I will sign it and personalize it, if you choose that path.
I will also assign to you your very own, unique-to-you, demonic progenitor, an ancestor from the time of chaos whose infernal blood now fills your own! (This may be inked in the book or on a separate postcard, depending. If so, the postcard will be cool. I promise. And I’ll sign the postcard, too, if that’s the case.)
And you’ll get a very cool, very freaky sticker of one of the demons from within the text, drawn by the inimitable Natalie Metzger, who did the stickers for Staircase, and who also did all the art for our book, You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton.
Oh! And this will also be sent directly to you! Er, unless you’re a local who wants to pick it up at the bookstore.
Let’s see. Are there other little tidbits to talk about, regarding this book?
Probably!
Will there be a tour?
Yup. Happening launch week and the week after it — I’m not at liberty to tell you for sure where that tour is going yet, but the theoretical tour takes me from PA to NY to OH to Chicago to Milwaukee. And there might also be a third little wing of the tour later on, in October, as I make my way to CanCon in Ottawa — but more on that as I have it nailed down.
Is there a UK edition?
There is! Releasing the same date. Did I ever show you the cover?
I love that cover. I love the US cover. I love both because they each take a very different approach, while still totally giving the proper vibe.
Yup. Released same day. They’re working on narrator lists as we speak — when I know more, you’ll know more.
Why should I pre-order?
Pre-ordering books does feel weird, I get that, especially when the book is not one that will have a tectonic, ground-shaking release because it’s the not the next in the series of The Heartbroken Dragon Riders Of Shadow’s Wing Of Night series, yeah?
But pre-ordering is good for everybody!
a) it’s good for the bookstore, because that’s a sale, and they need those to live
b) it’s good for the publisher, which may not be your primary concern, nor should it be, but that leads to
c) it’s good for the author because it sends the signal to both the bookstore and the publisher that hey you should carry this author and promote their books
d) it’s good for YOU because it makes sure a bookstore has stock, that you’ll get one, and also if you’re like me, you’ll pre-order the book, forget you ever did it, and then magically one day you have a new book, a gift from a time-traveling version of you, high-five, Past You
So, please do pre-order the book! If not from my local, then from your own!
SO KIND OF YOU TO ASK, RHETORICAL PERSON I MADE UP.
Listen — just tell folks. Spreading the word about this is the biggest and best and coolest thing to do. (Aside from just mailing me bags of money.) Spreading the word… well, gets the word out, generates buzz, and helps a lot. So! Please share this. Scream it so the heavens and hells can hear.
And soon, if the world doesn’t end, you’ll get to meet the fiends…
If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it’s that getting married is a bad idea. But if she’s learning anything from her widowed mother’s dementia, it’s that dying alone is worse. So when she meets Luke — the man of her mother’s dreams — marriage suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy.
But none of Ophelia’s obsessive scrolling on wedding forums can prepare her for the nightmare of planning her own. Why is her mother-in-law going crazy over every detail? Why is Luke’s family so eager to host the wedding in their vineyard’s ancient chapel? And what exactly will Ophelia have to sacrifice if she and her mother both hope to survive her special day?
Shot through with wicked humor, pitch-black horror, and unexpected romance, Until Death is a deliciously dark and funny send-up of the wedding industrial complex—and a mother-daughter story unlike any you’ve read before.
1. When it comes to wedding planning, your spreadsheets will not save you.
Fun fact: I had not yet planned a wedding when I wrote this book. I wasn’t even engaged. So, for research, I relied heavily on that bastion of first-person accounts, Wedding Reddit.
Before Wedding Reddit, I would have assumed that the worst parts of wedding planning were the organization and the expense. Most people are not simply born with high-level, large-scale event-planning skills, which is, you know, a whole career that requires experience and training. Still, I would have guessed that with budgeting and organization — a spreadsheet, maybe a three-ring binder or two — you could circumvent that problem and come out relatively unscathed.
Nay, nay. As I discovered through hundreds of firsthand accounts — and as my protagonist, Ophelia, discovers, through myriad run-ins with her terrible in-laws — the horrific parts of wedding planning aren’t the parts that can be solved with a spreadsheet. Hell Is Other People.
2. The symptoms of dementia stretch far beyond memory loss.
My protagonist’s mother has dementia, and my protagonist becomes her full-time caretaker. (This is still a fun book, I promise!) My own mother does not have dementia — we joke that she’s not going to get it, because she’s going to have to remember everything — but when I was a teenager, I witnessed close-up what it meant for her to care for her own mother through the illness. For a long time, I didn’t even realize it was an illness. I thought that dementia and aging were synonymous. I didn’t realize there was a way to get old without losing your body and your mind.
Because I was so young, and because I didn’t really know what I was looking at, and because I didn’t provide the bulk of my grandmother’s care, I thought the dementia was the same as the forgetting. I didn’t recognize all the other symptoms: wandering (oh, so that’s why Nanny tried to walk to her sister-in-law’s house at two o’clock in the morning!), aggression (there is an excellent memoir, Slow Dancing with a Stranger by Meryl Comer, that talks about this), agitation, sundowning, mood shifts. It’s all really quite devastating. Considering how many of us, God willing, grow old and need to either provide or accept some type of dementia care, I’m shocked that as a society, we don’t have better care systems in place.
3. Pennsylvania has some great wine country!
I already knew, to a limited extent, of the existence of Pennsylvania’s wine country. This is thanks not to my book, but to the spotted lanternfly.
The spotted lanternfly is an insect indigenous to China and Vietnam. I assume it’s harmless over there, but here, it’s very invasive. If you live on what I think of as the “Amtrak Northeast Corridor” section of the continental United States, you will know all about the pernicious threat of the spotted lanternfly. And, a few years ago, when we finally managed, for once in our sorry lives, to march in lockstep as a society to stamp those buggers out, part of the messaging was that we had to kill the spotted lanternflies because otherwise they would threaten Pennsylvania wine country… which implied the existence of Pennsylvania wine country.
So I knew we had it, technically. But I didn’t know it was so nice! I spent a long time researching Lancaster wineries for this book, and by my count, there are at least seven wineries within or around Lancaster County, an area otherwise mostly famed for its Amish quilts and Dutch Wonderland. Not to advertise, but they also have some cute hotels.
4. There are a lot of patron saints for women in terrible relationships.
This book is very Catholic.
I grew up Catholic myself, and I knew that if I was going to do a good job on a book about a wedding, the wedding in question would be a Catholic one. So the vineyard at which the wedding takes place has its own haunted Catholic chapel.
Originally, I also had a whole bit where the Stations of the Cross (IYKYK) had been replaced by hand-carved panels of a series of female saints. Those panels are no longer in the book. But I learned about the saints nonetheless. Saint Godelieve, patron saint of those with abusive in-laws! Saint Helena, patron saint of abandoned wives! Saint Wilgefortis, patron saint of women who wish to be liberated from their terrible husbands! All of them died in progressively more excruciating ways, but they live in on Catholic art, and in the third draft of my novel, which will not see the light of day.
5. Your family will still love you.
This is a novel about a woman with some similar biographical details to mine, who is having a very, very difficult time with her mother.
To be clear, my real-life mother is lovely and supportive. At the time of this writing, she has made plans to drive all up and down the Eastern Seaboard to kvell over me while I talk to crowds about the terrible mother in my book. But three years ago, when I sat down to write this novel, I really thought she would read it and stop speaking to me. In the middle of drafting the first chapter, I fumbled around for a realistic detail, and I landed on my real-life mother’s real-life injured knee. And a sort of gentle background dread rose up within me. I thought, Oh, shit. This is going to be the one that makes it.
That dread expanded and solidified as I injected more details into this frankly bombastic book about an evil vineyard and a shitty fiancé. My mother’s jewelry. My father’s secular Jewish heritage. My partner’s haircut. My mother’s nickname for me. My father’s wire-rimmed glasses. My partner’s very specific career.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a better way to make the made-up stuff feel real than to hang it on real details. I think of myself kind of like a magician sawing a woman in half: the woman is real, the box is real, but obviously no one’s been cut in half.
But I could see how somebody could be confused.
So I was terrified that my mother — or, if not her, then somebody; my father, my partner, some random cousin, somebody — would read this book and think I had slandered my whole family in a public forum. That by writing and publishing this novel, I would destroy the relationships that meant the most to me.
Obviously that has not happened. I made that fear up. And what’s more, I’ve expressed this fear to other writers; and it turns out to be a very common fear, and almost — not quite all, but almost — all of us just made it up. It wasn’t true.
The people who love us love us. Love is not conditional. And actually, now that I’m looking back — I think that’s a lesson Ophelia learns, too.
Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside, and elsewhere. Until Death is her debut novel.
Loa was not just a good dog, but rather, the best dog. And I know that all dogs are good dogs, and all dogs are the best dogs; that’s just how dogs are. But the reality is, when I say it, I need you to understand I really mean it. Every dog is the best dog but Loa really was the best dog.
We got her when my son was very young. She was, of course, a shelter dog, because shelter dogs are the greatest dogs; we saw a bunch of dogs that day, including an excitable cannonball of a pitbull puppy that (in wanting to play) knocked our son back horizontally like, five feet, as if he were a henchman getting blown away as collateral shotgun damage in an Arnold Schwartzenegger movie. So that dog was not going to be our dog. But that day they said, “You’re also scheduled to see Peaches,” and we did not know who or what a Peaches was.
Peaches was this little red dog — a puppy, really, maybe nine months old, and she trotted out and diligently followed behind our wandering child, keeping a protective distance but staying close enough to follow. She’d follow, then sit. Follow, then sit. Super cool, super chill. I drove her home, and all the while she kept trying to leave her seat and ride with me as I drove. Which wasn’t easy, but I managed. She helped drive me home that day. Always wanting to be with her people.
I’d argue that wanting to be with her people was her fundamental trait — the thing that drove her, always. Even now, up to the end, even with cancer hanging heavy on her poor muzzle, even when she couldn’t really see anymore or hear anymore, she knew where we were and would come to the room we were in. She would panic a little if we were out of sight — so we spent a lot of extra time being there, being present, and reassuring her with pets, touches, and extra snacks.
We named her Loa. We’d been to Hawaii a couple times and knew that Loa meant something between long and a lot, and she was both of those things — here she was, this long, gangly dog when she sprawled out, and a whole lot of dog. Not in a needy, too-much-to-handle way. She just had a lot of love to give and we had the love to give back. So: Loa.
She was always so good with our son. She was our dog, but also, his dog — they are, or were, the same age, after all. Loa was our first true family dog — we’d had dogs before, obviously. I brought a dog to our relationship, a gloriously hairy black Belgian sheepdog named Yaga. And my wife and I got a taco terrier, Tai, to join Yaga, and those two were fast friends. But Loa was the first for the whole family.
Tai, the chihuahua-fox-terrier, had found her one true best-friend-forever in Yaga. They were fast buddies, and she was like his little co-pilot. When he passed, something went away in her, too, and she did not want to be bonded to anyone or anything new. She tolerated our child, but really didn’t like Loa at all. This, despite Loa loving Tai oh so very much. Loa just wanted to hang with her new little friend. Tai just wanted to plot a complicated murder. (Chihuahuas gonna chihuahua.)
(For reference, see if you can spot the aforementioned murder-plotter.)
So when Tai passed, it seemed time to get Loa a new friend. And, as it turned out, a sister — in spirit, if not literally. Enter: Snoobug.
We got Snoobug at the same shelter. And again we saw a number of dogs that day and had Loa with us to take the temperature — and she had a blast with all the dogs because that was Loa. Loa got along with everybody. She had infinite love to give. Any of the dogs could’ve been a match for her, really.
But when we got in the room with Snoobug, the two sniffed each other, gave some licks, and then both just laid down together. Like they’d always known each other. So Snoobug came home with us, and they were bonded after that. They went out together, slept in the same bed together, ate together. It’s why we call them sisters — it’s like they grew up in the same litter.
(That photo of the two of them above is, of all the dog photos I’ve taken, the one I love the most. Sometimes a photo really captures a spirit and sometimes it doesn’t, but that one does so well it feels almost supernatural to me. I note too in that photo that Loa was definitely the dominant dog in the pairing, but played like she wasn’t. She was a gentle beast.)
I’m sobbing like a fool as I write this. Funny I guess how we sometimes cry more over our pets than we do some people. Maybe that’s not strange. Our pets are with us so much, so often, and they’re these like… little perfect pure beings. They don’t mean us any harm. They’re an unalloyed good. They want to love and be loved. And be fed. Hot dogs, ideally.
Loa’s eaten a lot of hot dogs in the last couple weeks. Like, an unreasonable amount. They weren’t something she was supposed to eat because of — well, I’ll get to that in a minute. But when you’re terminal with cancer, you get all the hot dogs you goddamn jolly well want. Hot dogs and turkey breast lunchmeat and even today she shared a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with me. It’s one of the things I’m glad about — she was still eating, drinking, sleeping well. And I know that wouldn’t last forever.
Loa almost died once before, big-time. She’d had bladder stones — and as it turns out, was prone to making them, a mobile canine bladder stone factory. She also loved to get on her back and have you rub her tummy, and our vet posited that this position was also perfectly optimal for working bladder stones into bad positions.
So we gave her meds and food to break them up, but one got lodged in her urethra and, stoic dog as she was, she failed to let us know this until one day we found her standing in the kitchen, shaking violently and going to the bathroom on herself. Which she didn’t do! She never, ever, ever went to the bathroom in the house. (Not even now, with all her systems shutting down — she dutifully made her way outside.)
So that day, we rushed her to the vet and she stayed there, in emergency care, for a week. But she pulled through. She had cancer, too, later on, but our groomer — thank your groomer! — caught it and we got it removed before it could do worse damage.
Though in the end, a new cancer, or maybe that cancer, still caught up to her. I guess that’s how it always goes with cancer. Still, fuck cancer. Dogs should be immune to it. Cancer shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near them.
Dogs are proof we live in a good and loving universe.
Dogs getting cancer is the proof that we don’t.
I hate this. I don’t want her to go. To be gone. It’s enough to make you never want to get another dog again. We will, of course. George Carlin was right — life is just a series of dogs. But the pain of this is so hard, so deep. This one fucking hurt, man. I feel like I’m dying inside. And yet it’s what we owe them at the end. It’s part of the price at the start. You make that deal the first day you take them into your house. Whatever it costs you then, it’ll cost you this at the end, and pay this price because it’s a mercy they can’t do for themselves — and ironically, often enough a mercy we can’t do for ourselves for each other, either, as people. But for them we can do it. And we have to do it. Even though it feels like the worst thing it is the best, most necessary thing. They give us so much. So this is the thing we owe.
She was ready to go. We weren’t ready for her to go. We would’ve kept her here forever if we could’ve. What a great dog.
Here’s why she was a great dog. The best dog.
She was calm. She was loyal. She was sweet. She was a complete goofusy doofus. She was fun. She was easy. She was a good guard dog. She was great on a leash and great off one, too. And she was smart, holy crap. Took almost no training and yet she never went in the house, knew how to knock at the door (or ring sleigh bells we put there) when she wanted to go out or come back in, she knew that if you said widdle paws at her she’d get down on her side and bring her two little paw-hands up to her muzzle and simulate petting, and that meant she was going to get petted so good, until you stopped, which meant she’d do it again, and you’d pet her, and she’d literally do this forever if you let her.
The cancer stole her in small pieces, though she didn’t suffer long with it. We had options to diagnose and treat, but none of them were really real — she was fourteen years old and any treatment would’ve been both costly in money but also costly to her, in pain. Her quality of life would’ve cratered and all just so we could’ve maybe, maybe had her around for a few months.
It was really only in the last two weeks that you could see the pieces of her going away — her eyesight, her hearing, her ability to smell stuff. The way the cancer in her mouth grew bigger. She’d sometimes appear lost in the room she was in. A kind of walking ghost phase. I tell myself now and told myself then that putting her to rest is literally that: letting her rest. The dog she is and was, well, went away. We were just giving her the peace she needed.
But god that fucking sucks. All the high-minded talk of what we owe them and the peace they need, it still fucking sucks that they get to come into our lives like this and be such perfect companions and friends and furry family members and then the universe gets to take them away again long, long before we are ready. It’s fucking stupid and it’s not fair, and cancer fucking sucks, and fuck all of this.
Okay, sure, she had a few less desirable traits. Did she eat poop in the yard? Sure. Who doesn’t? Would she, while on a walk or in the yard, be able to take a split-second’s worth of time to dart her head into the brush and come back with a baby rabbit or groundhog? Fine, guilty — she loved all creatures but preferred loving baby woodland critters with her teeth. (And seriously, she did this very very fast.) Did she, just the other day, in the throes of this cancer, somehow poop on a garter snake? Fact check: true. She pooped on a snake. I don’t know that this gets you any points over the rainbow bridge in the doggy heaven side of things, but she did it, and the snake was fine, if absolutely perturbed by it. Honestly, if you ask me, it was the snake’s fault. Loa was perfect. Shut up, snake. Get pooped on.
We don’t know what kind of dog she was, by the way. We never did any genetic testing. I always assumed she was somewhere in the middle of a hound slash retriever slash Rhodesian ridgeback DNA party. We just said she was a “red dog,” because she was a sweet red dog. Like Clifford if he was just a regular-size dog and not a gargantuan mutant.
I don’t really know how Snoobug is going to handle this. They were sisters, really, through and through.
But also, Snoobug is an absolute dipshit. And please understand I say that with full love in my heart. She’s the sweetest dipshit. But Loa had the brains. All the brains. Snoobug is like a dice cup — her brain is a random encounter chart in D&D. You shake it up and some days she doesn’t know how stairs work, or what side of a door to be on when it opens. She will literally change her habits every few months. So I don’t know what this will do to her. I hope, I guess, her brain just kind of forges ahead. Blissful ignorance. I know her heart won’t forget but her brain is definitely moth-eaten underwear and maybe that’s a nice protective way to be for yourself. We should all be so lucky.
I could talk about my dog all day and if you never met her I feel like that’s sad for you but maybe reading this you know her a teeny-tiny bit better. I can’t stand that she’s gone and I will miss her forever. She was the best dog we ever had — and no shade to out other dogs, they were the best too in their ways — and we’ll never see the like of her again.
We drove her home 14 years ago, and we drove her home again today.
I miss her.
I can’t stop crying at missing her.
I hate this, this fucking sucks.
Loa died today under an old, tall crabapple tree on a blanket set amidst a carpet of blooming violets. She was surrounded by her people. She is at rest.
She was a beautiful dog, so I feel it essential to show you with more photos.
And this is the last photo I took of her, from a good moment today:
The clock ticks! The calendar pages fly off the wall. The sun rises and sets and rises again. Winter is coming! And the wheel turns.
Which is to say, I’m uncmaxxing in my agemogging era, bruh, ngl.
Which is to more to say, oh shit, I’m 50 years old.
As it is my birthday, I feel it necessary to say, no, no, you don’t need to get me anything — but if you insist, then I note a donation to Authors Against Book Bans or Girls Write Now would not be remiss, and then if you further insist that you want to do something for me, I politely note that the thing you can do for me is a thing you also do for yourself, which is buying my books, or even (gasp) preordering my next book, The Calamities, from my local bookseller or yours. No requirement! But hey, pre-ordering is cool because if you’re like me you’re gonna forget you did it and then the book is one day going to ambush you, except it’s an ambush of bookish joy instead of like, a guy jumping out of the shrubbery with a sock full of 9-volt batteries.
In a general sense, I’m trying very hard to be sanguine about the five decades I have been allowed to exist on this planet. They were a little rough early on but I settled into a pretty good thing, and it’s hard for me to be mad at where I’m at and what I’ve done. Great family, a successful and persisting career doing what I love, a house, a freezer full of ice cream which will probably be the reason I die early because fucking hell, ice cream is really good you guys. And it’s not just where I’ve been or what I’ve done, I also have… more to do, which is also good! I have plans! Plans within plans! Sharks with lasers on their heads, all that. And fine, probably some more books or whatever.
At the same time, you know, my own father died when he was 63 — prostate cancer got him when he took a carefree gap year off his health insurance (this was pre-ACA, and it’s why I believe the ACA would’ve saved his life). So, by that metric, it gives me thirteen more years before I go.
Now, I recognize it doesn’t work like that. I certainly intend to beat his number and keep on kicking well past that point. But he died fairly young and my son never even met him. I didn’t meet my grandfather — either of them, actually — because they both died young. So, yeah, mortality is on my mind there just a little bit.
And the body is keen to remind. I am definitely in my “I hurt myself by sleeping” epoch, now. Things ache. Randomly! They just ache. I have learned the phrase “achilles tendonitis,” a problem I obtained by mostly beating plantar fasciitis, another phrase I had to learn. I beat the one thing and caused the other, I guess? Who knows. Also I think I have arthritis? I might have carpal tunnel? My ear rings all the time? (To be fair, it has been ringing for decades, so that’s not an old guy thing, it’s a “my ear is broken” thing.) I find myself on the lawn, waving my cane at planes, yelling about chemtrails? Okay, maybe not that last part. Yet.
It’s not all bad. I’m still running — not metaphorically, I mean, I literally run (aka jog, aka gallumph sweatily) and last year I really upped my game a good deal. In years previously I ran a 5k every month — last year I was doing one most weeks. So in a lot of ways I’m healthier now than I’ve ever been. It’s just, I can feel the machine breaking down, you know? It’s like a washer or dryer kind of juddering across the floor — it still works! Still gets the clothes clean! But it makes noises now. It’s doing stuff you didn’t tell it to.
I know my doctor is gonna wanna put me on a buncha meds soon — for high blood pressure (which is only high when I go to the doctor’s, weirdly), high cholesterol (my family has had high cholesterol genetically, as we’re pasty Eastern European types, but none of them had heart issues), maybe a GLP, I dunno. Hey, whatever, fuck it, at this point, get me on that statins-beta-blockers-cocktail. I have an upstairs and a downstairs bottle of Advil, so I’ll just take it when I take those.
See, even now I’m doing what old people do — we talk about boring health shit. My wife and I went out to eat about a year ago and they seated us next to a table of The Olds, and their entire two-hour conversation was about serious medical procedures described in graphic detail. Am I that, now? Shit. Shit!
Whatever. It’s fine. I’m gonna keep writing books till my fingers fall off and then I’ll write them with my hand-stumps until they stiffen to a chitinous lump and then I’ll just yell my books into a little mini tape recorder and mail them to you all individually. Gonna keep traveling. Gonna keep eating ice cream with the secret hope it’s actually really good for you and Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You To Know This One Trick Of Eating Ice Cream. Gonna keep living and loving till the living and stops and my loving turns to undead rage, whereupon I will stagger upon the earth, my fierce hunger for human flesh driving me ineluctably forward.
For now, I’m writing the sequel to The Calamities, called Chaos Reigns. I just turned in copy-edits on my next middle grade, The Boy Who Dreamed Of Doors. Then I’m out of contract once again and given that a writing career is a series of cliffs you gotta jump over like Evel Knieval, I best get to building the next ramp before I crash against the rocks in fire and blood. I’m also working on a The Staircase in the Woods film script because, fuck it, why not? There’s maybe some interest in me doing it, so away we go.
We’ll see how it goes.
So, I guess here’s to 50? Onward and upward and all that. One day closer to death. Yadda yadda yadda.
Have you ever wanted to eat stinky tofu while binge watching reruns of the Bionic Woman? Or fall in love with a boy named Pajamas?Have you ever thought there was an alien in your stomach trying to kill you?
Coming out is hard when you have two gay moms. At least it is for Simon Bugg. It’s his senior year, and nothing’s going as planned. When his mom scores a dream job, Simon’s world is turned upside down. Stuck at a new school in a strange town, he spirals, torn between the only friends he’s ever known and a growing circle of freaks and geeks who welcome him in.
Things start to look up for Simon when he meets the handsome PJ in drama class. That is, until he derails their first date in spectacular fashion. With a little help from his friends, Simon finds his way back to PJ. But how can he have a relationship with the boy of his dreams when he’s convinced he’s going to die?
No one knows about the nightly alien attacks at 11:22. Why then, and why are they getting worse? Simon must face a dark secret before he loses his chance with the boy he loves.
1: Stinky tofu is pretty damn tasty…in fact, it’s delicious!
Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in books. So, when I set out to write Somewhere in Nowhere, I made diversity a priority. I wanted my cast of characters to be as colorful and vibrant as the friends I had growing up in Montgomery County, Maryland. This approach opened doors to new experiences as I did research for my characters.
When I first learned about stinky tofu, I was obsessed.
This can’t really be a thing, can it?
Turns out it is.
Okay, but people don’t really eat this, do they?
Yep. They do!
And how bad does it really smell?
Pretty bad!
I had to know more. I investigated its history and the intense fermentation process it goes through to become the odorous, night-market delicacy beloved across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. But one thing was missing. I had to try stinky tofu for myself.
It wasn’t easy, but when I found a restaurant with stinky tofu on its menu (East Dumpling House in Rockville, MD if you’re asking), it was steps away from where my protagonist and his merry band of misfit friends go to high school. A stinky match made in heaven.
For the big, taste-testing night, my spouse and I took friends to East Dumpling House. I don’t want to give too much away, because I put it all in the novel, but I’ll tell you my spouse sort of liked it, but it was a gag-worthy moment for our friends. What about me, you’re wondering? I loved it! Every stinking bite. The fun part for all of us, though, was experiencing a new culture and trying foods out of our comfort zone.
I’ve since learned about hairy tofu. Who’s up for the challenge?
2: Sorry, Ripley. The only alien in my stomach is a-n-x-i-e-t-y.
At the risk of sounding clichéd: it’s okay to not be okay. This is a lesson I’ve had to learn more than once in my life, and it was never more poignant than when I was writing Somewhere in Nowhere. I was in the throes of crippling anxiety and panic attacks. I would be up all night. Then, in the morning, I would lay my experiences bare on the page. What Simon was feeling and going through was what I was feeling and going through.
I needed to take my own advice, and I wanted to share this message with readers who may be going through their own mental health struggles. (Spoiler alert: the alien isn’t real.) Simon’s challenge is my challenge. And it may be yours, too. Though his story is fiction, the anxiety and panic Simon experiences is very much my story and my truth. And writing this novel was way cheaper (and did more to help me) than all my years of therapy.
3: Are you there, Hector? It’s me, Simon, and I can’t breathe.
When I set out to write my debut novel, I knew it had to be three things:
a classic LGBTQ+ coming-of-age story
about a boy dealing with mental health challenges
written in the vein of Judy Blume (my favorite childhood author!)
Judy Blume’s books were everything to me as a kid. They were the ones that kept me reading. I learned about the world from her—things my parents didn’t tell me. She also helped me feel not so alone, and she inspires the books I write today. YA that deals with tough, real-life issues. I think this was where the seed was planted for my dark-meets-light writing style. I want my readers to feel all the feels. To laugh, and to cry. That’s real life, after all.
4:How a 20-sided die made me a better storyteller.
The idea for becoming an author came about at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. As I passed The Writer’s Center booth, someone asked if I was a writer. When I said no, they probed further, asking what I did for a living. When I replied, “singer-songwriter,” they said: You’re a writer. It’s in your title. It was a light bulb moment for me.
I thought about that conversation a lot over the next year andwhen the pandemic wiped out my work as a performing songwriter, I decided it was time to sit down to write that novel. But I still wasn’t sure I could do it. After all, I drew cartoons and daydreamed during school. I got Cs and Ds in English class. I loved books my whole life, and escaped into them, but never thought about myself as an author. And I certainly didn’t know how to write a book. Or so I thought.
Then it hit me, I’ve been telling stories for most of my life. Most recently, it’s been through four-minute folk songs, but before that, it was as Dungeon Master for countless Cheeto-dusted D&D games. As a kid, I never wanted to be a playing character, I wanted to create the world and tell the story of the game. This is where I learned about pacing, foreshadowing, and planting clues. Turns out, I’d been preparing for novel writing my whole life. Let’s go!
5: My Jewish family guilt has nothing on your Taiwanese family guilt.
“I swear to God, Mags, you have the nagging skills of a middle-aged Jewish mother.”
“Fine! Make fun of the weird girl! Who just happens to be worried about you! Also, you should know better than to bring up this old feud. You know very well that your Jewish family guilt has nothing on my Taiwanese family guilt. My mother’s guilt, and her mother before her, and her mother before her, and so on and so on, is steeped in a long lineage. It’s basically science. How many times are we going to have this argument?”
I mentioned earlier, representation matters. And own voices in literature are important. That’s why it was clear to me that Simon needed to be gay and Jewish. These are things I know and can write about from an honest place. A place of lived experience. That doesn’t mean Simon and I are the same person, we’re not. But we share a common denominator in lifestyle and experiences. These identities have not always been easy in my life. I had my own struggles coming out as a teenager, and I have never been a religious person. But I discovered in writing this novel that we tend to fall back on our traditions when times get tough. I realized there’s comfort and lessons to learn in accepting these truths about ourselves and our community.
Bonus Thing: Bread and water can so easily be toast and tea.
Sure, you might open a mostly empty refrigerator and see nothing to drink and only stale bread to eat. Or you could brew a cup of delicious tea and make that stale bread all hot and toasty. Mmmm.
Sure, you might lose your work and not know how to pay your bills. But you were also given a gift of time. How will you use it?
Sure, you haven’t slept all night because your anxious mind was trying to kill you. But you can pour this trauma into your art and write about it from an honest place.
So, to sum it all up, the main thing I learned was: put the kettle on, toast the bread, and write your truth.
Steven Gellman is an award-winning songwriter turned author. Inspired by his early love for Judy Blume’s groundbreaking stories, Steven has found his passion for writing coming-of-age fiction that centers LGBTQ+ voices and the real-life challenges of navigating adolescence in an ever-changing world. He has long championed authentic queer storytelling — first through song, now through fiction.
When he’s not writing, Steven can be found sipping a cup of Dark Rose tea and plotting new adventures for his book club, Tea & Peril. Steven lives in Maryland’s Piedmont region with his husband and a houseful of rescued companion animals. Somewhere in Nowhere is his first novel.
Stan Kaminski, a down-on-his-luck Polish immigrant, tries to scratch out an existence in 1990s New York City while avoiding the colorful, nefarious characters he encounters at every turn.
When Stan is asked by one of Manhattan’s wealthiest landlords to find a lost woman, he refuses at first. But money lures him in. As Stan searches for the brilliant but troubled Charmaine, he becomes ensnared in a waking nightmare full of mystery, multiple murders and the sword of a serial killer.
“The Skinny” is about the conflicts that come with change as one New York vanishes and another appears to take its place. It explores the constant struggle between the rich and the poor, how the addicted mind battles itself for answers, the way one mystery is solved only to open the door to another, and what hope actually means.
The evils of Gilles de Rais make their way into the plot of “The Skinny.”
Some years ago I co-authored a book with Dr. Helen Morrison called “My Life Among The Serial Killers.” Dr. Morrison is kind of like the real life Clarice from “Silence of the Lambs,” except she is a doctor and a lawyer. During that book, we wrote psychological profiles of serial killers from the past.
The story of Gilles de Rais, who fought alongside Joan of Arc, had a lasting effect on me. For research, I read a translation of his trial by the Catholic Church. It was tough going, shocking, and because his violence was against children, his misdeeds kept me up at night. Even during the day when I read what de Rais had done, I had to take a break to go to Bar 6 around the corner from my apartment at the time.
He used a short, sharp sword called a braquemard. That antique sword is important to the story I tell in “The Skinny.” There’s a twist regarding the blade that I hope you don’t see coming. I think that’s why Christopher Byrd, who writes for The New Yorker, said “The Skinny is a book about flawed, vulnerable people that is by turns open-hearted and wised-up. Its twists are unexpected, its ending lands just right.”
New York City is full of dead bodies, everywhere.
I’m certainly not the first to say that New York City is a dark character in my book. Stan Kaminski, my flawed sleuth, feels the grit and grossness of 1990s New York with every step he takes. He hates the smell of Macanudo cigars, big with the newly rich at that time in history. He worries that a rat might bite him if he falls asleep on the street while waiting to find Charmaine Kasimierz, a troubled but super-smart young woman who finds late winter in the city too much to take.
In my research, I found New York City to be full of dead bodies. Depending upon whom you ask, there are 10,000 to 20,000 bodies buried under Washington Square Park, and a violent scene in “The Skinny” occurs there, within the fabled Washington Square Park arch. In the 1800s, Corlears Hook Park along the East River was rife with malaria, violence and murder. Even recently, a car plowing through the park on July 4th killed four people. In “The Skinny,” Stan feels like he’ll be murdered in the park, and he has reason to think that way. And a scene in a small Irish cemetery in Queens leads Stan to think about his life in Krakow, and how he once slept on the one of the graves in a Jewish cemetery because he felt he had nowhere else to go, and maybe nothing to live for.
New York City, often beautiful and magnificent in the sunlight, is called the greatest city in the world. But at night, or even on a windswept, rainy afternoon, everything and everyone in New York can feel foreboding, from the rustling of a bird in a bush to footsteps trailing behind you, even if they’re a few steps away.
How video games were an inspiration, like Sam Lake’s Alan Wake series.
Video games can inspire the plots for books. During the day, I write reviews and features about games as a columnist for the New York Times. So the idea of immersion I felt in the better game narratives crept into my story. The dark nature of New York City is partially inspired by Sam Lake’s frightening Alan Wake horror series. While “The Skinny” is not a horror story per se, it has that Sam Lake vibe. Lake himself is inspired by everything David Lynch, so much so that many photos show him drinking coffee, like FBI Agent Dale Cooper in “Twin Peaks.”
From the first paragraph in “The Skinny” onward, I hope readers will feel that Sam Lake/David Lynch vibe. In fact, many of my Instagram posts feature music by Angelo Badalamenti. It’s the right music.
There’s a nod to Grant Theft Auto as well. Later in the book, there’s a frantic car chase that begins across the river from Manhattan in Jersey City. It’s fraught and it’s frantic, and it’s inspired by the minds at Rockstar Games.
I was influenced, too, by L.A. Noire, another game published by Rockstar. When that game was released in 2011, it felt like you were deep in a sometimes grimy, always sunny Los Angeles where everyone seems on the take, from bad cops to horrible politicians.
Another inspiration was Walter Mosley’s vivid “Devil in a Blue Dress” novel, in which every character, even those who exist only on one page, were wonderfully rendered. I mention that here because I hope that memorable piece of print fiction is turned into a game at some point in the future.
Polish Culture is so deep and compelling.
As Stan Kaminski moves through downtown New York City’s underbelly, one constant is Polish culture. This Polish immigrant is on a mission to find Charmaine, a young woman who’s dealt with some very bad people. The horrible sight of a school-age child being attacked by a falcon makes Stan think of folktales and myths that were even more violent than the Grimm Brothers could conceive. But generally, Stan sees things through the lens of all things Polish, like pop music from polkas to Bobby Vinton. He uses the words of his mother country for emphasis. He likes New York, but he wishes he could be in Poland.
The East Village was a bastion for Polish (and Ukrainian) immigrants from the mid-20th century onward until the 1990s. It was a tight knit enclave. By the time Stan begins his sketchy work for a rich Polish landlord, Poles (and Puerto Ricans) were being driven out of Manhattan by the high real estate prices that come with gentrification.
Stan salivates over Polish food like pierogi and sausage at his favorite East Village bar on Avenue A, and he has a soft spot for Bertha, the old, baseball bat wielding woman who runs the bar.
Before arriving in 1990’s New York City, Stan worked security for the Polish movement Solidarity, particularly for Polish union leader Lech Walesa. But he has nightmares about something his wife almost unwittingly did that made him leave Poland, shaken and embarrassed. While Stan’s English isn’t the greatest, he knows his culture well from the greatest authors to the dazzling salt mine sculptures in Wieliczka.
I didn’t think it would be, but going small was the way to go.
“The Skinny” is an immigration story and bigotry is a sad, pervasive fact here. It’s told from the perspective of someone for whom English is a second language. I think you’ll find some beauty in the writing and in the characters you meet.
But two of the bigger publishers wanted me to change Stan, the narrator, so that the occasional Polish word wasn’t used. If I did that, the book would be published in a bigger way. That, in itself, felt prejudiced, at least to me. So I put my draft in a drawer. Eventually, Measure Publishing asked if I had done any fiction. They liked “The Skinny” as it was written. But I polished up the draft a few times before it went to press. I had input on everything from the cover to the kind of paper that would be used to the number of books in the first run. The contract was structured so that royalties are much more than the going rate, and they will come sooner rather than later.
This is the beginning of what I hope will be a trilogy. I like Stan Kaminski as a nuanced character, and I feel there can be more books written through his eyes. But the second book will be told from the perspective of Charmaine Kasimierz – because her real story will be even more compelling than the Charmaine which Stan has so carefully observed.
Harold Goldberg has written for the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Boys’ Life and elsewhere. His narrative history of games is “All Your Base Are Belong to Us (How 50 Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture)” Random House, and he co-wrote the bestselling “My Life Among the Serial Killers” (Morrow) with Dr. Helen Morrison. “The Skinny” is his first novel.
