on bodies

there are two kinds of writers in the world.

(anyone who starts a sentence with "there are two kinds of ___ in the world" is without exception a bullshitter; semicolons and parentheticals are also red flags).

there are writers for whom the body exists--where it eats and breathes and aches and desires, where it moves through the world as physical thing, ever-present--and writers for whom the body does not exist, or exists only because their editors left comments like "where are they right now??" or "whose hand is that."

i want to get out ahead of you here and clarify that both kinds of writers can be and are often very good, and i have loved them dearly. i'm also not talking specifically about sex on the page, although i'm not not talking about sex on the page. nor am i talking about the actual real-life bodies of the writers in question, although it doesn't feel totally coincidental to me that the body often matters more to trans and queer writers, disabled writers, fat writers, everyone whose physical existence has been made into a political act.

i'm just talking about the sensory experience of a book. about the kind of storytelling that conveys itself through dialogue and thought and emotion, distinct from the meat of the bodies that carry them, versus the kind of writing where every feeling is--well--sorry--embodied. i think you know what i mean. think of Le Guin, and now think of Butler; for one of those writers the body is a necessary vessel of story and emotion; for the other, it is the story.

like, look at this, from The Farthest Shore: 

"But his heart went out utterly to his companion, not now with that first romantic ardor and adoration, but painfully, as if a link were drawn forth from the very inmost of it and forged into an unbreaking bond. For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last."

it moves me, every time. it's true and good and deeply felt, a very specific shade of love rendered beautifully—and it has absolutely nothing of the body. most of le guin is like that: stories that unfold as if seen from above or aside, whispered secondhand rather than lived directly.

but for the other kind of writer every kind of love is first felt physically; it's a trembling hand, an ache in the chest, a hunger. i think of lee mandelo's Summer Sons, which is suffused with touch--hands around the napes of necks, knuckles on jaws, palms on sprawled knees--long before anyone expresses anything with words.

and it's not just love and sex. like, this is how muir describes the emotion of betrayal in Gideon the Ninth: "Gideon felt...dirty and muddy, terribly exposed, as though she had unbuttoned her chest and given him a good long look at what was inside her ribs. She was garbage from the neck to the navel. She was packed tight with a dry and dusty mould."

this is how nicola griffith--a body-writer if ever there was one--describes a shout before battle in Spear. "She used her lungs, large from years of running in the valley, and her gut muscles, and her voice boomed and bayed like a huge hound."

it's a game i play sometimes, like sorting a bag of M&Ms by color. nghi vo adores a body, revels in every bead of sweat and sharp tooth; laini taylor deploys bodies as arresting visuals (wings sprouting from backs, moths pouring from mouths, blue skin, etc) but not real objects; tolkien read about bodies once in school and determined never to do so again.

but of course, all of this is bullshit (i did warn you). partly because any attempt to shove art or artists into a binary is both doomed and a little boring, and partly because you could replace "the body" with almost any metric. there are writers who always know what season it is (Alice Hoffman, Erin Morgenstern) and writers who literally do not care; writers who are aware at all times what clothes each character is wearing and what those clothes convey about social class and personality (V.E. Schwab), and writers who, like me, manifest those clothes only when somebody needs to put something in a pocket.

but the body is a political site in a way that seasons and pockets are not. i think all the time about the introduction to emily wilson's new translation of the odyssey, and penelope's hands. homer apparently described them with an adjective that meant thick or muscular; all the english translators since have skipped or altered the word, because a woman's hands are not supposed to be either of those things. emily wilson's translation reads: "her muscular, firm hand/ picked up the ivory handle of the key." it stuns me, the freight of culture and history and politics that rests on a woman’s hand: whose labor is valued, who is shaped to consume and who is shaped for consumption, who is strong and who is weak and whose strength is desirable.

and here in the real world of 2022 that the existence of the body is more and more heavily litigated. there's a sense--on both ends of the political spectrum, frankly! i see you, you damned turncoat puritanical leftists!!--that the body is an unsightly and indecorous subject, which ought to be wrapped in caution tape and shelved in a special R-rated section of the store. and if the body is non-normative in any way--perhaps it shouldn't be available for the public at all. for the sake of the children. (anyone who frames their policy "for the sake of the children" is without exception not thinking of the children).

i don't think there's much of the body in my writing--i would land somewhere in the murky middle of the venn diagram--but i'm always desperately, deeply aware of it when i write. i know where everyone's hands are and how their lungs feel inside their ribs and how horny they are. i just...shy away from it. i find it hard to let all those messy sensory realities into over-managed, carefully-pruned wes-anderson-ass dollhouse of my own writing. i think i'm just chicken, really.

but i've been dabbling in bravery, lately. the short story coming out next month is sort of a tiny piece of an idea i've been messing with for a while, a plot where the single consistent throughline is the connection between two people. they've forgotten it, over and over, but they remember it somewhere cellular and physical--somewhere in the body.

i wasn’t sure how well i succeeded, until i saw the cover they chose: shining armor; a dashing, modern font; and a woman’s hand.

further reading

• the rest of that collection, which comes out on nov. 15 and is free for prime members, is quite outrageous. i’ve already read two of the other stories and am frankly considering changing my name and fleeing into the mountains at the thought of my words being in such disastrous proximity to tamsyn muir, nghi vo, garth nix, veronica henry, and lev grossman’s words.

• i just finished emma törzs’s debut, ink blood sister scribe, and adored it. it has all the whimsy and warmth of the night circus or h.g. parry’s the magician’s daughter, but with this marvelously dark (body horrror!) edge. there is a magical library, but there is also an eye in a jar.

• hey, you should check out that new star wars show, Andor!! (did i pull that off? did it sound chill and normal, rather than fervently obsessed?? i think it’s my favorite star wars content that has ever existed. i want to read 300k words of fanfiction and watch twelve more seasons)