But like life, rereading can take many sharp turns; a blessed infancy does not always make for a golden maturity. In the case of Love in the Time of Cholera, our guest writer found an altogether changed character twenty-three years later.

For this month’s edition of The Books We ❤️ Club, gives as much of himself as he does the book in question, and it is magic.

Happy reading! ~ MTF

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The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way” by of PalCinema, Television, & Music

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Why I ❤️ Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

by of

On the second-to-last day of my junior year of high school, I wrote a message in a girl’s yearbook.

This wasn’t just any message because this wasn’t just any girl. I’d had a crush on her during middle school, and while my heart moved on when we landed in different English classes, it quickened when she appeared in Vocal Ensemble a few years later. Urged onward by a graduating soprano, I let loose every ounce of romance I had in my seventeen-year-old body.

Remembering the feral fever I wrote under in that yearbook makes me cringe now. I don’t know what I thought would happen afterward—that she would race across campus to mi clase de Español Tres, silence Sra. Alvarez mid-conjugation, and leap into my arms? Was that even what I wanted? I couldn’t have told you. My feelings for her were larger than she was, and also larger than logic or scale. I was “in love” in the way people who never have been are.

Although her best friend assured me my words had been compelling, the girl and I never talked before summer arrived. I began my final vacation as an adolescent pining after her, waking each morning cautiously optimistic that this would be the day she found me, that this would be the day we emerged from the shadow of my one-sided affection.

It wasn’t yet obvious to me that nothing would ever happen, so I set about keeping myself busy. My first move was to attack the glut of summer homework assigned by my Advanced Placement Physics class. Alas, I found my yearning too strong to digest time dilation and rudimentary thermodynamics, so I switched over to the stack of books anointed as AP Literature’s required reading.

A stack that included Love in the Time of Cholera.

Like most students, I had run into Gabriel García Márquez before in short story form: everyone at my school read “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” during one class or another. That fantastical but poignant story primed me to be optimistic about the novel. At the start of July in the sweltering Sacramento heat, I flopped onto the living room couch and read.

Perhaps due to the temperature, those two days I spent reading and ruminating on Gabo’s novel play like a fever dream in my memory. To my recollection, I ate nothing and drank only the sweat that pooled above my lips. When daylight evacuated into night, I drifted into shallow, slimy sleep, my heartbeat still matching the languorous rhythm of the story. A massive headache throbbed through the final 200 pages, but I embraced that pain as a sacrifice at the altar of love. I couldn’t put the novel down because it felt so instructive to someone who whimpered with longing every night in bed.

Love in the Time of Cholera is many things, but it’s primarily about unrequited love. The romantic wordsmith, Florentino Ariza, falls for the proud Fermina Daza, but passionate correspondence fails to unite them. Instead, Fermina marries the worldly doctor, Juvenal Urbino, while Florentino encases his ardor in glass and goes right on pining into old age.

To the lovesick puppy who read Love in the Time of Cholera, Florentino Ariza was a role model. Although he finds odd ways to occupy his heart in the interim, Florentino Ariza refuses to untether himself from the woman he loves. I needed reassurance that I was no fool for waiting for my Fermina Daza, and Florentino Ariza assuaged my fears. When the two characters reconnect in the final act, I swooned. Certainly, I didn’t wish to wait until I was eighty like them, but I got the memo: love rewards resolute hearts.

Ultimately, my patience that summer did not pay off because the girl I adored moved to Nashville to become a professional singer. I learned this news on the first day of senior year in August, and it crushed me, but my disappointment felt noble, too. I had exercised Florentino Ariza’s endurance; I had emulated my literary hero. My heart remained empty of the affection it craved, but my intellectual soul felt nourished.

I had no girlfriend, but I did have a favorite novel.

*****

When Troy invited me to write about my favorite book, I landed on Love in the Time of Cholera with surprising ease. It felt like an ideal choice because there was such a rich context for my fondness. Readers could laugh at my earnest yearning, recall their own youthful pining, and revisit or discover an incredible novel by a literary superstar.

The one snag was that I hadn’t read Love in the Time of Cholera since July 2003. Twenty-three years is quite a stretch. The seventeen-year-old girl that eleventh-grade me love-bombed had her music career start and end during that interval. Twenty-three years is a lifetime. So I decided to read the novel again last month.

It suffices to say that García Márquez still left me spellbound. Even via translation, his majestic sentences are incredible works of art. Gabo paints with language, his prose stretching the limits of syntax as he packs stories into subordinate clauses that should be disorienting digressions but instead captivate with rich detail. His gregarious narrator flows like water between characters and epochs; he’s omniscient, yes, but he’s also unmistakably Colombian, dropping into first-person plural pronouns when the politics or personalities of the day invade his story. I enjoy reading his words on the page the same way I do Elena Ferrante’s—Love in the Time of Cholera features flat-out beautiful writing. I wish I had one-tenth of Gabo’s command of language.

While García Márquez gained esteem on this read, everything else I once loved challenged me. While my younger self looked up to Florentino Ariza, my adult self reviled him. Given distance from the passion in my heart circa 2003, I no longer imprinted on the character, letting me recognize the monstrosity I’d read past and through at seventeen. When characters referred to him as “vampiric” and “perverted”, I’d shaken my teenage head. ThEy DoN’t UnDeRsTaNd, I’d protested internally. CoNvIcTiOn Is A vIrTuE! But Florentino Ariza is deranged; he eats flowers, dresses like a funeral director, and lusts like it’s going out of style. He behaves like Michael Fassbender’s character in Shame, but without the, you know…shame. And I say all this before even invoking America Vicuña, the ward he grooms, abuses, and then discards. “A vampiric pervert” does not sufficiently indict the guy. Forget about admiring Florentino Ariza this time—I would have preferred he die of cholera than end up with Fermina Daza.

I won’t mince words: the epic love story I’d read for AP Lit churned my stomach this time. Florentino Ariza wielded oppressive affection; he smothered Fermina Daza with poetry and gifts, and he pined for her despite barely knowing her. She was the object of his affection with emphasis on object; his devotion intersected limerence and carnal desire, not what I would call love. In this read, I felt sympathy for Fermina Daza, whose relationships with men flatten her livelihood. Love in the Time of Cholera isn’t some bible of romantic endurance but a cautionary tale. If you’re consumed by love, perhaps you need to invest in air quotes.

That’s a profound realization to have, I should note. I’m glad I read the work differently in 2026.

But what was I supposed to write for Troy?

*****

After rereading it last month, I’d no longer call Love in the Time of Cholera my favorite book. My affection for the novel is rooted in a specific moment in time when I was so in love with being in love that I idolized an awkward, abusive vampire. As much as the novel matched the massive feelings of a seventeen-year-old me, it no longer resonates with the adult he later became.

But that fact doesn’t leave the novel without power. My consolation prize for finding a predator where my romantic role model once resided is the observation of tremendous growth. Love in the Time of Cholera confirms that I have evolved. What passed for love in 2003 requires quotation marks today; obsessive one-sided pining no longer strikes me as aspirational or admirable. I grew out of that mindset. I’m glad I did.

Why do I love Love in the Time of Cholera today, then? Because the novel’s a fascinating landmark. There’s no doubt it was the most adult thing I’d ever read in 2003, the literary equivalent of watching Eyes Wide Shut. With a few gray hairs and amidst a long career, I’m wise enough at 40 to recognize that, despite García Márquez gifting his protagonist a happy ending, the character’s off-putting appearance, ghastly behavior, and defining hypocrisy before that ending weren’t accidents.

That Gabo’s main character was ever someone I revered says far less about the novel’s failings than about the lovesick idiot I was in high school.

Soured though I am on Love in the Time of Cholera, I would still recommend the exquisite prose of Gabriel García Márquez to anyone. Likewise, there’s a lot for fiction writers to glean from the book about narratorial voice, world-building around real-life events, and rotating among several principal characters. Gabo was one of the best, and Love in the Time of Cholera demonstrates his immense skill.

But for those who can’t stomach the character or story his immense skill delivers here, there are other options. His masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is one alternative; it’s been a few years since I read it, but I remember a sprawling epic packed with incredible prose and scope. His short story collections exist, too, and no piece showcases his magician’s touch more than “Light is Like Water”, my personal go-to text of magic realism. I didn’t love a lot of his later-career stuff, but he’s got plenty of good work out there.

Finally, if you’re interested in tamer art about love’s endurance across time and distance, let me recommend not a novel but a film: Celine Song’s 2023 Best Picture nominee Past Lives. This story of childhood twelve-year-old sweethearts reconnecting at 24 and 36 tackles our pesky hearts with gentle pragmatism. Hae Sung is an anti-Florentino, cautiously sweet and respectful but wholly uncertain what he wants, while Nora is understanding, honest, and realistic, a co-protagonist imbued with the agency Fermina Daza never quite gets from her creator.

Both Song and Gabo confront questions about the cost of holding onto love, making each author’s work an invaluable text for interrogating one’s heart. Still, in my humble opinion, only one suits an adult making their way in the world—and it’s not the one I long referred to as my favorite novel.

Recommending Past Lives wasn’t where I thought I’d land this contribution to Troy’s series about great books, but things have changed.

Especially me.

Intensely Specific

A teacher's endless search for purpose in the past, present, and future

By Michael Steele

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Tiffany writes “literary essays and fantasy for readers who want to go deeper — into grief, identity, and the things we rarely say out loud.” A good place to start would be her own bittersweet essay “In This Timeline” which appeared in ’s in May, and was also featured in ’s .

Orphan

by Troy Ford

My father died in 2007, my mother seven years later. 2014 was also the last time I spoke to my sister, who plundered Mom’s estate after obtaining power of attorney, sold the family home, and spent the proceeds on herself. I email one of my cousins at Thanksgiving and Christmas, though I haven’t seen her for more than five minutes in the last thirty-five years. The others—four boys on my father’s side, another two on my mother’s—have never had any interest in maintaining a relationship.

If asked, I say I have no family besides my husband and my dog.

It feels strange to declare myself an orphan, going on fifty-seven, but my sister and I were adopted, so for the first three weeks of my life, an orphan is in fact what I was. If this were a nineteenth century novel, a child given up by its parents might be placed in an orphanage and carry that identity for the rest of their life. But by the late 20th century in California, there was a state apparatus for putting stray children like us up for adoption. So I did have parents, but as time wore on, it became clear my placement with these particular two people was not a natural fit.

I won’t say our difficulties were any more grievous than might be found in biological families; my husband’s own was fraught with lies, betrayal, and violence which I never experienced. But despite the absence of that level of emotional warfare, something else was clearly missing—an attachment, perhaps.

Yes, there was food, clothing, shelter; birthdays and Christmas were celebrated. We weren’t rich, and my father’s career in aerospace was prone to periods of unemployment until he secured an overseas contract in Saudi Arabia where we lived for seven years. It was there, when I reached puberty, that I realized things were not quite on target with my sexuality, and some of the cracks in our family began to appear.

There were signs even before that. My mannerisms were worrisome to my father. I had a lisp, and my parents debated in front of me whether oral surgery would correct “my problem.” I did not enjoy sports. I threw like a girl, Dad said, and I was afraid the baseball he wanted to pitch back and forth might hit me in the face. I would flinch and miss the ball, and he would abandon our game in exasperation. When my little league baseball team—the one he demanded I join—came in last place for the season, the matter was quietly dropped forever.

I don’t know what our relationship would have looked like if I’d been the chip off the old block he clearly hoped for. He was a golfer, as were all his friends. I imagine if I’d shown even a slight interest in the game, the slow learning and perfecting of my swing might have proven the glue to a father/son bond. But I was awkward in most physical activities except the fluidity of roller skating with my little girl friends, and too self-conscious of the differences between me and most other boys to even try improving my skills. I was bookish; I liked to garden, but I got no encouragement from him there.

He spent years trying to suss out of me some kind of interest in girls. Birthday cards paraded the obligatory blondes in short-shorts, winks and nudges included. When I brought my friend Alice home from college for a visit, he was quickly crestfallen by our obviously platonic rapport.

The final blow came just as I was graduating. I had come out to all my friends already, but after I told my parents, their tolerance only lasted if I kept my mouth shut so they could pretend nothing had changed. When I couldn’t keep pretending with them, there was a rupture. After a five-year estrangement, I was able to reconnect with them by seeing them not as parents involved in my life, but as distant elderly relations more akin to grandparents.

When my father died, I stayed with Mom for a week so she wouldn’t be alone and kept myself busy by sorting through their disaster of a garage. They had inherited the hoard of my packrat grandmother, stacked to the rafters with bank giveaway toasters, back issues of National Geographic, and jars of buttons.

It was this same grandmother, my father’s mother, who we were always told had put some money aside for each of the six grandkids in savings accounts. Even at a modest interest rate, it would have grown considerably over twenty years. But after Gramma died, the inheritance for me was delayed by several years around the time of our estrangement. I heard from my sister that she had received her share of Gramma’s money. After we mended our rift, I broke down in a time of financial duress to ask if there was any forthcoming for me. A check arrived quickly, but out of curiosity I asked my sister why, if this money had been growing in a savings account for so long, the original amount hadn’t grown?

“Oh. They didn’t tell you? Because Gramma didn’t set aside any money for you and me, only for the natural-born grandkids.”

And there it was: our grandmother had lobbied against our parents’ adopting children. In fact, that was the reason she and our mother often butted heads in the years after, because Gramma’s wishes went unheeded and we two changelings had been introduced into the family. She felt a clear distinction between children born by blood, and those taken in from who knows what kind of people.

In the end, the “inheritance” had come out of our parents’ own pocket, and there was precious little to spare for reasons my mother revealed after Dad died.

It must have been the margarita. On the last night before I had to return home and work, Mom and I went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant and she began telling me stories about my father without realizing the magnitude of her revelations.

She told me the story of our last week before moving to Saudia Arabia in 1977; Dad had gone ahead for his job a few months earlier. One night, in the middle of packing and handling two kids on her own, there was a knock at the door. Two men in suits stood in the doorway. They knew her name.

“Ma’am, we’re here to collect your husband’s debt. We know he’s left the country, but he owes our employer $10,000 and you’re going to have to come up with that money before you leave too. We know where you live; we know where your kids go to school. We’ll be back tomorrow night at the same time, and you’d better have the money … or else.”

And so she went to the bank in the morning, cleaned out their checking and savings, and when the men returned the following night, she handed it to them without a word.

She also repeated a story a buddy of his had shared, about the time he and my father had gone out drinking one night after a late round of golf, and how, waking up from a blackout on a thin strip of desert highway, he’d asked Dad where they were going?

My father chucked his empty beer can out the car window and slurred, “We’re going to Vegas, baby.”

“Your father had a gambling problem,” she said as she finished that margarita. “He lost several fortunes over the years.”

In that moment, I also understood the odd encounter we had not long before his death. I had worked at a brokerage firm for many years, and he wanted my advice on an investment opportunity. Someone had called out of the blue about a boutique liquor brand “accepting” early investors. They had a thick package of marketing material heavy on glossy pictures of happy people enjoying their product but light on numbers and business plans. He mailed the package up to me in the Bay Area and wondered what I thought?

“Don’t do anything! Don’t give them any money!” I said, but by the time I arrived the next week for what turned out to be his last birthday, he’d already wired $20,000—their entire savings after a lifetime of work.

“But this is gambling!” I said to him in front of my mother, without realizing how loaded my statement was for them. He glanced at her and stalked off in apoplectic silence.

There were other disclosures on that night of seismic epiphanies over enchiladas. My father hadn’t wanted to adopt another child after my older sister. He knew how much my mother wanted children and found space in his heart for a little girl but didn’t want to adopt someone else’s son. He came around eventually and even named me after himself to try to codify the bond.

Once, my mother said, they were driving home and stopped at a liquor store. My father went in by himself and emerged with a flask-sized bottle in a brown paper bag. He went into the men’s room in the gas station next door, and a few minutes later, she heard a bottle smashing and Dad emerged smelling of the whisky he had chugged. Another time, he drove home so stumbling drunk he’d fallen in the driveway. On another night, hours late for a planned family barbeque, he arrived home so inebriated that he fired up the grill at one o’clock in the morning, unaware he’d lost six hours of time.

Perhaps the most gut-wrenching secret she told was the way he spoke to her near the very end. His heart had been failing for several years, and the lack of blood circulation to his brain had brought on dementia. At one point, frustrated by a pair of pants and shoes, he lashed out at Mom with a string of vitriol, calling her a bitch and lambasting her for “ruining his life.”

I felt awful that he’d treated her so badly. “That’s terrible!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “I mean yes, it was awful, but I knew who it was really directed at.” She looked at me meaningfully. “And why.” Stunned, I didn’t have the wits to clarify her statement at the time.

For the last twenty years, I’ve carried the implication that he blamed her for being unable to have kids and forcing him to adopt a boy who turned out to be gay. And by the time Mom died of a stroke seven years later, dementia had also robbed her of the memory that she ever had a son.

Around that time, I mentioned to my therapist that I was adopted; it hadn’t seemed relevant before.

My therapist stopped me. “Oh! But that changes everything.”

Our parents had told us we were adopted as soon as we were old enough to understand what it meant, “just so there wouldn’t be any surprises,” and they’d insisted that it made no difference in the way they treated us. But perhaps I should clarify: our mother was the one who said this to us. I now believe that might now have been true for Dad.

Over the course of more therapy sessions, we teased out some of the ways attachment in adopted children can become distressed, particularly in the event a parent fails to entirely bond or withdraws from a child. It can lead to chronic or acute anxiety, self-esteem issues, dissociative disorders—the very things for which I had sought help. My father’s long slide into disappointment and self-destructiveness resonated deeply through our relationship and my own sense of self. I have also struggled with substance abuse and depression; I am now sober.

Since then, this family history—my grandmother’s rejection, my father’s distance, my mother’s forgetting, my sister’s betrayal—has come to look less like incidental facts and more like a thread running through many of the challenges of my life. Our family hid cracks and fissures which each new pressure widened until the whole edifice crumbled.

I’d like to say there was a moment when all of this resolved—that therapy, revelations, sobriety, and time have brought me clarity and closure. But that isn’t entirely true. What I have instead is a story that makes more sense than it used to, and a word—orphan—that feels true, and not just as a metaphor.

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Last week I read a Substack post by a writer who announced they would no longer be sharing their writing publicly, The End. They have some significant credentials attached to their name, but were unhappy with the reception of their debut book. They mentioned frustrations like overlooked, inconsequential, and insignificant—also overly ambitious—but took pains to say they weren’t lashing out at anyone in particular except an indifferent world.

Considering some of the notable people and media outlets who spoke up for their book, it’s clear that even bona fides and celebrity support are not enough to push someone’s efforts above the fray, to distinguish them from the avalanche of writers publishing books and Substacks and articles and essays—we really are legion.

They also made reference to some personal pressures they had going on; there were some financial and other practical insecurities. Bottom line: based on their earnings, they were spending more time on writing than they could afford.

And that is often the crux of the issue right there, the place where so many writers can’t help but break down in the face of cold, hard dollar signs. While the pep-talkers of the writing world mesmerize us with the unquantifiable benefits of creative pursuits, the people in the business of publishing and selling books—agents and editors and publishers and booksellers—are frustratingly focused on that bottom line, the all-too-quantifiable difference between how much it costs to pay, publish and market a writer, and how much their book earns.

We are encouraged to let our voice and our spirit sing on the page, only to be told that while our hearts may beat pure and true in the creative act, the public isn’t automatically interested in the exercise of such courage, vulnerability and honesty. In fact, they seem to be annoyingly concerned with: What’s in it for me? What am I going to get out of it?

It may be a very brave thing for a writer to interrogate their feelings about a character, scenario or idea that intrigues them, enough to think What if? and then sit down with all that ambiguity and uncertainty to bang out their imaginings.

But the reading public—strangely, shockingly—rarely has the appetite to read something that doesn’t have as clear a payoff for them. Even other writers aren’t necessarily going to indulge our machinations if there aren’t some moments of refreshment, comfort, or excitement along the merry, marathon way.

This is not to say that you are in any way obligated to put out a tray of snacks and a pitcher of margaritas in your writing, nor that you won’t find readers who will enjoy your particular brand of minimalist or brutalist or baroque story and style. As we often console ourselves in life with the old adage, “We made the best decision we could at the time,” so it also stands that we always write the best story we can. And why wouldn’t we? After taking all those writing classes, reading all those books and articles on craft and plot, are we suddenly going to stop short and serve only our leftover, reheated stories, saving the good ones for ourselves? Of course not.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron—who has made a cottage industry of selling the soar instead of the score—will tell you that your job is to write the thing, and let the universe have its reaction, a cosmic call-and-response which spotlights the real issue: our motivations for writing.

Why write at all, without the guarantee that a story will ever be read? Why keep writing if our first stories are not celebrated, if we can’t even give them away for free? Why—if there doesn’t seem to be a single person who cares besides our stupendously kind husband and that one enthusiastic friend who seems to think we are brilliant in the suspiciously same way that every day is a beautiful day—should we ever write another word without so much as a pinky promise that it will be the golden ticket to a book deal and a bestseller list?

There are no guarantees in life, or in publishing. Assurances that if you just keep at it long enough you will eventually get your big break (along the lines of The only certain way to fail is to quit) are not actually certain. No, not even if you are a genius—look at Emily Dickinson.

For the rest of us non-geniuses, even a mid-list career—where our books aren’t necessarily #1 bestsellers but we do make it onto a few lists and a fair number of bedside tables—isn’t a foregone conclusion. A new writer has very good reasons to believe they may never make a living from their writing. Maybe a decade ago, when self-publishing was new and the old saw, “Twenty books to $50K a year,” seemed inevitable, but now?

Still, there are just enough writers winning the publishing lottery and telling all about the different ways they did it to believe it could happen to you, and you would be right. It could.

It’s also possible that you will not get an agent, or that the agent won’t sell the book, or that the publisher is disappointed with your sales and refuses your second book, maybe your agent moves on to newer and sexier clients, and you end up back at square one. These things happen. Frequently. There is neither a mathematical nor a magical formula to success—this is art, and it is not a tidy affair.

Square One. Dear me. It must look even more bleak from the other side of success.

I was sitting with all of this after reading that writer’s public resignation, noticing among their insignificants and inconsequentials how they had received three times as many ratings on Goodreads as my first novel, Lamb. Also, I’ve been grappling with the stark reality that my new book, Waterspout, is lagging on pre-orders by comparison to my debut at this same time last year. Freshman novels are always, well, more fresh than sophomore efforts after all.

I really had to take a minute when I read that plaintive writer’s post to fend off their implicit message that without a wide readership—and the commensurate financial rewards—making art is not worth the time and effort. In fact, I was in need of a good old-fashioned, Julia Cameron-level pep talk.

Coincidentally, I had just finished my essay “The Queer Creation Manifesto” for the new anthology, Steps to Liberation: The Rainbow Flag, Human Rights and Freedom, and the second line of my piece?

“Art is not the answer to your prayers. Art is the prayer.”

On the brink of feeling bleak, a voice inside my head said,

And of course I had to say No! Almost anyone can agree that the artist gets something out of making art—but what if they are the only one? What if it’s not enriching other people—because they aren’t seeing it; because there’s a glut of AI-written content; because there are so many other things to read for free on the internet; or because platforms are burying content by shadow banning queer and other marginalized creators and throttling organic growth?

What if you feel as though you are shouting into the void?

So. Yes, money—yes, if we make enough at our writing or art, we could stop making our living doing something else we might not enjoy. This is not a frivolous hope.

But in an oversaturated market, in which the sheer volume of “product” has increased exponentially with little (or an ignorant) regard for the craft, quality or provenance of the effort put into it, aspiring writers must face the reality that their voices may be drowned out by the din. And they must seek a more fundamental reason to keep practicing their art anyway.

This is not the territory of formulas or tropes, of neat diagrams and story maps. Nor is it a path to success, fame, or wealth. The sum of our value is not calculated by a public casting dollars like votes—consumption is only one part of this process, and perhaps the least significant.

I am saying to you that the experience of making art is itself nourishment. Making art feeds you. It nurtures you. Making art embraces fear, uncertainty, and ambiguity, and in the endeavor, strengthens and empowers the maker.

Every question is a search for clarity. Every reflection is a moment of genuine curiosity and an attempt to answer it. You peer deeply into the unknown, grasp meaning from unmanifested potentials, and try to make them real and known.

You have seen it, even if no one else does. You are never shouting into the void; you are listening to the very real voice of the universe, and offering your response to it in communion.

Making art is a profound practice of meditation and manifesting, an exploration of ourselves and the cosmos. Far from being small and insignificant, we are important, momentous expressions of a living world. It is our purpose to illuminate both the material and the intangible aspects of our existence.

Making art is the real banquet in all of this. Let’s dig in.

PREORDER Waterspout

Dana has built an amazing following on Subtack through her own writing and the beloved podcast, , which she shares with her childhood friend, . You can catch one or both of them every weekday at 10 a.m. Eastern—prepare yourself for a rundown on current events, outrages, and obsessions while you laugh your ass off.

Happy reading! ~ MTF

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The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ Gabriel García Márquez’s Love In the Time of Cholera” by of

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The Book That Got There First

A review of Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart

by

My younger daughter was eight when she read Lily and Dunkin. She loved it the way kids love books that hand them language for something they already feel but can’t quite say. I didn’t know then what I know now — that three years later, she’d come to me with her own version of that same truth, trying on identity the way Lily tries on her mother’s dress in the opening pages: carefully, privately, and in need of being seen and supported.

I’ve thought about that a lot since: how a middle grade novel published in 2016 was doing quiet, patient work in my kid long before either of us knew it was needed.

Lily and Duncan follows two eighth graders through a single school year in South Florida — coincidentally, where I grew up. Lily Jo McGrother was born Timothy and has known she’s a girl for as long as she’s known anything. Norbert Dorfman — rechristened Dunkin by Lily, for reasons involving an obsession with a certain donut chain — has just moved from New Jersey carrying two secrets: a bipolar disorder diagnosis, and the truth about his father. They meet before school starts, become improbable friends, and then spend the rest of the year almost losing each other to the pressures that accumulate around kids who don’t fit the narrow confines of the middle school cool kids.

Gephart structures the novel in alternating chapters, with Lily’s in cursive headers and Dunkin’s in block ones; it’s a small typographic choice that does a lot of work. These are two very different nervous systems navigating the same hostile ecosystem of middle school. Lily is working toward hormone blockers before male puberty can rewrite her body without her consent. Dunkin is quietly going off his medication, convinced the manic energy makes him a better basketball player, not yet understanding what it will cost him.

What the book gets right is that it doesn’t “queersplain” to its readers. It doesn’t explain gender identity to us as though we are tourists. Lily knows who she is. The confusion belongs to the adults around her, particularly her father, who loves her and is failing her at the same time, a dynamic that will feel painfully familiar to many readers on both sides of coming out. There’s a scene early on where Lily ventures outside in a dress to help carry in groceries and her father’s response is swift and crushing. And yet Gephart doesn’t villainize him. He’s a dad whose love is real but whose reality hasn’t caught up to his kid yet. That’s a harder, more useful portrait than a simple antagonist.

My daughter’s gender journey was different, fluid in ways that shifted and settled over a couple of years, not a straight line from A to B–and yes, pun fully intended. But what I kept coming back to as I parented through that season was how much I needed stories that modeled what it looked like to get it wrong and course-correct. Lily’s father does that, awkwardly, imperfectly, with more stumbling than grace. It makes him imminently relatable to parents, especially as it’s clear his love for his child never wavers.

The Dunkin half of the book is equally honest about what untreated mental illness actually looks like from the inside: the seduction of the manic state, the way it whispers that you’re finally yourself, the wreckage it leaves. Gephart wrote it for her son, who is also bipolar, and the specificity shows. This is not mental illness as metaphor. It’s mental illness as lived experience, rendered with the same clear-eyed compassion she brings to Lily’s story.

The book is shelved as middle grade, but don’t let that fool you. It’s the kind of story that ages with its reader. My daughter read it in grade school (thank you, Global Reading Challenge) and found a friend in Lily. I read it alongside her and found a map — imperfect, hand-drawn, but real — for the years ahead.

Lily & Dunkin has won numerous awards, including the 2021 California Young Reader Medal, 2018 Harry S. Truman Book Award, and 2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Middle Grade & Children’s, and the 2016 Rainbow Awards for Best Transgender Book. It also earned a spot of honor on many banned or challenged book lists in US school districts, including a 2024 removal by the Gardner Edgerton school board in Kansas.

If you have a kid who is figuring out who they are, read this with them. If you are an adult who’s still figuring out who you are, have a read. And if you are a parent who loves your child and is quietly terrified of getting it wrong, Lily and Dunkin will charm and educate and perhaps comfort you, too.

It got there before I did. I’m grateful it was waiting for me.

BIO:

Memoirist & cultural essayist. GenX word nerd. I write out loud. Co-host & booker: The Daily Whatever Show. Fine feminist. Loves storytelling, karaoke, ectomorphs, her two teens, and Oxford commas. Loathes the RHCP.

Dana DuBois | I Write Out Loud

Memoir and cultural essays about love, politics, parenting, and midlife selfhood. New and old work gathered into one living practice of writing out loud — using art and storytelling to reclaim power in chaotic times.

The Daily Whatever Show

The Daily Whatever Show aims to lead the cultural conversation around relationships, career, music, politics, aging, and fun. Brazenly liberal. Pro Oxford Comma. Hate Nazis.

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The official cover reveal for Waterspout happened last week on Not Straight Forward, the Monday spot on podcast with and which you can Watch in Full HERE.

And this is a snippet with some lovely words from Lawrence.

We had a barrel of laughs and I adore everyone connected to TDWS (special shoutout to co-host and co-founder, )—you should go subscribe to their podcasts and personal Substacks too—they hit all the high notes and beat all the drums.

PREORDER WATERSPOUT

Release date is July 14th and as Lawrence mentioned it really, really helps if there’s a little line of people waiting with their preorders in hand.

Last year, thanks to all of you, Lamb hit the #1 Hot New Release spot on the Amazon LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction Bestseller list in its first week, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

To every one of my readers who buys a print or ebook, whether pre-order or order-order, now or until supplies run out, I will happily send a signed bookplate for you to stick in your book or on your refrigerator or use as a bookmark, whatever you want.

You’ll just need to let me know your address and I will mail it to you from Spain with a lovely little inscription to let you know how much I appreciate you.

Come to think of it, I still have a bunch of Lamb bookplates left so if you want one for the book you already have or you’ve been meaning to buy it but good god look at your To Be Read stack, NOW is the time—get a signed bookplate for both of them in the same envelope.

So. Run to your computer and do that before you forget.

BTW: Lamb is #1 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction again TODAY!

And also #1 in Contemporary Urban Fiction. Yes, it’s the Free Kindle list, but it’s bringing some much needed visibility ahead of Waterspout’s July release. Here’s hoping some of those readers are moved by it and love it and want to buy the Waterspout pre-order.

ALSO—if you have been meaning to but forgot or haven’t had a chance, a Review on Amazon or Goodreads (or whatever retailer you got them through) is so very, very important.

I’m far below the 50-Review threshold which catches Mr. Algo Rithm’s notice, and that means staying current and finding new readers becomes very difficult without a lot of advertising finagling.

Re Written Reviews: Two words are all it takes. “Loved it” or “hated it” count. 🙏

THE PINK SHEEP NOVELS

Many of you will remember the hullabaloo at the Unconference last year when all the seasoned indie authors in our group said to me, “Hey, series are the way to go! It’s easy—just write two more books with the same characters.”

“Great,” I said. “But I killed my MC in the last one…”

“Oh dear…” they said.

Nevertheless, I have already substantially drafted the follow-up to Lamb—a now middle-aged “D” with a husband, a career, and a “perfect” life about to go up in flames (2027). And there will be a third book in which we will revisit the last three years of Lamb’s life after his disappearance (2028).

In the meantime, since I had it ready to go for 2026, Waterspout fits into what I’m calling The Pink Sheep Novels, stories with recurring themes and some characters that knit together without being out-and-out sequels. And I designed the banner above to celebrate.

THE KINK

If you listen to that podcast epi or take a closer look at some of these graphics I’m using, you will notice “kink” and “boy/Daddy” and “Pillion” and the play on watersports in the actual title. I can’t tell you how much I’ve agonized over including these sexual elements, aiming all the while not at erotica but queer literary fiction.

In fact, I’ve worried about it so much these last five years, I’m kinda over it.

I made a conscious decision when I was writing Waterspout that I wasn’t going to censor myself, that I would let the Muse carry me through regardless of where it took me. Perhaps letting go of all that fear in order to write the thing—only to have it come snarling back when I realized I had to market it with all that kinky stuff—has helped me let go of some of it. Internalized homopobia is an important subject and a major theme in my books; facing it in myself was long overdue. Mission accomplished?

All this to say: if kinky sex makes you uncomfortable, you could probably skip the barely three pages out of three hundred in which it’s mentioned—mere peeps, really, a glimpse into the world of some gay men you’ve maybe never had before.

I Declare: No AI is used in the creation of my books

You’ll notice that the cover is again an analog graphic, rather than those typical gay genre books with an AI-stud and its obligatory six-pack and chiseled jaw. I specifically told my cover designers I didn’t want any of that AI nonsense, even though it’s what they call “off-genre” to have a gay book cover that doesn’t scream “GAY!” the way these latter-day Fabios all do.

I also left a typo in Waterspout on purpose, partly because I’d already gone through it thirteen times, also because the formatter had set the whole thing and I didn’t want to send it back to her for one more tiny, nothing little mistake. Not to say there aren’t others, probably—in each of those thirteen passes, I was astonished to find yet more.

What do you mean “afluster” isn’t a word? It should be. Does “akimbo” really only apply to limbs? I almost left both of those too—I did leave “beginghamed” because it’s a pretty well established convention (“bedazzled” anyone?)—but in the end, with that intentional typo (see if you can spot it), I just thought,

So seriously, go buy the 100% handcrafted Waterspout.

I haven’t put all my eggs in the Substack basket, but it is the only social media platform that I give my absolute best—trying to entertain and illuminate with Ford Knows Books; highlighting other queer writers on Qstack—and it really does mean a lot that you’ve allowed me into your inboxes and hearts over the last 3+ years.

The more digitally connected the world gets the more difficult making a really human connection feels for many of us. I want you all to know that whether you read my books or not, there is a very grateful writer over here with a cuppa just for you standing by.

Your—
MTF

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In this month’s edition of The Books We ❤️ Club, Wyatt shines a light on one of the brightest legacies in the Black gay community, poet and activist Essex Hemphill, taken too soon in 1995. In the decades since his death, his reputation has only grown.

Publishers Weekly, on the posthumous release in 2025 of his collection Love Is a Dangerous Word, said:

Happy reading! ~ MTF

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The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart” by

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Love is a Dangerous Word by Essex Hemphill

a review by

Wyatt O’Brian Evans

Bold. Bodacious. Incendiary. Sensual. Masterful. Groundbreaking!

These are salient descriptors for Essex Hemphill, who is, according to Erick Taylor Woodby of Native Son on Queerty, “recognized as one of the most influential poets of his generation. For over three decades, Hemphill has been lauded for his legacy of politically bold, lyrical, and imaginative writing.”

Despite a relatively short literary career, Mr. Hemphill is arguably the most critically acclaimed and best-known contemporary openly Gay/SGL African American poet, author, performance artist, and activist. He helped shatter the silence surrounding Gay/SGL Black experiences and empowered other Gay/SGL Black men to find their voices. This ahead-of-his-time creative’s literary impact is still felt today; he’s opened the doors for myriad authors—including myself. At the age of 38, the revered artist succumbed to AIDS-related complications in 1995.

Last year, Love is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems by Essex Hemphill (edited by Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene) was released. This stellar, sublime collection features selections from Hemphill’s celebrated book Ceremonies (named one of the 25 most influential works of postwar queer literature by the New York Times), poems published in various magazines, and writings from several chapbooks.

Of course, I am here to review this collection. And to give my critique more meaning and life, my mission also includes: (1) presenting his biography; (2) celebrating his birthday, which is April 16; and (3) paying homage to our friendship. So, let’s get into it.

The Artist.

Hemphill was a popular Washington, D.C. performance artist. Believing that poetry should be heard, he regularly performed his work, often in collaboration with other D.C. African-American gay and lesbian artists. In 1983, Wayson Jones, Larry Duckette, and he teamed up to create Cinque. This performance poetry group combined cutting-edge political verse, vivid imagery about gay Black life, and tightly woven harmonies.

The group quickly amassed a loyal following. And on one sweltering summer evening in 1985, I attended one of Essex’s performances, which was mesmerizing, full of raw sexuality!

Cinque’s poetic style gained national attention in the next few years. Today, poetry slams are mainstream. Essex introduced this art form, developing and fashioning it, giving it crucial visibility.

In the 1980s, very few publishers were interested in the works of openly gay African American writers. Well, Essex didn’t wait for them to come around. Instead, he self-published his first two poetry collections, Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986). He appeared in Marlon Riggs’ 1989 video essay, Tongues Untied. His profile continued to rise after contributing to various anthologies and publications, including the Advocate, Essence, Obsidian, and Gay Community News.

After his close friend Joseph Beam succumbed to AIDS in 1988, Essex moved to Philadelphia to complete Beam’s anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Gay Black Men. Published in 1991, it won a Lambda Literary Award and garnered widespread literary acclaim.

The next year, a major publisher released Essex’s Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, which won the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award in Literature. Ceremonies provides powerful insights into the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in America. The topics it addresses include the sexual objectification of Black men in white gay culture.

The year 1993 was a virtual bonanza for Essex: he received a Pew Charitable Trusts Fellowship in the Arts and the Emery S. Hetrick Award for community-based activism from the Hetrick-Martin Institute. And he became a visiting scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California.

After battling AIDS for several years, Essex passed away on November 4, 1995, in Philadelphia. He was 38.

The Friend.

Essex and I met in April 1984 at the Potomac Electric Power Company, a service provider in the District of Columbia. He was a graphics designer; I was the associate editor/writer within that utility’s corporate communications department.

Immediately, “Es” and I connected! We had good stuff in common: emotional accessibility. A sense of free-spiritedness. The Artist Known as Prince over MJ. And most importantly, the hunger to write.

Firmly rooted in his sexuality, Es was unabashed about who he was. And Y’all, the brotha had swagger! His affecting smile and mischievous glint dancing in his eyes could win you “ovah” in no time.

Although Es was a sensitive, caring soul, he took no crap. He doggedly pushed back against obstacles, turning his dreams into realities.

Unfortunately, I lost contact with Essex after he moved to Philly. Although his struggle with AIDS was protracted and agonizing, his spirit remained vibrant and strong.

The Collection.

Mr. Hemphill’s artistic work, which focused on the experiences of African Americans and the emotional, mental, and physical anguish the LGBTQ+ community experienced during the AIDS epidemic, resonated with readers beyond the metro D.C. area and across the U.S.

“Hemphill’s poetry has become timelessly influential in the queer, Black poetic canon and valuable as a historical fragment of the HIV/AIDS crisis in America,” according to Silas Silverman-Stoloff of The Columbia Review. “Love is a Dangerous Word finds tenderness in the space between Hemphill’s growing grief around death and his eager exuberance for living.”

Livia Meneghin, for the Rumpus, wrote, “Throughout Love Is a Dangerous Word, Hemphill’s cravings and sexual appetites layer over the grief, and are embodied in a speaker whose voice is honest and sexy.”

Allow me to unpack four selections from Love is a Dangerous Word that particularly exemplify Silverman-Stoloff’s critique. “Heavy Breathing,” the second poem, is a heartbreaking exploration of the complexities of love, loss, and the human condition. When you really ponder it, the poem’s title itself, “Heavy Breathing,” suggests a profound, weighty experience, reflected in the speaker’s contemplation of the emotional toll of heavy breathing, a metaphor for the burdens and responsibilities that come with love and loss.

Hemphill uses repetition of the pronoun “I” to assert personal presence before expanding to a collective “we,” emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual and communal experience. This progression establishes him not only as a participant in his narrative but also as a witness and truth-teller for his community.

In “For My Own Protection,” the poet employs straightforward, uncomplicated language to advocate for mutual support within marginalized communities. He questions why lives are not valued equally and calls for collective action: “If whales, snails, dogs, cats… can be saved, the lives of Black men are priceless and can be saved.”

“Under Certain Circumstances” is a poignant exploration of longing for love beyond social boundaries. Hemphill uses the phrase “love is a dangerous word” to encapsulate both the risk and the potential of love in certain environments. The poem encourages readers to consider their roles in creating change and to believe in transformation within their own circumstances.

“Visiting Hours,” a standout piece, is audacious and hilarious. Hemphill’s ability to weave together themes of grief, humor, and the human being’s enduring spirit is remarkable. In “Visiting Hours,” a Black security guard is tasked with protecting European artwork. This employee, who probably only earns minimum wage, is thinking:

“And if I ever go off,
you’d better look out, Mona Lisa.
I’ll run through this gallery
with a can of red enamel paint
and spray everything in sight
like a cat in heat.”

Let me conclude with a quote from Native Son:

“Hemphill wove together through words the realities of sexuality, class, and race, magnifying the stories of Black queer men that were often muted in American literature. And his legacy as one of the most prolific Black queer writers of the 20th century endures, reminding us that our journeys through love—no matter how we define it—are worth celebrating.”

Happy birthday, Es!

Wyatt O’Brian Evans of is a journalist, radio personality (WYATT!, Lemme Tell U Sumthin’ Right Now!!!), Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse (IPV/A) SME (subject matter expert), and author of the novel Nothing Can Tear Us Apart—SHATTERED!

RUTHLESS!, the sequel, will be released this August. Visit: www.wyattevans.com.

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There’s this young guy who lurks around our neighborhood, let’s call him Karim which means “generous” in Arabic. He is scrumptious: dark brown skin, mid-20s to early-30s, slim, handsome, shorter than me, and very intense.

By intense I mean that the first time I ran into him early one morning as I was out walking Bubba, he cruised me hard, and as I passed, he puckered up and made a little kissy noise. (No, it definitely wasn’t for Bubba.)

I laughed, couldn’t help myself. It’s been a minute since anyone cruised me, since I’ve gotten sober and gained thirty pounds and taken myself off the market. Yes, I am married, but yes, we are open, and sure, right now I’m in this let’s call it monastic headspace, but that little kissy was basically him ringing the dinner bell for Daddy bear to come pillage him. Kids nowadays, they don’t use the gay back pocket hankycode anymore, but his would definitely be “orange/right”—anytime, anything, anywhere/bottom.

Like I said, since I got sober, I’ve been holding my cards close, and I just kept walking. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. but I suspect Karim had been up all night and was on the tail end of a long nightshift of hookups. You see these characters out and about or online, collecting notches in their bedpost (to put it politely) all night and into the next day or even longer, the more the merrier—lost weekends, or until the white powders run out.

It came as no surprise when several months later I was out walking the dog again and saw Karim careening down the sidewalk, hoodie up, a garbage bag for luggage, two different shoes. I didn’t see his eyes but I’m sure they were the size of dinner plates.

And yet several more months later, there he was on a balcony in our apartment complex looking no worse the wear, staring down at my husband and me while we were in the pool, and again, not just staring but almost telepathically beaming the international gay frequency for “Open for Business.”

“Do we know that person?” Leo whispered, and I explained my near misses with Karim. If I still had a profile on Grindr, Growlr, or Scruff, et al., I’m sure I would have seen him advertising his availability from right outside our bedroom window. I’ve pointedly avoided him the few more times we’ve seen him coming and going from our building, fairly sure he flits between short-term rentals (there are a lot of them in Sitges), laying waste to swaths of tops wherever he hangs out his shingle.

(My barber, only half kidding, once shared his advice for Sitges holiday trysts: Ask him how long he’s been in town—if he says more than three days, he’s already got an STI.)

I’m making light, it’s true—the type is so common they’re almost more walking statistic than real live trainwreck. So many “normal” gays dabble in similar bursts of indulgence it’s hard to tell who’s actually in a downward spiral and who’s just living it up before a long-scheduled wellness retreat. And what’s to be done, anyway, for someone trapped in a personal hellscape of addiction and recklessness? Even in sobriety circles, we can only take the hand already reaching out for help.

Truth is, by the time I quit drinking in 2021, I had become a figure every bit as ridiculous and terrifying as Karim. I won’t go into details because in many ways they are still painful to me, and I am not given to sharing the most shameful moments of my life for the sake of feeding the ravenous public appetite for dirty laundry, nor connecting with readers by giving out more details than the substance of my fiction or newsletters. I’m right here—feel free to connect—but that horror show is over.

One of the things I like so much about writing novels is the opportunity to sift through what used to be called “too much information” and presenting it in a way that doesn’t require me to fess up to whether these are episodes from my own life, or the lives of people I have known, heard about, or seen once upon a time. Maybe I just cooked them up out of these and other sundry ingredients of life. Maybe.

A New(ish) Genre: Low Queer Horror

Still, the particular flavor of this madness must be understood in order to also grasp the reasons I write the kind of fiction I do, what I have recently dubbed Low Queer Horror.

There’s already a genre of Queer Horror which focuses on queer characters and the themes of marginalization and alienation but places them in the context of your supernatural boogeypersons or killer drag queens from outer space—let’s call it High Queer Horror because like High Fantasy (think The Lord of the Ring’s Middle-Earth) it builds a whole world to contain the story in which standard horror tropes prevail.

(Thanks to for recently mentioning ’s runaway hit queer horror novel—you must take a tour through the shameless hilarity of his Goodreads list of other titles—all 18 pages of them.)

Like Low Fantasy (aka Urban Fantasy, think Neil Gaiman’s American Gods) in which fantastic elements merely intrude in our everyday world, Low Queer Horror focuses on the horror in the mundane: the moment a queer kid is thrown out of their home to face a predatory world; the terror of being assaulted by queer bashers; the tragic death of a character who lived their whole life believing they were unworthy of love, and receiving the final proof, alone and unwanted.

Breakdowns, blackouts, bashings, and bug chasing just about sums it up.

Gay men had been told for generations that their most basic, innate sex instinct is bad, wrong, disgusting, unwholesome—and then, at the moment when their liberation was finally unleashed to love and be loved and fulfill their fondest or most sensuous desires, they were cut down by a merciless disease, their tormentors actually rejoicing with variations on “God’s wrath” and “told you so.”

This was the state of the world I discovered when I came out, circa 1989. PTSD is written into the psychic DNA of many of us Gen-X queers who came of age after AIDS hit, who knew about condoms from the get-go and went to see the AIDS Quilt spread like a graveyard of previous generations as a coming out ritual.

One of the hardest parts of coming out to myself was undoing all the homophobic messaging I’d overlaid onto my conception of self. I have likened it to looking in the mirror and putting on a monstrous mask—a vile, contemptible image superimposed over “me.”

Add to that the horrifying pictures of the victims of AIDS—at that time a disease poorly understood and hiding in every kiss. The famous picture from Life magazine in November 1990 showing the final moments of activist David Kirby’s life leaves me in pieces to this day.

In my imagination back then, I could see myself suffering a similar fate. I also absolutely believed that my family would turn their backs on me and force me to face it alone.

When I told my father I was gay, his only reply was to ask with disgust whether I had a death wish. Never close to begin with, always a disappointment to him in sports and bravura, I took a giant step backwards in a protective estrangement that lasted for the rest of his life.

“It’s just not part of our world,” my mother said dismissively when I came out to her, and I understood that clearly to mean my authentic self was an alien, outcast, and that in my darkest moments, I would be forsaken.

I coped with the horror and shame I felt by drinking (etc.), which went on and off for thirty years until I got sober in 2021. I still struggle with the anxiety homophobia installed in my identity like a cancer. I am far from exceptional in having self-medicated to cope with what is actually a profound cultural dysphoria, or in using youth, beauty, and sex as an imperfect pathway to rebuild my traumatized self-esteem.

Celebration is one thing, but if the party only ends because you’ve run out of substances or options, that is a special kind of loneliness.

The good news, at least, is that my loving husband stuck with me through it all, we have the best dog in the world, live in a beautiful town in Spain, and the lambs only scream sometimes. 🤪

Waterspout, the first novel I wrote

Now imagine you are an aspiring queer baby author in the last throes of an alcoholic fever dream sitting down to finally write a novel during Covid lockdown, come hell or highwater.

Write what you know, they said, so you start rummaging around in your life and memories, trunks and boxes filled with boys and boyfriends, party bottoms and Daddys, cocktails and drag shows and bars and clubs with names like Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, Jackhammer, and Fist City.

You pick out a character from your past who still haunts you—a gorgeous married Latino man who lived downstairs in college and shared a joint with you one day in the garage, leaving you so tongue-tied you could barely say gracias. Then months after he, his wife, and his baby moved out of the building, he showed up one morning on your doorstep with a thrilling proposition in broken English. You were so filled with confusion, fear, and shame about your worm-like self being with someone so beautiful you sent him away. Your hands shook for the rest of the morning. You never forgot just how trapped he looked as you shut the door in his face.

If that ain’t the recipe for a horror story, I don’t know what is.

Tiffany encountered Franny’s breakdown at a moment when her own life was beginning to crack open in similar ways. What follows is a reflection on that collision between art, identity, and the terrifying question of whether the paths we pursue are truly our own.

Happy reading! ~ MTF

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The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ Essex Hemphill’s Collection of Poetry, Love Is a Dangerous Word” by Wyatt O’Brian Evans of

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Why I ❤️ J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey

by of The Untangling

*Note: Some slight spoilers ahead.

You’ve heard of Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield, but have you heard of the genius Glass children?

Franny and Zooey Glass are the two youngest, out of seven. They are smart—brilliant, in fact. The 150-page book comprises of one short story (Franny) and a novella (Zooey), originally published in 1955 and 1957, respectively.

Franny opens with Franny on a date with her boyfriend (also smart, but in a shallow way, as we quickly find out). Franny is in a Dark Night of the Soul; she is disillusioned by her experiences at college and the people around her. It’s reminiscent of Holden’s constant refrain of, “Everyone is a phony” (a recurring theme in Salinger’s works). Over the course of their dinner conversation, Franny grows increasingly distraught until she suffers a nervous breakdown.

When we meet Zooey in Zooey, Franny has been staying at home recovering from her breakdown. Following prodding from their mother, Zooey engages Franny in a long, philosophical discussion about humanity, intellectualism, and theology.

Franny and Zooey came into my life at the cusp between childhood and adulthood. I was on track to pursue a career as a classical concert pianist after spending my entire life training for it. This was a path chosen for me by my mother from the time I was five years old. I walked it unquestioningly to please her and my piano teacher(s) who took pride in me. I did it for the acclaim of being known as a gifted performer. It was my identity. Beneath simmered the insidious thought, “I don’t know how to do anything except this; if I don’t continue, I have no future.”

Of course, it was dramatic adolescent catastrophic thinking, but at the time, it certainly felt like life-or-death.

By the time I began reading Franny and Zooey for my high school senior English class, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown not unsimilar to Franny’s—questioning my own motives for pursuing music, wondering what true art meant, whether I even loved music or just the pride of being good at it. Ah, the war between external validation versus internal was fierce and bloody. Beyond that, there was another war getting entangled—one between superficiality and authenticity.

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everyone else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting…”
–Franny Glass

You see, Franny and Zooey (and all the Glass children) strive for authenticity. They despise those who chase after accolades for the sake of the accolades. They love art for its own sake. Franny and Zooey know they are different—clever. Their existential dissatisfaction bubbles over from their awareness of these differences between themselves and others. They are intense. They are passionate. They want to, as Thoreau puts it, to “live deep and suck all the marrow out of life,” and are disillusioned that those outside of themselves are content to chase after superficial accomplishments like degrees and fame and commercial success. And yet, Franny realises that she herself can’t quite extricate herself from the need for validation. The cognitive dissonance leads to her breakdown.

In Zooey, Salinger takes us deeper into this theme, as we’re given more background on the Glass family, but especially Seymour—the oldest Glass child, who killed himself seven years prior to this story’s events. Given that detail, it becomes all too clear that the stakes are immensely high, as Zooey is tasked by their mother to bring Franny back from the edge.

Zooey himself struggles with the same problem in a different way. He recognises the hollowness in many of his peers and artists, and it leads him to a distinct apathy. Where Franny is breaking down from caring too much, Zooey suffers from caring too little. Older brother Buddy Glass (widely regarded as Salinger’s alter-ego), rebukes Zooey in a letter for his impossible expectations for not only himself, but everyone else:

“You may have seen “inspired” productions, “competent” productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov’s talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage. … I can so clearly see you demanding something from the performing arts that just isn’t residual there, ... Enough. Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.”

For the love of art

Though I’ve read Franny and Zooey several times over the years, it’s eerily timely now, as I, like many others, have been mesmerised by Alysa Liu’s joyful performances on the ice. She embodied passion, and she did it for no audience, but purely for the joy of her art. Because of that, she triumphed in spite of previous setbacks. More than that, she shone.

Very few of us will make it to a world stage. Most of us won’t have an audience size that will make headlines. That’s not the point, though, according to Franny and Zooey and Alysa Liu herself.

The point is the love of art.

“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you.”
–Zooey Glass

It’s ultimately about love.

And humanity.

In the pseudo-introduction, the narrator, Buddy Glass, states,

“I say that my current offering isn’t a mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story, at all. I say it’s a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated.”

I briefly mentioned the Glass children’s mother earlier, but let’s hone in on her for now. Bessie is the antithesis of her children. She’s not brilliant or particularly perceptive. She is, in a word, mediocre. Mrs. Glass is your average mum who just wants to feed her ill youngest daughter a bowl of chicken soup. She’s also a woman who has lost two children—Seymour to suicide, and Walt to war—and thus possesses the sort of wisdom that only comes from grief.

In a long conversation between Bessie and Zooey, she entreats him to talk to Franny, who has been convalescing in the living room since her breakdown at school. Amidst the meandering, philosophical dialogue (and oh, is this book heavy on dialogue), underlies a theme of love. As I said, Franny and Zooey are part of a large family. Like any family, it has its problems. But despite differences in both personality and intelligence, they do love each other. The family is central—broken and dysfunctional as it is.

Where her children are the brains, Bessie is the heart; she reminds us of the essential:

“I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy,” she says. “At least, you all used to be so sweet and loving to each other it was a joy to see.”

Despite Zooey’s blatant disrespect for Mrs. Glass (constantly calling her stupid and fat, among other things; I’ll come back to this), her message hits home at some point, because he later conveys it to Franny himself. In the end, what really matters when “The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around…You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world”?

Some of us learn this early, and we’re lucky. Some of us only learn it on our deathbeds and realise we’ve wasted a lifetime pursuing the wrong things.

Because what good is it to be the best at something if we can’t find joy in it? What good is it if our relationships fracture and we wind up lonelier than before? Time is not guaranteed, and the human lifespan is “absurdly, insultingly brief.”1

(Good lord, I’m falling prey to Salinger’s excessive use of italics; save me.)

I learned from Franny and Zooey to find the sacred in the mundane. In this book, that comes up again and again in the form of Bessie’s chicken soup, which she continuously offers to Franny and is rebuffed. I was reminded of the form of love East Asians are particularly familiar with: the offering of food, in which parents don’t say, “I love you,” but instead, “Have you eaten?” Where love shows up in immigrant parents’ late nights learning a foreign language and being ridiculed during the day in an unwelcoming country, so their children don’t have to grow up knowing poverty and war like they did.

How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?

Beyond that, there is love for humanity—even toward those who exist on different levels and cannot see what we see.

When Zooey calls Bessie fat and stupid, there’s a specificity to these terms. To Franny and Zooey, to be stupid is the worst insult. To be fat—well, it is a way the Glass children divide up the world.

“We’re freaks, that’s all ... We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.”
–Zooey

Tattooed Ladies are enlightened. Fat Ladies are the stupid masses.

And yet. And yet. Zooey imparts to Franny a piece of wisdom from Seymour: “to shine [my shoes] for the Fat Lady.” Even when they can’t see them anyway.

“But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. … And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”

Now I’ve given away the punchline (please forgive me), but this is where Franny’s turn became mine:

Create, even when no one sees it.

Create, even when no one appreciates it.

Create, even when no one understands it.

Create for yourself.

Create as though your audience is the most perfect, divine being you can think of.

Piano was not for me. I had known it for a long time, but it took this book to help give me the courage to change my lifelong path, and another year after reading it to change it entirely. I made the decision after one year as a piano major at UCLA, to my mother and childhood piano teacher’s shock and dismay (who was already disappointed I hadn’t chosen to go to USC, “the Juilliard of the west coast”)—and switched to a psychology major.

I knew absolutely nothing.

It felt like being thrown into an alien world, learning biology and statistics, thinking in terms of data instead of music scales.

And yet, the world did not end. I found my footing and graduated half a year early, in spite of switching majors. A bachelor’s degree in psychology gets me nothing in the world, but I absolutely loved studying it. I was happy. My mom did not disown me, but rather came to embrace my choice. My piano teacher is still in my life. And, I still play, but only for myself.

I learned something about my art, whether that be piano playing or writing or making soup for my children: that it doesn’t matter who sees it or who appreciates it. What matters is that I’m doing it with all my might.

At the time when I read Franny and Zooey, I felt utterly alone. I was deep in my own Dark Night of the Soul, and no one could see or understand. I didn’t belong anywhere. My strange perspective isolated me from others on a soul level, and I could never reconcile with it. The feeling made me bitter and hopeless about people, about life. When I read this book, I felt seen.

This is a book for the outliers. It’s for anyone who wonders what the point of everything is. It’s for those who see the world differently and wish they could be brave enough to fight against it.

This book is for the “freaks.”

Tiffany Chu is a literary fantasy author and memoirist, writing about the topics we’re too scared to talk about. Find her at The Untangling on Ghost.

Coming Sept. 15th - Kickstarter
The Constellation of Forgotten Things Special Edition
by Tiffany Chu & Renley Nicolas Chu
"A grief memoir in fairy tales—The Everlasting meets When Breath Becomes Air"

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

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#BuryYourGays and Other Personal Problems:
On Feedback - Part 2

As promised, today I’m digging a bit deeper into some feedback I received on Lamb from a contest judge.

All feedback can be an opportunity for insights into how readers are receiving our books, and a judge who reads a lot of fiction is well placed to give a bird’s-eye view of your story and the market for it.

Like all good feedback, they started with something positive.

Lamb gave me much to enjoy. One of my favorite aspects was its documentary qualities—for example the description of Burning Man and its social dynamics and Kamala Harris officiating a gay wedding at San Francisco City Hall. In these places and others, the specificity of the detail was immersive and gave context for the characters’ emotions, psychology, and motivation. One of our contest’s key values is feeling like we are living an experience we’ve never had before, being transported to a specific place and time, and in that regard, this book shone. Great work.

Thank you very much!

Then we go on to some more specifics about why Lamb didn’t go further.

The main reason this book did not advance was that it shared much in common with the subject matter, themes, and craft execution of other books I’ve read … I see a number of gay novels each year that use similar elements in similar ways: a troubled friend who vanishes, a gay man who’s predatory towards a protagonist who hasn’t given wholehearted consent, slice of life elements about San Francisco and the late 80s/early 90s, drug use, descriptions of various gay relationships and friends/lovers, hate crimes and the experiences of being persecuted/bullied … a connection being drawn between a gay man who has passed away and Jesus (in this case through the use of the name “Lamb”), depictions of sex, and more.

Let’s go through this piece by piece.

The whole “gay man who has passed away and Jesus” and Lamb’s name thing? Completely and utterly not on my radar. That parallel literally never occurred to me until they mentioned it. “Lost little lamb” was more what I had in mind.

I understand that for this reader, Lamb maybe didn’t break any new ground. Totally fair to say although I must admit I personally have not read any gay novels in which a troubled friend vanishes—I’ll take their word for it that they’ve read more than a few even if I haven’t.

But I’m wondering if they are giving short shrift to a dynamic that is common (apparently) in gay literature because it reflects actual queer life. With our historic challenges surrounding identity and acceptance, queer people often leave places abruptly, cut ties, and reinvent themselves in new places. We call it a fresh start, or even ghosting; in sobriety circles, it’s called a “geographic.” Perhaps it’s common because it happens in real life, all too often.

For that same reason, I wonder if it’s fair to set aside a queer story which features that or any of the other tropes noted—predators, San Francisco (?), the 80s/90s (??), drug/alcohol use, gay relationships and friends (huh?), hate crimes, bullying, depictions of sex (???).

Basically, I don’t understand the whys of this list at all. I mean … how are we supposed to “write what we know” if people are going to read about our lives and say, “Ugh, how tired”...? Trust me, we’re tired too, but this is real life, not a glowed up version pretending that all is well and beautiful in Gay Land.

Also, that’s like saying mysteries need to stop featuring dead bodies, or romances should skip all the kissing because we’ve heard it all before.

But there was another line of feedback in particular that I wanted to mention:

Some tropes that were popular in earlier decades (for example, the potential use of Bury Your Gays in the way that the death of Lamb—a gay man who’s more lisping and feminine than the narrator and who the narrator calls “a big dumb crybaby” … is used as fuel for D’s narrative but doesn’t seem to do the Lambs of our real world much good) feel thin in 2025.

This struck me as odd because in the text I never referred to Lamb as lisping and feminine (they were perhaps careful not to say “effeminate”). In my mind, he was a big, tall, scary-looking dude trying to shield his marshmallow center, and I’m failing to see how a 15-year-old kid crying over a dead baby bird should be taken as “lisping.” If anything, assuming a man is not masculine because he cries is the thing not doing the Lambs of the world much good.

The “Bury Your Gays” trope, though, that was a concern for me, not only for Lamb but for my upcoming novel, Waterspout. The link above goes into more detail about how gays have been historically portrayed as expendable characters whose sinful ways must be punished, and how they often ended up dead.

This is now often considered a toxic trope, but I want to point out that at the time when these tropes were coalescing pre-Stonewall—and even on into the AIDS era—there were few counterbalancing depictions of queers living happy, fulfilled lives.

Now there are. Now you can read queer romances, sci-fi, fantasy, speculative, coming out, coming-of-age, historical, or literary fiction with queers living and loving out loud and not dying by The End. I assume the judge knows this. I assume they would not say to a gay author who wrote an AIDS drama, “Gee I kinda wish you’d let them live, I’m so tired of all the icky dying.”

I assume they also know that the story of everyone’s life concludes with The End written in granite. No less than Saint Cormac McCarthy said in so many words that serious literature must reckon with death. While I don’t think that holds in every case, the fear of death and AIDS was a central concern both in my young life, and in the stories I write. Should I pull my punches out of fear that readers might wish for something lighter? Obviously not.

I’m going to go out on a fairly sturdy limb and say that in 2026, a queer #OwnVoices story, especially one that draws inspiration from the author’s life, is not leaning on old tropes when describing the nuts and bolts of queer life back when it was dangerous to even say the words “gay” or “queer” unless you were screaming it at someone while chasing them down the street.

We have now an entirely different dynamic to that of queer literature over fifty years ago when authors had to write a bitter end for a vilified character in order to avoid censure.

To the extent that queer-phobia is alive and kicking in many places today, such stories are hardly tired to someone running for their life, maybe fleeing a situation abruptly without explanation hoping to find a new one with people who will love their queer selves.

Maybe let’s look a little deeper. Old tropes?

Welcome to 2026 and Making America Great for affluent, abled, cis, white, heterosexual Christians Again.

Fin.

Additional Resources

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For the most part, the experience has been a net positive. I’m proud of my debut novel and I learned a lot—about the process, the realities and challenges of self publishing, and about the kind of feedback you receive when you put your work out into the big, bad world.

One thing about NOT publishing is that your work never has to go under the microscope of other people’s judgment. In my case, not being able to finish a story for three decades was my brain’s sneaky way of keeping feedback in the “comfortable” realm of my imagination rather than the mortifying possibility that other people might not like what I’d written and tell me in no uncertain terms.

This is not to say that my imagination was any more forgiving, quite the opposite: I said things to myself that I wouldn’t say to my worst enemy just to make sure that I was so filled with shame I would never be tempted to share my writing again, as I did at Harvard Summer School after my junior year in HS with disastrous results.

You can read more about that here:

But that’s the nature of feedback, isn’t it? (And life, for that matter.) You just have no idea who’s going to say what, why they say it, and whether what they say holds up under calm scrutiny.

Some people just can’t help themselves. Perhaps they assume that anyone who puts their art into the public realm ought to be tough enough to handle *literally* anything that someone wants to say. I’ve written a couple of zingers over the years (and since deleted them quietly and with a certain remorse). One in particular stands out in my memory because I was really quite angry when an author said that they wished their gay father had died of AIDS and spared their family the pain of his presumed suicide.

Like yelling at the TV or arguing with folks on Facebook, leaving bad reviews is just too irresistible for some folks. Maybe they’re angry, maybe they feel cheated, maybe they think they’re saving others from wasting money on a bad book, a bad meal, or a bad night’s sleep at a crappy hotel.

You might tell yourself, like I did, that you’re not going to read your bad reviews—or any of them—to save yourself from the trolls just trying to get a rise, reaction, or public meltdown.

But you will read them, I promise you, and you will have feelings and thoughts about them.

I read recently that hashing out your disagreements with reviews is best left out of the public realm, and for the most part, I agree. Someone’s opinion is their opinion; they are entitled to it, and it is folly to debate them publicly and futile to try changing their mind. In fact, Let Them is pretty sage advice on the subject of negative reviews.

However!

Of course I’m going to share with you now a few words of feedback that I’ve received on Lamb because I want to show you some of the head-scratchers you will undoubtedly also encounter if you ever publish a book, and reassure you that you can live through negative feedback.

Let’s start with a lightweight—more curiosity than anything else. For a contest which shall remain nameless, a comment from the judge who reviewed Lamb dismissed it as “autofiction,” period, no comments.

Now, I do get that I made much of the real life inspiration for Lamb from a friendship I had in high school, and how many of the episodes also drew inspiration from my youth, but that was as far as it ever went—inspiration.

I also get that autofiction is a notoriously tricky genre, with such disparate and evanescent cited examples as Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (nonsense), On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (never read it), and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Hervé Guibert (def autofiction).

Perhaps the reviewer was merely lobbing Lamb into the genre they guessed it most closely resembled, reserving their dismissal for the quality of the writing or their interest in the subject or plot. Without more information, I can only say that Lamb is not autofiction as I understand the genre, and if that in any way colored their regard they were in error.

This barest nugget of feedback, scant as it was, illustrates well how reviewers may simply have no idea what you have written, or simply not care to give it more attention than a casual pooh-pooh.

Fair enough. Reviewers are an often overwhelmed and beleaguered assortment of individuals, tasked with reading an inhuman number of words not for enjoyment but assessment. I should know: I was a reader for the 2024 BookLife Prize, and by the end of reading and rating over thirty self-published novels in the space of four months, I wasn’t sure if I would ever pick up a book again.

This is where I must assert to any writer that you are always and completely free to return any feedback whatsoever with just as insouciant a “pooh-pooh to you too” in reply—but NEVER publicly. There’s nothing worse than getting into a flame war with a reviewer; it’s ugly when restaurants or service providers do it, and it’s downright foolish for a writer.

No, the only thing you should ever give a bad review is complete silence as though it doesn’t exist or is written in a different, dead language you don’t speak and which Google translate does not recognize. Preferably all of the above. Do not. That is all.

One review I received was so generous in so many ways that the couple points of criticism were as inconsequential as finding a speck of grit in an otherwise delicious dish. I was grateful, in fact, to be made aware that I had been making an innocuous punctuation error all my life.

This was complete news to me, not unlike discovering that “fiance” and “fiancee” or “blond” and “blonde” are different things while I had just been treating everyone as non-binary because why not? Growing up overseas, I often read books from the UK which had such glamourous English variations as cheque, theatre, or organise, and thought these gendered anachronisms were something similar.

Apparently not. I expect these distinctions will be phased out in future generations just as I expect never to make that punctuation mistake again after my slap on the wrist.

Here are a few snippets I received from readers, which technically should not be considered feedback because in the Internet Age the reviews you find on Amazon or Goodreads aren’t meant for you but other readers.

These sorts of written reviews didn’t even exist a generation ago—you had an opinion, and you told your husband or your dog what a great or crappy book you just read, maybe nominated it glowingly for your book club or groaned when some other member did. The rise of blogs and the exponential growth of the online bookscape, though, has turned reviewing books into an actual sport, and some people take their reviews very seriously indeed.

Here we go:

“Lamb was definitely a little autistic coded (maybe not entirely intentionally).”

Yes, it was intentional.

“This is a debut novel and it shows, but there is real promise here.”

Uh, thanks, it is my debut novel, and er, thanks, I guess we’ll see.

“The variety of vignettes was nice too, tho overall Ford could have pushed them further in terms of genre.”

Pushed them further in terms of genre? LGBTQ? Not enough dick?

These are pretty softball criticisms, I realize—overall, the reviews I’ve received have been generous and kind to a fault, and I really am grateful to the many of you who took the time to construct blurbs better written than the book.

Reviews are harder to get all the time by all accounts, even traditionally published Big 5 books are sweating it anymore, while indie published are basically blacklisted by trad book media and you’ll only ever get reviews from readers, friends, family, or bloggers.

Also: the more readers and reviews you get—and I have received a mere handful, it’s true—the more likely you are going to run across someone who you rubbed the wrong way (or didn’t rub enough, as noted) and you really must expect some random wanker to try reducing you to tears with a hatchet job.

I would go so far as to say one should celebrate such an occurrence—all the best writers get pilloried at some point. But barring throwing a party upon receiving a really bad review, there’s really only one thing I’ve noticed:

It will never feel as bad as the first time you read it, so just get it out of the way, read the damn thing, feel all the feels, and put it aside without comment, reply, or further consideration. Give it a week, or better yet a couple months. Longer.

When (if) you go back to it later, your brain will have done much of the unconscious work of soothing and healing the blow of it already, and you can return later with a clearer head to see if there is actually anything worth considering. Sometimes there is, but usually you can chalk it up to whatever and make a notch in your mental armour.

Next Monday

I’ll be continuing this breakdown with some more robust feedback I received recently from a writing award judge, as well as a mini-profile on Reedsy Learning and a discount code for FKB readers!

On Feedback - Part 2: #BuryYourGays and Other Personal Problems

Additional Resources

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For a while, I’d been doing pretty well—reading the news but not allowing it to raise my blood pressure or anxiety, holding out hope that the fabric of the law and public protest will be strong enough to prevent an actual rupture of our democracy.

I’m heartened by the number of new grassroots newsletters that are calling out the tactics of would-be dictators, but while my social media feeds blow up with growing threats, it gets harder to peacefully abide in measured witness.

To be clear, by “measured witness” I do not mean ignoring the problem and pretending it isn’t happening, but rather, to see the actual news and then take whatever actions a body reasonably can to fulfill the duties of their moral conscience. And then, yes, get on with it—the rent don’t pay itself.

And I can’t stress enough how important “peacefully abiding” is for the individual whose nervous system is tuned to a different, neurodivergent key. It’s just a fancy way of saying “serenity,” itself a kissing cousin to “sobriety,” which for a kook who is also a recovering alcoholic is the most fundamental ground upon which one stands as a human being.

Without serenity and sobriety, the door to chaos is wide open. Add to that chronic anxiety, insomnia, and a bucketful of other disorders (including Exploding Head Syndrome and a recent bout of shingles), and no matter how “high functioning,” you’ve got a frustrated writer kicking the creative can down the road by decades, wound so tight only a stick of dynamite can unravel him.

But all this was the reason I left Twitter around 2016—what was originally a fun, informative romp through an internet rife with novelty and fascinating human interest quickly devolved into an outrage factory.

It’s not that it’s wrong, not at all, the calling outs, the retweets and restacks, the battle cries and “Amens!” It’s just that this particular instrument of protest cuts right through me, jangling my nerves and dissolving my focus until I’m pretty much good for nothing and nobody.

I strongly believe in the power of the “tweet”—I call it the stadium effect, whereby the volume of a single voice resonates with others to produce a noise so powerful it can shake foundations.

But to the same extent that our wider culture also roundly supports raising a glass for almost every occasion, the rising pitch of collective indignation can wreak havoc.

No, no, I am not leaving Substack. I was just waxing rhapsodic two weeks ago about The Bloomstack Life, the friendships and good cheer I have found here, and how important you all are to me.

I’m just feeling the need to clarify what it is I’m doing here at Ford Knows Books specifically, and Substack generally—both what I produce, and how I consume.

My goal was never to start a newsletter as a prelude to conquering the world, but merely to reach out and profess my love of reading and writing while adding my own peculiarly burnt offerings to the higher powers of literature.

Substack may want me to wring myself out trying to build a media empire, but I’m holding fast to my original mission:

To write books and talk about books with other book lovers.

Everything else is, shall we say, best efforts.

I hope you all will understand that, while I’m eyeballs deep in the million-and-one To Do’s of publishing my next book, Watrspout, I will miss a Monday post now and again. And that, try as I might, I find myself unable to keep up with all your stellar writing.

Reciprocity is so important in our ecosystem; self-care is also important.

In profound gratitude for your continuing indulgence and support on this swiftly tilting planet,

Troy

Jerry—who has been Executive Editor of Out Magazine, Digital Editorial Director of Rolling Stone, and Editor in Chief of New York Press—started with co-editor to help queer people “find, accept and explore love and commitment among gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people in queer relationships. We’re also exploring the elasticity of queer friendships, pansexuality, as well as asexuality and aroace stories.”

Happy reading! ~ MTF

The Queer Love Project

What do we know about love? Find, accept and explore love and commitment among gay, lesbian and trans people in queer relationships through storytelling and interviews with LGBTQ+ folx.

By Jerry Portwood

The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy—as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey” by Tiffany Chu, co-author of The Constellation of Forgotten Things

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Why I ❤️ Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

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I hadn’t read Dorothy Allison’s groundbreaking 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina in a couple decades, but I think about images from it often. In particular, the idea of how its queerness existed on the margins. The aunts who lived on the edges of town, some who practiced root magic, and one in particular, Aunt Raylene, who persisted in the protection of her liminal space. Did I remember that correctly? Would I experience that reality in the same way now that I’m an adult.

I’d been thinking about the book a lot since Dorothy Allison died in 2024, and it didn’t seem like she received the tributes I expected. When I revisited the book last month to prepare to write this piece, I had a paperback from my permanent collection in hand, but I also decided to listen to the audiobook for a new experience. Over the past five years, I’ve fully embraced listening as part of my reading experience, and it’s transformed the way in which I process storytelling for the better (in both my own writing and my capacity to engage with more texts). I loved Elizabeth Evans’ narration of Allison’s novel for the most part (except for a couple of pronunciation choices and mistakes), but it also allowed me to experience some of the chilling scenes in a new light as well as enjoy the gorgeous language.

But first, before I started the book, I decided to read Allison’s short stories collected in Trash. I bought the new edition of the paperback in 2002 when she was visiting Outwrite, the gay bookstore in Atlanta where I lived after college. I remember Allison, who must have been 52 or 53 at the time, as a wry, bespectacled lesbian with long hair. I don’t remember her exact words, but I do recall being inspired by her comments about creative writing and valuing your story. She explained how she ran her workshops especially to empower marginalized people and helped them develop their voices and reminded us that “writing is supposed to be dangerous.” In some ways, she kickstarted my own passion to do the same and it’s why I am proud of the work I’m doing with .

The story in that collection that I love the most is titled “Lesbian Appetite,” and it echoes delicious descriptions about Southern meals and desires that show up in Bastard, in particular the way Allison describes food and hunger, and how easily our appetite for food can transform into sexual appetite. For example, this detail about a girlfriend who smears the narrator with “her own musky gravy.”

“With my eyes closed, I licked and sucked until I was drunk on it, gasping until my lungs hurt with hands digging into the muscles of her back. I was moaning and whining, shaking like a newborn puppy trying to get to its mama’s tit.”

Now that’s some fantastic writing.

Her prose is gorgeous and terrible, the latter because of the intensity of visceral descriptions of horrific abuse. This truth is on full display on nearly every page of Bastard Out of Carolina. Set in 1950s Greenville, South Carolina, the story is centered on Ruth Anne Boatwright, who everyone calls Bone. The story starts when she’s a “very little girl” and we follow her growth until she’s 12 to 13 years old. She’s raised within a large, tight-knit, and often volatile family of “hard-drinking men” and “indomitable women” who are frequently labeled “white trash” by the local community. Bone doesn’t know who her biological father is and, thus, feels perpetually othered. After the death of her first stepfather (and biological dad to her younger sister Reese), her mother Anney marries Glen Waddell. While Glen initially seems like a “good man,” he soon becomes a source of extreme emotional, physical and sexual abuse for Bone. It’s this twisted triangle that is the central conflict of the story. The other women in Bone’s life are the essential bulwark, and it’s her Aunt Raylene who becomes her savior.

I didn’t grow up in the South in the way Allison did nor Bone, since my dad joined the Air Force soon after I was born and we moved from South Florida to North Carolina back to Florida, then to Texas, with a stint in Okinawa, Japan during my formative years (12-16), before finally landing in the Deep South. That’s where my parents eventually purchased their first home in 1993 in an unincorporated rural county on the outskirts of Valdosta, Georgia, within spitting distance of the Okefenokee Swamp. It’s where I had my first boyfriend, a good Christian boy who taught me what hominy was (he made it with lots of salt and pepper), gave me my first taste of a pawpaw (an indigenous fruit to the region that tastes like a creamy, custard-like mix of banana, mango, and pineapple) and explained what to do with the too-sweet muscadine grapes our neighbors were gifting us, as well as all the okra (which wasn’t something my mom was used to cooking up).

I liked the sweetness of the people I met in the South and identified with them—mainly because they loved to tell stories. That’s one reason I had such a visceral reaction to Bastard, since I discovered it soon after its publication when I needed a guide to both this new region and my sexuality. My family was poor, but not as poor as the Boatwrights. Over the years, before we had military housing, we lived in trailer parks and my parents both had multiple jobs to make ends meet. We were living below the poverty line, but we never lacked clothes or food (the way Bone and Reese do), although I did manage the stigma of free lunches at school. Nor did I experience the sexual abuse and violence that Bone survives. Yet I felt seen in these pages. It was similar to the reaction I had to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; two other books that I have zero in common with on the most fundamental levels but became my guides to navigate the difficult teenage years of being queer in the Bible Belt.

It’s tempting to read this book and many of Allison’s stories as a form of autofiction, but she tried to dissuade the reader from making that mistake. Sure, she shared the poverty and was close to the region, but Bone was very different from a young Dorothy, the author explained. In an author’s note in the 20th anniversary edition I listened to (not present in my original copy), she explained this in her defense of the book as it was being banned in school libraries. Allison reflected on her desire to make readers “uncomfortable” by showing the reality of class, racism, and poverty in the South, arguing that “all you really have to do is tell the truth, and it will disturb and upset people.” It worked. It continues to work. It may seem like historical fiction now to contemporary readers—no internet, no mobile devices, no way to connect to anyone outside of your insulated community—but if anything I think it should be read by queer people—lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or nonbinary—as a tale of our forebears.

We don’t have enough stories about gay or queer children, and the ones we do are often banned or forbidden. The bravest thing Dorothy Allison embedded in her novel is to show childhood sexuality. Rather than relying on a trauma plot that only sees Bone as a victim, we also get some shockingly good writing about Bone discovering pleasure. The first time she masturbates and has an orgasm is a thing of beauty.

I’d forgotten about these passages, but when I read them again all these years later, I know it must have been one of the reasons this book spoke to me—even though they are about a girl. I began masturbating when I was an adolescent, and like many boys, it became my favorite pastime. My mom was disgusted and shamed me for it, and my dad never shared any helpful thoughts on the matter and pretended it was not something he ever did himself. I had two male friends who whispered about it one night during a sleepover when I was 12 or 13, which was the first acknowledgment that I wasn’t alone in this solo pursuit. So to read such incredible passages that celebrated a young girl’s discovery feels important. Bone’s discovery that her little sister has also discovered the pleasures of her body is equally revealing.

“I walked in on Reese one afternoon while she was lying on the floor with a pair of mama’s panties over her face. All her features were outlined under the sheer material, but her breath puffed the silk out over her lips. Frantically, she snatched them off and shoved them behind her on the bed. I grabbed a book I had been reading and pretended I hadn’t seen anything.”

Such simplicity, such honesty. It takes my breath away how much is packed into that small space: vulnerability, curiosity, shame.

When I first read Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 1 in my early twenties, I was thrilled by the discovery that he wrote about children and sex and why society worked so hard to cover this up. My boyfriend, now husband, gifted me a copy as a birthday present, and it was the first time I felt seen by a partner. Nobody had given me a book as a gift (no, not even my parents), and the fact that he realized this book would resonate with me so deeply felt even more special.

I think in all of the important texts I’ve mentioned so far, the main characters are not only struggling to have their needs met, they are striving to make their needs known. And that most basic need is love. In Bastard, Bone finds love and feels seen by her gay Aunt Raylene. Although the word lesbian is never used in the book, we understand that her aunt is queer, and she finally admits that she made a mistake when she chose to leave the woman she loved in the circus and try to fit herself into the straight world. She urges Bone, who she intuits is also queer, to not make that same mistake.

And yes, my memories of those liminal spaces described in the novel were confirmed. Raylene is marginalized and she lives on the edges of society. It’s in these boundaries between worlds where hope remains and things are made possible. When people have less structure and expectations creativity can take hold and something beautiful can sprout and bloom from the muck. But it must be nurtured since it can quickly be snuffed out, extinguished, left to rot. It’s this rot that can be the most difficult to stomach; we want to turn away from the stench, the ugliness. Allison turned her unflinching gaze upon these disgusting and despairing realities and crafted a thing of beauty.

Queer children have distinct needs, and it’s even harder for the majority of parents to understand those needs, see them and supply them. If we’re lucky, someone in our extended family or a trusted teacher or confidant recognizes those needs and can help. I know that’s what I was searching for in those adolescent years. My refuge became books, the place where I felt seen and understood and could imagine a future outside of the confines of my limited cultural impoverishment and opportunities.

We read in isolation but seek connection. We’re in a dialogue with novels, despite it seeming one-sided since we’re receiving words. Now that I look back on Bastard Out of Carolina and other pivotal novels that I found in the Book Rack used bookshop in my small Southern town or thrift stores or library shelves (if I was lucky), I realize these books saved my life and were my community. I’ve written about how I may have stumbled upon the discarded libraries of dead gay forbears in these spaces—and then went searching for a physical connection by exchanging my body, the one currency I felt I could trade for more connection. Even when that was disappointing, however, I still have the books, the stories, the tales and hope to create new ones for others to discover and feel seen.

Dorothy Allison discussing her first novel in 2013.

The Downs are beautiful and rolling and sparsely peopled (i.e., heaven)—I confess the word “SHIRE!” was screaming in my head the whole time I was biking, walking, picnicking, and blackberrying along my merry way to and fro the B&B where I was HQ’d.

Monk’s House is splendid, obviously, but the more modest of the two since it was just Virginia and Leonard, no kids. VW’s writing hut sits through a garden within a ramshackle little orchard, steps away from sweet little St. Peter’s Church, and a stone’s throw from the River Ouse.

Charleston Farmhouse, by contrast, was practically an artists colony. Residents included Vanessa Bell, her husband Clive and her lover Duncan Grant, his lover “Bunny,” and their children Julian, Quentin, and Angelica (who later married Bunny, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax).

Visitors included a cavalcade of family, friends, lovers, painters, and writers including Vita Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Roger Fry all depicted in biography, TV, and film, not to mention the Substacks (’s Beyond Bloomsbury, for instance), blogs, societies, reading and writing groups, lecture series, journals, exhibitions, and tribute bands focused on their work. OK I made that last one up.

I admit forthrightly I am envious of the “Bloomsberries” and not just in a My dottie old aunt died and left me an income of $40,000 a year kind of way.

Nor is my infatuation centered on their talents and fame. Except for Virginia Woolf, the rest of this extended friend-support group are practically unknown outside of the UK; even VW herself was nearly forgotten until the upswing of feminist criticism in the 1970s. Really, the only of her novels I return to again and again is Orlando, which is like reading a different book I don’t entirely understand every time I read it.

No, besides the cottagecore settings, it is exactly that friend circle which surrounded the sisters, a loose association of old chums and new connections based on shared artistic and political beliefs, which has been hitherto quite hard to come by in my life.

To imagine a network of people with whom I could share so many interests and values has been until recently just a dream…

But I was supposed to share with you the reasons why I’ve decided to independently publish my next novel, Watrspout, too.

Last year in the run-up to publishing Lamb, I asked of Book Publishing Brick By Brick for help on my marketing—and was immensely pleased with the result, I must add. We developed an independent publishing plan that I could also replicate for a second release in the coming year.

Lamb of course was a serial novel published on Substack, and the intention was always to publish independently. For Watrspout, on the other hand, I had already tried to find an agent and go the traditional publishing route to no avail.

As we got deeper into things, though, Jeff encouraged me to do a little tester with a new round of querying—that’s what we call submitting to an agent rather than a publisher. Perhaps just ten or so new agents, he suggested, just to see, because a big difference between the first time I queried and now was the platform of Ford Knows Books and Qstack I’ve been building over the last three years, something I lacked during my first round of querying.

If you need to get up to speed on why an author platform is important—

I set myself a goal to start this new tester round of queries on Sept. 1st last year, but when the day rolled around, and then a week went by, and then a month, it became clear my heart wasn’t in it.

I’d already absorbed the idea that the odds of getting an agent through a cold query maybe weren’t any better than the last time I tried. Also, there was the thought that even if I were successful, I’d be entering a new phase of editing, feedback, submitting, and waiting which could take years. I wondered how that would fit into my new thrust to write two follow-up novels to Lamb and package them as a series for a direct sales strategy which I learned about at the Indie Unconference last year.

My verdict: Not very well.

I’ve read enough stories about authors who get publishing deals which never earn out—that is, earn enough in royalties to meet the advance they received and begin to turn a profit for their publisher. Many deals nowadays include a right of first refusal on a second book, so the author must submit their next one to the same publisher. But if their first book wasn’t profitable (and most aren’t) the likelihood of the publisher taking a chance on round two is muted.

Many authors who go the traditional publishing route but don’t end up with a best seller their first time out are often dropped by their publisher, and sometimes their agent, and end up having to do the whole dance all over again. Starting from square one when you’ve put all your eggs in trad publishing is very disheartening, and a setback many don’t recover from. And so.

#1 Reason to Publish My Second Book Independently

To develop my independent publishing and direct sales capabilities so I am not at the mercy of a traditional publishing environment which always chooses profits over the career of the author.

That doesn’t mean I’m never going to try for an agent and a publisher in the future, only that when I do, I will also always have my own path for publishing my books and engaging with readers that doesn’t depend on the gatekeepers.

There are other secondary reasons of course to put together my own pipeline and backlist of titles.

⭐ The marketing of a direct sales operation just makes sense.

Not unlike a newsletter platform such as Substack where you “own” your mailing list and can take it with you if you decide to go another way, direct sales allows you to stay in contact with your readers. When they buy direct, you have their contact info and can reach out to them when you have a new book out and for the other little goings on and slices of life that make the author-reader relationship so rewarding.

This is something you absolutely do not get when you sell through any retailer. Even trad publishers aren’t privy to that jealously guarded information. If you sell a book through a bookstore or Amazon, you have no way of reaching out to the reader who loved your book—they have to either actively seek out the subsequent titles you publish, or you have to hope they’ll stumble over it by chance through the marketing efforts of the retailers which are decidedly not concerned with cultivating your long-term relationships but with their own bottom lines.

Direct sales lets you stay in touch with the people most likely to buy your books: readers who loved your last one.

⭐ I firmly believe that faith in yourself will sustain you over the long haul—and that is not built by committee.

There’s this awful “pick me, pick me” vibe coming out of trad publishing, and conversely, a kind of Winners Circle mentality which seems to beckon the lucky ones who land an agent, a publishing deal, or a bestseller.

Of course every author who goes that route should be rightly pleased and proud of their accomplishments, but the fact that there remains a disdain for independent publishing tells me that the “old way”—like Old Money—loves to look down on people who have done things differently, and that there is a retroactively applied standard which fails to acknowledge luck, timing, or connections, and the army of editors, designers, and marketers who polish up the chosen ones for the market in ways that independent authors can’t always afford.

It stinks and I don’t like it.

Believing in yourself requires a long-term approach that doesn’t wait for a gatekeeper to tell you you’re worth it.

That doesn’t mean you think you’re a misunderstood genius or that the world is out to get you. It does mean you can be proud of your independently published work and also recognize that you can always do something to tweak your approach, improve your craft, and walk the creative path rather than waiting for a parade to come along and seat you in the Grand Marshall’s car for a turn that may not last.

The Bloomstack Life

I’ve been ruminating a lot lately on the parallels between the Bloomsbury Group and the network of authors and creators I’ve met on Substack. We offer support and encouragement and develop relationships, which feels a hell of a lot like a virtual Bloomsbury if ever one could exist in our latter day dystopia.

While Substack the platform is focusing more on TV and video, shortform Notes, and betting on big names, the writers of Substack still seem to find and help each other—with a blurb, a review, a Comment, a Restack, or a just a shoulder to lean on.

Books are being serialized and published, small presses are being born, interviews and conversations keep proliferating among the citizens because deep bonds really are being forged, and there remains so much potential for all of us when we band together and just … care. It’s that simple.

I’m mesmerized by the idea of an organic dialogue between author, book, and readers—something that leaps off the page and connects me with others—a circle of writing and reading with all of you.

And every time I’m tempted to think of my writing, books or newsletters as mere products, I’m trying to flip the script and imagine instead a drawing room with a nice little fire and a bunch of cookies. I can’t deal with the constant hope or dread of deals, contracts, and laurels; I can deal with friends sitting around having conversations in comfy chairs.

There’s already more of you than can fit in the room—I guess we’ll just have to take turns sitting on the floor and each other’s laps.

Thanks for being here as Ford Knows Books heads into year four.

-MTF

Additional Resources

A video from and an article inspired by it:

You’ll Have an Easier Time Publishing If Your Novel Has THIS...
’s post from last week caught my eye (thanks to )—inspired by her read on a The Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing podcast: If you can come up with a really easy-to-pitch premise, a really easy way to describe it, you can still write the books you want but grab the attention of an agent or editor.

And here are some sobering statistics courtesy of :

“…the number one selling book across all Books-A-Million stores recently sold fewer than 800 copies in a week across more than 200 locations. Decades ago, a new Dan Brown could sell 5,000 copies in the same time without breaking a sweat.

That difference says something important about how attention works now. Sales are spread across far more titles than they used to be. Instead of a few massive books soaking up all the oxygen, hundreds of smaller successes are happening at the same time. The pie hasn’t disappeared. It just gets sliced into many more pieces.”

—from ’s Maybe I Overshared: What’s Happening in the Book Market Right Now - What Books-A-Million’s CEO and recent sales data reveal about how books move (via a Note shared by )

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Thanks to each and every one of you who subscribes, I’ll have a more illuminating post next week to tell you what writing this newsletter means to me and other sundry thoughts on the writer’s life.

In the meantime, please enjoy this video I recorded as part of the Top in Fiction Summit 2026 produced by , who does so much for the fiction community we can hardly thank her enough. Forty-seven writers read short stories over three days, and by all accounts the whole thing was a crashing success and a lot of fun.

And thank you , , , , , , , , and many others for tuning in!

Get more from Mr. Troy Ford in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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has me wanting to look back and give it a try. Meg’s a wickedly funny force in her own newsletter, , and a delightful interviewer—I had the pleasure of gabbing with her on the Talk Fiction podcast back in December, which you can listen to below.

(*Dithering Alert: Have I given a straight answer to any question, ever? 😂)

Meg also has a YA book of her own coming out with the delicious Empress Editions imprint from this year! Go Subscribe to Meg to stay tuned for her Watty Award-winning debut.

We hope you enjoy this month’s edition of The Books We ❤️ Club. Happy reading! ~ MTF

The Books We ❤️ Club—the book club you don’t actually have to read the book, leave the house, or even change out of your jammies to enjoy as writers sing the praises of books that reach into our hearts.

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison” with of

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Hungry for Feelings

by of

“Then, in the same way that his own dwelling slipped away behind him … the dream slipped away from his thoughts. Very briefly, a little guiltily, he tried to grasp it back. But the feelings had disappeared.”

I can’t recall how old I was the first time I read The Giver, but I suspect I was around the age of its protagonist, Jonas, who at the start of the story is feeling nervous about the upcoming Ceremony of Twelve where he, along with the other twelve-year-olds in his group, will be given his Life Assignment by The Committee of Elders in front of the entire Community.

Catching the sci-fi, dystopian vibe yet?

But Jonas is in for an uncomfortable surprise at this year’s Ceremony. He is not going to be given a typical job Assignment like his friends. The Committee of Elders has selected him, for his observed intelligence, integrity, courage, and his rare Capacity to See Beyond, to be the next Receiver of Memory. A great honor.

Under the guidance of his predecessor, a man known only to Jonas as The Giver, Jonas will learn why life in the Community is so comfortable. Why everything works out so well. Why no one is lonely. Or vengeful. Or hungry. Or sick. Why no one fears pain or death or wonders if they’re meant for something—or someone or somewhere—else.

“Life here is so orderly, so predictable—so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen.”

I picked this book up again several years ago. As a writer of young adult fiction, I had become deeply concerned about book banning, particularly with regard to stories written for and about young people and decided to build my TBR from banned titles, both as a sign of support to their creators and as an exploration into why these books were being pulled from shelves in the first place and out of reach of the readers who would benefit most from them.

The Giver has been challenged over 11,000 times since its publication in 1993, with a fresh surge of attention following the release of its film adaptation in 2014. While middle grade and YA titles are most often flagged for containing adult language or sexually explicit content, The Giver was simply deemed “unsuited to the age group,” in other words too “dark” for its intended readership, particularly in its depictions of war, suicide, and euthanasia (termed “release” in the text) of both the elderly and infants.1 The book also addresses the frailty of a homogenous society built on the sequestration of history and the erasure of uniquity.

It would not escape a rebellious reader’s notice that the primary notion being withheld from the book’s fictional society is their violent and colorful past, and more specifically … the books that contain record of it.

“Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”

So, what does a forty-something romance writer with a penchant for steam and satire find so loveable about this decades-old dystopian diamond?

Precision of Language

“He made himself say the words, though he felt flushed with embarrassment. ‘Do you love me?’ There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle.”

Whenever I venture into a middle grade novel, I am struck by how economical the language is. Books for young readers are shorter than those written for adults by design, but their goal of building immersive worlds full of relatable characters faced with challenging stakes remains the same.

Lois Lowry is a master of world building, and in this story she manages to pull the reader in to a world that’s both pleasantly familiar and deeply unsettling from page one, as Jonas recalls a recent incident involving an airplane flying over the community, which is highly irregular, not to mention against “the rules,” and decidedly “frightening.” It is this moment Jonas recalls when he makes the mistake of thinking he is frightened about the upcoming ceremony of Twelve.

“No. Wrong word, Jonas thought.”

Apprehensive is the word Jonas eventually chooses to share at the evening’s “telling of feelings” with his family unit. Because precision of language is something all community members must strive to maintain. Using the wrong word in a situation could result in confusion, a dose of ridicule from peers or, if it happens too frequently, disciplinary action from teachers. Best to choose the right words to describe the “feelings” that arise during the day so they can be properly discussed with family and resolved before bedtime.

Lowry paints us more of Jonas’ surreal world, and its many rules, expectations, and predeterminations, over the next several chapters with minimalist brushstrokes, leaving us to speculate about what fictional (or actual) events led to our collective “decision” to do away with free will and live in perpetual “sameness.”

A Timeless Message

“If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and and decide things!”

Written over three decades ago, The Giver offers a glimpse of a “utopian” future for humankind, designed by committee, perpetuated by obedience, and devoid of passion. Where everyone is alive and well but no one is really living. Where everyone fits in but no one stands out. Where the first “stirrings” of desire are squelched with pills, because to want is to stray selfishly from the path set out for you from the time you are born to the time you are released.

Like most dystopian tales, The Giver is meant to caution us about what a shift toward militant uniformity would mean for our humanity. And that when we bury the lessons of our past, we render ourselves vulnerable to future threats to our survival, dooming ourselves to repeat our worst mistakes over and over again.

I’ve returned to this book, time and again, and found its message to be evergreen. It seems human beings can never have enough reminders to look Beyond what’s being put in front of us by the “committees” and individuals who curate our feeds and deliver us our “facts.” To go deeper into understanding our own experiences and the experiences of those around us. To celebrate our differences. To appreciate color, nature, music, wisdom, and the freedom to choose.

The “Love” Connection

“The community where his entire life had been lived lay behind him now, sleeping. At dawn, the orderly, disciplined life he had always known would continue again, without him. The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain, or past.”

And here’s where the romantic in me gets her due. What Jonas ultimately learns from his time with The Giver, and with each memory he is called upon to receive, is that in their quest for comfort, ease, and peaceful simplicity, the people of Jonas’ community have given up their humanity. But without the knowledge to understand what they have lost, there is no impetus to reclaim it. Things will go on as they always have.

“‘Back and back and back.’ Jonas repeated the familiar phrase. Sometimes it had seemed humorous to him. Sometimes it had seemed meaningful and important. Now it seemed ominous. It meant, he knew, that nothing could be changed.”

Throughout his training, Jonas is introduced to a wealth of new, powerful, and often excruciating emotions. Fear. Grief. Rage. Anguish. Joy. And love. It’s Jonas’ newfound desire to feel love, to take chances and face consequences, to know pain and endure suffering, to see color and hear music, and to share those long-buried gifts with others that leads him to risk every assurance of safety a life in the community promises to save his adopted brother, a “newchild” named Gabriel, from being “released.”

But neither their escape nor the road ahead will be easy.

“When he had had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now he was starving. But if he stayed … he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.”

Lowry leaves us with a sense of hope that Jonas’ sacrifice will lead to some kind of change for the people he left behind. But she also leaves us wondering, even worrying, what Elsewhere has in store for our hero and his loved one.

“All of it was new to him. After a life of Sameness and predictability, he was awed by the surprises that lay beyond each curve of the road.”

There are few books in my personal library that have received as many repeat visits as The Giver. I love it for its clarity, its constancy, and its tender embrace of the human condition.

Beautiful, Daring, Stupid

A mercurial space for fiction (poetry, humor, essays, podcasts) and honesty from award-winning author, bona fide super-romantic, and critically-acclaimed mother of two, Meg Oolders.

By Meg Oolders

We invite you to add your own reactions, insights, and ideas in the Comments for an impromptu book club session. Share your favorite quotes, characters, moments, and surprises in discussion with other passionate readers.

(And if you’d like to feature your favorite book in a future edition, DM me.)

I want to introduce myself to those who have joined recently, but I’m leery of dusty bios: I was born in a manger, blah blah blah; spent my childhood in the Land of Hanalee, yada yada; had a career in Their Majesty’s Secret Service, etc.

No. Instead, I’m giving you my answers to The Proust Questionnaire, the famous getting-to-know-you inspired by French layabout Marcel Proust which many still employ for interviews. It’s 30+ questions long, which seems excessive but most of my answers are short, and I like the idea you’ll get a fuller picture than my terribly sober Official Author Photo affords.

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
   A small cottage attached to a large library far, far away. It is surrounded by a garden full of follies, flowers, fruit trees, and veggies. Once a fortnight, my husband, my dog and I have a big (catered) dinner party with good food and good friends, but otherwise, days and nights are spent peacefully puttering. Beloved robots take care of shopping, cleaning, etc. I write a book every year or two, and send it out into the world by stork.

   

2. What is your greatest fear?
   Abject destitution.
   

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
   Anxiety, which deep down is fear. It’s at the root of every bad idea, bad decision, and bad behavior of my life.

   ---

   ---

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

   

5. Which living person do you most admire?
   The Obamas. Wow, talk about grace under fire.
   

6. What is your greatest extravagance?
   Books, by a landslide.
   

7. What is your current state of mind?
   Wildly unimpressed.
   

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
   Respect for authority.
   

9. On what occasion do you lie?
   At restaurants.

   

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
    The broken capillaries in my nose, also the only cosmetic procedure I’ve ever seriously contemplated.
    

11. Which living person do you most despise?
    I don’t despise, I pity.
    

12. What is the quality you most like in a person?
    I will follow ’s lead on this one: Cheerfulness.
    

13. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
    All the four-letter ones.
    

14. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
    My husband, Leo, who is my soulmate, though I don’t believe in souls.
    

15. When and where were you happiest?
    Here in Sitges since I got sober in 2021 and finally found a therapist I really liked who offered actionable advice to deal with my chronic anxiety.
    

16. Which talent would you most like to have?
    Wouldn’t mind being a coloratura soprano.

    

17. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
    The Battle Cry of Pink People: My queendom for a tan!
    

18. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
    Overcoming 34 years of writers block to publish a book.
    

19. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
    A cat, obv. 💜🎩🐈‍⬛
    

20. Where would you most like to live?
    Next Stop: Italy.
    

21. What is your most treasured possession?
    We sold, gave away, or tossed everything but ten boxes of personal items and artwork when we moved to Spain in 2019—I highly recommend a good purge to anyone who feels they can’t live without things. Everything can be replaced, though in a fire I would grab my two photo albums because I’ve never digitized them (*Note to self).
    

22. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
    Active addiction—it’s an illness many don’t survive. It’s down there with being on the receiving end of world leaders’ homicidal tendencies, or the institutionalized poverty imposed by failed and dysfunctional governments.
    

23. What is your favorite occupation?
    Journaling. It’s the one kind of writing I always did even when I couldn’t finish a story to save my life; it also might very well have saved my life while navigating through adolescence, coming out, and my very awkward fit into the queer community. Alone with my thoughts, yes.
    

24. What is your most marked characteristic?
    My boisterous laugh—variously described as infectious, terrifying, or hyena-like, depending on one’s generosity of spirit.
    

25. What do you most value in your friends?
    I do like people who can entertain themselves in a conversation because I really can’t be bothered.
    

26. Who are your favorite writers?
    J.R.R. Tolkien, John Crowley, Elspeth Barker, Roberto Bolaño, Virginia Woolf, John Fante, and .
    

27. Who is your hero of fiction?
    Gandalf.

    

28. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
    Walt Whitman.
    

29. Who are your heroes in real life?
    Tilda Swinton.

    

30. What are your favorite names?
    I’m fond of gender-neutral names like Charlie, Georgie, and Jamie, though I wonder why they all end in -ie.
    

31. What is it that you most dislike?
    Zoos. They are cruel.
    

32. What is your greatest regret?
    Being a terrible student in high school and college—undiagnosed ADHD and anxiety made it impossible for me to study.
    

33. How would you like to die?
    Supernova.

    

34. What is your motto?
    You’re never fully dressed without a sigh.

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I hope this finds you merry and bright.

Still, it’s been yet another year in which tumult and tragedy took center stage, while peace and harmony were reduced to bit players or an ineffectual chorus.

But the holiday season and new year give us a chance to reflect and reset. I am trying to emphasize gratitude—corny as that may seem, every minute thinking about something good is one I’m not chewing on horrors, injustice, or resentments.

Sharon Salzberg is a renowned meditation teacher who has a simple method to help reconnect with compassion and equanimity, a mantra we can apply to ourselves, to loved ones, to whole groups of people, or even to a single individual who unbalances us, or inflames hostility and spite—

—and so on, even naming the person who you might, in your darkest moments, wish would just “go away.”

By wishing anyone positive things, we are acknowledging that most of the enmity in the world is at its root a fear we can probably identify with—fear of danger, fear of deprivation and destitution, fear of humiliation—for ourselves and our loved ones.

We nurture compassion by wishing that others’ (and our own) hurts and weaknesses might be healed. It is not a fanciful or magical exercise when we realize that the person we are empowering is ourself. The project of peace is literally accomplished one “soul” at a time.

You can find Sharon’s 10-Day Guided Meditation “Lovingkindness for Self” HERE.

I wish you all good things in 2026, and truly Thank You for joining me in this crazy, wonderful enterprise of reading, writing, publishing … and living.

🕊️🤍🪩

Troy

More in this issue:
→ The Lambiverse: Books 2 and 3
→ Unpublished first novel to the rescue
→ Editing, proofreading, coaching, and now, a writing group with Two Birds Author Services
→ An LGBTQ+ book roundup with The Queer Love Project
→ The Bouquinistes of Paris

Welcome new readers, of whom a fair few of you have joined thanks to the Bargain Booksy Literary Fiction Giveaway.

The prize drawing is 12/31 and there’s still time to enter for free to win a Kindle and 15 pre-loaded ebooks HERE.

Good Luck to all who entered, but if you don’t win and decide you are still interested in reading the bittersweet story of two boys coming of age in San Francisco circa 1990, click the links below to purchase your own copy of Lamb.

Lamb was a #1 LGBTQ+ Literary Hot New Release on Amazon the week of its release. It’s historical fiction too, as the story begins in 1984 and chronicles what I call the post-AIDS era, with the Gen X characters navigating a queer world already steeped in death and trauma as they reach adulthood.

They missed the post-Stonewall “party” but most of the funerals too. Their inheritance was an existential angst that haunted them up to the introduction of PrEP and beyond.

It’s experimental, it’s sweet and sad—many have said they’ve fallen in love with the main character—and it includes letters, journal entries, short stories, and bad poetry by our titular antihero.

LINKS: Amazon - Bookshop - Barnes & Noble

On the advice of several more experienced authors at the Indie Unconference I attended in June, I decided to write a follow-up to Lamb because standalone books are such a hard sell for indie authors. The current wisdom suggests that new readers who become emotionally invested in characters from one book will be motivated to read previous books in a series, and later books as they come out, in order to follow the continuing adventures.

“Write another book about your main character,” they said.

“OK!” I said.

“Did you kill them off at the end of the book?”

“Oops!”

But on further reflection, I realized there were plenty of unanswered questions: about the life of the narrator, D, after the disappearance of Lamb (Book 2); and about the missing three years of Lamb’s life between ghosting D in 2000 and the announcement of his death a few years later (Book 3).

Book 2: The Life of D (not the title)

Since August I’ve been writing the rough draft of the second book, title TBD, which catches up with D about twenty years later.

We find D now a middle-aged VP of online brokerage at his investment firm, living in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland in an open marriage to a good-looking knucklehead, and carrying on a Daddy/boy relationship with a younger man. Despite his success and a certain hero status among his friends for having it all, a series of events show just how precarious his gay American dream really is.

D was a strong and outspoken observer as he looked back on the events of Lamb with twenty-plus years to process what happened. But present-day D, focused on his own life instead of his slacker friend’s, is far less sure of himself, and he realizes his sensible but largely unexamined life path has led to some dubious choices. He’s not as put-together as he imagined, and he’s about to get a seismic shift in his worldview.

I found Lamb relatively easy to write, and the voice of D took on a familiar echo—I’d had decades to ponder my own youth, and the fictional episodes it inspired were well marinated.

But the current story focused on mid-life reflects a far more recent and less settled chapter for me, despite containing significantly less autobiographical fodder.

I’ve written 40,000 words since August, and plotted the remaining scenes which I need to finish the very rough draft. I’d hoped to be about 80% done by the end of the year, so I’m right on schedule. But it’s also a much bigger theme than I originally realized. I have no idea how long it will take to rewrite and edit.

This time last year, Lamb was substantially finished except for the additional material included in the published version. Final editing was complete by the end of January, but that was still a fairly tight timeline to get all my ducks in a row for a Summer 2025 Read.

At this point, I’m not confident I can set a 2026 release date, but I would really like to publish another book next year. What to do?

Watrspout - my unpublished first novel

I’m not going to say much about Watrspout for now because I’ll be sharing about it more in the months to come.

Here’s a little bippy to give you an idea:

When a New York sophisticate offers an introduction to the high-end art world, boy toy Jimmy, a struggling fine art painter in San Francisco, must up his game before drinking and carousing capsize his prospects for success.

Besides book covers, blurbs and so forth between now and publication date (let’s say Summer 2026), I’ll have more posts about the long and winding road this book has taken, from querying agents to sensitivity readers and the decision to self-publish again rather than a new round of submissions.

The Road to Published will continue next year with a trove of new material.

→ is a boutique full-service editing business, from blurbs to proofreading and everything in between.

and Michele Chiappetta are the two dynamos behind the beautiful books of many indie authors. On January 6th, their “encouraging online co-working” writing group—The Hatchery—is starting up with twice-weekly Zooms at an early-bird price of $75 for three months if you sign up by December 31st.

LINK: The Hatchery

→ A 2025 LGBTQ+ book roundup and look ahead to 2026 with , , and over at The Queer Love Project.

LINK: What queer books deserved more love?

→ The Bouquinistes of Paris

LINK: How a 475-year-old book market in the center of Paris is surviving in a digital world (CNN)

I’ve mentioned before that Sitges has ZERO bookstores; one of the two magazine shops which sold a few books recently closed. I’m always on the lookout for ideas. We have an impromptu Little Free Library downstairs in my building, and I’ve considered making that a more formal affair with a dedicated cabinet—Pequeña biblioteca gratuita, anyone? There’s also a cafe with a relatively large but neglected library, and I’ve thought about pitching some kind of arrangement with them but that would be just more time away from writing. The public library here is robust, and nearly empty of patrons. In the meantime, I depend on my Kindle, and dream about having a green book stall of my own.

You can listen to the episode HERE.

How lucky we are to have with us on Substack; in such a short time, he has shared so much of his life with extraordinary generosity, including his experience as caregiver during his husband Gregory’s ten-year battle with Alzheimer’s, and life as a widower.

His moving story of that time was told in an award-winning documentary, Alzheimer’s: A Love Story.

Michael A. Horvich: Memoirs, Musings, and More

BONUS POST: ALZHEIMER'S: A Love Story―A Documentary Film & Link to "QStack".

This FREE TO WATCH post of my documentary is being done in conjunction with Troy Ford and QStack, which will feature my book, “Good Grieving: Doing it correctly … doing it your own way!”, on “Qstack | The LGBTQIA+ Community of Substacks…

Listen now

6 months ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Michael Horvich

Reading his reflections on Giovanni’s Room—as both mirror and map—is to sit at the feet of someone who has experienced multiple eras of queer existence. He lived through a time when queer spaces were both hidden and relentlessly policed, when a single raid could unravel a person’s entire life.

I’m grateful—deeply—for the path he and his generation cleared, and the grace with which he now speaks about it.

Happy reading! ~ MTF

NEXT TIME: “Why I ❤️ The Giver by Lois Lowry” with of “Beautiful, Daring, Stupid”

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Giovanni’s Room By James Baldwin:

A Significant Book in My Early Coming-Out Days

by

It feels fitting to sit down with Giovanni’s Room again on a cold, rainy October morning, the kind of morning when seasons seem to shift before your eyes. Baldwin’s novel has always felt seasonal to me—full of arrivals and departures, of warmth slipping quietly into chill. I was a teenager when I first read it more than sixty years ago, long before I had a name to describe who and what I was, long before “gay” entered my vocabulary. It was a book that found me before I found myself.

The story opens with David’s confession that what follows “will lead to the most terrible morning of my life.” Even now, on my rereading, I couldn’t remember his terrible morning’s details; I felt the same anticipatory dread I felt decades ago, the sense that I was about to enter someone else’s world but somehow recognize it as my own. David’s tone—exhausted, confused, evasive—mirrored the turmoil I carried silently in my own adolescence.

He reflects on his affair with Hella, a relationship he entered out of “fun,” telling her he loved her, asking her to marry him, clinging to the idea of a conventional life the way a drowning person clings to driftwood. And then the line that cracked something open in me the first time I read it: “But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni.”

David continues: “I repent now… one particular lie among the many lies I’ve told … that I had never slept with a boy before. I had.” Even without Baldwin naming “homosexuality” outright, the emotional truth is unmistakable. As a closeted, frightened teenager reading these words in the 1960s, I felt understood in a way I had never felt in my real life. I didn’t yet know another gay person. I barely understood the word “homosexual,” except that it was something shameful, whispered, and dangerous.

And then Baldwin tells us Giovanni will soon die on the guillotine. The combination of forbidden love, desire, shame, and tragedy was overwhelming for me as a young person already convinced that something in me was “wrong.” Yet I kept reading because the emotions felt honest. I recognized myself in David long before I would admit it.

A Lens for a Life I Had Barely Begun

I didn’t read Giovanni’s Room like a literary scholar. I didn’t even read it as someone “interested in books about homosexuality.” I read it the way someone starving reads about food. I read it looking for signs that I was not the only one feeling the way I did.

Growing up, my life looked ordinary from the outside—“white bread,” obedient, no trouble. On the inside was a storm. I had no self-esteem and not much of a personality. I didn’t understand why I was drawn to other boys. I avoided friendships, terrified someone would sense what I hardly admitted to myself. My classmates sensed it anyway, calling me queer and fag. My parents didn’t know what to do with a son who withdrew into himself. They saw the quiet. They did not see the chaos.

Homosexuality was a mental illness then, a sin, an abomination. It was illegal in most states. You hid because there was no other option. “Gay” as an identity was not yet one people claimed with pride; it was a slur, an accusation. And so, the world of Baldwin’s Paris—complicated, messy, sinful, seductive—felt like a map to a place I had not yet reached but desperately needed to imagine existed.

There were no out role models for what I was experiencing. No public conversations. No internet. No books about gay people that weren’t in locked library cabinets or shelved under “Sexual Deviance.” Giovanni’s Room was the first time I had seen my emotions—my confusion and longing—expressed honestly.

I was not alone. That realization did not change my life overnight, but it changed the trajectory of my thinking. It planted seeds of self-recognition.

Looking Back from Eighty

Now, as an eighty-year-old gay man who has lived a full, loving, successful, complicated life, I look back at that young boy with tenderness. Today I name myself clearly: a white, cis, gay, retired, older, Jewish, Buddhist man. I know who I am. I know what I value. I love deeply. I strive for compassion towards others. I am many things to many people, to name just a few—husband, friend, educator, writer—but being gay is my lens on the world. It always has been. I am a man who loves men!

It took decades to reach that confidence. It took therapy, love, loss, community, courage. It took my husband Gregory (RIP), whom I loved for forty-one years and still love now that he is gone after living for twelve years with dementia, most likely Alzheimer’s Disease. “Until death do you part” isn’t accurate. Love does not disappear; it merely changes shape.

And still, even in the fullness of my adult life, I look back at Giovanni’s Room and see the ways David and I mirrored each other. Not identically, but emotionally. I spent years wishing I were someone else, denying my desires, hating what I felt. I acted in my fantasies without acting in reality—fantasizing vividly while living timidly. I hid from myself. Baldwin puts it starkly: “The very bed… testified to vileness.” I carried that same idea of vileness. I believed that my sexuality made me defective.

Rereading those early scenes between David and Giovani—“out of this intolerable pain came joy”—was like reading a diary I never wrote. When I first encountered the book, I had not yet been with another male. But I understood the joy, the fear, the recoil, and the shame. I lived all of that before I ever touched another man.

My Parents, My Silence

Baldwin’s reflections on David’s father cut painfully close to home. “He wanted no distance between us… but I wanted the merciful distance of father and son.”

My father and I lived in that kind of silence. We loved each other but didn’t know how. When we wrestled, he always won. I remember the panic of being pinned beneath him, the humiliation. My claustrophobia today may well have come from those moments.

My parents fought constantly—rage and retreat, attack and withdrawal. During their fights, my sister sometimes broke them apart. I hid under the bed wishing them dead, then panicked at the possibility that my wish might come true.

It took me into my forties to undo much of what that environment gave me. In truth, I am still undoing it, sixty years after Giovanni’s death in the novel and long after both of my parents’ deaths. But reading David’s confusion about fatherhood, masculinity, and distance gave me a sense that I wasn’t alone in that pain either.

Tentative Beginnings

By college I was ready—cautiously, secretly—to explore my sexuality. At that time, it was illegal to participate in homosexual activities.

I discovered the cruising restroom in the Student Union, learned the signals that enabled one to meet other homosexuals; the toe taps, the subtle movements of hands and feet. These encounters were not romantic. They were furtive and guilt-ridden and electrically charged. Sometimes sex happened right there in the public toilet and sometimes I would go home with the person, for a quick turnaround.

There were not many available ways or places to meet others like myself, so these trysts and adventures continued secretly and furtively. They were my first attempts at being with another man, even as I told myself I would stop, change, be “normal.”

We forget today, in the age of apps and community centers and Pride parades, that once the only place to learn anything about what it meant to be a homosexual, without Google and iPhones, was a library bookshelf. And even there, you felt watched. Your heart raced. You feared being discovered. You feared your own desires.

There were a few, gay-only bars if you were of age, but even then, without a moment’s notice police would barge through the doors, the lights would come on, and “RAID” was announced. If you were friendly with the Mafia owners, you might be warned ahead of time. These raids happened more often during election cycles when politicians hoped to appear to be “cleaning up the city.” If you were dancing, gay men would grab the nearest Lesbian so as to appear a “normal couple.” Many were carted off to jail, finger printed, released the next morning with their faces appearing in the newspaper. Charges were usually dropped but not until unknowing families and friends found out about you, jobs were lost, and landlords kicked you out of your apartment. This never happened to me, but I knew people to whom it did. If you were underage or doing drugs, charges did stick.

Paris, Through David’s Eyes

David both loves and hates Giovanni. And in many ways, I both loved and hated myself. I hated the secrecy, the risk, the desperation. I hated feeling different. I hated myself even more after sexual experiences with men. I still tried dating women as if I could outrun myself. I would drop a woman off after a frustrating date, even with some “necking” and “petting” and then drive to a gay bar, hoping the darkness inside would swallow my shame, frustration, and confusion, in reality, only adding to it.

Even now, decades later, I can still touch the residue of that self-hatred. When a society tells you you’re wrong, sinful, sick, disgusting, those beliefs burrow deep. They take years to uproot. Some roots remain forever.

Giovanni’s Room does not present a joyful picture of what it meant to be a homosexual. It is tragic and bleak. But for me, it was a first glimpse of truth. A first sign that desire between men existed and was powerful, complicated, consuming. It showed me I was not the only one in the world who felt split in two.

What the Book Still Means

David and Giovanni were my “first lovers,” long before I touched another male. David’s denial was my denial. Giovanni’s passion was what I longed for but feared. The atmosphere of shame, secrecy, desire, and the sinful inevitability shaped the early years of my sexual life.

We have come so far since the 1960s, and since my own youth. And yet, for many, the journey remains steep. Why should “acceptance” or “tolerance” even be needed? Why isn’t “existence” enough?

Giovanni’s Room taught me that existence itself is a radical act. The book gave me courage before I knew I needed courage. It opened a door—narrow, painful … but open. And through that door, slowly, I finally was able to walk into my life.

Michael A. Horvich: Memoirs, Musings, and More

I write essays & poetry about life insights & philosophies, the LGBTQ Community, & Dementia/Alzheimer’s Disease. I collect small things and I am a photographer. I will share all on my Substack.

By Michael Horvich

Correction: The Road to Published post will appear on 12/29, rather than 12/20 as originally stated.

Talk Fiction Podcast

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to my podcast episode on Talk Fiction with of the Beautiful, Daring, Stupid newsletter, click the ▶ Listen now link below.

Meg’s as funny as she is fabulous, and knows how to put a guest at ease. We talked about author platforms, social media, authenticity, and navigating the exhausting publication journey from both directions—me as a self-published author, and Meg as the Watty Award-winning AND now small press-published author of See Dot Smile, coming in 2026 from ’ Empress Editions.

Beautiful, Daring, Stupid

12 | The Cult of Authenticity

Welcome back to Talk Fiction, the podcast dedicated to entertainment media’s most overlooked underdogs: Fiction writers…

Listen now

7 months ago · 14 likes · 10 comments · Meg Oolders and Mr. Troy Ford

Samuel Richardson Prize

And if you are as excited as I am about ’s inaugural Samuel Richardson Prize, you will know that four of the finalists have so far been named:

• Naomi’s pick - Drive A by Merritt Graves - REVIEW

• ’s pick - Cubafruit by - REVIEW

• ’s pick - Glitterballs by Michele Howarth - REVIEW

• ’s pick - Here, The Bees Sting by Will Caverly of - REVIEW

I’ve grabbed all four for reading over the holidays.

Six other judges have not yet announced their finalist pick, so there’s still hope for Lamb. Click to read more about the Samuel Richardson Prize.

The Setback

I’ve mentioned before that in early October I came down with shingles, that Easter egg of maturity your parents don’t mention when your sister comes down with the chickenpox and they suggest building a blanket fort complete with flash lights, ghost stories, and hot cocoa to speed contagion along.

Spain has a rather different approach to vaccinations than the U.S., though I wouldn’t trust American doctors to be especially more proactive about it. Here you have to beg a doctor for a prescription, get it filled at a farmacia, and then hand-carry it yourself to a clinic for the injection. 😑

Guidance suggests that anyone aged 50 or above get a shingles vaccine, though since my diagnosis I have heard of much younger people getting it, as well as some horror stories of shingles on the face and around eyes and ears that make the patch on my chest and side seem blessedly manageable.

Still, once the rash and flu-like symptoms abated, the lingering combination of numbness, itching, irritation, and outright stabbing pain from the nerve damage has been vexing enough that my original schedule for drafting the follow-up novel to Lamb has been seriously undermined.

I must now admit that perhaps putting “1000 WORDS” on my actual Google calendar as a daily Monday thru Friday task from the beginning of August to the middle of October (50 work days = 50,000 words, oy!) might have had something to do with my outbreak.

Things actually got off to a good start. I stuck to my schedule through mid-September and clocked 27K words before I hit that “muddy middle” and realized I needed to clarify some ideas before continuing—you can read more about that in the September edition.

I admit I lost some momentum. Both my previously completed novels were accomplished through “pantsing” (writing by the seat of your pants versus “plotting” with an outline and other guidelines set before drafting) and this new one was humming along similarly up to the halfway mark.

The Snowflake Method helped me get some things straight in my head, and I even reset the “1000 WORDS” counter to a new deadline 23 working days out (mid/end Novemberish) when Mr. Shingles swooped in and waylaid me.

In the last seven weeks, I’ve managed to get to 33K words, so I’ve got about 17K words to reach my target of 50K, the minimum word count to be considered a novel.

Of course, the story takes up however many words it needs; undoubtedly, this one will expand and contract through rewrites and editing. I will never be a 600-page novelist—I’m a chronic under-writer—and besides, I think many books are too long.

Short Review

I just finished A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and 615 pages. I found it on our building’s impromptu Little Free Book Library shelf, which is mostly Spanish books.

In blurb, it was right in my wheelhouse: squarely bookended at the end of the 19th century by the English Arts and Crafts movement, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the later Bloomsberries, it tells the story of the extended Wellwood family and their group of friends with artistic, anarchist, and socialist leanings.

But its length was bloated at least 20% by extended summarizations of real historic movements and events which, though interesting, had little bearing on the meandering plot.

While I love a good family saga—and this one had some great characters and touching moments—it was far longer than it needed to be.

But that cover! 🤩

A Pivot

In any event, I had a good long talk with my Imaginary Mentor last week, and we came to the conclusion that “1000 WORDS” as a daily task was probably the formula for stress-related illness, and I promptly deleted it from my calendar.

Instead, I’m returning to my 10 minutes a day goal, which I talked about more in one of my very earliest posts below, along with two other tried-and-true strategies for busting through writer’s block.

Just sitting down to write for 10 minutes—a conversation, a description, a rumination, some small snippet of the story—and I will almost always end up writing more. The very act of starting produces connections and what-nexts that carry you along, and before you know it, you’ve written 800 words without even thinking about it.

10 minutes is the deal, and that’s all you have to do—set a timer—you can hit the snooze button and write for another 10 minutes (and another and another) if you’re on a roll, or just get up and walk away.

If I keep this up, I hope to be 80-90% finished with the rough draft by the end of December, and that’s 100% fine by me.

In the interests of holiday travel and merry-making, I’ll leave it there.

I am excited to share more about this second and the planned third book in the Lamb universe, and I’ll be dedicating December’s issue of The Road to Published to a sneak peak of those forthcoming efforts.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a very Happy Thanksgiving. I know I am grateful for many things, including all of you. 💚💛🧡🤎 MTF

Yes, boo, boo, but…

When Lamb came out, my nephew very sweetly mentioned that he’d bought it through Barnes and Noble (haha) because he wanted me to make some money on it (haHAha).

The truth, dear child (I said), is that Amazon actually does pay writers very competitively for their sales. Although we all want to support indie bookstores (or anyone who isn’t Amazon), in many cases, no one can produce, distribute, and sell books cheaper than the evil king of online retailing. It’s a shame, but there it is.

I get paid real money for print book sales through Amazon—but for every copy of Lamb sold through an indie bookstore, I actually lose a couple pennies.

This is partly my fault: I wanted to price the print book competitively at under $10, not knowing that with the steep 60% discount that indie bookstores get from my distributor, I am technically losing money after printing costs.

Also, bookstores have the option of returning unsold copies—I have to pay the cost of printing every book returned out of my own pocket, even though those books are destroyed rather than resold. Thankfully there have been very few of these, mainly because very few retailers will countenance purchasing and selling self-published books. My non-Amazon sales have been a bare fraction of the total.

Nevertheless, I get it. Despite a dollar/cents advantage to selling through Amazon, the damage they do to brick-and-mortar lives is immeasurable, and I’m very much looking forward to putting together a direct sales operation in the coming year.

In the meantime, however, I’m stuck with the beast, which includes their own “little” system of Amazon Best Sellers, a far cry from the New York Times or USA Today, but still something to talk about over dinner.

Which leads us to…

Free Books Tip #1

There’s a whole separate Best Seller list for free Amazon ebooks, and that’s where the secret to tons of great reads for ZERO $$ comes in.

Every Best Seller category has both the Top 100 Paid and the Top 100 Free, and you can download them all to your heart’s delight for absolutely nada, right here:

Amazon Top 100 Free Best Sellers

Check out the 31 categories on the left sidebar—each of these breaks down into even more categories, all with 100 Top Free Best Sellers. This amounts to thousands of free books you can read without paying Amazon a cent.

And you don’t have to own a Kindle to read Kindle ebooks—Download the Kindle app to your Mac, PC, phone, or tablet HERE, also completely free!

Free Books Tip #2

The other source of free ebooks is the BookBub Daily Deals newsletter.

If you’re not familiar, BookBub is the leading free service that helps readers discover new books by sending personalized, daily email newsletters featuring deals on discounted or free ebooks. Sign up, choose your preferred genres, and receive a daily email with a curated list of discounted and free ebooks from both mainstream and independent authors.

Sign up for yours and Follow Me

Free Books Tip #3

You can win a Kindle to download all those free books, with 15 books already loaded (including Lamb), with this free Bargain Booksy Giveaway! Click to enter.

(Why not? Did I mention it’s FREE?)

Bargain Booksy is another newsletter with great eBook Deals all at or below $5.

PINK FRIDAY SALE

The ebook of Lamb is available for free today!

Now that Lamb can no longer be considered new, and sales have slowed, I’m taking advantage of Amazon’s Free Deals feature to refresh interest.

I would rather new people read it for free than not read it at all, especially since this is a long-game, and readers of future books will hopefully search my backlist and continue buying Lamb for years to come as my pipeline keeps pumping. It’s all about keeping momentum going, in all the ways we can.

And as of this morning, Lamb is the
#1 Free LGBTQ+ Literary Best Seller!

And #1 in Free Contemporary Literary Fiction, too! (Beating out George Elliot’s Middlemarch, no less…)

Yay! That’s hundreds of new readers for this bittersweet tale of gay boys trying to understand the world, themselves, and each other.

So if you haven’t already, now is a great time to grab it. Get it here:

FREE Lamb

And if you do pick it up to read *please* leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
It would also be super swell if you told a friend, and encouraged them to give it a try.

Thank you so much!