It started as these things usually do, I guess. A Susan Johnson paperback left out at the home where I was babysitting. A friend’s mother with a subscription to Harlequin Temptations that she kept in the top left hand section of her book shelf. She noticed my fixation, the way I couldn’t walk past that shelf without slowing down to a crawl. She loaned me one and that one led to…this.
My bookshelf was under my bed. (It still is.) And at that time, with my McNaught’s and Garwood’s I also had the Stephen King starter kit: Salem’s Lot, Pet Cemetery and It; the first three books in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time and a tear-stained copy of Ordinary People.
What I’m trying to say is I wasn’t genre-specifc.
And then my sophomore year of high school, my best friend’s boyfriend committed suicide. My world fell apart. In every possible way. And I couldn’t fix anything. Nothing made sense. Except those romance novels under my bed. I dove deep into those Happily Ever Afters. The heavy, wild and hard emotions that all got tied up at the end gave me some closure at a time I could not find any of my own. They gave me a safe place to experience my grief and my guilt and fear.
I dove deep into those Happily Ever Afters. The heavy, wild, and hard emotions that all got tied up at the end gave me some closure at a time I could not find any of my own. They gave me a safe place to experience my grief and my guilt and fear.
When I went on to college my box of books came with me and slipped under the bed in my first dorm room and then again in my first apartment off campus. My sophomore year of college (honestly, what is with sophomore years) a friend of mine was killed by a drunk driver. And again, I dove deep. Thank you, Elizabeth Lowell, for getting me through that time.
Romance would have my undying devotion for getting me through those two years alone.
I would look back at it fondly, if I’d somehow left it behind. But I didn’t. Romance has grown up with me. College graduation, my year abroad, negotiating a long distance relationship and then a marriage that we can’t say WASN’T begun for immigration purposes. My parents. My brother. Unemployment, first jobs. Pregnancy. Babies. Toddlers. Musical beds. Sleepless nights. Bullying. Etc… etc… etc…
There was always and without fail a romance novel illuminating something powerful about the experience I was in. Even if it was just hope for an easier tomorrow.
Romance has grown up with me. College graduation, my year abroad, negotiating a long distance relationship and then a marriage that we can’t say WASN’T begun for immigration purposes. My parents. My brother. Unemployment, first jobs. Pregnancy. Babies. Toddlers. Musical beds. Sleepless nights. Bullying. Etc.
Romance has comforted me and excited me. It has eased my boredom (which let’s not pretend that’s not a HUGE deal in those days at home with a baby) and kept me up nights with its drama. It’s walked me through thorny parenthood problems and made me a better friend. A better wife.
And I could make some winky joke about sex, here. But that’s far too easy. And romance deserves so much better.
The romance authors I love are like deep-sea explorers, sending their submersibles down into the murky deep only to return with their hands full of language for things that are all too often considered unimportant. Or trivial. They show me – over and over again, how important nuance and specificity are to describing how we feel so we can understand what what we feel.
The romance authors I love are like deep-sea explorers, sending their submersibles down into the murky deep only to return with their hands full of language for things that are all too often considered unimportant.
(If you don’t think that is a big deal I would argue that maybe you’ve never suffered from anxiety or post-partum depression or even something as mundane as shame. Or fear.)
And, perhaps the real gift is that those romance novels have shown me that we are all deserving of love. And happily-ever-afters. And forgiveness. And orgasms.
Guilt is a very big word. And so is love. And fear. And desire. And my favorite authors show me time and time again the far reaches of all those emotions, where everything overlaps. And we’re all just humans trying our best and sometimes screwing it up. And, perhaps the real gift is that those romance novels have shown me that we are all deserving of love. And happily-ever-afters. And forgiveness. And orgasms.
I don’t know what I would do without romance novels. And if you’re curious… these are the best I’ve ever had:
Elizabeth Lowell: Only You, Only Mine, Only Him, Only LoveJudith McNaught: Something Wonderful, Once and AlwaysLaura Kinsale: Everything she wrote, ever.Susan Elizabeth Phillips: Dream a Little DreamJR Ward: The Black Dagger Brotherhood SeriesMegan Hart: Broken
As I sit and consider my favourite book genre, I think of how I never really understood what genres meant when I first started choosing what I wanted to read, and how liberating that was.
I’ve always loved reading, and with parents who propagated reading as the ultimate learning tool, I often found myself from a very young age in a bookshop or library, given free rein to choose whatever I wanted to read. My parents did not have English as their first language, and thus did not really care what I read, as long as I read. Lacking guidance in school (growing up in Malaysia) and supervision at home, I never explored literature through its canons. Rather, it was whatever the bookshops and libraries around me stocked. And as a child, my only criteria then were that the books were of my reading ability (or a little harder), had a nice cover, interesting title, and a premise/plot that was new to me. Outside that, anything goes.
The two books that propelled me into exploring literature more rabidly as a child are Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile and Susan Hill’s I’m The King Of The Castle. Though both are mainstream children’s books, they proved to be special to me, as they introduced me to what I would realise later to be the types of books that I like – books that push my boundaries of imagination, knowledge, and understanding of humanity.
The tricksy characteristics of the Enormous Crocodile, or how the elephant, Trunksy spun Crocodile on its tail and propelled it into the sun was mind-boggling for my eight-year-old self. Though I had read fantasy stories before (Enid Blyton and fairytales), this mixture of reality and fictional imagination acted as a catalyst for my love of science fiction and fantasy later in life.
The boys’ relationships in I’m The King Of The Castle were a brilliant introduction to psychological thrillers and horror that would come to be my love during my formative years. It was here that I learnt about human behaviour, social triggers, and the many faces of humanity that are reflective of real life. My understanding of the world comes from fiction, and I am still constantly looking at fiction for new stories that would allow me to learn more about the world.
They introduced me to what I would realise later to be the types of books that I like – books that push my boundaries of imagination, knowledge, and understanding of humanity.
So from these two books, I journeyed into different realms; soaked up romance novels, fought through crime thrillers, was kept awake by horror, as I made my way through the genres to science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Science fiction (or hard science fiction) still remains my true love today. I don’t think I’m anywhere near a science fiction specialist, but I’m definitely a massive science fiction fan at heart, with Frank Herbert’s Dune firmly in its centre.
My understanding of the world comes from fiction and I am still constantly looking at fiction for new stories that would allow me to learn more about the world.
I’ve read it countless times, and yet it still entertains, teaches, and opens up new understandings of humanity to me. The far-fetched worlds that are grounded in our own world’s sciences are precisely what I feel is the perfect form of escapism. It is in these surreal worlds that we can scrutinise humanity and its actions without judgement, but with acceptance.
The best I’ve ever had? Well, it’s got to be science fiction as the ‘imaginative extrapolation from the possible’.[1] After all, ‘cutting edge sci-fi is sci-fi that dares you to think differently’.[2]
The far-fetched worlds that are grounded in our own world’s sciences are precisely what I feel is the perfect form of escapism. It is in these surreal worlds that we can scrutinise humanity and its actions without judgement, but with acceptance.
I fell in love with fantasy when I started reading the Harry Potter series as a kid.
A fourth-grade classmate brought Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fireto school for our teacher to read aloud. She only read one or two chapters, but it interested me enough that I got my mother to buy me Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Chamber of Secrets was a wonderful reading experience. My mind became filled with flying cars and broomsticks, Hogwarts castle, and mythical creatures. Sparks flew from the wands of Rowling’s witches and wizards flew into my imagination, where they bounced around and created a craving for more fantasy fiction.
Still, when it came to fantasy fiction, I didn’t think characters of color could exist. I had been taught through reading itself that the realm of fantasy was only for white men and women, and I’d never thought to look for anything else.
While waiting for the next Harry Potter book, I wanted to read stories of epic adventures, gods and mortals, with well-written female protagonists like Hermione Granger. I consumed novels from the Dragonlance series, books on mythology, and female-lead books like the Song of The Lioness series. However, I read very little fantasy fiction with people of color in it.
In fact, I can remember only one moment when the existence of people of color in fantasy didn’t feel strange to me. I was reading Lirael by Garth Nix, a book that is part of a trilogy. I saw a description of the book’s protagonist, Lirael, that said her white skin “burnt” when outside and that she had long, straight hair. I looked at the cover and thought that she looked a little like my mother, who is Vietnamese. Even though she seemed racially ambiguous, I thought she could have been Asian.
Still, when it came to fantasy fiction, I didn’t think characters of color could exist. I had been taught through reading itself that the realm of fantasy was only for white men and women, and I’d never thought to look for anything else.
Once, I bought a fantasy trilogy with characters of color without realizing it. The Farsala Trilogy by Hilari Bell featured a setting and characters that were inspired by Persian folklore—but years of reading fantasy with white characters had taught me to read them as white.
By the time I found a fantasy with a protagonist of color whom I was able to recognize as such, I was in college. I was browsing the adult section of my local library at random when I found The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. I decided to check out the book when I turned it over and saw the author was a black woman. It had never occurred to me that a black woman could write fantasy novels with characters who looked like black people.
This book blew my mind just as much as reading the Harry Potter series had. Instead of seeing a white cast of characters, I saw more brown than white. Not only was there a brown woman of color protagonist with curly hair, but also a fantastic mythology involving two brown-skinned gods and one white one. The plot involving these characters and more added even more color. I imagined the gods dressed in silver, yellow, and black and their universe as a limitless rainbow of planets and stars.
While The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was part of a trilogy, I didn’t read the other books until much later. I believed that fantasy authors of color were a rarity… I gradually forgot about the book.
Not only was there a brown woman of color protagonist with curly hair, but also a fantastic mythology involving two brown-skinned gods and one white one. The plot involving these characters and more added even more color. I imagined the gods dressed in silver, yellow, and black and their universe as a limitless rainbow of planets and stars.
It took me getting tired of seeing the same old faces and plots in fantasy to start searching for alternatives. I did online searches and gradually found fantasy books with black and Asian characters and authors.
It occurred to me that there were probably other people who, like me, didn’t know these books existed. Since I had a personal blog where I was already reviewing books, I started reviewing books with authors and characters of color. Soon, I was focusing on black speculative fiction, especially after I discovered independent black authors on the web. These authors would show me that not only was it possible for people of color to exist in fantasy fiction, but also they didn’t need society’s permission to do so.
A few years after I discovered black indie fantasy authors, I learned that this same lesson applied to black indie comic creators and artists. The first fantasy webcomic I read by a black creator was Agents of the Realm by Mildred Louis. Agents of the Realm sparked an appreciation for comic artists and creators of color that I hadn’t felt since I read Japanese manga.
After I discovered more fantasy webcomics with people of color characters and creators, I became fully immersed in comics, both mainstream and indie. The titles that made the most impact were Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson and The Legend of Bold Riley by Leia Weathington. These comics made me see American comics in a new light by showing me how diverse creators can create diverse stories and characters that appeal to me. They also inspired me to spread the word about comics as a freelance writer—and they helped me understand what the fantasy genre meant to me.
Fantasy gave me a wild imagination, entertainment, and a sharper mind. It showed me that magic could exist in this world, another world, and in myself.
Fantasy gave me a wild imagination, entertainment, and a sharper mind.
I fight for diversity in the fantasy genre because I didn’t know I could exist in a fantasy world or make my own until I was an adult.
Even though their sparks seem small, marginalized readers and authors have as much magic as everyone else. The more magic we acknowledge, the more fantasy will ignite reality.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
Shortly after the Trump Administration announced it was ending Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans, the New York Times ran an article with reading suggestions for understanding the country those immigrants are expected to return to in 2019.
Of the three books suggested, only one is by a Salvadoran author. Readers are led to assume that Salvadoran storytellers simply don’t exist—a dangerous lie I myself believed for the majority of my life.
Growing up, I devoured many, many books about white people. Stories about white people turned me onto reading. Though prep school and the glamourous New York City were completely foreign to me, J.D. Salinger managed to make Holden Caulfield feel like a familiar friend, a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Ray Bradbury’s short stories introduced me to the place where nostalgia meets science fiction, an intersection I now write from often. Stories about, and by, white people gave me a voice by which to pen my own stories.
But the stories I’d begun to formulate in the margins of a high school notebook full of biology notes were hollow. The dialogue and monologues that I gifted my characters with were all mine, imbued with my teenage confusion and angst. But the characters were not like me. They were not Latinx, they were not the children of immigrants, and they knew nothing of growing up Salvadoran in Los Angeles. My first full-length draft ended up being an eighty-page young adult novel where two of the main characters were white teenagers from the suburbs of Colorado.
At another juncture in my development as a reader, with a college acceptance that relocated me across the country, the handful of non-white professors at my predominantly white institution gifted me stories that were (finally!) not about white people.
The dialogue and monologues that I gifted my characters with were all mine, imbued with my teenage confusion and angst. But the characters were not like me.
In a contemporary African American literature course, Claudia Rankine, Toni Morrison, George C. Wolfe, and Paul Beatty stunned and haunted me. Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Amy Tan wrote stories about immigrants that struck a chord deep inside.
Perhaps most life-altering were the Latinx authors I hadn’t realized were so desperately missing from my own personal canon. I flipped through Drown by Junot Díaz, as if to catch up for every day I hadn’t spent reading his work. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera gave me the words to explain the feelings I knew too well, of being American but hyphenated. Achy Obejas, Luis Valdez, Julia Alvarez, Hector Tobar, and other Latinx authors unhinged my timid tongue. They offered well-crafted stories about Latinx families and enemies and lovers. Their work gave me permission to write stories as I lived them, in English and Spanglish and slang.
But El Salvador, the country of my parents’ birth, wasn’t in those stories. The conjugation of voseo, refugees labeled economic immigrants, a U.S.-funded civil war and its aftermath: it was all missing from the literature I was reading. I convinced myself that those stories simply didn’t exist and anything I wrote about El Salvador and Salvadorans was a whisper into a cultural abyss.
I convinced myself that those stories simply didn’t exist and anything I wrote about El Salvador and Salvadorans was a whisper into a cultural abyss.
It wasn’t until months later that I’d come to realize that these stories existed, but that they’d been hidden away from me. According to Arturo Arias, “the Central American population remains nearly invisible within the imaginary confines of what constitutes the multicultural landscape of the United States.” Sociologist Leisy Abrego has argued that the U.S. government’s failure to acknowledge individuals fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War as refugees created “the silence that is the large void in generations of children of Salvadoran immigrants growing up in the US being denied access to our own histories.”
The stories I so desperately needed were out there.
But because of the value placed on Salvadoran lives and xenophobic assumptions of what El Salvador offers the world culturally, they were not on my radar. The journey I’m on now is one that involves recovering Salvadoran stories, mining them out with the help of friends and colleagues who offer a title here, a poem there.
It wasn’t until my sophomore spring of college, two decades into my life, that I finally discovered literature that represented El Salvador as fully as I’d come to know it on every international trip back to San Salvador. A professor asked me if I’d ever read Roque Dalton. I hadn’t, and I told him so.
Looking back, I feel an irrational sense of shame in the fact that, as an intense lover of books, I hadn’t heard about the most famous Salvadoran writer. But the stories had been hidden from me, and it wasn’t until I picked up Dalton’s poetry that I began to see the artistic landscape that’s existed in El Salvador for decades.
Though Roque Dalton’s extensive body of work comes from the years leading up to his assassination in 1975, he understood El Salvador and its diaspora the way I’ve come to, decades after his death. In “Poema de Amor” he refers to Salvadorans as,
los guanacos hijos de la gran puta,
los que apenitas pudieron regresar,
los que tuvieron un poco más de suerte,
los eternos indocumentados,
los hacelotodo, los vendelotodo, los comelotodo
Salvadorans, particularly those “eternally undocumented,” are those that do it all: as cooks, housekeepers, landscapers, farmers, and all the jobs in between. They sell it all as street vendors in Los Angeles where they’re criminalized for their attempts to make a living. Roque Dalton’s poetry has reflected what I know about the people who’ve left El Salvador for their new homes up north. Versions of my friends and families live in the poems I spent far too long assuming didn’t exist.
Versions of my friends and families live in the poems I spent far too long assuming didn’t exist.
But Dalton was a poet, a damn good one, not an all-knowing oracle. A twelve-year-long civil war left 75,000 Salvadorans dead, 50,000 missing, and hundreds of thousands more displaced all over the world. A scissure of that degree inevitably changed the literature produced about El Salvador, especially when a three-million-person diaspora begins to pick up their pens to write stories Dalton could have never imagined.
In a stroke of luck, I was at Harvard at the same time as a Salvadoran graduate student and poet who led me to a generation of Salvadoran writers who were like me: straddling that space between El Salvador and the United States. One of her first recommendations was a Javier Zamora, whose debut collection was forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press a few months from the day of our conversation.
When it was released, Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied felt like the book I’d been searching for from the moment I’d realized that writing about El Salvador was not a hopeless endeavor. My complicated relationship with another country that is mine, though more in my nostalgia than anything else, has never been an easy thing to articulate. Yet Zamora writes tactfully, “Tonight, how I wish / you made it easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easier / to never have to risk our lives.” The poems were written in the distinctly Salvadoran Spanglish I’ve learned to speak but had yet to see in print. Reading a line like “to say sobreviviste bicho, sobreviviste carnal. Yes, we over-lived” felt like knowing a secret language, coded just for me.
When it was released, Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied felt like the book I’d been searching for from the moment I’d realized that writing about El Salvador was not a hopeless endeavor.
Roque Dalton died in 1975 and Javier Zamora’s collection was published last year. Their writing spans more than four decades. But initially, those were the only two Salvadoran storytellers I had to cling to. Only in the last few months have I begun building up my own personal canon of Salvadoran writers telling their stories, and indirectly mine, those of my parents, tíos, and tías.
William Archila conciliates the tension between American and Salvadoran by presenting them as one in the same, writing Duke Ellington into Santa Ana in his poetry.
Señor Ellington claps his hands along,
dancing in a two-step blues, stomping
in the center of everyone like a traffic cop
conducting a busy city street.
Leticia Hernández-Linares write musical poems about women who challenge the machismo of the culture they belong to, including one about a woman who shares my own mother’s name.
Sitting with Estella, Dolores conjures
cumbias with sugar on top, about women
who aren’t gonna take it anymore
Yesika Salgado guided me through heartbreak, hunger, and the presumed unknowability of our Salvadoran identity, writing:
every man I have loved does not know my country / has
not been awakened by the rooster’s crow / does not know
the swell of grass and dirt beneath June thunderstorms /
does not smell burning wood and think of home
My canon, writers from both here and there, grew little by little, like a Santa Tecla sprinkle turned tropical storm: Quique Avilés, Claribel Alegría, Cynthia Guardado, Elena Salamanca, Lorena Duarte, Karina Oliva Alvarado, Susana Reyes, harold terezón, Alejandro Córdova, Willy Palomo, Janel Pineda, Claudia Castro Luna, Roberto Lovato, Raquel Gutiérrez, Alexandra Lytton-Regalado, Gabriela Poma.
These writers, whose work has entered my life in its most recent era, give El Salvador and its diaspora shape, complexity, and dignity. Finding faithful representations of Salvadorans in literature has been a difficult process, access to texts being one of the central struggles. Personal recommendations and anthologies like “The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States,” have made the process easier.
These writers, whose work has entered my life in its most recent era, give El Salvador and its diaspora shape, complexity, and dignity.
But it’s also required hours of sifting through footnotes and hoping that the cited texts are still in circulation. Two bilingual anthologies published by Kalina Editorial, “Teatro Bajo Mi Piel/Theater Under My Skin” and “Puntos de Fuga/Vanishing Points,” have been wildly helpful for identifying contemporary Salvadoran authors. Yet, I wasn’t able to buy copies until I was physically in San Salvador last summer.
These questions of access, of who comes across our stories and why, offers me, as a reader and writer, a challenge. For the sake of a rich but overlooked literary tradition, there’s a need to archive and connect others to our stories with the hope that people will begin to acknowledge that El Salvador is more than just its social ills.
In perhaps my favorite Roque Dalton poem ever, “El Gran Despecho,” he writes:
País mío no existes
sólo eres una mala silueta mía
una palabra que le creí al enemigo
That country of mine, nestled between two Americas, is the vibrant homeland of poetry and prose. Read its literature, lest you believe the lie that it simply doesn’t exist.
“Look,” said Ashley to Quinn, “you got the breasts. I want the belly part.”
“Fine,” said Quinn. “Fine, okay. So. ‘With his warm tongue, he found her navel again, and—’”
“Say David!”
“Right. So, ‘With his warm tongue, David found her navel again, and . . .’”
I pulled a flat, mildewy pillow over my head, giggling hard in hopes of drowning this out before I died from a heart attack. We were all thirteenish and at band camp, years before anyone came to believe that there was anything sexy about band camp whatsoever. Ashley and Quinn, however, brought the sexiness wherever they went, being jointly and severally obsessed with David Bowie. They were reading sex scenes out loud from a novel, swapping in their own names and Mr. Bowie’s respectively. And whose fault was this?
“‘David brought his hand back up her inner thigh, feeling the special softness there, and over the springy curls of her mound—’”
It was my fault. I had brought this novel to camp with me. I had disclosed to other human beings that I had a copy of The Plains of Passage—one of the sequels to Jean M. Auel’s The Valley of Horses. And now they knew, now everyone was going to know, that I had a dirty book—
“Okay, is this the actual sex? We should both get part of the actual sex.”
The other girls were laughing, yes. They were laughing and blushing, but—I moved my eye from beneath the pillow—none of them were laughing at me.
Everyone who forms a theory of prehistoric life must sooner or later base it on what they privately believe about human nature.
Marija Gimbutas was a pioneering twentieth-century archaeologist whose life was torn apart by war. When her native Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, Gimbutas had to flee, carrying only her dissertation and her baby. After her years of struggle and gender discrimination, Gimbutas’s 1974 book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe caught the zeitgeist like a spinnaker sail.
In the onrush of second-wave feminism and anti-war sentiment, Gimbutas’ theories had an immediate appeal to women inside and outside of the academy.
Gimbutas had studied prehistoric “Venus figurines” —small, anonymous, heavyset female statuettes, such as the Venus of Willendorf—as well as the warlike Indo-European cultures of the Bronze Age. According to Gimbutas, once upon a time, Paleolithic Europe had been inhabited by a race of peaceful goddess-worshipers. The Indo-Europeans swept in with their bronze, their chariots, and their patriarchy, breaking the scattered peoples of the Goddess and, in short, ruining everything. In the onrush of second-wave feminism and anti-war sentiment, Gimbutas’ theories had an immediate appeal to women inside and outside of the academy.
Around this time, Jean M. Auel, an accomplished Oregon businesswoman in her forties, sketched her first story about the prehistoric world. In 1980, she published her debut novel, Clan of the Cave Bear, in which an orphaned H. sapiens girl, Ayla, is raised by the Clan, a band of Neanderthals. The girl’s cleverness frightens and confuses the patriarchal Clan, who are genuinely incapable of learning anything new. Clan of the Cave Bear is now among the one hundred “best-loved books” listed by the PBS Great American Read, and it has become a minor classic of historical fiction.
Its sequel, The Valley of Horses, is not so much as a classic as a whisper among women, a shared secret in libraries and locker rooms. But it is this sequel, together with the subsequent books in the Earth’s Children series, that became legendary among female readers. In it, Ayla strikes out on her own and manages to make a living for herself until she meets another human for the first time, the comically handsome Jondalar. His people—as Gimbutas posited—worship the Great Earth Mother, Creator of all. Human cultures do not share a language, but because they share the Goddess, they live in peace throughout Europe. Ayla and Jondalar learn gingerly about each other’s worlds, culminating in Ayla’s detailed sexual awakening and Jondalar’s detailed falling in love.
The Valley of Horses is not so much as a classic as a whisper among women, a shared secret in libraries and locker rooms. But it is this sequel, together with the subsequent books in the Earth’s Children series, that became legendary among female readers.
And who could not love Ayla? She is the type specimen of the Canon Mary Sue—a flawless, feisty maiden, persecuted for her daring. At various points in the series, she invents horse-riding, fire-starting, the concept of sexual reproduction, and dogs. Jondalar has already invented having blue eyes and a large penis; Ayla helps him come up with the spear-thrower as well. They then take a leisurely three books to travel through Ice Age Europe to return to Jondalar’s people. Each book offers diminishing returns to the reader, and yet, taken together, they offered something that women of the 1980s apparently needed.
At that time, the hero of a romance novel was generally what modern authors call an “alpha-hole” —a cruel, self-absorbed rake. The heroine’s reward was that her persistence would unlock his heart and teach him to love. This is not a job that Ayla must do. Jondalar actually likes women; he accepts them as leaders and comrades, just as other men do. And, like all the Cro-Magnon peoples in Auel’s books, Jondalar views sex as a sacrament— “the Mother’s Gift of Pleasures.” The drawn-out sex scenes are repeated throughout the books, with as much tenderness on the fiftieth occasion as on the first.
The first time anyone else saw me naked, they laughed at me.
They were little boys who had threatened to hit my dog if I didn’t pull down my underwear. The association between taking off one’s clothes and being laughed at has remained strong in me ever since. I got more sex education on the fly from R. Crumb comics and dirty magazines. Sex, I gathered, was a nasty business, premised on one principle: make the joke or be the joke.
Sex, I gathered, was a nasty business, premised on one principle: make the joke or be the joke.
There are no jokes in the Earth’s Children series—at least, none that are funny. There is plenty of boisterous teasing, but nothing with actual bite. Something about this appealed to me. I did not exactly like the sex scenes. Even as a sheltered child, I suspected that the characters could not possibly bathe enough for all that. Yet the scenes depicted something I had never imagined: truly safe sex—respectful, reverent, healthy. Auel envisioned a world in which life was dangerous, but men were not, and a woman could lead a life of adventure with a partner, not for him or against him.
The scenes depicted something I had never imagined: truly safe sex—respectful, reverent, healthy… a world in which life was dangerous, but men were not.
Once, I found a heavily used paperback of The Valley of Horses at a jumble sale. In the margins, someone had written “Turn to page 41,” “Turn to page 150,” and so forth. These instructions resulted in a simple tale of one woman surviving in the wilderness and domesticating animals, then meeting a nice fellow. Who gave these instructions and to whom, I cannot say. But it was clearly someone who recognized that the book could give more than it was famous for. Stripped of its sex scenes, it still offered hope—the hope that one woman, alone with her broken heart, could build a full life.
Hope, however, is not the same as quality.
The paperback edition of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s Reindeer Moon was stamped with FOR EVERYONE WHO LOVED THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR! It is decidedly not. Reindeer Moon is indeed a book about the adventures of a young woman thrown on her own resources in ancient Europe, but the heroine, Yanan, lives a grinding life of constant cold and hunger. Her clothes are ill-fitting; her companions are narrow and quarrelsome. Yanan too is passionate and defiant, but when it costs her dearly, fate does not reward her. Nor does struggle make her exceptional. When Yanan encounters a motherless wolf cub, her first instinct is to eat it.
Thomas, who spent some of her youth among modern hunter-gatherers, has more insight than Auel does into what truly motivates humans on the edge—not peace, love, and discovery, but warmth, blood, and fat. By the time I found Reindeer Moon, it reinforced what I understood then to be true: life is brutal, and any men who express interest in the ancient spirituality of the female body are trolling for tail.
It seemed unsafe to enjoy something like the Earth’s Children series. Women’s fantasies are used against them in a way that men’s never are. By the time I was in college, I had been sexually assaulted by someone who was, by all accounts, deeply in love with me, and I understood this to be my fault for being in love with him. I needed to prove two things—first, that I was to be taken seriously, and secondly, that I knew better to expect anything from men.
It seemed unsafe to enjoy something like the Earth’s Children series. Women’s fantasies are used against them in a way that men’s never are.
One way I have done this, over the years, is to make fun of the work of Jean M. Auel. I turned on the premise and the purple prose, mocking its sexiness and its ahistoricity. I wasn’t wrong, but I was also bridging a dark place—my own knowledge that sex, for me, had never been a joyful, celebratory, sacred act, and that I could not trust anyone who said it was.
I have, I think, been ungrateful. Auel offered me something that I once took gladly—a chance to imagine, free from the laughter of boys or men. Thousands of readers were able to enjoy the same peace, for a little while, and to learn a few things from Auel’s vast and diligent research. Every day, I struggle to imagine a simple story that is unclouded by discourse, by the weight of what I know the world to be. Auel could not only imagine such a story, she could write hundreds of thousands of words of it and cite her research. Auel depicted a world that was more than pain, and for this, I am glad.
The problem is that the form of a sonnet is clear and exact.
Fourteen lines, plus a strict rhyme scheme, plus iambic pentameter, equals sonnet. Life doesn’t tell you the form. Life says figure it out.
I’d run up the stairs to my room, take the box off the bookshelf and put the cassette in the stereo. Sigh in frustration. I needed to rewind if I wanted to listen to the chapter from the beginning. I’d pour out my Legos while the cassette whirred and clicked. “Hello, I’m Madeleine L’Engle and I’m going to be reading A Wrinkle in Time to you.” I’d lay on my scratchy green carpet and build castles for my Harry Potter Legos while the author read to me. Mrs. Whatsit tells Meg, “Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: you’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”
The problem is that the form of a sonnet is clear and exact. Fourteen lines, plus a strict rhyme scheme, plus iambic pentameter, equals sonnet. Life doesn’t tell you the form. Life says figure it out.
Life doesn’t tell you the form. Life says figure it out.
Auntie Susan has The Gift. I think my family calls it that because saying “witchcraft” would be too risqué. Mom called her sister every time she lost something. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table. The phone was bright orange with an extra-long cord. She’d say, “I can’t find the book I was reading.” She’d listen to the answer and then go pick up the book from wherever my aunt said it was. Auntie Susan could make things happen. When I was little she told me that I have a witch’s toe. I told her mom says I have monkey toes. They’re long and thin and the second toe is longer than the first. Auntie Susan said that long second toe was the mark of a witch. She showed me her foot was the same.
My parents have the most romantic love story. My grandfathers were both in the Navy and both families settled on the same beach. Gamma looked at Grandma Terry one day as my parents were playing in the sand and said, “My son’s going to marry your little girl someday.” To which Grandma Terry said, “Over my dead body.” Or so the story goes. They grew up together and got married when they were twenty-three. I’m twenty-two.
Grandpa Johnnie had the gift too, in a way. He was really good at finding glasses. He once found the glasses Grandpa Curt lost when he tipped the sunfish. Three tides later. He yelled from the beach as Grandpa Curt walked out into the water. “A little to the left. No further out. Bend down.” Sunglasses found.
I nearly lost my glasses jumping off a dock last week. They were on my face when I jumped and gone when my head came up out of the water. I assumed they were gone forever but a minute later I felt them on my foot and got them back. My mom says it was Grandpa Johnnie looking out for me.
The second time I ever cried at a movie I was fourteen. The Gay Straight Alliance at my high school was doing a movie marathon. My friends had mostly left to do homework, but I was engrossed in But I’m a Cheerleader. It’s the story of two teenage girls who fall in love at straight camp. As I watched the cheerleader stand on the front porch of the camp, pom-poms in one hand, suitcase in the other, I felt the form of the sonnet crashing down around me. I was wrapped up in a blue blanket my mom knit for me. When the movie finally came to its happy ending I felt fat tears rolling down my cheeks.
As I watched the cheerleader stand on the front porch of the camp, pom-poms in one hand, suitcase in the other, I felt the form of the sonnet crashing down around me.
When I was seventeen I read two books about mental hospitals the week before my best friend was committed to McLean. I read another one when I was twenty-one in the days before driving my girlfriend to Grinnell Regional. Both nights, when laying in my dorm room bed in the blue blanket, and when sitting in the hallway of the hospital while my girlfriend told the nurse her plan, I felt the same. The same specific guilt. I had read the future and failed to act. I twirled my hair. I stared at the wall. I promised myself I would listen to my friends and to my own small voice. I would write down my bad dreams. I looked at my toes.
I was eleven when I reached the peak of my Greek mythology phase. I made an altar in my closet. I filled it with rocks, ribbons, shells, and potions of soapy water and glitter. It was dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of maidens and the moon. I would go to my altar to write in my leather-bound journal. It was there I decided I had a crush on a boy. I felt Artemis’ disappointment that day. Or maybe it was my own.
My mom has the gift. When she sets a timer on her phone she moves to turn it off a second before it dings. She’d say it’s just practice.
I’ve tried to keep listening. To keep practicing.
In a poet’s apartment we’re on the bed next to each other, them turning the pages, reading silently together. My heart leaps and I listen.
On the terrace an artist complains about a negative tarot reading. I look at my own cards and listen.
The first time a writing professor told me poets could break the form of the sonnet I was offended. I’m a rule follower, and I was offended for Mrs. Whatsit and Madeleine L’Engle.
Sitting in a restaurant that only serves dishes containing avocado an old song says, “Call your girlfriend, it’s time you had the talk,” and I listen.
The first time a writing professor told me poets could break the form of the sonnet I was offended. I’m a rule follower, and I was offended for Mrs. Whatsit and Madeleine L’Engle. But I’ve figured something out. A sonnet doesn’t have to follow even its own rules. Life doesn’t either.
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