact. Sometimes it’s something else – moral lessons or insights into the human experience. Even the most fantastical writing has to brush up against reality in one way or another. We can understand this as a moral responsibility, or as artistic guidance. Whatever our obligations to the truth are, I think we can agree that the best art engages with the real world in one way or another, even if that engagement is abstract.

Technically, I write historical fiction. My first book takes place from 1940-1980. My second book takes place in 2001 (I know that calling this historical fiction will probably send some millennials into an existential crisis. Please accept my apologies. 2001 was, in fact, twenty-five years ago). I’ve had to reckon with historical realities that I was not present for in both of my works. In my first book, I researched the history of Canada’s unwed mother’s homes. It felt important to get the facts right, as I was writing about a historical injustice that impacts people to this day. In my second book, the historical aspects are more nebulous. Vibe-based, if you will. I wanted to capture a particular feeling of an era, rather than recounting any specific historical events. In both cases, however, I had to make choices about what historical facts to include, which facts to embellish, and where I could diverge from the truth altogether, as one does and as one must when writing fiction.

I’m currently in the very early stages of planning my next novel. It’s a kernel of an idea right now. I know that I want to write about Montreal’s Irish community in the 1920s. I know that I want it to explore themes of class and religion, of identity formation, of how Irish communities staked a claim to whiteness through participating in colonialism. And I know that I want to draw on my family’s history – I initially got the idea for this project after reading my great-grandmother’s memoir, which is filled with larger-than-life stories that beg to be translated to a novel, like her aunt’s rum-running business and the orphanage fire that killed her illegitimate brother.

The issue, of course, is that I don’t know where the truth stops and my great-grandmother’s narrative voice begins. My image of the ideal historical fiction writer is someone who translates the truth into fiction. With this project, I’m translating fiction into fiction. Which is, perhaps, what all writers do (West Side Story is based in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet is based on Pyramus and Thisbe, Pyramus and Thisbe was inspired by Anthippe and Cichyrus), but it still feels disingenuous to write something supposedly historical that has, at best, a tenuous connection to the truth.

In my preliminary research for this project, I came across the concept of “memory work” in Matthew Barlow’s Griffintown: Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood. Barlow’s thesis is that diasporic identity isn’t a given – it is instead actively constructed. Griffintown, the working class, largely Irish, neighbourhood where my great-grandmother grew up, was a site for the construction of a distinct Irish Canadian identity. By the 1920s, Irish immigration to Canada had slowed. Many middle-class Irish people were assimilating into Montreal’s upper class, dominant, Anglo culture. Faced with these changes, the community in Griffintown began to actively build a distinct Irish-working-class identity, articulating this identity through support for Irish independence, community organizations, and pageantry.

What struck me the most about Barlow’s history is the way that identity was both performed and imagined. Barlow highlights two places where a connection to Ireland was articulated: the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and the annual play put on by the St Anne’s Young Men’s Society. These were both forms of pageantry where Irish Canadian identity was constructed and put on display. The case of the plays is especially interesting. These plays were written by people in the community and displayed imagined history of Ireland. They included stock characters, often displaying surface level stereotypes about the Irish, even as they were written within an Irish community. The plays were sympathetic to the cause of Irish independence. They were fictional. And it was through this fiction, the creation and performance of a history, that people in Griffintown laid claim to their identity.

I see my great-grandmother’s memoir as another iteration of this memory work. She was growing up in a time and a place where her identity was an open question. Through storytelling, she was working through what it meant to be Irish, to be Catholic, to be part of a working-class immigrant community, and what it meant to be a woman. The truth or falsity of her stories don’t matter so much as what these stories tell me about how she saw herself and the world around her. It’s incredibly intimate. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to get to know her like this.

When I write my own stories – which are iterations of her stories – I am working through these same questions. Identity is always an open question. What it means to be Irish now is incredibly different from what it meant in the 1920s. What it means to be a woman now is incredibly different from what it meant in the 1920s. When I write about my family, I am interpreting and re-interpreting their experiences in order to better understand myself. Historical fiction writes the present into the past.

I recently read Maggie O’Farrell’s book The Marriage Portrait, a beautiful work that tells the story of Lucrezia de Medici, a young woman in Renaissance Italy who – it is rumoured – was poisoned by her husband. Robert Browning imagines Lucrezia’s story in his poem My Last Duchess, which is narrated by Lucrezia’s husband. In many ways, O’Farrell’s book is as much a response to this poem and the mythology surrounding Lucrezia’s death as it is a retelling of historical events.

In The Marriage Portrait, Lucrezia is confined and burdened by her role as a wife. She is lonely in her husband’s court, she is not allowed to leave the castle walls, and she must submit herself to her husband in order to produce an heir. We see, in O’Farrell’s novel, a heart wrenching depiction of a brilliant young woman who is slowly ground down by her surroundings. O’Farrell leaves the ending open. The reader gets to decide whether Lucrezia finally succumbs to the reality of her restrictive life, or if she escapes.

Some critics have said that The Marriage Portrait fails as a work of historical fiction because it distorts women’s historical experience to suit modern sensibilities. In her review for The Conversation, Jessica O’Leary argues that O’Farrell embellished historical facts to appeal to her contemporary audience. The roles and responsibilities of a woman in the 16^th century were dramatically different than they are today, and Lucrezia’s true experience would have reflected a different set of sensibilities and values than the ones that O’Farrell gives her. O’Leary writes:

“The infantilisation of Lucrezia is probably at odds with the duchess’s experiences. She would have received a courtly and spiritual education that emphasised her role in the dynastic system. The individualism espoused in O’Farrell’s novel was not as starkly evident in the early modern period, in which collective familial identity drove decision-making and defined a person’s sense of self.

The duchess must have felt unease and insecurity when travelling to a new court after spending most of her time alone with her sister and mother. Given the gravity of the marriage and her understanding of her dynastic role, however, such emotions were likely infused with a sense of reassurance that she was assisting her family with an important task.”

In writing Lucrezia as a modern woman trapped by the demands of her time, rather than as a product of her historical context, O’Farrell flattens and erases the real Lucrezia. This points to a larger trend of importing modern sensibilities onto the past, which “make it difficult for historians to communicate the complexities of past lives to modern audiences.”

This is a strong critique, and one that I have been sitting with for a while as I contemplate my own work. O’Leary makes a compelling case for historical accuracy. The experiences of women in history are often flattened. Importing modern concerns is a way of further flattening these experiences and, ultimately, denying historical figures their agency.

That said, I don’t think that the task of historical fiction is to give an accurate account of a time and place in history. Literature is an artform first and foremost, and writers should be allowed to make artistic choices, even if they contradict historical record. This isn’t to say that history isn’t important. I just don’t think it’s our job.

What, then, is the task of historical fiction? I think that the task is to speak to the concerns of today. When we write historical fiction we are constructing a past to relate to – just as the playwrights of the St Anne’s Young Men’s Society constructed a past in order to better understand their connection to Ireland, just like my great-grandmother told outrageous stories about her family, just as I am attempting to understand my family through writing an imagined past. Our task is not to tell the truth about history. Our task is to tell something true about the world we live in today. Historical fiction is a tool for this truth telling.

It may appear that I am defending historical revisionism here. This is tricky because I do believe in the value of historical accuracy. Clearly it is harmful to distort historical facts – please do not think that I support pseudohistory or Holocaust denial. At the same time, all history is interpretive in one way or another. I worry about the idea that there is such a thing as a brute historical fact. There are gaps in our archives, there are experiences that cannot be captured, there are perspectives that are left out, there are the particular ways that history is taught. I don’t know how to reconcile the importance of historical truth with the interpretive nature of history as a discipline. Ultimately, this isn’t a question that should be answered by a fiction writer. Distortion is our artform.

What matters, in my particular discipline, is the question of what we are trying to convey when we tell stories. What kind of inheritance are we creating?

This is question is personally pressing when I take on the task of writing about Irish identity. Irish history is often distorted to promote some imagined ideal of whiteness. I think about “The Irish Connection” exhibit at the American Police Hall of Fame, and the use of the Celtic cross by white supremacists. At the same time, there are ways in which the history of the colonization of Ireland lends itself to solidarity with other oppressed peoples. I think about the relationship of material support between the Choctaw people and the Irish, the number of keffiyehs worn in my Irish language class, and the Palestinian flags flown over Falls Road in Belfast. What kind of legacy do I want to create in my writing? It’s not a hard question to answer. The real task is figuring out how to write a story that does history justice.

I don’t think that the goal of The Marriage Portrait was to tell the truth about the life of Lucrezia de Medici. Instead, the book draws on a literary and historical inheritance to tell a story about what it means to be a woman today. There is an impassioned call for women’s freedom at the heart of The Marriage Portrait – a message that is existentially important today, as conservatives imagine their own historical precedents for rolling back women’s rights. O’Farrell is using history to tell us something about ourselves.

Most likely, the story about my distant uncle and his printshop isn’t true. But there is a truth to the story beneath the fabrications – a moral truth and a political one. In telling that story, my grandmother was trying to convey something about our identity, about our past, our origins, our values. She was giving me a story and telling me to run with it.

You don’t have to date men.

Read that statement. Read it again. Let it sink into your stomach. How does it make you feel?

Note that this is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. I’m not saying that you can’t date men or that you shouldn’t date men. I’m certainly not saying that you should date women (this is not the solution to your romantic woes that you might think it is). All I’m saying is that you don’t have to.

I don’t date men. Lots of my friends – even some who are straight women – don’t date men. You may want to date men, and that’s fine. It may even make your life easier. All I’m saying is there’s no moral imperative to doing so.

How does this make you feel? If you shrugged your shoulders and thought, yeah I know, you don’t need to read this article. I’m already preaching to the choir. This is an essay for those of you who hear that you don’t have to date men – again, simply a descriptive statement – and feel as though something is being taken away from you.

In October 2025, Vouge posted an article by Chanté Joseph entitled, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing now?” The thesis of this piece is self explanatory. We are, thankfully, at a point in society where women can live fulfilling lives without men. Men continue to be terrible. These two facts, taken together, lend themselves to the conclusion that women no longer need to put up with men. If they do decide to date men, that choice is a wee bit embarrassing. As Joseph writes:

“As long as we’re openly rethinking and criticizing heteronormativity, “having a boyfriend” will remain a somewhat fragile, or even contentious, concept within public life. This is also happening alongside a wave of women reclaiming and romanticizing their single life. Where being single was once a cautionary tale (you’ll end up a “spinster” with loads of cats), it is now becoming a desirable and coveted status—another nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with.”

I want to point out the non-offensiveness of this statement. Again, Joseph is not saying that you must not date men, simply that we are living in a time when it is not needed. Women are no longer, legally speaking, men’s property. At the same time, many men do not treat their partners with dignity and respect. If you date a man who treats you this way, you are essentially making the choice to be with someone who degrades you. And yeah, let’s be honest, that’s a bit embarrassing.

Essentially: “’Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right.’”

I see this article as pointing to a kind of unorganized Lysistrata. If men do not treat women well, why should they be rewarded with the love, emotional labour, and sexual availability that accompanies romantic partnership?

What I appreciate about Joseph’s essay is that it puts the responsibility where it is deserved: on men who consistently fail their romantic partners. There is something real to the idea that dating someone who does not respect you is an embarrassing move. It points to an inability to see your own value.

How many incredible women do you know who have become smaller because of their relationships? How many women at the top of their field go home to a man who does not wash his own underwear? How many women sacrifice friendships because the emotional intimacy involved makes their boyfriend feel insecure?

I’ll put in the obligatory “not all men” so that I don’t get crucified. If you have a boyfriend who loves and respects you, I’m overjoyed. All I’m saying is that you do not need to settle for anything less. You do not need to date anyone who does not treat you right, and if you do make that choice, you will have to live with the fact that it is a little bit humiliating. It is humiliating to put up with someone who humiliates you. The moral responsibility here is on the person disrespecting you, not on the people outside who are naming that disrespect for what it is (I’m talking to you, girlie who posts about her boyfriend’s blunders on TikTok and gets mad when people say you should dump him).

This applies to all sorts of relationships. I’ll critique your wife or your lesbian life partner just as quickly as I’ll critique your husband. The reason that the cultural focus is on men, however, is because men are allowed to get away with disrespecting women in a way that other groups are not. Men exploiting, disrespecting, and humiliating their partners forms the very basis of the patriarchy. Men are rewarded for this behaviour. It is on us to stop rewarding them.

Let me emphasize, once again, that this statement is not incredibly offensive, interesting, groundbreaking, or even all that politically helpful. All that this article is trying to say is that being humiliated is humiliating. So why are people losing their minds over this statement?

The worst thing to come out of this growing cultural awareness that women are no longer required to put up with being mistreated is the outpouring of whiny think-pieces defending women’s right to date men.

On May 31^st – a day before Pride month, mind you – the New York Times published a headache inducing opinion piece entitled “There’s Nothing Wrong with Wanting Men,” in which Magdalene Taylor defends heterosexuality as if it is a city under siege by a bunch of man hating dykes, and the supplies are running out. Taylor’s thesis is that we’re unjustly critiquing women who decide to date men. In fact, Taylor argues, it is better to date men now more than ever because women have rights that give them more freedom in our romantic lives. Apparently, this freedom shouldn’t apply to opting out of romance all together.

Taylor claims that the root of heteropessimism – that is, the kind of negative attitude towards straight romance displayed in Joseph’s article – comes from a “place of mismatched expectations,” a simple disagreement over what most men and most women want out of a relationship. This statement is willfully ignorant. Heteropessimism does not come from women’s inability to find a man who shares the same values, it comes from the material reality of women’s exploitation by men in romantic relationships.

Taylor constantly misunderstands the basic political premise of heteropessimism by treating this phenomenon as a way of venting personal dissatisfaction instead of acknowledging that there are real, structural issues with heterosexuality. Heterosexual partnership has long been the primary locus for women’s oppression. Heterosexuality is a property relationship in the guise of a romantic partnership – by marrying a woman, a man is legally allowed to stake claim to her labour, her finances, and her body.

Throughout her article, Taylor critiques the long-held idea that the personal is political, writing:

“One problem with heteropessimism is its tendency to closely link personal choices with politics. Rebecca L. Davis, a historian and the author of a history of sex in America, said the second-wave feminist slogan “the personal is political” had seeped too deeply into the public consciousness. The slogan, she told me, insists that many things once seen as personal failures should be viewed as results of structural problems. The feminism of the 1970s emphasized that the problem was not with “the male sex,” but rather that society as a whole was flawed. Heteropessimists take “the personal is political” as a literal, narrow axiom, returning responsibility to the individual, rather than focusing on social pressures.”

To say that the personal is political is to say that politics inevitably and always makes its way into the private sphere. It is a sentence that articulates why feminists can and should focus on women’s issues in the home instead of only on issues in the public sphere.

The liberal tradition relies on a distinction between the private and the public sphere. The underlying idea here is that people’s actions should only be critiqued and regulated insofar as they impact public life, and that moral critique should not extend towards people’s private lives. In the Western liberal tradition, the family serves as a bastion against political society, the institution that signals a firm boundary between what is and is not the proper subject of political critique.

When feminists say that the personal is political, we are critiquing this boundary. We are critiquing the idea that there is any point in which politics “stops,” any area that cannot be subjected to political critique. This is a vital part of the feminist movement because the locus of much of women’s oppression takes place within the family. If the family is seen primarily as the private sphere, and therefore untouchable by political critique, many of the most existentially important feminist issues cannot be addressed. The statement “the personal is political” is critiquing the very private/public distinction that makes women’s issues so easy to dismiss. As Carol Hanish writes in a 2006 introduction to her original paper entitled “The Personal is Political:”

“Many… ended up joining the criticism of women getting together in consciousness-raising groups to discuss their own oppression as “naval-gazing” and “personal therapy”—and certainly “not political.” … they belittled us to no end for trying to bring our so-called “personal problems” into the public arena—especially “all those body issues” like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our demands that men share the housework and childcare were likewise deemed a personal problem between a woman and her individual man… Heaven forbid that we should point out that men benefit from oppressing women.”

The idea that the personal is political thus serves the practical function of shifting the terms of political discourse to include places where women are oppressed in what would otherwise be considered the sphere where political critique stops. It forces us to look at the ways that structural issues are reproduced within the family and within romantic relationships – places that have traditionally been understood as off limits for political theory.

Why, then, is Taylor afraid of the idea that the personal is political? I have a few theories. But, first, I want to look at yet another iteration of this confused feminist rhetoric: The Walrus’ piece “Are There Any Straight Women Left?”

The Walrus published this piece by Phoebe Maltz Bovy on June 21^st, 2026. I’m not one to read into things like publication dates all that much, but there is something strange about the fact that two major publications both published defenses of heterosexuality close to or during pride month. Plus, this piece was published a day after my birthday, which makes it feel doubly homophobic.

Like Taylor, Bovy is concerned about the rise in heteropessimism. The rhetoric in this piece is even more egregious. Bovy argues that being straight is going out of style. Much of this article is spent deploying the particularly queerphobic move of questioning whether women who identify as queer are, in fact, queer:

“Someone who’s by all accounts straight can correct the record and insist she’s “queer” without anyone asking her what she means by this, lest they be accused of nosiness or gatekeeping. … My aim here is not to insist that heteroflexible women with husbands, or assigned-female-at-birth non-binary people with high heels and boyfriends, are in some definitive sense straight women in denial about their true selves. … But I’d also urge some sympathy for the spicy straights. If you get some straight women claiming to be queer, this is because ... straight women have internalized the idea that straight womanhood is a bit ridiculous.”

Like Taylor, Bovy misinterprets the political critique at the heart of heteropessimism, arguing that “man-wanting can be viewed as a weakness to be overcome, an inability to resist social conditioning.” This is not the point that heteropessimists are trying to make. The failure is not on women for desiring men; it is on men for disrespecting and exploiting women.

The political statement that heteropessimism is trying to make is that women are not required to collude in their own oppression. If men want to have access to our time, our labour, and our bodies, they have to be worthy of it. Women should not settle for anything less.

The issue with both these articles is a fundamental misunderstanding of what people mean when they say it is embarrassing to date men. This statement is not an indictment of the existence of straight women; it is an indictment against men who are constantly get away with treating their female partners poorly. This is a widespread phenomenon. We need to stop putting up with it.

Joseph is critiquing women who decide to date people who humiliate them. But it is not people who name this humiliation for what it is who are at fault for the existence of that humiliation. The real responsibility here lies in your terrible boyfriend. And the truth is, it is embarrassing when women allow their partners to disrespect and exploit them. You do not need to do this. You do not need to date men if men are not going to treat you right.

While the stated focus of the critique of heterosexuality is on women’s behaviour, if you apply a modicum of critical thinking to heteropessimism, you will find that the real subject of this critique is patriarchal oppression. Joseph’s article is, at its heart, a reminder that men are not entitled to women’s bodies or affection simply by virtue of being men.

Women’s right to date men has never been under attack.

The fact that the growing cultural awareness that women no longer need to put up with being mistreated in romantic relationships has sparked so much handwringing over how it’s okay to date men, actually, is deeply telling. It points to a fundamental insecurity that a lot of straight women feel about the state of heterosexuality. This insecurity is misplaced. It comes from a desire for everyone to approve of everything you do – a desire that feels uniquely and violently cishet.

Heterosexuality is not under threat. If you think it is, you have no critical thinking skills. Seriously. Heterosexuality is socially rewarded, over and over and over and over. The fact that you cannot see this is a result of heterosexuality’s hegemony. You think it is not coerced because coercion only works when you do not notice it.

Have you been ostracized by your loved ones because of heterosexuality? Have you been assaulted, stalked, harassed, spat on because you’ve held hands with your hetero partner in public? Have you been denied parental status or hospital visitation rights, or had your property transferred to your deceased partner’s abusive family, because you aren’t allowed to get married? No? Okay, then shut the fuck up.

All of this noise is being generated because of one word: embarrassing. Feeling embarrassed because people have noticed a man disrespecting you is not a form of systemic social coercion. For all intents and purposes, you will be socially rewarded if you date, marry, and have children with a man. That a few people might think your choice is slightly humiliating is nothing compared to the vast mechanisms of social control that enforce and reward heterosexual partnership.

The core belief underlying critiques of heteropessimism is that true feminism will support women in whatever decision they make.

This is the rhetorical structure of this debate:

Premise: Women do not need to do X. There are social and political factors that coerce women into X and it is important to criticize these forces.

Objection: But lots of women do X. Therefore, feminism needs to defend and center X.

Replace X with whatever feminist issue is being discussed. Shaving. Wearing makeup. Dating men.

The fact that many women do something does not mean that that thing is inherently feminist. If anything, it indicates that women are coerced into doing it.

Sometimes women make choices in their lives that are not feminist. We have to be okay with acknowledging that not everything we do is liberatory. These articles point to a discomfort with the simple possibility that someone might disagree with your life choices. It’s childish. At a certain point you just need to get over it. The term “feminist” is not a check mark that needs to be placed on all aspects of our lives. This is a kind of political coddling that robs feminism of its teeth.

We are losing sight of the fact that feminism is a critical project. Feminism does not exist to describe and justify the status quo. Feminism exists to critique women’s oppression. And as long as heterosexual partnership is a site of women’s oppression, feminism will critique it.

Date men. Love men. Marry a man and do his laundry and raise his children and make him dinner. I literally could not care less. Just don’t call it feminist. Because, ultimately, who does that benefit? Men. Men who exploit the unpaid labour of their wives, their girlfriends, and their mothers. Men who directly benefit from women’s oppression inside the home. If you date a man who exploits you, you are opting into your own oppression. Why are we not allowed to acknowledge this?

Respectfully, you need to get over it. Feminism doesn’t exist to justify your individual choices. If you want to date men, do it. But don’t get mad when someone points out that your man is mistreating you.

And here’s the thing. Despite everything I’ve said in this essay, deep down, I am a romantic. I think that love is one of the most beautiful, radical things in this world. I think that love is transformative, that it makes us better, that we need it to survive. Exploitation, however, is not love. Patriarchy makes us think it is. This is a lie that patriarchy tells us so that we will dismiss oppression in the home.

Straight women: you deserve love. You deserve deep, life changing love. You deserve a partner who respects you, who cares for you, who knows you, who has good conversations with you, who makes you laugh. Love should be fulfilling, life sustaining, giving. Love should expand your life, not make it smaller. The basis of this kind of love is a deep, mutual respect. You shouldn’t settle for anything less.

And to straight men: you deserve love, too. But love is not uninhibited access to someone’s body, time, and labour. The only way that you can find real love is by letting go of this illusion. Only then, when you see your partner as a full human being with her own needs and desires, will you be able to experience true communion.

All we’re saying is that women don’t have to settle. There’s a reason that people are critical of dating men, and it’s because men, often, suck. So, men, don’t suck. If you are really, truly worried that heterosexuality is going out of style, the best way to protect it is to create new forms of romantic and familial relationship that don’t rely on the exploitation of women. Exploitation is the problem. The problem is not and never will be someone calling exploitation for what it is.

Men, start acting right. Maybe then it won’t be embarrassing to date you.

Sometimes, a bad adaption feels like a personal slight. I know, I know, it’s not healthy to invest too much of your identity into a piece of media. If you don’t like a show, you can just not watch it. Block tags, look away, skip over the long Substack think pieces written by a bitter twenty-something deeply entrenched in Tumblr fandom discourse. Or you can be a cunt about it.

I choose to be a cunt about it.

AMC’s TV adaption of Interview with the Vampire holds a very special place in my heart. It’s campy yet serious, poignant yet funny, the actors are incredible and the production hits all the right notes. The show deviates from the source material in many ways, and yet these changes add to the original themes of Anne Rice’s novel. The show is a great example of adaption done right. The changes, dramatic as they are, heighten the moral heart of the source material.

I’m not sure if I can say the same for the most recent iteration of this adaption, AMC’s The Vampire Lestat, which seems to be simultaneously a third season of Interview with the Vampire and its own show. I’m still not clear on exactly what’s going on here. Seasons one and two of the show expand on Anne Rice’s world to say something poignant about life as society’s “Other.” And yet, through a dramatic shift in tone and perspective, the most recent season of the show seems to undermine its own thematic concerns.

Let’s start with some background. Anne Rice’s original 1976 novel follows Louis de Point du Lac, a Louisiana plantation owner who is turned into a vampire by a crazy blonde Frenchman named Lestat de Lioncourt. Louis and Lestat become companions, keeping one another company through the loneliness of vampire existence. Nothing is perfect, however, and Louis begins to resent Lestat for the power that he holds over him. To stop Louis from leaving, Lestat baby traps him by turning an orphan girl, Claudia, into a vampire. Like many couples, Louis and Lestat ignore their problems in favour of raising a child together.

Things are good for a few years until Claudia begins to grow unhappy about being frozen in a child’s body while her mind ages (fair). Claudia and Louis hatch a plan to murder Lestat and flee to Europe, where they search for other vampires. Claudia and Louis finally find the community they have been searching for in a vampire coven in Paris.

In Paris, Louis is drawn to the coven leader, Armand. Fearing that she will lose Louis, Claudia asks him to make her a companion, and he turns a woman named Madeline into a vampire for her. We later learn that Lestat survived his family’s murder attempt. The coven kills Claudia for her transgression, but spares Louis on Lestat’s request. Louis then avenges his daughter by killing the rest of the coven and ends the novel by going on an extended honeymoon with Armand.

Anne Rice’s novel has had a lasting impact on contemporary vampire fiction. As Eric Diaz writes in his article for Nerdist:

“Interview with the Vampire wasn’t the first major portrayal of a sympathetic vampire in pop culture. The television series Dark Shadows already accomplished this, as did Marvel Comics’ Morbius. But it did introduce a formula that would inspire many over the next several decades: two hunky male vamps taking center stage, one remorseful and one relishing in evil. It’s a relationship usually soaked in conflict and homoerotic subtext.”

Diaz points to David and Michael from The Lost Boys, Spike and Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bill and Eric from True Blood, and Stefan and Damon from The Vampire Diaries as Louis/Lestat derivatives. And, even if Anne Rice’s vampires are not the original template for the sexy, sympathetic vampire (the origin of that trope is, unsurprisingly, Lord Byron), it is hard not to see echoes of Louis’ romanticised existentialism and moral brooding in most, if not all, contemporary vampire fiction.

Interview with the Vampire was first adapted for the screen in a 1994 movie staring Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis. The film was a success; subsequent adaptions of Rice’s work were not, and in 2020 Rice sold her rights to AMC, which released the TV adaption of the series in 2022.

AMC’s adaption of Interview with the Vampire takes some creative liberties with the source material. The novel takes place in the antebellum period while the show takes place in the 1910s. Louis and Claudia are both Black in the show; they are white in the novel. Louis is a pimp rather than a plantation owner. The relationship between Louis and Lestat is explicitly romantic; in the novel it was only subtext (although, let’s be honest, the romance between them was more “text” than “sub”). Claudia is fourteen instead of five – a necessity of child labour laws. And, finally, Lestat is physically abusive towards both Louis and Claudia in the show, a choice that is not made in the novel.

These changes are dramatic. They also work. While the show veers away from a straight adaption (in all senses of the word), it also pays homage to the original themes and emotional thrust of Rice’s work. Rice’s original novel is about being outcast from society. It is about violence, power, and cycles of abuse. It is about finding love and companionship in a world that rejects you. Instead of being trivialized or abandoned, these themes are enhanced through the show’s creative choices.

Vampirism as Queer Metaphor

In their essay “Queer Vampires: What We Want is in the Shadows,” S. Brooke Cameron argues that the vampire has always been a metaphor for queerness, writing:

“The vampire functions in much the same way as does the concept of queer itself in heteronormative culture: as Judith Butler explains in Bodies that Matter, ‘much of the straight world has always needed the queers it has sought to repudiate through the performative force of the term’. Queer thus connotes ‘Other-ness’, or an identity category against which heterosexuality must define itself by naming what it is not or what is tabooed. Just as queer serves as the Other against which straight sexuality is defined (often forcefully, per the often derogatory use of the former term), so too is the vampire a kind of shadow figure for tabooed desires” (117).

Vampire fiction allows us to confront the parts of ourselves that we would rather deny. The vampire is a vehicle through which we can look taboo in the eyes, both to denounce it (vampire as monster) and, simultaneously, to see ourselves reflected back to us (vampire as friend, as lover, as ourselves).

Vampires are outcast from society. They cannot integrate into the mortal world. And, as a result, their love is always doomed to destroy them.

AMC’s adaption of Interview with the Vampire does a gorgeous job using vampirism as a mirror for the queer experience. In the first episode of the series, Louis recounts being seduced by Lestat. This seduction is much more prolonged than it is in the books. In the show, Louis has denied his queerness, both to those around him and to himself, as a necessity of survival. Lestat promises freedom from denial, from secrecy, from his multifarious facades, when he turns Louis into a vampire:

“This primitive country has picked you clean. It has shackled you in permanent exile. Every room you enter, every hat you are forced to wear... the stern landlord, the deferential businessman, the loyal son... all these roles you conform to and none of them your true nature… I can swap this life of shame, swap it out for a dark gift and a power you can’t begin to imagine.”

Louis accepts his queerness at the same time that he accepts Lestat’s gift of vampirism. Louis’ struggles as a vampire also mirror struggles that many people feel around queerness: he is rejected by his family, he struggles reconciling his life with his morals and religion, he must accept that he will never have children, and so on and so forth. Louis is othered as a gay man and as a vampire. The explicit queerness of AMC’s show highlights the existing themes of alterity that are present in Rice’s work.

Race and Power in AMC’s Adaption

Louis’ Blackness is another way that the show grapples with themes of alterity. In her video “How Interview with the Vampire Got Racebending (Mostly) Right,” Princess Weekes discusses the ways that Louis’ Blackness in the show enhances his character. Louis in the show is much more complicated than Louis in the book. In the show, the viewer can see how his race, his class, and his queerness shaped him, leading up to the choices that would ultimately send him into a relationship with Lestat.

In some ways, Louis’ vampirism allows him to gain control in a world where power is denied to him. He is immortal, indestructible, and unimaginably strong. At the start of season one, Louis uses his vampirism to gain power over others, and to exact revenge on the white politicians and businessmen who have wronged him. It’s hard not to cheer when Louis eats the man who infantilises him in the middle of a business deal, or when he kills the politician aiming to segregate Storyville, hanging him on the same park fence where authorities used to display the bodies of runaway slaves.

In the chapter entitled “Black Vampires” in the book, Vampires in the New World, Louis Palmer argues that much of Black vampire media portrays, “larger-than-life protagonists who triumph over the racism and traditions of an enervated white culture by way of sheer bravado and style” (69). It’s hard not to see Louis de Point du Lac, in his chic red suit, telling a white alderman that he’ll wait for him to reload his gun – the bullets won’t hard him anyway – as the epitome of the stylish Black vampire finally getting his revenge on a society that has tried and failed to grind him down.

There are points in the narrative where Louis’ vampirism give him a level of power that he would not otherwise has as a Black man. But Louis’ vampire powers will always be secondary to the way that he is treated by white society. Louis’ vampirism is not enough to counter the all-consuming power of white supremacy. This is shown both inside and outside the home. Racism plays a foundational role in Louis’ romantic relationship with Lestat.

In the novel, Lestat feeds on the slaves of the Point du Lac plantation. Here we see the figure of the vampire as a political metaphor – Lestat feeds off Black people just as America feeds off their labour. In an analysis of Black vampirism, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins writes:

“If the path to the American Dream has been and continues to be “on the backs of blacks,” then it is also the case that there will continue to be a market for black bodies in pain precisely because part of the process of becoming “American” is exploiting and terrorizing black bodies. In the words of Debra Walker King, “The constant ‘truth’ about interpretations of black pain in America is that black people disappear while their bodies are constantly renewed as memorials to suffering and as tools for lessons benefiting systems of American acculturation.’” (322).

In novel, Louis and Lestat, just like the country they live in, survive through racial exploitation. In AMC’s adaption, Lestat still sucks the life blood from Black people surrounding him – the difference is that the racial exploitation in the television show is entwinned with a romantic relationship. Lestat in the TV show exploits and feeds off his Black lover; just as Lestat in the novel exploits and feeds off Black slaves. Both narrative choices can be seen as a critique of the way that whiteness emerges and is upheld through violence.

Lestat has immense social and economic power compared to Louis. Lestat, ultimately, has control over their relationship, their joint ventures, and their social lives, because he can move through white society in a way that Louis can’t. For example, when Louis and Lestat go into segregated spaces, such as the opera house, Louis has to pretend to be his valet. Race complicates the dynamic of maker and fledgling that is present in the book and it is the power that Lestat can wield over Louis that enables his abuse.

This brings us to the complicated question of consent in Interview with the Vampire. To what extent does Louis meaningfully consent to being turned? On one hand, Louis’ acceptance of vampirism serves as a metaphor for embracing queerness. On the other hand, in order to turn Louis into a vampire, Lestat must seduce and stalk him, and the moment in which Louis consents to vampirism is accompanied by a violent demonstration of Lestat’s powers.

Lestat turns Louis into a vampire for his own benefit. He needs someone to keep him company through the loneliness of immortal existence. The fact that Louis says yes seems almost insignificant, given the power the Lestat holds over him. And, throughout the show, Lestat constantly manipulates Louis into remaining with him.

In the video Why Can’t We Write Black Vampires (And Why It Matters), YouTuber Pyrus looks at how Black vampirism appears in film and television. They point out that in many pieces of media focusing on Black vampires, vampirism is violently forced upon Black characters. For example, in the 1972 film Blacula, the main character, Mamuwalde, is transformed into a vampire as punishment for defending his wife from a white vampire’s inappropriate remarks. The true horror of this movie is not vampirism but “the horror of bodily autonomy.” Pyrus argues:

“Mamuwalde’s horror comes from a body that was forced to move despite the mind… The true horror of Mamuwalde’s story is not that he wants to feed on you, but that he is a conscious mind trapped in a body that is compelled to do so against his will. Blacula is a horror of lost autonomy, of being a puppet to a curse you despise.”

This analysis can also be applied to Louis’ vampirism in Interview with the Vampire. Throughout the show, Louis struggles with killing human beings, preferring to feed off of animals instead. Lestat constantly diminishes this choice, forcing Louis to take part in violence that would not be necessary if it weren’t for his initial transformation. Louis’ autonomy is constantly denied, both by his vampirism and through his relationship to Lestat, who enforces his own values onto Louis.

It’s tricky. In this show, vampirism is clearly a metaphor for queerness. But, in many ways, Louis’ relationship with Lestat represents the exchange of one mask for another. Just as he is not the cold businessman Louis pretends to be in his human life, Louis is not the killer that Lestat wants him to be as a vampire.

I think the fundamental issue here is one of control. Louis is constantly denied the opportunity to live life on his own terms. Instead of letting Louis learn about vampirism, meet others, and explore what he wants his immortal life to look like, Lestat limits Louis’ knowledge of vampirism, refusing to tell him anything meaningful about vampire life beyond the confines of their townhouse. Louis is never allowed to define vampirism for himself.

Louis and Claudia are the only Black vampires in the first two seasons of Interview with the Vampire. There’s an intimacy and a solidarity between them as people who are both controlled and abused by Lestat. In season two, Louis and Claudia try to find other vampires – others who are “like them.” On one level this is a statement about vampirism, on another it is about race. Louis and Claudia are the only Black vampires in America. In addition to the physical and psychological abuse dealt out to them, Lestat physically isolated them from people who would understand their lives and experiences. Their longing to find other vampires is a longing to create the community that Lestat could never give them.

Who Tells the Story?

It’s important here to note that Louis is the narrator and POV character for seasons one and two, with a few interludes from the perspectives of Claudia and Armand. This is important because Louis is given the power to interpret and narrate his own experiences as a gay, Black man. The audience has access to an intimate, internal perspective on his story. On the choice to have Louis narrate his own story in the novel, Cameron writes that Rice signals “a new era in which the vampire plays the protagonist in control of the narrative and explicitly demanding our sympathy” (126). In the television show, it is the queer, racialized other who controls the narrative.

In season three, the narration switches. Lestat controls the story now. This change in narration was probably inevitable. Anne Rice’s second book in the Vampire Chronicles is also told from Lestat’s point of view. However, in the book, the race-based power differential is not a factor. The switch in perspective feels less loaded because of this. In the show, it’s hard not to feel as though the Black characters are being sidelined for the sake of a white lead.

As Nadira Goffe writes in an article for Slate:

“That the show has received an obviously higher promotional budget only after Louis’ hands were taken off the wheel has upset many fans who feel that the channel might be losing a handle on how to handle this show. On paper, it looks a bit like a Black protagonist being shafted so that a white narrator can take over with aplomb.”

People have pointed out the marketing disparities between the Louis-narrated seasons one and two, and the Lestat narrated season three. AMC went crazy with the marketing for this season. They released a rock album, had a glittery press tour, and even had a concert where people could go to see Sam Reid as The Vampire Lestat live. Where was this energy – and where was this money – when the show focused on a Black lead?

AMC, What are you DOING?

My favourite book series start small. They present a contained story and a few compelling characters. Then, in further books, the author blows the world open. This is exactly what Anne Rice does in The Vampire Chronicles. We spend much of Interview with the Vampire knowing almost nothing about Rice’s world outside of New Orleans. Until around halfway through the novel, one could almost believe that Louis, Lestat, and Claudia are the only vampires in the world.

The world of The Vampire Chronicles explodes in The Vampire Lestat. Not only do we get to read about Lestat’s life pre-vampirism, but we also get insight into the lives of characters like Armand and Marius, and Rice weaves a long narrative about the origins of vampires, spanning all the back to pre-dynastic Egypt. The Vampire Lestat is a gripping read. It’s a glittering nesting doll of a novel.

AMC’s adaption of the book is dizzying. Lestat’s narration is manic, sometimes drug-fueled, the cinematography flips between mockumentary shots, flashbacks, and straight filming, the scenes are fast, the music is loud, and one has the feeling of being pulled into Lestat’s downward spiral as they watch the scenes flip past. These choices do justice to Rice’s original novel, which is equally brash and disorienting. Aesthetically and narratively, this season is very well done. My concern is with the moral and political implications of centering Lestat’s point of view over a character that he has had immense control over for the past two seasons.

To put it simply: do we really need to hear the perspective of a racist abuser?

The show has always played with Louis as unreliable narrator. From the start of the series, we are told not to take his account at face value – his memories are fading, he cannot remember details, and his new boy toy is manipulating his perception of events. The issue is that the showrunners have made choices that make Louis’ unreliable narration more politically charged than it was in the original novels. In the book, Lestat and Louis are on a more even playing field – they are the same race, the same social class, and they are even closer in age than they are in the show. Louis’s unreliable narration is not much deeper, in the novel, than post-divorce bitterness.

The choice to portray Louis as an unreliable narrator has more weight in the show, however, because the narrative took so much time to show the race-based power dynamic between Louis and Lestat. What lesson is the audience supposed to take away from this change in narration? That people who claim to be victims of abuse are lying? That complaints of racism are exaggerated? That we cannot trust marginalized people to tell their own stories?

This is all the more frustrating because I do not think that there’s any way to adapt Rice’s subsequent books without switching perspectives. Shifting to Lestat’s perspective must have been part of the plan from the start. And, if this were the case, I can’t conceive of why the showrunners made some of the choices they made in the earlier seasons – especially their brutal and explicit depiction of domestic abuse, which was not present in the novel.

One of Princess Weekes’s critiques of AMC’s adaption of Rice’s novel is that Louis and Claudia are both subject to more violence than they are in the book. These characters are physically brutalised. Their white counterparts in the novel are not subjected to the same violence. The extreme physical abuse that Louis and Claudia are put through acts as a kind of trauma porn, an exploitation of Black suffering.

With the change in narration, this extreme abuse takes on another layer. It is almost as though the show is asking the audience to forget about Lestat’s violence for the sake of the glitz and glam of the new season. If we are meant to sympathize with Lestat, why did the showrunners make the choice to add a level of brutality to his character that wasn’t present in the books? Again, the switch in perspective is near-inevitable due to the nature of the source material. Knowing that at some point Lestat would have control over the narrative – and that the audience would have to empathize with him as a result of this narrative control – makes the choice to add so much racial violence almost baffling. I simply don’t know what the show is trying to say here.

At the time of writing this, only four episodes of The Vampire Lestat have come out. Perhaps there will be some kind of shift in the storytelling that re-empowers Louis as a character. So far, however, the audience has been asked to sympathise with Lestat. We have been asked to treat Louis’ story as a lie: “Never… fucking… happened…” Lestat screeches as he comes across Louis’ version of events.

Will the narrative, at some point, hold Lestat accountable for his actions in season one and two? I’m not sure. So far we have only been asked to empathize with him - he is lonely, heart broken, has a traumatizing backstory, and is now the subject of an ex boyfriend’s smear campaign.

I wouldn’t mind this season if, at some point, Lestat either takes accountability for his actions or if the narrative holds Lestat accountable. There could be something very interesting to be said about power, intergenerational trauma, and cycles of abuse if the audience is told to hold two truths in their head - that Lestat is both victim (this was demonstrated, brutally, in episode three) and perpetrator. So far, however, it’s almost as though we have been asked to forget that Lestat is a perpetrator all together.

And if this season ends with Louis returning to Lestat, I might actually have to beat someone up.

There’s no way to know what will happen as the rest of this season unfolds. For now, I’m disappointed. In addition to being good entertainment, seasons one and two of Interview With The Vampire provided a poignant expression of existence as society’s Other. Now… I don’t know. Let’s just hope that the show lives up to its own standards.

Further Reading

As a white writer, my analysis of the racial dynamics of Interview with the Vampire will necessarily be limited. While I have done my best to engage with Black thinkers in this essay, I urge you to take the time to read, listen to, watch, and support (financially, if you can!) BIPOC creators working on this topic, whose work I am deeply indebted to. Here are a few suggestions:

(In fact, you should watch all of Said By Ty’s videos on Interview with the Vampire!)

(And this video says everything that needs to be said about Lestat)

Lesbian Jumpscare

Armand, colonialism, and the weaponisation of anti-Blackness.

Above death, gore, and the prison of eternity, the most distinct horror AMC’s Interview with the Vampire explores is the experience of dating a white person. The 2022 television adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel, created by Rolin Jones, established itself firmly as a commentary on race in the vampire genre (a…

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Welcome to a vampy edition of The Culture Communiqué…

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Paul Justin Encinas

From Dracula to Sinners: How the Vampire Switched Sides

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And finally, a few of the articles that I’ve cited in this essay are behind paywalls. If you don’t have institutional access to them, feel free to send me a direct message and I will forward you a copy.

June is a month of big feelings. I turned twenty-four a week ago and if I think about it too hard I’ll cry and/or throw up. Add Pride celebrations, long days, and hot weather to the mix and the month feels like one big bruise. It’s been bittersweet. If I had a choice, I would spend June alone in the forest contemplating the passage of time. Thankfully, however, I have loved ones who drag me, kicking and screaming as I am, out of my ennui and force me to enjoy the beautiful summer.

I’ve been incredibly productive this month - writing a lot, reading a lot, crossing some things off my to-do list, trying to put things in place for the summer. And, at the same time, I’ve spent a lot of time lying around, day-drinking in parks, going on walks, attempting to keep up with soccer, socializing, and trying new things (turns out I’m really bad at axe throwing). I’m tired, but it’s a good kind of tired. Sometimes the fullness of my life hits me like a bus and I can’t help but take a step back and look at it, awestruck.

I try not to get too navel-gazey on this platform. I want to offer you something worth reading and, ultimately, I don’t think that the usual existential crises of a twenty-something are all that interesting. But there are times when I need to write down my feelings, or else I’ll explode. Here’s a little essay I wrote on the bittersweetness of looking back and forward and back again every birthday.

Writing Updates and Summer Housekeeping

I recently experienced a pride month miracle! Somehow, after months trying to build community on here, I have finally found my fellow nerdy, overthinking lesbians. I want to take a moment to say how incredibly grateful I am for all of you. Reading your work has expanded my worldview so much. I feel like I’ve learned more from reading and engaging with your ideas than I did throughout all of grad school. Genuinely. Thank you so much.

As a way of celebrating Pride month, I’ve compiled a few of my favourite pieces from independent LGBTQ+ creators on here. Please check them out and send them some love. And, if you are a smaller, queer writer, please send me your work! The beauty of this platform is the way it lends itself to forming an intellectual community. I want to read your works of theory, your reviews, your journal entries, your fiction. Everything you write is worth celebrating!

Now for a few pieces of housekeeping:

First, I will be out of the country for most of July and have decided to take a break from this platform from now until August. I have been hard at work writing and scheduling essays to be published throughout July, so you will still receive weekly pieces from me! However, I will not be able to stay up to date on communicating, replying to comments, promoting other people’s work, and so on and so forth. I promise I still love you, I’ll just be hiking without any internet access.

Secondly, I am working on a four part series about Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire while the new season of the TV adaption comes out. I wanted to plug this series because I’m very excited about it, and I know that many of you are equally excited about gay vampire romance. For those of you who couldn’t care less, I am planning to intersperse these essays with my usual content. I promise that this page has not become an Interview with the Vampire fan account.

And finally, I wanted to share that I’ve finally figured out what the hell I’m doing on this page: I want to create a space where I can grapple with the larger questions about the how and why of writing queer fiction. I want to ask: what are the moral and political implications of queer fiction? How are the lives and concerns of queer people reflected in storytelling. Why does it matter? And how do I, as a writer, do justice to the vast, messy, and beautiful experience of queer life?

My writing on here will always be free. If you want to support me, the best way to do so is to start a conversation in my comments section or share my work with your friends. Thank you to everyone who has been here from the start, while I experimented with finding my voice and my niche. I am really and truly grateful for the support I’ve received on this platform!

Share O.H.B. Reads

June Reads

The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell

I’ve loved Maggie O’Farrell’s work ever since a friend told me to read Hamnet, saying that it was so good she was unable to read anything else for months afterwards. This book holds up. O’Farrell’s writing has a way of transporting you into another world. Her prose is lush and decadent, her characters sing, and reading her work makes you feel like you are abandoning your inconsequential life for something beautiful. Case in point: this book got me through an eight hour drive around Southern Ontario in a bus with a broken toilet.

The Marriage Portrait is a fictionalized account of the life of Lucrezia de Medici, a 16th century Florentine noblewoman. Lucrezia was married at thirteen and died three years later. It is rumored that she was poisoned by her husband, a story that inspired Richard Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” O’Farrell’s book is as much a response to this poem as it is to the historical record of Lucrezia’s life. While Browning provides Lucrezia’s husbands account of the marriage, O’Farrell allows Lucrezia to tell her own story.

O’Farrell takes some creative liberties with Lucrezia’s story. Don’t go into this book expecting a historical record. Instead, enjoy the romance of O’Farrell’s writing, the decadence of her prose, and the empathy she shows towards her subject. And enjoy the ending. I won’t spoil it here, but suffice to say O’Farrell treats the subject matter brilliantly.

Stag Dance - Torrey Peters

This is a collection of short stories, plus one novella, from the author of Detransition, Baby. The stories are quite eclectic: we get trans lesbians roaming around post-apocalyptic America, a romance at a Quaker boarding school, listless lumberjacks playing with gender, and a trans woman confronting her identity at a Las Vegas meetup.

Peters’ writing is brilliant as always. Some of these stories replicate the kind of fun, comedy-of-manners-esque writing that we got in Detransition, Baby, which I discuss in this essay. That said, I found the novella (the titular Stag Dance) to be a bit of a slog. It’s clear that Peters spent a lot of time researching her subject matter. The prose is full of lumberjack slang and lumberjack history and lumberjack legends. I respect this. I’m also not a lumberjack and felt LOST as a result. That’s on me. I can see that Peters had a lot of fun writing Stag Dance and that’s all I can ultimately ask from any piece of literature.

As a side note, you should check out ’s brilliant article on “The Masker,” which is the last story in this collection.

Having People Over - Chelsea Fagan

I discovered Chelsea Fagan through her videos and articles on The Financial Diet. I love the way that she pairs financial literacy with larger social and political analysis, and how she makes a point of platforming other women on her channel. Her advice has also been super helpful, practically speaking. I was really looking forward to reading Having People Over, which is part hosting guide, part advice on building community as an adult. This book is right up my alley. I’m always looking for advice on how to be a better friend, neighbor, community member, and so on. Plus, I love impressing guests with a fancy dip.

Unfortunately, Having People Over was disappointing. I can’t place my finger on what it is about this book that let me down. Maybe the issue is that it tries to do too much: it acts as both a hosting guide and a work of social critique, and does both in a pretty shallow way. If you know the basics of friendship (reply to people’s text messages, have meaningful conversations, show up when it matters), or the basics of hosting (make sure there’s enough toilet paper, remove all the tripping hazards from your space, make twice the amount of food you anticipate needing) I don’t think that you will get anything out of this book that you don’t already know.

My main problem with this book is that it felt achingly bourgeoise. Fagan emphasizes, over and over, that her hosting tips are amenable to all sorts of financial situations and that your finances do not necessarily have to limit your ability to build community. Point well taken. At the same time, Fagan depoliticizes the topic of community building, making it a question of having the right drinks at a party instead of the rather radical act of changing the way that we relate to the people around us. I actually don’t think that the height of community building is a nice dinner party. It’s important to be a good friend, but being a good friend can only do so much. If you want to counter hyper individualism, you need to step out of your own class and social circle.

Maybe I wanted this book to be something it isn’t. Maybe I just didn’t need it; I finished the book feeling gratified that I already do most of the things that Fagan recommends when hosting. I wanted the book to dig deeper. In the end, I didn’t get anything from Having People Over that I couldn’t get from a few minutes of active reflection on what I value in my friendships.

Woman Down - Colleen Hoover

It’s probably dramatic to say that the two weeks it took to finish this book represented one of the lowest parts of my life so far. So I won’t say it. But…

The thing is, I actually quite like Colleen Hoover. I know, I know, this is very uncool of me. What can I say? There’s space in my literary diet for fast paced and sexy upmarket fiction. This isn’t to say I’m uncritical - I love being a killjoy and CoHo has terrible politics - but at least her books are fun.

This book, however, was just baffling. I don’t know how else to put it. The story is about a writer who deals with creative block by starting a relationship with a married cop who serves as her muse. Okay, sure, whatever, CoHo wrote your run of the mill heterosexual copaganda, nothing especially interesting about that. What makes this book unique is how poorly Hoover executes her rather basic premise. The plotline is bizarre, the writing is full of non-sequiturs, every chapter has to start with a reference to the chapter before it (for some reason), and, on the level of bare syntax, the writing is just bad. I could only read a few pages at a time before I got a headache. The only reason I finished this book is because I’m stubborn and needed something to fill up my time while waiting for other books on my TBR to become available at the library.

The Dark Heart of Italy - Tobias Jones

The Dark Heart of Italy is an incisive look into Italian politics, history, and culture in the early 2000s. Jones’ central concern is the rise of Silvio Berlusconi - a media tycoon and the former Italian Prime Minister - and what forces made his particular brand of politics popular. I really enjoyed Jones’ writing. A lot of anglophone literature that focuses on Italy obscures the real concerns of people living there, romanticizing the country for the sake of a English-speaking audience. Jones, a British writer who moved to Italy, does a great job of engaging with the grasp that Italy holds on the anglophone imagination and deconstructing this romanticization bit by bit.

As a result of the author and audience, there are parts of this book that treat Italy as some exotic place that Americans and Brits couldn’t possibly understand. The chapter on Catholicism, for example, felt a lot like reading Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”. That said, I think Jones does a good job positioning himself as a British journalist writing about another country, and he spends a lot of time grappling with the task making Italy home while also being critical of Italian politics.

The Dark Heart of Italy looks at the way that populism plays out in a specific time and place, and I found this contextual grounding of larger ideological concerns valuable. If you look past Jones’ focus on specific cultural quirks, insights from this book can be applied beyond the immediate context. All I’m saying is that a business tycoon becoming a populist politician, constantly going to court, cracking down on immigration, and enabling far right extremism isn’t an exclusively Italian phenomenon. If you know what I mean.

Perfume and Pain - Anna Dorn

Perfume and Pain follows Astrid, a mid-list lesbian author who spends her life self-destructing via ill advised romances and a combination of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes that she dubs the “Patricia Highsmith.” My favourite thing about this book was Dorn’s near obsessive focus on scent, makeup routines, fashion, and astrology. I’ve written here about why I love this kind of writing. These details make the book incredibly sensual. Dorn’s writing is like looking at a Hiroshi Nagai painting: oversaturated, violently bright, and buzzing.

Beneath Astrid’s irreverence and Dorn’s near manic prose, Perfume and Pain was surprisingly tender. A real love - for the characters, for lesbian literature, for the craft of writing - runs throughout the book. For this reason, I’d recommend Perfume and Pain even to those whose taste runs less unhinged-hyper-femme than my own.

Picking up this book lead me to finding on here, and, subsequently, helped me discover Sample Sluts, the perfume substack that she runs with . Going through their archive took up my whole weekend, and it was a weekend well spent. Side note, if you guys ever want a guest writer, I spend my spare time on fragrantica and I was also blonde as a child.

June’s Cookbook

Every month, I try out a new cookbook so that I’m not stuck eating beans and rice and plain pasta. This month’s cookbook was Skye McAlpine’s A Table Full of Love.

I have a lot of opinions about what makes a cookbook work. A good cookbook should be arranged intuitively. It should have some sort of theme or story that ties the recipes together. It should introduce you to techniques that can be used beyond that specific recipe. I should conceivably be able to fit the recipes into my life (much love to the Greek cookbook I purchased where the first step in one recipe involved drying olives in a basement for three months). And, finally, a good cookbook should include at least a few balanced recipes that combine vegetables, protein, and carbs for the days when you don’t want to use a million recipes for one meal.

A Table Full of Love did not meet any of my exacting criteria. The overarching theme of this book is food as a love language. That’s great, I love that. I do think that there is something deeply romantic about cooking for someone. My partner and I fell in love over penne alla vodka and nothing makes me happier than sharing a huge meal and a bottle of wine with my best friends. I loved this theme; I hated everything else about the book.

The recipes are divided into five categories: Comfort, Seduce, Nourish, Spoil, and Cocoon. This is a categorical nightmare. What makes a recipe seductive? Why does “Honey Roasted Chicken Thighs with Golden Potatoes” nourish, while “Roast Cornish Hen with Lemon Potatoes” cocoons? What does any of this even mean?

The cookbook is impossible to navigate. Dessert recipes are tossed alongside salads and entrees. None of the recipes are nutritionally complete. And, worst of all, there is a STARTLING lack of garlic in this book. Sorry, if your roast chicken recipe doesn’t involve at least a head of garlic, I’m simply not going to bother with it.

Let this be a warning to you. If you decide to write a cookbook without catering to my exact tastes and criteria, I will give it a bad review and my tiny group of Substack followers WILL be notified!!!

Thank you!!!

Thank you, as always, for supporting my work! What’s one thing you’re looking forward to this summer? Comment below!

Before you go, check out the articles I published this month!

Somehow, I’ve cracked the Substack code. After months trying to find writing that resonates, my feed is now full with brilliant, complex, and gorgeously written essays from people across the world who are writing about love, literature, sex, community, queerness, and all the things that aren’t given a platform in traditional publications. I feel so grateful to have come across the smaller creators writing amazing, thought provoking pieces that have broadened my view of the world over the past three months that I’ve been writing on this platform.

This piece is a love letter to all the people writing for the joy of writing. The incredible care you put into your work is evident from the first sentence. And the best thing about spending time on this platform has been reading these pieces - especially the ones from people who refuse to submit to the algorithm or let the grind of social media water down their thoughts.

I love independent work. I love artists who publish their own stuff, I love thinkers working outside of the ivory tower, I love everyone who is working to create an artistic and intellectual community outside of the constraints of traditional media. These works are raw and glorious. I’m endlessly thankful for this platform because I know that I would not be able to find this kind of work anywhere else.

To celebrate independent creators, especially LGBTQ+ creators, I wanted to compile some of the best essays that I’ve stumbled across. I want to say thank you. Thank you for your commitment to your work. Thank you for expanding my worldview and teaching me something I didn’t know. And thank you, most of all, for keeping up with the often grueling and thankless work of writing. The world is better for it.

theresa tian

your queerness is not about you

I love being seen by friends. Not just seeing, but seen. That jolt, almost painful, when you walk into a space and are wrenched into familiarity—that was the feeling I had when my friend J proclaimed that she, too, was reading Stag Dance (just finished story 2) and we simply…

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3 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · theresa tian

This piece looks at the ways that identity is formed within community, using Torrey Peter’s short story "The Masker” as a jumping off point. I really loved the way gets us to reconsider what queerness means, especially in the context of hyper-individualist identity politics that we’re seeing today.

resident lesbian

Lesbianism made me want to lose weight

Note: The process of writing what you’re about to read triggered me in numerous ways, therefore if at any point you feel like this piece is impacting your mental health, please take care of yourself and stop reading…

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3 months ago · 97 likes · 10 comments · resident lesbian

I think it’s vitally important to interrogate intra-community issues with honesty. I love any piece that looks at the way that larger systems of power are replicated within queer communities, and this is exactly what this raw and deeply personal piece from does.

Dolly Scribes

The Cursed Privilege of the Tenderqueer

I don’t remember the first time I heard the word “tenderqueer” but as soon as I did, I knew who they were, and I knew that I wasn’t one. In fact, I’m pretty certain that it would be just about impossible for a Black woman to get away with tenderqueer behavior at all…

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6 years ago · 1982 likes · 83 comments · Dolly Rose

There is a certain kind of person who you may brush up against in queer communities who talks about community and accountability while simultaneously ruining your life. Chris Fleming calls this phenomenon “Vibe Dysphoria” ’s article dissects this phenomenon and how people consistently use politically and therapeutically correct language to dodge accountability.

rou's bazaar

i have the blues at the gay bar in a post-communist country

i realized i was queer at the age of 11. i remember the feeling that something heavy was finally dropped into a place where the burden fit, it made the array whole. i opened a secret flower within me, it spread right as the moon cycle settled into the night, feelings set into place just as tiny kittens that bundle to sleep together for warmth seem to fi…

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4 months ago · 66 likes · 2 comments · rou

The heartbreaking story that narrates in this piece will feel uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has dipped their toes into the local queer community looking for acceptance, and only got hurt. Rou beautifully captures the simultaneous hopefulness and loneliness of finding community at a young age. This isn’t even to mention the beautiful, evocative writing in this piece. I was enthralled!

Tara Knight

Your Polycule Is Not a Revolution

The Polyamory Mystique And The Chosen Family…

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4 months ago · 200 likes · 20 comments · Tara Knight

This essay is about the way that ideals of love, community, and chosen family obscure the ways that reproductive labour can be exploited in queer communities. I really love ’s work, which always engages meaningfully with Marxist-feminist analysis and translates theory into lived experience. Capitalism requires gendered exploitation to continue functioning. Knight reminds us that misogyny doesn’t disappear the second that you step into a progressive community.

“They say it is chosen family. We say it is unwaged work. The labor that holds together a polycule, a queer household, a transbian friend group is reproductive labor in Federici’s sense. It is the work of keeping people alive, fed, soothed, sexually content, emotionally regulated, and able to keep functioning. The labor survives the change in unit. It is still being done. It is still being done by women — increasingly by dolls — and it is still going unrecognized and unpaid. The aesthetics have changed. The labor pattern has not.”

Peter Van Wijnaerde

This was never just about sex

Call yourself vegan at a dinner party and watch what happens. You did not just make a simple statement about yourself. You activated a whole personality in other people’s heads. Your politics. Your car. Your general level of fun at a barbecue. You said one word and the room rearranged itself around it…

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4 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Peter Van Wijnaerde

Much like the first piece I highlighted in this list, ’s essay looks at the ways that identity is socially and politically mediated, rather than simply being a brute fact. This piece looks at the changing meanings of homosexuality, as seen through art history.

up for interpretation

Lesbianism Is Its Own Universe (And You Keep Trying to Flat Earth It)

Originally Published: April 9, 2026…

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5 months ago · 483 likes · 20 comments · Just K.

Every time I hear he/him lesbian discourse or butch/femme discourse or “soft masc” discourse I feel like I’m losing my mind. ’s article articulates the complexities of lesbian gender and why people just. keep. getting. it. wrong.

Queer Hoodoo Housewife

white people don't deserve queerness

Before Pride Month kicks off on Monday, I want to say that I don’t feel like white people deserve queerness. I don’t feel like white people should get to experience queer joy or feel congruence with who they really are when that means carrying tenets of white supremacy around like a security blanket. Especially in this time, when it seems like we are at…

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3 months ago · 1167 likes · 65 comments · Queer Hoodoo Housewife

This article from is an important reminder that queerness does not absolve white people of white supremacy. White people benefit from both the contemporary and historical exploitation of people of colour, and queerness does not let us escape from this truth.

“Regardless of how you exist or your status, if you are white, you have crushed and eaten the bones of my Ancestors as historical tradition to be able to be where you are now. Even if you didn’t know that’s what seasons your food (because we know nothing else does), you now know and yet you continue to eat of the same human flesh, claiming you can’t do fucking anything about it. Yet, you’re salivating for it.”

Rev. Oliver Snow

The Beautiful Chaos of "The People's Joker"

A few months ago, I watched a movie called “The People’s Joker”. The People’s Joker is a 2022 comedy/ parody movie by Vera Drew, a transgender woman who wrote, directed and starred in the film. The film is based on/ parodying Batman, with Drew starring as the Joker. I guess. Sort of. Its complicated…

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3 months ago · 22 likes · Rev. Oliver Snow

A few years ago, I was visiting family in the middle-of-nowhere-Ontario and went to a drag show held at a sports bar on the side of a highway. Before the show started, one of the queens thanked us for being there and said that the show might not be good, but we all need to “protect bad queer art.” ’s essay is a love letter to bad queer art and reading it sparks a belly-deep joy.

Jule Ghoul

fighting the femme

[This article is referring to femme lesbians, and only femme lesbians. Femme is different from fem, which is a label that can be used by any sapphic/fem presenting person. Femme is specific to lesbian’s and will be addressed as such within this writing…

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5 months ago · 231 likes · 11 comments · Julia

It’s upsettingly rare to find works that deal with femme identity is a way that doesn’t reduce us to mere femininity or the people we date. ’s piece is about grappling with femme identity and learning how to make it mean something outside of the reductive narratives so many femmes are fed.

“Femme isn’t an outfit. Femme isn’t just a role we play in a relationship. We are femme because it’s in our soul, our blood, our minds, our actions. We are femme because of how we fight for and protect our community. We are femmes because we are powerful and smart and beautiful and brave, just like butches. We are femme because we are femmes. End of story.”

Samantha Everly

Queerness & Creativity: Gays of Substack, it's time to stand up.

Queer people exist in a land of Otherhood…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Samantha Everly

’s most recent essay is a love letter to queer literary history, and a call to action for queer artists to keep doing what we do. We’re living in a time of intense political backlash against queerness, and this essay serves as a rallying cry about the importance of creating community, uplifting each other’s voices, and continuing to make art.

Thank you for reading! What are some of your favourite pieces from independent queer artists and creators? Comment below!

I turn twenty-four tomorrow. I’m trying not to let that fact send me into an existential crisis.

In a lot of ways, I feel like time stopped at seventeen. That’s how old I was when COVID hit. I had four months of high school left when we went into lockdown. And, while I was lucky that my learning wasn’t disrupted very much – I already had a bad case of senioritis when school ended – it meant that a lot of major milestones went uncelebrated. No prom, no graduation, no frosh week.

Compared to the global crisis of the pandemic, missing these things hardly matters. What matters is that all my loved ones are still safe and healthy. And in truth, if I had the opportunity, I don’t know if I would have taken part in the celebrations that I missed. I was a cynical weird kid and probably wouldn’t have gone to prom anyways. Still. It would have been nice to skip it on a matter of personal principle rather than because of an international emergency.

All this is to say, because I didn’t experience those cultural markers that signal transition from one part of life to another, in many ways it feels like those transitions simply didn’t happen. I finished high school. Moved out. Broke up with my high school sweetheart and fell in love again. Made new friends. Got a degree. Got another degree. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ll be engaged by the end of the summer. And still, if I were wake up tomorrow in my childhood bedroom and find out that the past six years were all a dream, I wouldn’t even blink.

Is this just the reality of adulthood? Will the rest of my life feel like sleepwalking?

I’m now older than my mother was when she gave birth to me. This could make me feel like I’m falling behind – but in a lot of ways it makes me grateful. I can’t imagine what it was like for her to have a kid while she was still finishing school. I’m proud to be the first woman in my family to make it to her mid-twenties without popping out a baby. I think about the generations before me and feel overjoyed that I’ve broken through the cycles of trauma-and-Catholicism to emerge, in my mid-twenties, as a well-educated, childless, lesbian artist with a hot butch life partner and easy access to anti-depressants.

Maybe I don’t want to grow up. Or, at least, I don’t want to grow up in the way that people before me have grown up. I feel weird about turning twenty-four, but I think this weird feeling comes from a recognition that I have control over my life, real, meaningful control over it, and it’s up to me to build a life that I feel is worth living. The feeling is liberating. And terrifying.

I understand the appeal of the school-job-marriage-children-retirement template. It gives you something to work off of, something to measure yourself against, something to guide you through the muck of adulthood. Going through life without these guardrails is scary.

I am aging, growing up, maturing. The slow, forward crawl of time is inevitable. But what is liberating about life without guardrails is that I get to define these terms for myself. I get to decide what growing up means to me.

Right now, my main concern is becoming a better writer. I want to dedicate this part of my life to developing my voice, articulating my thematic concerns, becoming the artist that I want to be. And I am overwhelmingly happy that I live a life where I’m able to make art my primary focus.

I don’t think that a single day of my twenty-third year around the sun went by without me writing. At the height of productivity, I spent upwards of six hours writing. On other days, I simply jotted down a to-do list or wrote a few lines in my journal. Either way, my work has improved in leaps and bounds. I compare my work today to my work from a year ago, and I cannot believe that they were written by the same person.

The joy of writing is that I know my work can only get better. Many of my favourite authors produced their best work long past the age of fifty. I will read more. I will write more. I will have more experiences, meet more people, home in on my craft. I’m reminding myself that there is no deadline here. There’s no point where my writing will peak. Becoming a good writer is a slow, steady dedication to the craft over the course of a lifetime. I still don’t know what kind of artist I will become.

And isn’t this the case with everything? Won’t I become a better friend, a better partner, a better community member, teacher, cook, host, daughter, cousin, Chrisitan, reader, coffee drinker, library patron, porch-sitter, and so on and so forth as I age? Isn’t all of life a slow, steady lesson in the art of living?

Here’s what I want to do this year. I want to write, a lot. I want to read, a lot. I want to break open some of the books that have been gathering dust on my bookshelf: Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Marx’s Capital, the many volumes of Edward Said that I’ve collected over the years. And I want to, finally, finish Ulysses. I said I would do it last year and failed; this year things are serious. I want to go on a lot of walks. I want to have long conversations with strangers. I want to have long conversations with friends. I want to stay up late. I want to explore my city. I want to learn new things, to go to public lectures and audit philosophy classes just for the sake of it. I want to get strong enough to do a pull up. I want to spend my afternoons lying on the floor in the sunshine. I want to improve my Irish. I want to have a lot of sex. I want to grow my hair down to my butt. I want to spend quality time with the people I love. I want to pet the neighbourhood cats.

I’m reminding myself that there’s nowhere I need to be, no set of rules that I need to follow or things that I need to check off my list. I just need to be here, present in my life, and drink deeply of it. I hope that one day, I’ll miss being twenty-four. I want this year to be worth missing.

As Mary Oliver writes in “The Summer Day:”

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

If, like me, you are an avid reader of contemporary queer fiction, you may have noticed a certain kind of novel growing in popularity over the past few years. These books are usually set in New York City. The protagonists are in their 20s or 30s, queer, wealthy, well educated, and terrible at communicating. The prose is full of punchy, declarative sentences and references to twitter discourse. If you don’t exist within the particular social milieu being written about, these books will probably make you feel alienated. If you do exist within that milieu, these books will probably make you feel seen. Uncomfortably so.

Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby is a classic example of this kind of writing. See also Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis, The Call Out by Cat Fitzpatrick, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, and, if you want to get a bit old school, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. These books are all queer comedies of manners.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines a comedy of manners as a “witty, cerebral form of dramatic comedy that depicts and often satirizes the manners and affectations of a contemporary society.” Characters live in a milieu with strict, if ultimately petty, social standards, and the dramatic tension comes from whether or not characters meet these exacting expectations. Apurva Khadye defines summarizes the genre as “the literary equivalent of sipping tea while judging everyone in the room.”

In essence, a comedy of manners satirizes the social graces of a particular echelon of society. Menander’s comedies satirize the social mores of Ancient Greece. Moliere satirizes 17^th Century France. You can find a comedy of manners in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (perhaps the genre has always been queer) and, most famously, in the work of Jane Austin. Today, writers like Torey Peters and Jenny Fran Davis satirize the social graces of a set of upper-middle-class queer people who live in Brooklyn.

Through satire, Moliere and Oscar Wilde critique the limits and hypocrisies of upper-class society. There is a sense, in reading these works, that they have chosen an appropriate target. The people they mock have social and economic power – they can handle a few jokes made at their expense. A queer comedy of manners does something a bit different. The characters in these books are often wealthy and white. They have some amount of social power. However, they are also part of a marginalized group. Unlike the society of the 19^th century’s upper class, which was built off of exploitation and that people were born into, building a society of queer people is often a matter of survival in an otherwise hostile world.

The underlying moral worldview of the queer comedy of manners is that nothing is beyond critique. These writers are doing something radical. In satirizing the messy, catty, petty, aspects of our lives, they are refusing to flatten down the queer experience for the sake of palatability.

These books refuse to cater to cishet society. They refuse to translate our experiences to make them legible. There’s something very beautiful about this kind of writing.

I was sixteen when the movie Love, Simon came out, that sickly sweet romantic comedy about a white suburban teenager who comes out to his nuclear family. At that point my lesbianism was an open secret in my extended family. We didn’t speak it out loud. Irish-Catholics don’t do that kind of thing. The prejudice wasn’t necessarily against gay people; it was more against having heartfelt conversations. They knew I was gay. I knew they knew. We didn’t have to bring it up.

A few months after Love, Simon came out, I was helping my grandmother with dinner when, without looking up from her cutting board, she said that she watched and liked the movie.

“It really showed me that gay people are just like us,” she said.

She threw some onions into a frying pan and went to look for salt. We moved on. I knew she was saying she loved me in the way she knew how.

The thing is, I hated Love, Simon.

The movie starts with scenes of suburban teenagerhood. A messy bedroom, college brochures, a football field, a pretty white family.

“I’m just like you,” Simon tells the viewer, “For the most part, my life is totally normal. My dad was the annoyingly handsome quarterback who married the hot valedictorian, and no, they didn’t peak in high school. I have a sister I actually like, not that I’d ever tell her that, and last year and two hundred episodes of chopped ago, she decided she wants to be a chef. And then there’s my friends. Two of them I’ve known since pretty much the beginning of time… or at least kindergarten. One of them I just met a few months ago, but it feels like I’ve known her forever. We do everything friends do. We drink way too much iced coffee, watch bad 90s movies, and hang out at Waffle House, dreaming of college and gorging on carbs. So, like I said. I’m just like you. I have a totally, perfectly normal life. Except I have one huge ass secret…”

Take me out back and shoot me, why dontcha?

There are queer stories that are told with the goal of appealing to sweet grandmothers who have difficulty talking about their feelings. I see the necessity of stories like these. At the same time, there’s something almost violent about watching the opening scene of Love, Simon. I didn’t grow up in a nuclear family. I lived and went to school in a working-class neighbourhood. I struggled making friends. I always felt like I was different. The only thing I have in common with Simon is our queerness, and, honestly, that connection feels tenuous at best. My life and my community look nothing like Simon and his masc4masc white picket fence crush.

The term “homonormativity” seems to have gone out of fashion. It’s chic these days to dismiss it. Queer people are being killed, our rights are being rolled back, and you want to complain about the prevalence of white gay families in sitcoms?

But this term grasps something important about how the desire to be read as “normal” ultimately betrays the movement for liberation. The narrative of normalcy becomes a demand. “Queer people are just like us” starts off as a description and ends as an imperative. If you are not “just like us” you are doing something wrong.

The queer comedy of manners stands in direct opposition to the sickly-sweet feel-good stories written with the goal of garnering cishet sympathy. These are stories by and for queer people, that refuse to pull their punches for the sake of palatability. They portray queer life in all it’s messiness. And there is something profoundly humanizing about reading them.

When you are young and lonely, the queer community feels like a guiding star. The thought of it sparkles in the back of your adolescent mind, a hazy, half-formed dream of the life that you could be living. I used to dream about what it would be like to date a woman and walk past my local dyke bar, trying to sneak a peak through the windows (by the time I was old enough to go inside, it had closed. Now, my only options cater to yuppie cis men. They sell $15 cocktails and are packed with more bachelorette partiers than lesbians).

Then, at the tender age of nineteen, I launched myself into my local queer community for the first time. The experience battered me. I wanted connection, community, people who saw me as I was and who loved me unconditionally. Instead, I got endless drama, bad sex, and exes-friends-lover’s-exes calling me a bitch behind my back. The conflicts were petty. I once told a former lover that she was bad in bed; she told me I needed Botox. There are places in the city that I no longer frequent in fear of running into someone who has it out for me. And if I do go to the gay village, you know I’m spending at least an hour and a half getting ready because my hair and outfit carry almost as much social meaning as the people I’ve slept with.

I’ll take personal responsibility for this. I was a mess: unmedicated, insecure, constantly heartbroken, unsure of who I was or what I wanted out of a relationship. I could have treated people better. People could have treated me better. Such is the reality of human relationships. Nobody is infallible. But there s something a little heartbreaking about walking into a space that you have been dreaming about for years, and finding it filled with messy, broken people who are still learning to love each other.

Your local queer community is not a utopia. Systems of oppression do not cease to exist the moment you walk into a queer bookstore. At the end of the day, we are human people with human flaws. Add to this the fact that most queer people are dealing with immense amounts of trauma, and that many of us are living precariously – making money under the table, couch surfing, estranged from family with nobody to fall back on but a handful of lovers – and you’ve got a recipe for social disaster.

People are writing about this phenomenon all over Substack. has a heartbreaking piece about how being attracted to women has made her want to lose weight, writing: “Lesbianism, something I treasure, is the source of my depression, disordered behaviour, and ever-present pain I’m currently undergoing.” ‘s essay “I have the blues at the gay bar in a post-communist country” details the way that the community enabled an abusive relationship between an 18-year-old and someone almost ten years her senior. has published some brilliant essays about the way that gendered dynamics of reproductive labour are reproduced in t4t polycules.

When writing for an audience of other queer people, we can look our community in the face and critique it. I love these pieces because they capture the feeling of disenchantment that, I think, most people feel when they enter a space that they thought would save them and find the same problems rebranded with a bit of glitter.

The queer comedy of manners takes on the project of critiquing a social milieu that we want to believe is infallible. This critique is ethically and politically important. It is also profoundly humanising.

The queer community is the victim of society’s Madonna/Whore complex. It is either a flawless utopia, or a group of degenerates who threaten the very foundation of society. It is far too easy to promote trite narratives about community and acceptance as a way to counteract homophobic and transphobic propaganda. We’re not trying to corrupt your child. We’re here to make them feel safe and loved.

Reductively positive narratives about the queer community – like what we see in Love, Simon – have their place, strategically. But I reject that idea that the only task of queer artists is to beg and plead for acceptance. This demand is incredibly limiting, not only for the artist, but also for the viewer who wants to see themselves reflected in a way that feels honest and real.

I think the main appeal of the queer comedy of manners is this sense of being seen. These works may tease and make fun, but they do it like a close friend would, someone who loves you and isn’t afraid to call you on your shit. There’s something beautiful about seeing your identity, your concerns, your social mishaps and romantic foibles translated on the page – especially when there is such an astonishing lack of media that treats queer people as people, warts and all.

Denying us the complexities of our experiences can function as a kind of epistemic injustice. This term was coined by Miranda Fricker (although the concept has circulated long before then, albeit in less pedantic form) and refers to ways that a person can be wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Fricker argues that there are two forms of epistemic injustice:

1) Testimonial Injustice, wherein someone is not seen as credible because of some aspect of their identity. Think, for example, of someone’s contributions to a discussion being dismissed because of their race, discrediting someone’s account of sexual harassment (women are crazy, etc), or assuming that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about because they have a particular accent.

2) Hermeneutical Injustice, wherein a shared epistemological framework excludes the interpretive resources needed to understand particular experiences. Fricker uses the example of sexual harassment to demonstrate this idea. Before the specific language of sexual harassment emerged, many women did not have the language to name what was happening to them. Because of a gap in the common interpretive resources, women were left unable to articulate their common experiences. I suggest reading this chapter for more details, the case Fricker describes is quite interesting.

(If you want to read this but don’t have institutional access, send me a message. IYKYK.)

Philosophers working in the analytic tradition, like Fricker, love to create a term and then argue about whether some phenomenon fits into the definition they made up. If it doesn’t, the task is to create a new term and then argue further about whether the phenomenon fits into that made up definition. This is a piece of disciplinary resentment from my past life as an academic. Suffice to say, I don’t think that reductive narratives about queerness easily fit into Fricker’s definition of testimonial or hermeneutic injustice. However, I do think that there is something important here when we’re discussing the theory and practice of queer literature. What Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice shows us is that a person is wronged when they operate in a context that denies them the resources to interpret their own experiences.

No identity is a given. We form our self-concept through relating to other people, through forming communities, through bouncing ourselves off one another (in all ways that phrase can be interpreted). This argument is brilliantly articulated in ’s essay, “Your Queerness is Not About You”:

“It makes me uneasy, this awareness that queerness itself is fundamentally changed when defined within or without social relations. It disrupts the narrative that we are “born this way,” that there is something irrevocable and unchangeable about our identity. It introduces an incontrovertible element of choice, which harkens unpleasantly to the violent language often used to shame people back into the closet. Make the right choice, or else.

For those of us who stood at the crossroads and stepped to the other side, “out of the closet,” we have made this decision already, knowingly or not. This reinforces for me the idea of being “culturally queer,” someone who not only is attracted to the same sex but is fluent in the social niceties and lingo of the queer community. What if being queer has little to do with your sexual preferences but everything to do your social relations?”

Or, as Judith Butler puts it in their essay, Besides Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy:

“And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of another.” (19)

Our identities are fundamentally shaped by the people around us and the communities we take part in. In many ways, one’s identity is not actually a description of the self, but a description of the way that one relates to other people – socially, culturally, romantically, and so on. And while the quotations above point to the way that our identities are formed through real life social engagement, I want to suggest that identities are also formed through the stories that we tell about ourselves.

If you’ll allow me to step into the boots of an analytic philosopher for a moment, I suggest we call this something like narrative injustice. When the narratives that are told about us are limited, our ability to interpret our lives is also limited.

It may seem like I’m overemphasizing the impact that narratives can have on our self conception. But I think that the stories that circulate in the public consciousness have more of an impact on our lives than we might like to give them credit for.

In the introduction to The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (and do remember that my inbox is always open), Terry Castle argues that literature is one area where “the lesbian idea,” or, our concept of what same sex love between women means, is worked out culturally. Castle traces out different the different cultural relationships to the lesbian idea throughout literary history. In the 16^th and 17^th century, lesbianism was seen with astonishment, shock, and disbelief (Castle, 19). Later literature portrayed lesbianism unsympathetically – Castle points out various lesbian stock characters such as the “seductive older woman (usually a teacher of some sort) who preys emotionally on a younger one” (24). Literature reflects social and cultural attitudes. It also shapes them. When our only narratives references are predatory or tragic or shocked. we form a particular idea about what lesbianism means. These stories function as a kind of regulating tool. The underlying message is that queerness is dangerous. You need to watch out, least an older woman prey on you (I am putting the specific feelings that this idea inspires in me aside for the sake of coming across as a respectable thinker).

The underlying message of the comedy of manners is much more complex. These works tell us that queerness is beautiful. They also tell us that it is hard. Communities have their unspoken social codes, people are petty, conflict can be simultaneously trite and devastating, we can unconsciously replicate the very oppressive dynamics that we wish to escape. The view of queer life presented in these works is nuanced and incredibly human.

The most radical aspect of these works is the question of audience. The queer comedy of manners does not cater to a cishet society. These books are by and for queer people, and they display the intricacies of our lives in a way that only someone who is deeply entrenched in our community can. A criticism I’ve read about some of the books mentioned in this article is that they are too culturally specific, to the point of alienating a cishet audience. Let’s be real though - sometimes a cishet audience needs to be alienated. Our stories are not for you. This is the radical claim of the queer comedy of manners.

As puts it in “The Beautiful Chaos of the People’s Joker”:

“I can appreciate a piece of work that, for better or worse, is… us. It’s just us, warts and all, putting something into the world that future generations of trans people can look back on and say ‘Yeah, we’ve always been here, and we’ve always been kind of dramatic and weird.’”

That’s why I love this genre. I love petty drama, I love the long passages that read a character to filth for a particular outfit choice, I love works that take the messy, complicated, hard, unpalatable aspects of queer life and make them beautiful. There’s something profound about seeing yourself reflected in a work of art. There’s something beautiful about writing that refuses to be translatable.

The recent popularity of the queer comedy of manners indicates a beautiful shift in the trajectory of queer literature. There is writing about us. Then there is writing done by queer people for the benefit of a cishet audience. And finally, there is writing by us, for us, about us.

Literature is ours now. Happy pride.

If you enjoyed this essay and want to read more of my thoughts on queer literature, may I recommend these pieces:

I’ll start this review with a confession: I don’t know how to write queer stories. This is an ethical dilemma, not a technical one. I know how to write queer stories (beginning, middle, end, then add some girls kissing), but I don’t know how I should write queer stories.

Growing up with a lack of queer representation was incredibly lonely. I knew that there was something that made me different from other people, but I didn’t have the language for it until I got older and could read books in the adult section of the library. When I did find myself reflected in literature, it was through a warped funhouse mirror. I saw suicides and heartbreak; the occasional monster whose death is a triumph.

I want to write positive queer stories. I want to give us happy endings. I picture a precocious, twelve-year-old girl who doesn’t yet have the language to name her sense of otherness, wandering into the adult section of the library and picking up one of my books. I want to tell her that it’s all going to be okay. I want to tell her that this loneliness will fade, that the world is a good and kind place, that she will find love and community, that life will be easy.

But this isn’t true. Being a queer kid is hard. It continues to be hard as an adult. Kindness is hard won for people like us. This isn’t because of anything inherent to queerness, but because it is difficult to live in a society that hates you. I don’t know anyone who isn’t scarred by this reality.

I want to write happy stories, but I do not want to flatten the queer experience. I don’t know how to balance the fact that I will always be writing for an audience who may see themselves in my work with my desire to capture something genuine about existing in a world that doesn’t think you should be here.

Chuck Tingle captures this dilemma in a tongue and cheek way in his book Bury Your Gays. The main character of Bury Your Gays is a film writer forced to kill off one of his queer characters. After making an impassioned case against this trope, the company he works for changes tune, allowing only happy endings and positive representation in their films. The problem is that both the tragic and the overly positive erase the nuances of the human experience. Life doesn’t take place in black and white. To allow for only one type of queer story is to deny us the full range of the human experience – a form of injustice in its own right.

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a book that takes the ambiguity of the queer experience seriously. It is a dense and complicated book, dealing with questions of racialized trauma, state violence, motherhood, and community. The book defies genre, hovering somewhere between fantasy and science fiction, and bends reality to tell a complex story about making a home in a world that is hostile to you.

I won’t mince words here. The state wants people on the margins to die. This is especially true for racialized communities. The reality is one of state sanctioned violence, both overt and covert: police brutality, the AIDS epidemic, human experimentation, deportations, missing and murdered Indigenous women, poisoned water supplies, the every-day brutality of poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, lack of access to healthcare, and so on and so forth since 1492. The question at the heart of Sorrowland is how to live in a world that wants you dead. Solomon refuses to give a simple answer.

The story begins with a young mother, Vern, escaping from the cult where she was raised. Vern grew up in a compound called The Blessed Acers of Cain, or Cainland. Cainland is a Black separatist group that began as radical community devoted to creating a refuge from white supremacy and capitalism. It is also a high control group that enforces strict gender roles and relies on violence to keep its members in line.

Vern is fifteen and pregnant when she escapes from Cainland. Vern raises her twins alone in the woods, living off the land and trying to escape from a hunter that she suspects is trying to bring her back to the cult. Meanwhile, Vern experiences changes in her body: she no longer knows her own strength, her wounds heal unnaturally fast, and she is visited by ghosts that seem too real to be only in her head. The novel follows Vern as she raises her children, undergoes a bodily transformation, and tries to escape from Cainland’s clutches.

Sorrowland is morally ambiguous from the start and never gives the reader a clear resolution. Cainland is simultaneously a Black radical utopia and a site of abuse. Vern’s children are the product of sexual abuse at the hands of a much older man, and her greatest source of joy. Her transformations are unwanted and terrifying; they also give her the power to survive. Everything in this book is both and… a refreshingly complicated take on lived experiences that are often flattened to meaninglessness.

The worldbuilding in Sorrowland is fantastic, bringing together highly imaginative scenarios with the historical realities of the United States. Cainland is modelled off Black radical movements of the 1960s and 70s and it is revealed that, like these movements, Cainland has been infiltrated by the United States Government to control its members. Here, Solomon draws a direct connection between Cainland’s infiltration and COINTELPRO, the American Government’s counter-intelligence program. Later, it is revealed that the government used Cainland’s residents to conduct human experimentation, another nod to racialized violence at the hands of the American government that brings to mind the Tuskegee Study and James Marion Sim’s experimentation on Black women. Here, again, Solomon does not let faer’s story get flattened. Cainland is both a refuge from racialized violence and a locus of that violence, its origins are admirable, its abuse is clear, and, ultimately, the cult exists within larger systems of power that it’s members cannot escape from, despite Cainland’s promises.

Throughout the novel, Vern is forced to come to terms with the legacy of Cainland while undergoing a transformation that she does not fully understand. The transformation, a result of the human experimentation that took place in Cainland, begins as preternatural strength and the ability to heal from wounds. Then Vern’s body begins to change, growing a fungal exoskeleton. Through the book, Vern is visited by ghosts. It is later revealed that this, too, is a result of the transformations she is undergoing: she was injected with a fungus that connects the living with the dead through mycelium networks.

I don’t think I’m doing the worldbuilding here complete justice – I had to return my book to the library and so I am writing this review from memory. Suffice to say, Vern becomes part of a fungal network that gives her incredible powers. It is interesting that Vern, who escapes into the woods and finds solace in the natural world, becomes part of that world through her transformation. I also love that the hauntings are real. Sorrowland provides an interesting twist on the classic ghost story, and refuses to let the past die – a poignant metaphor in a book about intergenerational trauma and racialized violence.

What’s most compelling about Vern’s transformation is the ambiguous space it inhabits. Vern did not want this transformation to take place. At the beginning, she does not know how to handle it, as the fungus makes her incredibly ill and, not knowing the full extent of her strength, Vern hurts her children. Throughout the book, however, Vern learns to embrace the transformation. It becomes a source of power that allows her to protect the people she loves. Vern’s embracing of the change represents an embracing of herself. All the things that society has rejected her for become a source of power. As Christina Orlando writes in their review of Sorrowland:

“The monstrosity of queer bodies began as a narrative put upon us by cisheterosexual society to elicit disgust and distrust; queer bodies are transformed to something grotesque, queer desire is twisted into bloodlust, dark magic. But this concept has since been reclaimed by the queer and trans community as a means to discuss the way otherness can become power, the way bodies and desire can transcend the bounds society attempts to put on us. Solomon’s work exists within a growing canon celebrating queer and trans monstrousness, and the surrealism of life in the margins.”

Ultimately, this is a book about finding power in the things that society hates. Vern finds power in her body, in her sexuality, and in a community of other people who live on the margins.

This is why, despite the violence, the hauntings, and the elements of body horror, Sorrowland is, at its heart, rather tender. Vern is fifteen at the start of the novel. She is nineteen when the novel ends. She has been through more than anyone should ever have to experience, much less as a teenager, and Vern’s experience reflects the way that, because of misogynoir, Black girls are often treated as older than they are. At the same time, Vern is a quintessential teenager. She is rebellious for the sake of rebellion, she is sharp and critical of the world around her, and she deals with romantic relationships the way most nineteen-year-olds do: avoiding hard conversations in favour of emotionally detached sex. Throughout the book, Vern grows as a person, and her story, between the fantastical elements, is a coming-of-age narrative.

The most profound change Vern experiences is learning how to rely on other people. Vern begins her story in the woods, raising two children completely alone. When life in the forest is no longer possible, Vern must rely on other people for the first time. She becomes incredibly ill and has to let someone else take care of her in her most vulnerable state. She learns to share the responsibility of motherhood with others. She learns how to become open and vulnerable, and how to let other people love her. At the start of the book, Vern is completely independent. At the end, she learns that it is okay to lean on others. Slowly, Vern is learning to find joy, love, and community in a world that has only ever given her pain.

Love doesn’t fix anything. The characters in Sorrowland are dealing with forces too large and deeply ingrained to be overcome over the course of a few hundred pages. The antagonist of Sorrowland isn’t the person hunting Vern, or the leader of Cainland who orchestrates the experiments. It isn’t even the cult itself. The real antagonist of this novel is white supremacy and capitalism.

Overcoming these systems is a big ask for one nineteen-year-old and, although the immediate problems are solved by the end of the book, the ending still feels open. There is more work to be done. But Vern has found people that she can rely on. She has learned to find love in the midst of it all. The ultimate triumph of this book is quiet, but it feels like a triumph all the same.

Solomon is up to the task of writing the ambiguous experience of life on the margins. There are no platitudes here. There is no moralizing. But there is a sense in faer writing that community, love, and connection do exist, even amid systems that are larger than us. Sorrowland gives its reader the gift of finding tenderness in the heart of horror.

I’ve lived with my partner for the past three years. We’ve spent at most a handful of weeks away from one another, generally when one of us is travelling for work. We’ve fallen into a nice routine of domesticity. We start our days reading together over coffee, share meals in a comfortable silence, and fall asleep while chatting in bed. I love her presence, the comforting way she takes up space, and the little noises she makes – the kettle whistling, the shower running, her voice in the other room as she talks on the phone. I love seeing her toothbrush next to mine and my heart still races in anticipation when I hear her key in the lock.

Sometimes, however, I miss the “secret single behaviour” of Sex and the City fame: cxamining my pores up close and picking at the calluses on my feet and slowly liquifying into the couch as I watch episode after episode of reality TV; i.e. things I won’t do in front of someone who I want to have sex with.

I was excited to spend some time alone while housesitting. I purchased all my favourite processed foods, put on my sweatpants, pulled up The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and proceeded to let my brain rot in my skull.

It was fun for about two hours. Then the empty house started to feel too big, and I developed a Red-40 induced headache.

I switched off the TV and raided my host’s bookshelves, where I found a copy of Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (“MYRR” henceforth). I’d been meaning to read this book for a while – Moshfegh is a weird girl idol of mine who’s career I’d like to steal. After retuning to my spot on the couch, book in hand, I was confronted by an eerily familiar description of what I had just been doing: falling asleep on the couch while the television droned on in the background.

I understood the narrator’s urge to disconnect from reality all too well. For the past few weeks, I’ve been teetering on the edge of a specific kind of burnout. It’s not the feeling of having too much work, but of working a lot and seeing no results. I like to think I’m hustling. I like to think that every bit of effort I put into my writing will pay off in the long run. But it’s hard to maintain energy when all the successes I’ve seen are a few rejection letters from literary journals and yet another ignored query letter. I’m on a hamster wheel, running and running and running while staying in place.

Sometimes, when I haven’t slept enough or when I’ve missed a dose of my SSRIs, the beauty of the world vanishes and all I can see is looming crisis. I want to escape from this feeling of doom, but I can’t figure out how to do it except work. I’m worried about money; I apply for arts funding and start looking for a side hustle. I’m worried about climate disaster; I start canning tomatoes and learning emergency first aid. This amounts to a great expenditure of energy, which makes me tired, which makes me even more anxious about the state of the world, which I can only deal with my expending more energy, and so on and so forth.

I’m tempted to ask what would happen if I just stopped. Wouldn’t it be nice to drift off into a drug induced sleep and not have to worry about work? Wouldn’t it be lovely to stop showering, stop worrying about the way I look or the things I’m putting in my body, to stop paying attention to politics, to ignore the apocalyptic emails from my mother with instructions on how to properly store lentils in case of societal collapse?

The root of Moshfegh’s narrator’s desire to disconnect is different, but the impulse is the same. The narrator of MYRR is a wealthy WASP who doesn’t need to work to survive. This privilege has put her in a position where everything feels is an expenditure of energy for the sake of expenditure. There’s a hole in her life where meaning should be, and instead of trying to create that meaning in some existentialist fashion, the narrator simply opts out.

MYRR takes place in 2001, at a time when it seemed as though the history had run its course and capitalism has triumphed. I’ve been on a Y2K kick lately, in part because my current novel in progress is also set in 2001. There’s something about that year – the frenetic hopefulness of the new millennium paired with the bare violence of 9/11 – that provides the perfect mirror for a character’s internal transformation. To cite myself in a previous essay, the Y2K era promised endless expansion and progress. But progress towards what? History was supposed to be finished. What was left to do?

The characters in MYRR answer this question in different ways. The narrator’s friend Reva fills the lacuna of meaning with self improvement. Reva studies women’s magazines to stay up to date on the latest trends in fashion, obsesses about how to make herself thinner to the point of developing an eating disorder, and follows professional development plans that promise to help her “live up to her full potential” (15). In part, Reva’s obsession with self-development comes from her desire to overcome her less than privileged origins and fit in with New York’s sparkling social world. But Reva’s efforts don’t get her anywhere. She’s spinning her wheels. The narrator, meanwhile, decides to disconnect from the world completely.

Both over-connection (seen through Reva) and disconnection (seen through the narrator) are responses to the lack of meaning created by hyper-individualist capitalism. Our lives are filled with work for the sake of work, optimization for the sake of optimization, wealth for the sake of wealth. We are no longer people but cogs in capitalism’s grand Do-Nothing Machine. Do you opt in or opt out? The result is the same.

In many ways, we’re still living in the shadow of the end of history. We haven’t seen any material economic or political changes since the early 2000s. America is still invading the middle east. Temperatures are still rising. Capitalism is still hard at work destroying our souls and ensuring nobody can afford groceries. The only difference is that we are no longer comforted by the illusion that we are living in the best of all possible worlds. The glamour of the early 2000s is gone but the problems inherent to capitalism still exist.

This revelation of the contradictions of capitalism has done nothing to make our lives more meaningful. It’s simply imbued westerners with a sense of crisis. We once thought we lived in a world of ultimate prosperity – that this prosperity was built off the exploitation of the resources and labour of other countries did not register as a problem. Now that prosperity is threatened (God forbid plane ticket prices go up), but we cannot conceptualise of any way to deal with this threat save doubling down on the very system that created it.

Over-connecting and disconnecting are twin strategies of dealing with the ultimate meaninglessness of life under capitalism. These options play out in current discourse about what women should be doing with their lives. I’m talking here about the girlboss-tradwife dichotomy, a topic of conversation so brutally online I feel I’m betraying my academic qualifications just by talking about it, but which seems to be setting the terms of feminist discourse all the same.

The girlboss opts in. Meaning comes from work, accumulating wealth, breaking the glass ceiling, and pushing people out of the way. The ultimate feminist dream is to become a CEO or a drone operator. Women can exploit their workers and destabilize the governments of other nations just as well as men can – and they look great doing it!

The tradwife opts out. Meaning comes from family, romantic love, the Pope or Joseph Smith (depending on the particular flavour of conservative we’re dealing with), and having as many children as humanly possible. Women weren’t meant to work! We are supposed to live soft, quiet lives based off a man’s financial control – er, sorry – support.

In many ways, the tradwife lifestyle is a response to the failures of girlboss feminism. Women who work hard aren’t rewarded for it. We still make less than men. We’re still objectified by our co-workers. We still feel the hole in our souls caused by living in a fundamentally isolating and exploitative system. Wouldn’t you love to stop hustling for a while? Wouldn’t you love for someone to take care of you?

The impulse to domesticity is the same impulse that led me to bed rotting this week. We’re tired. We’re all so fucking tired! We want to put away the computer, stop answering emails, eat a warm meal and have someone rub our feet.

But, of course, housework is still work. The tradwife may want to disconnect from hustle culture, and rightly so, but she is still working. This is true on the level of tradwife influencers who make money selling their content. But it’s also true for the women who don’t. It’s true for the women who opt out of paid work to be stay at home mothers, to focus on their families, to clean, cook, and take care of the emotional needs of her husband. Becoming a tradwife doesn’t free you from labour. It frees you from being paid for your labour. Your boss becomes your husband. Your clients become your kids. You want to opt out from hustle culture, but at the end of the day you are just as tired as you would be working a 9 to 5 – the difference is that you don’t control your own money and you never get time off.

Being completely financially dependent on another person is dangerous. It creates an imbalance of power and limits your options to get out of a relationship if shit hits the fan. But even if you’re married to the most generous, gentle, kind man – the kind of man who would never hurt a fly - isn’t there something unjust about working without any compensation?

(I do think that wages for housework would solve a lot of these problems. I want to start a book club for Utah housewives where everyone reads Sylvia Federici and then rallies for a universal basic income.)

There’s something else we’re longing for that neither the girlboss nor the tradwife lifestyle can give us. We want rest. We want meaning. We want connection. Our lives under capitalism do not give us what we need. We can only function in this system by denying our own humanity.

Despite her disconnect from the world, the narrator of MYRR reaches out for some kind of meaning. In her medication induced blackouts, the narrator sexts strangers on AOL, writes long letters to her ex begging him to get back together, and buys roses for Reva after her mother dies. Subconsciously, the narrator yearns for connection. This yearning scares her. She tries to deny it by locking herself in her apartment, but it’s there all the same. The narrator wants something more, even if she is unable to accept that she does. Beneath her cynicism and her disconnect, there’s a woman who wants to live a life filled with meaning.

I was surprised, while reading MYRR, to see how compassionate the narrative ultimately is because of the way that Moshfegh brands herself as unconcerned with morality or politics. As Ty Gavin, writing for the Berkeley Beacon, puts it: “Moshfegh demeans writing with a political lens, or with a vision of what the moral reader may disagree with. Art today, and fiction especially, gets watered down by lukewarm, ethical expectations into being an agent to aid the reader’s sense of goodness.”

Moshfegh and I have different philosophies when it comes to the role of ethics and politics in fiction. I don’t think it’s possible to write a story that isn’t about ethics. And I don’t think it’s possible to talk about ethics without talking about politics. This isn’t to say that all stories need to have a moral, or that the purpose of fiction is to compel us to be better people. Instead, I think that fiction is at its best when characters are treated as ethical agents, who face and respond to questions of morality, even if they do so in a way that the reader doesn’t agree with. Being human is to exist in a complex web of relationships. We cannot make a single choice without implicating other people, and so everything we do concerns ethics in one way or another. Stories that deny any moral dimension miss something fundamental about what it is to be human.

The thing is, MYRR does grapple with moral and political questions. The lack of meaning in the narrator’s life and her response to comes from a particular kind of political and economic arrangement. She longs for something more. Ethics and politics form the very basis of this story because MYRR is about navigating human relationships in a political system that discounts them.

This is what we all have to do while living under capitalism. We must find a way of making meaning in a world that is ultimately meaningless. The opting in of the girlboss and the opting out of the tradwife are both ways of grappling with this. They fail because they work within an economic system that will expand until it has eaten up our souls in addition to all the earth’s natural resources.

Is communist revolution the only solution to the lack of meaning in our lives? Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know is that we are faced with making meaning in the here and now. We cannot defer the question.

I want to suggest that one way we can make meaning is by taking part in our communities. This is the kind of meaningful activity that the narrator of MYRR longs for. So much of our modern malaise comes from loneliness. We are feeling the ache of self-sufficiency. My single girl housesitting weekend filled with reality TV and Red 40 is a larger indication of what happens when we are alone. My headache points to something deeper.

The solution here isn’t to retreat into monogamous love or the comfort of the nuclear family. My romantic relationship is incredibly nourishing; I also know that I’d be miserable if I only had my partner for emotional support. Can we think about love in a more expansive way? Can we extend it to our friends, our neighbours, to the world around us?

Reprieve from the crushing loneliness of modernity, for me, has come from my faith. I’m aware that this won’t resonate with everyone, and I know the bringing up Christian ethics when I brand myself as a feminist dyke first and foremost may be off putting. I’ll try not to get too theological. But I will say that the call to “love your neighbour as yourself,” has been a resting point when I feel overwhelmed by the world around me. When I spend too much time hustling and get burned out, or when I become terrified about the state of the world, I remember that I was meant to love others. I can picture this love spreading through my atomized body and stretching out, past my apartment, past my neighbourhood and my city and my country, and filling the whole world. I imagine lines of interdependence connecting me to people on the other side of the planet, just as those lines connect me to my next-door neighbour and the person asking for change at the end of my street.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly revolutionary about this love. But I need it to survive. There’s something very selfish about love, even if loving others calls for self-abandonment. It is the thing that makes life worth living. It is the thing that stops me from going into a drug induced slumber and forgetting the world around me.

What if there’s another option, beyond opting in or opting out of the world as it exists today? What if we worked, here and now, to create something new? What if reached out to our neighbours and supported them in their loneliness, just as they support us in our own? What if we created new ways of being that broke through the isolation of modern life?

What if that new way of being looked something like love?

I post essays and book reviews, with a focus on feminism and LGBTQ+ fiction, every Wednesday. My work is free to everyone, and I do all my research, writing, and editing myself - without any AI assistance. If you like my work and want to support an aspiring queer writer, you can buy me a coffee here. Your support makes it possible to continue the work I do!

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Spring is the only time I actually enjoy living in the city. And I love it so much that these few months justify living here full time. The world is alive in May - gardens are in full bloom, trees have exploded into flowers, the heavy smell of lilacs fills the air, and everyone is out on the sidewalks enjoying the sunshine.

Toronto in May is lush and extravagant. I haven’t been able to do anything this month save going on long walks and sticking my face in lilac bushes. My productivity has taken a bit of a downturn, but I can’t bother feeling guilty about it. My most important tasks this month have included: listening to the buskers at Christie Pits, losing myself in a crowd on Queen Street, getting sunburnt over the course of a long walk, helping my neighbours in their garden, reconnecting with friends over a bottle of wine, and trying to befriend neighbourhood cats.

Writing Updates

I tell myself that my writing needs to percolate. This is an excuse for slacking off in order to enjoy the nice weather. After finishing the first draft of my current work in progress last month, I’ve been sitting on it for a bit, reading through my work, and trying to figure out what changes I need to implement in my second draft.

The first draft is always the easiest for me. I’m really good at writing a lot of nonsense. Now the task is trying to wrangle everything into a coherent story. I’ve commandeered the walls of my apartment to plan out the next round of edits visually.

The main goal of my second draft is to make the plot more coherent. I’m also thinking about how I can make the prose more sensual and visually compelling. There’s something about writing a first draft in the winter that makes the prose feel terribly inadequate when you read it in the spring. I’ve been so slow lately, just taking everything in, and I want to figure out how to translate this feeling to the page without getting purple-prosy.

Writing is a fascinating and difficult medium because it is simultaneously visual and rhythmic. Painting a picture in writing requires zooming out to look at the ways that texture, colour, sound, smell, and so on appear in your work. At the same time, good writing requires a miniscule, sentence level look at syntax. There’s the work that individuals words are doing. Then there’s the work of many words taken together. Editing makes me hyper-aware of the way that the micro and macro aspects of a text work together to make writing emotionally resonate.

I’m currently experimenting with treating writing as a visual medium. I’m not necessarily concerned about the way that text appears on the page - instead I’m concerned with the world that I evoke in my writing. Where do I want to draw the reader’s eye? How do visual elements come together to complement the story that I’m trying to tell?

A reminder that I go back to when I forget what I’m trying to do in my writing: You have to let the world crack you open.

May Reads

Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything - Collette Shade

I’ve been on a Y2K kick recently because my current work in progress takes place in 2001. I was born in ‘02, and although I was a very politically conscious baby, there are, of course, gaps in my knowledge. To make up for it I’ve been harassing my mother to tell me about what email was like, and reading books like this one that will tell me a bit about what it was like to live in this era.

Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything was incredibly helpful on the level of cultural knowledge. It gave me a good sense of the aesthetics of that time. More impressive, however, is how Shade analyses cultural objects within their political and economic context. On one level this book is about fashion, music, and celebrity culture. On a deeper level, it’s about the illusion of the triumph of American capitalism, how this illusion was sustained, and why it is now falling apart. You can read my full review of Shade’s book here.

The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice

I’m very passionate about queer vampire eroticism. Anne Rice is up to the task as always. This was my favourite book of the Vampire Chronicles so far. It has the wide-spanning, historical plot of the earlier books in the series. There’s a romance to following a character through time that was lost in the tighter, more contemporary storylines of Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil. And of course I loved that Armand was finally front and center in this book. He’s by far my favourite character of the series, in part because Assad Zaman, who plays Armand in the AMC series, is so beautiful. My gender envy knows no bounds.

Dykette - Jenny Fran Davis

Dykette is a contemporary comedy of manners that follows a group of lesbians vacationing together over the winter holidays. It delves into themes of queer domesticity, jealously, and lesbian gender, and has a high femme main character whose “camp antics” drive the story forward. I’m a high femme and I have my fair share of antics, and so my love for this book is more or less completely biased. This was my second time reading Dykette and, although I now see some of the book’s flaws, the story still holds up. You can read my full review of Dykette here.

Olivia - Dorothy Strachey

This queer classic, published in 1949, is about a young woman who falls in love with her teacher at a French boarding school. The plot is very simple - almost nothing happens - but the book is worth reading for the way it captures a particular kind of adolescent obsession, the way that loving someone for the very first time is intense enough to consume you.

The first time I fell in love, I felt an accompanying intellectual awakening. I was suddenly so hungry, both with desire and for new books, for new ideas, for new people to learn from. Strachey captures the way that intellectual and romantic desire are so closely interlinked, especially when someone is coming of age and discovering the world for the first time.

“I had been a fairly intelligent pupil; I had enjoyed learning and working in a kind of humdrum way. This was something quite different - something I had never known. Every page of Latin grammar seemed to hold some passionate secret which much be mine or I should die.”

Olivia is also interesting as a historical object. Strachey was associated with the Bloomsbury Group. The book is dedicated to Virginia Woolf and was published by her press. Despite the emancipated views of her social circle, Strachey originally published the novel anonymously because of it’s lesbian content. I highly suggest reading Andre Aciman’s introduction to the book, which explores this historical context. Also of note is the fact that Olivia inspired Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

I’ve been meaning to read My Year of Rest and Relaxation for years now, and I’m glad to say it lived up to the hype. I’m somewhat critical of Moshfegh’s philosophy of literature - she has been outspoken about the way that ethics shouldn’t come into storytelling - but I found her writing to be surprisingly compassionate and politically compelling. Moshfegh writes absolutely unhinged characters that draw you into their orbit. I underlined every bit of Dr. Tuttle’s dialogue because the writing was just so perfect. Next week’s essay will delve into My Year of Rest and Relaxation properly, so stay tuned if you’re interested in my full analysis!

Hue’s Hue - Katy Kelleher (The Paris Review)

I was debating whether or not to add this one since it isn’t a book, but I’ve decided to include Hue’s Hue because everyone needs to read this essay series. Each essay explores the history of a particular colour, with a focus on the way it is used in literature and art. These works have given me a deeper appreciation for the symbolism of colour, and have made me more aware of both the way that colours are used in the works I consume and the way that I use colour in my own writing.

My favourite essays from this series include Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk , Marian Blue, the Color of Angels, Virgins, and Other Untouchable Things, and Incarnadine, the Bloody Red of Fashionable Cosmetics and Shakespearean Poetics - but really, you should read all of them.

Sorrowland - Rivers Solomon

Sorrowland follows a young woman named Vern who escapes from a cult while pregnant. As she raises her children in the woods, Vern’s body begins to transform, and she undertakes a journey of discovering the roots of this transformation while trying to escape the clutches of her past. Sorrowland is hard to define in terms of genre. Rivers Solomon combines aspects of science fiction, fantasy, and horror to explore Black queer trauma. Solomon works in the radical speculative fiction tradition of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin and Sorrowland does a beautiful job weaving together elements of speculative fiction with political critique.

There are a lot of things I loved about Sorrowland, and I am planning to write a full review soon(ish). For now, I’ll say that one of the things I liked most about this book is the way that Solomon treats queer motherhood. Vern is an incredibly compelling main character, and her relationship with her children provides the emotional core of the book. I very rarely see mothers treated with such respect and agency in fiction. I loved that Vern is the protagonist of the story, that she has a rich inner world and her own goals and desires, and that none of these things take away from her as a mother. So often mothers in fiction are denied any interiority or desires once they have children. This is a small point to make about a very dense and politically nuanced book, and it is just one of many reasons why you should give it a go.

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

This book is pure 90s sleaze. The main character is an absolute loser who runs a record shop and has no personality outside of his taste in music, and yet he pulls like crazy. It’s male fantasy on steroids. While I normally can’t stand books by or about men, there was something so charming about this book that made me finish it in two days.

Through the main character’s chauvinism and the author’s barely disguised bigotry (did he really need to include an alcoholic Irish character for comic relief?) there’s something real in this book about love and community and finding beauty in everyday life. And the writing is fun. I choose to see this book as an anthropological artifact of ‘90s British masculinity and, you know what, I think I learned something.

Zoe Kravitz plays the main character in a recent TV adaption of this book and the thought of this loser as a woman is so hot that I might pass out. Anyways. Maybe I do understand the appeal.

May’s Cookbook

Every month, I try out a new cookbook so that I’m not stuck eating beans and rice and plain pasta. This month’s cookbook was Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street: Tuesday Nights. This cookbook includes over 200 weeknight recipes that pack a lot of flavour, with a wide variety of regional inspirations.

I liked a lot of the recipes in this cookbook. However, I didn’t love the book for weeknights specifically. The recipes are fast on their own, but they aren’t balanced. You will have to make at least two or three recipes in order to have a complete meal, which kind of takes away from the point of having a fast cook time. For example, there are a lot of variations on buttered noodles that take 30-45 minutes each. That’s fine, of course, but I’m at a stage in my life where I’m increasingly concerned with getting enough fiber and protein. Fancy buttered noodles don’t cut it, no matter how tasty. Weeknight cooking needs to be fast, but it also needs to be simple, and I wouldn’t suggest working out of this cookbook if you have post-work brain fog and want something simple, fast, and balanced.

That said, the food was good. Oh my God. Working from this book forced me to fill out my pantry with staples for building out flavour. It also introduced me to my new favourite technique for cooking chicken: braising chicken thighs in a sauce, then taking the chicken out, shredding it, and returning the meat back to the pot until the sauce has cooked down and the shredded chicken is completely coated.

Even if some of the recipes weren’t very practical, the book did what it promised and taught me how to build flavour fast. I recommend the cookbook in general, but if you’re looking for a weeknight cookbook specifically, Tuesday-Nights misses the mark.

I’m always on the lookout for cookbooks that will teach me something new! Please recommend your favourites!

Thank you!

I hope that June brings you summertime joy! If you like my writing, why not subscribe? I post book reviews and cultural analysis, with a focus on queer fiction and progressive politics (bleh), every Wednesday.

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