More than 50 years ago, the name “Judy Blume” became an enduring pop culture staple for the bravery it took to write books about puberty and sex in a way that no one else was doing. And now, between “Margaret,” “Judy Blume Forever,” and at least three more film and TV projects to come, Judy is becoming something of a movie star.
As we eat lunch, Mitchell stops by to ask Judy if she might be free for breakfast in a couple of days, but she’ll be having her hair and makeup done for an event at the Miami Film Festival. “The glam — I love that,” she says. “I never knew anything about that! The glam is going to be happening,” she giggles before returning to her grilled cheese.
For much of my career, I was the type of journalist who only published a handful of magazine pieces a year. These required a great deal of time, much of which was spent on minor improvements to the reporting, structure, and sentences. I believed that long-form journalism, much like fiction or poetry, possessed a near-mystical rhythm that could be accessed through months of intensive labor. Once unlocked, some spirit would sing through the piece and touch the readers in a universal, truthful way.
Then, about two years ago, while working at the New York Times, I began writing and publishing thousands of words a week. My main motivation was health care: I had been a contract employee for years and had very little income stability. But also, from an authorial standpoint, I was curious to see what would happen if I just started churning. Would my sentences deteriorate? Would I lose my sense for what was good or bad?
But for me, an only child of divorce, it was the first half-step into the world of cooking for myself.
If lesbian bars are dead, then where did I spend $50 on a glass of orange wine and a hot dog?
If Xu’s work is powerful, it’s because of the ways she so eloquently articulates this problem of wanting to honor one’s past without being reduced to it, a problem she links to debates about poetic genre while gesturing beyond them to the higher-stakes issues of surveillance, citizenship, cultural memory, and diaspora. Xu thereby deftly navigates a particularly tricky double bind of representation that has been at the heart of recent critiques of both confessionalism and experimental verse—a larger dynamic of the public sphere wherein minoritized writers must either negate their differences or risk being negated by rhetorics of invalidation. In so doing, Xu refuses the either/or logic that culture imposes on her, realizing in The Past a book that looks to the future as much as to history.