If I’ve learned anything from being in community with Zhu and reading their work in the past year, it’s that a whole lot of people don’t know how to love in healthy ways, and most of those people are eager to do better. What makes Zhu’s work so special is that they learned to stop fearing love, not by following constructs and norms, but by destroying them. In a culture filled with so many tragic depictions of queerness, this is one of the few books that illustrates how the answer to broken systems lies in queer communities of color who understand love better than anyone — if only because we’ve overcome the unconditional hate of others.
Is there a German word for being surrounded by stacks of once-feted, now forgotten novels piled in a deeply haunted basement wondering, “What if this is where my book ends up?”
Three years of German in high school didn’t offer an ample enough vocabulary. Thankfully, English has a word for this: sadness.
Literature’s history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos. It’s the shadow narrative of expression—how we fail because of sloppiness, or ignorance, or simple tiredness. Blessed are the copyeditors, for theirs is a war of eternal attrition. Nothing done by humans is untouched by such fallenness, for to err is the universal lot of all of us. Authors make mistakes, as do editors, publishers, printers (and readers).
There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night.
Toward the end of the novel the protagonist acknowledges that she is “apart from this world and vulnerable to it.” It’s a deceptively simple statement that neatly summarizes the overarching theme: that existential loneliness exists alongside the deeply porous experience of being a human in a social world. It’s the tension of that seeming contradiction, as well as the sure hand of the book’s guiding intelligence, that makes “Meet Us by the Roaring Sea” such a pleasure to read.
Just before our ’68 Camaro hit the guardrail, I thought, “I’ve spent four years crying every day over something I can’t have, and now I’m going to die.” Unharmed and stunned, my husband and I stood on the shoulder listening to the ambulances’ screams. “I’m done ruining my life trying to have a kid,” I said. I got pregnant that night. Nine months later, during my emergency Caesarean, both the baby and I almost died.
Fast-forward 33 years. Same place: San Francisco. Same problem: A woman desperately wants a baby, and it’s not working out. “At twenty-seven,” Michelle Tea writes in “Knocking Myself Up,” the latest of her 16 novels, memoirs and how-to-live-an-artsy-life books, “I read Ariel Gore’s book The Hip Mama Survival Guide and suddenly pregnancy seemed sort of cool, like some sort of wild art project. Ariel’s book was the first thing I had ever read that gave me—poor, queer, weird—permission to bring a kid into the world.”