The Girls ​is a novel that examines the consequences of religious extremism: how can an oppressed group survive in a society that disavows equality, science, and ultimately, bodily autonomy?

A different kind of campus novel, The Girls follows four young women as they navigate the bizarre world of Scofield Boarding School for Girls—where students may only walk on preordained pink sidewalks, must endure public shaming for real or imagined sins, and are surrounded by massive walls and miles of desert on all sides. The girls struggle with concerns that all too often plague women because of contemporary societal norms including: insecurity regarding appearances, shame regarding sexuality, mental illness, gender identity expectations and complicated family dynamics, all in a setting seeped in generational patriarchy and intolerance.

Some are pushed, and others go willingly, but the young women in The Girls all fight for the thing they so desperately require—a voice in an environment that desperately seeks to silence them.

PROLOGUE

Our fathers taught us of everlasting life. They poured oil, anointed our foreheads; told us we would never die. Told us: dear hearts, the boys are the chosen ones, but you are the promised land. We nodded, backs straightening. We’d heard the parables. We’d heard of The Father from our fathers; with voices, deep and certain, they spoke of His power over death. O grave, where is thy victory? our fathers asked. O death, where is thy sting?

We were silent as we have been taught. Truth did not require voices; it required only obedience.

We often discussed how our fathers reacted, the moment the news of the death reached them. How they might have wondered about the details. Tried to explain our failure. It’s a simple matter of faith, they would have said; it’s a simple matter of strength. We were anemic, after all. Girls, who gave unto the earth: our blood, our toil, our pain. We only gave, we did not take. It was foolish to attempt it, they would have said. Foolish to expect a miracle amongst such frailty.  

We still remember the force of her screams—how her face folded into sharp angles and retreated behind shadows of pain.

Our voices: confident then beseeching.

Her voice: piercing then faint. 

We, hands hovering in the space above her head.

We, confident in the power of our immortality.

We, breathing into these slain that they might live.

While perhaps more honest conversations about identity are occurring today than ever before, the violence infused into identity by millennia of conflict has barely been reduced, if affected at all. Indeed, identifying with a particular political party, religion, sexuality, etc. is often considered a declaration of war on those of differing beliefs and/or existence. The abuse and toxic perceptions created by such conflicts have only fed our culture’s escapist tendencies. Now, individuals often role play characters’ adventures and/or binge watch the lives of others more than they live their own, and the face—both figurative and literal—that individuals show on social media is partly, if not wholly, a persona. Seeking to escape reality, we have become a people skilled at substituting for every part of it, including ourselves.

The Morpheum Principle is a dystopian novel that aims to explore such issues by examining the nature of perception and how escapism/self-substitution can lead to self-erasure. Set in the city-state of Morpheum—a society that has banned the public expression of personal identities and mandated that its citizenry wear masks at all times—the narrative follows the lives of the twin sisters Dalia Lorenson and Anastasia Peddlebrook. Born to an abusive mother and a negligent father, Dalia seeks to dissociate herself from their parents’ and culture’s view of her blindness while Anastasia strives to break free from being their mother’s personal slave and another mindless citizen. Both take refuge in the personas allowed during Morphuem’s masquerades, and both must decide how much of themselves they are willing to sacrifice to escape the labels and lives that hold them.

Dalia wondered why black was the color of grief. Both glossy and matte black fabrics were used for the most elegant suits and dresses. Black striped the lionfish mask that the government had assigned her for soirees and the dress Anastasia made to match it, and their mother had called the outfit gaudy. Black was the color of night and, therefore, rest and relief from the day’s work. Anastasia had told her that black was the color of nothingness, that it was the color Dalia saw. There had certainly been times when her lack of sight angered, maybe even grieved her, but she perceived the color before her not as nothingness but more as the fabric of her reality. It was neither gaudy nor elegant, neither happy nor sad. If she had a word for it, it was stable. When she wore black, she matched the color of her world. There was a beautiful unity to that idea. Anastasia would like the balance of it.

This Might Get Heavy is a collection of essays which explores intersecting themes of body image, mental illness, and sexual identity. Through these personal essays, Mayer explores and interrogates the societal norms and tendencies that have formed the shape into which she has forced herself both mentally and physically.

In essays such as “The Point System” and “Refraction,” Mayer uses memoir to depict the origins of her struggles with body image and disordered eating. “Tara’s Body Quiz and Answer Guide” and “How to Determine Your Sexuality: A Guide to Finding Your Letter in the Acronym” inhabit “hermit crab” forms to break through emotional barriers and question the need for conformity. Other essays, like “Green Tea and Giant Donuts” and “(Potentially Unwanted) Letters from Your Former Self,” act as thematic bridges that explore the ways body image and sexuality can influence one another, ultimately helping Mayer to unearth previously undiscovered pieces of her identity.

This Might Get Heavy uses several voices and forms to address and break away from the perceived expectations that have ruled the narrator’s life. It is both a reflection on the ways in which a body is built and a rebellion against the binding that holds these parts together.

Nuclear Option

Our bodies are weapons. Dangerous. The fat we contain is a bomb waiting to go off. The larger the bomb, the bigger the explosion. But if our wires cross, which way will the bomb detonate?

Forty-three-year-old, thirty-three-year-old, twenty-year old, thirteen-year-old woman/girl/body found on a running track, outside a weigh-in, in her kitchen, on the bathroom floor. Cause of death: starvation, disillusion, cardiac arrest, drowned in her own bile.

Our bodies are your weapons. You take my hips from me, sharpen bones to points that carve out the words “too wide”. You take my stomach, stretch it whip-thin with a crack that sounds like the word “fat.” You take my arms, carve down flab until they are hilt to your sword. I can’t remember these parts. When did they stop being part of me? When did you learn to wield them? And when there is nothing left of me, will that be enough for you?

Fat women everywhere, dead, like the radiation has spread and claimed them all for not being thin enough. Only the thinnest survive, and the curves will be forgotten about and no one will ever be fat again and America will be sane again because everyone’s body is the same.

Our bodies are our weapons. Comfort in this skin—with its folds, pockmarks, and sags—is an act of political violence. Celebrate every molecule: fat, muscle, blood. Be worshipped. Exist. Resist. Survive. Take back the weapons that they have stolen.

Memoirist Linda Joy Myers said, “It seems to me the best way we can manage complexities about ‘mother’ is not to remain in judgement of our mothers, no matter how hard that is.” Taking Inventory is a biography my mother, whose life spanned decades filled with hope, heartbreak, loneliness, and adversity. Weaving together micro-essay and prose poetry set at the merger of her adulthood and my childhood, this mixed genre collection examines the many ways her life influenced mine.  

The triptych structure of the book moves backwards in time, exploring the relationship between my mother and the world she navigated, beginning with the final stages of her life, moving through a turbulent mid-life, and ending with the young woman affected by a world war, an alcoholic father, and a devoutly religious mother.  Through one of the central pieces of the collection, “Late Night Ap·o·lo·gi·a,” regret and justification are intertwined to explore an imagined confessional, while another key piece, “A Daughter’s Nondisclosure Agreement,” allows my teenage persona to put my mother’s indiscretions on full display. “When I Kissed Her Today, She Smelled Like Coconut” and “I Was Someone’s Daughter Once” highlight the redemptive qualities that created the foundation of the mother-daughter alliance that is evident in “Ice Cream.” “Bumper-to-Bumper Bravado” and “A One-Woman Dance Party in the Middle of Nowhere” relate the struggles of navigating the final stages of her life. Woven throughout the collection is an inventory of the contents of my mother’s apartment after she moved to hospice care, complete with anecdotes from her life.

At some point, you realize your mother is not who you thought she was, but someone separate from what you made her out to be. My mother didn’t have the solutions, nor the answers to her problems—or her daughter’s.  In many ways, Taking Inventory stands in judgement regarding the why, how, and what if in her role both as a mother and as a woman. It’s full of questions about motherhood, womanhood, and daughterhood—and ultimately about forgiveness. 

Late Night Ap·o·lo·gi·a 

These hours before dawn—when sleep eludes me, a time when I let go of everything associated with the day, my mind loosened for contemplation so the darkest recessions can filter through the cracks— I examine my daily thoughts to see what they really mean.  

First movement, pensive, dreamy mood, twilight, the blue hour,  

The burden of not being what I might have been haunted me and drove me to engage in selfish behavior. Frankly, I was tired of the burden of provision, both emotional and economical, but felt compelled to continue until my obligations came to an end. I suppose I must say in my defense that my reasons were not based wholly on requirement, and that I did indeed have some maternal instincts based on love for my child and the desire to nurture. But those qualities were waning and waxing, leaving me exhausted, and ready to resign from the post, pushing my fledgling from the nest too early, making her take on more responsibility than a teenager should. 

Transcendence ​is a novel that examines masculinity and self-acceptance in the modern era: How do we move on from wrongs done by others and our own mistakes?

A coming-of-age novel, Transcendence follows Cassiel, a young man in his mid-twenties, as he searches for his absent father and finds himself in a monastery where monks have strange abilities. He decides to learn meditation and find the source of his unhappiness through trials that test his discipline and faults. With the promise of enlightenment and learning what happened to his long-lost father, Cassiel completes each trial and comes closer to finding the answers to life within himself. His struggles reflect current concerns with technology, of feeling insignificant, addiction, depression, lust, jealousy, pride, and doubt, all in a setting that leaves behind our modern society’s obsession with consumption in exchange for a life focused on self-actualization. 

Cassiel hopes to overcome each trial with the resolve he finds in a life he never imagined was possible and find his truth in self-acceptance.

The concept of home is often synonymous with security. Dutiful Daughter is a memoir which traces the experience and impact of growing up with an alcoholic mother and an abusive father. Mothering plays a large part in these pieces: my complicated love for my alcoholic mother, the ways in which our roles sometimes reversed, my search for an alternative mother figure growing up, and my attempts to mother myself. I also explore the shifting concept of home—from the home my parents created to the many homes I found after they divorced. As an adult, I searched and found my brother Christopher, whom I had not seen in thirty years, and discovered he was homeless, schizophrenic and an alcoholic. This memoir details my search and the complex struggle to get him into a stable situation. Throughout, I attempt to address the dissonance between the dream of a home and the reality.

Dad snapped a Polaroid picture of our modest, West Texas ranch style house from the front sidewalk the day we moved to Odessa. The gears hummed inside, and the instant camera spit out the picture like a chemically treated tongue.  

“If you kids want to see this, you better get over here.” 

He took a long drag on a cigarette and stood squinting in a swirl of smoke, holding the corner of the picture between his thumb and index finger and waved it, waiting for it to process. Dad wore a heavy turquoise ring on a quick, thick calloused hand. I had learned early to keep quiet and stay out of the way. But this was a rare moment of unexpected kindness. Andrea, Christopher, Jonathan, and I dodged and elbowed into position. At first the frame contained only a milky white square but then, slowly, a ghostly geometric outline began to form, followed by the yellow and brown smears which became the defined shape of our new home.