In 1999, when overnight I quit a good job to write The Devil That Danced on the Water, I did so in the grip of a fury. From the United Kingdom I had watched my paternal country of Sierra Leone, finally and after decades of oppression, erupt in a violence that had simmered too long.

For months my stepmother had lived with me in my London home as a refugee. Inside Sierra Leone a decade had passed in which no one had made contact with the remainder of my father’s family, who were caught behind rebel lines in the north of the country. When the government in Sierra Leone declared it was safe to return, I had put my stepmother on a plane home, a terrible mistake as it turned out.

Within weeks the rebel army of the RUF began what was intended as the final onslaught on Freetown. They called it “Operation No Living Thing.” On the telephone to my stepmother I heard the shells exploding nearby, the gunfire of the advancing rebel soldiers. All of this made me feel desperate and very afraid, but it was not the cause of my fury.

The fury came from listening to and watching the reports of the war by the Western press, who salivated over stories of mutilation, rape, child soldiers, forced marriage, and especially cannibalism, of which there were multiple accounts. What was missing was any apparent effort to understand or to report the causes of the war. There was no context, no history, no politics, just the senseless violence with which Africa had long been associated. I was then a reporter at BBC TV. My beat, though, was British politics and current affairs. The BBC was not the worst offender, by any means.

When I let it be known that I was from Sierra Leone, at least one correspondent sought my advice. Once I called in from home and corrected the pronunciation of Magburaka, where my father spent part of his childhood, while the presenter was on air. For another correspondent, I translated interviews with my people caught up in the January 6 invasion of Freetown. Still, even within the most responsible news organizations, there seemed to be little interest in the question of why this was happening.

Elsewhere, the world went on with its business. Barely a soul asked after my family, even among those whom I considered my friends. Perhaps Sierra Leone seemed too remote a land to appear as more than an abstraction, or perhaps the absence of peril in the lives of most of my London friends resulted in a failure of imagination. I know now that my experience is shared by many people who endure war remotely, whether those people are returning combatants or refugees.

War in Sierra Leone had been turned into a spectacle without ever becoming a tragedy.

I have often been asked how long it took me to write The Devil That Danced on the Water and I have replied that it took me two years and a lifetime. Two years, because that was the duration of time in which I researched and wrote it, as the furies snapped at my heels. A lifetime, because sometimes you have to see enough of the world to begin to understand it.

In her Nobel Prize speech, published later as the essay “Witness: The Inward Testimony,” Nadine Gordimer describes the task of the writer as the “transformation of events, motives, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning.” And it was this “meaning,” viewed through the lens of subsequent events and the shock of war, at which it took me twenty-five years to arrive.

Following publication of the book, I returned to Sierra Leone year upon year. I gave talks at the schools and universities. I remember the first young man, a student, who approached me to tell me that he had heard me speak at Fourah Bay College and had then gone to talk to his parents. “Are these things true?” he had wanted to know. And his parents had replied, “Yes, they are true.” Then the young man had asked them why they had never told him and his parents had replied, “Because we were afraid.” This is the silence of oppression.

From that time on many young people came up to me in the street, or in a restaurant or store, or else wrote to me. All told the same story as the first young man, a story that they had never known. The silence of a generation had been broken. In time the history books used to teach schoolchildren in Sierra Leone would be rewritten to include the events related in The Devil That Danced on the Water.

A ‘meaning’ I have derived from writing this book is that certain patterns of historical events, sometimes including but not limited to cowing people into silence and terrorized inaction, could be repeated anywhere. What had begun as a quest to discover the truth behind my father’s murder would grow into a twenty-year investigation into the causes and effects of civil conflict.

In 2017, by then teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I was invited to lunch with Hillary Clinton shortly after she had lost the election to Donald Trump. I was seated next to one of her advisers, who listened with interest as I described my writing and where it had led me. I told her what I had learned of the signs of incipient and growing authoritarianism: control of the press and judiciary, co-option of the loyalty of the police and the army, rise of militias, manipulation of elections.

There was one more element, most crucially: a transformational leader, someone both charismatic and deadly. In the case of Sierra Leone this had been Foday Sankoh. In Yugoslavia the ambitions of Slobodan Milošević had placed the country on the course to war. The woman appeared to be listening with a great deal of interest. So, I concluded, these were the reasons I was worried about the United States of America.

My companion looked at me and frowned, then she swatted the air with the back of her hand and pronounced: “Not in freedom-loving America!” I wonder what she thinks now. Even then, Donald Trump had begun to discredit the mainstream press and to promote his own ‘truth’ on social media. He was wooing the military by bringing generals into his administration and was seeking control of the judiciary by appointing federal judges at breakneck speed.

Four years after that conversation, on the day before the invasion of the Capitol on (coincidentally also) January 6, I sent a text to an American friend in London: “Are you ready for the coup?” I was only half joking. He would later ask me how I’d known, and all I could say is that I had spent a long time thinking about the ways in which a country strays from the path of peace.

In Sierra Leone in the 1980s, even as war raged in neighboring Liberia, people did not believe it could happen to us. We Sierra Leonians saw ourselves as essentially peace-loving, even if our leaders were venal. If anything, our problem was that we were too passive. But when things begin, they must begin somewhere. There is a schema, one that might be traced from the first flap of the butterfly’s wings to the hurricane.

On a noticeboard in my office, for a long time, I had taped a handwritten note to myself with the lines “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth,” which is true, I think, of a certain type of story. Two novels set in Sierra Leone followed The Devil That Danced on the Water. I continued to explore the themes of civil conflict in fiction.

Fiction allowed me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth. Ancestor Stones took the reader back to pre-colonial times to examine the century-long antecedents of state collapse. The Memory of Love examined the immediate prelude and the aftermath to the war and the silence of censorship, of self-censorship, of trauma, but also of complicity. How did a generation account for their actions, or inaction, to the generation whom they had failed?

The road to conflict may be long or short. Sometimes countries find their way back. Certain events may tip a country finally into war, chief among them an economic crisis. In time, my attention moved out of Africa and turned to the former Yugoslavia for the reason that the war that led to the collapse of that union had been almost exactly contemporaneous with the war in Sierra Leone (Yugoslavia 1991–2001; Sierra Leone 1991–2002). Though just as savage, the Yugoslav conflict had been reported completely differently, with both causes and consequences analyzed in forensic detail.

The war in the former Yugoslavia encompassed several nations. I chose to concentrate on Croatia, because there were striking parallels between Croatia and Sierra Leone. The first is size: Sierra Leone is 22,000 square miles, Croatia 28,000. At the start of the wars in 1991, the population of each country was around 4 million. Both are coastal countries of outstanding natural beauty, with a chiefly peasant population and a rural economy supplemented by tourism. Then, of course, there is the key similarity, the one that drew me in the first place—both nations had endured decades of authoritarianism, followed by economic free fall and, finally, civil war.

I have friends from the former Yugoslavia and we talked about our similar experiences. I was interested, too, in the differences. The war in Sierra Leone had never gone down ethnic or nationalist lines, despite the misreporting of the war as “tribal.”

In contrast the war in Yugoslavia had indeed been fought along viciously exploited ethnic divides. The war in Sierra Leone had begun after thirty years of exploitation of people and resources by a corrupt regime; it had been a slow burn. The war in Yugoslavia had been, comparatively, fast burning. A friend who had reported there commented: “The reason those wars kicked off so fast was because every man had a gun and knew how to use it.” This helped answer my question about speed. Men in Yugoslavia had been obliged to do military service, making for a supply of trained citizens who could be recruited into the militias that characterized that war. A nation in which guns are easily available is a tinderbox relative to one in which people have little access to high-powered weaponry.

My friend’s remark led me to understand something else, too. The war in the former Yugoslavia became a sniper’s war. Civilians were shot and killed by the thousands in cities under siege by men in the surrounding hills. Yugoslavia was a nation of hunters; Sierra Leone is a nation of farmers. The war in Sierra Leone had been characterized by amputations: the rebel army hacked off people’s limbs. When people go to war they pick up the weapon at hand, be it a machete or a rifle.

As time went by I became interested in the ways in which a population survives the aftermath of a civil conflict, when you must continue to live side by side with your enemy (as in the case of Sierra Leone) or with the knowledge of what you have done to them (as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where communities were ‘ethnically cleansed’ in the form of mass deportation and murder).

In The Memory of Love, two of my main characters are trauma specialists, and in the years of writing those books I spent many hundreds of hours talking to victims and those who try to help them. Early in my research, a Sierra Leonian psychiatrist had remarked to me, “These people will be all right, you know.” He was talking about the mental health of most of the population over the medium to long term. He thought that trauma diagnoses were being applied too widely and too quickly, in particular by Western aid workers.

His views echoed those of the French psychologist Boris Cyrulnik. Cyrulnik lost his parents in the Holocaust and worked professionally with many survivors of genocide. He challenged the orthodoxy that pain necessarily equals trauma. Instead, he argued that emotional vulnerability could be transformed into emotional strength. He called this ‘resilience.’

In May of 2014, I received an email from a woman asking if she might put me in touch with a former political detainee from Sudan. Sudan was then under the rule of the longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir. In 2013, Ezekiel (the name he used) and three other men had been arrested and charged with treason. They were held in custody at the National Security Headquarters, where on many days they heard rifles being fired within the compound, which they feared were the sounds of prisoners being executed.

One day a guard gave the prisoners each a copy of The Devil That Danced on the Water with the order to read it. The men did as they were instructed, but they also took to discussing the book among themselves. They saw the obvious parallels between their story and that of my father, and they concluded that both the book and the gunfire were part of a process of psychological intimidation. “They were trying to tell us that the same fate awaited us as had awaited your father.” But far from inviting despair, the book “had the opposite effect.” It renewed the strength of their convictions. They promised that, when and if they were ever released, they would find the author of this book and tell her about the inspiration they had derived from it.

Following the collapse of the government case against them, Ezekiel fled into exile. Soon afterwards he began his search for me. Omar al-Bashir, the dictator, would eventually be unseated in a popular uprising in 2019.

A positive temperament, an inclination to humor, the passage of time, being surrounded by people who care but do not “catastrophize” and by a society that does not turn every adversity into an existential question (why me?) but accepts that sometimes “shit happens”—all these factors help. In the end most of us develop the characteristics that help us overcome the bad things that have happened. Thus, my twenty-year enquiry into the causes and effects of civil conflict ended with a novel called Happiness.

To write a memoir is to live in the minds of readers as the person you were in the pages of the book, all of which leads me to a question readers often ask me. What happened to the members of my family after the events in the book were over? Here is the answer. In my father’s last will, written shortly before he was executed, he stated the wish that we children should be reunited with our mother. An international search for her took place, about which we, the children, were kept mostly in ignorance until one day we were summoned before a lawyer and asked if we remembered anything at all about our grandparents in Aberdeen. Anything at all, he said, perhaps the part of town where they lived? To which we replied: “Gran and Grandad live at 38 Gairn Terrace.” And so our mother, who was living in Zambia with her husband, the New Zealander, was found.

My mother is now in her eighties and retired in New Zealand. My brother and sister both have families of their own. Morlai, along with my husband, Simon, and myself, established a primary school in Rogbonko, a village founded by my grandfather where my father was born. Immediately following the war and the years of missed schooling, not a single child was able to read or write. Today Rogbonko Village School boasts university graduates among its alumni. And as for my stepmother, Yabome, she has lived quietly and contentedly in Sierra Leone ever since.

__________________________________

From The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (20th Anniversary Edition) by Aminatta Forna. Copyright © 2023. Available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

To reach his books, my father had to exit our home, down the small one-step cement porch, under the mulberry tree that left purple splotches on our dirt driveway, and walk to the side of our house that was three different colors from all the peeling paint, everything chipped anemic blues and grays.

There, behind the cover of trees and unruly vegetation, he’d lift the tiny, unreliable plastic tabs on the small rectangular window and heave himself into the room that was filled to the ceiling with books. At just under six-foot-five, his frame was long but he was thin enough to maneuver his way in. Sometimes he would reach down from the window to pull me into the wreckage that housed his most precious possessions.

The room, which we dubbed The Book Room, was inaccessible from the inside, the door unworkable since too many books blocked its movement in any direction. In that room, I looked at books—was nearly consumed by books, most musty with the particular smell of antiques and moisture, filth tainting any treasure—but I didn’t have the space to read them. I could barely breathe.

*

What I remember most about childhood are the things I saw. My face, too short for the medicine cabinet mirror, wasn’t burned into my memory as vividly as the books or the laundry baskets that were stuffed to the brim with miscellaneous items and scattered around the living room or the piano that was unplayable because it was covered with clothing or the worthless knick-knacks strewn around.

Books weren’t the only thing that made our house full. Both of my parents had a hard time letting things go. Poverty—that fear of never knowing when they’d be able to purchase another one of whatever thing it was—was only one reason why.

We had some paths throughout the house, these curved walkways around items piled high. The entryway to the home was kept clear so anyone looking in wouldn’t know our secret.

*

My father published a book about ventriloquism in his twenties. By IQ standards, he is probably a genius but he had a variety of issues that prevented him from publishing and eventually writing new material at all. Even his voracious reading dwindled. Like the turn of fate with Beethoven going deaf, my father struggled with his vision for as long as I can remember, having various surgeries throughout my childhood.

He often talked about the Twilight Zone episode featuring the man who survives what is essentially the apocalypse. The man collects all the books he wants, but right at the end, he breaks his glasses. Sometimes, my father would take off his glasses and hold the book up to his face, squinting mere inches away.

But even when when reading became almost impossible, his passion for books and collections never ceased. It often felt like being around books was enough.

*

The problem with stuff was how paradoxical it was for our family. We had so much stuff but yet we never really had anything. We had a bare fridge and I longed for toys of my own, not just broken yard sale finds. I liked Pringles because the plastic lid doubled as a miniature frisbee, which felt like a free toy. Because everything was saved, we couldn’t find things that we actually wanted or needed. The daily task of finding socks for six people was nearly impossible.

My childhood home was ultimately condemned and has since been demolished. A little plot of green land, cleared of most of the trees, sits clean now. During the pandemic, the land was for sale for less than five thousand dollars. I wanted to buy it, a way of reclaiming the past. I could plant a community garden, I told my family. I wanted to take the mess that became nothingness and turn it into something beautiful. The tangibility cyclical, things blooming, dying. I wanted to attract butterflies. I didn’t want to make the land into a metaphor—I wanted to turn something real into a symbol.

Buying this land felt like the perfect way to heal—but no one else thought it was a good idea. I think someone bought it eventually, though for now, it still sits empty.

*

When I was in middle school, I moved into my brother’s home, which was always nice and tidy. I had the necessities but didn’t have a lot of possessions. That remained the same for most of my adulthood, since I moved frequently. Friends or acquaintances would comment on the things missing in my apartment. (“Don’t you want more rugs?” “Where’s the rest of your furniture?” “Why don’t you hang something on your walls?” “You should decorate like HGTV.” “Surely this can’t be all you own, right?”) But I liked being able to see so much of the floor.

Now, more immersed in trappings of the middle class, I have things—too many things and too many books. I have six bookcases and piles of books stacked against the wall. On Zoom, I’m asked if my bookcase background is real.

There are so many things that I longed for, and the truth is, money can probably never heal that. I can never buy my past self the dolls I wanted at age eight or the toy I wanted for kindergarten show-and-tell.

I have worked in fast food and I have worked as a senior government official. I have had months with multiple viral pieces published and years when I’ve had nothing published. Throughout these different extremes in my life, I’ve had times where I wanted to buy something so badly while knowing there was no possible way to ever make that a reality and on the other hand, I’ve been able to make impulse purchases without regret.

Sometimes, the idea of an object is more exciting than the object itself. The truth is, I was happiest when I had less. Clutter, even valuable clutter, creates stress. Books, even ones I desperately want to read, still have to have a limit. Because truly, the more I buy, the less I read.

My favorite times with books were when I read them in the library, the books unowned and simply borrowed, my mind reading the pages of the stories that stay with me even now, my mind joining the minds of others, my experience based not on the physical copy of the book at all but the words that burn into me and the emotions that followed.

The following is excerpted from Cold Crematorium:Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz,  József Debreczeni’s firsthand account of his deportation to Auschwitz, from Hungary, in May 1944.

*

The long train, comprised of low boxcars with German insignia, was grinding to a halt.

“We’re stopping,” the word spread among the barely conscious, listless crowd.

We suspected that we were nearing our destination. We’d been herded aboard two and a half days earlier in Bačka Topola, and since then we’d stopped just twice, and only for a minute or two. On the first such occasion, some sort of thin soup was handed in through a gap wide enough to fit only the bowl containing it. The second time, the train slowed down along the open tracks.

The bolts screeched open, and the German military police, in grass-green uniforms, barked shrilly: “Aussteigen! Zur seite! Los! Los! [Exit! To the side! Come on! Come on!]”

We stopped by an embankment awash with flowers and beside a little patch of woods. Who could say where we were? In Hungary, Slovakia, or perhaps Poland? The henchmen, in their grass-green uniforms, announced that we could relieve ourselves.

“Going into the woods is prohibited! We will shoot at every suspicious movement!”

Hundreds upon hundreds of people stampeded toward the designated narrow space. Old women’s fading eyes were grotesque mirrors of terror. Six days earlier, these women had been sitting in their lovely old armchairs talking of Sunday lunch. They’d been listening to the radio and looking out at their yards from the living rooms of their provincial homes, awaiting news of grandchildren away on forced labor service.

Younger, married women. Days earlier they’d been sprinkling their bosoms and arms all over with eau de toilette, and discreetly draping their skirts over their knees each time they sat down.

Girls. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. They’d learned to curtsey properly. At home they’d left schoolbooks; perhaps a few timid love letters in ribbon-tied, paper lace–adorned boxes of chocolate; and wildflowers pressed between the pages of keepsake albums.

Men. Young and old. Wide-eyed schoolboys and disheveled adolescents. Grown-ups in their prime, men getting on in years, octogenarians. They run; they run. For two days they had no way of relieving themselves. They spread their legs instinctively, squatting like animals. Urine collects in pools.

Nearby, the camp guards, in spick-and-span grass-green uniforms, don’t take their eyes off them. Not a line stirs on the faces of these guards. They aren’t human. Nor, any longer, are those who are squatting.

I believe that somewhere in Eastern Europe an extraordinary metamorphosis took place at the edge of a verdant forest along a railway embankment. That is where the people of this tightly locked train of hell were transformed into animals. Just like all the others, the hundreds of thousands of people that the madness had sent spewing out of fifteen countries toward factories of death and gas chambers.

At that moment they put us on all four legs for the first time.

*

The train is slowing….

What remains of life stirs in the darkness of the train cars. Of the sixty human beings herded into our boxcar back in Topola, fifty-six still show faint signs of life. Primal terror, hunger, thirst, and lack of air have already done in four of us. Their corpses have been heaped into a pile in a corner. Most of us are from the southern and central Bačka region of Serbia’s Vojvodina. Mr. Mandel, the old carpenter, a good friend of my father, was among them, and he was the first to fall. Mr. Mandel had made the furniture for more than a few girls from Bačka for their betrothals. He did so always reliably, honorably.

What the old carpenter died of, I think, was that his cigarettes had been taken away. For sixty years he’d smoked fifty a day. Not a man alive had ever seen Mr. Mandel without a smoldering cigarette. His supply, along with his jewelry and money, had been confiscated back in the camp in Topola. For twenty-four hours en route, Mr. Mandel just stared blankly, stubbornly, deliriously, at the surging mass of people all around, at the billowing of all those stinking, steaming human bodies.

Sixty years of work had stained his hands to a mahogany hue. On the train his right hand sometimes moved mechanically, as if holding a cigarette. Between his index and middle fingers Mr. Mandel raised the imagined cigarette to wilted lips. Like a child pretending to smoke, he even pursed his lips to puff.

But after Nové Zámky, that aging head of his tilted to the side. His death was not an event. Here death could no longer be an event. For a moment, Dr. Bakács from Novi Sad, raised that haggard head above the frayed fur vest. He gave a tired wave of the hand. Dr. Bakács was already in a bad way, too. Perhaps he was thinking that in twelve hours some other doctor in the car would be taking note of his own death.

Two people went mad. They raged incessantly for many hours. Bloodshot eyes bulged from their waxlike faces as they sprayed foamy spit all over and tried clawing at the faces and scratching at the eyes of those standing nearby. Without further ado, the camp guards shoved these two and those rounded up from the other boxcars into the woods when we stopped to relieve ourselves. A few minutes later we heard the crackle of machine-gun fire. One of the grass-green henchmen let out a thick, vile guffaw, and spat.

No, we didn’t look at each other. We’d been on the road too long for that.

On the road… to where?

I was somehow amazed at myself. This road…Subotica, Budapest, Nové Zámky. Lo and behold, I’m still alive, and I haven’t gone mad, either—so came the fleeting thought. Not that I was thinking much. To be thinking, I too—no matter how much I’d managed to hold myself together—would have needed cigarettes. And yet I had none.

Lake Balaton, frothing a restless green, comes into view through the tiny cell window of the car. On this windy, rainy first of May, tonguelike waves vomit with revulsion toward the train. I see Nagykanizsa. We rumble past the small city without stopping, though back in Topola policeman number 6626 said we’d be brought here to work.

“Have no fear,” 6626 had whispered to us. “You’re off to Nagykanizsa, where you’ll do agricultural work.”

Number 6626 was an amiable, sober-minded Hungarian peasant. He bellowed loudly at the internees loitering about in the yard, hauling stewpots, drawing water from the well, or standing about exhaustedly, but meanwhile—when the German guard wasn’t looking—he winked at us blithely, wagging his head, like some chummy little rascal.

It was May 1944, and by then few Hungarian peasants were still so beguiled by Nazism that they couldn’t see this much: Döme Sztójay, László Baky, László Endre, Béla Imrédy—pro-fascist Hungarian leaders—and other such murderers had lost the game. Someone would have to pay for the blood, the tears, and the kicks.

Number 6626 was mistaken all the same. We didn’t go to Nagykanizsa.

The mirror of the Drava River sparkles meaninglessly upon us. On the other side is Pavelić’s Nazified Croatia. That is, death. Just like that, from the middle of life. I wave my hand as did my onetime teacher of Greek, Mr. Lendvai, from the window of his faculty office ten days earlier in Sombor, as we were being loaded onto trucks on the street below, in front of the high school.

I’m standing on the bed of the truck, wearing a backpack and a jacket with a homemade, regulation-size yellow star. Mr. Lendvai, whose class I finished in 1924 with an A, and the other teachers look out numbly at the truck and its anxious throng of passengers. Our eyes meet, and Mr. Lendvai waves his hand just so. I understood.

The world is over. Everything is over. So said Mr. Lendvai’s wave of the hand.

Nenikekas Judaiae…nenikekas Judaiae….Wretched Jews…wretched Jews….

*

The prisoners walk on the sprawling grounds of the Topola internment camp. Older folks dodder along, hands clasped behind their backs. Some people exchange tearful smiles on recognizing each other. Present here is practically the entire team of Yugoslavia’s onetime Hungarian-language daily paper: editors and other staff, old and new. Our cynicism masks our despair.

“The women and children were rounded up yesterday,” says stumpy Lajos Jávor, who suffers from heart trouble. His bloodless lips are wincing strangely even though his perpetual smile is frozen on his face. “In Subotica, Sombor, Novi Sad. Everywhere. They rounded up everyone.”

Dr. János Móricz, the onetime editor in chief, to whom I’d once handed over my first pieces, in anxious veneration, wipes his pince-nez spectacles and snaps at me: “Translate this to Hungarian if you’re a translator.”

Hopelessness takes off all its clothes in everyone’s eyes. Damp, frayed straw mattresses lie about within the ugly, red-stone building. The persecuted sit on heaps of suitcases and rucksacks, staring blankly ahead. A few of them still have cigarettes, which they managed to hide from the guards on arrival. They are now prodigal smokers.

No one here bothers with tomorrow. Nor even with the next fifteen minutes. Despair doesn’t look through calendars, and it pays no heed to planning. Tomorrow is shrouded in a fog of distance so hopeless that it might as well be the next millennium, when people might be wandering about in skirts or tunics, when there won’t be relocation camps and, perhaps, the guiltless need not be punished.

Tomorrow….But who bothers with that? After all, even the women were rounded up yesterday. As were the children. But why? Almighty madness, why? We don’t dare think through the thought. There, in Topola, few of us had heard of Auschwitz, and little at that. Vague snippets of information about the chilling terrors of the Polish ghettos had reached us, true, and with chattering teeth we can recall the deportation of women from Slovakia, but only yesterday all this was distant and unbelievable.

Not even now did we dare think seriously that we would be hauled away, abroad, thousands and thousands of innocents. We tried cheering up ourselves and the others by concocting technical difficulties.

“The Nazis now have other problems. Where would they acquire the coal, boxcars, trains, and people needed to pull off this sort of mass migration?”

So said Béla Maurer, lawyer and political commentator, in a tone of voice tolerating no dissent. Indeed, the others’ expressions were encouraging. Hungarian workers and peasants had not yet been irrevocably clouded in their thinking by the madness of the brownshirts. They sensed instinctively that the folks in charge had lead in their wings. The more intrepid among them mouthed off in taverns about villainous things going on. They were already smiling at the flowery communiqués from the front, at constrained euphemisms such as “breakaway military maneuvers,” “strategic retreats,” “redeployments,” and “repositioning.”

On Hungarian land, smug Germans were already being showered with dark glances. The people could see what their leaders didn’t want to see: the tired, rumpled, unshaven Wehrmacht regulars; the imbecilic, apathetic SS guards, whose merciless eyes had already sunk deep under their helmets; the ditzy fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids draped in shirts made of tent canvas—the army with which the German “allies” had occupied the country. They saw they had to go back, and they knew there was no going back.

Empty streets, shuttered windows, defiantly sullen faces. The awaiting silence of the inevitable horror skulked in the villages of the Bačka region, too. The quiet of the coming storm stood on tiptoes.

When we set off on the four-kilometer march from the grounds of the camp in Topola toward the railway station, none of us—not the men with their bundles and backpacks, not the waddling kids, not the tired women—knew about Auschwitz. But the bayonet-adorned Hungarian policemen the Germans had positioned every fifty meters along the road, they knew.

Hatred smoldered in the eyes of the policemen. That carefully seeded hatred whose proxies, trained to follow commands, didn’t exactly question a whole lot. And yet there were some whose sober-minded peasant humanity was resuscitated by the stunning scene. A few of the armed statues lining the road murmured: “May God save you!”

The half-conscious people wobbling along don’t even glance that way, but that ominous sentence of farewell is still resounding in me when, from far away, I first glimpse our train along one of the platforms at the station. The cars with their “DR” emblem—Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway)— speak a German even more German than that of the German camp guards accompanying us. We’re being deported, after all. The best-case scenario: gas chambers. The worst-case: slave labor until death.

And to think how sorry we’d felt for those eight among us who’d taken their own lives at the camp when the order for departure had come—when it became clear that our Hungarian camp was nothing more than a relocation site. The whole thing had been more tolerable, after all, as long as we could keep telling ourselves that they’d keep us there or order us to some other place in Hungary. Topola, Bačka….!

This familiar conceptual duality, this thought, had somehow kept the terror of utter hopelessness at bay. Topola was still a bit of home.

Our eyes sought hope, and glinting before them was the dubious, if not yet completely discredited, promise of personal security represented by the four numbers gleaming on the belts of the Hungarian Royal Gendarmes. Grasping at the straws of a familiar landscape, we held out hope that we were not yet completely outside the law of our land.

A Hungarian Nazi could be just as cruel as a German one. He could be just as determined. But his ingenuity—so we felt—had not yet warped into the sadism of the gas chambers.

______________________________

Copyright 2023 by the Estate of József Debreczeni. Courtesy St. Martin’s Press. Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz by József Debreczeni and translated by Paul Olchváry is available via St. Martin’s Press.

Photographs by Kelly Marshall, copyright © 2024.

Mama always began calling as early as Christmas, letting us know that her February birthday was approaching. “I got a birthday coming up,” she’d say. I was sometimes annoyed by the frequency of her reminders, but I’d laugh and say, “I know, Mama.” This was our routine for all of my adult years on until the end of hers.

Each time I’d ask her what she wanted for a gift, she’d answer with glee, as if she were a child. Chocolate cherry cordials. A new dress for church. A blue sweatsuit with pockets. Chili. A pretty bedspread. A watch. A bar of chocolate. An amethyst birthstone ring. Pickled bologna. A mess of fish. Pickled eggs. She’d name one thing or a dozen things she wanted and then she’d say, “Oh, I don’t want nothing. I just wanted you to know my birthday’s coming up.” She did this every year.

Black people where we’re from didn’t celebrate birthdays much. We weren’t a time-conscious people back then. We kept time by the sun and the moon and when work needed doing, even after the Industrial Revolution brought watches and clocks to nearly every home. It has been only a few generations since our enslaved ancestors weren’t allowed to know their birthdays or even keep track of their ages to perpetuate the idea that they were property, not people, so maybe this birthday celebration idea needed time to catch on.

By the time I came along, my grandparents still weren’t accustomed to marking birthdays. They’d raised their children as they worked alongside them in the fields. The workday and the tasks ahead for survival were more important than any solitary day or any solitary person. They worked as a cooperative unit, and the only days celebrated were holy ones. But still, through the years, there was an occasional card, a favored dish cooked, and a quiet-spoken “Happy Birthday.”

By contrast to the old ways, I grew up in a time of little white children with pointy party hats and fancy cakes on television and in magazines. My white friends from school had slumber parties and cakes with candles and finger foods in their honor. They were showered with presents wrapped up like Christmas gifts, but we didn’t do that in our house.

*

Mama was born in 1939 into a family that would include seven siblings. Children were considered economic assets more than they were emotional assets, though I know my grandparents loved all of their offspring. When I asked Aunt Lo what she remembers about birthdays, she said it was just like any other day. I’m sure my mother’s childhood was the same, but as an adult, Mama reveled in being celebrated, if only for one day. She liked a big fuss made with candles and store-bought cakes and dinners out to restaurants in her honor, and now that she’s gone, I wish we’d made a big fuss about her birthday a little more.

*

I had one childhood birthday party when I was twelve, likely because of my whining for a party and wrapped presents like the white children. That July, my grandmother bought party hats from the dime store. She put a plastic tablecloth with balloons over the dining room table and cooked hamburgers and hot dogs on a grill right outside the kitchen door.

Though cooking food over an open fire in pots was still common during hog-killing time, this idea of grilling food outside was also something new to us. We’d seen this on television, but our people were not the kings and queens of the cookout; that was a thing in locations farther south. Cousin Loretta was the only attendee. We blew into little plastic horns that must have been included with the hats as my grandmother lit the candles on my angel food birthday cake. I blew out the candles. We clapped.

It was fun for about fifteen minutes, but I can’t recall that any of it gave me what I thought I saw in the magazines. We played badminton in the backyard, tried our hand at pin the tail on the donkey, went down to the creek to swim. We floated downstream on inflatable loungers that had taken half the day to blow up. Then the partying was over. My birthday done.

For my son Gerald’s ninth birthday, I invited eight little boys to our duplex for a sleepover. I made three gallons of red Kool-Aid in a container with a spout, and they drank from it all night as if I’d organized a keg party for rambunctious boys. I served limp pink hot dogs on cheap buns and offered a piddly squirt of yellow mustard or ketchup as they skipped, jumped, twisted toward the table. They ate on paper plates, and I let each of them dig their hands into a family-size bag of chips to complete the birthday meal. They punched each other in the arm and wrestled on the floor.

For dessert, I served a mushy slice of ice cream cake that I had bought at Dairy Queen, which became a family tradition for a few years, well past the time that his twin sisters were born and had become teenagers. I wanted my children to feel celebrated. I broke my budget on the party. Some of the boys’ mothers bought gifts for my son. I bought gifts for Gerald, too, though I can’t remember what they were.

What I remember most is the red circular stain on my carpet that blossomed underneath the Kool-Aid decanter and plate after plate of melting ice cream cake, the boys hopping over discarded plates strewn on my living room floor and in my son’s bedroom like lily pads. Late that night, when the boys should have been asleep in the sleeping bags, on the bed, on the pallets I’d made on my son’s bedroom floor, they slipped into the kitchen and got into a canister of popcorn.

The next morning there was popcorn all over my son’s bedroom as if confetti had been thrown. I never quite understood the art of children’s birthday parties, but I knew I wanted to try. I wanted them to feel celebrated.

*

Mama glowed on her birthdays. She sat in her senior citizen high-rise apartment and received cards from her neighbors and relatives like a queen. She taped a long trail of birthday cards to her door for all to see. We took her to all-you-can-eat buffets. We bought gigantic cards for her that played music or featured a pop-up scene and a saccharine message when she opened them. We bought roses, pink carnations, dresses, heart-shaped ashtrays, and bowls that declared her to be the best mother/grandmother in the world.

She bought diamonds for herself. I baked pies and cakes for her. Cooked her special dinners and some years simply sat in her company while she basked in her glory. I baked an apple spice cake for her once that was made with artificial sweeteners. She retaliated by eating a half gallon of butter pecan ice cream when she got home. It was her birthday, she told me. “I can eat what I want.”

Cousin Trish says she’s had two birthday parties in her life—one at sixteen and another at forty. Her sweet sixteen party has held firm in my memory all these years; I could have been no more than seven. It seemed a grand affair to me back then, though of course the memory blends with the imagination. Trish in her new dress, looking like a movie star.

The party was put on for her by Miss Margaret from their church. I’m not sure why Miss Margaret hosted the party and not my aunt and uncle, but me and my other little cousins were underfoot. There were tables of food like a Southern summer soirée—mounds of sandwiches on a great long table and a punch bowl filled with something cold, sweet, and tart, made, I believe, from sherbet and lemon-and-lime pop.

That day began my decades-long love affair with pimento cheese, but there was also Benedictine and chicken salad sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off and small bowls of butter mints and peanuts. There was music. It was the ’70s and everything was awash in pastels. What I remember most is Trish’s smile while she stood in the middle of that milestone that August, her future glittering in front of her as all of us bore witness, celebrated, and ate the fancy food.

*

For my twin daughters, I took a different route, having learned my lesson with their brother. I saved up for their birthday parties even though my money was tight. I rented two adjoining rooms at a cheap hotel with a pool. I stuffed a cooler with a variety of drinks no one else wanted from Big Lots’ sale table and bought pizza and bags and bags of odd clearance snacks that none of the children had ever heard of (Big Lots, again). I bought one ice cream cake with both their names written in icing on it and set their guests loose in the pool until they were so tired they fell asleep in wet piles of girl giggles across beds that smelled of chlorine.

Stained carpets, plastic palm trees, nightstands with cigarette burns in the faux wood, calling hotel security on unsavory characters lurking in the hallways, my friend Sue Bonner volunteering every year as chaperone and bouncer. My girls remember these birthdays as the times of their lives.

During a family discussion about birthdays, I tell my adult children that our ancestors didn’t celebrate their birthdays and that if you go even further back, they weren’t allowed to. “Let’s honor each other,” I tell them. Let us celebrate. Not in a way that is meant to milk our pocketbooks in the name of consumerism and capitalism, but with love. I ask them each to name a birthday meal and an accompanying dessert.

Ron, my husband, says soup beans and cornbread and chocolate cake.

Gerald, my oldest son, says pot roast (I knew he would) and a homemade ice cream cake.

Elainia, one of the twins, says meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, and pineapple upside-down cake (I knew she would).

Delainia, the other twin, says spaghetti with garlic toast and angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries.

Journey, my bonus daughter, and I share a birthdate. She says breakfast with pancakes with crispy edges and yellow cake with chocolate icing.

Isaac, my bonus son, says, “Let me think about it,” but he never gets back. He’s a college student and well… he’s a college student. I’ll ask him in a few years when he’s less distracted.

Me: Give me a good burger with potato salad, baked beans, and greens with Aunt Edith’s Hot Milk Cake.

*

Comedian KevOnStage says in a popular online video, Black people love celebrating birthdays. I don’t know about other cultures and people; I’m sure they do but Black people, we really go hard for the birthday. Let me tell you, if my birthday falls on a Wednesday you can guarantee I’m having a birthday celebration the weekend prior and one after. My birthday will have come and gone and I’m still celebrating. We’ll celebrate all month like a Roman emperor.

He goes on to mention that we will plan something every day of the week or the month to celebrate our birthdays: white parties, photo shoots, special gifts for ourselves, and he’s right. I’ll go get a spa treatment, manicure, pedicure, go to the hair salon, buy books and other gifts for myself in celebration.

I deserve it. We deserve it.

*

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass writes, “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, springtime, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.”

Douglass would later choose a birthday for himself of February 14, which also happens to be my mother’s birthday (and also my uncle Glen’s birthday). That’s not to say Mama knew this. She grew up in a time when her education lacked Black history. As smart as she was, I’m not sure she even knew of Frederick Douglass or his contributions to the lives of Black people. But she certainly knew of the importance of the celebration of the self. How important it was to mark another trip around the sun. How exhilarating and affirming it feels to be celebrated on the day of your birth.

*

Angel Food Cake

This cake has been in my dessert repertoire since high school. It is as spongy and fluffy as a cloud, and it’s fat-free. Serve it plain, simply dusted with confectioners’ sugar, or paired with berries and whipped cream. To ensure maximum lift, make sure your 10-inch tube pan is grease-free and your egg whites contain no trace of yolk.

Serves 12 to 14; makes one 10-inch cake.

1½ cups confectioners’ sugar
1 cup cake flour
12 large eggs, at room temperature
1½ teaspoons cream of tartar
1 cup granulated sugar
⅛ teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Sift the confectioners’ sugar with the cake flour onto a sheet of wax or parchment paper. Repeat two more times.

Move the center oven rack down one notch and preheat the oven to 325°F.

To separate the egg whites from their yolks, crack the eggs one at a time into a small bowl. Lift out the yolk and place it in a separate container with a little water in it (see Tip), and pour the whites, one at a time, into a 2-cup measuring cup. You need a total of 1½ cups of totally yolk-free egg whites.

Pour the egg whites into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment or a mixing bowl and use a handheld mixer. Beat on medium-low speed until frothy, then sprinkle in the cream of tartar. Beat on medium-high speed until glossy, soft peaks form.

Sift or gradually spoon small amounts of the granulated sugar into the egg whites, beating at medium-high speed as you go and maintaining the beaten peaks. Add the salt and vanilla, beating to incorporate. Remove the bowl from the mixer.

In three additions, use a flexible spatula to fold in the sifted confectioners’ sugar–cake flour mixture to create a soft batter. Do not overmix. Transfer to your tube pan, spreading the batter gently and evenly. Bake on the repositioned rack for 40 to 45 minutes, until the surface is lightly browned, with some wide cracks. Invert the cake, still in its pan, on a wire rack or with its center tube set on the long neck of a sturdy bottle to cool. Once it’s completely cooled (at least 1 hour), run a thin knife around the cake’s edges to dislodge it.

Tip: Leftover yolks from this recipe can be refrigerated with a little water in an airtight container for up to 2 days. Use them to make mayonnaise, hollandaise sauce, lemon curd, ice cream, crème brûlée, and more.

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Reprinted with permission from Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson. Copyright © 2024. Available from Clarkson Potter, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

I am a CODA, a child of a deaf adult, which, I guess, makes my mother a COHA, a child of a hearing adult. Two actually.

One was her father, Dick Worthen, a man’s man, a house builder, a World War II airplane mechanic, an English professor, a bastard. My entire life, I never heard my grandmother speak a single positive word about Dick until that day she told me he made her shudder with orgasmic bliss every single time they banged. Dick fell asleep at the switch on parenthood. Dick’s only child, my farting mother, Beatrice, was born deaf, her eardrum ballooned up into non-functionality. And Dick, a prominent English professor in the Bay Area, an activist for the advent of the modern community college system, and by all accounts a remarkable and passionate advocate for the importance of the mastery of language, never learned sign language.

Until the end of his life, his communication with his only child, my mother, was limited to a mix of cartoonish gesticulations and scribbled notes. The master of communication couldn’t communicate with his own child. Which is tragic, but also tragically common. The vast majority of deaf people are born to hearing parents, and a heartbreaking number of those parents never bother to learn the language that would enable them to have a relationship with their children.

My grandmother, Hope Worthen, receiver of Dick’s seemingly magical dick, was the “other way” this story can go. She was a public school teacher in the Oakland public school system. The moment she realized my mother was deaf, my grandmother quit her job, went to graduate school in deaf education, and eventually went back to work for Oakland public schools, leading their program teaching deaf children. In other words, she did what mothers do. She put her child first, and my mother reaped the benefits.

This question is raised every time two unwitting hearing people give birth to an unexpectedly deaf child: “What are we going to do?” Their answer to that question decides not only their relationship with the child but also forges that child’s destiny, determines if they will be a professional or a pauper, illiterate or enlightened, independent or subordinate to state-sanctioned “help.” The decisions of people with zero experience in the deaf world, who have never really thought about deafness in any way, shape the future of the deaf, again and again.

Though Dick’s neglect is common, more common still are passionate parents who only want the best for their deaf children. But a parent’s love for their children is not a guarantee of sound decision-making. In many ways, it can have exactly the opposite effect. People’s love of their children is so overwhelming it can become impossible to recognize the choice you are making for that child is actually a gateway to their downfall.

This kind of destructive, “best interest” parenting is made more acute by faulty information. Sometimes this information comes from a QAnon adherent, convincing a parent that the polio vaccine is filled with the spinal cord fluid of enslaved unbaptized babies, and sometimes, in the case of the deaf, it comes from the inventor of the telephone.

*

Young Alexander Bell was born with a chip on his shoulder. Unlike his brothers, he had been born without a middle name, and he pleaded and petitioned his dad for the dignity afforded a three-named person. On his eleventh birthday, Daddy Bell relented and gave him the gift of the middle name Graham. This just goes to show you how poor and bored people were in the mid-1800s: You could delight a child with a birthday gift of being named after a cracker.

You know Alexander Graham Bell as the man who invented the phone. But to the deaf community, he is more than that, a self-appointed Moses, a boogeyman, a Pied Piper, playing a flute no one could nor wanted to hear, guiding the deaf to their educational doom.

Bell was, like me, the child of a deaf mother and was married to a deaf woman. You’d think that would ingratiate the deaf to him, that his connection with that world would be, as mine is, tender and loving and filled with a fierce loyalty. And maybe Bell felt that loyalty, but tender and loving he was not. It is not hyperbole to say that, in some ways, he wanted to eradicate the deaf from the face of the Earth.

Like most hearing people throughout the history of the deaf, the way he proposed to do it was to “help” them. Without even asking if they wanted that help, he would insert himself into their world, slam a railroad switch into the track of their emancipation, and force a crossroads where before there had been a straight line.

He was, for all intents and purposes, an imperialist, considering his superiority objective and decreeing the great tragedy it would be to deny it to a primitive culture. And, just like standard-issue imperialism, the savages he wanted to liberate were unaware of their savagery; they were whole and complete, not in need of rescue. The liberty he offered would quite quickly prove itself to be a prison.

Before Bell imposed his will upon the deaf, they had been on a one-hundred-year journey out of darkness. Their own self-initiated liberation was a dramatic tale of impossible odds, Napoleonic violence, Catholic education, and three singular geniuses living at the same time, in the same place: a tale that eventually led to the founding of the National Institute for Deaf Children of Paris. 

Prior to the establishment of the school in 1750, the station of the deaf in France (and the rest of the world) was largely a dire one. We’re talking old-school “bath a month” France, so let’s be real: The station of everyone in France other than powdered-wig, paint-a-mole aristocrats was pretty dire.

But if you were born deaf? You were fucked.

Often, you’d be born poor in a village where you were the only deaf kid. The only language you’d ever receive or experience was whatever gesture you and your family invented in order to get you to understand when Papa said, “Pass the ratatouille.” You’d be born in the dark, destined to destitution, largely wordless and languageless, an island of deafness alone in a sea of the hearing.

But what if luck smiled on you and the genetic deafness in your family tree produced more than one deaf kid? At that, your chances of intellectual freedom exploded. You and your deaf sibling could pass language back and forth, building on it an increasingly complex structure.

With the simple power of one peer, a peer who defaulted to your natural state of communication, you could, quite literally, create a new language. A language of two. With that, you could unlock your mind, learn to communicate, and step out into the light.

A pair of siblings just like that met a Catholic priest, Charles-Michel, abbé de l’Epée, “the Abbe,” in 1770 and changed the destiny of the deaf in France and then the world.

Prior to this meeting, the intellectual status of the deaf was in question. Aristotle himself thought that the deaf were incapable of reason or complex thought. He claimed reason without hearing was an impossibility. The truth is, it is not hearing but language that unlocks reason, and deafness at that time had the profoundly destructive effect of cutting people off from language.

But like two male velociraptors in a Michael Crichton book, deaf people (like all people) “found a way.” They created language from nothing, and it was this language that the abbé encountered in a Parisian slum in 1770. Struck with the hand movements he saw exchanged between two deaf sisters, he knew that he was looking at language and, at that moment, he dedicated his life to finding a way to use those signs to educate the deaf, and to allow them salvation.

Salvation was most of his concern. The abbé intuitively saw that deaf people had no less ability to reason than anyone else but, if they didn’t have language, they could not be given the sacrament and were therefore damned to hell. This makes perfect sense of course: an almighty God, looking down at the deaf and saying to the devil, “Look, if they could talk I would grant them permission to eat my God-Body biscuits but, with things as they are, my hands are tied. They’re all yours! Into the eternal hellfire they go!”

From this religious instruction, and these two signing girls, the first free school for the deaf was formed, the National Institute for Deaf Children of Paris. The abbé began to gather deaf students from around France and to teach those children.

The abbé was a teacher, but he learned as much as he taught. As he was taught by his students how to sign, he reciprocated by using those very signs to teach them French, how to take the sacraments, and indeed how to acquire the knowledge that had been withheld from them behind an unscalable wall of spoken language.

In other words, the students taught him how to weave rope and the abbé taught them how to form it into a ladder that they could use to scale the wall. Over the years the signing system, aided and added to by all of the gathered deaf students there, formed and shaped by the collective body of the deaf in Paris and the teachers at the school, became increasingly complex and sophisticated, and by the time Laurent Clerc, the father of modern American Sign Language, arrived, fresh from a French village and hungry for language, there was language waiting for him.

Born in 1785 in a village outside of Lyon, France, Laurent Clerc became deaf after an accident when he was one year old. He was lucky enough to be the son of the mayor. If he’d been the son of the baker, odds are we’d have never heard of him and he’d have died in that same village, making baguettes in a languageless world.

I know that France is so charming that it’s hard to paint a tragic picture by saying “this poor guy might’ve been living in a rustic French village, pulling crusty bread out of an oven and spreading it with fresh-churned butter made from the milk of the cow that lived next door.” But for Clerc and the world, it would have been a tragedy, because when Clerc left that village for Paris and the school for the deaf, he began a journey toward changing America, changing the world, and changing my life.

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From Subculture Vulture: A Memoir in Six Scenes by Moshe Kasher. Copyright © 2024. Available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

In March 2019, twenty-three-year-old Olympic silver medalist Kelly Catlin took her own life in her college dorm. A month earlier—the day she was scheduled to meet the queen of Spain—she had tried and failed to kill herself by asphyxiation. Her family and coaches rushed in after the first attempt. She was referred to two sports psychologists, but neither could see her. She tried calling a suicide hotline multiple times, was once put on hold. Another time, no one answered.

Kelly was a member of the US cycling team, a three-time world champion in the four-rider group race called the team pursuit. She was earning a degree at Stanford University in computational math and engineering. She spoke Chinese fluently, was a natural athlete, a gifted classical violinist, had plans to be a data scientist. This all changed for her after a slick winter ride in December when, two months before her suicide, she suffered a head injury. Her family insists: “The concussion changed her.”

I think about what it must have been like for Kelly in the weeks before her death, struggling through tough math problems and headaches, unable to withstand even a “coffee ride” with her coach. I imagine her putting her violin to her chin and grasping for Niccolò Paganini, touching only air. At one point, in four pages of frenetic journaling, she writes—If I am not an athlete, I am nothing.

“We didn’t know about the racing thoughts and the obsessing,” Kelly’s sister Christine says.

In his paper on behavior analytical approaches, clinical psychologist Stephen M. Myles blames ruptures of identity after TBI on the “inconsistencies between her post-injury functioning and pre-injury conceptualized self.” With a brain injury, even those we don’t define as serious, there is the persistent sensation that you are not you. This is the Crisis of the Conceptualized Self.

You look the same, therefore should be the same, and people react to you as if you are the person they remember. They talk to you as if you are still the silver medalist, even if your heart races after only moderate exertion. They do not know you are now somebody new—a secret person, a stranger to yourself—who researches and rents two cylinders of compressed helium for an exit plan, and in the end you are the body that your roommate finds in the dorm now filled with noxious gas. They expect you to be the same uninterrupted line you have always been. For a while—because identity is the natural formation that arises where we meet others—you fight to return to that person, too.

After my third concussion, I sit in the chair, wrestle with the empty page. I do this out of terror and habit. Nothing comes. This is not writer’s block. I have lost the gift of sight—I can no longer look into that space ahead and conjure something out of the fictive world. It is less like blindness, more a body part gone numb.

I forget how to imagine. I forget words entirely, how to set them alongside one another. It is as if someone has hidden language behind a curtain, and I can only see the shadow it makes on the blank wall. I’m able to hold on to certain pieces of the narrative if I concentrate, but I can’t build much out of them.

Specifically, I am showing indication of low idea density and nonspecific language lacking detail (empty words—“anyone,” “something”—keep creeping up). I try talking into a voice recorder, write entire chapters this way. When I play it back, it sounds like someone else’s book, so I throw it out. Dear god, I pray, please make me whole if only on the page.

On my desk is a notebook, Post-its, a photo of Whitney Houston, a plastic pirate, a rubber octopus, some precious rocks, a puppet playing a lute, a very dramatically thirsty plant, a red daruma, and other writing talismans given to me by friends or found in the wild. On the bookshelf beside my desk, the sky-blue spines of my first novel stare back at me. The greatest kindness I ever felt from Mom was when she called me up and said, Of course I was going to read it, why would you think I wouldn’t? and then, You can see why people like it, it’s different. But I am very far from that book right now.

I get the distinct feeling that the novel was written by someone else—another writer, someone I am outside of, somebody who could never recognize me. Overnight, my work has become no longer mine because I am not me anymore. I tell myself that writers always spurn their first books or else they would never write a second, and that every book written is many selves ago.

I tell myself that, per neuroscientist Anil Seth, all reality is a “controlled hallucination.” But then I look again at the blue spines. I turn the books so they face backwards, with the gray pages fanning out. Now the novel might have been written by anybody.

Kelly—and the whole Catlin clan—were overachievers. In third grade, Kelly started following The Code, strict guidelines to live by, which she wrote into a notebook and which included no crying. In eleventh grade, Kelly enrolled in classes at the University of Minnesota and got perfect SAT scores. She shut herself away for twelve-hour study sessions and went on sixty-mile bike rides. The only time she watched movies was on a stationary bike, and her $20 allowance was contingent on how much she had exercised that week.

Her parents, who wanted to prepare their daughter for the future they believed she deserved, pushed her to excel. Her mother, Carolyn, after Kelly’s death, said: “So many parents automatically just say, Good job. Their kids are successful getting a fork to their mouth: Good job!” Whatever Kelly did—origami, competitive shooting, riding, suicide note—it had to be perfect.

Her brother Colin says of Kelly, “She always wanted to basically be this monolithic, terrifying force of power.”

*

In Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars, a painter goes color-blind after his concussion. Everything appears in black-and-white, like an old television. Everything looks misty, bleached. His abstract paintings, once full of intense color, are now gray to him, meaningless. His dinner plate is full of gray, dead food; when he closes his eyes and tries to picture a tomato, it’s black. He sticks to black and white foods, olives and rice, coffee and yogurt. Flowers, museum paintings, are all wrong. He is depressed by rainbows. The flesh of his own wife looks to him “rat-colored.”

He dreams he is about to see color, and then he wakes up. In his sorrow, he sits for hours staring at his lawn, willing green to life. Sacks writes, “He knew all about color, externally, intellectually, but he had lost the remembrance, the inner knowledge, of it that had been part of his very being. He had had a lifetime of experience in color, but now this was only a historical fact.” The color-blind painter tells himself, If I can’t go on painting, I don’t want to go on at all.

*

After brain injury, we lose the words we once used to describe ourselves—strong, industrious, clever, creative, talented, resilient, imaginative. We are left with something unspeakable, a core self that can be frightening and exhilarating to meet, a stranger who wears our shoes and smells like us.

The me I used to know chose freedom over obedience and left home at seventeen. The me I once was graduated college at the top of the class, feeling herself behind everyone else but never showing it. The me I once was—but apparently no longer am—did not give into failure or fears of being an impostor, because scrappiness overcame almost any hurdle. I pushed and pushed.

A year after my first head injury, I travel south for a job interview, where I am asked to read and speak about my first book. I smile through it and deliver the jokes from page one. I sign copies of the book, as if I’m doing a favor for the real author. When I am offered the job, I can’t help but feel like I’ve stolen someone else’s work, that the nice people on this committee believe I’m somebody I’m not.

John Locke’s idea of psychological continuity suggests that someone who comes through a struggle can still recognize herself on the other side if some idea of her continues to exist. Philosopher Carsten Korfmacher further explains this notion: “In order for a person X to survive a particular adventure, it is necessary and sufficient that there exists, at a time after the adventure, a person Y who psychologically evolved out of X.”

Yet, with brain injury, the shift is so abrupt, so decisive, that there is a cleaving—only the before and after, was and is, war and prisoner. After injury, who you were on Sunday is not who you are on Monday. After injury, the person giving the interview is not the person on the page.

I stop seeking out readings. When sales are down, I think, let it die, it’s dead already. I accumulate pages toward a new novel, but deep down (I know it, my agent knows it), they are brittle. It is not just the words. I am locked out. My characters are at a party in the apartment next door, and all I can hear are their muffled conversations.

It is slowly dawning on me that I am alienated not only from my body, from my brain, but also from my imagination. I cannot see into that distance where creation happens. My wife says, Don’t worry you still have your voice. It takes years to figure out that what she actually means is I still have my soul.

Q: What do you call a writer who cannot write?

A:

The painter tries to paint in color again: it doesn’t work. His friends, even his wife, tell him it’s not a big deal—but the colorless colors are repulsive to him.

*

Catlin Kelly is not the only female athlete to die by suicide after concussion.

A year before Kelly’s suicide, Ellie Souter, the British snowboarder who won a bronze medal in snowboard cross, kills herself in a remote woodland on her eighteenth birthday. Seven concussions between 2013 and 2018, airlifts off mountains. No one suspects depression, her uncle describes her as “chirpy.” Her father says: “I truly believe today that my daughter would be alive had I had any inkling, you know, even the smallest bit of information.”

A year after Kelly’s suicide, in 2020, Australian football player Jacinda Barclay kills herself. An autopsy reveals that there is significant degradation of the white matter in her brain, not unlike the CTE diagnosed posthumously in American football players.

In November 2018, a little over a month before her accident, three-time world champion Kelly stands at the podium at a World Cup track cycling race. She looks past the cheering fans, waving flags, all the way out to Tokyo 2020—where she’s predicted to win gold. She sees the bright future she has been training for all her life, the one owed her.

“As far as we knew,” Catlin’s father says, “she was never a person that suffered from depression.”

*

In his biography, first recorded in the late first century, Plutarch asks if we are still who we once were if those recognizable parts of us go missing. In the Theseus paradox, Theseus, hero of Athens, returns victorious from my home island of Crete, having slayed the Minotaur. The Athenians are so in awe, they decide to preserve his broken-down ship by replacing it plank for plank. Plutarch poses the question, If an object has had all of its components replaced, is it still fundamentally the same entity? If you replace all the boards on a ship, is it still the same ship? If someone takes those old boards and builds an entirely new ship, do you now have two ships?

If this new Kelly Catlin can no longer race, sees in herself someone who is physically weak, without stamina, a person who fails after a lifetime of excellence, who might not be able to compete in Tokyo, who has unexpected dark, spinning thoughts, whose very body and brain are betraying her, is she the same Kelly Catlin?

With brain injury, there has been a disruption of borders: because a sequential self requires proximity to the past self for association to occur, the present unknown self is disquieting, mistrusted. The injured brain, unlike the ship that has been built back together from parts, is fractured. The split self arises from self-estrangement, the evaluation of deficits, enduring emotional distress.

This is the untold legacy of head trauma. It is so common that it is described as being the sine qua non of brain injury. “Certain qualitative changes in a person’s psychology or physiology may kill the person,” Korfmacher says. “The question a criterion of personal identity answers is: what kind of changes does a person survive?”

“She was not the Kelly we knew she spoke like a robot,” Kelly’s father, Mark, said. “We could get her to talk but we wondered, what has happened to our Kelly?” Yet even now, when Kelly Catlin is covered in the media, almost no one—outside her family—talks about the concussion.

About the time that Kelly Catlin falls off her bike, I attend the Mind Your Brain Conference in Philadelphia. The keynote speaker is a snowboarder whose professional career was cut short by a bad ride—an Olympian, like Kelly, an athlete to rival Shaun White. In the audience are medical professionals, students of neurology, but mostly, the attendees are people with brain injuries.

There is a free lunch. I tell myself I’m here to conduct research for a new novel since, little by little, over five years’ recovery, I have been regaining the ability to write—not just put down mangled words, but to see true shapes. I show up late to the conference, I’m jittery and don’t know why. The back of my neck prickles. I can’t shake the uncanniness, as if this is all an elaborate set with hired actors whose job it is to fold me into their ranks.

People sitting on plush chairs, eating apples. People flipping through the schedule. A woman with blond curls sauntering up to a table for free swag. Then I realize my unease—the hundreds of people wandering the booths and finding their seats are entirely unremarkable. They look just like me. What were you expecting? I ask myself. Limping? Dark glasses? Someone helping them down the stairs? Eye patches? We look mostly the same.

I sit in on Dr. Ann Marie McLaughlin’s astounding presentation on emotional health, entitled “I Am Not Me,” and learn just how many of the walking wounded are troubled by a divided self. This comes as a revelation, because all this time I think I’ve just been coping badly. And it turns out, I have. Apparently, overachievers with perfectionist tendencies—Kelly Catlin, Annie Liontas—have the worst time adjusting to cognitive disruption.

Dr. McLaughlin compares us to homes in a Class 3 hurricane. We have not all suffered the same damage. This house over here is okay. This second house is a mess, foundation gone, insurance wants to know if the symptoms correlate with the accident or if it was always a run-down house whose owners are now trying to scam the system. This house way out here is narcissistic and grandiose and is bound not to know itself after the storm tears down its walls.

Suicide, she tells us, is at three times the population norm. We are seeking to understand the relationship between white matter changes in the brain and suicidality.

Then Dr. McLaughlin pulls up a slide called “Living in the Basement.” The Basement, Dr. McLaughlin explains, is where a lot of people with brain injuries end up. This is not a metaphor. Thousands of survivors can no longer live upstairs: 20 to 30 percent are wracked by vestibular symptoms, another 19 percent suffer from vision problems and headache, all are in “psychic distress or withdraw.”

I know the Basement. Despite my childhood avoidance of basements (the philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls it the dark, subterranean, irrational entity of the house, the place from which fear springs), I have been living in one. My Basement is the blue scarf I’ve kept wrapped around my face for the greater part of four years. It is the separation I have felt from people even when we’re in the same room. My Basement has no staircase, it is just one long step down. It is at this very moment that I realize I’ve sensed my old self missing, I just haven’t understood where she’d gone.

I look at all the people sitting around me—the people too sick to even make it here today, Kelly Catlin who is only beginning to suffer—me with my snotty nose, all these people in their own dark basements but all of us somehow together. Somebody in the next row sees this is too much for me, passes a napkin that smells like a ham sandwich, and this feels like a great kindness.

I tell myself that the brain injury did not take away a self, rather it revealed many other selves heretofore unknown to me.

Mark Doty writes, “That is a relief, is it not, to acknowledge that we do not after all know what a self is? A corrective to human arrogance, to the numbing certainty that puts a soul to sleep.” He goes on, in The Art of Description, to say, “Consciousness can’t be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness.”

I rewrite the book until it is a different book; then I rewrite it until I am a different writer.

*

One morning, as the painter is driving, he sees the sun coming up over the highway, the reds all blacks. “The sun rose like a bomb, like some enormous nuclear explosion,” he says. He starts working again, abstracts as before in a series called Nuclear Sunrise, with one big difference: he paints in black and white. He never gets green back, but he sees black/ white in an entirely new light.

There is a philosophy experiment that is even better known than Theseus’s ship, and that is “People Who Divide Like an Amoeba.” In this puzzle, philosopher Derek Parfit asks you to imagine that your brain is sawed in half and placed into two different bodies. Both brains survive, both go on to live different lives.

Parfit, who most of all does not want people to suffer (the idea of anyone in pain, even Hitler, makes him want to cry) wants us to remember that even the divided self can never fully be divided. “They can be different people and yet be me, just in the way the Pope’s three crowns are one crown.” I can be both the writer and the non-writer. The artist can see in color, and also see no color.

Kelly’s parents beg her to quit school, quit everything. Come home, forget classes, heal, be somebody else for a while. Her sister sends her articles on a little Italian town where Stradivarius violins are made by hand. Wouldn’t it be nice to go there? Maybe Kelly considers the possibility, briefly. Maybe she can almost reach out and touch that other life of Kelly Catlin, before it disappears for good.

In her final words, she writes, “I was dancing before the end. Just so you know. I woke up, danced a dance, played my fiddle, and died.” After her death, still seeking answers, her family donates her brain to concussion research at Boston University’s CTE Center.

The colorblind painter who paints in black and white is a night person now. He drives to random cities, Boston, Baltimore, pulling up at dusk, wandering the streets for much of the night. He is drawn to diners. He says, “Everything in diners is different at night, at least if it has windows. The darkness comes into the place, and no amount of light can change it. They are transformed into night places.”

The basement is still dark, but little by little you get used to it, and then you realize—there is something to be found in the darkness.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery by Annie Liontas. Copyright © 2024 by Annie Liontas. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

The night of a dry lightning storm in Northern California I woke up terrified, and from my bedroom window I watched relentless spears of lightning shatter the sky, Zeus or Jupiter very upset, fire from darkness splintering the land, and I knew immediately we couldn’t all survive this. People. Critters. Houses. Trees. Max rolled over in bed next to me. There’s going to be a fire, I said. We got up. It was four-thirty a.m.

I lived on the north slope of a thickly forested hill with Max, my partner, in a small white house under large red trees. Our road was a single-lane dead-end. Down the hill there was a ramshackle neighbor­hood of cabins. Upslope, past the leaning fence of our yard, there grew three hundred acres of mixed evergreen forest, which was privately owned and chronically neglected.

From here the woods spread west into thousands more acres of Northern California landscape: more trees, more hills, small groupings of homes perched between. Farther west, where the coastal range stopped, shrubby slopes descended to the Pacific Ocean. My extended backyard.

Wind had woken me before the lightning; it rattled the single-pane windows in our bedroom. Above the redwoods fathomless clouds lin­gered like silence. From inside them the furious sky hurled its energy at millions of acres of dry, deep wood. I had never seen so many light­ning strikes. The blades of electricity bisected the air, the earth, every­thing.

My insides were set abuzz. My lungs contracted like they’d just hit cold water; my jaw compacted into itself; my eyes searched for purchase in the uneasy dark. Every muscle in my pelvis, from psoas to sphincter, felt as though it had been turned to wood. Somewhere inside my brain every synapse fired, and I was thrust into a whorl of anxiety: go, go, go.

The storm continued. Max and I ping-ponged between each win­dow in our house, trying to track the lightning and gauge its proximity to the roof; the large, open yard; the 150-foot-tall redwood trees sur­rounding it; the thousands more trees in the hills. We opened the door and stood on the back porch beneath the eaves and looked up. The canopy blocked our view of the dive-bombing sky.

Redwoods were the tallest plants on the planet, older than almost everything. Since childhood I had felt safe beneath the shelter of these grand trees. I often thought of them as my protectors, and myself as their comrade. The redwoods where I lived—coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens—were second-and third-growth, as most in the area were, due to past logging.

They were probably over a hundred years old; just babies, in redwood years. The trees lived together with us in mutual silence, and when it was windy they swayed gracefully above the roses I’d planted in the clearings between them, as though they were keeping watch.

Despite my feelings of comradeship, past storms and human history showed that the trees and I were in fact liabilities to each other, not guardians; anyway, we couldn’t protect each other from this. Lightning was inescapable, an elemental force unleashed. It struck and struck, splintered and shone.

My skin bristled as the atmo­spheric pressure plummeted, but bizarrely this lightning had arrived without rain. The storm was near to us, very near, and every time the thunder clapped I counted one, two, three inside my head to clock its proximity. But the expected crescendo of every thunderstorm, the deluge, never came. Instead, electric spears kept plunging toward the earth and fear kept rising inside my body, and the two connected in my brain and, perhaps, never came untied.

We went back inside. Max looked online for reports of new fires, and I put on a sports bra, in case I had to run from something. I then walked to the closet where we kept our camping gear and started to take stuff out. Although we’d evacuated from a wildfire the prior year, we didn’t have an emergency kit—a go bag, in disaster-preparedness parlance, which was fast becoming everyday lingo all over the world.

Here, fires didn’t usually happen until autumn. In recent years I had noticed less predictability to the seasons, but by August the land was reliably dry, the hills a mélange of browns and yellows. August nights, however, were moist; in the mornings the fog crept out of the valleys and back toward the ocean like it was hungover. By September the marine layer would relax its grip as the Diablo winds, named in part for their capacity to do bad things, began to roll over the mountains from the east, and the oak leaves and fescue would then shimmer like hot gold.

Historically, in summer in coastal Northern California, it did not rain. It did not thunder. Lightning was for other seasons. But there was so much fire in that sky. It had to land somewhere.

I did laps around the house, carrying things from closet to bed. Tote bag, sleeping bag, head lamp. Car registration, my asthma inhaler, passports. In the closet we had an old, cheap backpack with a broken strap that had been my feeble earthquake kit when I had lived alone in San Francisco. I found it, cursed its uselessness, and tossed it on the floor near the front door anyway.

I had read that in the extreme heat of a wildfire scenario, synthetic clothing could fuse to your skin, whereas natural fibers burned clean. I positioned my leather clogs by the door and fingered the fabric of my pajamas. Cotton. I added to the pile a wool sweater, in case it ever got cold again, although we’d been in a severe heat wave all week. The lightning kept crashing and the electricity flickered, but held.

Max reported back from the internet: no fires yet. Wild lightning pics, though. I kept packing. I thought I could smell sulfur. Somewhere in my body, a habitual response had already taken control. The world was flexing its power over me, and I knew from experience that when this happened it was important to be quick, be ready, then be gone.

At some point our local firehouse siren moaned its air-raid lament. I checked my phone. I checked again. No notifications. But the siren meant that someone nearby had called 911, which meant that some­where near my home, trees were being cracked open; power lines were falling; small fires were certainly starting.

We could only hope that the volunteer fire department was finding them all. Our next-door neigh­bor was on the VFD; I usually relied on him for intel about storms or fires. I looked out my kitchen window and across the half-acre slope of the yard toward his driveway, but his pickup truck was already gone.

Max joined me in packing. We didn’t talk much. My thunder counts grew shorter in number, then began again to extend. The light­ning stopped, eventually. The sirens quieted. Then the light dawned and it was gray, then, bizarrely, there was a very small amount of rain, more thunder, and for a refreshing moment the atmosphere felt like August in Pennsylvania that summer when I was fifteen years old and away from California for the first time and the thunder rolled across the green landscape every afternoon and two different boys wanted to kiss me. But this moisture was anomalous, limited, I knew. It couldn’t make magic happen.

It was 2020, the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. There were no vaccines. On Earth’s surface it was about one degree Fahrenheit warmer, on average, than it had been when I was a child. In the United States a climate denier with white-supremacist leanings occupied the highest political office.

Around the world people and places were hav­ing a hard time. It was a year of overwhelm: In January flash floods had displaced sixty thousand households in Indonesia. I had been told to stop hugging my friends in late February, and we’d stopped going inside one another’s houses in March. That April unseasonable wildfires had burned in northern climates such as Scotland, Poland, and in Ukraine inside the exclusion zone at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By May the virus had killed one hundred thousand people in the United States alone.

In June a wave of protests swept the country in response to ongoing murders of Black people by the police. The U.S. mail stopped arriving promptly sometime in July. In early August an inland hurricane called a derecho had decimated parts of the Midwest, causing $11 billion in damage and destroying nearly seven million trees in Iowa, and it had barely made national headlines.

By this time in the age of humans, it was a known truth that extreme weather events were linked to irreversible changes in the climate—which were caused by increased greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmo­sphere, a direct effect of burning fossil fuels and a slightly less direct effect of capitalism—and that nobody with power seemed to be doing anything differently.

*

In the San Francisco Bay Area, then home to 7.7 million people, it felt to many like the summer season had seen higher temperatures than usual. The rents were up, too: average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $3,000 and rising; there were roughly twenty-eight thousand people living without houses in the region. In Sonoma County, two hours north of San Francisco, my mortgage was $2,800 a month. Max, a union organizer, and I, a literary magazine editor, worked from home now.

Behind the house in which we lived, the for­est trails, known only to locals, had lately on weekends become as crowded as the beach. One neighbor had taken to patrolling the paths for interlopers, mad with territorial defensiveness. There were rumors of increased crimes. People were out of work. People were bored. The air was thick with worry. In many ways, a freak lightning storm fit right in.

That Sunday morning of the storm, after it became light, Max and I checked news and fire maps online but didn’t see anything notable. We put on our jauntiest cloth masks and went for bagels at our favor­ite outdoor café. We made small talk about the eerie weather with the proprietors, a cheery couple in their thirties who cured their own lox, and traded rumors with café regulars about small, lightning-adjacent catastrophes—spot fires that were easily extinguished, power fritzes that were soon restored.

We returned home to work on our go bag, a term I disliked because it was grammatically awkward, but I also disliked the alternate, bug-out bag, which made me think of dooms­day preppers, who in the year 2020 in America were often also racist separatists and whom, as a fellow white person, I felt it important to not share vocabulary with.

We spent the day packing the bag without the appropriate moniker: first-aid kit, camping equipment, cash, two kinds of masks (cloth masks, which at the time were recommended for Covid-19, and N95 masks, for smoke), and a medical handbook called Where There Is No Doctor that an anarchist friend gave me a decade back. We joked that we weren’t sure whether we were packing for a potential wildfire evacuation or an apocalypse, and really don’t they go together, one after another?

The next day, a Monday, I flaked off work and drove around doing errands. In the nearest big town, about twenty minutes east, I got more Band-Aids and refilled my pain meds, for the go bag. On the way home I sped west down Occidental Road with the radio up and the windows down in the oddly humid heat, singing along to David Bowie’s “Five Years.” As Bowie and I hit the high notes, I felt a peculiar sense of tri­umph, as though I had done something to merit the luck of not having my home catch on fire.

By the time I got home Max had made dinner, which we ate on the deck. When no large fires made their presence known to us that evening, we left the go bag by the front door and went to bed. The air was still sticky and stormy. There was more lightning in the region overnight, but if it came to my house, I didn’t wake for it.

The wildfires that came to be known as the 2020 Lightning Com­plex fires started during these unusual August storms, but the light­ning had struck deep in unpeopled places and so humans didn’t really know about them for another day or so. As I ran errands and felt alive, the fires spread.

In his book The Pyrocene, fire historian Stephen J. Pyne wrote that because fire moved through biomass and consumed life like it was hungry, fire—much like a virus—was often attributed the qualities of a living thing. The language widely used to describe fire further per­sonified it as a thing possessed of violent appetites: fire devoured and raged. But, Pyne wrote, fire was not a thing; it was a reaction. The sci­ence of fire was at its core a simple equation: when fuel, heat, and oxy­gen met a source of ignition, fire happened.

There were generally two entities that caused fires: people (who in California in the twenty-first century were responsible for ninety-five percent of all wildfires), and lightning (five percent). Although technically lava and other geologic reactions could start fires, too, lightning had been the primary source of fire on the planet named Earth since it began. Lightning, with its force and unstoppability, was what made fire so powerful. It was the impetus of a raw element sent from the heavens, fire and brimstone, older than time.

When lightning hit a tree, it might cleave the primary trunk open like a wound and simmer inside it before shooting up the tree’s limbs and out into the air seeking further fuel. Or, the force of the strike might simply knock flaming bits of wood into the passing wind. Either way, the tree was transformed into a torch.

Over seventy-two hours that stormy August, more than ten thousand individual lightning strikes occurred over a landscape that was overgrown, dry from drought, and experiencing record-breaking heat and high winds. The resulting 650 wildfires that were big and serious enough to be named by the fire sup­pression authorities were simply a matter of odds, earth science at work. But they seemed to behave more like something out of myth.

Northern California was a very large place. When fire came to the northeastern side of the Sacramento Valley at the edge of the Sierra Crest—about a five-hour drive from my house—it delivered upon the watersheds and canyons of Butte and Plumas Counties twenty-one sizable conflagrations that came together to be called the North Com­plex. There the fire fed on ponderosa pines, toyon, and blue oaks, in the process killing deer and bears and sixteen humans.

Up in the emer­ald forests of Mendocino County, the August Complex fires began their ravenous progress toward the burning of what would become a million acres of trees, consuming the habitats of an untold number of spotted owls in the process. Near Silicon Valley, south and east of the city of San Jose, twenty fires that joined as the SCU Complex vaulted from grass to manzanita shrubs to oak trees, scattering in their wake feral pigs, mountain lions, and red-legged frogs.

Between that valley and the ocean lay a coastal mountain range where forty-three years earlier my mother had given birth to me in a trailer next to a geodesic dome. In those same mountains, fire flew with vigor through groves of thousand-year-old redwoods, up to pine ridges, then back down­hill across coastal scrub and farmlands, all the way to the sparkling Pacific Ocean. All across the northern half of California, fire forded rivers and freeways.

It surrounded small towns and lakes. It barreled through the biomass of the coast ranges, the Sierra foothills, the sub­urbs along the I-80 corridor, and toward the ruins of a town named Paradise, again. It feasted on woods that adjoined wetlands atop the San Andreas Fault.

And in Sonoma County and neighboring Napa County, locus of many prior burnings, fire came to the vineyards and dry valleys, to live oaks and dead tan oaks, guzzling up oily bay trees and unkillable broom, leaping across shingle roofs and over hot hills and tree crowns, through temperate rainforests, and into the woods a few miles north of where Max and I slept.

The season had begun.

______________________________

Excerpt from The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin. Copyright © 2024 by Manjula Martin. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Every year, my aunt, who lives in the West Bank, ships bottles of olive oil to our entire family in the United States. It’s our share of the olive harvest—our inheritance from our grandparents and great-grandparents, who tended those trees since the late 1800s. My aunt handles it all, arranging for the olives on our family’s trees to be harvested and pressed into liquid gold.

When I was young, I loved hearing about how my aunt, my father, and their siblings joined my grandparents during the harvest. They’d surround the base of the olive tree with large tarps and swipe at the branches with long sticks, forcing them to release the olives. They’d sing songs to entertain one another, and when the sun rose high in the sky, they’d gather under the shade of the tree and eat their midday meal.

It’s an ancient legacy, unchanged for at least a century. In fact, one of their olive presses is the original one that our great-grandparents used.

But since October 7th, olive farmers are being prevented from reaching their groves. Settlers shoot at, physically block, and generally terrorize them. This is nothing new; in years past, settlers have even uprooted, bulldozed, and burned centuries-old trees.

The olive harvest is October through November, maybe early December if you’re lucky. But at this point, it is over—and an entire community has lost its income, and its legacy.

And the olives are rotting on the branches.

*

These days, I’m reminded how impossible it feels to be a Palestinian in the diaspora. My social media timeline is more surreal than anything Kafka could have conjured up. On the one hand, I see a Palestinian child screaming, holding up a hand on which most of the fingers have been blown off. On the other, I see posts from American friends who are irate but amused that Valentine’s stuff is hitting the store shelves so soon after Christmas. Meanwhile, as a Palestinian Christian, I belong to a mourning community that refused to celebrate Christmas this year, even though the holiday originated with our ancestors.

Like I said, surreal.

Growing up in the United States as a Palestinian American, I’ve always lived in two worlds, although existing in this space now is more jarring than ever before. That’s because I am supposed to be, in this moment, while bodies in Gaza lay unrecovered under the rubble, promoting the launch of my debut novel.

I began writing this book six years ago. As a mother of three who works full-time, I have written fiction in the only way I know how: by squeezing even more time out of an already tight schedule. I belong to a group of people who write at 5am. I work until 6:30, at which time, my “real life” begins: I wake up the children, pack lunches, prepare my work bag, drop everyone off, and then head to my job. On a good morning, I will set the crock pot for dinner and start a load of laundry.

On one of these mornings, while the dawn was still splintering the sky, I began exploring a new character: a young Palestinian American man who is at odds with his father. Marcus is a cop, living in Baltimore. While Marcus and his father are both attached to their Palestinian roots, they are growing increasingly detached from one another.

As I wrote, morning after morning, I saw that Marcus’ father, a refugee, had one way of being Palestinian, an approach shaped by war and exile and poverty, while Marcus’s identity was quite different—it was deeply influenced by growing up in the working class, diverse city of Baltimore.

That’s how the book started, as a story about Palestinians dealing with the loss of their homeland, as well as with the urgency of living in a country that is, itself, fraught with class tensions and unable to confront its racist past. The novel grew from that seed, as I contextualized this father and son—I gave them subplots, I expanded on their relationships with others, I gave voice to their community, and so my novel came alive word by word and page by page during those six years.

As I wrote, I was driven by a passion to explore the lives of working class Palestinian Americans—the cousins of those olive farmers, of people who work the land and respect it.

Living in the United States, where the very notion of Palestinian existence is contested (I’ve heard “There’s no such thing as Palestine” enough for one lifetime), many Palestinians worked hard to depict our community according to upper middle-class standards of “respectability.” You were lauded for being a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer. Your home should be large and luxurious. Your clothes should be designer and your kids should be honors students. I get it—when your people are portrayed by the media as barbaric and uncivilized, the obsession with saying, “No, we’re not!” is intense.

And yet, I reject the idea that someone can be authentically Palestinian only if they’re upper middle class. What about those who landed in America and became part of the rest of American society that lives paycheck-to-paycheck? Are they less Palestinian if they delay an aching tooth because there’s no dental coverage? If they attend community college? If they work a job that leaves their hands and back aching at the end of the day? If their relationships don’t involve marriage and 2.5 children and a house with a pretty white fence?

I want to liberate Palestinian identity from the toxicity of middle-class respectability. Not many people write about the cleaning lady. Not many people write about the mechanic changing the oil on their car. About the immigrant mother who cuts coupons and can make a chicken breast stretch to feed a large family. About the refugee who quietly grieves when his children are financially stable but cannot speak to him in Arabic.

The book is titled “Behind You Is the Sea,” after the famous charge by Tariq ibn Zayid to his troops, when they landed on the southern coast of Spain. Having burned their ships behind them, he gave them no other choice by to go forward. Bleak as it is, it reminds me of the ways in which Palestinian refugees have had no other choice but to survive when they arrive in the United States… there is no path home, so they have to make it here.

*

I am relieved that my novel is finally making its way into the world. And yet, what kind of world is it entering? How can one think about books during a genocide, when the poets are being arrested, the writers ripped apart by bombs? Even the book world is violently suppressing Palestinian voices: how many instances of censorship have we seen? How many Palestinian writers have been either openly or—more dangerously—quietly canceled?

I had a school visit canceled shortly after the war began. I am the author of the Farah Rocks book series, an earlier foray into writing for children; my series is the first to feature a Palestinian American protagonist. I was scheduled to speak to elementary school students about becoming an author and the power of imagination.

The plans had been discussed in detail and the contract had been signed in September, but that suddenly didn’t matter to the organizers, PTA moms in this case. As they coldly told me that they’d see about rescheduling my visit later in the spring “or maybe next year,” I found their evasiveness insulting and infuriating. When I asked for more details, I was told, “We don’t owe you more details.”

I knew exactly what was happening.

I am Palestinian American author, and it was objectionable that students should hear me speak about the power of the written word.

Erasure is a dangerous thing, but it’s why I have to believe that stories matter. Writing is tedious but necessary work. Next year, the olive farmers in Palestine will be back at their trees, refusing to give up. I take my cue from them—these are my people, and their humble resilience will continue to inspire me.

__________________________________

Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj is available from HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

There’s a scene in my novel, Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife, in which my teen protagonist, Eli, accompanies his terminally ill mother, Debbie, to what he believes to be a cancer support group. Spoiler alert: It’s not. It’s actually a PFLAG meeting—Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays—and Debbie, well-intentioned but naïve, takes Eli there without warning after having secretly witnessed him kiss a boy.

When Debbie asks for advice on how to help him come out, one of the PFLAG teens turns to a sullen, closeted Eli: “Wait. You mean you’re not—? You haven’t—? Oh, that’s fucked up.”

I wrote this scene having never been to a PFLAG meeting, having never been pressured to come out myself, much less in a church basement full of strangers (ouch), but I know exactly how Eli feels in that moment because I’m writing this essay.

I’m writing this essay, you see, because I’m being yanked out of the closet by my own book.

*

While reading a galley copy of Eli, one of my writer friends asked why I made Eli gay. There was no malice behind the question, but still, it felt like an accusation: Who are you to write a gay character? And my gut reaction was: Um… none of your fucking business! Why do you have to pry into my sexuality to form an opinion on a work of fiction?

Then again, I get it. The #OwnVoices movement exists for a reason. The publishing industry needs to take a hard look at its systemic racism and increase the diversity of its output. This applies to LGBTQ and neurodiverse authors, too. It’s a complex issue with no easy solutions, and I acknowledge that I say this with the privilege of being a cis, neurotypical white man.

But at the same time, I get extremely squeamish when it comes to policing art by setting up boundaries around “authenticity.” Especially when it results in a climate of fear (re: appropriation) that silences authors writing characters unlike themselves.

Because isn’t that the whole point of fiction? To write outside yourself? It’s risky, perhaps even taboo now, to stray too far from your own identity. Mostly because you might do it poorly. Offensively. The rise of authenticity readers is a testament to that. Even so, I’m all for crossing such lines, especially when it comes with interrogating your own craft and the capacity (or limits) of your empathy.

A few weeks after that conversation, I was at a party and talking about researching actors for the novel’s audiobook. I’d been told it would be preferable if the narrator were gay, like my protagonist, and though this made sense to me, it sent me down an uncomfortable internet rabbit hole, looking up the romantic lives of strangers and asking questions like: Doesn’t it also matter if he’s Southern like my character, for the voice? What if he’s gay and Southern, but also Korean American? Or does he have to be white, too? Which lines of identity can be crossed in creation and representation and which are non-traversable?

“But why should his sexuality matter?” a friend said. “You wrote the book and you’re not gay…?”

There was an implied question mark at the end of that sentence. A pause yawned between us, an opening I might have filled but instead let hang there, then dissipate. I probably nodded. I might have even said, yeah, and changed the subject.

It was yet another failure for me to come out. But I knew it was only a matter of time. I’d soon have interviews. Readings. Q&As. These questions were sure to come up again. I imagined myself taking the witness stand: “The Defendant pleads not guilty to the charge of LGBTQ appropriation by reason of being a bisexual man. Although he is married to a woman and therefore passing as heterosexual, he’d like to have his same-sex attraction entered into the record as evidence.”

I hate that I have that impulse—to strip down the walls of privacy between me and the reader so I can be judged accurately. Not by the work itself, but by how it measures up against me as a person: Am I really coming out as bi as a defense for writing a gay character?

*

Straight Me: “I made Eli gay, because I wanted to include a subplot about his sexuality in concert with the book’s main plot, re: Eli’s doubts about whether or not he truly visited heaven. I cared about Eli’s romantic life in addition to his familial and it seemed like a natural way to “up the stakes,” as they say, since his Baptist minister father would be, at worst, homophobic and disown him or, at best, reluctantly forgiving of this “sin.” I was inspired by works like Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased and Emily M. Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, about conversion therapy camps, and wanted to explore my own take on a boy coming out in a fundamentalist family.”

Gay Me: “I didn’t make Eli gay. Eli’s gay because he’s gay! He was, is, always will be gay gay gay!”

*

Sometimes I wonder if I was born into a later generation, if I’d have been brave enough to not only come out as bi, but also to actually date men. When I was in high school (class of ’06), “gay” was slang for “stupid” or “embarrassing.” I remember being very conscious about how I sat, because I was told that crossing my legs was “gay.” W. was president and my conservative classmates viewed gay marriage was viewed as a legitimate attack on “family values.” They wrote essays about it in which the Bible was cited as a source. No wonder I defaulted into heterosexuality. It was the path of least resistance.

But my queer self was always there, buried. When I was a child I was so obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, I used to dress up in my mom’s red high heels and an orange Moonlight Madness t-shirt, a freebie from McAlpin’s, the department store where she worked as a buyer. For a long time, I found photos of me in this outfit mortifying. Now they make me wistful: I was so free to be whoever I wanted to be! There is something so painful to me about the purity of the self before it is corrupted by contact with the social world.

Later, there was performative masculinity, performative heterosexuality. I hated sports, but when I was ten and my family moved houses I got to choose wallpaper for my new bedroom and I chose a border that featured basketballs, soccer balls, a skateboard. This choice couldn’t have been further from the interests of the shy, unathletic bibliophile I was turning into. I wrote a list of “Girls I Like” on a Post-It and hid it in my room. I actually did like these girls, but you’d never see a comparable list of “Boys I Like,” because I didn’t have a crush on that popular snare drummer in the band—I just wanted to be him. Or be friends with him. Right?

I had a vivid romantic life in my fantasies, but dating-wise, I was a late bloomer. I met my first girlfriend in grad school. And then I married her. I might regret not being brave enough to be more sexually adventurous in my youth, but I don’t regret marrying my wife—my life partner, the mother of my son, my best friend. We’ve made a wonderful life together. But this also means I’ve closed off a piece of myself. I’ve stunted the gay teenager inside of me, locked him in the closet of my mind and heart.

But he’s still there. He comes out through the fiction I consume and create.

*

I feel my queerness most acutely when I watch teeny bopper movies and TV shows with gay protagonists. I get emotional watching, even when they’re geared toward a younger audience and are so cheesy they’re bordering on cringe. When Simon, of Love, Simon (2018), discovers the identity of the mysterious Blue and they share their first kiss on the Ferris Wheel. When Alex Strangelove, of Alex Strangelove (2018), contemplates his sexuality via the metaphor of cereal brands: “Heter-Os,” “Gay-Flakes,” or “Bi-Crunchies”? I get to vicariously experience what coming out to my mother would have felt like as a teen when Heartstopper’s Kit Connor tells Olivia Coleman (who doesn’t want Olivia Coleman to be their mom?) he’s bi.

These coming-out narratives were all released when I was in my 30s. The hit gay movie of my own teen years? Brokeback Mountain (2005). I loved Ang Lee’s film (and Annie Proulx’s story on which it’s based) and was upset when Crash won the Oscar over it. But really? A tragic tale about the doomed loved of two cowboys? That was my model for gay love?

And there were even fewer models of bisexuality. The first TV show I watched featuring a bisexual man was also in grad school. It was an episode of Ally McBeal I was watching with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, called “Pursuit of Loneliness,” in which Ally rejects a guy after learning he’s bisexual. Even after being called on it, Ally doubles down after the image of him in bed with another man intrudes upon her strictly hetero fantasies. This was particularly hard to watch with my future wife, since she was the only person to whom I’d openly confessed my own attraction to both women and men.

I didn’t watch Ally McBeal when it originally aired, but I did watch Friends. When I re-watched it during the pandemic lockdown, I re-discovered the episode called “The One Where Nana Dies Twice,” which might as well have been titled “The One in Which Chandler Has a Gay Quality.” Chandler’s co-worker mistakenly tries to set him up with a man and the friends reveal they all previously thought Chandler was gay, too, because he has a certain “quality” about him.

I remember watching this growing up and thinking, that’s me. I’m straight, but sensitive, which some people read as effeminate, that’s all. I liked to think this made me evolved. But in Kentucky in the nineties and early aughts, that “quality” was mostly considered a defect. It was unsettling, to be pegged so easily for something you thought you could hide, something you hid even from yourself, like I was giving off gay sonar—gaynar, tripping off everyone’s gaydar—that I wasn’t in control of.

*

When I first started writing, the idea of writing about myself held no appeal. My life, I felt—still feel—is boring. I grew up reading and watching fantasy, sci-fi, horror. Give me a wizarding school. A time-traveling island. An end-of-episode plot twist.

But when I tried my own attempts at the fantastical, the characters came out flat. It was like playing with paper dolls. My imagination was engaged, but the emotional heart wasn’t there. So I tried to flip this and wrote thinly veiled autofiction. I wrote about a little boy obsessed with the Wizard of Oz, who cross-dressed with his mom’s red pumps (“Not Nobody, Not Nohow”).

I wrote about Marcus, a closeted bisexual man who joins a marriage study with his wife (“Lipless”), after I, a closeted bisexual man, joined a marriage study with my wife. These stories brought personal vulnerability to the page, but they were…less fun to write. It was when I married the two strategies in a story like “Quantum Convention,” about Colin, a man meeting his multiple selves (including one in drag) at a parallel universe conference, that I found the sweet spot. A story premise that engaged my imagination and drew on my own vulnerabilities—in this case about my career choice and anxiety about having children.

And then came Eli. He was, as others seemed to intuit, a way for me to vicariously live out the parallel life of my inner stunted gay teen—not on screen in someone else’s fictional reality, but on the page in my own.

*

Straight Me: There’s a rainbow unicorn on the cover? This is the gayest cover ever.

Gay Me: There’s a rainbow unicorn on the cover! This is the gayest cover ever!!!

*

Being bi is confusing. It often feels like there are two teams: Team Gay or Team Straight. Pick one. Coming out is hard for me not just because of the shame of internalized homophobia (although I’m sure that’s a big part of it), but because I’ve never been sure if I can claim a queer identity based on attraction alone.

In fiction, nothing conveys character like action. You are what you do. And I’ve lived a straight life; I’ve made straight choices. Can you have imposter syndrome for your own sexuality? Because it often feels like I don’t have my gay credentials. But I’m sick of feeling that way.

If the worst version of this essay is me on the defense stand, maybe the best is a pride party. I do up the house in rainbow bunting. Buy a rainbow unicorn cake. Blast Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out.” I’ll invite everyone I’ve ever known over. Everyone I’ve never known, too. But the real guests of honor are those who helped me come out to myself first. Colin, Marcus, Eli. The Boy in Red Shoes.

The masks I’ve donned to write stories truer than the one I’ve made of my own life. I wrote about gay and bisexual characters, because it felt safe to do so in fiction. “Not me!” I could say. “Just my character.” I’m done thinking of that as cowardly. Because what it really was, was empowering. It gave me the chance to be myself by being someone else.

And now it gives me the courage to own my bisexuality, even though I’m married to a woman and never been with a man. It’s time to forgive myself for passing straight and finally embrace all sides of who I am. So come on over. Let’s party.

__________________________________

Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife by Eric Schlich is available from Abrams Books.

I am nothing if not a diligent student, so when my therapist, Mitchell asks me to track my headaches, think about what I hope to gain from an open marriage, and talk to my mother about the one she had, I take my homework seriously.

I track my migraines, but it’s hard to find a pattern. I can get a headache while dropping Nate off in his classroom, during lunch duty or my last-period class, picking Daniel up from Afterschool, getting the boys into bed at night. Or at four a.m., I might wake up from a dream in which my head is being crushed by boulders. I might find myself downing Excedrin before a date night with Stewart, trying to keep the pain at bay so I can maintain a compartment of myself for marital bliss and carefree sex. I might think about Matt, and the nausea will rise as light flashes behind my eyeballs. I’ll be forced into bed and will cry under the covers, hoping I can purge my tears as well as my headache before the kids find me. And my last surefire way to enter the migraine zone? Thinking about my other two assignments.

Why do I want an open marriage?

And do I really have to talk to my mother?

I ask Stewart to take the boys to the playground on a Saturday so I can call her. Earlier in the week, I sent an email asking if we could make time to talk. My mother and I speak on the phone regularly. So my request is designed to forewarn her: this won’t be a typical chat.

Of course, she writes back. How intriguing!

*

I rack my brain for days, trying to think of where to begin. And I silently rehearse as she answers the phone, fumbling the receiver, reminding me again of her new physical reality.

“Hi, Mom!” I say, summoning my best cheerful voice.

“Hello, sweetie,” she says, sounding like she’s far away. “I’m sorry. Just give me one moment while I get the phone in the right spot.”

It takes me back to phone calls with my grandmother in the months before she died. As often as not, the phone was upside down in her hand, and we’d have to shout at her to turn it around. At least my mother is aware of her issues.

“That’s better!” Her voice is slower than it used to be but chipper as ever. “So what’s going on? Your email got me so curious.”

I take a deep breath, and before I lose my nerve, I spout the opening I’ve practiced: “Well, I’m seeing a therapist now, and he gave me homework to do. One of my assignments is to talk to you about something. But I’m not sure how to say it.”

“I see!” she says. Sometimes I think my mother must be from central casting—she could have auditioned for the role of June Cleaver. “Well in that case, I suggest you just say it!”

While I’d guessed that my mother would respond like this, I’d never managed to script my next line. I take a deep breath and out tumbles an avalanche of unplanned words.

“Um, okay. So Stew wanted me to sleep with somebody else a few years ago like Dad told you that you should have an affair and so I did it his name is Matt and it went on for a while but now he doesn’t want to talk to me anymore and I think Stewart and I are still fine but I’m worried that I might have ruined my marriage and I don’t think I should ever do anything like this again except there were parts of it that were really nice and I miss Matt a lot but I don’t know if I really miss him or if I just miss the way he made me feel and I still love Stewart but I don’t think I can handle him being with other women and now I’m a mess and I have migraines all the time and I don’t know what to do.”

The moment I come up for air, I begin to sob. I’m not sure how much my mother has been able to decipher, but I can no longer speak. I cradle the phone between my left shoulder and ear and reach for the box of tissues by my bed.

“Oh, sweetie,” my mother begins. “You’ve been holding this in for a long time. I’m so glad you’re talking to me about it now.”

“You are?” I snuffle. “I was afraid to tell you. The last time I brought up, you know, you and Jim, you seemed really…uncomfortable.” I avoid calling it shame. Over a decade later, that conversation is still wrapped in the haze of postpartum exhaustion. But when I peel away the gauze that covers my own memory, I see my mother’s stiff shoulders. I hear her halting words: I was a virgin when we married. Your father thought an affair would give me confidence. It was a long time ago.

“I suppose I was,” she says. “And I’m still not eager to share intimate details about myself. But if you need to talk about it—well, that’s different.”

“Okay,” I say. “I guess I don’t really want to discuss details either. But I have a couple of questions. Just in general.”

“All right,” she says. “Ask away.”

“Do you think sleeping with other people will ruin my marriage?”

“Definitely not,” my mother says with such certainty that I laugh. She laughs, too. I’m reminded again of the sound of her laughter—like a ringing bell—when she used to talk to Jim on the phone. This is my real mother. Not the goody-two-shoes persona I tried to emulate throughout my childhood, but a whole person, one who defied the rules, is urging her daughter to do the same, and is laughing about it to boot.

“But how can you be so sure?” I say when we settle down.

“Because you and Stewart have the two magic ingredients,” she says. “You talk to each other, and you love each other. If you keep doing those two things, opening yourself up to new experiences can only make your marriage richer and stronger.”

“You make it sound so easy. Was it easy for you and Dad? Didn’t you get jealous?” I ask, fishing for information. “I mean, I’m assuming he had your permission to sleep with other people, too.”

“I’m not going to talk about your father’s experience,” my mother says, always the vault. Her words come out deliberately, with little pauses in between as she works to control the muscles of her mouth. “That’s a conversation you’ll need to have with him yourself.” I cringe at the mere thought of asking my father about his sex life or sharing even a shred of information about my own. “I’ll just say this: it was not easy. Not one little bit. We sometimes stayed up all night talking things through. But if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

A little lump of sadness rises in my throat as she says this. “But, Mom,” I say, “you had a real connection with Jim. And you’re still friends with him. Maybe that’s why you don’t have any regrets. Matt and I barely ever saw each other. And I’m wondering now if it was all just—I don’t know—superficial.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” says my mother. “Don’t you worry. There will be more.”

It doesn’t hit me until I’m hanging up the phone: there must have been more for my mother as well.

That night, after the kids are in bed, Stewart sits me down on the couch and asks me about the conversation.

“How did it go?” he says, looking like he just scored backstage passes at a Van Halen concert. “What did you find out? Anything scandalous?”

“Not really,” I say. “My mother always keeps it pretty vague.”

He sighs and shakes his head in disappointment. “So what did you talk about?”

“We just talked about open marriage in general, although she never calls it that. I doubt she even knows the term.” I pause, thinking of what else to say. I can’t tell Stew I asked my mother whether she thought our marriage was in trouble. It would reveal my own fear. The irony is not wasted on me when I choose to focus on something else: “She did say you and I are good communicators. That’s what’s most important.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” says Stewart. “And I happen to agree.” He squeezes my knee and kisses me. “I’m going to get some work done. Good night, my sexy Suitcase.” Suitcase is his nickname for me. Maleta is one of the few words he remembers from high school Spanish, and to Stew, it sounds like Molly. My husband’s mind is an interesting place.

“Good night, baby. I love you.”

Later, I lie in our bed and think about my parents in theirs, during the years of my childhood. We sometimes stayed up all night talking, my mother had said. I remember overhearing at least some of these conversations. I could never make out the words, but the tone of their blended voices—my father’s baritone and my mother’s alto—was always a comfort to me. And now my mom believes that I have learned, through osmosis perhaps, the importance of communication in my own marriage.

But an unformed thought hovers at the edge of my mind. I’m starting to believe that this is the real source of my migraines— unspoken truths that I refuse to acknowledge, even to myself. The thought is starting to take shape now. It’s about what my mother said to me, in the early days of her ataxia symptoms, as she began to slow down and stumble, to garble her words and drool.

Maybe it’s all my repressed rage, she’d said.

How does that rage fit into the picture of marital harmony she’s painted for me? A life in which she and my father gave each other freedom and talked through all their difficult feelings? Where did that rage come from?

And what does my mother’s rage mean for me?

*

I bring these questions to my next session with Mitchell. “What do you think is the source of your mother’s rage?” he asks me.

And I’m back in 1979. My father comes home from a trip with his students. He leads an experiential education program for high school seniors. My mom is a teacher, too, but the “normal” kind, with classes to teach and papers to grade. The kind who is also a mother and has to pick up her kids and shop for groceries and make dinner and wash the dishes. My mother sighs heavily when my dad announces he’s dropping off his laundry and leaving again the next day.

“That’s the only way my mom ever expressed her anger,” I tell Mitchell. “She sighed. I mean, how fucked up is that?”

“And how do you express your anger, Molly?” Mitchell asks. Suddenly it clicks.

“I don’t! That’s why I get migraines!”

“Ahh,” says Mitchell. “I think we’re onto something. Did you track your headaches like I asked you to?”

“Yeah,” I say. I’ve never been so excited to think about my headaches. I’ve taken notes on my phone. I open the document and start to read aloud. Nearly everything on my list—taking care of the kids, teaching, even sex with Stewart—has to do with a feeling of obligation. The only other item—thinking about Matt—relates to the disappearance of one thing in my life that didn’t feel obligatory. “I know men have obligations, too,” I say, “but I’m pretty sure that being a mother feels different than being a dad. It’s not just the duty to provide for your family. It’s like, as a mother, you’re supposed to give up your whole self, like you’re not allowed to have a self at all.”

“That’s not an uncommon way for women to feel. And it sounds like your mother modeled this type of femininity for you— with one exception.”

“Right! It’s like sexual freedom was her only outlet,” I say. “But she still blames her illness on repressed rage. So clearly that outlet wasn’t enough.”

“Molly,” says Mitchell, leaning in with his elbows on his knees. “It seems you have an opportunity here. What can you learn from your mother’s journey? Repressed emotion may have contributed to her illness. And repressed emotion seems very connected to illness in you as well—these debilitating migraines.”

I meet his gaze and nod furiously, tears filling my eyes. It’s such a relief to have someone spell out what the hell is going on with me. “I’m going to give a name to the part of you that feels these obligations and represses anger—let’s call her Straight-A Molly.” I laugh. “That definitely fits.”

“And since Straight-A Molly loves homework, let’s give her some. Our theme today is freedom. So I’d like you to fill out three lists.”

He tears a fresh piece of paper from his notebook and writes at the top “reassigning straight-a molly.” Below the heading, he creates three columns. I love this assignment already. The block letters, the straight lines. This is my jam.

“The first column,” Mitchell continues to narrate, “is ‘freedom from.’…What does Straight-A Molly need to free herself from? Next is ‘freedom to be.’ …And finally, ‘freedom to do.’ ” He finishes writing and gives the paper to me. It feels like he’s handing me an actual piece of freedom.

“Great work today, Molly,” Mitchell says. “I’ll see you in two weeks.”

__________________________________

From More: A Memoir of Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024.