📚 nationally bestselling novels Exhibit & The Incendiaries • Lambda Literary Prize • 2025-2026 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow • substack.com/@rokwon
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ALT FICTION After an Abortion and a Separation, a 30-Something Flails Toward Adulthood The novel “Goddess Complex,” by Sanjena Sathian, takes a sharp turn from an existential crisis into a more literal one.
ALT If you’re a woman in America and you don’t want children — and if you’re honest about this when people ask — then you might be excessively familiar with the common follow-up opinions, questions, warnings. You’ll change your mind. What does your partner think? You’re wrong. You’ll regret it; once you come to your senses, it could be too late. Part of what can be striking about such rebuttals, over time, is how little they vary. It can feel as if the people claiming they know you better than you do are reciting lines from an immensely popular, age-old guide to life. Somehow, you’ve never read it: If you did, it probably still wouldn’t be for you. But how did so many people get their
ALT Power Lifting Made Me a Better Writer Strength training became an artistic practice for one best-selling novelist
ALT One of the only ways I can find calm is by risking injury. I began learning this when, years ago, I tried rock-climbing. Bouldering, that is, which doesn’t involve rope and harnesses. Scaling 17-foot walls with no backup rope, balancing all my weight on a toe and two fingers, knowing that if I fall badly I might break a bone or worse—I hadn’t known my otherwise anxious, restless mind could get this quiet from anything so relatively available as a gym sport. For several years, I climbed as often as I could. But that proximity to physical harm did come, at times, with real injury. I
ALT It’s startling, too, how quickly muscles can rise, my body altering as if birthing a new self. Also exhilarating is the experience of hitting a personal record: dead-lifting five more pounds than I did the last time, and another five, then finding I’m at fifteen. I measure changes against myself. Starting out, I could dead-lift half of my own weight, then three quarters. Then all of my weight, and then more. Crucially, each time I hit a personal record, nothing can negate the new triumph. It happened; it’s a fact, established. Before long, I’ll push a
ALT Such thrills are difficult to obtain in the rest of my life, much of which is dictated by writing. I am, to date, a slow writer—my debut novel took ten years. My second, nine. There was overlap between those years, but still. Upon finishing a book draft, I feel no sense of accomplishment: there are so many more to go. Meanwhile, as is true for any number of artists, my well-being is predicated on that of my writing. The first depends on the second. I think sometimes of what Honoré de Balzac said when he ran into his writer friends at the end of a day. He didn’t inquire how they were doing; instead, he asked if they’d worked well that day, since, if they said yes, it necessarily followed that his friends were thriving.