In the summer of 2019 we adapted Emily’s cult novel about a hair-based virus, The Blondes, into a scripted podcast. Starring Madeline Zima, Yvonne Zima, Rob Belushi, Helen Hong, and Bree Elrod, the podcast was a moderate hit for the then-new medium. A few months later the world plunged into the Covid lockdown and things got weird from there.

To mark the fifth-ish anniversary we remastered the original episodes and got together in front of a mic to talk about The Blondes’ strange journey from satire to the uncanny.

You can listen to this talk below, and all the remastered episodes on iTunes, Spotify, or on Youtube.

We discuss what happened along the way, what we got right about pandemics, and what we got wrong. We share how the series ended up a worldwide hit, what the French don't find funny, and the craziest thing ever said by a network executive. We also talk about why a DIY ethic work matters and give an update on the future of The Blondes.

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At some point in the process of writing The Morgue Keeper, an image appeared to me: amidst a horde of exhausted workers, a blind couple trudging through the dirty blue dawn, all en route to yet another round of seemingly timeless drudgery. I don’t know whether the image was an ancient memory resurfacing after decades of repression, or whether I was imagining it after having immersed myself so long in the days of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Whatever its origin, in my mind the couple stood out in terrible relief, their ragged clothes, their grimy gray textile-worker’s caps, their battered shoes, the heavy bag on her shoulder, his bamboo stick tapping and sweeping. I saw their broken steps, their pale flitting eyes. Over and over I heard the woman shouting her desperate refrain: “Is the bus here yet?”

Her words began to haunt me. It became clear that this was a scene I had to write, though for a time I couldn’t say why. But th…

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I came across the story of Milena Jesenská by accident. It was 2013, and I was living in London, UK in pretty dire straits. I wasn’t selling many stories and my writing career was almost a fiction itself. That’s when I found out there was a fellowship being offered by a university in Vienna that would fund the creation of projects for European journalists (remember the UK was still part of Europe at this time). The fellowship was called The Milena Jesenská Fellowship for Journalists. Naturally I applied, but my interest was piqued. Who was this Milena Jesenská? I’d never heard of her.

So I searched online and found a sparsely populated Wikipedia page. Okay, she was Franz Kafka’s first translator…. They had a brief love affair…. His letters to her were published in the 1950s in the epistolary book Letters to Milena. Okay, neat I guess? But still, I wasn’t satisfied. There was still something nagging at me to find out more about her. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Something was telling me I needed to know more about her story.

I began to look for books either written about her or by her. I found that almost everything written about her was only published in either Czech or German, however I managed to find five books that were translated into English. I bought and devoured all five. I learned that she and Kafka met twice for two lovers’ trysts, but it’s not known what happened during them. After Kafka died, she became instrumental in fighting the rise of fascism in Europe, hiding Jews and dissidents in her home, helping them escape over the border, and writing for banned publications denouncing the Nazis. She was arrested by the gestapo in 1939 and died in a concentration camp in 1944.

When I was done reading, I stared off into space, absolutely gobsmacked over the life of this brave, unconventional woman with moxie, gumption, and chutzpah.

But tantamount to all that, I was struck by the fact that I’d never heard of her. I began mentioning her to others, even those who considered themselves followers of Kafka, and no one I spoke to had ever heard of her.

I found that to be such a shame.

Perhaps the biggest shame is that Jesenská is not even considered a written authority on her own life. She is only remembered (if she is remembered at all) not by her own words, but by the words of others. She is mostly remembered in the epistolary book Letters to Milena, which was published in the 1950s by Kafka’s editor and friend Max Brod against Kafka’s final wishes. The book only contains Kafka’s letters to her. Milena’s letters to Franz have never been found.

At this point, I said to myself, “Someone ought to write a novel about her.”

Then I realized, “Wait a minute… I’m someone.”

One of the more striking aspects of Jesenská’s story that captivated my attention was the fact that she had such fortitude in a time when women were expected in polite Viennese society to stay on the sidelines. In 1918, the Great War had just ended, and if one didn’t die in the conflict, the Spanish flu epidemic finished off the job. Men were coming back from the front with hastily patched-up faces and phantom limbs. There were coal and fuel shortages, breadlines, and inflation was out of control. Respectable women were selling their bodies on the streets to support their families. And here’s Milena, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, who decides, come hell or high water, that she’s going to be an author. It’s so ostentatious, brave, and brazen. And my body of work has always been drawn to the stories and voices of women who find their power, and have the courage to use them against all odds. As the kids might say, I stan a queen.

In recent times, there has been a wonderful, corrective push to acknowledge the achievements of women that historically were attributed to men. Known as “The Matilda Effect,” much ink has been spilled revealing how often women are only remembered by the men in their lives (who stole their ideas). When we look at famed literary love affairs, for decades our understanding of women such as Hadley Hemingway, who was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, or Zelda Fitzgerald, wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald, has almost exclusively been through the eyes of their famous husbands. Luckily, the times being what they are, contemporary literature has finally tried to offer these unheard viewpoints a microphone.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain recounts the marriage between Hadley and Ernest Hemingway from her point of view when the young couple first moved to Paris from Toronto and he began work on The Sun Also Rises. It details Hadley’s love, pain, mourning, healing, and hope as her relationship with Ernest breaks down amongst this philandering and disloyalty.

Then author Therese Anne Fowler gave us Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald to offer Zelda’s oft-ignored viewpoints on her marriage to F. Scott, how she was unjustly called mentally infirm, and how she saw the relationship between her husband and Hemingway as they gallivanted around 1920s Paris together.

Today, more and more novels attempt to offer a glimpse into the overlooked lives and views of the women who loved famous men like Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring about a fictional affair between Jan Vermeer and his muse Griet, or Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell about Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway.

These are just a couple of examples from the literary world where we as both authors and readers are attempting to reevaluate what we know about history, and reveal the unknown stories of the women who deserve their due.

Milena Jesenská was so much more than a footnote in history, or some man’s lover, and she has been overlooked and glossed over for far too long. That is the idea behind crafting Letters to Kafka, which is my attempt to restore her voice. This novel imagines what she might have said in her lost letters to Kafka, and also imagines from her POV what might have happened during those two trysts. The act of writing this in her voice is critical because it restores her as a written authority on her own life, and it removes her as a passive object in the story. This is done so that, henceforth, she might not simply be known as Kafka’s lover, but that he might be known as hers.

CHRISTINE ESTIMA is an Arab woman of mixed ethnicity (Lebanese, Syrian, and Portuguese) and the author of the novel Letters to Kafka and the short story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society. She has written for the New York Times, The Walrus, VICE, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. Her story “Your Hands Are Blessed” was included in Best Canadian Stories 2023. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism and a finalist for the 2023 Lee Smith Novel Prize. Estima has a master’s degree from York University and lives in Toronto.

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As you might have noticed, we did not complete our 1990s film playoffs yet. Within a 48 hour period we got assigned a full feature script and—after testing a lens on our building’s roof—I fell down the stairs holding an entire camera kit. While not broken, my ankle was the size of a football for all of June. It was one of those moments where you have to limp away from anything non-essential. While recovering—and still working—I started thinking about how writers can get obsessed with efficiency at the expense of art.

During a cross-country drive this week I turned on the recorder with Emily Schultz and we talked about the importance of not writing, as well as how long periods of convalescence could be formative for writing habits.

Because it’s us, we also talked about mosh pit injuries, Italian Jaws ripoffs, and gangrene.

EMILY SCHULTZ: Unfortunately, distraction does not help my driving.

BRIAN J DAVIS: What I was thinking about since I busted my ankle up was how important immobility was to learning how to write. You do have to learn that skill: focusing and being away from the world. But you also have to eventually unlearn that.

ES: So you had this unexpected thing happen. It made you look at your habits differently?

BJD: When I’ve talked with so many artists and writers over the years it seems like we all had this critical moment in childhood—an illness, or an accident—and it took us out of the flow of time. And that gave us the skills to do this. When someone asked me how I survived five years of writing for an alt weekly without being fired, the only answer I had was: I never once filed anything late.

ES: You’re talking about two different things there.

BJD: But two connected things! We learn how to be alone to do what we do.

ES: Where you pretty much only have your imagination.

BJD: But there’s a tradeoff. We have to then learn how to distract ourselves from the work. My theory is that’s when the ideas get good. Let’s say I write every day and I hit my deadlines. It will be finished, but there’s no guarantee of that being good.

ES: So for me that alone time was in the sixth grade. I broke my ankle and I had a full length cast and I was on crutches for a full season. There was a complication, which was gangrene. Going back to how you learn to be alone in those long stretches of childhood illness—

BJD: Wait! You don’t get to say “gangrene” and move on! Tell the gangrene story.

ES: The problem was the cast was too tight. So after a couple of days my parents didn’t understand why I was still crying about my break. I was still screaming so they took me to the doctor and he cut a little window in the cast to take a look. And everything seemed fine. But he didn’t cut the window up high enough to see where it was actually rubbing. By the time the cast came off I had this stinky black necrosis on my heel.

BJD: So unlike many other people, you’ve been a zombie before. When you’re writing The Blondes, you’re writing from a place of real lived experience.

ES: I do know what my own rotten flesh smells like!

BJD: Alright, so mine begins at my first punk show. I’m 14 and I go to see the Bad Brains. I am this tiny art punk and my friends convince me to go into the pit. I begin my “mosh” and within seconds I’m head-butted in the stomach. I’m knocked backwards and on the ground. And I was like, that hurt. And then later that night I was like, that still hurts. The next day I could not walk upright. My mom takes me to the hospital and my appendix is about to burst. I end up missing the first month of ninth grade, and I think that permanently took me away from my peer group. I just didn’t bond with them. My only social life after that was zines or bands. By the time I was 17 the UK Subs were crashing at my apartment—I mean, that’s amazing, but not normal.

ES: And your ankle brought you back to thinking about that?

BJD: What’s interesting is right after I fucked up my ankle, my immediate split second thought— after screaming—was I'm going to have a bit of down time after this. Maybe change some things about my life.

ES: What are some distraction techniques for writers, to get away from too much focus?

BJD: One of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock stories is how he worked with screenwriters. The screenwriter would be at Hitchcock’s house or studio bungalow and his whole thing was to avoid work as long as possible. They’d have breakfast and then breakfast would lead into lunch. They’d order something insane, like lobster thermidor. Then after lunch, they’d have cocktails. At 3 p.m. they’d be hammered. And that’s when they might write a few ideas down. This was completely orchestrated by Hitchcock because when you set out to seriously work, there’s a chance you’re going to stick with your first or second level ideas when really you want to skip ahead your third or fourth.

ES: I think what happens when I get stuck is it takes something to jostle me loose to get unstuck. I have to feel like I know where I’m going. When I was younger, I just wrote and felt it, and wound up where I wound up. Now I have to have more sense of direction. And if I don’t know where I’m going I can’t sit down and write it.

BJD: If I can reveal something about you as a writer, when you start you will burn through a book. You’ll write 80 pages and then your life will fall apart or something, and you’ll not go back to it for two months. But you’ll go back to it in a completely different state of mind.

ES: I didn’t know that I had this break at 80 pages and then went back in.

BJD: It’s almost like you’re starting a new relationship with a novel and are unsure at around the one month point. You’re like, “I don’t know. Let’s take a break and see if we really like each other.”

ES: The other thing that happens when you’re a writer is obviously sometimes you have to stop writing to go promote a book!

BJD: With me and screenwriting, I’ve gotten into this groove now where if I write one good page, I’m happy. And if I write 20 good pages in one sitting, I’m happy. I think that’s actually a very good spot to get to. You’re not judging yourself on your productivity, you’re judging if you still have ideas that day or not.

ES: I actively try not to write too long in terms of page count anymore. I mean, even The Blondes was too long.

BJD: Considering we’re adapting it right now, yes, I agree!

ES: When I went back and I looked at it this month, it’s really strange. It’s incredibly literary for a horror novel.

BJD: It’s incredibly literary for someone who had gangrene!

ES: It’s the book I wrote the fastest, that I was the most efficient on, and it’s the one that people like the best. And I don't think it’s my best book at al!

BJD: I think it doesn’t matter if a book takes 30 days of effective writing time or three years. Good or bad, it’s going to be up to other things. I think that some ideas have energy and other ideas don’t.

ES: And it’s a little bit luck of the draw. So what is your go-to when you need distraction?

BJD: If I wrote a lot during the day, now I know exactly what to do: watch a very bad movie. And it’s not that I’m going to sit in judgment about a bad movie. I want to watch a movie like that to remind myself that you can actually reduce this form to the bare minimum effort at storytelling, with no budget whatsoever, and you can still have something watchable for an hour and 30 minutes. It’s hypnotic. It’s better than Ativan. Something like Killer Crocodile— a Jaws ripoff filmed in the Dominican Republic by Italians. What’s your go-to?

ES: Soccer, obviously. I don’t think that I learn anything from it though.

BJD: You come back with everyone’s story of the week though, which is very you.

ES: I do go out in the world and never come back without some kind of interaction! I know what’s happening with everybody in the neighborhood.

BJD: So your gas in the tank is talking to people out in the world?

ES: Right. Like, just before we left for this wedding, I was sitting in a cafe and two women were sitting next to me and they were having a chat. They were obviously good friends. And one of them said, “Blah blah something your boyfriend.” Then she corrected herself. “I mean our boyfriend.” And they both just kind of giggled after that.

BJD: And there you have an entire generation and era in one line of dialogue.

ES: And after hearing something like that I could go home and write all day!

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My earliest writings are still some of my finest. In junior high, because I was a ham, I pandered to my friends by writing Choose Your Own Adventure stories in which they were the protagonists. These stories were written in second person, and focused on romance plots (“You are standing on a windswept moor at twilight, the sun is setting behind your amber locks, you are lit like a fiery torch...” etc.) and they were populated by characters from popular films. My chosen form was the diamond-shaped folded note, and length was constrained by the maximum width of notebook pages that when thus folded would still slide through the air vent of a locker.

The recipient chose the character/actor who currently held real estate in their heart, I drafted three or four fairly PG sexy adventures based on scenes from the movie (it was the ’90s…think Crocodile Dundee, or Tom Cruise in Cocktail), now recast as the love interest to my friend/reader, who navigated by multiple choice options. I did most of my writing during biology or algebra class (hours four and five), and then self-distributed the following day during “office”—that magic hour where I was assigned to do menial secretarial tasks for the ladies in the principal’s office. (The principal was a coach, so he was never there. Most of the teachers were also coaches, and so also often not there). Every day in zero hour, I stuffed my romantic oeuvre into the lockers of my friends, while collecting the attendance slip papers clipped to each of the classroom doors.

I haven’t thought about it for years, but when I was finishing up the edits on my new novel Porthole I realized that this “serious” novel I’d been laboring over for a decade was really an extension of my junior high model: collaged scenes from my favorite films, populated by mash-up versions of the actor crushes I’ve had over the years—not exactly navigated by multiple choice, but definitely focused on the fallout from the choices my character had made in her rather vexed career as a filmmaker. When I began, I thought art is art, so the protagonist could be a version of me, and I chose the first person for the point of view. (After all, I no longer have access to the locker vents of my friends.)

I had a few things wrong, however. The main character in my novel Porthole is a filmmaker, and I am not. The protagonist, Helena Désir, is a rare species: someone who has managed to have critical and commercial success, and beyond this, she is a woman who knows how to wear the pants in a male-dominated industry, even if at times that means pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable for a woman in the public eye. What we share is a love of film. However, I am an obsessive movie fan, and someone without much discipline when it comes to binge-watching, and repeat play movie marathons. My relationship to the medium is not objective—though I tried to be studious and academic in my research for this book, the content really comes from the many film infatuations I’ve had over the years that derailed me from life, the universe, basic work tasks, etc.

The degree to which I feel for characters on-screen is beyond my control—the intensity of my obsession and/or identification with actors, or to be more specific, actors-as-characters. When I was a teenager I kept a picture of Daniel Day Lewis in a heart-shaped frame on my night table. These are some of the fiercest crushes I’ve lived through, and some of my worst breakups.

So when I began writing Porthole, I was trying to see through the screen to the other side, trying to get some objectivity on the form that has taken up a lot of my time and attention, even though I work in another medium entirely: words on a page! I wanted to inhabit the voice of someone who had the power and agency to build these deeply affecting immersive realms from the materials of our real world—professional actors, constructed sets, costumes—but on her side of the camera, she would control the fantasia, she would not be overtaken by it. I wanted to write someone who was totally unlike myself, never starstruck, never fangirl. She would not nerd out!

My protagonist was on the other side of the art form that felt to me so totalizing, so absorbing. As Helena came to me, it was often in a barrage of unexpected contradictions. I knew she needed to be a tyrant, and a powerhouse, but as she emerged she was also self-deprecating; she was an auteur but with a pulpy agenda, an anti-intellectual poseur and an arthouse snob whose successes are failures and vice versa — she was selfishly committed to her artistic vision, to the point of myopia, but that also meant she was emerging as someone difficult, incapable of collaboration, insensitive, exploitative, often manipulative. I knew she must be able to charm to seduce her conquests, but I felt she was also deeply disinterested in whether or not she was charming. There she was, hovering around and haunting the edges of my thinking, building up her own surface, her own way of seeing, a few too many opinions, and a whole heap of irreconcilable personality traits. I wrote her in full rant, but knew I also had to figure out how to write her inarticulation. She was driving me nuts, to be fair, and drawing out the process. Beyond this, the reality of writing a novel is that it takes more time than fourth and fifth hour STEM courses with revisions and book-bindings (the football fold) done in the commercial breaks during David Letterman.

I never expected to feel something for Helena beyond the challenge of having to make her seem real. But in fighting my way through her contradictions and her paradoxes, the answer was never true or false, never A or B, and I realized I was fixated on watching her sort through her vexed choices. By the time I had finished the book, I had begun to see her as a cheerleader for a certain kind of commitment to making art, someone resolved and stubbornly resistant to seeing her artistic process as the means to an end. This commitment to put her relationship to her art above almost every other relationship in her life doesn’t make for a seamless existence, nor will it make her relatable across the board for all readers, but she is a champion for being uncompromising about the importance of art, which as a writer, sometimes I feel is very difficult to sustain without a cheerleader.

As I continued to listen to her, I began to accept that Helena simply wouldn’t have an unimpeachable ethic, that her choices were not ones that would be easily reconcilable: she wasn’t solvable. But she certainly did choose her own adventures, and followed through. She was maddening, but compelling, attractive but dangerous as an object of affection, and suddenly I knew I had a serious crush. I began to imagine myself not as someone inhabiting her voice, but more like an actor in one of her projects, trying to teach myself how to see failure and see beyond failure as she did. I felt myself allowing her monologues to wash over me, allowing her Bernhardian pessimism to operate as comic relief, and as a release valve around my own anxiety about failure or success in my writing.

And so it came to pass, I was smitten with my protagonist. For the next installment in this romance, check your locker vent, or buy the book.

Joanna Howard is a writer and translator from Miami, Oklahoma. She is the author of the memoir Rerun Era (McSweeney’s, 2019), the novel Foreign Correspondent, and the story collections On the Winding Stair and In the Colorless Round, the latter of which was illustrated by Rikki Ducornet. Howard also cowrote Field Glass, a speculative novel, with Joanna Ruocco. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Verse, Bomb, Flaunt, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and parts elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Denver University.

Is there truly never enough time? This question certainly applies to the things one may want to create, and then life in general, but how does it apply to a book once completed, masterpiece or not?

In an interview with Deadline, Martin Scorsese told the story of Akira Kurosawa receiving his lifetime achievement Oscar. “[Kurosawa] said, ‘I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.’ He was 83. At the time, I said, ‘What does he mean?’ Now I know what he means… I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time.”

My book After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema is now out in the world, and out of my hands, left to the reader to decide what it’s worth to them. I saw Scorsese’s 1985 film After Hours as offering me a chance to write about two things I tend to obsess over—grief and the act of becoming a creative person. A mix of criticism and memoir, the book is about how this movie helped me to make sense of the death of my father.

Let’s pause to note here that for those who haven’t watched After Hours—and if you haven’t, what have you been doing with your life—it’s a movie about Paul Hackett, played by Griffin Dunne, who feels trapped by his 9-to-5 office job. He chases a woman late one night to SoHo, believes himself trapped there as well and spends a manic, claustrophobic, and dread-ridden night trying to escape the neighborhood and arguably—in his mind anyway—stay alive, all of which unfolds in what feels like (near) real time.

Lately I’ve wondered if Paul Hackett truly does all he can to escape the neighborhood. He does not, but let’s un-pause to note, I’ve done what I could do, and I released the book.

Have I released myself?

Not from the desires that led to its creation, but from the hold my vision for the book had on me and my need to craft the content to meet that vision?

Yes, for sure, mostly, yes.

Before one gets to this place, one has write the first draft, and not just write it, but finish it, get to the last line, there’s no book if you can’t get to the last line—and it’s not a judgement if you can’t get there, and not intended to be ableist either, which I would hate. It’s just that the first draft must happen if anything is going to happen.

Which is why I believe I’m here today—at one point, I completed the first draft of this book, and now my understanding is I might have something to say about that.

And I do.

Wherever this ends up I want you to know the intention is to somehow channel something livewire onto the page for you, written (mostly) without edits, hoping to create some sense of real time energy.

Which was my intent with After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema. It seems too easy to say that every piece of work begins with a first draft, which also means we all have stories about our first drafts, and if we’re lucky enough to publish more than one book, we’ve probably found a certain rhythm that works for us and we tend to return to time and time again.

We seek consistency, a practice, a method and flow that allows us to both start and finish—both of which can involve its own challenges and the endless ways we can become stuck, unable to find our voice, the correct pace, problems with plot or characters, when all we really want to do is get to the last sentence. We really have to do that or we don’t get to finish the book, much less the first draft.

Some of us might even have rituals or needs around what time of day to write or where, the music we listen to, or what we need to have available to eat or drink. Maybe we use word counts. Or have outlines—outlines! I’ve heard those are wonderful.

I don’t do much or really any of that.

I do commit to writing thirty minutes a day, never less, sometimes more, but as for time of day, location, music, anything to do with setting, I don’t allow myself to focus on those things, and I never have, though I’m very committed to getting to the last sentence.

I’m also committed to writing my first drafts in longhand, usually in a composition notebook, and I don’t edit until I’ve written the first draft in its entirety. I barely even edit while I’m typing up the handwritten draft.

I do print that draft however, and that I edit by hand.

I heard the author Lauren Groff say she places her first drafts in a box that she never looks at again. She just begins writing the draft again from scratch, believing that whatever she leaves out doesn’t belong in the manuscript.

Wow.

I’m not sure I’m emotionally stable enough to do that. I am envious though, mostly because it sounds cool and because she’s a rock star. Who doesn’t want to be a rock star, or at least cool?

I also spend as much time as I need to brainstorm all the ideas and themes, I want to potentially include in whatever I plan to write about, and I rarely start writing until that gathering of ideas feels complete. Do I have a formula for when that list feels complete?

I do not, it’s a feeling.

With this book I also compiled a number of potential ideas that seemed like they might or should go in the book, which is to say anything I could think of that had to do with my father’s death; my parents’ love of the movies and the movies that mean something to me; New York City; Patti Smith; creativity; feeling trapped; journaling; Kafka. The Basketball Diaries, which I’ll return to.

There is one key difference though between the first draft for this book and other books I’ve written.

I decided to write the first draft in real time, journal style, daily, channeling the energy and vibe of The Basketball Diaries (not to mention the frenetic energy of After Hours itself), and trying to capture whatever I was thinking or feeling when I sat down to write that day, the ideas from my brainstorm, any associations, lists, and emotions, anything that got stuck in my brain, the movies I watched, the podcasts and interviews I listened to or encountered, the books I was reading, the music that popped-up on in my Apple music library, as long as they spoke to film, Scorsese, grief, memoir, creativity, fathers, and on and on, no editing, or tightening until the end.

Then I was done with my first draft.

There was enough time to do that.

To sit, be present, write what I felt needed to be written.

Now that book is out in the world. In After Hours I wrote:

To create.
To escape.
To live a creative life, we must live long enough to accomplish these things.
Scorsese is 80.
Kafka was 41 when he died.
My father was 59.
I’m 54 at the time of this writing.
How many masterpieces does one have to create?
The answer is there’s never enough time.

Will there be enough time to work on everything else, all the other books I want to write, even those I can’t conceive of yet?

Probably not, which will ultimately be fine, though I hope I get enough time to try.

Emmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. His recent novel The Missing was released in March 2024 by 7.13 Books and was a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year finalist in the category of Traditional Fiction and his new book After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A heartfelt if overstuffed tribute to the author’s father and the ameliorative power of art," was released from Ig Publishing in May 2025. Ben lives in Chicago with his family.

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I was standing on the side of a busy road beside my favorite brewery in Burlington, Vermont, crying my eyes out, when I told my agent I’d never write again. It was summer 2022, and she’d just told me my novel—the one I’d spent a decade on and had folded into my identity—wasn’t going to sell.

It’s not that I’d never considered this could happen. It’s hard to sell a book. And retrospectively, as I step back as an author who has a debut novel coming out this month, there were plenty of red flags in my struggle to complete it that should have told me this would be a particularly uphill climb. I’d rewritten the draft from scratch eight times. I’d removed characters and put them back in, only to take them out again. I’d generated questions in my plot I couldn’t answer, and shoehorned in another perspective to try to fix them.

But in the most reductionist sense, this wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d put in so much effort; I had the agent who’d pitched it passionately; I had editors in New York who were interested. In Vermont, confronting my unexpected reality, I choked on tears to the point that people slowed down beside me to make sure I was okay.

At the same time, reality outside of writing was its own ball of string: most notably, I’d moved into a community I ended up hating after so much research, and I didn’t have a path to get out.

This is life. No matter what you put into your best-laid plans—how much discipline you have, the groundwork you carefully lay, the vision you have—something inevitably goes off course. Sometimes it’s relatively small (even if it feels huge at the time), like not selling a novel; sometimes, it’s bigger than you can even wrap your head around. There are points in life when you’re thrust into change without your consent. It is uncomfortable, sometimes agonizing.

This reality is what I wanted to explore in my new novel, Just Want You Here. Each of the four voices in the story sees their life explode in some way, and they have choices they have to make for what their next steps are—ones they never expected to have to reckon with.

On the first page of the book, my main character, Ari, has just been told her engagement to her boyfriend of ten years is now over, and she’s suddenly left with no compass for how to live the rest of her life. She’d expected one path, and is now thrust down another. Things get messy.

As I wrote, I saw myself in Ari—someone struggling to make sense of a moment (or a life) that wasn’t supposed to be in the cards. Of course, not selling a book was a lot smaller than Ari’s need to rewire her entire life, but it was both therapeutic and helpful for me to spend time with a character who was also rudderless. As I wrote Ari’s story, I saw her learn a lot about non-linearity and what goes into an important decision to try to find footing again. Through her, I learned, too. Sometimes she succeeds; sometimes she fails. I get it. I also learned a lot about living with discomfort over the way my expected future had swerved.

When I look at Just Want You Here, I think seeing Ari’s non-linear journey and feeling its weight is the most important part of the novel. Because it reflects reality. Life is rarely straightforward and often uncomfortable.

It’s tempting to tell clean linear stories in writing, especially when audiences sometimes bristle when things aren’t cinched neatly, or at least go down easy. When I was on submission with the first novel, a lot of the feedback I got was that editors couldn’t imagine readers wanting to go down the messy journey with my deeply imperfect characters; and even as I look at some of the pre-publication reviews for Just Want You Here, a handful of early readers went into the book looking for an ending tied with a bow and felt let down when they didn’t get it.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting that kind of straightforward character journey or finale. But for me, if I wanted my writing to feel real, that tidy comfort wasn’t right.

Who knows what happens next for me as an author. After publishing my debut, the “expected,” linear path will be that the manuscript I’m working on now will sell, too. It’s out of my hands—and maybe this project will leave me crying on the side of the road again. No matter what happens, though, I can guarantee whatever comes next won’t serve those readers looking for a clean and comfortable story. It’s important for all of us.

Meredith Turits’s writing and interviews have appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, ELLE, BBC.com, Electric Literature, the Paris Review Daily, and Bustle, where she was a founding editor. She graduated from Tufts University and attended the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Connecticut.

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My mother didn’t talk about her illegal abortion until I was nearly the same age as she was when she’d had it. I had just dropped out of college and she was worried enough to tell me her story while we did dishes in her kitchen.

In 1967, my mother was 22 and worked at a college library in Michigan. She took a payday loan to travel to Juarez, Mexico. That was very much my mother and how she took care of things. She was like Mrs. Dalloway in that way—she would buy the abortion herself.  

The trip at the time was two days of traveling—a bus to Detroit, a flight, a connecting flight, and another bus. In her pocket was the address of a grocery store, which she’d received from a doctor back at home who was rumored to be “sympathetic to women.” In Mexico at the grocery store, she said the code word to them, and was then taken to a doctor’s house. The house was small and immaculate; what would have been the dining room was well lit, had been sterilized, and dressed in surgical sheets.

My mother received anesthetic and a D&C. She woke, healthy, without complications. The surgeon gave her antibiotics and told her, “Live your life now.”

I think about that surgeon a lot and the gift she gave my mother. It was not just a safe abortion, but the new beginning she had hinted at. My mother had been dating a man that year who had turned controlling and violent. He eventually stalked her and broke into her apartment with a knife, threatening to kill her. That’s all she would ever tell me about the incident, leaving me to fill in the blanks from there. (In a small town in the sixties, I’m absolutely sure she never reported any of this.)

Having returned to Michigan following the procedure, she found out the stalking had continued. Though it was too late, he’d tried to stop her from ending the pregnancy by phoning her parents and telling them what she was doing.

She had shared this story with no one before relating it to me in her kitchen that day. It was a journey she made alone, and my father, whom she met and married only a year afterward and with whom she would have four children, knew nothing about it. My mother was not a radical by any stretch of the imagination. She had seen Dylan go electric at Newport and whenever I asked her about it, she answered, “Meh. It was okay. I guess.” That was as sixties as she ever got. But she wanted me to know that having an abortion gave her a life that was her own—not tied to a man who stalked and assaulted her—where she could go on to finish school, have a career, a better life partner, and children when she chose it.

This was the first time I really understood that in spite of the ordinary life my mother seemed to lead, she was extraordinary. She had privileges that helped her in her journey, but it also demanded vigilance and self-reliance. To receive care, she traveled 1700 miles and back again.

After the abortion, she graduated with a Master’s in English, worked for a publisher, and later became an administrator for a college, helping adults who had never finished their high school degrees graduate. That she and possibly many other middle-aged women I saw—shopping at Kmart, threading sewing machines and whipping up original Halloween costumes at midnight, and scraping small holes in their gardens with trowels on weekends—possessed such histories and strengths was something I had never considered.

I ended up going back to college and I asked her if I could write about her experience one day. She said yes, and that time has come. It’s obvious we need to stand up again for what our mothers fought for. Since losing Roe v. Wade in 2022, more and more headlines are now about the deaths of those denied abortion treatment—especially Black and Hispanic women—and we can stop those headlines by voting.

My mother, Jo, died in June at 80, going out her own way…by choice, with medical assistance in dying, surrounded by friends and family after a hard fight with cancer and a long, tenacious life. Right now, I most miss the weekly phone calls where we’d kvetch about whatever nightmare Trump was creating. Her disgust with him was profound and a safe subject for us. Sadly, it was one month too soon for her to see Kamala Harris join the presidential race against the man who killed Roe.

When I vote this November 5, I will be doing so for my mother.

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A few days after Trump plucked JD Vance from the Republican clown car to serve as his running mate, I was browsing in a used bookstore in Ocean City, NJ, where I stumbled across a copy of Hillbilly Elegy.

Before Vance’s name was in play, even before Peter Thiel bought him a US Senate seat in Ohio, I knew the book. After Trump was elected, the media fawned over it, knighting Vance as a “must-read” author if you wanted to understand why white, rural voters pulled the lever for a billionaire conman who clearly despised them. I heard from a lot of other people the book sucked—an excoriation of Appalachia by someone not from Appalachia, trucking in stereotype and conservative pull your bootstraps–bullshit.

Standing in the bookstore in July, I didn’t think Trump had much of a chance of winning again. He was already a loser, and his base may be loud, but it’s dwindling. All those independent and undecided voters who carried him to the White House had finally gotten a good, long look at the naked emperor.

Still, a week is a lifetime in politics, and there was always chance—albeit slim—that the man who wrote the book could end up an ill-timed Big Mac away from the presidency.

And I don’t like walking out of bookstores empty-handed.

But the biggest deciding factor in purchasing the book was that it was a second-hand, and therefore unlikely to count for Vance’s Bookscan numbers. (Authors do know how to shiv other authors.)  

I cracked it open about a half hour later as I hid underneath an umbrella while my daughter splashed in the ocean surf. I wanted to hate it. When I pitched this piece I wondered: how florid can I make a skull-fucking?

Having finished it, I’m less inclined to do that.

Honestly, I just feel bad for the guy.

A lot has been said about the book’s authenticity. I’m a born and raised New Yorker, and therefore ill-equipped to comment on Vance’s perception of Appalachia. I will say that it often felt like watching a cheesy kid’s show, where a man in a safari hat and a bad Australian accent tries to explain kangaroos.

Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all.

This from the Marine who graduated Yale before working as a venture capitalist. Vance sounds like a tourist in his own narrative.

It’s fascinating to read this eight-year-old memoir while simultaneously watching Vance give endless sexist and racist sound bites, and play eager accomplice to one of the dumbest, most dangerous human beings alive. A man he admits, in the afterward of this edition, he didn’t vote for.

Hillbilly Elegy offers glimmers of a more reasonable, less shitty person. Vance speaks highly of women. He sticks up for a classmate who’s being bullied. He’s a smart, sensitive kid growing up in a culture of toxic masculinity—but he recognizes it for the poison that it is.

Knowing what was coming, it felt a little like watching a horror movie, and someone is about go into the room where we know the killer is hiding. That itch, like you want to scream at the screen, to tell them to be careful.

Except, the basement was Trump Tower, and Vance went in knowing who he’d find there. Any glimmers of hope I had were extinguished when the book veered into that most heinous attribute of the conservative: Exceptionalism.

Even for all the faults and foibles of the titular hillbillies (and according to Vance, there are many), he writes: “I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamn people on this earth.”

This was a theme throughout the book. Hillbillies care about their families. They stick up for their own. They suffer hardships. They work hard. They’ve been abandoned by their government.

I’m not saying these things aren’t true.

But here’s the one little point that seems to be missing; that last connection that could have closed the empathy circuit.

The same can be said for everyone else.

Are hillbillies god’s chosen people because they care deeply about family? Give me a fucking break. Find me a culture on this earth where the concept of family does not carry a great level of import.  

It’s the same kind of mindset that makes religion so insidious (and why the Venn diagram of conservatism and evangelicalism are a closed circle)—that one single group has discovered something about the world that makes them better than everyone else. Which is especially ironic when put it in the context of Vance’s abusive mom and absentee dad, who sure as shit don’t seem to care much about the family unit.

It makes me wonder where that connection point failed for Vance. Maybe it’s a combination of nature, nurture, and inertia; he grew up in a conservative area, bombarded with those mindsets from a young age. People in rural areas, who’ve been exposed to less of the world, are more suspect of it.

What makes me so mad about his moral failure is that I see a little of myself in him.    

I bet he would find the assertion funny. I’m an elite liberal New Yorker, and he makes a lot of hay out of getting into Yale as Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel. (He goes to a fancy dinner and has to call his wife because he doesn’t understand why there are so many forks!)  After all, I’m white, I present as straight, I have all my hair. In terms of privilege, I’m doing pretty good. But I also grew up in a blue-collar setting where money was tight. My dad was a New York City firefighter, my mom works in a bowling alley. I went to a state college. I didn’t grow up around soup spoons and fish knives either, but I did grow up on Staten Island, surrounded by the “Fear City” conservativism of fleeing New Yorkers in the ’70s and ’80s. (Which is different from rural conservativism, but that’s another essay.)

The difference between me and Vance seems to be: I’m not so ashamed of where I came from, and I don’t think it makes me better or worse than anyone else.

It just makes me who I am.

So where did our paths diverge? I have no idea. I’m not even sure if Vance loves or hates these people, the same way he seems so dismissive of the elite class, while being desperate for their acceptance.

As to whether the book revealed any deep insight about hillbillies voting for Trump—I don’t think it does that. He argues that hillbillies need institutions to do a better job of helping raise them out of poverty, without creating a permanent underclass.  

Except he’s now running with the guy whose every policy ensures the underclass is carved in stone for eternity. He’s thrown in with billionaires like Peter Thiel, who uses his money solely to keep more of his money, live on a floating island, and the world can burn in the meantime.

Reading Hillbilly Elegy in a vacuum you can see a person with a capacity for empathy, who just wants to see the world become a better place for him and his loves ones.

But seeing Vance standing on stages and lamenting ethnic enclaves and childless people, you realize: he is absolutely okay with a permanent underclass, as long as he gets to choose who lives there.  

The more I think about it, the more this reads to me as a story of revenge.

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None of my friends wanted to model a dead girl’s dress, but after they did they all posted photos of it to their Instagram accounts. The outfit was black with a gold belt, and black bows on each shoulder. A pleat ran across one hip, making the fabric of the skirt drape in a sexy way. I didn’t remember having ever seen my roommate in it. When my roommate was killed, I’d been left with a stack of blue jeans and blouses and an empty room.

Her name was Olive Baker. I’d met her through a friend on social media when I’d posted that I had an extra room. I didn’t know the friend well and I hadn’t lived with Olive more than three months when she was hit by a ConEd truck while cycling home from work.

Her parents, Stan and Jodi Baker, had that broad Midwestern stature, feet shoulder-width apart, standing tall and wide even in their grief, like very old trees. They came and collected some of her things—fit three boxes into their Toyota Corolla. They had driven nine hours from Parma, Ohio to ID her body and make arrangements for her cremation. I cried a little and gave them almond milk and cookies, as if they were children, and told them I was sorry. They took Olive’s vintage typewriter, some photographs in frames, her laptop, a couple pieces of pottery she’d made, a box of books, a teapot, and an old plush dog with a chewed-up ear. They asked me if I could look after the rest.

“Of course.” I didn’t know what else to say. Olive died five days before rent day but I couldn’t bring it up.

Since moving in the only purchase Olive had made that wasn’t edible was a bookshelf she ordered online from Dot & Bo. I took a photograph of it, and sold it on Craigslist for $150 to a couple in Ridgewood. In Olive’s closet I found vintage dresses: mostly unworn, probably because she biked every day across the Williamsburg Bridge to a small publishing office near Union Square. I struggled into a few different garments. The looser styles didn’t look bad on me—I snapped pictures using the full-length mirror in her room. I posted them to my Etsy and kept the descriptions brief. Wool cardigan with rhinestones, good condition, size small. Floral 1990s shirt-dress—cotton. And the measurements. A-line skirt with hot air balloon appliqué. I priced everything $30 more than I thought it was worth.

The Etsy page was left over from my vase project—a couple years ago I collaged old black-and-white photos onto flower vases and mugs. It went awry when I pasted a grainy image of General Josip Tito of Yugoslavia onto a purple pitcher. I didn’t know he was a Communist dictator. By the time the ban was lifted, I had tired of collage on objects, and now I mostly used my Etsy to sell stuff when I was short on cash.

I tried on a pair of Olive’s Mavi jeans, but they were too snug. She was a size ten. I texted my friend Gabi, who was small-waisted, and asked her to come over and help me sort. It was while I was waiting for her that I spotted the black dress. I could see right away it was too little for me. I laid it down on the couch and took a photo of it against the blue seating. I couldn’t decide if it looked sad like that, empty and flat, so I picked it up and took it back in the bedroom.

I tried to shimmy into it, but it was stiff—not a lot of give. One of the bows on the shoulder kept flopping in my face as I half-turned to try to do up the zipper. Very confined, slightly overheated, and maybe even nauseous, I looked at myself in the mirror: my breasts pressed against the fabric obscenely. I was suddenly self-conscious to be putting on Olive’s things. I had liked Olive. I remembered learning about ethics years before and a wave of words seemed to swarm me—accountability, assent, beneficence, conduct, relativism—words one never reached for in daily life.

But I was also determined. I knew it would sell.

The buzzer rang and it was Gabi.

“That isn’t ’80s,” she informed me. “ It’s actual ’50s. Price it high, Sue.”

“Aren’t you a size ten?”

Gabi raised an eyebrow at me. “Six. Eight on a bad day.”

“So you can wear it.” I began to peel it off, but she stopped me.

“I’m not wearing it. Put it back on. I’ll take your photo.”

Gabi knew I needed the money from the sales, but she never understood why I couldn’t just phone my mom for it. That was the problem I’d always had being friends with kids from wealthier families than mine. At the end of each month I had my rent ready plus another 100 or two, if I was lucky. Gabi knew a lot about fashion though—and made some adjustments to the bows, smoothing them over the shoulder in a way that tickled. Then she told me how to stand. “Lean into the light. Put your foot back. No, the other foot. Your toe, yes, like that. Chin up. Don’t look so annoyed. Channel your inner Kim.”

“The dictator?” I asked, worried I was stepping into another Etsy ban.

“Kardashian,” she clarified.

I closed my eyes and let my mouth hang open a little. I felt twisted and faint in the shape she’d put me in. The bulb in the lamp was making the room hot. “Did you take it?”

“One more.”

I didn’t have the patience. I unsnapped myself from the position and stood staring at her, my arms hanging uselessly at my sides. She took another. “I can’t use that,” I said.

Gabi shrugged. She passed me her phone camera. I looked over the shots while she rummaged through the dresses in the closet, fingering the material. “Cute, frumpy, kinda cute, frumpy, frumpy, hideous, oh, maybe—no, never mind. Oh, this blouse is Anthropologie, and this is Madewell.”

I looked up from the shots she’d taken to insist that she model the dress.

“Did you see they left her jewelry?” Gabi poked her hand into the closet and came back out with a honeycomb necklace. There was an opal pendant, another of hammered gold, and something antique-y and green that looked like it might be half valuable. All the necklaces had been hung on tiny cup hooks along the back wall. “Why would any mother leave this stuff? What were they like?” Gabi’s nose wrinkled.

“Stan and Jodi?”

“Maybe they didn’t get along. I mean, you didn’t like Olive much.”

“That’s not true. We didn’t have as much in common as I thought we would.”

My phone dinged. I looked. “It’s from Serena.”

“Again?”

I barely knew Serena Alton except that she was the one who had introduced me to Olive. We’d only met once in real life before, but since Olive died, she’d been texting me constantly. I didn’t understand it—I didn’t think they’d been great friends either. Gabi leaned in and examined the message.

“It’s because you’re Olive’s roommate. You’re on point for grief,” Gabi said. I grumbled that it was a big responsibility and she said, “Pick a sentence she wrote and text it back verbatim as if you’re agreeing.” Gabi pointed. “There. It’s terrible—I can’t stop thinking about how it happened. Add an exclamation. Trust me, I do this all the time. Sometimes I say the same thing but with a question mark instead, and then the person just answers their own statement back again. It’s conversation without the danger of thought.”

I said I couldn’t, but in the end I modified only slightly: I can’t stop thinking about it either! It is just terrible!!!

“I should be sadder,” I said.

I had dodged past Olive every other morning as she made her way out of the shower down our narrow hall, and one time I heard Olive giving head to a date in her bedroom. I remembered how she had sweat on her lip when she came in from riding through the city, and how every once in a while I would hear her talking on the phone through the wall, her voice a little warmer, more buttery, than it usually was. I wondered now who she’d been talking to—a best girl friend, or the Hinge date she never talked about again. Mostly I knew her stale granola in the kitchen, her special gluten-free flour, the two 1970s cups she’d added to our cupboard: green with a chevron pattern.

The phone chimed twice more—Serena didn’t notice the trick.

“Am I a horrible person?” I asked as I read the new messages aloud to Gabi.

“Yes,” Gabi said.

I texted back a sad emoji and felt better. The yellow circle was more real than my words.

Gabi emerged from the closet with a vase I’d made a long time ago. It had been wrapped up in a shirt. Hadn’t that room been mine once? she asked. Before Olive—before the last roommate? Yes, it had, but I hadn’t left it in there. In fact, I’d wondered where it went.

“Maybe Olive liked it and wanted it,” Gabi speculated, tilting the vase to the side to examine the image on it: a pair of 1950s girls riding bicycles, windblown hair and high-waisted shorts.

It creeped me out a bit that that was the one Olive had decided to steal, given how she died. It creeped me out even more than the fact that she’d tried to steal something from me instead of just asking. It didn’t seem like the Olive I’d known. But what had I really known about her? Just that she wore tortoise Ray-Bans and left each morning at 7:45. Gabi took a photo of the vase for my Etsy.

“How come you stopped making these?”

I didn’t answer. I went and got a half-empty bottle of wine from the fridge. It had been in there a couple days, but she wouldn’t care.

“I miss living here,” Gabi said when I came back.

She agreed to slip into the dress, but she frowned down her torso. She pirouetted once and I snapped her pic, blurred at the edges, before she ran back to the mirror, groaned and began pulling angrily behind her at the zipper. She went to the window and climbed out onto my fire escape and smoked a cigarette. “You can use it,” she said when she came back in, her voice flat from pretending not to care.

*

I posted everything except the black dress. I considered putting up the photo of myself in it, but I was vain. A couple of Olive’s frumpy floral dresses sold first. My vase sold quickly, and the honeycomb necklace I’d promised to Gabi if it didn’t sell. But by the thirty-first of the month I’d only made $220.

I texted Gabi and she texted back: The honeycomb necklace sold? It was one of my sentences, only with a question mark on the end. I couldn’t decide if it was a joke, or if she didn’t know she’d done it to me. I went back through a bunch of our texts and saw she’d parroted me back to me at least ten times before.

On rent day there was a knock on the door. I almost ignored it—could it be the landlord demanding my check already? When I looked through the peephole, I saw a guy about my age: well built, a beard and eyebrows that looked like they’d been waxed. I don’t know why I opened the door. He had a nice face, I guess. He introduced himself as Devon. He said he’d been dating Olive.

“Come in,” I said. “I’m Sue.” His hand was soft and firm when we shook.

I watched Devon moving around the space, eyeing the old window frames and the new windows. He looked serious, but not particularly upset.

“You’ve been here before? With Olive?”

Devon nodded. “I can’t believe it. I feel horrible.” He went to the door of her half-empty bedroom. “You’re being really brave.”

“Am I?” I followed him in.

He leaned into the sill and looked out. Olive’s view was the better one—all of Manhattan lit up, far across the rooftops, though it was not yet sunset. Below us were the slab flat buildings of industrial Greenpoint. Devon asked me why I’d given her the best room.

I shrugged. This had been my room once before, over a year ago. I didn’t tell him that since coming to New York I considered most of life to be changeable, negotiable. Things could shift in an afternoon, just as they had when I’d found out about Olive.

“How much is her half of the rent? Today’s the first.”

I was surprised that he thought of it.

“Maybe I could help you out.” Devon grazed a hand across his combed beard. He had incredible eyes, and a great chest. The longer Devon walked around the room, the more aware he made me: of the space, the silence, and his body there and what I heard him do with Olive. I felt as though he was waiting for an invitation. He had a contemplative expression. Then he said it: “It’s available?”

I didn’t know how to answer so I stared down at my phone. There was a message from Serena saying we should do something meaningful.

We should do something meaningful! I texted back.

“I don’t understand. You’re looking for a place?” I wondered if I’d got it wrong.

Devon looked out the window. “I just—” There was a new neediness in his voice. “I have to find a place. They sold my building. I was looking, and then, well, I lost most of last week because Olive and I were fighting and texting. And this week…she’s gone.”

I noticed Devon couldn’t say dead. I felt that struggle.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to ask. Actually, all I wanted was to get this. I gave it to her.” He held out a book I’d cleared off the shelves I’d sold. Her parents had left it behind. I watched him handling it the way one might touch a baby. “Don Quixote. The illustrations are by Salvador Dali. First edition of this version.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to ever open the copyright page to check an edition in my life—that it could be worth something, and I’d overlooked it, stung. I asked how long they’d gone out.

“A month.”

I set down my phone and went to the closet. “Come here,” I said. My whole body felt hot as I reached up and pulled out a men’s style shirt. I held it up to Devon, smoothing the fabric across his chest and shoulders. “You should have this. I saw it in here the other day.”

The other day. As if I hadn’t been going into the closet every half hour looking for things to sell. I bet the Quixote would have fetched hundreds.

Devon put it on over his gray T-shirt. He rolled up the Oxford’s sleeves before buttoning it. It wasn’t going to close. “Doesn’t really fit,” he said, looking down at himself. He plucked the shirttail up, and held it against his mouth. “It smells like her.”

Devon sat on Olive’s bed.

“I’ll give you a minute,” I said. My phone chimed, a new text from Serena: Drinks? I checked my Etsy and saw that I’d sold the full-length mirror. I had no idea if the price would cover much more than the shipping. My guts tightened with guilt at what I was doing.

In the kitchen at the far end of the apartment I wondered if this guy was going to start crying in Olive’s room. I found an unopened bottle of Remy I’d seen in Olive’s cupboard, and some crackers. I put glasses and saucers on a tray and carried them back to the bedroom. Devon sat looking at the floorboards. When he looked up and saw the drinks he said, “Oh yes, definitely.”

There was nowhere else to sit, so I sat beside him on the bed. We clinked glasses and drank silently. The brandy stretched across my tongue like a silk ribbon. Devon’s was already half empty.

“What did you fight about? You said you were fighting with her.”

Devon reached out and took a Ritz. He chewed through it and then another. I poured us each another drink.

“The day she got hit, I wanted to come here with her. We were having an argument about it actually. She said she didn’t want to bring me back here because she wasn’t comfortable hanging out here.”

“Because of me.”

“She said you never left.” He reached up and touched my shoulder, an arm around me for just a minute. “But don’t take it that way. It isn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have yelled at her. She took off on her bike without her helmet. Why didn’t she take her helmet?” He stood up and stalked around the room, furious with himself.

“I’ve been selling her things online.” I blurted it out like a confession. I expected him to hate me—and maybe I wanted him to. I deserved to be hated. But his eyes turned soft and he came over and touched my sleeve. Not my arm this time, just my sleeve. I got a funny electric feeling, like when you’re a kid and you put a battery on your tongue because someone has dared you.

“Sure you won’t let me move in? I could give you rent right now.”

I hadn’t realized I’d said no, but having never answered was an answer. “I’ll think about it.”

The closet was still open and he saw the black dress hanging in there. He let go of my sleeve as he moved past me.

“This is the best one,” I told him. He reached out and touched one of the bows the same way he’d touched my sleeve. “No one will model it.”

“I will. I’ll help you.”

Devon was still wearing Olive’s button-up shirt, and now he pulled it off, along with his T-shirt. He held the hanger out from him, peering at the dress. “Why does wearing her dress feel more personal than that shirt?”

I picked up the shirt and felt its buttons. I shook my head.

“Like invading her privacy,” Devon insisted.

“We’re already in her room.”

“A room belongs to anyone. A dress only belongs to one person.” But he was already undoing the dress zipper.

“You don’t know,” I said. “Dresses get lent, swapped, donated, rebought and turned into hairbands. We don’t respect clothes.”  

I let my gaze climb up and down his torso. He had a smattering of black hair in the center of his chest and a script tattoo on his shoulder that said: “Life itself is a quotation.” He was part thick and part muscle. It wasn’t a bad mix.

He glanced up and saw me looking.

“What’s that?” I pointed at the tattoo to cover my embarrassment.

“Borges.”

“I’ll give you a minute.” I went out and closed the door behind me.

*

When Devon came out of the room in the dress, he looked surprised and happy with himself. I aimed my camera but he wouldn’t stop moving. He was walking in a softer, coyer way, his gestures more elongated. The dress was stretched as far as it would go and he hadn’t done up the zipper. A triangle of pale back flesh peeked through along with the tattoo. I went into my room and came back with a makeup kit. We poured another couple drinks. We were both good and drunk by the time I took photos. It surprised us both that the bottle was empty. Devon rested one hand on his hip and stuck out his lips at me. He looked theatrical with cosmetics and a beard, but cute. I’d dabbed a red color called Fearless on his bushy lips. We both laughed and then he said: “You know, you’re nothing like she said. I don’t know why you two didn’t get along.”

“Wait, what does that mean?” I yelled as he went into Olive’s bedroom to take the dress off.

When he didn’t answer, I followed him in. He turned around and then his Fearless-red mouth came down at me. The lipstick had a waxy taste and a different smell on someone other than me—and his lips were hard even though Olive’s dress granted him more feminine movements. The hairs of his beard tickled. On Olive’s bed, I ran my hands up under the dress. He was still wearing boxer briefs and there was nothing elusive about what I found there.

I told him I didn’t know his last name and he said it, but into my mouth, the kiss muffling it. I didn’t stop him when he snagged his cargo shorts off the floor and found a condom in the wallet.

*

After, he didn’t want me to post the photo. It wasn’t because he’d been in drag, he said. But he didn’t want anyone to think he’d put on her dress. If it had been my dress, it would make all the difference. He didn’t want to be seen as callous. Besides then people would know there had been something between us, and obviously it was too soon.

“It’s Etsy. How will anyone know?” I asked, but he just lay there, shaking his head, a red shiny smear across one cheek. I said he wasn’t even on my social media, then he picked up his phone and clicked and said he’d just added me, and I heard the faraway of chime of his friendship on my phone as he followed me on two platforms.

I told him he was still drunk.

“Just ashamed.” Devon let his arm fall back over his face and pretended to sob. “Is this how women feel?” He sat up suddenly, unsmiling.

“No. Much worse.”

“You should leave,” he said, pulling back the curtain on the window. It had become night. The Empire State Building was illuminated in red and blue.

“I’m not leaving. This is my place.”

“I’m just saying, if you can’t afford the rent.”

“Are you still trying to get my apartment?”

I turned over and fell asleep, a bit angry that he wouldn’t let me post the photo. When I woke, I realized we’d done it in Olive’s bed. I hadn’t even thought about it. The bed was much softer than mine and had a good frame. I could easily sell it on Craigslist. I stood up and looked around. Devon’s clothes were gone—his boy clothes. The dress lay in a black circle on the floorboards where it had been shed.

*

Three days after rent day, Gabi posted the picture of herself in the dress. There it was, below her handle @DowntonGabi. Twirling and blurred, caption: #nomakeup.

I was at work so I couldn’t even get angry. On my way home, I got a new text from Serena. I feel so alone right now, the text said.

I feel so alone right now! I wrote.

What’s your address? she asked.

*

“Donate what’s left to charity,” Serena said, walking around Olive’s room. We’d already had a couple glasses from the bottle of rosé she’d brought over. The apartment was emptier now because I’d moved Olive’s bed into my room, and sold my own bed. I still hadn’t paid the rent and there wasn’t much left to sell. Serena took out her phone and emailed me the names and webpages of three different organizations that took donations to help women. I liked Serena more than I’d remembered, though I had a hard time reconciling the emotion she channeled into her texts with the restrained woman in front of me.

“This is nice,” she said, one finger whisking the black dress with the gold belt.

I told her she should take it, have something of Olive’s.

She frowned. “I don’t believe in that. Possessions are just objects. We don’t lend our energy to them. That’s what I’m sad about: that her spirit and her energy is gone.”

“You don’t think it’s terrible that I’ve been selling her things?”

“Why,” she asked. “Do you think it’s terrible?”

“A little.”

Serena held the dress up to herself. She was a tall, athletic woman. I could see the dress would fit. “I think there are more effective ways of making the money,” she said. “If it had been me, I’d have asked her parents. It’s their obligation to fulfill, even if they are grieving.”

“You would?”

Serena nodded.

I knew she worked in the nonprofit sector—a place called Homesteads. I had Stan and Jodi Baker’s number and said that I’d consider it. Would she at least try on the dress? “Look, it’s just right for you.”

She gave in. I hadn’t thought her beautiful until she put on the dress. That was what I was thinking as I took her picture, that she was one of those people who physically transformed depending on a situation. It was why I’d felt like I didn’t know her well—and how after we started talking it was easy to know her.

As she posed for me, she told me she’d done a book drive and contacted the publisher Olive worked for to get donations. They’d hit it off and gone on a couple of bike tours together. I told her she knew Olive better than I did, and Serena said she didn’t think so. She turned around and tugged at the zipper.

She undressed in front of me, and put on her other clothes. “I knew her when she was out with friends. You knew her in the morning.”

As Serena was leaving, she gave me a long hug, which surprised me. When she pulled back she had tears on her cheeks. “Damn,” she said, swiping at them as if their existence was a personal flaw. Something caught her eye in the apartment and I turned to look. I had a photo collage I’d made above the table, something I did a decade ago at school.

Serena walked over to it. “Do you still do this kind of thing?”

Homesteads had a silent auction fundraiser coming up and an artist had called her that afternoon to ask to drop out. She could put this in. Homesteads would take a percentage—I’d make at least a few hundred.

*

After she left, I stood there for a moment staring at the blank wall: an outline square where my work had been. A sunbaked shape. New York had convinced me that everything had a value, except me.

I found a large old frame in my closet: what to put in it? I swiped through the photos I’d taken of Olive’s dress: me, Gabi, Devon, and Serena, then the shot of it draped, empty, on my couch. I went and got the dress from the closet. I put it on. This time, like Devon, I didn’t worry about the zipper. I wondered what Olive would have wanted from me—a near stranger whom she’d only tolerated because of New York’s rental shortage.

I took the half-finished bottle of rosé Serena had brought up the stairs to my roof. I phoned my landlord as I walked out on the tarpaper.

“Listen, I need to give notice.” I took a slug of the wine and hoped he wouldn’t hear. I never understood why other women liked rosé. It was like trying to drink a sunset.

“Why? It’s a good apartment, and a fair price.” The landlord seemed offended. Apartments in New York were personal.

I apologized: I’d be using my deposit as my last month’s rent.

If I could count on the art price Serena had promised, I would be at a thousand dollars, enough to buy a ticket somewhere. I didn’t know yet where I would travel. Walking toward the roof ridge between my place and my neighbor’s, I realized I hadn’t been up there all summer and couldn’t fathom how that had happened. Staring out at the salmon color of the sky behind the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, I wondered which street Olive Baker had been riding on when she died. A Brooklyn breeze came up, swirling my hair and climbing into my nostrils: warm garbage, with the promise of the ocean only ten miles away.

The breeze stirred the bow on one shoulder, forcing it against my mouth. The material was musty and sweet at the same time. I reached across myself, not caring what I would damage.

I yanked, feeling the soft sigh of the fabric as it ripped. I held it in my hand, a stiff black bow shaped like a dog’s toy bone. I gazed across the East River at the city skyscrapers. I went back downstairs to my apartment and grabbed the scissors. I peeled off the dress, and kneeling in my underwear on the living room floor, cut the garment into long strips and lay the ribbons out. With every snip, I felt I could breathe a bit better.

Then I braided the black pieces together with the ghost-colored slip lining and twisted in the gold belt. When I finished it was a frayed but pretty thing, arranged in zigzags beneath the glass. She was gone, and soon, I would be too. Whoever wanted the apartment could have it.

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A version of this story was originally published in The Hopkins Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2020.