No matter what we’re fleeing or moving toward, we must have a relationship with the present.

An introduction to the Creepy Autodiegetic Male Narrator, or CAMN.

The womb-like purple room is haunted, but it is also therapeutic.

Check out my essay at LitHub (and read a section from the piece that I ended up cutting)!

Feminists have always known that patriarchy is designed to divide and conquer -- to keep women from, well, talking: to each other, and about the violent acts (or the specter of them) that produce their submission and compliance.

In spite of the triggering content it explores, this book is a safe space.

Maybe a movement is what happens when a story of injustice gets told enough times that suddenly, hearing it again, we recognize it.

What this kind of trouble does, Burns shows us, is chill not only the outer, real, perceptible world; it chills our inner worlds, too. It makes us put up fences in our own minds.

Whereas victims and villains in A Little Life are easy to spot, trapped in unthinkable cycles of harm, and painfully without justice, The People in the Trees widens our lens, honing us in on the more subtle brutalities whose cause-effect relationships aren’t as clearly identified.

It’s a novel that explores what happens when someone with power exercises, as in exerts, employs, trust: exercises it in order to cross a boundary. And it’s also a novel about why, when that boundary gets crossed, it’s so hard for us to talk about it: why, when a trusted figure abuses power, it is so hard for us to hold them accountable.