A Compassionate Portrait: Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay

“Shattered energy seemed to pulse from him like sonar. Tight blips of loneliness. Tallie translated the echolocation easily. She was lonesome and blipping too.”

Leesa Cross-Smith is known for her beautiful imagery, lush and aromatic sentences that leave you breathless and pondering for days. Her two short story collections, Every Kiss, A War and So That We Can Glow and her debut novel, Whiskey and Ribbons have earned notable accolades from the literary establishment and praise from Roxane Gay. Her second novel, This Close To Okay, is less poetic, more straightforward, more accessible. It has all of the charm and anticipatory fizz of a rom-com but underlying all the quippy dialogue, shopping montages and rescuing of cats, Cross-Smith submits for our consideration a tableau of human frailty, the far reaching grasp of grief and mental illness, rendering a compassionate portrait of the sufferers and the caretakers.

The backdrop is Louisville, Kentucky. In the waning days of October, in a cold, driving rain, two broken people meet on a bridge, Emmett on the river side, “the suicide side” of the cold steel railing, Tallie on the other side, the safe side. Emmett staring down at the turbulent Ohio River. Tallie, the only person driving by, amidst a noisy shimmer of vehicles, to stop and inquire, to aid a stranger in need. With little more than words of care and musical offerings of Andrew Bird and Wilco playing on her cellphone, Tallie encourages Emmett to climb back over to safety. She takes him for a coffee and then offers him a place, her place, to stay for a few days. Over the course of a weekend, Emmett and Tallie construct a metaphorical bridge from the depths of despair to close to okay.  

This is a quiet novel. Cross-Smith acknowledges but doesn’t dwell in the unbearable. Most of the bad stuff has already happened off the page. Infertility, failed relationships, racial bigotry, mental illness, depression, PTSD. Suicidal ideation. Tallie and Emmett confront their demons through talk therapy. Conversation provides the driving force, propelling the plot forward. The details the characters choose to withhold from one another deliver the dramatic tension. Tallie confides her longing for children, her failed IVF treatments, her ex-husband’s affair but conceals that she is a professional therapist. Emmett confesses that he too used to be married although his true identity and source of pain remain a mystery throughout most of the book. He snoops around in her computer, her Facebook page. He secretly emails her ex. In his mind, he obsessively catalogues his surroundings. He never gives up the possibility of the bridge.

Told in alternating points of view, Tallie’s narrative offers a clinical assessment of Emmett’s emotional health noting his inability to regulate his body temperature, dimming, detached feelings, dizziness. She wonders if he’s confusing his exhaustion for hopelessness. Emmett’s narrative reveals that there is no straight path to wellness. His healing accordions in and out. Tears arrive without warning. At one point, he assesses, in detail, the damage his body will suffer should he jump off the bridge.

And yet, the relationship that blooms between Emmett and Tallie, from strangers to confidants, to friends to possibly more is both believable and aspirational. For the reader, their story serves as an emotional support manual. How to recognize the signs of emotional distress. How to help someone in need. How to reach out in very small but persistent ways.           

Talk, talk, talk, talking. Always talking and listening. Cups of tea, mugs of coffee. Food, eating, nibbling, snacking, cooking meals together, grabbing a bite at a diner. Sharing the intimacy and distraction of music, movies and baseball during The World Series. Discussions of the “big things, not little things.” Art, pop culture, literature, faith. Playing gin rummy. Reading Harry Potter out loud. Strolling through a shopping plaza. The gift of a fuzzy blue snow hat with flaps. A red one to match. Shopping for Halloween costumes. Choosing Mulder and Scully. Sharing a smoke. The ritual burning of emotional artifacts. Doing for one another, like fetching a glass of water or cleaning leaves out of a gutter. 

And then there’s hand-knitted chunky afghans and scented candles and the sound of rain thrumming on the roof. Clean fresh smells: soap and shampoo and lotions. The comfort of home. Hygge.

“Making things as comfy as possible…it’s what I do,” says Tallie to Emmett in response to his appreciation for the charms of her cultivated domesticity noting how her home quiets his anxiety.

Hygge (pronounced HOO-gah) is the Danish word for cozy, a contentment achieved by enjoying the simple things in life. Highlighted in The New York Times a few years back amidst a spate of books, websites and online venders, Hygge celebrates homespun pleasures: fuzzy wool socks, raglan sweaters, a wooden mixing spoon with a burnt handle, handmade quilts and fresh baked pies. Hygge captures the essence of a crackling fire and a mug of hot cocoa — the kind made with milk and miniature marshmallows foaming on top.

In This Close to Okay, what could be more hygge than sharing a late autumn weekend, pumpkin spiced latte, old fashioned donuts, kids bobbing for apples, mums — bursts of yellow, and orange and purple. Rain giving way to crisp clear skies, the promise of a Halloween party.

In addition to promoting the healing powers of hygge, Cross-Smith champions a new feminism with her elevation of home life and the purposeful cultivation of a nurturing space. Domesticity, long seen as a negative, demoralizing tug with demands that diminish women slavish to their homes and broods, toiling in the kitchen and the laundry room, mop and dust rag. Unless of course these chores are monetized into celebrity empires a la Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray or Marie Kondo or the latest HGTV renovation stars. 

Now, the battle of the stay-at-home moms in mom jeans vs the suit wearing professionals, where one set of duties cancelled the value of the others, have come full circle. Tallie is a professional who owns her own house, makes her own way in the world. And yet aspires, and finds comfort in knitting, making her home cozy and beautiful and doing things for others. A woman showcased as both healer and provider while allowing for the possibilities of good men, men and women working together as a team.

Ultimately, This Close to Okay is a buoyant instructive for living in a loud, loud world. It maps a course of action for reaching out to those in need. A guide for navigating social and emotional isolation. A reminder that in the midst of hopelessness and heartache, it’s the simple things that can life raft optimism and revive the weary.

Don't Censor Yourself. Write What You Want to Write: An Interview with Lee Zacharias

Lee Zacharias and I met in Greensboro, North Carolina, too many years ago to specify. We were part of a group of women writers dubbed “Ladies Lit” that convened on a regular basis for drinks, dessert and invaluable rough and tumble criticism of early drafts of our work. I count Lee the person who nudged me toward proper grammar (among other stylistic improvements). An accomplished photographer as well as author, Lee’s books include the short story collection Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, the essay collection The Only Sounds We Make and four novels, the most recent What a Wonderful World This Could Be (Madville Publishing, 2021). In the post-COVID era, with luck, Lee and I will again hoist drinks across from each other and continue the conversation started here.

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Kat Meads: At what age did you define yourself as a writer? How did that self-identification come about?

Lee Zacharias: I knew I wanted to write even before I could read. I loved books, and when I was in first or second grade I would always put my hand up for "show and tell"—do they still do that?—and make up a story on the spot. I got a lot of encouragement from other students, mainly because the longer I could make my story the less time we would have for arithmetic. I began to write around the time I was in sixth grade. I was reading a lot of girl detective and boarding school novels at the time, so the "novels" I began in the steno books we used for class notes were imitations of those, none of which I finished, likely because I wasn't a good enough detective to solve the plot. And the one my mother found made her so angry I didn't dare put anything on paper again until I left home for college. I applied to a graduate program but married a grad student instead, and so for the next few years I worked full time and wrote sporadically. I didn't start writing in earnest until I was 25, when my first husband finished his exams and we moved to Richmond, Virginia. But even after I began to publish, I never identified myself as a writer. During the years I taught, I would say I was a teacher, because everyone who's ever told the inquisitive stranger that he or she was a writer, knows what follows: "Have you published anything?" And then, "Anything I would have read?" Now that I'm retired from full-time teaching, I'm more comfortable saying I'm a writer, because I've always got a camera, so people want to know if I'm a photographer. Part of not wanting to identify myself comes of having had a mother who was forever defining herself for me, though her definitions were always expressed in adjectives instead of nouns: she was smart, independent, resourceful; I was resentful. I suppose it sounds passive—to let others define you— but I prefer to think of it as an active way of being. Gertrude Stein once said, in her essay "On Poetry and Grammar," that poetry was about the noun and prose about the verb. There are a lot of issues one could take with that statement, of course, but I like the distinction between noun and verb. I write.

Meads: Are there any writing "rituals"—superstitious or otherwise—that you swear by?

Zacharias: I have to work my way into writing. I don't get up at 5 a.m and start scribbling. I tend to write better in the afternoon. I don't write by hand, except for notes, and haven't since I was inventing girl detectives in the steno books of junior high. Before word processing came along, I wrote on a typewriter, so it's natural for me to sit at a keyboard. My hand cramps, I can't always read my own handwriting, and paragraphs and dialogue don't look right to me unless they're typed. But I'm old enough to want to see what I've written on paper, so I print a lot and mark up those drafts with pencil, though at a certain point I switch back to editing onscreen. But that's a ritual of revision. My preparatory rituals are more like stalling: I read the newspaper, check my email, take a shower, nothing in particular, just daily life. The actual rituals are technical: getting my computer to boot up and let me use it instead of telling me it has no internet connection or needs to clean the cache (whatever that is) or blocking out the screen with endless reports of threats it's saved me from, or insisting that the document I am writing has been saved by another user as "read only." Nothing like Samuel Clemens warming up with a game of billiards in his attic or Herman Melville filling inkpots and sharpening his quill pens. No spinning around five times or placing a lucky token on my desk. But eventually there I am in front of a functioning machine, and a few words in, I'm no longer there but wherever those words take me.  

Meads: When you get stuck on a project, what is your go-to activity to help unblock the blockage?

Zacharias: Oh, anything! I take a walk with one of my cameras. Make jewelry. If I'm really desperate, organize a closet, though I've never gone so far as to clean the stove. Right now I'm working on a memoir focused on my mother's life that includes scans of letters from my father written in 1941 and photographs I consider part of the text. I can spend an entire day processing a single image because you have no idea until you blow them up onscreen how full of dust, pinholes, scratches, and cracked emulsions those old photos are. Many are of people I know about but never met, others people I knew in much older incarnations. It's very mechanical work—something you can do even when you're blocked—but it begets an odd intimacy, like picking eyelashes out of strangers' eyes, that leads me back to the writing. I haven't had to process photographs for fiction, but I've often left a troublesome chapter of a novel to look at pictures or read more about the relevant time or place. It's a way of working myself back into the necessary atmosphere.

Meads: How has being a photographer affected your writing?

Zacharias: I used to think of photography and writing as completely separate. I wanted to compartmentalize them, to make photography a break from writing. But they're not nearly as separate as I pretended. Photography is about light in the way writing is about words, and over time I've realized how much attention my writing pays to light and weather. I love old snapshots in which the shadow of the photographer stretches toward the subject. You don't see the photographer, but you're very aware of the presence. To me, that is the story, the shadow the narrator casts. I never write from an omniscient point of view. Photography also teaches you a lot about framing—what goes into a picture, what is left out—and in a much more subconscious way I think that affects the way I construct units—paragraphs, longer passages, or chapters. Rhythm is important to me, so I am very conscious of the music of the language, but I had to learn the auditory part. From the beginning writing has been very visual to me.

Meads: You have a deep connection to North Carolina's Ocracoke Island. How did that attachment begin and how does that particular place contribute to your artistic life?

Zacharias: I first visited Ocracoke in 1971, before the water system was in place, while residents were still using cisterns. Certainly there was a tourist trade, but nothing like the industry that took off once the water treatment plant was built. It was still a fishing village. By the time I started visiting on a regular basis in 1990 a great deal had changed, and each year I would note other changes: the disappearance of the red and white wooden skiffs from the harbor, the paving of the roads in Jackson Dunes, new street signs, a narrow sidewalk, the trail to Springers Point, the bike path, the historical markers. I couldn't go last year because the island was closed to visitors in May for covid, which means I haven't been back since Dorian devastated the community in September of 2019. I have a lot of friends in the village and know something of what's changed, but knowing is not seeing, and when you visit an island every year, that island gets in your blood, becomes necessary to your life. I rarely write when I'm there. I'm outdoors, riding my bike, kayaking, reading or walking on the beach, always taking photographs. I go off season, so it's not as crowded as it gets come summer. There are sixteen miles of beach from which you cannot see a single building, and when I am riding my bike out South Point or Grass Roads, it's just me and the birds, the same when I am paddling up the back side of the island. I stay in a house where I can kayak from my front yard into the Sound. I'm also very isolated. I disappear into nature. I live entirely in the moment and entirely without ego. There is nowhere else I can divest myself so completely of myself, which is to say that it is the restorative part of writing that doesn't show but is everywhere.  

Meads: As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, what are some of the factors that determine whether you deal with a subject as truth or fiction.

Zacharias: That's never a question for me. I'm writing about myself or my family or something I experienced, or I'm not, and when I'm not it's fiction. My fiction isn't autobiographical—oh, I might steal a detail here or there, a line of dialogue I've overheard, a rug, a sofa, the whoosh of a door's weather stripping because I know how to describe them—but not at all in terms of character and event. Because I've written personal essays, I don't bring any desire to write about myself to fiction. On other hand, my fiction sometimes goes places I wish I had been. In Across the Great Lake Fern and I mourned the town of Frankfort, Michigan, together, she because it was hers and she lost it, me because I wanted it and it had never been mine. In What a Wonderful World This Could Be I wanted to experience the youth politics of the 1960s from the inside because I was married and working office jobs during those years, and I often felt that instead of living it I watched the story of my generation unfold each night on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. That doesn't mean my novels are wishful thinking, though I did imagine, the first time I saw Frankfort, when I was eleven or twelve, that if I only lived there instead of in the industrial wasteland of Hammond, Indiana, I would have a perfect life. But the first thing any writer learns is that a novel is no place for a perfect life. I made Alex a photographer in What A Wonderful World This Could Be because I knew cameras. And at one time I did, very briefly, work as a darkroom technician for a TV tuner plant and for a newspaper, but I wasn't writing about myself. I simply gave her a profession I knew something about.

Meads: As a professor at UNC-Greensboro and instructor at the Wildacres Writing Workshop, what writing question from students a) is most frequently asked and b) the hardest to answer?

Zacharias:  You have written and taught both nonfiction and fiction, so you've heard this. Students always want to know how to write about their lives or what someone might interpret as their lives without damaging their relationships. How do I write about Mom without making her mad at me? I think my answer is the same one most teachers give. Don't censor yourself. Write what you want to write, what you remember, what you imagine, what you feel. You can decide later whether or not to publish. But that's not what students want to hear, because they hope to publish, and they want a formula for writing about others without risk. But there is no formula. Oh, there are the strategies memoirists suggest: changing names or genders, creating composite characters, finding a different setting. But the truth is that writing is a risky business. Others will read themselves into your fiction even if they aren't there—and nonfiction, well…no one's story happens in a vacuum. So some people will be angry about the way they think you've portrayed them or secrets you've revealed. Others may be angry because you didn't think them important enough to write about. It's impossible to predict every response. Some writers show their work to family or friends and invite them to object. I don't. I edit to improve the work, not to spare feelings. But there are also things I choose not to write about. Every writer has to decide what they value most. Writing is hard work, and students want some part of it made easy. But this is the most uncomfortable part, which is why the question always comes up, and why the answer rarely satisfies.

Meads: Do any of your fictional characters continue to nag at you, post-publication? If so, in what ways to they nag, and (best guess) why do they hang about and nag.

Zacharias: No. Someone asked if I intended to write a sequel to Across the Great Lake, and I was floored. A sequel? Fern is eighty-five years old. She dies, or experiences a vision of her death, on the last page. Where in the world would I go from there? Do I still care about her, about Alex, or other characters I've invented? Absolutely. But even though I suppose I could write a book about what Alex would be doing in 2021, I feel no reason or desire to. That may be where the photographer's sense of framing comes in. I framed the part of her life that interested me. What haunts me more than characters are the worlds I leave behind. My first novel was about a classical clarinetist. That is a profession I knew nothing about, and I immersed myself so completely that it was a shock to finish the book, to get up from the table where I'd often lunched with musicians from the Eastern Music Festival who graciously answered my questions and realize I had no reason to come back. I can't sing; I don't play. I've never lived in Michigan or in a collective. To write a novel is to create a world that you will someday leave with the homesick backward glance of an exile.

Meads: Your most recent novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, wonderfully interweaves the personal and the political. Was that mix a conscious goal at the onset? What are some of the challenges of that approach and how did you go about narratively solving those challenges?

Zacharis: Oh, yes, that interweaving of the personal and the political was very much a conscious intent. To me, that's really what the book is about, the tension between the two. As a photographer Alex is committed to the individual vision of the artist, to the singular, whereas her husband, the civil rights and antiwar activist is committed to the masses. She is initially attracted to him because she wants—needs—to get outside herself, but ultimately she recognizes the danger in putting ideology above all else. As she sees it, her husband multiplies and strings zeroes, whereas she reserves the right to count on her fingers one by one. I think the biggest challenge came in what happens to her when her husband disappears. She withdraws. I'm quite certain that if I were writing about her in 2020, for instance, she would have been making her voice heard, because there are some things in politics you simply can't ignore. But that's not where I left her. I left her in 1982, when she still bears the emotional scars of her husband's and her own—but especially her husband's—political involvement in the 1960s and wants to think of herself as apolitical. I'm sure a lot of readers will fault her for that. But they are reading in a different time than the one in which she is acting.

Are Women Always Ghosts?: A Review of Karen Salyer McElmurray's Wanting Radiance

The literary relationship between women and nature has a long history, with roots reaching to Genesis. Eve—Woman—tempts pure-hearted Adam—Man—into betraying the reason and logic of Eden and indulging the sweet fruit of nature. On the one hand, women are quite powerful—at least enough to tempt old pure-hearted Adam. They are witches, temptresses, mother nature herself, the giver of all life. On the other hand, associating women with nature in an industrialized patriarchal narrative justifies the masculinist conquest of both women and nature. This is why Carolyn Merchant argued that ecological stories are also feminist stories.

For instance, consider Olivia in Richard Power’s much-lauded Overstory. Olivia undergoes a transformative experience in which she is electrocuted, “dies,” and then is jolted back to life with the memory of “presences” and “beings of light.” They call on Olivia to protect an old-growth forest across the country. Along the way, she also grows detached from her human family, as if, post-death, her more-than-human kinship becomes more meaningful than her human one. Olivia acts as a medium for the desires of the sentient tree spirits who speak to her mostly in flows of emotion.

Olivia is certainly a powerful protagonist, both in terms of her more-than-human connections and her agency. However, her “magical qualities” almost flatten her into a Jungian archetype. Some critics, like Susan Balée, see Olivia as nothing more than an avatar rather than a multidimensional character. Her identity becomes so inextricable from her exceptional ability that she loses human complexity, risking reproducing the magical woman trope that others women even as it grants them special powers.

Karen Salyer McElmurray’s new novel Wanting Radiance wonderfully revises this trope. The novel follows two generations of fortune-telling women whose entangled lives form the foundation of a captivating plot intimately tied to place. Ruby Loving and daughter Miracelle Loving roam mountainsides, coal country, deserts, and towns forgotten by industrialization in search of something like love. The men they encounter, however, might be more interested in “buying up the land, timber, coal, paper but [ending] up owning next to nothing.” Their desire for extracting wealth by splitting mountains open and securing affection by asking women to “stay put” often precludes the love Ruby and Miracelle need. Despite each woman’s magic-like ability to read palms and tarot cards, communicate with spirits, their longing for love leaves them as vulnerable as mountains stripped by miners.

Both Ruby and Miracelle wander like ghosts, detached from place and yet deeply yearning for it. Even as they embody similar qualities as women in other eco-fiction, these qualities expose rather than protect McElmurray’s characters. In one moment, Miracelle confesses, “I didn’t know of what I was more afraid—roads out or all the roads leading inside,” and in another, she asks, “Are women always ghosts?” In many ways, their displacement—their disconnection from any place that feels like home—comes as a result of their relationship with the particular men in their lives.

As Susan Griffin reminds us, both womanhood and nature are terrifying to men, who hunger for the control of both. Ecofeminist fiction exposes the subjugation of both women and nature for being on the same “inferior” side of various colonial and capitalistic dualistic expectations (e.g., feminine/masculine, nature/culture, savage/civilized). McElmurray brilliantly collapses many of these binaries using the image of hands. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, we have been told. Hands are how humans make a living. They are symbols of labor, survival. The cowboys in this novel use their hands to “move the earth.” In lyrical prose, McElmurray describes what men are capable of with their hands:

After [he and his logging crew had] been here awhile, mountains were split open like hardwood, and the scent drifted in the open windows at night. Musk. Tearing. A scent of blood and birth. And behind them the coal men left their machines. Earthmovers. Excavators. Extractors. Big machines with names of companies bold across them. Smyte. Black Diamond. Ruby would walk home from town some nights and see a huge shell of a thing that had taken a mountain’s insides in its wake. Prongs of a forklift, held out like empty arms in prayer.

In contrast to the extraction and separation at the hands of men, hands connect the novel’s women to each other as well as to place. “I saw lines of earth like lines on a palm,” Miracelle narrates. “My heart reached out for that earth-hand like I could study the past. Swirls and twists of roots, and fissures where nothing had grown back. Desolation, but the earth told lives.” Like Powers’s Olivia, Miracelle also seems to hear voices from the earth. Nightmares of “mountains opening up, swallowing other mountains” haunt her like the voice of her mother’s spirit. McElmurray creates tension from magic. The men often find themselves plagued by the loneliness of a flattened mountain or forest from which every tree has been ripped. Miracelle, meanwhile, only pretends to read cards and hands, undercutting the magical woman trope, and the tragic fate Ruby foresees renders her both powerful and powerless to the man she loved.

Part of what makes Wanting Radiance an important ecofeminist novel is that it is also many other things: a gothic love story, a murder mystery, a revival of Jerry Garcia’s bluegrass told by Flannery O’Connor. Voices from the grave haunt the broken hearts of lovers lost and dead. The prose sings the spirit of Appalachia, with sentences that evoke a fiddle’s voice or mandolin’s woody strum. One can taste the sadness of tragedy while at the same time admiring the scenery of “mountains soaking up the dawn daylight” or “wind settling in meadows underneath quiet stars.” Wanting Radiance is a song about the places that feel like home. Home we left behind. Home we head towards. Home we ruin because of how much we want it.

Lizz Schumer and Anne Leigh Parrish Talk About Trust and How Stories Connect Us

I met Anne in that strange, liminal space so many of us are these days: Online, while planning a virtual event reading for my latest book, Biography of a Body. We share a publisher, Unsolicited Press, who matched us up as co-readers because so much of our work explores similar themes. But while I write personal essays and hybrid poetry that delve into what it’s like to be a woman in the world through a highly personal lens, Anne’s fiction brings to life richly painted characters who feel like people you already know. In A Winter Night, we meet Angie Dugan, 34, a social worker struggling with her career, her anxiety, and her difficult family. But like so many of us, she’s also looking for a love she can lean on. Many of the themes in this book — substance abuse, mental health, how much we can trust each other, and whose feelings are worthwhile — feel so pertinent right now, as so many of us grapple with those same issues in isolation. Anne and I talked about what readers can find in this book and how it fits into our broader context.

Lizz Schumer: First, I am always fascinated by titles. The fact that the story is set in the winter certainly tips me off as to why A Winter Night fits on one level, but can you expound a bit on why else that tile works for this book in particular or how you came to it while writing?

Anne Leigh Parrish: I grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, where A Winter Night is set. Winters were long and hard. On a psychic level, winter felt like a retreat, a need to withdraw and seek protection, but it also was a chance to be quiet and reflect. I often sat at my window and watched the snow fall, thinking of the world being covered, lying in wait, preparing itself for the next season. I felt like I did that, too. I waited for time to pass, and my eagerness for what came next was my way of preparing for it.

LS: Without giving too much away, substance use is a major theme in this book. I wonder if you can talk about how you decided to incorporate it, what sort of research you did in order to depict it accurately and thoughtfully. Why do you think it's such a compelling topic, especially now?

ALP: A lot of my characters are train wrecks, and the reason many of them go off the rails is because of alcohol and drug use. These things make someone unreliable, despite his best intentions when he’s sober. My research is personal experience. I have been close to people similarly afflicted, and trying to understand them, and not be harmed by them, spurs me to write about them. With the stress of the pandemic, the economy, and the presidential election, I have to think a lot of us are struggling with substance and alcohol abuse and trying not to jump down our own dreadful rabbit holes.

LS: Similarly, I noticed that weight, food, and the body type of your female characters was also very heavily featured. It struck me that you describe your characters as attaching a lot of value to their size and the food they're consuming (or not consuming). Why do you think that's such a driving force in our culture, and what inspired you to focus on that element?

ALP: Angie Dugan, my thirty-four-year-old protagonist, carries a little too much weight. She’s the only one who cares about this, but she imputes the concern to her love interest, Matt. Early in the novel, she reflects on the fact they haven’t yet slept together, and she wonders if her weight is to blame. I think Angie represents many women in our culture, regardless of what number pops up on the bathroom scale. Men are judged by how much money they make; women by how attractive they are. Angie’s self-doubt is so deep, so hard to soothe and bolster, that even when Matt tells her how great she looks, she doesn’t believe him.

LS: I saw a lot of my own late grandmother's elder care facility in the one where Angie works, which was really touching. I loved the emphasis on the residents' stories. In one scene, two characters talk about the fact that we all tell ourselves stories and that stories keep us human. As a writer, why is it important to you to tell these people's stories, and how do you think storytelling draws out our humanity, in general?

ALP: The purpose of writing — of any art — is to remind us of our common humanity. Stories hold us together across space in one generation, and across time from one generation to the next. The stories we tell ourselves are how we navigate the world. They’re our own private religion and mythology about how we became who we are and why that’s important. Often these stories are based on lies which defend us against how we believe others see us. We take these stories and soften a painful past and brighten an uncertain future.

LS: Similarly, there's a scene in which several of the characters talk about whose feelings are worth protecting. That's such a fascinating idea. Can you talk more about how we make that decision in our lives, and how that sometimes drives our relationships with others?

ALP: I think we learn to view and characterize people through the lens of their weaknesses, or what we perceive as their weaknesses. This speaks again to substance abuse and how it warps not just the perspective of the user, but also the perception of those who have to deal with it. In Angie’s case, her father has a long-standing problem with alcohol. He drinks — or drank, since he’s put much of it behind him now — because he knows how badly he disappointed Angie’s mother, Lavinia. Lavinia suffers a lot, too, but because she just carries on and does what’s required of her, the vibe she gives off is one of strength and being secure in herself, even if she’s not. Angie comes to see that she tends to protect her father because she thinks he can’t take care of himself, when he can. And she tends to overlook her mother’s pain and unhappiness because she functions at a higher level.

LS: I love the complicated relationships in this book, especially those between men and women. Do you model those after anyone in your own life? Who are some of your influences when crafting these relationships between people?

ALP: I’ve been married almost forty-four years, and that’s a long time to spend both observing and experiencing marriage and romantic love. My own parents never seemed to talk about anything important, which contributed to their getting divorced. Many people didn’t open up to their partners back then, probably because it wasn’t encouraged or accepted. I don’t know. My husband and I strive for candor, though we don’t always get there. There’s so much under the surface the other person never sees, yet somehow knows is there. This creates the presence of enormous complexity which both keeps a relationship interesting but can cause strain, especially when other things in life, like careers and what’s going on with your children, go against you.

LS: The meaning of reliability and the limits of how much we can really rely on one another (as well as what it means to go too far) are also explored in depth here. What about that theme interested you? Why do you think it's such an interesting one to explore?

ALP: How much you can rely on someone really comes down to how much you can trust them, assuming they’ve shown themselves to be fairly steady in the first place. We learn this first as children under the care of our parents. Mine were reliable in some ways, and unreliable in crucial ways, especially when it came to affection and offering moral support. They were very wrapped up in themselves, and I never trusted their affection for me, as a result. In Angie’s case, she knows her father loves her unconditionally even though he can’t be counted on to be where he says he’ll be. Her mother is the opposite. She doesn’t hand out affection, though she feels it deeply enough, and is always on time. So, I think it’s a study in what it means to be reliable and more importantly, how. Will one reliably show affection? Kindness? Pay the bills and do chores? Some people are better at some of these than others, and Angie’s is trying to figure out just where Matt falls on this spectrum.

LS: There's a line in A Winter Night that "love is giving someone a chance," which I think is a beautiful sentiment. I'd love to know if there was a particular moment in your own life, or during the creative process, that led you to that idea.

ALP: Angie is constantly confronting her doubts about people, especially Matt. It’s easy for her to assume the worst, and figure he’s just another guy who’s let her down, even when he’s speaking and acting to the contrary. He admits his mistakes then goes on making them, and this drives her crazy. I was proud of her for not falling into the trap some women do, where they tell themselves that the man’s failings are her fault, that she didn’t believe in him enough, or give him enough confidence. Matt asks her flat out if she’ll give them a chance and she sees that she has to, that people don’t come with guarantees. It’s a risk she simply has to take.

LS: One of the things I found fascinating about this story is how timeless it feels. It could have taken place last year, or 20 years ago (a few technological tweaks notwithstanding). Was that intentional?

ALP: I can’t say it was, but I’m glad you found it so. It’s a huge compliment, really. I want my stories to last and not be nailed down to the current time, because life always moves on. The situation Angie finds herself in is timeless, I think, because it’s universal. She wants to find love and has been burned. She has to put herself on the line and try to overcome her doubts and not be all starry-eyed and unrealistic. It’s a hard balance to strike, finding that boundary between oneself and another person, especially because the boundary is always in motion, always shifting.

LS: Let's talk a bit about the writing process. Can you give us a little insight into how this book came to be, and who some of your greatest influences were while writing it? Who are you reading these days? Are there authors your readers might enjoy as a dessert course after finishing this one?

ALP: Well, I love Alice Munro and William Trevor. They are my major influences, and I’d suggest both as dessert to the main course of A Winter Night. As to my writing process, I never outline. Instead, I just roll forward then pause and reread what I’ve got, trying to sense the subtext and direction. I also start pulling out plot threads that need to be resolved or carried through. The one thing I must have always have in hand as I go — or even to begin a story at all — is to know how it ends. Then it’s a matter of building to that point, filling in all that’s blank before then.

A Review of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi

Piranesi, the title character of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, has appointed himself explorer and archivist of his world—an apparently endless labyrinth of stone halls lined with enigmatic statues. A vigorous sea sweeps through the lower level of the house; cloud, mist, and rain roam the upper level; stars shine through the windows at night. As far as Piranesi knows, he is the only living inhabitant of his world but for one: the Other, an academic who believes that the House holds a forgotten knowledge which can be used to unlock powers of flight, shape-shifting, and telepathy long lost to humankind.

Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke’s 2004 bestseller, Piranesi is a novel of enchanting world-building and detail, and a novel that is itself enchanted by the pursuits of knowledge-seeking and knowledge-sharing. Jonathan Strange layered speculative elements over a realist framework of Georgian social dynamics, emphasizing power relations and socially enforced silences. In Piranesi, Clarke has focused on a setting that reconfigures aspects of human experience and the natural world into abstract forms; a setting that recalls the parallel world on the other side of the rain to which the magicians of Jonathan Strange disappear.

Jonathan Strange is heavily footnoted, so that the novel itself could seem to be one of the volumes of magical history to which the narrator refers. Piranesi, too, is conceived as a found object, as if it has grown freely out of its own setting. The novel is structured as a series of journal entries, leaving the reader reliant upon Piranesi’s observations as a window into his world. Luckily, Piranesi is a generous observer and a meticulous notetaker: “As a scientist and an explorer,” he tells us, “I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.” Clarke narrates so brilliantly through Piranesi as to turn his keen eye for detail and tendency toward pompousness into stylistic flourishes.

Piranesi’s frequent interrogatives make the text rich with a kind of loneliness more akin to wonder than to moodiness. “When I feel myself about to die, ought I to go and lie down with the People of the Alcove?” he writes, referring to a set of skeletons that he has discovered in the House, and to which he—like an acolyte—administers offerings of food, drink, and flowers. “What is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?” he writes, as he sacrifices the dried seaweed that he burns to keep warm for a family of albatrosses that has made its home in his Halls. Piranesi’s narration is fascinated by the interconnectedness of things, and by Piranesi’s own place in the web of being that includes skeleton, albatross, statue, and sea.

The pages of the novel are studded with clever details and found objects, and part of the delight of wandering Piranesi’s Halls is in finding and listening to them. Listening to them because—though Piranesi is a distinctly quiet novel, punctuated by terse conversations between characters who tend to conceal as much as they share—every object that we discover in its pages is gorgeously in conversation with Piranesi’s universe. There are the pieces of torn-up notes found stashed in birds’ nests—evidence of a human mind in distress. There are the bottles of multivitamins and slices of Christmas cake that the Other occasionally offers to Piranesi, which suggest the existence of a world external to the House. There are the “seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones” that Piranesi weaves into his own hair, physical manifestations his oneness with the House, which other characters would likely call his madness.

Piranesi is a thriller at times, with moments of fast-paced action and occult intrigue—but it is the interaction between Piranesi and his setting that makes the novel illuminating and memorable. Like one of Borges’ labyrinths, Clarke’s infinite house of statues is a meeting point between human consciousness and indifferent cosmos; between meaning-making and wild-beyond-meaning. As Piranesi and the Other navigate this liminal space, Clarke shows us different ways of thinking about knowledge and the natural world.

Piranesi identifies himself as an explorer and a scientist, but also as the “Beloved Child of the House”—because Piranesi’s way of knowing is also a way of loving, a way of receiving love. Piranesi’s ways of knowing are numerous: he explores the Halls by foot and notes the statues he encounters; he records patterns of star and sea, and so makes sense of the terrible tides; he talks to, and receives messages from, birds and statues. Clarke uses Piranesi as a model of knowing, and reminds us that there are areas of overlap between knowing and loving: Both ways of relating to the world can involve attentiveness and wonder.

Piranesi soon comes into conflict with the Other over the latter’s search for exploitable knowledge. Piranesi worries that this model of knowledge-seeking leads the seeker “to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted.” This objection to the Other’s motivations is not a denunciation of scientific pursuit (Piranesi, after all, is an avid mapper of stars and predictor of tides); instead, it is an intellectual cringing-away from the kind of science that views the universe as dumb stuff. To Piranesi, the universe is active—infinite in its beauty and kindness—and the worthwhile ways of knowing the universe are those which put him into greater harmony with it.

One of the few missed opportunities in Piranesi is the novel’s failure to locate its literary discussion of “madness” in relation to contemporary discourse about mental health or cognition. Clarke’s romantic treatment of madness (which is related to both childhood cognition and melancholy, and which opens the mind to magic) feels at home in the Georgian context of Jonathan Strange. It seems disappointing, though, that Clarke’s treatment of madness has not evolved in Piranesi: Though several characters are contemporary academics, discussions of Piranesi’s state of mind are conducted in the same, general, poetical terms as in Jonathan Strange.

Piranesi’s prolonged stay in the House, we learn, has caused him to suffer from memory loss and other side-effects. Piranesi, however, does not sense any disconnect between his consciousness and the totality of things. “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly,” he writes. “Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.” Piranesi’s state of mind (his memory loss, his dissociation from his former identity, his familial feelings toward birds and statues), which other characters call madness, seems to go hand-in-hand with his ability to understand the House.

Madness figures into Piranesi as a literary device, as it does in Jonathan Strange or the Romances of Chretien de Troyes. Given the cleverness with which the novel resolves some of the other puzzles of relation between the normal, human world and the House, it seems a shame that Clarke has not weighed in more explicitly regarding the extent to which Piranesi’s cognitive state might connect to something literal.

There are also moments of awkwardness toward the end of the novel, when the action between characters becomes the central focus of the narrative, and Piranesi’s relationship with the House seems to take a backseat. The narrative’s sudden insistence on straightening out Piranesi’s literal circumstances (on the Resolution of the Plot, as Piranesi might write) feels a rude awakening after we have been so happily immersed in the mysteries of the House, which ought to evade resolution.

Piranesi is a shapeshifting, dynamic creation that keeps the reader guessing as to what kind of thing, exactly, it is. It is a book about magic and alternate worlds, and also a book about science and learning. At the core of the novel is an abstract conflict that transcends human action; yet the pages are too saturated with Piranesi’s emotive consciousness to read as a straightforward, disinterested allegory. Gorgeously imagined and meticulously constructed, generous and sharp, it is one of those rare books that cuts through the heart of things but leaves that heart beating.

Asking the Right Questions: The Overstory by Richard Powers

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

The Overstory by Richard Powers, whether it changes your mind or not, is a damn good story. It is also more than just a story.

I picked up The Overstory months ago in a moment of inspiration. It is a 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, but more importantly, Keanu Reeves had recommended it in an interview. Since I would trust John Wick with my life, I figured I could trust him with recommendations. And yet, committing to a tome of 625 pages seemed as ambitious an attempt as the book itself.

I drifted in and out of it for many weeks, eventually picking up pace with my reading once I decided it would be my April read for my monthly reading challenge. It took me another six weeks to plod through it, but once I had finished, I flipped back the volume — now extensively dog-eared and interspersed with pressed flowers — to its beginning, and I inscribed under the title the two sentences that open this review.

As I write this now, I realize how challenging it is to comment on The Overstory without resorting to blatant exhortations at people to “give a f*ck about trees”. But we’ll come back to this.

The Overstory is divided into four parts. Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. Each chapter in Roots is a mini bildungsroman of one of the main characters of the novel, of which there are as many as eight/nine. They are as diverse as could be; a farmer’s son who becomes an artist, a reclusive child fascinated with ants, an IP lawyer and an amateur theatre enthusiast, a loadmaster in the Vietnam War, the engineer daughter of a Chinese immigrant, a computer nerd in a wheelchair, a hearing and speech impaired young scientist, and a carefree student living a risqué lifestyle who dies for seventy seconds and then comes back to life, serving as a bridge between the Roots and Trunk of the novel.

As I read Roots, it felt like I was reading a collection of short stories, each story coming across as objectively detached. These chapters seem as unconnected as they are different, like trees and men. But as pointed out more than once, “you and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor”. And so it is that the nine protagonists share a common thread. For one of them, it is stated outright, “he owes his life to a tree”. The rest, in their own strange ways, do the same. Even the one broken by a fall from an oak. Even the one to whom trees mean nothing but the stage prop forests of Birnam Wood in Macbeth.

It is only about one-third into the book — we’re barely through the understory — that Olivia, the resurrected, finds Nicholas, the tree artist. Soon, more roots come together to form the trunk. Five of them unite to form the heartwood. Much of the story hereon is focused on the battle for the Californian redwoods, waged against timber companies working their way at a suicidal pace through the country’s green cover, but a battle is a mere milepost in the trajectory of the greater war — the endless struggle of planet versus profit.

One of the key tenets of The Overstory is the delineation of this struggle and its stakes — the tree of life is on the brink of collapse. Mankind’s hunger for ‘just a little bit more’ is endless, and endless exploitation of resources within a finite system can only lead to one outcome. Climate crisis is already upon us, a pressing life-threatening reality, and deforestation alone has been a bigger factor than the carbon footprint of the world’s transportation taken together. A key character proposes damage control, “What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

The other is simply this — trees are the most wondrous products of four billion years, they’re sentient, they’re social, and they need our help.

Yes, The Overstory tells you why you should give a f*ck about trees, but it also narrates the story of men and women, those who are brought alive in its 600 odd pages. From failing to remember their names in the first part, to witnessing their journeys of self-discovery, to being moved to tears in the end pages by their acts of love, sacrifice, betrayal and redemption, the "best novel ever written about trees" (Ann Patchett) takes you on a tumultuous ride through the experiences and emotions of its bipedal heroes.

More than anything, The Overstory amazed me with its details. The sheer volume of minutiae — of plants and their species and their behaviours and habitats — had me constantly wondering how long and hard the research for the book must have been. It took Powers five years to write The Overstory. But Powers is known as the ‘the last generalist’ and known well for writing masterpieces in the realist tradition. The Overstory is one triumph among many.

And yet, there is such a thing as too many details. The Overstory could have been part botany text if not for the seamless way in which tree talk is interwoven into the story, but reading it can be exhausting at times. There were pages when the descriptions wore me down to the point where baobabs and their buttresses and bald cypresses and cedars all seemed to merge into one another.

The scope of the story is grandiose, even overreaching, spanning the entire lives of many of its characters. The sheer chronological scale makes it necessary for chunks of the story to be summarized, which Powers does with skill. This, however, renders some parts too simplistic, as if the writer couldn’t afford to have his readers stray in contemplation. Dilemmas are dissected, motives and actions explained, evidences clearly signposted.

Nonetheless, The Overstory has more than one trick up its sleeve. Structurally, the book is a conceit. The story unfolds like the whorls on a tree. A bunch of roots unite to feed its trunk, extending into the crown, which reaches out towards the sky and in a final act of bountiful giving, disperses its seeds into the cerulean expanse.

More notably, The Overstory asks the important questions. How much is enough? How long do we have? Do trees have rights? Does the end justify the means? It is remarkable and scary how pertinent these questions seem to be in the current times; a time of bushfires and cyclones and earthquakes and pandemics and rising temperatures and weakening magnetic fields. Even when the ideological tussle of environmentalism vs capitalism veers off into the territory of ecoterrorism, absolute censure of the acts of vandalism and arson is difficult in view of what is at stake. Violence, by all accounts, cannot be justified, but what when it’s state-sponsored? When the city’s finest are the ones pouring pepper spray into the eyes of peaceful protesters? Who do you call when the police murders?

One of my favourite modern artworks is the photographic self-portrait of Adel Abdessemed, French-Algerian contemporary artist, where he set fire to himself and struck a defiant pose in response to contemporary events like Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War. A dominant interpretation is that it represents the incitement of violence in response to the injustice existing in the world. Similar sentiments echo through The Overstory, and whether it changes your mind or not about the merit of desperate measures in desperate times, it will at the least have you acknowledge it as more than just a good story.

Some may even call it radical. Radical, a word that comes from Radix. Root.

A Review of St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon’s slim, yet layered fifth novel, St. Ivo, takes place mostly during a weekend getaway. Sarah and her husband, Mathew, visit their long-estranged friends, Kiki and Arman in upstate New York. The story, however, is far from linear. There are secrets in the background. There are masochistically overplayed memories and one, looming, life-defining mystery about Sarah’s absent daughter, Leda, that will keep you turning pages, as if you’re reading a thriller, even though you know it is not that. 

St. Ivo is a story about one woman’s search for connection. Sarah struggles to connect with others while she struggles to connect her past and present lives because something happened with Leda that cleaved her life in two. There is before and there is after and Hershon’s mastery lies in her ability to show Sarah’s disjointedness, while making her story, as a whole, feel connected and complete. 

Sarah lives inside a hardened shell, an all too familiar mechanism. As with Sarah, as with ourselves, the shell stems from pride, from a secret fear of not being enough. To avoid judgement, we keep thoughts, wishes, hopes, facts to ourselves. Habits, money, geography — other obstacles wedge themselves between relationships so that if we don’t make an effort, if we don’t share our secrets, our vulnerabilities, we lose touch. Our shells harden. 

This isn’t new information. We know we have to be honest and open to connect with others, but it’s so much easier to digest this fact when we see the world through Sarah’s eyes, when we see how disconnected she is from her best friend, when we watch her seek out hollow connections with strangers because she can tell them lies. The lies provide only a temporary balm, a way to keep her hurt private and intact. 

Sarah’s pain defines her and it takes the whole book for her to acknowledge that “Leda’s absence…was the center of her life. She’d chosen to make it so.” Here is the crux of all sustained misery, which Hershon drives uncomfortably yet satisfyingly home — more often than not, it’s of our own making. Yes, some things are out of our control but once the waves pass and we pick up the pieces, we can either choose to move on or we can stay put and polish our shells. 

Hershon doesn’t tie everything up with a bow. There are questions left unanswered. There are levels to Sarah that might never be known, even to her, but we are left with hope. We are reminded that the spaces that form between true friends and partners are never permanent — they can deflate after just one, honest conversation because genuine connection breaks down our barriers and allows life, the ebb and flow of it, to come rushing back. In Hershon’s words, “they were breaking apart. They were coming together. They came and went with the tide.”

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