To some, this is progress: in this day and age, do students really need to read a book that uses the N-word more than 200 times? (For the record, Twain is using the word to represent racism, not to endorse it.) But others—including myself—believe Huck Finn still has something uniquely meaningful to offer: not just a commentary on the depredations of slavery and racism, but also a road map that demonstrates critical thinking and questioning authority. I spoke to more than three dozen teachers, students, and Twain experts in 13 states to learn how students can still appreciate this book today.

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I almost never read the comments on my pieces, but there were already dozens by the time I looked at the Times website Monday morning, and I couldn’t resist. What I found was the most civilized, well-written, and interesting comments section I’ve ever seen. The comments eventually numbered around 1500, so there was no way I could read all of them. But I dipped in and out all week. Here’s a sample of the conversation.

First, an English teacher who agrees that a massive amount of work is necessary to prepare students for a text like this one:

Here’s a reader who nicely illustrates the necessity of facing our difficult history:

Many readers suggested that Percival Everett’s James, a loose retelling of the Huck Finn story, should be taught alongside the novel. It’s a good idea that would be hard to put into practice in most classrooms, since it would require another major investment of classroom time. But none other than the editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature wrote in to say that the next edition of that classroom classic will include a selection from James as part of the supplementary material with Huck Finn.

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Here’s a teacher who makes a useful point about class demographics:

I also heard from Black readers who recalled their own bad experiences with the novel in childhood. “Every Black person I know has a horror story about reading this book in class,” one commented on my Instagram. I heard many of them in my reporting. Here’s another:

And here’s a Black teacher who explains why she taught the novel:

I received a fascinating email from Tasha Burton, an artist and researcher in St. Louis, who in 2020 put together an exhibition called “R is for Racism: How ABC Books Taught Children to Hate.” It included a book by E.W. Kimble, the illustrator of Huck Finn, whose caricaturish pictures of Jim have often been cited as evidence of the novel’s racism. Burton discovered an alphabet primer by Kimble titled A Coon’s ABC, which she describes as consisting of “Kimble’s signature drawing style, [with] caricatures of Black Americans, in scenes often inclusive of some form of violence or pain or illiteracy, e.g., a lack of common sense.” In another primer called A Harvard ABC—this one published by Harvard University—the letter C stands for “A Coon Waiter’s Thumb.” As Burton describes it, “The waiter is depicted as a server bringing white male students bowls of soup. It states that his thumb ‘flavored’ the soup, which to me indicates that the soup was tainted or no longer edible. There are no other representations of Black people in the book.” It’s truly grotesque to think of these books being used to teach children racism along with their ABCs, and I’m grateful to Burton for bringing them to my attention.

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Finally, Twain scholar Larry Howe, whom I interviewed for the piece, makes this point about Twain’s use of the N-word:

Yes, it’s very much in our face, but it’s crucial to pay attention to who uses it, when, and how. Huck’s own uses shift over time: gradually he relinquishes the term to refer to Jim except when he’s deceiving others in order to protect Jim. And most tellingly he uses a significant word when he refers to Jim when he reveals to Mary Jane Wilkes that the king and the duke are frauds. Huck tells her that … there’s “another person that you don’t know about who’d be in big trouble. Well, we got to save him, hain’t we?”

Although it’s not widely recognized, Huck’s use of the term “person” signals his evolving awareness of Jim’s personhood. Moreover, it reminds us that despite its antebellum setting, the text was begun just as Reconstruction was being abandoned. The debate over the 14^th amendment, which occurred while Clemens was covering Congress as a journalist in DC, assigns both personhood and citizenship to Black people. In fact the 14^th amendment reference to “persons” is one of only 51 references in the entire document, and the only one referring to Black individuals except for the notorious 3/5ths clause that denied their full personhood. But by 1884 when Twain completed the novel Black personhood and citizenship were under renewed attack by white supremacists.

While it may be argued that Twain’s singular use of the word “person” is relatively inconsequential, I would counter that it’s a deliberate choice--Huck could have said “there’s somebody or someone else.” But by referring to Jim as a person marks an important shift in Huck’s perspective. Against the ubiquity of the N-word, the word “person” resonates with greater power if readers pay attention to it.

I’m grateful to everyone who contributed to this fascinating conversation. One last comment:

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Where to find me

September 2, 8 p.m.: I’m very excited to be speaking at De Balie in Amsterdam alongside my longtime friend Arnon Grunberg and Yael van der Wouden, author of the international bestseller The Safekeep. This is the launch event for the Dutch translation of my book, De Vele Levens van Anne Frank! Tickets here.

I was also honored to be part of the new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, which is now streaming on PBS. “With a few exceptions, Oliver’s poems don’t end in thunderbolts,” I wrote in The New Yorker when her collection Devotions appeared. “Theirs is a gentler form of moral direction.”

Study writing with me!

Sunday, October 25, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Eastern (online): I’m teaching a new craft seminar called “Everyone’s a Critic.” Here’s the description:

We’ve all finished a book, walked out of a movie, or wrapped up a series and immediately thought, “I have some thoughts on that.” But turning those raw opinions into a sharp, propulsive piece of writing that readers love—and editors actually want to buy—is its own craft.

In this craft seminar, longtime critic Ruth Franklin takes you on a deep dive into the practical mechanics of criticism. We’ll break down the anatomy of a brilliant review, learn how to weave in deep analysis without getting trapped in plot summary, and discuss how to pitch editors with an angle that ties into the current cultural moment. Whether you want to write for legacy publications, elevate your newsletter, or just build a more authoritative voice, this workshop will give you the tools you need.

Sign up here! Scholarships are available.

But not all archive stories have happy endings. Today, I’m going to share one that doesn’t. Or didn’t—until much later.

In 1934, Shirley enrolled at the University of Rochester and spent two mostly unhappy years there. She then either dropped or flunked out and spent time regrouping at home before transferring to Syracuse. There, within a few months, she published the short story (“Janice”) that caught the eye of her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman.

But what happened at Rochester? This is a relatively dark period of Shirley’s life, with spotty diary entries and almost no letters. She draws on it heavily in Hangsaman, her weird and elusive second novel, about a girl who loses her grip on reality almost immediately after entering college, but that’s fiction.

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Still, it offers an important clue to Shirley’s life. The protagonist of Hangsaman dreams up an imaginary friend to accompany her on long excursions exploring a city that sounds a lot like Rochester in the 1930s. But Shirley had a real friend.

In those days the university hosted two exchange students a year, one from France and one from Germany. The French exchange student—Jeanne Marie Bedel, nicknamed Jeanou—lived in Shirley’s dorm. She was a few years older and “a true Parisian,” and she and Shirley became best friends. Here’s a photo of them taken that year—Shirley’s on the left. It’s the happiest she looks in any of her youthful photos.

“Slightly mad, we were,” Shirley wrote in a poem in which she referred to them as “Gay Jeanou and Crazy Lee.” They spent a lot of time hanging out in cafes and exploring everything sleepy Rochester had to offer: films, concerts, meals in “funny little cafeteria[s].” They walked around for hours, bonding over their shared dislike of the city, which in comparison with Paris must have seemed unbearably stodgy—not to mention freezing. Eating lunch one day, “in one hour we counted one hundred people passing and found seven interesting faces,” Shirley wrote. They planned someday to spend a few weeks holed up in a hotel writing a book mocking Rochester and its residents, as “revenge.” They were so inseparable that they even wrote together in Shirley’s diary.

Jeanou encouraged Shirley’s writing, helped her with French (“I shall never be able to pronounce my r’s”), and scolded her for not doing her homework. Shirley cut classes whenever she had anything better to do and pursued her own interests rather than following her syllabi: at one point she invented a secret language and even wrote poetry in it. And in spring 1935, she published her first story: an untitled fragment, several paragraphs long, in Meliora, the literary magazine of Rochester’s women’s college.

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Jeanou was an emotional support for Shirley as well as a constant source of intellectual excitement. But the intense friendship was tempestuous and marked by frequent quarrels. Jeanou didn’t hesitate to tell Shirley exactly what she thought of her, criticizing her for being “spoiled” and “selfish” and saying that her affectations could be “unbearable.” Once she got so angry that she threw a stack of typing paper at her friend.

Despite the arguments, Shirley was bereft when Jeanou returned to Paris in June 1935. The two made a vow to meet in Paris three years later, on Bastille Day, 1938. “Write to me,” Jeanou begged in a good-bye letter. “Don’t remember the quarrels but the nice times.” She asked for Shirley’s reports on her schoolwork, the parties she went to, and—not least—her writing. “Try to work and write and meet people and leave Rochester as soon as you can.”

Now their paths diverge. Jeanou headed first to New York, where an American artist took her to Radio City Music Hall and to Coney Island for dinner. “You see Shirley, as soon as you leave Rochester behind you, you see the world,” she wrote from the transatlantic ship on which she sailed back to Paris. The letters continued, once a month or so, sketching the life of a French bohemian in the mid-1930s. “I am sure you would like Picasso. He lives in Paris, he is Spanish, drunkard and crazzy [sic].” She and her friends “go out almost every night, we drink, we talk, we sleep, dance, write, paint and laugh.” Shirley wrote back—one letter was apparently fourteen pages long—telling Jeanou about her unhappiness in Rochester and enclosing her own writing. “I loved your poem about the Russian musicians,” Jeanou responded. “What about your term paper on witchcraft?” she asked later.

Fourteen pages long?! Term paper on witchcraft?!?! I had to find Shirley’s side of the correspondence. But how? My searches turned up nothing for Jeanne Marie Bedel—no published writing, no descendants.

I kept reading Jeanou’s letters for hints about what Shirley had written to her, but I became more and more engrossed in her story. By the end of the 1930s, she had become a Communist: “For one person, rich, not obliged to work hard, or at least possessing a personal capital, you find a thousand poor people, who must earn their living in very painful conditions,” she explained to Shirley in March 1937. Her father disowned her. She considered going to the Soviet Union but changed her mind: “It’s going to be terribly hard and interesting, here, in Paris.”

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It was. Jeanou started meeting veterans of the Spanish Civil War: “It’s horrible. People shot themselves like if they were rabbits. They throw bombs, they use dynamite.” She and her sister spent a summer in Germany: “We saw Hitler. We would not say he is nice looking.” She asked Shirley to send her the Daily Worker. The promised meeting date—July 14, 1938—came and went. “Everybody here is talking of war. Everybody is anxious and excited but not afraid,” she wrote that fall.

The rest of the letter was full of relationship advice—Shirley and Stanley, whom she was now dating, had had some kind of big fight, probably about his infidelity. I dutifully harvested whatever I could discern. But by this point I was deeply invested in Jeanou’s life. “I am happy. I hope I’ll see the Revolution. I’ll try to help it. You’ll understand some day what I feel,” she concluded the letter.

In March 1943, Jeanou was arrested for Resistance work—“I was sentenced to three years after a ridiculous trial, having been accused of ‘Foreign Propaganda’ by French judges who were more German than French,” she explained later—and spent nearly a year and a half in prison. On August 18, 1944, she was supposed to be either shot or deported—she didn’t know which. But on the night of August 17, the prison doors swung open: the Resistance had risen, and Paris would be liberated just a few days later. By then, much of Jeanou’s family had been deported (she believed to Germany, but almost certainly to concentration camps), along with her lover, a Russian national. She remembered wistfully how she and Shirley used to throw orange peels at each other: “We have had no more oranges for years.”

Shirley sent a package of tea, canned milk, chocolate, soap, stockings—all scarce in wartime Paris. She dispatched a friend of hers from college, stationed in the U.S. Army there, to visit Jeanou; he was charmed by her and brought her to eat at the Army mess hall. Jeanou’s life eventually stabilized. She married and bought a house in a small village in the south of France. They corresponded sporadically for the rest of Shirley’s life, but they never met again. In her last letter to Shirley, dated 1962, she confided that she had written “13 books of a ‘Chronicle of Life,’ never printed.”

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One day I picked up a thread. Searching for Jeanou’s sister under her married name, I found a documentary filmmaker who had interviewed her for a film about the Moroccan mining town where she and her husband had lived. The filmmaker put me in touch with a cousin of Jeanou’s. I wrote to him with excitement.

Unfortunately, the news was sad.

This message reached me in December 2015, more than four years after I had first started searching for Jeanou’s papers. It was, obviously, the worst possible outcome.

But ironically, my overwhelming sensation was one of relief. As a biographer, it’s rare to have such closure. To be told that you have done everything possible by someone who actually witnessed the incineration of the documents.

My relief was also a sign to me that my work on this book was done. By the time I heard from Jeanou’s cousin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life was in proofs. I had already had an eleventh-hour scoop—a FOIA request submitted years earlier for Stanley’s FBI file had finally borne fruit, necessitating changes to a few chapters. I was ready for this process to be over.

But this wasn’t the last I would hear about Jeanou.

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Last fall, almost exactly ten years after my email from Jeanou’s cousin, I received an email from Natasha Grin, a Russian writer living in Paris. She was working on a novel about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s romance with a man named Kostia Rodzevich, a Soviet spy. After his affair with Tsvetaeva ended, he fought in the Spanish Civil War and was later imprisoned by the Nazis for his Resistance activities. Hoping to tie up a few loose ends, Natasha went to look at his dossier in French archives. “And so I landed upon a few lines in a directory of French left-wing activists about a woman that, according to their long-dead author, was his mistress (one of several I fear) during the war years: Jeanne Marie Bedel.”

What chills I got! Here was Jeanou again, from a new perspective. All these years, I had been waiting for her to reappear.

Natasha’s search for information about Kostia’s lover had led her to my book. “I wasn’t sure at first—those two worlds seemed so far apart, peaceful Rochester and wartime Paris, could it be the same person? Still there it was, in your words: communism, resistance, arrest, and ‘her lover, a Russian national.’ No doubt left.”

I immediately uploaded all my material about Jeanou for Natasha to examine. This is what she pieced together of their relationship:

They had met in Paris in 1938, “at an evening meeting of Communists.” Nineteen years older, he had just come back from Spain. “I can only imagine the impression he made on Jeanou, who dreamt of going to Russia to study “communist theory” (l’échappée belle!) and could only see him as a hero,” Natasha wrote. Soon they were living together in the 19th arrondissement, where they were arrested in 1943 for their Resistance activities. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and liberated by the Red Army on May 1, 1945. In a letter to Shirley in March 1945, Jeanou wrote that she didn’t know what had happened to him or if he was still alive. But after he returned, in June, her tone changed. “She doesn’t love him anymore, she wants to settle down, have a child, write books.”

Jeanou’s trail hadn’t ended with me after all. It was picked up by another writer—another woman—and made, once again, into something new. Together we grieved the burning of Jeanou’s papers, especially those thirteen volumes of autobiography, never to be read. But now the reason for that was clear.

Jeanou wasn’t erasing herself. She was protecting the secrets of her Resistance work. And she survived anyway—through the letters she wrote to a young American woman who became the writer Shirley Jackson, and now through a Russian novel that will bring her to life for a new audience.

It’s a partial resurrection. What remains of Jeanou’s writing is addressed to someone else. Reading it, we glimpse her only over Shirley’s shoulder. Her own papers can never be restored.

But she is not invisible. Ninety years after a fateful encounter in a dorm in Rochester, two women who never knew her are still trying to understand the truth of her life.

In your own research or writing, did you ever stumble into a mystery you couldn’t solve? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

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Where I’ll be

September 2, 8 p.m.: I’m celebrating the Dutch publication of The Many Lives of Anne Frank with an event at De Balie in Amsterdam! I’ll be in conversation with my friend Arnon Grunberg, a Dutch novelist and journalist, and Yael van der Wouden, author of the international bestseller The Safekeep. Details here.

Teaching

Sunday, October 25, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Eastern (online): I’m teaching a new craft seminar called “Everyone’s a Critic.” Here’s the description:

We’ve all finished a book, walked out of a movie, or wrapped up a series and immediately thought, “I have some thoughts on that.” But turning those raw opinions into a sharp, propulsive piece of writing that readers love—and editors actually want to buy—is its own craft.

In this craft seminar, longtime critic Ruth Franklin takes you on a deep dive into the practical mechanics of criticism. We’ll break down the anatomy of a brilliant review, learn how to weave in deep analysis without getting trapped in plot summary, and discuss how to pitch editors with an angle that ties into the current cultural moment. Whether you want to write for legacy publications, elevate your newsletter, or just build a more authoritative voice, this workshop will give you the tools you need.

Sign up here! Scholarships are available.

There were about a dozen letters, chatty and affectionate, starting with a fan letter responding to an essay in which Jackson lamented the current state of children’s literature: magical kingdoms were out; practical, inspirational stories were in. “Every now and then,” she had written, “even these days, I meet someone else who knows the names of the four countries of Oz…. There are fewer of us every year, I suspect.”

Jeanne’s letter listed those four countries (Gillikin, Munchkin, Quadling, Winkie) and came with gifts: a Moomin book by Tove Jansson and another called Palm Tree Island, “better than Treasure Island.” It showed that Jeanne, a Baltimore housewife, was a kindred spirit. In addition to knowing the Oz books just as well as Shirley did, she was clearly starving for someone to talk to.

An intense correspondence ensued: a letter every month or so from December 1959 to January 1961. Shirley didn’t save drafts of her own letters, so I could only read Jeanne’s side, but her responses made clear what the exchange covered: family life (both women had four children), recipes (one involved canned grapefruit slices frozen in gin and served on toothpicks), and much talk about books: Tolkien, Dylan Thomas, children’s literature. There were also tantalizing details about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which Shirley had begun writing around the same time as the correspondence started.

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I closed the folder knowing I had to find Shirley’s letters to Jeanne. Shirley’s diary-keeping was sporadic; with few exceptions, the only substantive letters of hers that still exist are to her parents, and these touch only briefly on her writing. Letters about her work on Castle, her last completed novel, would be invaluable.

A Google search turned up an email address for Jeanne’s oldest daughter, who remembered the correspondence well—one of Shirley’s children had even visited the family in Baltimore. But after Jeanne’s death, only a year earlier, most of her possessions had gone into a dumpster.

I was saddened but not surprised. A hazard of women’s biography, I was beginning to learn, is that one’s subject tends to correspond with other women, whose papers often go unpreserved. I kicked myself hard for not having come upon the letters sooner, resolved to interview the daughter at some point about her mother’s connection to Shirley, and moved on.

A year or so later, the daughter wrote to me again. A bungalow Jeanne had owned in the Pennsylvania countryside was about to be sold. She had used an old barn on the property to store papers. Could the letters be among them?

Those words galvanized me. Somehow I knew Shirley’s letters were in that barn. We arranged to meet at the house—a four-hour drive from my home in Brooklyn—the following day.

The barn held a lifetime’s worth of detritus: old toys, clothing, knickknacks, and box upon box of newspapers, magazines, and letters. We were soon covered in dust and dirt. Mice had chewed through many of the boxes and left their droppings in others. Hours of searching turned up letters from friends and family members, but nothing from Shirley.

Jeanne’s daughter had to leave, but I decided to check into a nearby motel and continue the search the next day. There were at least a hundred more boxes. I couldn’t give up, knowing that the letters could be in one of them.

Feeling like Hercules before the Augean stables, I begged a friend who lived nearby to come help. By the time she arrived, I had already spent the morning in the barn with no luck. At the sight of her car, I collapsed on the grass, ready to give up.

My friend took a hard look at the building. “What’s in the front?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. Jeanne’s daughter thought the letters would be in the back, so I hadn’t even looked.

We opened the door—which was unlocked—to a room strewn with more boxes and old furniture. In a corner was an ancient wooden filing cabinet. With some difficulty, we jiggled open the heavy top drawer.

My friend reached inside and pulled out a letter. I would have recognized it anywhere—typed pages on Shirley’s signature yellow paper.

It is not an exaggeration to say this felt like a miracle.

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The drawer held fifteen letters, totaling more than sixty pages, mostly still in their original envelopes, with postmarks—a big help, since Shirley rarely dated anything. They were every bit as extraordinary as I hoped they would be.

On both sides, the correspondence became personal almost immediately, moving from books to children, husbands, writing. “I have promised myself absolutely to begin a new book next Monday morning, after the children have gone back to school,” Shirley told Jeanne in her first letter. “That means that I must lock myself up in my cave for four dogged hours a day, and sneak a minute or so here and there for writing letters and making lunch (‘You will eat vegetable soup again today and like it; Mommy’s beginning chapter three’).” (This first, more formal letter conformed to conventions of capitalization, but Shirley soon abandoned those for her typical all-lower-case style, which you see above.)

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As the friendship progressed—only through the mail; the two women would never meet face-to-face—Shirley did not hide the more difficult aspects of her life. She joked about her moods, calling herself “sharly (snarly shirley)” and “shurley (surly shirley).” She complained about the isolation of North Bennington, Vermont, “with no trains and only an occasional nasty bus and roads not fit to travel on most of the time, so we are forced to find all our social life in one small college community.” And she wrote at length about her difficult marriage to Stanley Edgar Hyman, whom she described as “professor of literature at bennington college, vindictive winner of bets, poker player, writer of profiles for the new yorker, stern bearded disciplinarian, who will not read [The Haunting of Hill House] because he is mortally afraid of ghosts.”

At first, Shirley presented their family life as quirky but happy, full of inside jokes and private games. But soon a note of melancholy crept in. Stanley refused to enter her office because her books were not alphabetized and her shades were always crooked. He begrudged “every minute” she spent on anything other than writing fiction or magazine articles to sell, and once “in a fury figured out that considered in terms of pure writing time my letters are worth forty dollars a page.” And her haphazard working habits irritated him:

he sits down at the typewriter and says today i will write ten pages with half an hour for a cigar after lunch and today he writes ten pages and on tuesday he writes letters . . . and answers all the letters he has gotten since last tuesday and on sunday he files everything. . . . so when he sees me spending a Working Day making a doll house out of an old carton he gets very nervous. or sometimes i look at pictures of old houses or sing to myself or sit on the back steps telling myself stories and stanley frets.

Jeanne identified strongly with Shirley. Evidently brilliant, she had attended Oberlin College and Johns Hopkins University, taking courses in English, mathematics, and botany, but had given up her studies to marry and raise children. Her husband, an engineer, worked long hours, and she often broke off her letters in order to tidy the house before he got home: “Of course I will meet him smiling.” He, too, believed that time she spent writing or reading was time wasted. “What am I doing reading the Sunday papers? (It’s Sunday.) Why am I not washing fingerprints off the woodwork and vacuuming spiderwebs off the ceiling? . . . What are women for, anyway?” He had made her give away her piano—“House wouldn’t hold both it and play pen and we’re not giving the baby away”; she couldn’t even have a record player. She wouldn’t leave him, at least partly because she suffered from depression and depended upon his stability (“he solidifies the atmosphere”). But when Shirley described how she had spent part of the previous summer driving around by herself in her car, Jeanne felt “purest saturated envy. . . . I want loneness, no kids, no responsibilities but me, or nothing [no writing] comes. Except a couplet now and then put down on kitchen paper, and one of those got put out by mistake for the milkman.”

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How I felt for them both: Jeanne, who had set aside her gifts for a husband who didn’t value them, and Shirley, brilliant and tormented, close to abandoning Castle, which would be her last completed novel. Their friendship was so unlikely—how often does a real relationship grow out of a fan letter?—and apparently brought so much joy and solace to them both.

Then, after about a year, the correspondence started to fizzle. First it was Shirley’s fault: as her work on Castle finally got underway, she had less time for letters.

Then it was Jeanne who abruptly stopped writing. Shirley was first puzzled, then hurt. She wrote a few more times and sent a copy of Castle when it came out. But Jeanne never wrote again, not even to acknowledge the gift.

When Shirley died a few years later, in 1965, Jeanne clipped her obituary from The New York Times and put it away in the same folder in which she kept the letters. And there the folder remained for almost 50 years.

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I can’t imagine what my book would have been like without these letters. They transformed my understanding of Shirley’s writing process for Castle, which I describe in great detail in Chapter 16, “Steady Against the World.” They added texture to my portrait of her marriage to Stanley. And they revealed the depth of her loneliness, through her willingness to pour out her heart in the mail to a complete stranger.

Some time later, telling another biographer the story of how I found the letters, I said, “I can’t believe how lucky I was.”

My colleague shook her head. “You made your own luck,” she told me. “Those letters didn’t find themselves. You asked the questions that needed to be asked. And you knew where to look.”

Well, it was actually my friend who figured out where to look. So I would add: I knew to ask for help when I couldn’t face that barn full of papers alone.

Have you ever had a moment of “making your own luck”—a time when persistence (or sheer stubbornness) led to a unexpected discovery or breakthrough? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments.

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What I’m reading

I have a review of British writer Fiona Mozley’s new novel, Awake Awake, in the latest New York Times Book Review. It’s one of the most mysterious, nearly opaque books I have read in a long time—in fact, it reminds me a little of Jackson’s Hangsaman, in that I was genuinely unsure whether certain events were real or figments of the narrator’s imagination. Read my review here.

Where I’ll be

October 25, 11 a.m.–1 p.m. Eastern (online): I’m teaching a craft seminar called “Everyone’s a Critic.” Here’s the description:

We’ve all finished a book, walked out of a movie, or wrapped up a series and immediately thought, “I have some thoughts on that.” But turning those raw opinions into a sharp, propulsive piece of writing that readers love—and editors want to buy—is its own craft.

In this craft seminar, longtime critic Ruth Franklin takes you on a deep dive into the practical mechanics of criticism. We’ll break down the anatomy of a brilliant review, learn how to weave in deep analysis without getting trapped in plot summary, and discuss how to pitch editors with an angle that ties into the current cultural moment. Whether you want to write for legacy publications, elevate your newsletter, or just build a more authoritative voice, this workshop will give you the tools you need.

Sign up here.

A few years later, when I was working on my biography of Shirley Jackson, I regularly encountered what I came to think of as “I don’t know how she does it” letters (in honor of Allison Pearson’s book about a working mother who teeters precariously on the edge of her so-called work/life balance). They were notes to Jackson from mothers who had read her humorous magazine stories about her family life and wanted her advice on how they, too, could become writers—a hope they had all but abandoned after having children. Here’s a sample from one, written by a woman who had formerly been a newspaper reporter:

After the No.1 boy was born I simply couldn’t find time to write, and that condition persisted after No. 2 boy came long. Now that I have three, of course I have infinitely more spare time, and a corresponding need for more money to swell the income. But to make money, you have to Write Something, and to Write Something you have to sit down to a typewriter and concentrate for a few hours each day-----and by the time quiet descends at night I’m too exhausted physically to keep my mind in gear.

I read this with immense sympathy. At the time, I was a recently divorced mother of two young children. I could travel from my home in New York City to the Library of Congress, where Jackson’s papers were held, only when my children were with their father. My days at home with them were a Swiss cheese of early school pickups, the usual seasonal maladies, and curveballs—like the time Hurricane Sandy hit and we had no school for a week.

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I have loved being a mother since the moment I first laid eyes on my firstborn. I chose to work as a freelance book critic in part because of the great freedom and flexibility the job offers. But like this letter writer—and like Jackson herself, as I would learn—I have also always struggled with balancing the competing demands of my children and my professional life, even now that I’ve been writing and mothering for more than twenty years.

That call from my editor was only one moment out of many when I have felt acutely the clash between the two roles. There was my first residency, where the sight of a space set up just for me to work in brought me to tears. (I didn’t have a “room of my own” until that toddling baby was twelve.) There was the New York Times Magazine piece I closed at LaGuardia Airport, waiting to pick up a sick child whose flight home from sleepaway camp was hours delayed. There were all the times I hid out in the park across the street from our house trying to finish something before a babysitter left for the day. At this very moment, I’m writing this newsletter while making lunch for my youngest.

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What if we could see the cognitive dissonance between these two parts of life as something to embrace rather than to overcome? That’s the premise behind the workshop I’m teaching next weekend, which I’ve been thinking about ever since I first embarked on this path.

Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children is intended to help any writer harness the chaos and beauty of motherhood to fuel their creativity, from those with a new baby nap-training to someone already navigating the empty-nest stage. We’ll look at inspirational passages about parenting and creativity from brilliant mother-writers such as Ursula LeGuin, Audre Lorde, and (of course) Shirley Jackson, and come up with nuts-and-bolts techniques to keep the work moving forward even after a sick child has kept you up all night.

There are still a few spots left for this workshop. If this piece resonated for you, I’d love to have you in the (Zoom) room.

• Date: Next Saturday, July 25

• Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (Naptime!)

• Where: Live via Zoom (with recording available)

  
  → Secure Your Spot in "Write Like a Mother" Here

Where I’ll be

New York, July 26, 2 p.m. I’m joining forces with my brilliant friend Heather Clark for a live conversation. Heather is the acclaimed author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the stunning novel The Scrapbook, a moving exploration of how the aftermath of the Holocaust ripples through generations. We’ll be diving into history, fiction, and the writing life—and we might even tell the background story of a special connection between Heather’s book and my work. Free! Full details and registration here.

The frog jump is an homage to “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the famous story by Mark Twain, who spent much of his childhood in Hannibal. It’s one of the final events of Tom Sawyer Days, an annual week-long festival that also includes a whitewashing relay, a parade, and—most importantly—the selection of the town’s Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, drawn from a pool of rising eighth graders. For the next twelve months, the pair will serve as tourism ambassadors for the town, greeting visitors and traveling around the country to Twain-related events.

As I’ve written about here before, over the last few years I’ve been interviewing high school teachers and students about their experiences reading Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn—a text that some interpret as deeply antiracist and others see as a document of white supremacy—in the classroom today.

When I heard about the Tom and Becky competition from one of those teachers, I knew I had to see it myself. But as I learned more about the festival, I realized how much my youngest child, then nine, would enjoy it. Could I really report on something like this without her?

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My children (I have three) have always been involved in my writing, to different degrees. When I was working on my biography of Shirley Jackson, who literally wrote notes in the kitchen while her children played around her, my older two enjoyed Jackson’s humorous stories about her own children, such as “Charles,” in which her eldest son comes home from kindergarten talking about a misbehaving boy who may or may not exist. Once, early in my project, I was checking Jackson’s memoir Raising Demons out of the library with the two of them in tow. The guy at the desk looked at the book, at them (around five and seven at the time), and finally at me. “Is it a how-to manual?” he quipped, deadpan.

But I’ve never before brought a child on a research trip. My usual M.O. is to squeeze the maximum amount of work possible into every day so as to be away from home no longer than necessary. And my trips usually involve either hours on end in archives or back-to-back interviews—not the most child-friendly activities.

Still, as I planned this trip to Hannibal for last summer, it began to seem not only feasible but necessary to bring my daughter. Unlike me, she could participate in the events designed for kids. And she could come along to the interviews, since I would be speaking with teens. She might even have something useful to say.

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We spent two days in St. Louis before heading upriver to Hannibal. Exhausted on the first night, we had dinner at the most convenient spot—Ballpark Village, a complex of restaurants by the entrance to Busch Stadium, around the corner from our hotel. Looking it up later, I was chilled to learn that it’s the site of a former slave market.

We went to the famous arch first thing the next morning, and it was as beautiful as I expected. Mark Twain would have loved it—a marvel of engineering, different from every angle. My daughter ran around in the grass as I took pictures. On a warehouse across the river, someone had graffittied the words “Writing History” on the wall beneath the Casino Queen hotel.

We stopped by a plaque next to the water. St. Louis began as a fur trading post; from the 1830s to the 1850s—Twain’s early years—it was the third busiest port in the United States. “ ‘Steamboats waiting to load and unload their cargo lined up for miles along the Mississippi River,’ ” I read aloud from the plaque.

“Can you guess what that cargo was?” I asked my daughter.

“Food?” she wondered.

“Slaves,” I told her.

There was a pause. “Were slaves threatened?” she asked.

“They were treated very cruelly and were beaten if they didn’t work hard enough,” I said.

“Might they be killed?”

“Yes. But their owners also kept them alive to exploit them for their labor. One of the cruelest things slave owners did was separating families. They might sell a person’s spouse or children to someone else and that person would never see their family again.”

Her eyes widened. In a small pond nearby, a mother duck paddled with four ducklings in a row.

Later, we visited the courthouse, which has a large exhibit devoted to the case of Dred Scott and his wife, who famously sued for their freedom. My daughter, who had recently finished a school project celebrating Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was stunned to learn that the Supreme Court decided against Scott in 1857. “[Blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and … the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit,” Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote in his decision.

“If you were living then, could you buy as many slaves as you could and set them free?” my daughter asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But it would be more important to work to end slavery politically. You can do only so much as an individual.”

I mentioned that we had eaten dinner at the site of a former slave market without realizing it. “Is that good or bad?” she asked.

“A little of both,” I said. “It’s right to move on. But it’s also important to remember the past.”

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Before heading to Hannibal, we also visited the Griot Museum of Black History, the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing (honoring a free Black woman who taught enslaved people to read and write and helped them escape), and Ulysses S. Grant’s birthplace. None of this made it into my essay about the Tom and Becky competition, which just came out in The American Scholar.

But it was all in the back of my mind as we spent the next few days hanging out with the contestants. I was beginning to understand that the project I was working on wasn’t just about Mark Twain, but would use him and his work as a lens into the contested history of our country and the way that history is commemorated.

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In Hannibal, I found all the commercialism off-putting (there’s the Mark Twain Dinette, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, the Mark Twain Casino and Riverboat, and much more), but my daughter loved it. She could have spent hours just in Clemens General Store, examining the old-time board games, puzzles, novelty salt and pepper shakers, and dozens of flavors of salt-water taffy. “They have everything anyone could want,” she breathed, awestruck. While I was taking notes, she devoured most of the fudge samples, to the horror of the clerk at the counter.

We met at least a dozen present and former Toms and Beckys, often at Java Jive, a cafe in the center of town featuring sugary caffeinated drinks made out of something called “lotus.” My daughter mostly sat and read, or played on her iPad, while I conducted the interviews. But I could tell she was listening.

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I didn’t see what that meant, though, until the frog jump. The competition took place on a blindingly hot day, and the frogs turned out to need more encouragement than one would expect. Some tried to escape, but most lay there pathetically, legs splayed, looking confused. “It’s too hot for this!” a dad complained as a cute blond boy around five tried unsuccessfully to get his frog to move.

My daughter and I were hanging out with the newly anointed Tom and Becky in front of the cooling fan when a man I didn’t recognize addressed me out of the blue. “How’re you liking Hannibal? Pretty different from New York?” he asked without introducing himself.

I responded with something noncommittal.

“It’s pretty gross,” he volunteered.

I looked at the kids handling the frogs, which they didn’t seem to find particularly gross. Frog 91 was currently on the lily pad. My daughter’s number was 118. All I could think about was how eager I was for her to take her turn so we could find some shade.

An older guy, maybe the grandfather of the kid with frog 91, yelled “Boo!” at the frog. It didn’t move.

“Inhumane,” my interlocutor added.

When he said that, everything shifted. My daughter, hearing him, felt it too.

“It’s frog torture,” she said slowly. “You’re scaring the frog to make it move.”

It was inhumane. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Incredibly, my first reflex was to defend this bizarre ritual. I didn’t want my daughter to feel guilty—after all, this whole thing was my idea. It was a Hannibal tradition, sponsored by the Boy Scouts, and what could be more wholesome than that? Maybe the frogs weren’t really suffering. Anyway, the event only lasted a short time.

It’s absurd to compare a frog-jumping contest to the institution of slavery. A frog isn’t a person. But there was something not entirely dissimilar about the dynamic underlying it: a system that cruelly exploits a powerless being for someone else’s profit and enjoyment. (Afterward, still upset, my daughter suggested that the real frogs could be replaced with electronic ones. I tried to picture the reaction if someone suggested that, especially an interloper from New York.)

Even more than that, I saw how easy it was to get swept up in such a system. With virtually no encouragement, I rented a frog for my own child to torture! But I also saw how little it took—literally, the questioning voice of a single person—to make it clear what was really going on.

Have you ever been to Tom Sawyer Days, or a festival like it? What do you think about the intersection between nostalgia and history in America today, especially with the 250th anniversary festivities that are going on this summer? Let me know in the comments.

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P.S. On writing while parenting

Hearing my daughter question this Hannibal tradition on our trip reminded me that my writing really does benefit from having my kids around, even when it feels impossible to balance the two.

If you’re a parent trying to protect your creative life amid the chaos of family, I’m hosting a single-session workshop designed for you: “Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children” (July 25, 1–3 p.m. Eastern). Rather than treating family life as a hurdle to clear before you can write, we will reframe motherhood as a creative asset.

In this session, we will:

• Borrow from the masters to understand how brilliant mother-writers like Audre Lorde, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Shirley Jackson integrated parenting and profound art.

• Get practical by mapping out actionable strategies for protecting your time and organizing your work when life is unpredictable and exhausting.

• Find your forward motion and build a roadmap to keep your projects alive, no matter what phase of parenting you’re in.

Secure your spot and sign up here. A limited number of scholarships are available.

P.P.S. Come see me in person!

New York, July 26, 2 p.m. I’m joining forces with my brilliant friend Heather Clark for a live conversation. Heather is the acclaimed author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the stunning novel The Scrapbook, a moving exploration of how the aftermath of the Holocaust ripples through generations. We’ll be diving into history, fiction, and the writing life. Free! Full details and registration here.

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Thinking about Shirley Jackson, and the story that changed both her life and American literature forever, on the day that has become known as “Lottery Day.” Below, a capsule history of that story, told via photos from my archive.

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1. The battered cover of a scrapbook where Jackson collected some of the letters she received in response to the story, which The New Yorker published in its issue of June 26, 1948. Jackson originally wrote and submitted the story in the spring, but when its publication was delayed, New Yorker editor Harold Ross wanted her to change the date on which it was set to match the season. The first draft has been lost, so we don’t know what the original date was.

2. One of those letters, which would eventually number in the hundreds. Jackson later claimed that they were dominated by three main themes: “bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse.” Some readers wanted to know where such lotteries were held, and whether they could go and watch; others threatened to cancel their subscription to the magazine. But most, like this writer, just wanted to know what the story—“the most terrible tale of man’s inhumanity to man I have ever read”—was supposed to mean. “We can’t take it. Is it symbolic, as my husband suggested?” I love the image of this reader passing this story around to her friends and family, asking each what they thought it meant.

3. The New Yorker’s form letter in response to these letters: “It seems to us that Miss Jackson’s story can be interpreted in half a dozen different ways …” Jackson herself famously gave at least half a dozen explanations of it to different people: it was about small-town life in North Bennington, the Vermont town where she was living, or elsewhere in New England; it had to do with the Holocaust, or antisemitism in general; it traced its genealogy back to The Golden Bough and the myth of the scapegoat. My favorite of these answers is one she once gave to a high school student, the friend of one of her children: “If you can’t figure it out, I’m not going to tell you.” But she approved this message from The New Yorker, which was written by Kip Orr, a young staffer at the magazine.

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4. Jackson reading “The Lottery” during a lecture in Michigan in July 1962. By this point, “The Lottery” had already become one of the most frequently anthologized stories in American literature, especially for high school textbooks. It’s been adapted for TV (several times), opera, ballet, and film. Despite the substantial earnings it brought her, Jackson feared it would overshadow her other writing. At once point, she asked her agent to raise the permissions fee to encourage editors to “let the poor old chestnut rest for a while.” The price hike only brought in more money.

In 1959, Jackson recorded the story for Smithsonian Folkways, along with “The Daemon Lover.” Those recordings are the only publicly available audio of her voice. Jackson’s son Lawrence Hyman made them on a reel-to-reel recorder. Nervous, Jackson kept a glass of bourbon next to her as she read. If you turn up the sound, the clink of ice cubes is occasionally audible.

As we approach the 10th anniversary this fall of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, I’ll be posting more of these outtakes from my biography as well as new reflections on Jackson’s life and legacy. Do you have unanswered questions about her you’d like me to tackle? Let me know in the comments.

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Where I’ll be

Online, July 25, 1-3 p.m.: I’m hosting a single-session workshop, “Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children.” It reframes motherhood as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle, as well as offering practical strategies for organizing time and work. We’ll look at passages on parenting and art from brilliant mother-writers like Shirley Jackson, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and discuss how to keep our work moving forward when life is unpredictable and exhausting. Sign up here.

In person: New York, July 26, 2 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with my friend Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the novel The Scrapbook, which deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust two generations later. Details here.

What I’m reading

On the recommendation from the Books newsletter of the Sunday Times (of London), my favorite book-review newsletter, I devoured Sophie Mackintosh’s beautiful, mysterious Permanence, an impressive new addition to one of my favorite genres: the adultery novel. One morning Clara wakes up with Francis, her married lover, in an apartment in an unknown city. Everything seems to be designed for their comfort and pleasure: the furnishings in the apartment, the coffee in the kitchen, the books on the shelves. They soon discover that the city is filled with couples just like them, snatching a moment of joy together before returning to their everyday lives. Can this go on forever? Would they want it to? Mackintosh is superb at delineating not just the intoxication of an intense affair but also the constellation of moral and ethical issues for all involved.

I was astonished a few years later to learn later that Yolen, the author of the Caldecott-winning Owl Moon as well as numerous other books for children, had also written The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), a very powerful Holocaust novel for middle-grade readers that won the National Jewish Book Award. When the book opens, Hannah, the book’s protagonist, is a rebellious American preteen who doesn’t want to go to a Passover seder hosted by her survivor relatives. Her grandfather frightens her by yelling at the TV whenever footage of the camps appears; once, when she used a ballpoint pen to ink a copy of his tattoo on her arm, he screamed at her in Yiddish.

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At the seder, Hannah opens the door to welcome the prophet Elijah—a key moment in the ritual—and finds herself transported to Poland in 1942. She’s now Chaya, the niece of Gitl and Shmuel, siblings who have taken her in after the death of her parents. At first, Hannah/Chaya thinks she’s stumbled onto a movie set or become the victim of an elaborate prank. But when guests arive for Shmuel’s wedding to Fayge, a rabbi’s daughter from a nearby village, Nazis are waiting at the synagogue to transport them all for “resettlement.” To Hannah’s frustration, no one will listen to her warnings, not even the rabbi:

“The men down there,” she cried out desperately, “they’re not wedding guests. They’re Nazis. Nazis! Do you understand? They kill people. They killed—kill—will kill Jews. . . . Six million of them! I know. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. We have to turn the wagons around. We have to run!”

Reb Boruch shook his head. “There are not six million Jews in all of Poland, my child.”

Yolen renders Hannah’s plight in language and imagery that make sense to younger readers: the boxcar in which she’s packed reminds her of the subway during rush hour. But the author does not condescend by evading the awful details. The stench of vomit and excrement in the train car grows thick; a child dies in its mother’s arms. When the train finally stops, after four days, Hannah is so thirsty that “she could feel her tongue as big as a sausage between her teeth.” Her head is shaved; she receives a tattoo. A girl introduces her to the camp rules, the first of which is “One does not ask why.” When she is finally restored to her real life in America, she returns with a new appreciation for her relatives’ stories.

At a convention for librarians soon after its publication, The Devil’s Arithmetic was attacked by an editor at a children’s-book journal who asked why readers should waste time on Yolen’s fiction when true chronicles, like Anne Frank’s diary, were available. To resort to fantasy, he said, trivialized the Holocaust. The science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card defended Yolen, arguing that her book might actually be more powerful for its audience than Anne’s diary—both because Yolen’s protagonist is a typical American preteen and because the diary ends “where the true horror begins.” The Devil’s Arithmetic allows readers to imagine themselves in Hannah/Chaya’s place, Card wrote, in “the most terrible part of the most terrible crime mankind is capable of.”

Yolen, too, in an article describing her rationale, emphasized the importance of personal identification. “Thrust a young reader back into the heart and mind of someone his or her own age. . . . Let that protagonist ask the questions our young people all want to ask. . . . The answers they get from the folk in the story will astound them, shake them into new awarenesses, really let them remember and be part of history.” When children are toddlers, they can identify with dinosaurs; as they grow older and more sophisticated, we can ask more of them.

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Part of the difficulty of writing about the Holocaust for children is the irreconcilable tension between the subject and our assumptions about children’s literature. To write about the Holocaust realistically, in all its horror, violates the tacit promise of writing for young readers: not to disturb them too deeply. At the same time, a story that won’t keep young readers up at night contradicts the historical reality. Yolen’s fantastical framing device is an ingenious solution to the problem. Not only does it prevent the atrocities of life in an extermination camp from overwhelming her young readers, it also speaks to the painful paradox all of us in the post-Holocaust world feel: how to be an adequate witness to something we ourselves didn’t experience. If we can’t time-travel ourselves, reading is the next best option—and the only possible consolation.

I wrote about Yolen’s Holocaust writing, which also includes two other young adult novels, for The New Yorker back in 2018. In the piece, I tried to parse what separates the best Holocaust children’s writing from more cavalier specimens like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a deliberately unrealistic work that coyly declines to elaborate on its fictional methods. “Not only are her Holocaust books extensively researched, and their departures from historical fact scrupulously noted, but her fantasy framing devices also reflect a kind of imaginative humility about the difficulty of ‘truly understanding,’” I wrote then.

But looking back at the piece now, what haunts me most is the conversation in which Hannah tries to warn the rabbi about what is going to happen to his community:

“No, Rabbi, six million in Poland and Germany and Holland and France and . . .”

“My child, such a number.” He shook his head and smiled, but the corners of his mouth turned down instead of up. “And as for running—where would we run to? God is everywhere. There will always be Nazis among us.”

Yolen died last week at the age of 87. May her memory be for a blessing.

Have you read any of Yolen’s books? Which ones stayed with you most? Let me know in the comments.

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Where I’ll be

Online, July 25, 1-3 p.m.: I’m hosting a single-session workshop, “Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children.” It reframes motherhood as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle, as well as offering practical strategies for organizing time and work. We’ll look at passages on parenting and art from brilliant mother-writers like Shirley Jackson, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and discuss how to keep our work moving forward when life is unpredictable and exhausting. Sign up here.

In person: New York, July 26, 2 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with my friend Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the novel The Scrapbook, which deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust two generations later. Details here.

What I’m reading

Apropos the discussion of AI in my last newsletter, I devoured Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, which imagines a not-far-off future in which parents acquire AI robots as companions for their children. I was intrigued by the novel’s use of an AI as the narrator, but I came away with a sense of the book as a kind of paler echo of his Never Let Me Go—which, in fairness, is probably one of my top ten of the 21st century.

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A few days ago, instead of opening that file again, I started a new Gemini chat. A friend recently started using the Google chatbot and has been raving about its usefulness in matters of daily life.

“I have an essay to write that is long overdue,” I typed. “It is based on interviews I conducted as well as secondary source research. Can you help me come up with a plan for finishing it?”

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As always, the chatbot responded first with support. “It is completely understandable to feel stuck, especially when a project is already late and the pressure is mounting,” it reassured me. “When a feature relies on both deep secondary research and hours of interview transcripts, the sheer volume of material can feel paralyzing.”

I felt … seen.

It continued, “The goal right now is to stop looking at the article as one massive mountain and break it down into high-velocity, manageable sprints.”

I know this, obviously. I have given the same advice to students countless times! But when I’m struggling myself—paralyzed, if you will—it’s hard to put the strategy into action. Perhaps this is especially because I work mostly at home, by myself. My pets do the best they can, but they can’t give me professional support.

As I watched, Gemini unspooled an eight-day plan for finishing my article. I would spend Day 1 and 2 doing a “triage” of all the material. First, it told me to write down in a few sentences the core question the piece is trying to answer (the “nut graph”). Then I would go through all the interview notes and transcripts, but rather than reread everything start to finish, I would scan for “golden quotes” that directly relate to my theme. Everything else could be considered secondary for now.

On Day 3, I would write a “scaffold” outline, setting out the major beats of the piece and then dropping all the quotes in where they belong.

Days 4 through 6 are the big writing days where I try to get the whole messy first draft down, leaving TKs when necessary (placeholder text where I need to look up a fact or check a quote). And on Days 7 and 8, I fix the TKs, polish the language, and finally read the entire thing aloud to check for awkward moments and pacing problems.

None of this advice was groundbreaking. I know how to write an article! But to be honest, part of what was holding me back was the low-level depression that can set in when I’m not making progress. In that mode, to see all the steps spelled out like this gave me an odd sense of relief. It felt as if someone was cheering me on—or maybe just holding my hand—while I got myself moving again.

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Until now, I’ve been loath to use AI for any work-related task, though I have tried asking it mundane questions about travel, dog training, household repairs, and the like. That reluctance is mainly due to ethical qualms. In addition to the primary concern about AI’s environmental consequences, nearly a dozen books that I either wrote myself or contributed material to are listed in the Anthropic lawsuit, which means they were scraped to educate an LLM without my consent. The thing sounds like a human because it has been trained on text by humans like me.

And my very first experiment with ChatGPT, in which I asked it to come up with restaurant suggestions in a Brooklyn neighborhood I don’t usually frequent and it produced two “hallucinations” in response—was sufficiently discouraging to keep me away for a while.

But in the professional circles where I spend time, I’ve seen the conversation shift over the past year or so from “AI is a monster that will destroy our livelihoods” to “AI is here to stay—how can we best harness its power?” A publication I regularly write for recently issued ethics guidelines for using AI during the reporting and writing process. (The essence: don’t use it to generate text or ask it to edit your writing, but some help with brainstorming or structure is permitted.) Last summer, I tried out a few AI apps for transcribing interviews and was pleasantly surprised by the speed and accuracy of the results.

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After my experiment using Gemini as a project manager, I posted on my Facebook page to ask for opinions on whether writers can ethically use AI. Some of the responses were vehement. “Please don’t feed the machine,” one person wrote, while another called me a traitor to humanity. Most were concerned primarily about the environmental costs, although others suggested that there can be no ethical way to use an LLM since the system they are built on is too deeply flawed. Why not look to a writing book for advice? one friend wondered.

But when it comes to technology, we are all ethically compromised. This debate was conducted, after all, on Facebook, which everyone who participated in it is still using, despite the damage it has done to humanity. We all make tradeoffs in our behavior based on our values and our circumstances. If you abstain from using AI but drive a car 50 miles a day or eat red meat, are you ultimately harming the environment more? Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most environmentally conscious writers I’ve ever encountered, recently discussed using A.I. for her research.1

Meanwhile, have you ever evaded a paywall? If so, you’re taking money out of the pockets of journalists like me and contributing to a social culture that doesn’t value paying for media, resulting in its devaluation. Part of the argument against AI is that its “thoughts” are simply a dressed-up aggregation of search engine results, without attribution. But we’ve been rewarding aggregation over argument for years now in the websites we choose to click on. Remember the days when only Buzzfeed and its ilk had “listicles”? Now they’re everywhere.

Still, I don’t plan to consult an AI chatbot as a regular part of my writing practice. In addition to all the reasons above, I fear growing psychologically dependent on it, like the New York Times writer who just used AI to help sell his house and wound up feeling that “it was now almost impossible … to make a decision without getting A.I.’s opinion.” But at the moment, I’m hopeful about the possibilities of using AI to support my work rather than replace it.

Are you in the “never A.I.” camp, or do you use it for help with writing, research, or other tasks? If so, what have you found most useful? Let me know in the comments.

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I couldn’t resist telling Gemini I was writing about using it as a writing coach. “What other ways do you think you can be helpful to nonfiction writers like me?” I asked.

After the obligatory sycophancy (“That is incredibly exciting to hear—I’m honored to get a mention in your newsletter!”), this is what it suggested:

1. Interactive digital whiteboard: “You can dump a messy outline or a complex set of themes into our chat and ask me to analyze it from different perspectives.”

2. Devil’s advocate: “You can feed me a thesis statement or a specific historical interpretation and command me: Act as a skeptical reviewer or a specialist in [X subject]. Tear this argument apart. Where are the weak points? What assumptions am I making that require stronger documentary evidence?

3. Information synthesizer: “You can upload or paste dense historical texts or trial transcripts and use me to quickly locate specific needle-in-a-haystack details, summarize dense institutional histories, or cross-reference timeline events to ensure chronological consistency.”

4. Admin manager: “I can take over the administrative cognitive load. You can ask me to draft pitch letters to editors based on your notes,2 format your bibliography, craft engaging social media threads or newsletter teasers about your upcoming work, or break down your massive macro-deadlines into micro-tasks for the upcoming week.”

5. Sample text generator. [FOR THE RECORD: I WOULD NOT USE AI THIS WAY OR ADVISE ANYONE ELSE TO DO SO.] “I am completely immune to writer's block because I don't care about making mistakes,” Gemini writes. (Interesting phrasing: Isn’t it supposed to care about not making mistakes?) It continues, “If you are stuck on a transitional paragraph or a tricky introductory hook, you can tell me: I need to get from Point A to Point B. Give me five completely different, rapid-fire ways to transition this paragraph. They might not be your final prose, but breaking that initial friction gives your brain something concrete to react to, edit, and transform into your own voice.”

   I REPEAT: I HAVE NOT USED AND WOULD NOT USE AI TO GENERATE TEXT, WHICH SEEMS DIFFERENT IN NATURE FROM THE OTHER POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS.

Do any of these suggestions strike you as useful? What else would you consider asking A.I. to do?

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Where to find me

New York, July 26, 2 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with my friend Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath and, most recently, the novel The Scrapbook, which deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust two generations later. Heather’s writing is definitely 100% human generated! Details here.

Online, July 25, 1-3 p.m.: I’m hosting a single-session workshop, “Write Like a Mother: Finding Your Voice After Having Children.” It reframes motherhood as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle, as well as offering practical strategies for organizing time and work. We’ll look at passages on parenting and art from brilliant mother-writers like Shirley Jackson, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and discuss how to keep our work moving forward when life is unpredictable and exhausting. Sign up here.

What I’m reading

Thinner by Stephen King, in which a man falls victim to a curse that causes him to waste away. Also 100% human generated, since it was published in 1984. (Maybe someday books will bear a sticker like Ivory Soap: “99.4% human generated!”) This book has not aged well in terms of its stereotypes about “Gypsies,” a major plot point. In that respect at least, we’ve come a long way in the last 40 years. But I was intrigued that its horror consists in inverting the desire to be thin. A great number of people surely still believe that losing too much weight would be a good problem to have rather than a literal curse.

This sculpture, by Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Perkins&Will, is called “With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited.” It sits on the campus of Davidson College, a small, elite liberal arts school in central North Carolina, opposite one of the oldest buildings on campus—one built by enslaved people. That building now holds a small museum exploring the ways in which the college benefited from slave labor. On display are bricks in which the fingerprints of the enslaved people who created them are visible: deep, tactile holes. Exhibits seek to reconstruct the life stories of those people.

Over the past year, as part of a project exploring Mark Twain’s legacy in America today, I’ve traveled around the country visiting sites that commemorate Black history, such as the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama; the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; and the Niagara Falls Underground Railway Heritage Center. I began this journey shortly before the Trump administration ordered a review of exhibits discussing slavery at national parks and other institutions, including the Smithsonian, which it accused of trying to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

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During these travels, I’ve seen some powerful historical exhibits and works of public art, which I plan to share more about in my newsletter over the coming months. But nothing had the same effect on me as the sculpture at Davidson. I sat near it for the better part of an afternoon, looking at it from all angles, watching visitors pose for pictures next to it as the light softened and shadows deepened. At night, illuminated from below, it glows.

The sculpture stands in honor of not only the enslaved people who built those early buildings, but all the Black workers, “known and unknown,” who contributed to the life of the college from its founding in 1837 through the Jim Crow years: laundry workers, gardeners, groundspeople, cooks. As poet Clint Smith—a Davidson alum and the author of the remarkable book How the Word Is Passed—writes in a poem he read at the sculpture’s unveiling last fall:

With these hands they constructed buildings they were not allowed to enter,

they cooked food they were not allowed to eat,

they washed clothes they were not allowed to wear.

How did I get here from Mark Twain? you might be wondering. Over his lifetime, Twain underwent a remarkable personal journey. Born into a slave-owning family in Missouri, he eventually married Olivia Langdon, daughter of leading abolitionist Jervis Langdon, and committed himself to the fight for equality for Black people.

On a visit to Yale in 1885, soon after the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain met a young Black law student named Warner T. McGuinn who was struggling to support himself with part-time jobs. Twain was impressed with both his brilliance and his work ethic. “I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color,” he wrote to the dean of Yale Law School, offering to pay some of McGuinn’s fees. “We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs; & we should pay for it.” As Ron Chernow puts it in his recently published biography, “Twain had devised his own form of racial reparations.”

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On my own journeys around Trump’s America, I’ve been thinking about the forms reparations can take. Toward the end of their lives, my grandparents fought for and received financial compensation from the German government for their sufferings in the Holocaust. As I’ve written here before, I regard the Polish passports I acquired for myself and my children, giving us the right to live and work in the European Union, as restitution for the crimes committed against my family.

What is required to appropriately acknowledge our crimes against the Black people whose fingerprints are embedded in the bricks of our country’s buildings? Many years ago, the great German writer W.G. Sebald gave a speech in which he described literature as a way of honoring “the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done … an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts.” Places like the Legacy Museum (which goes far beyond the work of a typical museum) can serve this purpose. So can a sculpture like “With These Hands.”

Meanwhile, as Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, today is the 72nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. Yesterday in Alabama, thousands of Americans protested in Selma and Montgomery against the Court’s recent decision weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Has your community made efforts to reckon with the painful aspects of its history? Let me know in the comments.

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Where to find me

I’ve been doing a radio and podcast tour to promote the paperback launch of The Many Lives of Anne Frank. Some highlights: The Shelley Irwin Show, The Roundtable with Joe Donahue, The Lowdown with Ira Wood. More to come!

What I’m reading

Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas, a horror novel that doubles as a smart and funny parable of diet culture. A sweet young guy who has always struggled with his weight signs up for a trial of a new drug called Obexity, which offers miraculous weight loss—as long as he can tolerate some extremely disturbing side effects. I’m working on an essay that examines recent books about fatphobia and tries to answer the question of why thinness remains so persistent as an ideal. Stay tuned …

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One of the first things you’re told when arriving in Israel is to download the official Homefront Command app. When incoming missiles are detected, the app erupts with a “warning” alert: a uniquely jarring chug-a chug-a noise capable of waking the soundest sleeper. At that point, you have about five minutes to get to a bomb shelter.

Just over a minute before the attack, the air raid siren goes off. Wikipedia describes it as “a continuous ascending and descending tone,” but that doesn’t adequately convey the horror of its wail. If you’re outside, it seems to be coming from everywhere at once. Without words, it conveys an unmistakable message: Take shelter. Now.

(I recorded this about a week ago.)

Yesterday, the nineteenth day of the war, no one seemed to be in a particular hurry to respond to the first warning. Two construction workers continued to unload steel beams from a van. A young woman riding a bicycle pulled up to the nearest building, carefully secured her bike, and sauntered inside.

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Most of Tel Aviv’s characteristic low-rise apartment buildings, built in the 1950s, have bomb shelters in their basements. The front doors of the buildings are usually secured with electronic codes, but these days many of them are left propped open so that passersby will be able to quickly enter.

At the hair salon, employees were calmly ushering clients into the shelter in the adjacent building. The stylist welcomed me as if nothing were going on. “Something to drink?” he offered.

Apparently it’s possible to become accustomed to anything, even missiles falling out of the sky.

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This is my first war, but that’s not the case for almost everyone around me. It’s not even Israel’s first war with Iran: that happened last June, the conflict now known here as the Twelve Day War. New as it is to me, the current routine—restrictions on gatherings, educational activities, and commerce; radically reduced flights in and out; and, of course, the need to run to the shelter at any time of day or night—is familiar to many. A friend described it as “like Covid, but with missiles.”

On February 28, the first day of the current war, the sirens went off every few hours, around the clock. But since then, the pace has slowed to five or six a day, and somehow we’re living with it. I set out my clothes before getting in the shower, so that I’ll be able to get dressed as quickly as possible. When friends came over for dinner, we made a slow-cooking stew rather than a dish that would be ruined if we had to suddenly abandon it on the stove. I still go out to run, but I make sure to stay near buildings rather than roaming in the park.

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But I can’t go on like this indefinitely, and neither can my Israeli neighbors. I see it in their faces in the middle of the night: the elderly woman who shuffles to the shelter on her caregiver’s arm; the middle-aged couple doting on their little white dog; the parents who manage to carry their toddlers down two flights of stairs without waking them. We listen to the muffled booms of the Iron Dome intercepting the missiles. Sometimes we hear the louder boom that signals an impact.

We’re all holding it together, for now, thanks in large part to Israel’s astoundingly effective air defense system and ubiquitous missile shelters. We tell ourselves that as long as we make it to a shelter in time, we will be safe, even considering Iran’s increasing use of cluster bombs, which split into smaller projectiles that can cause damage over a wide area. On Tuesday night, one exploded a few kilometers away, killing an elderly couple who weren’t in a shelter and damaging a nearby train station.

After the all-clear pops up and we stumble back upstairs, I lie in bed thinking of the people of Tehran and the terror they must feel when bombs land without warning. This morning, I learned that four Palestinians in the West Bank, including a pregnant woman, were killed in the missile attack last night.

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I’m not here to pontificate about this war or any other. I consume a wide variety of news media, but I don’t pretend to understand all the complications of this conflict.

What I do understand, in a new and visceral way, is that it’s hard to think in geopolitical terms when your body is on the line. Maybe this, too, gets easier in time.

While I was writing this newsletter on Thursday morning, the alert sounded three times.

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With any luck, I’ll manage to leave Israel in time for a very special event at Lofty Pigeon Books, my neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn! On March 25, at 6:30 p.m., to celebrate the paperback launch of The Many Lives of Anne Frank, I’ll be in conversation with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the echoes of Anne’s story in our present moment. There’s a lot to discuss! Register for free here.

I was thrilled to be in conversation with Rachel Kadish, a dear friend and extraordinary novelist, at the very special restaurant and event space Lehrhaus last month. Here we are in front of a big bookcase filled with works by Jewish writers.

I was supposed to be in Amsterdam last weekend for the publication of my book in Dutch, but alas, that event had to be postponed. Hopefully it will be rescheduled for later this spring. In the meantime, my Dutch readers can find the book here.

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Another friend, who lives in Minneapolis, posted on Facebook an agonized meditation on how she now no longer knows whether she would be a “good German,” because she’s not sure she would be able to sacrifice her life during a protest.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day: the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It also happens to be my paperback publication date, but I’m not in the mood to celebrate, not while ICE agents are storming the streets of Minneapolis and shooting protesters with no provocation.

A year ago, when my book first came out, Donald Trump had just been re-elected. At the time, I thought the comparison of undocumented immigrants to Jews persecuted during the Holocaust was not wrong, exactly, but a little imprecise.

I see now that the imprecision doesn’t matter. We’re living in desperate times. We lack the vocabulary to convey the horror of seeing masked government agents on the streets of American cities gunning down peaceful protesters. People reach for the Holocaust as a comparison not to diminish Jewish suffering but because—even after all the other disasters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—it’s still the worst thing they can think of.

Make no mistake: we are all witnesses to these crimes. If you clicked play on a video, or read someone’s post detailing what they saw, or paused your scrolling to look at an image of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, you have borne witness.

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There’s a famous photograph taken in Amsterdam in June 1943, at the height of the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, that has haunted me ever since I first saw it. The photographer, whose identity is unknown, is looking down from a second- or third-floor window at the street below, where a crowd of people are gathered in front of a tidy middle-class apartment building. Some are milling around; others are sitting and waiting. The luggage scattered around them makes it obvious that they are Jews rounded up for deportation.

On the windowsill, in the foreground of the picture, there are two teacups. Someone, about to make tea, paused to take this picture.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, we might think: This person’s neighbors are about to be deported and they’re in their cozy home drinking tea?!

But at the same time, the very act of taking such a picture could have gotten the photographer arrested or worse. As such, the photograph itself represents an act of resistance. When fascist thugs are terrorizing your neighborhood, you do what you can. As it happens, researchers were later able to identify some of the deported Jews by using this photo.

Keep filming. Keep watching. Keep witnessing.

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More than any other song I know, this one captures the feeling of the road trip, that quintessentially American journey: crisscrossing the country from one end to the other, walking or hitchhiking or taking a Greyhound bus while searching for America, and for yourself. I took a trip like that one summer, mostly on my own, driving from Boston to D.C. to Austin and beyond as far as Las Vegas, following dirt roads and sleeping at campsites and getting lost in the desert.

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Was I looking for America? Not deliberately, but that’s what I found: an America of deserts and diners, canyons and trailers, park rangers and waitresses and people in no particular hurry. I went back to New York and started my first real job in publishing, but in my mind I was still driving down those highways, wondering what might lie just off the next exit.

I’m looking for America again now, lying awake at night. As the Simon & Garfunkel couple hitchhike from Saginaw, scenes from Minneapolis play on repeat in my mind. They share a pack of cigarettes and something called “Mrs. Wagner pies,” they make up stories about the other passengers on the bus, and eventually the moon rises “over an open field,” perhaps the most beautiful image in any pop song, ever. I can see it, from the windows of their bus.

And I see Renee Good through the window of my computer screen. Like me, she’s middle-aged, with an SUV and a partner and a dog and kids who she wants to raise in a better world. For that she is shot in the face while exercising an inalienable American right, the right to get in your car and drive away.

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After his girlfriend falls asleep, Simon confessses that he’s lost: “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.” Haven’t we always been? The cars on the New Jersey Turnpike have all come to look for America. Perhaps they are just as lost as he is. Perhaps they will find themselves.

But I’m not sure I want to find myself in this America, where masked thugs roam the streets of Minneapolis, where a synagogue was set on fire in Mississippi, where a doctor in California is in danger for providing abortion pills to a woman in Louisiana. I can’t stop reading the stories, and there are more of them every day. The fortysomething mother from Boston, born in Peru and a U.S. resident since age nine, who was separated from her family at Logan Airport and detained for two weeks over a marijuana charge from more than twenty years ago. The children—including two who have cancer—detained for weeks, with and without their parents. The Massachusetts teen picked up after volleyball practice.

If you haven’t listened to “America” in a while, I recommend this version, which I heard for the first time a few months ago via Mark Oppenheimer’s Substack. It’s a duet by two Swedish sisters, their voices songbird sweet, performing the song for Simon at a concert in 2012. The camera comes to rest a few times on his face. At first he seems to be impassive, as if frozen in disbelief at the beauty of his own creation, but the end tears are clearly visible in his eyes. Perhaps he’s weeping for his own lost former self, the 27-year-old hippie who wrote that song in 1968, confessing his secrets to someone who can’t hear, or isn’t listening.

Or perhaps he is weeping, as I too weep, at the gulf between the promise of America then and what it has become.

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To combat that where-has-all-the-time-gone-and-what-do-I-have-to-show-for-it feeling, I’m trying what my friend Gretchen Rubin calls a “ta-da list.” Instead of creating a page full of…

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I’ve visited Israel several times since the pro-democracy protests of summer 2023. Each time, the mood among most of the people…

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I have Kondo-ed my books.

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I’ve been writing book criticism for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years as a book critic means a lot of free books. In the post-Covid period, many publishers have shifted to e-galleys, a reprieve welcomed by both my sagging shelves…

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That’s the first line of an essay I may never write, an essay about something so personal I’ve almost never even talked about writing it: my difficult relationship with my mother.

But last weekend, I wrote the first paragraph. Then I read it aloud to a room full of strangers.

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This took p…

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The novel is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, whi…

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“Our government must not be in the business of ruling ideas off-limits. This country’s rich intellectual tradition of free thought and debate is one of our most valuable assets. To squander it in the name of ideology—whether by removing books from college libraries or restricting grants to literary critics writing about racism—is a tragedy.”

A few years …

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The doctor who treated me reassured me that I would be able to run again. I…

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