I’d gotten in touch with Kris on Facebook through a friend of a friend. Lately, driving the familiar backroads, I had been stirred by memories of how it felt to be young and queer (and closeted) in West Virginia in the nineties and early two-thousands and I wanted to connect with the current generation of rural LGBTQ youth to see what life was like for them today. I remembered lying low in the back seat of the bus, nose in a book, listening to the kids around me talking about “that lesbian doctor in town.” Fucking pussy-licker, an older kid said. That’s why my dad told my mom we can’t go there no more. And something had leapt inside me. I’d never paid much attention to the local lady doctor when I passed her at the grocery store or laundromat; now I wanted to get a better look. I was maybe nine, not even old enough to fully understand my own desires, but I knew without knowing that this conversation had something to do with the way I felt around certain girls. And I could sense the palpable hatred that wreathed that word lesbian.
Upon returning to my hometown, though, some twenty-odd years after that bus ride, I kept seeing signs that perhaps, even in rural Appalachia, the times had changed. There was an advertisement on Facebook for a local queer film festival, an Appalachian photo essay that included an image of two teenage girls publicly kissing, an Instagram account dedicated to queer Appalachians interested in creating their own zine, and talk in the county seat of an LGBTQ protection ordinance. I myself never came out until after I left West Virginia, and now that I was back home my queerness was fairly invisible. I was married to a man, and most of my neighbors and coworkers at the local community college where I taught had no idea that before I fell in love with my husband I had dated only women. It was a privilege that I felt uneasy about and I couldn’t help but wonder what life would have been like for me if I had never left West Virginia. I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have felt comfortable moving back home if my partner were a woman. I reached out to a friend, the only publicly out lesbian I knew in the area, to ask her what she thought life was like for rural LGBTQ youth these days. She told me I should talk to a guy named Kris, and so here I was, lost in my own hometown, looking for him.
Fiction is a portal to a deeper understanding of myself, and when I went through it the first time, I knew I would write fiction the rest of my life. Fiction allows me the freedom to conjure up scenes, add details from my life or my mother’s, alter them—whatever is best for telling a story. It’s the ultimate tag sale. I used the frayed sofa in one house and snippets of gossip around mahjongg tables during meetings of the real Joy Luck Club. I resurrected the horrifying sound of a neighbor girl screaming as her mother beat her in the bathroom. I carried into many stories the hopes and expectations of my parents: to practice hard to become a concert pianist; to be American enough to take advantage of opportunities but Chinese in character; to marry a generous, kind man without spots on his face. My rejection of their expectations went into the mix, and, as the story evolved, a broken bit of my self-esteem surfaced.
A phrase that often came up for us was that we didn’t want this collection to seem “like a scrapbook,” filled randomly with miscellaneous writings, as anthologies and posthumous collections sometimes do. This is where sequencing the pieces became crucial. We wanted this book to have its own narrative arc, to give a suggestion of Oliver’s entire life’s path.
But even more broadly, Gingerbread is about stories — who tells them, who hears them, and what they mean. It’s only when Perdita embarks on the perilous journey to Druhástrana, with the aid of a poison-laced hedgehog-shaped gingerbread, that Harriet begins to unfold her life story. As it turns out, gingerbread, the food, is sort of the ideal vector for storytelling, because gingerbread is all about making up stories. It’s been used over the course of its history as a vessel for meaning: It’s been luxurious and refined; comforting, treacly, and homey; threatening and insidious. As it’s become established in different cultural contexts, rituals and stories have sprung up around it. Back in Druhástrana, Harriet Lee spent some time working on a gingerbread farm, where one team was tasked exclusively with “concocting gingerbread lore,” inventing stories with titles like Gifts of the Four Wise Men: Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh + Gingerbread. The gingerbread exists; the narratives develop later.
Leila S. Chudori’s 2012 novel, Home, translated from the Indonesian by John H. McGlynn in 2015, uses food as a mechanism to create and sustain intimacy during political exile and as a method of resistance against the imposed narrative of the dictatorship. Set mainly during the New Order government rule of Indonesia, the book, which spans a period of thirty years, begins in Jakarta just before the 1965 September 30 Movement, during which an organization of the Indonesian National Armed Forces killed six army generals in a coup d’état. The president at the time, Sukarno, and his government quickly blamed this on the Communist Party of Indonesia and began a genocidal massacre and imprisonment of communists, those suspected of relations with communists, and ethnic Chinese Indonesians.
Machines Like Me manages to combine the dark acidity of McEwan’s great early stories with the crowd-pleasing readability of his more recent work. A novel this smart oughtn’t to be such fun, but it is.
What is death,
but a letting go
of breath?