I first heard of Franny Choi in 2013 when we were both finalists for Write Bloody’s book contest. My own education in poetry being poor (it’s okay, I was the fiction part of a book on writing), my poet co-author was gobsmacked by the company we found ourselves in. So when I was asked to read We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg, Choi’s new collection of essays, I jumped at the chance to get to know Choi’s work better and to meet on the prosaic ground I mostly inhabit. What I didn’t know is how much our interests would overlap and also how they would stretch my thinking on some projects that have obsessed me for a long time.

Conversing with Culture

Remember the good ol’ days when everyone at school or work would be watching the same show and the stance you took on the latest episode felt like a crucial part of your personality? We Radiant Things took me back there as Choi uses movies, TV, and music I know well as lenses with which to explore the things that interest them. It doesn’t matter that I watched Humans ages ago, I still remember Gemma Chan’s Anita vividly (and not just when my husband says, “Why don’t you share?”). Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots joined our record collection this year, and Blade Runner feels like it has been in the background of my whole life.

Bouncing ideas off this shared landscape gives Choi a way to instantly ground us in a conversation before taking us somewhere we might not have gone on our own. It’s a smart way of stretching a reader. They write in another essay of the struggle of “having to learn to make yourself liquid enough to slip through the bars of other people’s myths,” but it is this hard-earned facility with understanding and subverting expectations that Choi uses to force open eyes of “those whom privilege has soothed into ignorance.”

“I can’t deny that what drew me first to Kyoko—and to all the Asian women cast as androids, cyborgs, Cylons, synths, fabricants, Windups, Realdolls, and AI companions—was something like beauty. I wanted to be close to them, or maybe I wanted to be them, which is another way of saying I desired them queerly. Terrified, I drifted toward their light, knowing that I was also approaching my own becoming.

It was only then that I could confront the terribleness of the image, that I could mourn the things I’d been made to be.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

Inviting Readers into the Openness

Despite my admiration for how Choi leads readers to explore a thought, the essay I think I loved most was “Notes Toward an Essay on Blade Runner (1982).” Though the disjointed sentences and scant paragraphs of this essay could be mistaken for notes for an essay (and there’s a feeling that they did in fact start there), the openness Choi creates by setting sentences like “Blade Runner has, in its set design, many Asian references. It also has some Asian people, who are mostly inscrutable, comedic, or both” alongside “Blade Runner‘s Asians are, mostly, part of the set design” invites the reader to collaborate with Choi’s thought process. As we fill in what connects these ideas, it’s easier to inhabit their perspective. The connections get more prescriptive as the essay advances, but by then the reader is already part of the team and is eager to see where the ideas go next.

Exploring Class and Work

Choi eventually landed on a topic I’m obsessed with at the moment: social class, both the immutability of it and our failures to see across class lines. “Good Job!” looks at the role of robots in labor (and the sometimes pleasure of robotic actions as we labor). And “I, Roomba,” helped me understand something I’ve felt deeply but never been able to articulate about the way we internalize our worker roles on a personal level. Despite differences in our races, I felt seen when I read about the division of domestic labor with their partner, “[T]here is no level of housework equality within the tight space between us that would make it feel just… We’ve each absorbed too many lessons about what we’re for—the thing we can do, and do well, that makes us worth the sticker price.”

As with the rest of the book, the discussions in this essay are richly layered, exposing inherent contradictions that only lead to deeper exploration of subjects. Some other sentences from the various essays in We Radiant Things that I’ll be thinking about for a long time include:

“Ghost in the Shell” and the Development of a False Self

“In recent years, you have begun to suspect that all your careful blending is actually keeping you distant from others, rather than bringing you closer.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“The Reboot at the End of the World” and the Difficulty of Changing the World

“Soon, all this will happen again… In the meantime, you are not the same person you were the last time you were forced to encounter your twin.

“Tell me how many times we’ll each have to reawaken from the dream of certainty before we finally get it right.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“Imitation Games” and the Gift of Multilingualism

“At school, the grammar questions were always my favorite. I loved how I could feel when the sentence was wrong, like the heat that sometimes emanates from an injury.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“Sympathy for Robot Vengeance” and the Responsibility of the Writer

“I found a place where the thing I was most ferocious at—writing—could meet the ferocity of my desire to reorder the world.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“Love, Death and Pink Robots” and Remembering to See Humans

“Any scene organized around the fantasy of a people has the power to make the people themselves feel like ghosts.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

I took a lot of pleasure from reading Choi’s ideas and thinking about the ways they structured those thoughts. We Radiant Things is a brilliant book that will sneak up on you, entertaining you while stretching you in the best of ways. Just like a humanoid robot, it’s both familiar and strange, and I look forward to reading it again to see what else it has to teach me.

The book isn’t available until October, but you can pre-order it now (and if you use this link, I get a commission).

A recent visit to the town where I grew up has me reflecting that life is long and no matter how much we change (or think we’re changing), there are people who will always see us as we were, just as there are elements of ourselves that we carry forward without always thinking about it. A Moment’s Surrender by John Burt, a novel about friendship and grief, met me in that place.

The book begins a few days after (Tom) Corbin has left the home of his college friend (Paul) Bishop. Bishop is talking to the police because Corbin never made it home and Bishop is trying not to tell the police that Corbin was planning to leave his wife, Susan, for Bishop’s college girlfriend, Rachel. It quickly follows that Corbin was killed by someone he met on the road, and the rest of the book alternates between stories from the college days when Corbin, Bishop, and Rachel were closely knotted together and the present where Bishop is trying to console and protect Susan.

The relationships are complicated and Burt elucidates the characters’ motivations with careful insights like this:

That’s the funny thing about doing something really stupid. Everybody keeps telling you how stupid the thing you’re doing is. But you knew that from the beginning so that advice doesn’t help you at all because it doesn’t stop you from wanting it. – John Burt, A Moment’s Surrender

He pays special attention to Jack, Susan and Corbin’s son, and effectively conveys the unique perspective with which a child sees the world:

“[S]he really is trying to protect you.”
Jack wasn’t quite ready to concede this. He took his thumb from his mouth, and knotted his fingers together, as if to keep from sucking his thumb again.
“And I know you’re trying to protect her too,” Paul added. – John Burt, A Moment’s Surrender

The intuitive portrayals of characters falls short, however, when it comes to Rachel and Susan. One carries a twisted darkness that seems thin, despite her backstory, and the other is surrounded by an angelic aura that would be impossible for anyone to live up to. That isn’t to say that Burt does not spend time with these characters and their interiority or that Bishop never sees Susan or Rachel. We get some fine moments of observation like, “She loves him, and she’s happy. He had to take another look. No. She’s hoping to be happy.” But the female characters seem stuck inside virgin/whore tropes, and I had come to care enough about both women to want more for them.

This is a reader’s novel, by which I mean there’s a literary fluency and a level of intertextual referencing (especially poetry) that provides an extra layer of satisfaction for the very well read. Of course, you might expect this from a professor of literature such as Burt. It also means that a good share of the book takes place in and around academic discussions of literature and writing. This pleased me, of course, and gave me something to stretch towards (as my own poetic education is ever developing).

If you’re looking for a story about grief, long-term friendship, and how we deal with betrayals enacted and received, A Moment’s Surrender will take you deeply and engagingly into the humanity of it all. If you pick up your copy from Bookshop.org, I will receive a commission.

The morning after I finished reading Show Yourself by Shane Pollard, I heard the news that a 15-year-old girl had been dragged from a bus stop and raped in the woods less than a mile from my house. Too apt for a book that starts with a strange man chasing an 11-year-old down an alley, and I’ll admit that this intrusion of reality colored how I remember Show Yourself.

Danger Lurks

Child of the 1980s, the idea that there’s a stranger lurking in the bushes is very familiar to me. Crime stats be damned, the way our human brains assess risk (there’s an excellent Hidden Brain on this) means I carry this fear whenever I go anywhere. The visceral way Pollard captures Jenavieve’s situation in the opening pages of Show Yourself tells me I’m not alone. The craft behind this is precise, from using strong verbs (cowering) to details (“rusted dumpster, amongst the dirty runoff and the smell of wet asphalt”) just specific enough to convey an ugly, if not unfamiliar, environment without drawing attention away from the action.

I’m not spoiling anything by saying the stranger ends up (physically) harming Jenavieve’s father instead of her, reflexively stabbing James to death as James tries to protect his little girl. Here Pollard amps up the poignancy (and the omnipresence of danger) by flashing back and forth between what must have happened in the alley and the merry group of friends Jenavieve and James had been part of immediately before.

All this in the first three pages.

Point of View Affects Everything

So far I’ve written about Jenavieve and James, but the book is not really about either of them. The book is about the narrator, Tristan, James’ friend and Jenavieve’s “uncle.” Pollard very clearly structures the book this way, using not just Tristan’s first-person point of view, but also going so far as to start the book with the word “My.” It’s a valid choice, and the events of the book would unfold very differently if he had chosen a different POV character (11-year-olds might feel a lot of agency in the world, but their effectiveness is limited by societal constraints). Regardless of whether Pollard had chosen third person or third, he was going to have to stick close to Tristan to investigate the nature of vengeance.

The one flaw in this is that sometimes Jenavieve gets lost on the story. Maybe it’s because I’m a mom or because the news keeps newsing, I wanted more of what was happening with the girl: how was she coping? who was actually caring for her? is she waking up in the middle of the night wondering what would have happened if? Some of these questions are answered obliquely (Tristan takes custody, she spends many nights with Mike and his family—the rest of their party from that fateful night). And Mike and Kristen (Mike’s wife) do remind Tristan from time to time that he’s responsible to Jenavieve’s actual wellbeing, not just for avenging her father. But the effect of centering the narrative on Tristan is that the story can be as blind to the real victim as he is.

Revenge?

The tagline for this book is, “This is not a revenge story.” Which is an interesting choice for a book about one man’s obsession with retribution. But maybe that’s because the story does also become about how Tristan himself gets lost inside his quest. He lets his obligations to Jenavieve slide, fails to maintain his business, and sometimes (accidentally) creates situations where he could be mistaken for the kind of creeper he’s trying to rid the world of. It affects his friendships, too, as he tries to recruit Mike but Mike refuses to set aside his whole life for this one purpose.

Still, Tristan drive and actions push the plot forward and the action revolves around tracking down the perp to make him pay. The action is swift and fast-paced, even when Tristan is stymied in his search, which makes the book a fast read.

Literary Thriller

Don’t read too fast, though, because (as I described earlier), this book is finely crafted. The relationships between characters flow naturally (with more than one character offering a chance to challenge Tristan’s view of them), events unfold in unpredictable (but not unbelievable) ways, and the sentences are spare without being terse.

Show Yourself is the best kind of thriller—the book you reach for because you just want to lose yourself in a more just world for a few hours but also a book that ends up stretching your thinking along the way.

Closer to home, they caught the guy who assaulted the little girl in my neighborhood. I don’t know who or how she is, but I can only hope that she is surrounded by people who love her as fiercely as James, Tristan, Mike, and Kristen loved Jenavieve in this book.