Another year, another July 11, another summer day of sticking my hands into the soil and rooting around with the roses and missing you. I whip butter and sugar to make the mocha icing you used to spread over Angel Food cake. I have people for dinner and the kitchen smells like yours used to: Onions and wine, a faint strain of flowers, chocolate tempering on the stove. You never met my husband, but you'd like him if you did: Today, I wrote out a to-do list, and he did the things on it without a word: Compost, trash, light bulb in hall. He's handsome, he works hard, he's kind, he reads books. I lend out books and remember what you warned: Never lend books or money. I have no money to lend, anyway, but books I can't help it, I'm sorry. I lend them. I think of it this way: When I lend books I know I'm really just giving a gift. It's summer and there's no work and I read fervently, hungrily, a book a day the way you used to. My neck is sore from reading. Outside the rain's about to come and it smells like your house used to in summer, ripe magnolia blooms dropping onto the ground. The years pass without you, and I try to be grateful for every beautiful day I'm alive.
Patagonian Road
Friday, July 12, 2019
Saturday, February 16, 2019
Always a Winter Day
This year on my birthday, the wind gusts while the sun beams through puffy, swift-moving clouds. The air outside is electric, and the cat dashes madly up the stairs and down, unsettled, agitated, racing after the fabric balls I chuck across the living room. Usually, she’s a lazy cat. I study my hands, because someone once told me you can tell a person’s age by looking at their hands. My hands are thirty-five today, nicked in places from playing rough with the cat. My wedding band sparkles on my left hand, originally placed there as an engagement ring by my husband three years ago. It was my birthday, the first day of our engagement, a beautiful biting sun-splintered day like today.
Some birthdays, I cry – missing my mother, never with me on my birthday now. I feel sad opening gifts alone, presents wrapped and mailed days ago and now smelling only faintly, if I bring my nose close, of my childhood house, my mother’s hands, our mountain town. Some birthdays, years ago, I’d get drunk. Some birthdays, I gazed at a foreign world: A crescent-shaped beach in southern India when I turned twenty-three, my friend Katie on the sand beside me, wiping beer from her mouth and passing me the bottle, laughing as palm trees creaked and swayed overhead. One birthday, a sweltering Nicaraguan town, pineapple juice sticky on my fingers, the rose-colored sky reflected in crooked cobbled streets. One birthday, I held my newly published book in my hands.
Some birthdays, it’s been too cold to go outside. One birthday, an ice storm. Childhood birthdays: Pool parties on freezing winter days. Floppy pieces of pizza on paper plates, and opening presents in front of other people.
I take my birthday too seriously, I think. I get all existential and dread the day. My cat doesn’t know her birthday at all. My husband guesses it’s Halloween, because of her calico coloring, and so we give her extra little treats every year on that holiday. On my husband’s birthday, he prefers to go into the woods with water and food and walk for hours and hours, miles and miles, speaking to no one. I haven’t seen my brother on his birthday for many, many years. For my dad’s birthday every September, my mom bakes a mocha-chocolate cake. Once, for her birthday when I was just a little girl, my dad bought my mom red roses, more roses than I’d ever seen at once, and he had me carry them out to her while she worked in the garden. He followed behind and presented her with a slim black box, a gold necklace inside, the same necklace she’s worn every day since. That birthday, my mom was the one to cry, wiping tears from her eyes with dirt-stained gloves.
Saturday, May 5, 2018
A Little Life

But A LITTLE LIFE isn’t A FORTUNATE AGE. It’s not THE GROUP. In fact, I suspect many would be hard-pressed to find an easy contemporary for this complex, tragic story. It’s a singular, unforgettable, searing work, one that navigates the realms of trauma, physical pain, and grief by means of expert language and gorgeous, visceral scene. For the last third of A LITTLE LIFE, I wept, turning the pages and wiping my eyes as the story unfolded, gruesome and true.
The central figure in A LITTLE LIFE is Jude, the one who holds his group of male friends together. He’s the victim of a childhood trauma, one that is revealed to the reader in fits and starts, snippets and scenes, until we finally grasp the horror, the breadth of such abuse, in the book’s closing pages. Jude holds his secret tightly, and his friends come to accept this. When he’s crippled with pain, paralyzed on the floor, they hold him close; they take him to the doctor; they don’t ask questions about the cuts on his arms. His friends are his saviors, and he, with his understated beauty, his generosity, his humility, is also theirs.

In A LITTLE LIFE, “Friendship [means] witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs.” At one point, Willem wonders, “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going.” Willem and Jude’s friendship is like this: the most important relationship in each of their lives, and one that remains sexless, but not without love.
As handsome and charming as Willem is, it’s Jude who steals the reader’s heart. Jude, who keeps his pain knotted tight inside himself, who never complains aloud, who feels, all the time, like his legs will give out—it’s Jude who’s the true hero in A LITTLE LIFE, the one who survives, who even thrives, despite the obstacles he’s faced. Jude hates himself, hates his failing body, his terrible past. He can’t enjoy sex, can’t enjoy his physical body: He sees himself as flawed, “a piece of junk.”
For this reader, Jude’s pain was the most compelling part of the book. I’ve taken my body for granted my whole life, and yet it’s brought me to countries near and far, to the tops of frozen peaks and to the shores of vast oceans. It’s folded itself into cramped buses, cabs, rickshaws, boats—all so that I could see the world. Swimming, walking, skating, climbing, hiking, skiing, rowing, biking, running: verbs have always been the vocabulary that’s defined my life, punctuated the other, more literary life I’ve also led. It took A LITTLE LIFE to teach me to treasure these things, hold them close, thank my legs and arms for taking me through another pain-free day, another day when I could forget about my body and get down to the business of living.
A LITTLE LIFE is about enduring pain. Jude’s pain was never a friend, but it was always a companion, something he could count on, something he spent his life managing. And yet even in pain, Jude eked out success: As a prominent lawyer, he spent his final years with the man he always loved. The two gardened together, created beautiful spaces for themselves, those final years together all cool, shimmery pools and frosted cocktails in the afternoons. The book ends in tragedy, but it’s so imbued with beauty that you almost don’t even notice. It’s only when you finish reading do you realize you’ve been weeping for hours, and your face and hands are stained with tears. You’ll stand, aware of how your body hurts or doesn’t hurt, and you’ll see the world anew, pain-infused and beauty-bound, a brand new place each day.
Friday, April 27, 2018
There There

Still, his is the new voice of an old soul, the voice of someone who’s bound to stick around, make a splash, put new ideas about what it means to be Native into our collective head. His can be a weary voice, or a joking voice, or a voice imbued with an unnamable grief. It’s a voice saturated in new turns of phrase, a voice simultaneously youthful and wise. THERE THERE tells the story of urban Natives, and the prologue begins with a reflection on a bloodied past—“They did more than kill us. They tore us up.” Orange remarks that “getting us to the cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure.” But “we did not move to cities to die,” he explains. Instead, “the city made us new, and we made it ours.” For anyone still imagining each Native with a wolf at his shoulder and a feather in his hair, THERE THERE will upend that perception – one that’s sometimes true, but increasingly not.
In the city, Orange’s characters reinvent what it means to be of the earth. The city became home, because “the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been.” In the city, “Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth...Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? Were they shipped from Mars, or the moon?” In Orange’s world, “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building.” The city’s become home, where “the land is everywhere or nowhere.”
THERE THERE tells the stories of twelve different Natives, roaming the West Coast as they make their plodding way towards a long-awaited Oakland, California powwow. Some are going to make money; others to perform, to dance, to don the regalia that’s been gathering dust in their closets. Some are going to find the parents who long ago left them behind, and who now are feeling sorry, feeling guilty. As the story progresses, the connections between each of the twelve characters reveal themselves; they are interconnected, and their journeys have crosses many times, without their even knowing.
In one of the book’s final chapters, Tony Loneman, one of the twelve, puts on his regalia, then takes a train to the powwow. “No one on the train knows about the powwow,” Orange writes. “Tony’s just an Indian dressed like an Indian on the train for no apparent reason. But people love to see the pretty history. Tony’s regalia is blue, red, orange, yellow, and black. The colors of a fire at night. Another image people love to think about. Indians around a fire. But this isn’t that. Tony is the fire and the dance and the night.” An older white woman asks Tony about his regalia, but when he invites her to the powwow, she demurs. “People don’t want any more than a little story they can bring back home with them…to talk about how they saw a real Native American boy on a train, that they still exist.”
THERE THERE is often searing, frequently beautiful, and ultimately tragic. That’s how so many Native lives look today: Conflicted, complex, and sometimes brimming over with love. There’s a grief beneath the surface, and there’s hope. There’s fear, doubt, and shame. There’s an unnamable legacy, ugly and beautiful both. To be a Native today means so many things, so many different things: It means to be alive, to smell the air, to put both feet on the ground and keep moving.
Friday, September 22, 2017
We write to nurture our inner lives, to challenge ourselves with ourselves.
- the incomparable, ever inspired Philip Graham
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Hunger
I saw Roxane Gay last February at the American Writers and
Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. It was cold and gray that
weekend, and I wore wool the whole time. I was walking with my friend Austin, making
our way out of the conference hotel and into downtown D.C., and all of a
sudden, Austin whispered, “Roxane Gay,” and he pointed with his gaze.
I knew what Roxane Gay looked like, of course—I’d seen the
pictures online and in her books’ jackets. But nothing prepared me for Roxane
Gay in the flesh, just a few feet away from us, leaning against a wall and
smoking a cigarette. She was dressed in dark colors, denim and black, and
though I’d sensed nothing a moment before, I now felt her presence like a
spirit in the room with you when you’re sleeping. I gasped. She was the woman
who’d written the stories that broke me down, made me weep, made me remember
for years afterwards. She was a legend, a literary goddess, and here she stood,
smoking a cigarette and leaning against a wall, just a few steps away from
where we walked. We hurried past, not the type of fans to gush or hug or be a
bother, but I was chilled for the rest of the night, stunned by what I dared to
feel coming off of her: this latent power, warm like the sun.
*
I couldn’t believe it: Roxane Gay’s Hunger was on the shelf, and no one had snapped it up yet. I love
our library, especially when it feels like no one goes. I checked it out,
tucked it into my bag, and had it open by lunchtime, sandwich and lemonade
forgotten. “We should not take up space,” Gay writes on page thirteen. “We
should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men,
acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to
disappear, but its something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over
again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”
Hunger: A Memoir of
(My) Body is Gay’s courageous, beautiful, terrible story of her
coming-of-age, her sexuality, her roaring twenties and fumbling thirties, her rise
to fame, and always her body, her body, and her hunger. The book feels like
you’re reading someone’s diary. It feels, uncomfortably and blessedly, like an
invasion. This is the best, rawest, most troubling, most healing kind of memoir
there is, and it’s the kind I can’t yet make—she tells us everything, she lays
her life bare, she opens her heart and dares to let us take it. The intimacy of
this book is a revolution, and should be required reading for all women and
men, all mothers and fathers, all teachers and civil servants. Everyone who
resides in a body in this world owes it to herself to read Hunger.

Reading Hunger was
a little bit like reading Americanah,
by Chimanada Ngozi Adichie—the reading process was also a process of learning
how it is to be black in America, or, in Gay’s case, to be too big in America—for
armchairs, for planes, for the public’s comfort. The stories she tells break my
heart and smack me in the face, because of how little I’ve seen, and what I’ve
been willing to ignore—in airports, in college, and even in my own classroom.
Chairs that don’t fit, clothes that are always too small, doorways that are
always too narrow. Strangers who take food from your grocery cart and put it
back on the shelves. Nurses who wince when they weigh you. After a while, it
all gets internalized, “and then I start to hate myself for my unruly body that
I seem incapable of disciplining, for my cowardice in the face of what other
people might think.”
In the end, Hunger
is a story of triumph, even if the book isn’t framed that way. “I often
wonder,” Gay writes at the close of her memoir, “who I would have been if this
terrible thing had not happened to me, if I hadn’t spend so much of my life
hungering so much.” And by the very end, she’s asking her reader to look
within: “Does anyone feel comfortable in their bodies?”

I closed the book this morning, tears in my eyes, and I thought about the day I’d seen Roxane Gay standing outside the Marriott Hotel in downtown D.C. I thought about the experience I had at that conference—all the walking, the standing, the waiting, the sitting, and how easy it was for me to fit. I thought about my own body and the times I’ve hated on it, run it ragged, dragged it too far, pushed it to make it thinner, starved it. Beat on it. All the ways I’ve hated my body over the years.
I can still feel the way the writer’s strength hit me like a
warm gust of wind, though she hadn’t looked at us, hadn’t moved at all. In
fact, if Austin hadn’t said her name, I might have walked right past without
noticing the tall, denim-clad woman smoking a cigarette by herself.
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
A Ranch Bordering the Salty River


In language rich with natural imagery and tense with the poles of joy and disillusionment, Page has written a collection that leaves an indelible imprint. These layered stories-in-poems render birth extraordinary, death ordinary, and the natural world a disappearing muse, a forested siren the narrator yearns to know. Ever relevant and always beautiful, “A Ranch Bordering the Salty River” contemplates the possession of land alongside the inscrutable mystery of the natural world.
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Not Altogether Yogic
I was storming out of the Target, Seventh Generation laundry
detergent in hand. They didn’t have our kind of toilet paper, and I’d travelled
all this way, twenty minutes off the route, just to stock our house. Why was I
the only one to stock our house with toilet paper, anyway? When did my husband
last buy the stuff? So I was storming out of the Target, laundry detergent so
at least I wouldn’t be leaving empty-handed—though this probably would mean I’d
have to do laundry, in the end.
*
It had already been an awful morning, relatively speaking:
not enough caffeine, not enough breakfast, unwashed hair, unwashed clothes (no
laundry detergent), not enough time. And my husband’s ever-present refrain:
“Why not leave a little more time in the morning? Why must you write until the
very moment it’s time to go?”
And my screams, in reply: “BECAUSE I AM A WRITER,” even
though some days it feels like the least productive activity available in a
house filled with unwashed clothes.
And then I was tearing down Cerrillos Road, perpetually late
to yoga class, but I’ve set my intentions to attend, and this didn’t feel very
yogic at all, speeding along at a great rate and cursing the slower drivers.
“Go!” I shouted. “Go!” My window was down, and the man in the red car next to
mine was looking over, smiling.
*
Naturally, in the end, yoga class was cancelled, the man at
the front desk told me smugly.
So as not to make the whole trip a waste, I arrived, sweaty
and rushed and yoga clad, at the Target, where I stormed through for the one
thing we truly needed: toilet paper, but only the natural, recycled, non-toxic,
non-paraben, non-cancerous toilet paper, please—our bottoms require this.
Sold out.
*
And as I was heading to the counter to pay, there you stood,
blocking the aisle. You were wearing a red shirt like all the other employees,
neat and new and tucked into your khakis. You were unloading something,
toothpaste maybe, mouthwash, I didn’t look closely. You were helping a woman
pushing one of those massive Target carts, and what with the cart, and you, and
her, and me, there was no space for anyone to move. I was crabby, yoga-cranky,
and all I wanted to do was go home.
Finally, you’d answered the woman’s question, and now we
were letting her pass. Now I was moving ahead. I heard it distinctly: “Good
morning,” you said sweetly to me, your voice gentle and genuine, like you
really wanted to greet me with kindness. I didn’t look up at you. I said
nothing in reply. Instead, I walked towards the register, imagining your eyes on
my back—maybe you were rolling them, or maybe you were a little stunned at my
cruelty, or maybe you were used to this, and you just kept on with your work,
smiling down at the boxes you had left to unpack, your sweet voice filling the
aisles.
How ugly of me, not to reply. How little my problems that
day. A greeting, after all, costs nothing, and smiles are free. This morning I
sit with my tea, the air fresh outside after an all-night rain, and I cringe at
myself, wondering what would have been the harm.
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
A Birthday Letter
Dear Hen,
Five years you've been gone, and still you come to me daily—your lavender scent, or the sound
of your voice, or some little thing that you did so long ago. Today I thought about
that recipe you had me copy down, beef bourguignon when I was about thirteen
years old, too young to even fathom cooking a dinner like that. I told you I
liked the smell, told you it was my favorite meal, and so while you cooked, I
copied, noting how similar our writing looked: the rounded consonants, the
looping vowels, our shared impatient cursive.
I thought about the garden path today, which the new owner
neglects. I know because I went there two summers ago, just showed up on her doorstep
weeping, and I continued to weep as she walked me through your old house,
pointing out all the things they’d changed, steeling me for the upstairs, which
they’d gutted: all of our bedrooms, the narrow toy closet with all the games,
Poppa’s dark office with the gleaming desk, and my dad’s childhood room with
the flowered paper on the walls and the lace curtains that billowed out over
the driveway—all of it, gone. They’d left just one space, one tiny room
unchanged: the hall closet, right next to your old bedroom. That room smelled
just like you, preserved after all those years. I went into the little closet and shut the door and
breathed in deeply and tried not to cry while outside, the new owner waited
kindly.


Tonight I’ll cook beef bourguignon. I wrote a book and
dedicated it to you. The cactus are blooming, and the sky overhead is a sharp
and piercing blue. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t think of you, and in this
way, I keep you alive.
Happy Birthday to my grandmother, Hen. I love you forever and ever.
Happy Birthday to my grandmother, Hen. I love you forever and ever.
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
No One Can Pronounce My Name
In the tradition of Jhumpa Lahiri,
Nell Freudenberger, and Akhil Sharma, Rakesh Satyal’s NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME emerges as the funniest, freshest story of the lot. There’s a market for
Indian fiction, as the author astutely observes through the lens of his
protagonist, Ranjana, and NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME has budged itself right to
the front of the line. This beautiful, hilarious, and richly reflective novel
explores the fate of the Indian family on the North American continent, with
the narrator’s observations constantly drawing parallels between East and West,
old and young, ancient and modern. Ultimately, the Indian-American family is
reshaped, reformed, and refashioned into a motley crue of friends: The
flamboyantly gay Teddy, the tentative Harit, the gaudy, talkative Cheryl, and
the literary Ranjana. In America, the author seems to suggest, the family that
endures is the friend group we adopt.
In smart-but-not-isolating prose,
Satyal presents the lives of disparate characters whose lives intersect.
There’s the Indian contingency—we first meet Harit, who, despite ten years in
the States, feels no more acclimated than he did when he arrived. Donning saris
and lipstick each night, he pretends to be his dead sister for his mother’s
sake, though it’s not until the last quarter of the book that we learn the
true, stupid reason for his sister’s untimely death. (We also learn that, all
along, his mother knew it was him—such is the humor of this clever,
tightly-wound book.) With the gender bending of the first few pages comes an
element of the queer—unexpected for a book about Indian families, but knotted
deeply into the fabric of these interconnected lives Satyal has designed.
From Harit’s life, we move to the
story of Ranjana, who has lived in the States for fifteen years but who, the
narrator reveals, still doesn’t feel a part of the culture either; she doesn’t
drink, doesn’t flirt, doesn’t walk on the street with men she doesn’t know. In
our flirty, sexy culture, Ranjana is an outsider: at her job at a
proctologist’s office, in the market, and even, it seems, in the company of her
own husband. The conversations she has with her college-aged son over the phone
are conversations among strangers; Prashant, the son, can never end the call
soon enough.
Ranjana’s only peace is her writing
hour, after she’s served her husband dinner, worked all day, and completed all
errands. Late at night, all alone, unfueled by wine or weed or caffeine, “It
was easily her favorite time of day,” Satyal writes, “work barely a memory,
dinner accomplished, her husband appeased, a story her only world for an hour
or two. It was at once fun and disorienting.” It is Ranjana who sails the rest
of the book forward, she who guides the fumbling characters towards unity.
“That was what writing really was,” she observes, “an excuse to gild your
loneliness until it resembled the companionship of others. It was entertaining
yourself when you had no other entertainment. It was the way out.” Just as her
own writing becomes a “way out,” so too do the characters, for each other,
become an alternative to the realities they occupy.
As
Ranjana’s taste for writing develops, she joins a writing group, where, each
week, the members tear each other apart while defending their own bad writing
to the death. Ranjana, for her part, spends the hour feeling self-conscious and
reading her worst work, hiding her bloody Indian vampire stories for
after-hours, when she’s alone. It’s only when she finally shares one with the
group that the other members take note of her ability, and she’s invited to a
writers’ conference.
Because I’m
a writer, I loved this book, whose climax concluded with two days spent at said
conference. The book’s four central characters – Ranjana, Cheryl, Teddy, and
Harit – end up making the trip together, in one car, though Ranjana’s the only
writer of the group. In one of the final scenes, the four of them meet Pushpa
Sondi, the book’s version of Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ranjana’s initial reaction is
not admiration or awe but envy, “jealousy, the top of her mouth turning to
metal. All the goodwill that she had built up – the warmth that she had felt
upon ingesting the stories and their beauty – was effaced upon the author’s
entrance….there was no emotion as swift and complete.” This is the type of
writing that makes me love NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME; such fumbling grace,
so real, so true. The envy is Ranjana’s and mine.
Just as
quickly, Ranjana’s envy melts at the woman’s next words: “Fear is as common as
blood,” Sondhi admonishes her audience. “It courses through us and is, in its
way, a vital source. It is the requisite formula for our continued work as
writers.” Ranjana is “immediately reenergized,” and begins to wonder how her
own writing, however humble its beginnings, could provide readers something
that even the great Sondhi’s words could not.
Like others
that have come before it, NO ONE CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME is a poignant reflection
of what it means to be the Other, the relocated, the one who came from
somewhere else. This is an Indian story, but it might as well be mine—or my
grandmother’s, who came here from Finland at twenty-two with a fake passport
and no English to speak of, but who worked as a maid in rich ladies’ houses to
raise my mom right. While my grandmother grew old and white-haired and feeble,
I became a writer myself, shaping stories around the journey she’d taken so
many years ago. At the book’s bold close, Ranjana seduces her husband,
rekindling a love she thought had died years ago: “She turned her head to his
and pressed her laughing mouth to his agog one. She kissed the man who had
brought her to this country, to this house.”
In NO ONE
CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME, all of your wildest dreams come true: A housewife goes
on to earn bestselling fame. A bumbling Indian man finds love in Men’s
Furnishings. A chatterbox receptionist rises above her child’s death, and a man
forgives himself a fatal mistake. In the characters’ fumblings, we recognize
our own, and my only response was compassion.
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