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Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

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Cathy Park Hong's book of essays bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision.

Early in the formidable new essay collection " Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning," the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. "In the popular imagination," she writes, "Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down." Asians, she observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always "frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy." Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes "a comfort," she writes, "to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head."

Hong, who teaches at Rutgers, is the author of three poetry collections, including " Dance Dance Revolution," which was published in 2007, and is set in a surreal fictional waystation called the Desert, where the inhabitants speak a constantly evolving creole. ("Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere," the narrator says.) "Minor Feelings" consists of seven essays; Hong explains the book's title in an essay called "Stand Up" that centers on Richard Pryor's "Live in Concert." Minor feelings are "the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic." One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which "everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape." Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

In "The End of White Innocence," Hong describes her childhood home as "tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches." Her father drank; her mother, she writes, "beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father." Her parents grew up in postwar poverty in Korea-as a child, her father caught sparrows to eat. In order to get a visa to immigrate to the United States, he pretended to be a mechanic, and ended up working for Ryder trucks in Pennsylvania, where he was injured, and fired. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown, then bought a dry-cleaning supply warehouse, and became successful enough to send Hong to private high school and college. He recognized that Americans valued emotional forthrightness in business and developed a particular way of speaking at work. "Thanks for getting those orders in," Hong remembers him saying on the phone. "Oh, and Kirby, I love you."

Hong feels ashamed, but not of her proximity to awkward English, or her features, or witchy domestic stenches. "My shame is not cultural but political," she writes. She is ashamed of the conflicted position of Asian-Americans in the racial and capital hierarchy-the way that subjugation mingles with promise. "If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering," Hong writes. "The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject." She becomes a "dog cone of shame," a "urinal cake of shame." Hong's metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured. It is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.

For a long time, Hong recounts in the book's first essay, she did not want to write about her Asian identity. By the time she began studying for her M.F.A., at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she had concluded that doing so was "juvenile"-and she couldn't find the right form, anyway. The confessional lyric felt too operatic, and realist fiction wasn't right, either: "I didn't care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!" In "Stand Up," she asks, "Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?" The predicament of the Asian-American writer, as Hong articulates it, is to fear that both your existence and your interpretation of that existence will always be read the wrong way. At Iowa, Hong noticed other writers of color stripping out markers of race from their poems and stories to avoid being "branded as identitarians." It was only later that Hong realized that all of the writers she had noticed doing this were Asian-American.

I read "Minor Feelings" in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. I have tended to interpret my own acquiescence to and resentment of capitalism in generational terms rather than racial ones; many people my age seem to accept economic structures that we find humiliating because we reached adulthood when the margins of resistance appeared to be shrinking. I know, too, that my desire to attain financial stability is connected with a hope, bordering on practical obligation, to protect my parents, as they grow older, from the worst of the country that they immigrated to for my benefit. But, for some reason, I haven't written very much about that. Was I, like Hong's grad-school classmates, afraid of being branded as an identitarian? Had I considered the possibility of being positioned as a proxy for an entire ethnic group, and, unlike Hong, turned away?

The term "Asian-American" was invented by student activists in California, in the late sixties, who were inspired by the civil-rights movement and dreamed of activating a coalition of people from immigrant backgrounds who might organize against structural inequality. This is not what happened; for years, Asian-Americans were predominantly conservative, though that began changing, gradually, during the Obama years, then sharply under Trump. Today, "Asian-American" mainly signifies people with East Asian ancestry: most Americans, Hong writes, think " Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues." The term, for many people-and for Hollywood-seems to conjure upper-middle-class images: doctors, bankers. (We are imagined as the human equivalent of stainless-steel countertops: serviceable and interchangeable and blandly high-end.) But, although rich Asians earn more money than any other group of people in America, income inequality is also more extreme among Asians than it is within any other racial category. In New York, Asians are the poorest immigrant group.

Hong describes a visit to a nail salon, where a surly Vietnamese teen-age boy gives her a painful pedicure. She imagines him and herself as "two negative ions repelling each other," united and then divided by their discomfort in their own particular Asian positions. Then she pauses. "What evidence do I have that he hated himself?" she wonders. "I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them," she writes elsewhere. "But I feared the weight of my experiences-as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian-tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail's antenna that's been touched, I retracted the first person plural." Hong doesn't fully retract it-"we" appears fairly often in the book-but she favors the second person, deploying a "you" that really means "I," in the hope that her experience might carry shards of the Asian-American universal.

Throughout the book, Hong at once presumes and doesn't presume to speak for people whose families come from India, say, or Sri Lanka, or Thailand, or Laos-or the Philippines, where my parents were born. The Philippines were under Spanish control from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and under American control until the middle of the twentieth. Many Filipinos have Spanish last names and come to the States speaking English; many have dark skin. In his book " The Latinos of Asia," the sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo argues that Filipinos tend to manifest a sort of ethnic flexibility, feeling more at home, compared with members of other Asian ethnic groups, with whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and other Asians. The experience of translating for one's parents is often framed as definitive for Asian-Americans, but it's not one that many Filipinos of my generation share; my parents came to North America listening to James Taylor and the Allman Brothers, speaking Tagalog only when they didn't want their kids to listen. I grew up in a mixed extended family, with uncles who are black and Mexican and Chinese and white. Ocampo cites a study which found that less than half of Filipino-Americans checked "Asian" on forms that asked for racial background-a significant portion of them checked "Pacific Islander," for no real reason. It denoted proximity to Asian-Americanness, perhaps, without indicating a direct claim to it. (About a month ago, at a doctor's appointment, an East Asian nurse checked "Pacific Islander" when filling out a form for me.)

" Koreans are self-hating," one of Hong's Filipino friends tell her. "Filipinos, not so much." My experience of racism has been different than Hong's, as has my response to it. Much of the discourse around Asian-American identity centers on racist images associated with the stereotypical East Asian face: single-lidded eyes, yellow-toned skin, a supposed air of placid impassivity. I don't have that face, exactly, and I'm not sure that I've confronted quite the same assumptions; when I hear people perform gross imitations of "Chinese" accents, I don't know if it hurts the way it does because I'm an Asian person or because I come from a family of immigrants or simply because racism is embarrassing and foul.

If you escape the dominant experience of Asian-American marginalization, have you necessarily done so by way of avoidance, or denial, or conformity? What can you do when colonization is embedded in your family's history, in your genetic background, in your very face? If I feel comforted in a room full of Asian people rather than alarmed at the possibility that my inner racial anxieties have been cloned all around me, is this another effect of the psychic freedom I've been granted with double eyelids and an ambiguously Western last name, or does it mark progress in the form of a meaningful generational shift? In the decade that separates me from Hong, the currency of whiteness has lost some of its inflated cultural value; one now sees Asian artists and chefs and skateboarders and dirtbags and novelists on the Internet, in the newspaper, and on TV. Is this freedom, or is it the latest form of assimilation? For Asian-Americans, can the two ever be fully distinct?

"Minor Feelings" bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. "Even to declare that I'm writing for myself would still mean I'm writing to a part of me that wants to please white people," she explains. She's circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of " Aiiieeeee!," one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature-it was published in 1974-argued that "euphemized white racist love" had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of "self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration." A quarter century later, in her book " The Melancholy of Race," the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described "the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?" In the introduction to his essay collection " The Souls of Yellow Folk," published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as "unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved."

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways-and "Minor Feelings" serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of "Aiiieeeee!" call the stereotypical Asian-American "contemptible because he is womanly"; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission-of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway-as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, "My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country's gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish."

I hate my Asian self the way I worry about being written off as a woman writer-which is to say, not at all. Hong concedes that the self-hating Asian may be "on its way out" with her generation: for me, the formulation still has weight, but does not capture the efflorescence of the present. The question, then, is whether the movement toward love, as Anne Anlin Cheng put it, can be made outside the grasp of coercion. Is there a future of Asian-American identity that's fundamentally expansive-that can encompass the divergent economic and cultural experiences of Asians in the United States, and form a bridge to the experiences of other marginalized groups?

The answer depends on whom Asian-Americans choose to feel affinity and loyalty toward-whether we direct our sympathies to those with more power than us or less, not just outside our jerry-rigged ethnic coalition but within it. The history of Asian-Americans has involved repression and assimilation; it has also, to a degree that is often forgotten, involved radicalism and invention. "Aiiieeeee!" was published by Howard University Press, partly as a result of the friendship that one of its editors, Frank Chin, formed with the radical black writer Ishmael Reed. Gidra, an Asian-American zine that was published in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, called for the "birth of a new Asian-one who will recognize and deal with injustices." ( Gidra reported on cases of local discrimination and profiled activists such as Yuri Kochiyama; it's now back in print.) To occupy a conflicted position is also to inhabit a continual opportunity-the chance, to borrow Hong's words, to "do better, be better," but in moral and political rather than economic terms.

In one of the essays in "Minor Feelings," called "An Education," Hong looks back on her friendships in college with two other Asian-American girls-brash, unstable hellions named Erin and Helen. They made art together, they traded poetry, they got drunk and fought and made up. "We had the confidence of white men," Hong recalls, "which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our career, underestimated." The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves-and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn't. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn't look white-a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness-and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.

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"Minor Feelings" and the Possibilities of Asian-American Identity

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Jia Tolentino writes about "Minor Feelings," a collection of essays about Asian-American identity, by Cathy Park Hong.

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"Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as 'slipping away' or 'peaceful' has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight."

"What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any time, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children's hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown."

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"Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as 'slipping away' or 'peaceful' has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight."

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Read 4,504 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a l...

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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi: 9781101971062 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Just us

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In her book-length poem " Citizen," from 2014, the writer Claudia Rankine probed some of the nuances and contradictions of being a Black American. Her focus fell on what it means to be erased, projected upon, or politicized, and how the cumulative effect can shatter one's sense of self. Rankine has said that she wanted to "pull the lyric back into its realities," and "Citizen" struck a delicate balance between the world that Rankine dreamed about and the one that she saw. The book's narrator found words for the pain of racism, and little seemed lost in the translation; but there was, too, an aura around that pain, a ripple of reinvention. Rankine wrote poetry that was always slipping toward the next shape, the one that only she could see.

The subtitle of "Citizen" was "An American Lyric." Rankine's new collection, " Just Us," is subtitled "An American Conversation"-the transparent eyeball has acquired ears and a tongue. "Just Us" describes a series of racialized encounters with friends and strangers. Rankine attends a lot of dinner parties (perhaps too many, it must be said) and is repeatedly subjected to white people stepping in it, thanks to a combination of willed oblivion and condescension. At one gathering, Rankine challenges a man about the 2016 election: his theory of Trump's win seems to elide the role of racism. "I was sailing closer and closer to the trope of the angry black woman," Rankine recounts. A female guest interrupts, cooing over a tray of brownies. The redirect is so obvious that Rankine blurts out, "Am I being silenced?"

The technologies of whiteness-silencing, surveilling, policing-are supposed to be frictionless for the user. Rankine exposes and disrupts them, but not for long. In this case, the other guests, like a fleet of Roombas, clear away the awkwardness, and a defeated Rankine pushes food around her plate, absorbing the discomfort back into her body. Her book's title comes from a Richard Pryor quote about the courthouse: "You go down there looking for justice, that's what you find, just us." Those two terms-justice and just us-provide some of the work's animating tensions. In Pryor's skit, "just us" referred specifically to Black people, but Rankine's primary "us" is cross-racial, a seed planted in the dead land between Self and Other. When Rankine wonders how individuals, much less community, can survive in our system, the question is intimately tied to justice-to whether "just us" is possible without the acknowledgment of inequity. At one point, Rankine considers a white friend, whose ancestry dates back to the Mayflower. Rankine loves this friend; love urges her to tend their closeness beyond the reach of history. But that's impossible, Rankine finds. To ignore her friend's "innate advantages," she writes, "is to stop being present inside our relationship."

Rankine's interest in the white part of "us" turns her into an anthropologist. Several sections of the book are given over to masochistic exchanges with white men in airports. ("After a series of casual conversations with my white male travelers, would I come to understand white privilege any differently?") This goes neither well nor cartoonishly badly. One man, upon learning that Rankine teaches at Yale, complains that his son's inability to "play the diversity card" sank his early-admissions chances. Another interlocutor suggests that he doesn't see color, and then characterizes his own comment as "inane." The exchanges, even the positive ones, inspire a nervous excitement, somewhere between dread and hunger. The reader fears for Rankine, although that doesn't quite make sense; she waits for catharsis, which is denied. The book's lack of resolution can feel like a concession to the limits of the white men whom the narrator meets. Even as Rankine stages scenes that touch the third rail of "American conversation," she is only ever speaking indirectly, through questions.

This dynamic can make Rankine's goal-what, in the end, she hopes to get out of these exercises-somewhat blurry. After a white man cuts her in a first-class line, Rankine claims, "What I wanted was to know what the white man saw or didn't see when he walked in front of me at the gate." Elsewhere, she writes, "I felt certain that, as a black woman, there had to be something I didn't understand." If this is an accurate account of Rankine's feelings, it is also a strange one. Rankine teaches a class at Yale called "Constructions of Whiteness." In 2016, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, an "interdisciplinary cultural laboratory" that studies how "perceptions, resources, rights, and lives themselves flow along racial lines that confront some of us with restrictions and give others uninterrogated power." "Just Us" invokes the race scholarship of Édouard Glissant, Whitney Dow, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Orlando Patterson-in the space of two pages. Exactly what does Rankine think the entitled guy in D-14 is going to clarify that she doesn't already know?

Rankine's humble posture may be a response to what her husband, who is white, refers to as "white fragility," invoking Robin DiAngelo's book of the same name. (White fragility refers to white people's tendency to lash out under racial stress; some have criticized the theory for painting a simplistic picture of Black people.) Rankine's thinking seems informed by DiAngelo, who blurbed her book, but "haunted" may be a more apt description. Is it the spectre of hysterical white readers that causes Rankine, who needs no instruction on oppression, to pretend that white fellow-travellers are educating her? The language that results-"I didn't understand" and "I wondered" and "I'm just curious"-is needlessly caressing, and it gives the book a tortured, insincere quality. But Rankine is not so committed to this act that she can't also poke fun at it. Chatting with a white man before a flight, she describes wanting "to learn something that surprised me about this stranger, something I couldn't have known beforehand." "Coming or going?" she asks.

Rankine realizes, then, that conversing with white people isn't likely to yield much new information about whiteness. In fact, this realization feeds into one of her central critiques: that white society is defined by an obstinate refusal to examine itself, and that, as a result, the well of white racial imagination has run dry. Yet, once you understand this about the book, a sort of spell takes hold. The narrator rides from encounter to encounter. Scripts are recited; formalities are observed. There is an air of strange, exacting, half-understood rules, and of dangerous illusions. Bizarre as it sounds, Rankine's path has a breath of epical romance to it: the knight says the words so that the lady will lower the drawbridge; midway through a charmed banquet, all the fruits turn to dust.

After a while, I realized that I was reading "Just Us" as a kind of grail quest. The book seeks the impossible thing, the healing thing, which is at once so impossible and so healing that it surpasses language. Like Rankine's previous work, "Just Us" collages poetry, criticism, and first-person prose; it remixes historical documents, social-media posts, and academic studies. There's the sense of a subject overflowing every genre summoned to contain it. There's also a contemporary feeling, of going about one's day-switching on the news, talking to a friend, reading an essay-at a time when all discourse seems drawn back to the magnet of race. Rankine has never not known of race, but she shows us life in a country that pretends to be newly awakened, and mourning the dream that it has just lost. "You say and I say," she writes, as if foggy with sleep, "but what / is it we are telling, what is it / we are wanting to know about here?"

Narrating whatever "it" is will require "a new sentence," one capable of resolving the book's driving paradox: that "just us" is impossible without justice, but justice is unlikely to be done until a sense of "just us" is achieved. This conundrum-no transformation without identification, no identification without transformation-spurs the work forward, but not everyone will be persuaded that it matters. A hotter and blunter activism has engulfed the United States in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Many feel that structural reform is a more effective path to justice than renovating white hearts and minds, at least partly because it does not depend on the types of conversations that Rankine wants us to have. Rankine is a humanist: she prizes empathetic connection for its own sake. If this is unfashionable, it is only because such connection can seem to crumble when asked to bear the weight of history.

And yet the ache of "Just Us" isn't that Rankine attempts too much but that she gets free of too little. The ache is more than thirty pages, written by Claudia Rankine, on the meaning of blond hair, and many more pages, also written by Claudia Rankine, about white people who are not nearly as thoughtful, expert, funny, or compelling as Claudia Rankine is. "Just Us" includes gorgeous passages, ruminations that set the reader down on "a patch of dry grass, a median strip, between infrastructures, between lanes of traffic, between nowhere and here, between him and her . . . a necropastoral." But the book also litters Rankine's inner landscape with "fact checks." "White people don't really want change if it means they need to think differently than they do about who they are," the narrator suggests; on the opposite page, a line of text notes that "there may be counterexamples." Studies are marshalled to corroborate perceptions or memories. As Rankine considers the mistreatment of young Black boys in the classroom, a paper on the "eye gaze patterns" of early educators seems to license her thought. This deference to objectivity, or to its appearance, is jarring. It evokes another moment in the book, when Rankine writes that "the black person is asked to leave to vacate to prove to validate to confirm to authorize to legalize their right to be. . . ." The author's vision, so suffused with longing, ends up impaled on facts.

If "Just Us" extends "Citizens" 's effort to "pull the lyric back" into reality, it may succeed too well. Rankine cedes large swaths of her imagination to mourning the constraints placed on it, and her self-subordination-to white people, especially-hardens many of the certainties that her art aims to unsettle. The book returns often to the phrase "what if," but it feels besieged by "what is": unfreedom is the point, as is a shift in the "American conversation" from hope to a kind of dignified resignation. (One hears an echo of Michelle Obama's Convention speech from this year: " It is what it is.") But progress, though challenging, doesn't need to be a holy grail; and poetry, though of this world, doesn't need to be tied to it. As a study of what it's like to operate within society's limits, "Just Us" is exactly the mixed triumph that Rankine has permitted herself to hope for.

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The Burdened Insights of Claudia Rankine's "Just Us"

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In her book-length poem " Citizen," from 2014, the writer Claudia Rankine probed some of the nuances and contradictions of being a Black American. Her focus fell on what it means to be erased, projected upon, or politicized, and how the cumulative effect can shatter one's sense of self.

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An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, the new novel from the author of A Man Called Ove is a "quirky, big-hearted novel....Wry, wise and often laugh-out-loud funny, it's a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure" (People).

Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix their own marriage. There's a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.

Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them-the bank robber included-desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

Proving once again that Backman is "a master of writing delightful, insightful, soulful, character-driven narratives" ( USA TODAY), Anxious People "captures the messy essence of being human....It's clever and affecting, as likely to make you laugh out loud as it is to make you cry" ( The Washington Post). This "endlessly entertaining mood-booster" ( Real Simple) is proof that the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope can save us-even in the most anxious of times.

Chapter 1 1
A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point, much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea.

This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human being for.

Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You're supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand "amortization levels" and "inflation rates." That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don't know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there'll be another one coming along tomorrow.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how, because it's so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.

One single really bad idea. That's all it takes.

One morning, for instance, a thirty-nine-year-old resident of a not particularly large or noteworthy town left home clutching a pistol, and that was-in hindsight-a really stupid idea. Because this is a story about a hostage drama, but that wasn't the intention. That is to say, it was the intention that it should be a story, but it wasn't the intention that it should be about a hostage drama. It was supposed to be about a bank robbery. But everything got a bit messed up, because sometimes that happens with bank robberies. So the thirty-nine-year-old bank robber fled, but with no escape plan, and the thing about escape plans is just like what the bank robber's mom always said years ago, when the bank robber forgot the ice cubes and slices of lemon in the kitchen and had to run back: "If your head isn't up to the job, your legs better be!" (It should be noted that when she died, the bank robber's mom consisted of so much gin and tonic that they didn't dare cremate her because of the risk of explosion, but that doesn't mean she didn't have good advice to offer.) So after the bank robbery that wasn't actually a bank robbery, the police showed up, of course, so the bank robber got scared and ran out, across the street and into the first door that presented itself. It's probably a bit harsh to label the bank robber an idiot simply because of that, but... well, it certainly wasn't an act of genius. Because the door led to a stairwell with no other exits, which meant the bank robber's only option was to run up the stairs.

It should be noted that this particular bank robber had the same level of fitness as the average thirty-nine-year-old. Not one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures, more the sort of thirty-nine-year-old whose daily consumption of cheese and carbohydrates was more likely to be classified medically as a cry for help rather than a diet. So by the time the bank robber reached the top floor, all sorts of glands had opened up, causing breathing that sounded like something you usually associate with the sort of secret societies that demand a password through a hatch in the door before they let you in. By this point, any chance of evading the police had dwindled to pretty much nonexistent.

But by chance the robber turned and saw that the door to one of the apartments in the building was open, because that particular apartment happened to be up for sale and was full of prospective buyers looking around. So the bank robber stumbled in, panting and sweaty, holding the pistol in the air, and that was how this story ended up becoming a hostage drama.

And then things went the way they did: the police surrounded the building, reporters showed up, the story made it onto the television news. The whole thing went on for several hours, until the bank robber had to give up. There was no other choice. So all eight people who had been held hostage, seven prospective buyers and one real estate agent, were released. A couple of minutes later the police stormed the apartment. But by then it was empty.

No one knew where the bank robber had gone.

That's really all you need to know at this point. Now the story can begin.

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This reading group guide for Introduction ANXIOUS PEOPLE Topics & Questions for Discussion includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
A failed bank robber flees into an open house apartment viewing, taking its eight prospective buyers hostage. As the pressure mounts, these eight strangers slowly begin opening up to one another and revealing long-hidden truths. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them are entirely whom they appear to be. And all of them-the bank robber included-desperately crave some sort of rescue. Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope-the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.

1. The man on the bridge tells the boy, "Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you're always judged by your worst moments . . . Parents are defined by their mistakes." Do you think this statement is true? Does social media make it more likely to be the case these days? In what ways are people critical of other's parenting choices? Is the bank robber a bad parent?

2. In Anxious People, the author writes, "If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans" and "The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn't that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future." Do you make plans for your life or do you let life guide you? Even if our plans often don't turn out as we'd hoped, is there a benefit to our making them? Discuss these questions with your group.

3. Zara tells her psychologist, "your generation don't want to study a subject, they want to study themselves." Is she speaking of millennials? Why are boomers and millennials so critical of each other? How do they see the world differently?

4. Nadia (the psychologist), James (the police officer), Zara, and Estelle all have stories tied in some way to the bridge. What does the bridge represent to each of them? Has the bridge's meaning changed for them by the end of the book? If so, how?

5. Anna-Lena compares her and Roger's marriage to a shark that can't breathe unless it is moving the whole time: "People need a project . . . if we didn't keep moving, our marriage wouldn't get any oxygen. So we buy and renovate and sell." Why does Anna-Lena think that a project is the one thing keeping their marriage from falling apart? What surprised you about their history as individuals and as a couple? How have they underestimated each other, despite having been together for so many years?

6. How did you feel when the identity of the bank robber was revealed? Were your assumptions challenged? How does the author manage to keep this a surprise?

7. Zara appears to be very cold and distant to other people. Is Zara's attitude toward people a defense mechanism? Do you agree with the psychologist that Zara isn't depressed, just lonely? What is it that Zara can't forgive herself for?

8. Estelle says her book-swapping moments with her neighbor were "an affair." Do you agree? What counts as an affair if there's no physical relationship involved? What book would you give as a present to a crush?

9. While on the apartment balcony, Zara starts to open up to Lennart. Why is he the person whom she is able to open up to?
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10. At the start of Anxious People, the author tells us, "This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots." In what ways are these characters acting like idiots? At the end of the book, do you think that's still a fair description of them? Are we all, by virtue of being human, inclined to act like idiots from time to time?

11. Jim and Jack, the father and son policemen, have a difficult relationship that is made worse by their working so closely together. What is it that annoys them about each other? What did you make of Jim's role in resolving the bank robber's predicament? Should he have told Jack what he was doing sooner? Why didn't he?

12. Anxious People is very much a character study. How did your feelings about these characters change over the course of the book? Who is your favorite character and why? Which character surprised you the most and why?

1. Estelle is very much a lover of wine. With your book club, choose a wine or other beverage that you think pairs with each of the characters. Discuss your choices and have a toast to yourselves and to Anxious People!

2. While they are held hostage, the characters draw closer and closer together. Encourage your book club to go to an "Escape Room" event together. If there isn't one in your city, play a game that requires you to solve a puzzle together. What was each person's strength? How well did you work together?

3. Fredrik Backman's first novel, A Man Called Ove, was made into an Academy Award nominated film, and his novel Beartown will soon be a series on HBO. With your book club, watch A Man Called Ove and discuss how its themes connect to and diverge from those of Anxious People. Discuss which actors you would cast in the primary roles if you were making a movie of Anxious People.

Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, and Anxious People, as well as two novellas and one work of nonfiction. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter @BackmanLand and on Instagram @Backmansk.

Publisher: Washington Square Press (July 6, 2021)

Length: 352 pages

ISBN13: 9781501160844

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"The perfect balance of heartwarming and heart-wrenching, and Fredrik Backman has a way of simply yet elegantly describing relationships. We can all be idiots, but we're still all human beings worthy of connection and love." -NPR

"Funny, compassionate and wise...an absolute joy." -AJ Pearce, author of Dear Mrs. Bird

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An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, the new novel from the author of A Man Called Ove is a "quirky, big-hearted novel... .Wry, wise and often laugh-out-loud funny, it's a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure" ( People ).

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So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

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So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell: 9780679767206 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning...

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