just stories (or, a eulogy for bojack horseman)

“I got into this business because I love stories. They comfort us, they inspire us, they create a context for how we experience the world. But also, you have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of time with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it's not.”

— Princess Carolyn, “What Time Is It Right Now”

BoJack Horseman finished this month. I watched through the entire back half of its final season in a night, in a weird little echo of how I watched the first three seasons — back to back, preparing for a trip that I knew was going to be rough, trying to shake loose all the sadness before I had to put on a brave face. It’s hard to explain what this show has meant to me without that kind of anecdote, which I recognise does not say much for my critical objectivity. I promise I am capable of being smart and articulate about media, albeit only when it matters to me less.

Immensely relatable.

I remember disintegrating in the final moments of the first season, when BoJack says “I really wanted you to like me, Diane,” and Diane responds only with a quiet “I know.” I remember pausing to sob into my knees when BoJack finally answered the phone for his mother, only to have her tell him that he was born broken; that’s his birthright, and there isn’t any cure. When a series I’d relied on for comfort became fraught and complicated, I went right to BoJack, because I knew it would understand why all the reassurances felt hollow to me. Starting to think critically about restorative justice and the hope of redemption, I tore through season five in a fit of desperation, unable to tolerate the thought of stopping without knowing what happened in the end. I have been ride or die, for want of a better turn of phrase, for this show from the beginning. It’s strange knowing that there won’t be any more.

All of this to say that I was surprised by the tone of a lot of the discussion I saw around the show. Specifically, I was completely thrown by the total confidence with which people announced that BoJack was meant to be a unilaterally bad character — that the only people who sympathised with him were shitty men, and that his function in the story was to facilitate suffering and (therefore) growth for characters like Diane and Princess Carolyn.

To be clear: I love both Diane and Princess Carolyn. But I love BoJack, too. Call this my apologia, if you like.

BoJack sucks. This much is on the record, and reasonably so, as fact. He’s careless even with the people he professes to love; he’s an outright asshole to everyone else. His reckless, self-destructive behaviour puts everyone around him at risk. He’s emotionally unavailable; he’s unreliable; he pretty much never has anyone’s back when it matters. The show is forthright about this. A late episode in the most recent season goes directly in on all of BoJack’s flaws, setting them all out one by one in a clear and measured tone; he gets defensive, he tries to clap back, but ultimately even he accepts it. Yeah, he admits, at the end of the episode. Confronted by his worst self, he can’t deny it: that’s him.

There are two ways to respond to a character who sucks, when you love them anyway. Here’s the first: I suck, too. You heard me! I am pretty terrible. I frequently neglect to think my shit through. I throw myself into stupid plans and cross my fingers that I won’t break my neck in the landing. I’ve literally been broken up with for being unreliable and emotionally unavailable; half the time, I know I’m doing it, and I do it anyway. Why would I not sympathise with this bad horse man?

Also kind of horrifyingly relatable.

And here’s the second: BoJack’s journey toward sucking as hard as he does is also pretty fucking clearly delineated. Because the show is not exclusively about how men hurt women; it’s not setting out to be polemical about that one specific form of harm. It’s about the horrors of living in public. It’s about addiction, and intergenerational trauma, and how childhood abuse can shape the adults who survive it. It’s about the limits of emotional support between friends. It’s about a black tar pit of an industry, swallowing everything good it ever touched. It’s about how a cute kid in a sailor suit can age into a grown man who can only barely function in the world. It’s about all of these things, in the person of one character who tries (sometimes) and fails (often) to be better than the people and places he came from.

Most characters in BoJack’s orbit are forced to deal with his shittiness, one way or another. Princess Carolyn thanklessly does her best to wrangle his career into shape, only to be held at arm’s length whenever she pushes for care or support in return — and guess what? I’ve been there, too. Diane’s association with BoJack variously threatens her career, her marriage, and her mental health, right up to the end of the show; there is no easy way for her to be around him without either enabling him or being enabled in her own worst foibles, which is also a whole-ass mood. Todd’s good nature and enthusiasm are exploited, undermined and wounded almost every time he shares a storyline with BoJack. Kelsey Jannings faces severe professional consequences for BoJack’s stubbornness; Herb Kazzaz faces the same, for BoJack’s unwillingness to hold his ground. Sarah Lynn spirals until she dies. Charlotte and Penny are clearly shown to never be the same again. The list goes on. All these characters — a majority of them women — are vivid and real portraits of what it means to be around someone like BoJack; it isn’t a show that shies away from showing its audience his fallout.

But I still have beef with the notion that to be sympathetic to BoJack is, by default, to be unsympathetic to everyone he hurts. Specifically… you do know it’s possible to extend sympathy to multiple places, right? Sometimes you can even do so simultaneously. That’s the fun and cool thing about media content, and also — dare I say it — about being a person in a morally complicated world.

“You come by it honestly, the ugliness inside you.”

I love BoJack the way I do because it not only acknowledges that complexity; it leans into it, actively, to tell a story that’s hard to sum up by way of any one moral position. It asks big, bleak questions about what warrants forgiveness, and who warrants forgiveness, and how often forgiveness is possible before a line has to be drawn. It doesn’t always answer them. Sometimes it answers them more than once, showing a different set of workings every time, and allows both answers scope to be true together. I can see as much of myself in a careless, self-absorbed, traumatised mess of a (horse)man as I can see in a brutally efficient career (cat)woman who’s convinced she’s going to die alone, or a depressed and neurotic writer clinging to her own inability to compromise — because it’s good, actually, to have the space to acknowledge the broken parts of myself. It’s good to see them and acknowledge them, every once in a while; it’s good to have fiction out there that facilitates that acknowledgement, and provides a safe way to go about it.

Life isn’t just stories. Stories aren’t life. And I suppose what I am saying is that it’s good to have stories that resist being mapped straightforwardly onto life, the way BoJack does. I will miss it. I hope it lives on in more stories that try to do the same.

a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore

When I was active on Tumblr, back in the day (like, in 2012), it was at the height of the craze for The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s debut, based heavily on her own time at Bennington College, follows a group of classicists at an elite academic institution, who murder one of their friends and end up disintegrating around the shared secret of his death. It had everything that 2012 Tumblr ate up: tragically beautiful young men! Pithy quotes about the philosophy of beauty! A kind of blood-soaked aspirational aesthetic that lent itself well to desaturated photos of marble!

The Secret History is a really good story. I like it a lot. As a story about the darkness attendant to academia, it is wildly and deliberately off the mark. Its main character confesses in its opening paragraph his fatal flaw, which colours his narration throughout: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. Dude is not telling the story he actually lived; he’s telling the story the way he prefers to recall it. His unreliability saves the book from being a straightforward encomium to cruel and violent elitism, which makes it all the more extraordinary that so many readers seem to miss it.

I studied for a three-year undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge. I applied because, at a formative age, I was told by a teacher that I should be aspiring to Oxford or Cambridge, please. I had very little sense of the class divide that separated me from the Oxbridge institution; I had been told what was expected of me, and I’d read His Dark Materials early enough to solidify the instruction. I threw myself into my studies until I arrived in Cambridge on an unseasonably sunny October morning, my life packed into the boot of the family car. The three years that followed were impossible. I remember very little of them; I don’t remember how I survived.

100% haunted.

People who study at Oxford or Cambridge for three years are signing up for nine intensive eight-week terms. There aren’t any pauses mid-term, and the workload is unrelenting. The atmosphere is one of neurotic, anxious hypercompetition. Put hundreds of people who were the smartest kids in high school into the same city; they will lose their minds trying to be the biggest fish in a very deep pond, or they will drown. There’s a lot to be said for it, if you can cope with the pressure. Problems arise when you can’t. In Cambridge, at least, the support systems in place for undergraduates were limited at best and inaccessible at worst.

People buy into the Oxbridge ideal: there are baby clothes for sale in the tourist-tat shops in Oxford that say ‘born to go to Oxford,’ like that’s not an insane and cruel expectation to put on an infant child. People buy into the Oxbridge aesthetic: though the last thing I want is to direct more vitriol her way, look at Caroline Calloway, who built her brand on an idealised version of Cambridge, right down to producing merch for an imaginary Cambridge college. (I honestly can’t fault that, as a business decision; if Harry Potter taught us anything, it’s that people love a good House.) Calloway has since spoken about the addiction she struggled with while studying at Cambridge. What does it say about the actual, material horror of elite academia, that it surprises me less when people almost overdose than when they claim to have had a good time?

Here’s the actual dark academia vibe: I helped lead a campaign to recruit a college counsellor, and went to speak to the senior tutor armed with evidence to support that request. I had barely gotten out a sentence when the senior tutor blithely said, “Well, we could sack the college nurse, if you really want to hire someone new.”

Another example: I went into my third year acutely aware of my ongoing mental health crisis, and tried to tell my dissertation supervisor at our first meeting that I had spent much of the previous year suicidally depressed. She nodded, passed no comment, and pressed on. Months later, when my depression was bad enough that it started to affect my work, she asked me whether I was making an effort at all, and whether there was any point in her talking through the feedback she had given. I was too ashamed, too convinced that I was in the wrong, to report any of this to my Director of Studies. I stopped contacting my supervisor; a generous friend studying for a PhD helped me to edit and refine my dissertation. My supervisor did not at any point reach out.

Another: A kid with autism and a series of physical disabilities came up to college while I was there, and asked for the heavy fire doors to be made operable with wheelchair-height buttons — which, according to UK disability law, they already should have been. The college had kicked that can down the road, promising to fix it when someone who needed button-operable doors was admitted. Not only did they not fix it; they continually threatened this student with eviction from her lift-accessible room, and when she sought assistance from the disability advisory service, they put pressure on her to take a year out (with the implicit threat that, once she had left, she would not be given leave to return). She was one of the smartest, most capable mathematicians I ever met. I don’t know whether she graduated, in the end.

One more for the road: my college hosted its first ever Alumni Ball in 2013. In the interest of security, they advised all the students resident on-site that we would be required to vacate our rooms until 3am the morning after the ball. We were expected to leave our homes, throw ourselves on the mercy of friends at other colleges, and continue paying our termly rent as though there had been no interruption. Whether or not we had anywhere to go was not their concern. No provisions were made for students at risk of being made homeless for a night.

The most beautiful room I ever lived in.

Asking me if I regret going to Cambridge is like asking me if I regret being alive. I can’t conceive of an alternative anymore. I got out with my life and a 2:1 degree; after a couple of years working retail, squandering all my much-vaunted Potential (tm) and disappointing my mother, I now have a literary agent and a full-time job I enjoy. (I live in Oxford, where I work for a college within the university, as part of the office that tries to support students in difficulty while on course. I couldn’t have been persuaded not to go to Cambridge, when I was seventeen; I am trying to do what I can for the current generation of kids who won’t be told, and can report from the ground that there are slightly better systems, now.)

But I don’t look back on my time there with fondness. In my third year, I lived in the most beautiful room I think I’ll ever live in, and I wasted all the time I had there lying in bed and crying. My enduring memory of second year is a memory of playing an internet flash game in pyjamas in the middle of the day, unshowered and unhappy and acutely aware that I was failing the person I had it in me to become. I drank too much. I didn’t eat enough. I saw my friends for supervisions, or for exhausted evenings spent on our separate studies. We weren’t murdering each other in elaborate orgiastic frenzies; the students who vanished at Cambridge vanished quietly and alone, into their rooms and into intrusive thoughts of world-ending failure. Sometimes, we resurfaced for graduation.

The History Boys gives Hector, the eccentric and pitiable schoolmaster, a line that should have warned me away. “I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone,” he says, reflecting on his own Oxford years. I learned. I learned a lot, even. But I don’t know how much of it was what I was meant to learn.

Don’t get me wrong: like I said, I love The Secret History, and I genuinely think we’re fortunate that Donna Tartt saw fit to turn her completely deranged college experience into art. (You’ve read the oral history, right? We’ve all read the oral history?) But I’m thankful for the caveat that Richard Papen offers on the novel’s opening page. Underneath that morbid longing for beauty (which is terror), the true terror is the ugly banality of it all. Death is still death, even dressed up in stately old buildings and ancient tradition; the loss of the illusion is its own kind of knife in the gut.

the surface of our warm lonely planet

Rugby Cement Works, on the way out of town.

I realised that I’ve become a climate writer by mistake.

My short story, “The Last Good Time to be Alive,” appeared in Reckoning 4 this week (check her out, I hear she’s pretty good). I’ve described it as a short story about internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, though it actually emerged from an idea I had for a larger project: it was still set in the near future, but the flood was incidental, and the heart of the concept was Marlo’s ‘cancellation’ by her audience online. I’m sort of relieved I didn’t end up writing that iteration, not least because I worry that it would have been contentious in a way that diverted attention from what I wanted to say.

I got distracted from the cancellation idea, because I thought too hard about what the future might look like. For a writer looking at near futures, trying to keep it terrestrial, there is no way to think about the future without taking into account the present — and at present, we are in a state of emergency. Extrapolate from there and the conflict the narrative requires is already baked in. The weather’s broken. The sea is creeping further and further inland. God only knows what the political landscape will look like, as the climate crisis displaces more and more of the global south, and the higher ground becomes a precious, lifesaving commodity.

“The Last Good Time to be Alive” does not try to encompass the world at large, because I’m a comparatively sheltered white person, and I know better than to overreach. It’s set in my hometown, Rugby; you wouldn’t know it, but it’s secretly set in my parents’ house, on a sharp street corner at the foot of a small hill. There really was a brook at the back of our house, running parallel to the garden, and it really would threaten to burst its banks after rain.

The town centre on market day.

Rugby is a singularly unremarkable place. It’s a boarding school with a tired industrial town grafted on; it’s a rail freight terminal with a dead and joyless heart. I left as soon as I could. I think of it all the time, because the world is changing and Rugby is changing with it. I’ve seen it cited as a place for working Londoners to retreat to, with its direct line to Euston and its desperately low cost of housing. I drove back with my dad for a school friend’s wedding, and he pointed out all the new warehouses hunched at the edge of town.

Zuri, the protagonist of the short story, lives an isolated, increasingly dangerous life in Rugby. She’s offered the chance to leave. Despite everything, it’s harder than anyone expects for her to take it.

Home is difficult and complicated, but it never leaves you behind. You mourn, and you move forward. I wanted to write a story about that — about home, but about that duality, as well. About the living and the grieving and the growing that our world demands of us all.

Arkady Martine, who guest-edited Reckoning 4, has written with characteristic power about withstanding the temptation of apocalyptic despair:

“I reject it because the apocalyptic is itself a form of denial. It is a place to hide within. It is also a kind of violence, inflicted on us—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes quite deliberately by agents—whether they are fossil fuel companies or simply people who cannot imagine a future different from the one which gives them some power and some control—to push us away from the work.”

I don’t always know how to reject it. Mired in my early teens, I was horrified at what I read in the news about global warming, the greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone layer. My dad would drive us up the motorway to visit family further north, and I would look at the sky, anxious that our car would be the one to exhale that fatal, tipping-point breath of carbon fumes. I couldn’t cope. The terrible scale of the world and the damage done overpowered me in every quiet moment. I had to shove it to the back of my mind just to get through the day without panicking.

We used to get our hair cut here.

I’m older now, and the world is more complicated than one car journey or one apocalyptic instant. I have to balance the pull toward hopelessness with the need to keep being, and with the need to cling to what joy there is to be found.

A friend of mine, like Marlo, makes videos on the internet. I borrowed the title of my story from him, though I haven’t told him yet (if you’re reading this: surprise, bitch). We weren’t talking about the climate, exactly; we were talking about how strange it was to be able to listen to the same song together, at the same time, continents apart. “This is absolutely the best time to be alive,” he said, “and probably the last good time to be alive.” I don’t know to what extent I agree, but at the time it resonated hard. We live in the future, and it is climate catastrophe burning down California and driving indigenous communities off the melting ice of their homes, but it is also listening to an album you love with strangers on the internet. It’s forging a connection you didn’t expect to forge, in a place where you didn’t expect to be. It’s internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, holding space for one another in the midst of a devouring storm.

I became a climate writer by mistake, but not by accident. We know what’s happening. We’ve known for a while. I am trying to live with that knowledge, and to respond to it the only way I know how; I am gathering the things I will take with me into the future, fear enough to keep me moving forward, joy enough to see me through the dark. If this is the last good time to be alive, then I want to approach it with purpose. I hope you enjoy the story, and I hope you at least feel prepared as we face down 2020.

muffled sarah mclachlan playing in the distance

It’s probably really good SEO to give my blog posts titles like this, right? I don’t actually know if anyone else remembers when Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Fallen’ was on every single fanmix for every single morally complicated character, back in the 2000s when fanmixes were still on MegaUpload. Anyway: I write a lot about redemption, and I want to talk through why.

One of the four main characters of my book — Merle, specifically — was originally meant to be a villain. She was supposed to be an extremist who committed fully to the eldritch abomination that was riding the coattails of her trauma to victory. She was meant to come into direct conflict with the protagonists, and probably be neutralised somehow, and never particularly be taken seriously by the narrative. So what changed? I started to think about who she actually was.

This happens to me a lot. I can’t turn off the impulse that wants to understand, even if it also condemns. In real life, as you can imagine, this is not an easy impulse to negotiate — especially when it comes to my own pain, which is not exempt from the double-bind of compassion. I can recognise my trauma, and the source of my trauma, while being acutely aware that the source of my trauma was traumatised too. That’s a general statement. I’ll be angry if people hurt me, sure, but the anger will always be tied up tightly with a desire to see the whole picture.

I spoke to a friend about this recently, and their response was straightforward: very noble; can’t relate. They cut ties with their family years ago.

Not actually a prelude to a final boss fight.

Redemption isn’t necessarily in vogue right now. Steven Universe recently wrapped up a major redemption storyline, but the Extremely Online contingent of fans were split. Was it realistic? Was it fair that a eugenicist tyrant should get such an easy out, while those she oppressed barely got screentime at all? In the real world, the answer would probably be no — and that’s what I hear a lot, when people talk about redemption stories. This goes double for media meant for kids. What are we teaching our children?

Given that I have in my time written a YA book, albeit largely by accident, I feel vaguely qualified to comment on this: we’re teaching them that there’s a way forward that doesn’t end with a Disney villain getting pushed to their death from a great height (the actual death, of course, conveniently left out of frame; we wouldn’t want to think too hard about the ethics of heroic murder). Of course we are not literally saying to children that if they should ever encounter a space alien empress who may or may not have personally victimised their mum, they should leap headlong into forgiveness and disregard the consequences. We’re saying: here’s a way out of stories about revenge. Here’s why that’s rewarding and important. Here’s why compassion is hard, and worth striving for.

Because that’s the thing that gets lost in the conversation, I think. I’m talking about redemption stories, not redemption moments. It’s a process. And Steven Universe takes pains to show Steven working through that process — dealing with his moments of very comprehensible anger, reckoning with his desire to fight alongside the Crystal Gems, examining how his friends handle and mishandle conflicts large and small, and coming to terms with the fact that compassion needs to be thought-through and well-judged. That’s literally his whole story arc.

The furrowed brow of complicated forgiveness.

What are we teaching our children? We’re teaching them care, and empathy, and good judgment. Of course some oppressors, some abusers, some straight-up mean people won’t respond to those things, and it’s okay to let them go! But there is value in trying to understand before condemning outright.

I would certainly never insist that anyone who has ever been hurt take the time to consider the circumstances of the person who hurt them; society does enough of that without my help, and even for myself, I know there are people who I find difficult to forgive. Likewise, for a multitude of reasons, I am not going to smear my introspecting about restorative justice all over Twitter while everyone is trying to talk about patterns of abuse or oppression. I see the value of anger, and I know when it’s more appropriate to sit and listen than to wade blithely in.

But for myself, I don’t think it’s productive to see monstrous things and not try to look at what’s behind them. In all things, I want to be asking questions: where did you come from? What created you? Who would you be if your circumstances had been different? Fiction is a space for asking questions. More to the point, fiction is a space for trying to write your way to the answers — not for creating a definitive formula of what morality should look like, but for showing your working as you start to define your terms. It shows, and I think any given story is lesser for it, when an antagonist is nothing more to an author than their wrongdoing.

I’ve been burned, in reality, by trusting too readily; I think we all have. But I don’t want it to be a mistake, in the stories I tell, to believe people can be better than they were. I want kindness to prevail. I have that power, when I write; it’s about the only time when I do. So there are people who believe in Merle, and who see her as a whole person in terrible pain. She gets to recognise her mistakes, and become a protagonist, and stand with people who believe in her potential to create a kinder world. She gets to set things right. I can’t imagine a better way to be redeemed.