Florida - Short Stories and the World They Inhabit/Random Thoughts on Language & Why Short Stories are Great

Okay, so something that is really great about short stories (particularly short story collections) is that the writer can explore an entire world and develop the sense of setting across multiple snapshots. For example, if you look at Karen Russel's collection "St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," she tells the stories of different characters all living in the same strange world. By doing this, she doesn't have to spend as much time world building in each story because the sense of place is built little by little across each character's experience (while also being able to have characters from one story show up as tertiary characters in another).
That being said, Groff's use of Florida across her stories is so important to the reader'e experience of each story. In both "Ghosts and Empties" and "Above and Below," while the characters felt like they were important, they also felt less important than the aspects of the setting that they were revealing to us through their experiences.
Also, I've been pretty sick since last night & my brain isn't wanting to do the things, so I'm gonna do some bullet points and thoughts and then burrow back into my bed:

"Ghosts and Empties":

• We get a lot of changing of seasons through MC's nightly walks and the changes she sees in the neighbors - "I look at him closely for the first time in a long time, my dear flabby friend whom I took for granted" (11); "It is a sticky night [...] time will leap forward and the night will grow more and more reluctant to descend [...] I will no longer have my dangerous dark streets to myself" (11)
• We also get a lot of the setting and how it works as this thing that overshadows and guides the MC - "But the tree has never before announced itself fully as the colossus that it is, with its branches that are so heavy they grow toward the ground then touch and grow upward again; and thus, elbowing itself up, it brings to mind a woman at the kitchen table, knuckling her chin and dreaming" (13). This quote is actually really great and reflects the longing that MC seems to have when it comes to her husband and her life in some ways - what do you guys think? 
• Another moment that I loved where the setting reflects things is "my husband and I will look at each other crouching under the weight of all that we wouldn't or couldn't yell, as well as all those hours outside walking together, my body, my shadow, and the moon" (14) - this sentence in particular I love because it starts out with MC and her husband but ends with the "we" being MC and her nightly walks accompanied by the setting. 
• THE SWANS THOUGH. "The swam parents floated for months inconsolable. Perhaps this is a projection: as they are both black swans and parents, they are already pre-feathered in mourning" (8). Like damn, also the otters that came and ate the cygnets with this moment being so underplayed with how the otter "ate it in small bites, floating serenely" (8). Both these moments really reflect the whole idea of the food chain being indiscriminate to how we might try to humanize animals but then we also have the swans being black and how that reflects the fear that many African-American parents fear for their children because of how others perceive them based on their skin - what do you guys think? I'm not sure I have all the words especially right now to articulate all of these thoughts and ideas that came up with my reading.

Moving on to "Above and Below" now because so many thoughts:

• Did anyone else think of the movie "As Above, So Below" while reading this which instantly turned up the potential creep factor?
• While reading I also had a lot of thoughts which kept bringing me back to Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and the people who slip thorough the cracks and are usually only seen if they interact with "Florida Above" first such as when MC is looking at her colleagues through the window "a knot pulled tight in her gut, but when he looked past her to a sleek young woman gliding by on a bicycle, the knot frayed and broke apart" (188). I notice this several times and how the setting functioned to absorb MC in a way so that people from above wouldn't see her but those in "Florida Below" saw her and recognized her as one of them.
• Also colors - those who are "below" are dark while those who are "above" she sees as pink such as with the friends in the cafe - "how fat they looked, how pink" (188). There's very much this calling back to a lot of cultures where being pale is a sign that you're in the upper class because you're not dark from being outside, yet there's also this envy from the above that "all she needed to be pretty was laziness and some mild starvation" (173) which also lends to the setting in that MC interacts with it so much because she is now a part of the background and being a part of "Florida Below." I'm very much liking this idea of "florida above" and "florida below" and how that impacts how we experience the setting and what it says to us as a result.

I'm gonna leave this here for now, but what do you guys think? 

Florida part 1

In Ghosts and Empties, I noticed how “yell” was used to signify more than just yelling, but the effects of her temper on her family, “…whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces…” (Groff, 1).  I felt that told the reader a lot without going into detail about what the narrator has done.

            I felt the narrator’s disdain for her neighborhood by how they describe the Spanish moss as, “…dangling like armpit hair…” (Groff 3).  Later another character describes the Spanish moss as more sinister, “…Spanish moss and vines that looked from the corners of her eyes like snake.” (Groff 276).  This shows how different the moss can look to different characters, depending on who they are and what their situation is.   

            As the narrator moves around her neighborhood she slips into imagination about the real people who live around her, “…the nuns in full regalia in their shelter…while, aboveground, all has been blasted black…” (Groff 6).  She also imagines the woman with the Great Dane needing medical attention and the dog acting as a stretcher.  The narrator observes and rounds out her neighborhood with imagined stories and interactions with people she will probably never talk to. 

            At the end of the story, the narrator imagines her house, absent herself, much like she imagines the lives of her neighbors that she doesn’t get to witness.  Here, her body far away from them, she feels that she can love them without the other complicated emotions that get in the way.

            I got the sense that the older sister, in Dogs Go Wolf, is used to caring for her younger sister.  She is used to telling her bedtimes stories, and on page 68 she dresses her sister’s wound without thinking about asking the adults for help.  The adults, and the dog, both abandon the girls.

            On page 91 there is a flash-forward that lets us know they survive.  Just when the reader is the most doubtful of the sisters’ fate, the author introduces their future.  Instead of being wholly comforting, we learn about the younger sister’s doomed marriage.  This seems to be an important time that the older sister thinks back to the island.  The end of the story is focused on their rescue, we have already had a glimpse into what lies ahead for them.

            In the beginning of Above and Below, the main character kicks her cat out and is scratched.  It reminded me of Dogs Go Wolf, animals turning on humans in a way, but here the cat has more reason to be angry.  The scratches she receives become scars, and seem to remind her of the life she lost.

            At the start of the story I found her memories of her life before sad, but they become more and more painful to read later on, after she’s gone through more difficulties, I found my sympathy for her had grown. 

            I thought it was interesting how, when she surrenders Jane’s children, she is still waiting for her mother to help her.  She isn’t the children’s mother, but I thought it was interesting how she still believes in mothers even after Jane has difficulty providing, her mother hasn’t helped her, and she herself isn’t willing or able to help the children temporarily in her care.

            This story ends with a birth, it’s clear time has passed, but I’m not sure how much, and it’s unclear what her life is like at the time of the birth.  I felt the ending was more ambiguous, the mysteries of death and birth feel connected here.  The darkness of when she is lost and the fear of birth are connected, which made me think the “glow” in the dark that was her survival that night, is the same as her chance of survival while giving birth.    

-Iris    

           

 

Florida - Pacing, Syntax, and Time

     Okay, so digging into Florida this week I was a little skeptical. I love short story collections, but sometimes they leave me feeling like I've lost something. I'm dropped into these worlds where more questions than answers are raised. But, with that being said, I was pleasantly surprised here. I had my eye roll moment - the good white lady living around all those not-so-bad Black people; the overweight Black woman (we had to know she was Black) and the brown cleaning man just to name a few - but I still felt like these tales had an 'everyman' (woman) quality about them. Not to mention that each sentence Groff writes is packed with a punch. Short stories don't have much room to create an impact and Groff makes sure each one counts while also creating patterns with their cyclical structures.
    In 'Ghost and Empties', we follow the unnamed female narrator as she catalogs her neighborhood each season. The sentences are long, dense, and packed with information. Lots of commas to keep piling the information Groff is throwing our way. Take the opening for example, there are six commas. The sentence piles on itself. She's a woman who yells and the sentence is bookmarked by a man who does not yell. Not only does the sentence drag, building on the narrator's anxiety, but it also gives us what we need to know about the narrator's relationship. Even when we get the detail that she's seen something on her husband's computer to warrant suspicion, we've already got the background information on the narrator and her husband. Groff's syntax mimics the content and builds suspense.
     Groff also does this thing where she messes with the timeline and withholds somewhat necessary details, too. In 'Dogs Go Wolf', we're presented with two sisters abandoned by their mother and left to battle a foreign terrain. We don't know how far inland they are, where their mother went (or even that they have a mother until a few pages in). What we also see too, is two sisters telling and stories that are often muddled and retold on the spot conflated with future renderings of the girls' futures and what we can describe as current day. The sentence lengths her differentiate between girls, but still mimics the amount of information girls below ten can hold. When we stray towards future memories? wanderings? of the older sister thinking of her young sister's marriage, the sentences are again longer, filled with more.
    'Above and Below' again varies in sentence length. It was also the lease palpable of the three tales for me. I wondered why and on the second read through realised its because that's how its meant to feel. The pacing, encouraged by the sentences and the content, are meant to feel cyclical, tiring, and oppressive. We're again with this unnamed woman whose frustration with the world is turned inwards and plagues her into this . . . nothingness where she struggles to make sense of anything. Again some details are withheld from us -- why does she hate her step-father so much; does it have something to do with the fact that her mother lowers her voice when he enters the room? why won't she go home?
  Each tale is unflinching in its pacing, dragging us along to mimic anxiety, fear & confusion, and hopelessness. They're an unflinching portrait of economics, the unsaid, and the downs of life (with some lights at the end of the tunnel).  All set in America's pain in the ass Florida. Well, at least none of them revolved around the infamous Florida Man.

Florida and something about women in a crumbling world

Firstly, a big Juggalo “Woop Woop” for a short story collection, which we know are superior in craft and importance to long-form novels and other boring shit like that (citation needed). In these stories, economy is crucial, so each sentence is required to do more ‘heavy lifting’ than long-form works which are poised to accommodate empty paragraphs, pages about nothing. So thank you Lauren Groff for this collection which never has the time or privilege to bore me into skimming its pages. 

Groff is an interesting storyteller. Her women protagonists are unnamed though other girls and women characters in her stories have names. There is something here about the every [wo]man of these characters. Any one of us might find ourselves in their (often terrifying) positions, enraged by everyday living in a world being destroyed one neighborhood at a time, out of work and money and then one's car and thrust into houselessness and hunger, left behind by the woman in charge of protecting you to fend for yourself to eat and stay safe, a little sister in tow. 

Even without a first-person narrator, there is an immediate sense of relatability to the main character through each one’s curated ambiguity. In the story of your demise, you will probably say the names of others but likely not your own. And this was the exact effect these stories had on me; I read myself within them. Even when there is a logic to understanding the fictionality of fiction, its separateness from the reader is only as strong as their own fears about what they are reading. This is an odd way of saying Above and Below did not get me stoked to pursue a career in academia. 

            I read an NPR interview (take a drink) where Groff discusses the inquiries into the autobiographical nature of her characters—Which is a question so boring that when it is not asked of women writers I put one dollar into a celebration jar on top of my fridge. It currently holds $6. Anyway, she responded with this good good shit:

She's not not me ... she's not me, she's a fictional character, someone that I know, made grotesque, basically, that's what I think of. There's no such thing as fiction that is not somewhat autobiographical. Likewise, there is no such thing as memoir that is not fictional.And it's possible that some of the things that this narrator says and thinks are things that I myself have said and thought. But I think in general, I'm less grotesquely frightened of the world [emphasis mine].

Here, we get to be the characters and so does she—and also they are neither her nor us. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Read or listen to the rest of it here. She discusses snakes and the book and Florida’s odd history

 https://www.npr.org/2018/06/05/617250180/in-lauren-groffs-florida-everythings-out-to-get-you

Characters That Are Salvageable

Lauren Groff loves marital discord, brushes with death, storms, European holiday, and unlikable, lonely narrators. She weaves comfortable threads through all the stories that reappear as you read along. Struck by the desperation and upheaval that characterized several narrators' lives, so alone even when around other people. The solitude of the unliked and the unwell appears and reappears with different hats on, whether it is the boy Jude or the nameless girl featured in Above and Below. Coming back to and repeating themes is an element of craft that feels invisible, since the themes aren't necessarily the hedging aspects of these stories. Groff's Florida is full of near-survival, even for the housewife in The Midnight Zone vomiting on herself in a swampside cabin, or the two tiny girls in Dogs Go Wolf who are left to starve by possible drug dealers, possible murderers. The self-sufficience of these characters is the nobel arc, seeing them through survival against odds of rape, kidnapping, being washed away by a storm, being eaten by an alligator or a dog, or being forgotten.
One particularly striking moment for me was in Above and Below, when the girl surrenders Jane's children to Family Services. Here is a character who has endured the elements, nearly starved, very at the end of her capacity, finally finding a limit to what she can do. It's sad and it's life affirming, even as she backs out of the police station, that she can claim that much of herself back. Groff's characters embody this dimension of near-limit in most cases, finding the "edge", whether it is within the body or the outskirts of the mind. Groff reserves the most brutal circumstances for women, her men characters have less to grapple with. Yet they do not lack the multiplicity of recognized failure, as Grant in For the God of Love, For the Love of God confesses his plan to leave Amanda to Manfred in the Fiat under the pounding rain. He knows this is a weakness to let out this information to someone he hardly knows and certainly doesn't trust, who has also just let on that he likes his wife. But there is a hardiness in being free once you've scraped the bottom and found there's nowhere to go but up.
I loved how Groff describes the settings of these stories, having lived in Gainesville myself, I was taken back to the insect-ridden swampland with the heat and the danger and the Spanish Moss hanging from every tree. The alligators of my memory hung near. The settings of these stories are characters themselves, the swamp in At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners takes on its own life quite drastically, itself a possible murderer that Jude has somehow knowingly toyed with in his solo trip in the boat he doesn't know how to operate. The snakes, the gators, the temperature, the sunburn, and the mosquito onslaught all pulse off the page in this piece.
It's so well written that I'm always surprised when a story ends, even if I agree and acquiesce to the last sentences, because it doesn't need to continue though I would be happy for it to. Some of the characters are still salvageable, or have room for redemption that isn't quite imminent when the piece dispels. What's left for our imagination as readers is an open road.

Change is a Sliver Lining, discussing Florida

Change is a Silver Lining

By Jamie Harper

In reading the first story of Lauren Groff’s collection Florida, I was struck by how much it reminds me of a story I read recently for my flash fiction class, titled Lead Us Not into Penn Station by Amy Hempel. Like Hempel’s flash, Groff’s work, ‘Ghosts and Empties’ presents a sort of list, or catalog, of human experience. Hempel focused on illness or bodily harm, on the absurdities of human violence that we become numb to within our everyday lives, while in contrast, Groff presents her catalog of human worries, injustices, and damages with a silver lining.

Groff gives us a number of examples of humans suffering under the gentrified veneer of the middle class. “The facade is preserved, the rest is gutted” (p. 5) she writes, telling us of the character who provides us the narrative point of view, a woman who cannot help but yell at her husband and children, the sickly woman walking her great dane, the homeless endemic, the dying breed of the nunnery, and the neighbors who go about the shells of their lives, looking for “the people they once were” (p. 5). The unnamed narrator walks each night, patrolling the streets of her neighborhood as a means of relieving the tension she builds as she fights with her husband, yells at her children, discovers her husband's adultery, and suffers an existential crisis of the simultaneously over- and underwhelming American middle class life. On these walks, she peers into the fleeting snap shots of her neighbor’s lives as they are framed by the window panes of their houses, noting the things that stay the same, but being blindsided by those that change.

It is this change that provides the silver lining in Groff’s story, as the overweight neighbor gains the ability to run on his treadmill, and the new owners of the nunnery highlight the beauty, strength, and age of the live oak in the front yard, and the narrator finds a tenderness inside of her yet unexpressed in the waking world. The world of the American middle class may be a rotting facade, crushing inhabitants’ souls in their apathy, or as Groff puts it, forcing them “under the weight of that we wouldn’t or couldn’t yell” (p. 10) in a way superficially similar to the homeless that live under the bulk of their house, faces inches from the soles of their feet (p. 1), but the human life, that can be nourished. Just as the swans follow the impulse and cycle of nature to build again (p.10), mated for life, so too can the life of a person cycle into spring.

Paring this gloomy winter of the soul with the spring of renewal, Groff also parallels her turns of phrase, giving many of her symbolic figures double meanings. The swans lose part of their future with the deaths of their cygnets, and are already dressed for mourning in their black feathers (p.5), but they also begin again with the turn of the year. The water in the cold season runs down an icicle to plummet to the ground, death like, but it also represents beauty, and the building up of something new, i.e. the icicle (p. 1). The narrator mourns her past and perceived lost self as she mourns for the cygnets, sea turtles, and “hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species” (p. 5), both those of animals, and of people, be they the homeless burned out of their tent city in the forest, or the ungrateful suburbanites laboring behind their windows and “cracker” houses. Similarly, when she speaks of the weight she and her husband are “crouching under” (p. 10), it comes on the heels of her impulsive wish to “host” the homeless couple again before realizing it “is not a kind thing to tell human beings that they can live under your house” (p. 10), placing the two couples in direct parallel with each other, while also reminding the narrator of the privileges she does possess. All these paralleled meanings, aligned with the repetitive nature of a narrator circling the same few blocks multiple times a day, provides for a somewhat circular pacing, reminiscent of, well, pacing. Back and forth, block to block, past to future.

“These gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it” (p. 10) Groff writes, providing perhaps the most poignant of her parallels, that of change and growth, and thus her silver lining. So while, at first glance, Groff’s story seems a twin to Hempel’s it is actually a far more hopeful, inspiring, and encouraging piece, something which seems to thread throughout the other stories assigned to us this week.              

A Map, A Wolf, An Obsession

I think I really needed a short story collect, so Groff’s Florida comes at a great time. I’ve had Fates and Furies on my shelf since it was published. I started and stopped, started and stopped, at least twice. I was surprised in the best of ways by the assigned stories in Florida. Where Fates and Furies hangs on a marriage, the stories in Florida hang on the landscape. Each of the three stories assigned this week are gutturally connected to place, so much so that place almost becomes a character. 

The question for the week is “mapping the short story movement.” I want to focus on “Dogs Go Wolf” as I think Groff made some interesting choices in shaping this narrative. So let’s map it!

We’re dropped into the narrative amid a storm that has “erased the silence from the other cabin” (44). The adults have fled an island leaving two young girls (though we don’t know how young) alone. As a moment for beginning, the storm and the isolation create immediate tension. There’s heat from the first sentence: “The storm came and erased the quiet” (44). The story is already loud. 

Section break—

Groff uses a fairytale motif in the next section with the older sister (OG) telling the younger sister (YG) about the rabbit princess finds her family. The last two paragraphs are musical—like a lullaby—which fits because OG is lulling YG to sleep with the story. 

SB—

The third section moves back before the storm, introducing Smokey Joe (can we pause for a moment and ponder this ridiculous name) and Melanie. Then the two “adults” leave because, in the words of Smokey Joe, “Safer to leave ‘em.” And this begs the reader to ask, for who? Or is it whom? I digress. The section ends with a catalogue of befores, a movement perpetually past into the string of men and places their mother dragged OG and YG through. All the way back, to where OG “was too small to remember. Or maybe there was nothing” (50). Apt, because before one can remember there really is nothing. Memory is a catalogue of nothing punctuated with events like this list of places and men. 

SB—

The girls are in full Lord of the Flies mode without the all the toxically masculine bullshit. The dog runs away when OG takes him out to pee on a leash. That leash comes back. Just wait. YG cries about the dog; cookies are relief. An air conditioner eats a snake, which may be my favorite moment of the story. 

SB—

OG and YG suffer in the heat because the generator, the last vestige of civilized life, empties of gas. Things get really wild when OG and YG put on their mother’s makeup and realize they are thirsty. They walk through the woods terrified of mythical monkeys and carry water home. 

SB—

OG and YG find porn magazines, paint their nails, then go on a dog hunt. YG scares OG by dropping into a hidden cavern (which also comes back—lookout!). They find the dog waiting at the camp. He drinks water and runs away. What a user. 

SB—

They girls are dirty now, which makes sense. We get a fairytale again about a cannibalistic riff on Hansel and Gretel who “ate the lady all the way down until there was nothing left, not even blood” (58). YG is disturbed by the the kids in the story’s desire to eat the wicked stepfather, though I think this may be the best decision any two kids could make. 

SB—

A lyrical moment in which OG is happy. 

SB—

A man comes. A bad man. OG and YG run away, hide in the little cave from before— I told you to lookout. We know now that something awful has happened to mom. And it’s at this point that I find it hard to continue. I do, continue that is, but my mom senses start freaking out because I worry that these two might actually die of starvation on this island alone. 

SB—

YG asks about the “lady” who’s supposed to save them. They’re so hungry their “hearts make music in their ears.” They dream of food. 

SB—

OG is made of air. A mosquito bites her. And we flash forward, thank the author we’re saved, and we learn that OG and YG do in fact make it out of this starve-y mess. But the future we get is one in which YG leaves OG, like the mother, for a man and it’s almost more sad than her “ugly wish” to stay on the island. One more fairytale about girls made of air. 

SB—

The dog nearly asphyxiates itself with that leash (I promised it would come back) but OG saves him. He was not grateful. YG eats not yet ripe bananas and blames a monkey who disappeared. A noise calls them to the other side of the island. 

SB—

The girls clean up. You can’t be saved if you’re a dirty kid. A woman and a man on the beach are having a nice day, a picnic with beers and bathing suits and bikini bottom feels. OG and YG put lipstick on each others lips and cheeks. They run to the woman and the man, and we know what happens next. 

END. 

As an exercise in craft, I thinking mapping the movement of this short story in particular taught me how to lay some breadcrumbs (or blue pebbles from a fish tank) out. Little moments come back, motifs return again and again. I’m obsessed with this story, I think because it’s wild and constrained at once. And that title, “Dogs Go Wolf.” I’m set up to expect something, a dog going wild, and that does happen, but the title works on so many more levels. The men could be dogs gone wolves eating OG and YG’s hope at a happy future at every opportunity. Or OG and YG themselves go a little wolf, a little wild. And wolf instead of wild says something. Wolves are an endangered species in North America. Are little girls? Is innocence? 

I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this story. 

PS—

Here’s a random observation: I think Groff thinks people in Florida are obsessed with air conditioners or maybe Groff herself is obsessed with air conditioners. Either way, air conditioners appear in all three of these stories and I found that compelling or coincidental. Maybe both. 

Pacing Mimics Plot in Florida

Ghosts and Empties:

The narrator is obsessively observant, and the pace moves quickly, never sinking fully into flashback, meditative thought, or any real self-analysis. This reminds me of the pace of speed-walking… which is to say, it’s not too fast to savor, but it is too slow to let life rush over you and not analyze. I liked that this pacing matched the psychological issues of the narrator (sorry, but not really sorry, I can’t help but wish I was a psychologist all the time). She is willfully ignoring her husband’s adultery. She chooses to speed-walk (not run) away from her problems. She avoids. She distances herself from pain, and therefore, from healing. To me, this piece feels like it holds the tone of someone just before a breakdown… where all the pieces are there, poised to drop. The narrator knows the facts of her life, but just needs to suspend them for one more day. I felt this in the tone of acute observation… always pivoting from one delicious people-watching moment to the next.

Dogs Go Wolf:

The form of this reminds me of a fairy tale, which seems fitting because it is in the voice of the oldest child, who is seven. She is also telling a fairy tale to her younger child.

The narrator recalls dialogue of the adults without judgement or even deep understanding. Yes, the mother wears blue eye makeup. Yes, she swears and she gets mad, but the narrator doesn’t judge. Things are just happening to her. The fact that she is a child taking in her world as it happens allows the reader to accept the information at face value as well.

Just when I felt the most panic of the piece, when the older sister is so lethargic that she just lets a mosquito bite her and pump out blood (page 63), Groff gives the end away:

“It was all so much. Through the years to come, she’d remember these days of calm. She’d hold these beautiful soft days in her as the years slowly moved from terrible to bearable to better, and she would feel herself growing, sharpening.”

As a reader, I still had the taste of foreshadowing in my mouth from when the older sister told the story about eating people to her younger sibling. I thought this flash-forward was going to be a moment where the older sister reckons with having eaten her dead sister’s body… dark, I know. But I fully expected something different. This flash-forward built tension while it simultaneously broke it (because we knew from that point on that the girls would be ok).

I think this flash-forward works in the span of a short story… in a way, the existence of more time gives the piece more “bulk.” I’m not saying it well at ALL, but this moment could have been a jumping point for the piece to become a novel, if Groff wanted to. Instead, she curbed the tension. When all was hopeless, she gave hope and was able to spin the ending in a way that would have felt sudden and contrived without the reader expecting it. She made us aware that she was about to end, so it worked. The ending was earned.

Above and Below:

Real, too real. I notice the presence of starvation in this piece and Dogs Go Wolf. It was an embodied starvation, one that seeped into the tone and voice of narration. The rhythm accelerates when the nameless protagonist finally eats in that boy’s apartment (page 180): “She ate a slice of cold pizza standing in the glow, opened a jar of pickles and ate three, ripped a hunk of cheddar from the block with her fingers and gobbled it down. She didn’t see the boy standing in the doorway until she reached for the orange juice.” We get NONE of the pleasure of her eating after all this time. She is ravenous and eats with a reckless randomness that takes place in a short span of time. We don’t feel her satisfaction… only her shame.

Since I think we’re talking about mapping the short story movement, I noticed that the story moved from event to event -- living on the beach, to sleeping in car and getting caught by cop, to sleeping with the boy who had food in his fridge, to eating at a church and watching a lovely scene of server comforting a woman eating, to the cop rapping on the window of her car, to working for Eugene-Euclean, to losing everything when her car was destroyed and scavenged, to moving into the Prairie home -- while there was an undercurrent of worry for her mother that seeped into moments throughout. She was always on the run, similar to the other two pieces we’ve read… there is a survival aspect to all three.

I would say that survival in Ghosts and Empties hinges on self-denial through acute observation of others - denial as a mechanism of protection. In a way, the narrator has just enough of a window into herself for to keep denying her feelings for just a bit longer.

Survival in Dogs Go Wolf is rooted in innocence and vulnerability… it is the quality of childhood that both endangers and protects the older and younger sisters. They are able to play and be nonchalant while their lives crumble and their situation becomes more and more dire, which probably prevents them from panicking and making a dumb decision. The fairy tale form(?) pairs well with their childlike, survival via going-with-the-flow existence.

In Above and Below, the protagonist's survival hinges on the adrenaline of being sick (eating disorder), and being lost. The protagonist floats like a leaf along life’s stream, rushed along by complete, whole-body pain. But she hasn't given up, or else why would she wait in line at soup kitchens? Again, the pacing of this piece mimics the plot... the event-to-event nature of this story is just like someone who is out of control... things keep happening and stacking on top of one another. The protagonist strikes me as depressed and in the throes of an eating disorder that was complemented by her situation of homelessness. The impetus to survive propels her to find food and sustenance, but only after she is tanned and experiences “mild starvation” as she puts it. Oh -- I also notice that she’s obsessed with the bodies of others; on page 175, she refers to the women at the gym as having “bellies and thighs larded by their easy lives.” I would say she's controlling her body because she can't control her life. She does not even possess a name.

Side note, not sure how this relates to craft: there is also a striking awareness of body in the first piece, Ghosts and Empties, where she comments on the weight of the neighbor boy and how his stomach looks like a rock rippling through a pond as he works out… because all I had as a reader are the details of her observation, I feel like I am complicit in those observations.... and some feel particularly cruel. To be fair, I get that she's a hurt person giving us these details... so is that what's craft-y about it? I'd love to put better words to this.

This is How It Always Is - Reliable Narration and How We Experience Characters

Reliable narration is something I consistently grapple with. My initial instinct is to trust the narrator - why should the narrator lie or omit or misdirect me? Shouldn’t I be trusting of them like I trusted my parents when I was small? But in fiction, the narrator isn’t beholden to me, they’re beholden to the story. There were several points while I read that I had to stop and ask, “is this character supposed to be someone we should genuinely trust?” and “why isn’t more information being given to us about this/why is only one side of the story being told?” It made me think to last semester in my Craft of the YA Novel class when we read and discussed Parrotfish. We discussed whether a child who is transgender or questioning their gender should take the narrative as an example of coming out that shows acceptance. Should there also be some kind of section where it explains that the sixteen-year-old main character, Grady, was able to be mostly accepted and experience some ease in transitioning because he was surrounded by so many people who already accepted him for who he was? That unfortunately not all environments are safe to be out en masse because of the hate that exists in the world. But we saw this hate in Frankel’s novel, and we felt the fear that Rosie and Penn felt for their daughter.

No work that deals with the grey areas of gender will be perfect, I don’t think. No work could capture all the nuances and every experience that gender-nonconforming individuals experience. While This Is How It Always Is captures the uncertainty that parenting is and while it does give some insight into the questions that burn when it comes to those individuals who live in the grey area of gender who are also minors (Is it up to the parents whether they transition all the way? At what point is the child old enough to decide if and how much they want to transition? Do the benefits of hormone-blockers outweigh the potential risks of wayleighing puberty?), I worry that some parents may see this novel as the best way to approach having a child who is gender-nonconforming.

My first concern with this is the character of Mr. Tongo. While he’s supposed to have several degrees and Rosie and Penn treat him as a counselor or psychologist, the language in which he speaks about Poppy and her transition is concerning as the tone the language creates makes him into some kind of cheesy, informational video they might show in school. This came up first when he appeared on the skype chat as godzilla posing as puberty (180) and coupled with his continual chorus of “this is going to be fun!” (181) which, in my reading, made the way he approached the subject similar to how you might discuss something with a small child while also not acknowledging they are intelligent human beings. As a reader even, it felt patronizing and not educational or helpful. Mr. Tongo and how much both Rosie and Penn viewed him as an expert with the answers when they felt lost troubled me when Poppy was outed. His remarks that “she hasn’t suffered enough” and that, as parents, they had “protected her too thoroughly” (231) left me feeling angry above anything else. It would have been one thing had he said something like, “great! You’ve created an environment for her where she can be herself so she knows that she’s loved and accepted and what that looks like! Now she’ll know what it’s like to be loved and accepted and that those who love and accept you are safe to come to with your truths and concerns and fears,” but there was none of that. Only, “that doesn’t help Poppy live anywhere but your house” (231). While it’s true that she’s ten and is at the age where kids really start to learn about how mean other people can be, I had great difficulty finding the places where he helped them find a balance between being supportive and putting their child’s happiness above all else as parents do and being honest with Poppy about what people are like but that it’s okay because she will always have the people who love her best.

These are the concerns and questions that came up for me, and I became concerned because, if a reader chose to read the novel and trust the narrator, to not question if the narrator is reliable, would they think that this is the way to do things? Or would they see that a large part of the novel is about how these two parents did what they thought was best at the time as parents do for their children no matter how those children identify?

A Fairy Tale Narrative

Laurie Frankel’s This Is How It Always Is, has a strong fairy tale association both within the story and in its narration. The concept of transformation is a popular theme in fairy tales—a girl becoming a princess, princes becoming animals—that is fit into Poppy’s story of her transformation. Penn compares it as such explaining, “virtue leads straight to transformation; transformation leads instantly to happily ever after” (page 159). His view of transformation is about bring to the outside what is already on the inside, not as an ideal self but as the true self. In the case with Poppy, it is about bring her self, Poppy, out from Claude. The novel follows a loose fairy tale structure as well, from the kind but childless husband and wife, conflict that requires advice from a knowledgeable, “magical,” individual, transformation, and happily ever after. Rosie and Penn are presented as the kind couple that want kids, Rosie asking for a daughter every pregnancy—in fairy tales it is a mother or queen that asks for a child, like in Snow White, or Rapunzel. Once they have their children they are unsure how to properly support Claude/Poppy and thus Mr. Tongo for advice—the wise friend that seems to hold the answers. He is even described as a “multi degree social-working therapist-magician” (page 66). Then there are the transformations, mainly with Claude becoming Poppy, reverting to Claude, and then reaching her true self and thus reaches the happy ending.

There are multiple times throughout the novel where the line, “once upon a time” come up. It is in the title of the first chapter that introduces Claude and the events that lead up to birth.  It comes up again during the creation of the Grumwald bedtime story, which serves as a mirror to the Walsh-Adams children. Frankel intentionally makes the parallel to fairy tales in order to add her own spin on it. When this line does appear in the first chapter it’s, “Once upon a time, Dr. Rosalind Walsh and her husband had had sex that started spontaneously and uncontrollably…” (page 4). Frankel includes Rosie’s name—and title as Doctor—and excludes Penn’s, referring to him as “her husband.” It contrasts against the typical fairy tale beginning where the King is mention and the Queen is usually “his wife.” These stories existing inside the family’s story at times take over the narrative. Aside from Grumwald’s, Claude’s recounting of Stephanie’s tale escapes Claude’s narrative by existing outside of Claude’s quotations. Similarly, Rosie’s Jane Doe story is also told outside of her mind and quotes. This small narrative takes up almost four pages, treating Jane Doe and Chad as their own characters with their own insights. Frankel’s narrative switching was interesting to read, bringing back to mind the quote from early in the novel, “That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories?” (page 29). There are multiple stories in This Is How It Always Is as the perspective does not stick to one character

Frankel tells the story of Poppy and her family as a fairy tale while at the same time dissecting them and yet falling into the structure. The family read as the ideal family, described at one point by Mr. Tongo as too supportive. Claude/Poppy was the virtuous main character pulled into negative circumstances that, as a child, does not have a lot of control over. I expected a happy ending early on, just like a fairy tale. However, the magic is not the cure to all nor a painless and instant form of transformation. Poppy needed to overcome obstacles. I was also interested in the question Frankel raised in the Author’s Note. Because the novel was so intertwined with magic and storytelling, just how close—or not—is it to fiction? With the similarities to Frankel’s life, just how “fiction” is her fiction novel? Fairy tales, no matter how magical they are, have an aspect to them that relates to reality, thus allowing them continued existence. Maybe Frankel wanted to capture an experience or an emotion and keep it in the form of a story where the reality and the magical blend.

Narrative Devices

Overall I felt the narration to be thoroughly reliable. Some points about the narrative devices I found compelling or not:

1. It felt like every chapter ended similarly. Here’s an example from part 1: the last sentence of the chapter “Once Upon a Time, Claude Was Born” reads, “Something that had long been true—since Rosie was twelve, half his lifetime ago—except he hadn’t known it yet” (15). Or here’s another example from “Air Currents and Other Winds.” This chapter’s last sentence reads, “But happy is harder than it sounds” (58). Or one more last sentence from “One Thing” that reads, “They told each other everything. Except for one thing.” Many of the final sentences of the chapter do this thing—and I’m using thing here because I’m not quite sure what to call it—that feels cheeky, a bit of a tip pressing us into what’s coming next, and all wrapped up in sentimentality. I’m not entirely sure I’m doing a good job even discussing it. But after two-thirds of the book, the last sentences of the chapters bothered me. They feel so composed. Which is of course what we’re all doing here, but isn’t the goal for it not to feel that way? 
2. Frankel uses long paragraphs that feel almost like lists to provide back story and history of the family. One example that I felt was incredibly well-done is on page 138. The paragraph describes the pictures on the new Seattle wall that Rosie put up and Penn took down. They’re a catalogue of Poppy’s history as Claude. A list of memories housed in photographs that provide backstory in a condensed form that doesn’t feel like telling or summary. I appreciated the way Frankel built into the narrative moments like this. Meandering paragraphs that provide the reader with necessary context, breaks from the dialogue and scene, but doesn’t overpower the reader with telling. 
3. The last narrative device I wanted to mention is the use of Grumwald and Princess Stephanie. These fairytale bedtime stories remind me of the play within a play in Hamlet. The stories serve to reveal truths about the characters, the family, and the situations they deal with. As a way of communicating with the children, the stories eventually become transparent to the kids. Aggie mentions to Poppy that there’s always a message. After a while, the stories fail to work in the way Penn hopes. 

Google, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin Say it again

Appreciation first because its brief:

I really enjoyed the backstory on Rosie and Platt or Pitt or whatever the dad’s name was. I loved hearing how they met and fell in love. I thought their early days as a writer and emergency medical resident added a lot of context for their characters later in the book as spouses and parents. Truly, the best part of this book was the bit about the Dad in the MFA program in this glorious passage:

It seemed like getting a degree in creative writing would mostly involve writing, but it didn’t. It mostly involved reading and not reading what he wanted to read and not reading what he wanted to write. 

I snapped while reading this on the bus. Interestingly enough, even though I loved this articulation, that is how I would end up feeling about spending a week out of my semester reading this book. 

Ok, so I have this theory and it upsets people who write novels and long-form work. I think all books should be zines. And it’s not that the long book should not exist—but I am of the thought that, written well, the same tension, emotional investment, revelation and attachment to characters can be accomplished in short-form. In this way, the filler has been trashed and the story made accessible to an audience with a wider span of attention, age, education, access to information, income etc. 

And then I started reading this story and thought perhaps, this was an exception to my rule. Dealing with such a nuanced and sensitive subject matter would maybe require long-form to get the story right. To capture the state of each character accurately. To articulate what the author has learned after hours and hours of research on the topic, reading theory and work written by trans folks about their own lives. What words to use and when. What not to say. What is and isn’t someone else’s story to tell. (And make no mistake, an abundance of this writing exists. Scholarly and non-academic. Google is a good thing, y'all). But this pay-off never happened.  

Was the story written by an author with excellent voice? Absolutely. Was this story—the story that required so much research and care—done well? Not at all. We run into this familiar trouble as writers where we see a story and think because we’ve witnessed it, even from afar, that it’s ours to tell. We destroy its integrity, we don’t ask the right questions, we don’t ask permission. We take and don’t give anything in return. But the problem here is that this book was Poppy’s story and was told through the parent’s perspective—and not well at all. 

So I started to think about trans tropes in writing and how not to fuck up your work by falling into them. There’s a long list but for starters, when you’re writing about the past, don’t refer to someone as their dead name. “Back when she was Claude,” is problematic because one—was she ever Claude? And two—it’s unnecessary to provide the former names of trans people who’ve changed their names. In fact, it’s dangerous and degrading. There’s a reason they don’t use that name so, why are you? Don’t dead name trans people. One more time: Don’t Dead Name Trans People. We have studies linking this behavior to suicide and it’s a generally shitty practice on and off the page. Someone’s old name is irrelevant. Stop saying it. It doesn’t help your story. It just makes readers not trust you. 

And when Frankel sat down to write this book, she knew this character would be a trans girl named Poppy. Yet we’re fed hundreds of pages of the wrong name and he/him pronouns—long after she came out in the story. This story could have drastically cut its exploitative-factor by introducing Poppy as herself, stating something about when she was born the parents and doctors thought she was a boy and they were wrong. How hard is that? Apparently really difficult because everyone wants a shot at their own cheap M. Night Shyamalan trans twist. The only reason I can think she didn’t introduce the character in this way was because she needed the twist—the grand surprise that a normal-ass nuclear family was in fact, worthy of a sensationalized novel. Yes, introducing Poppy as a trans girl at the beginning of the book would have changed the rate of revelation (thank you, Elmaz), but it would have also preserved any kind of trust I had in the author to handle a story on this topic at all.   

When I finally closed the book because I couldn’t bear to waste any more of my week on stories written about vulnerable, targeted communities written by careless authors who exist outside of them, I realized something. This book should be a zine. A zine about what not to do when writing about trans characters. 

Also, it was Penn. The dad’s name was Penn.