the literary life INDELIBLEperson aware of her own privilege—to
start the work of compiling this book
by reaching out to writers of various
backgrounds. I wanted to hear from
Black writers, Latinx writers, Asian
writers. I wanted to hear from writers
who identify as queer and writers who
ident if y a s t r a n s. I a lso wa nted to hea r
from writers who were adults before
I was born, who could offer a broader
perspective.
Which is to say that I wanted these
sentences from contributor Honor
Moore: “I remember the beginning
of Women’s Liberation. I don’t re-
member particular conversations, but
I remember the feeling I got when a
woman declared she didn’t need any
movement.” And this one, from con-
tributor Gabrielle Bellot: “I had read
too many stories of trans women who
went to the police after men harassed
them and were told by the cops that
it was their own fault; what do you
expect, the officers asked, when you
dress like a woman?” And this one,
from contributor Syreeta McFadden:
“I know to expect the requisite
bullshit that comes with being a Black
woman in the world. I know wrong is
not my name.”
I wanted all these words before
t hey were w r it ten, before t hey la nded
on the pages of this anthology. So I
e-mailed writers and artists, people
whose work had made me gasp in the
past. I asked how they were doing,
and I asked if they’d be willing to
write about how they were doing, or
if perhaps they already had. And in my
e-mail I said: Give me essays, stories,
poems, anything. It felt imperative
to not limit the scope of this book to
one genre. When collective pain and
trauma yield art, our job as a society
is to receive that art in all the forms it
takes, in all its different garbs.
In September 2018, as I assembled
these artistic testimonies, Christine
Blasey Ford took the stand and shared
the details of her trauma with the
world. “Indelible in t he hippocampus
is the laughter,” she said of the men
who victimized her. That one of those
men was subsequently confirmed as
a judge on the highest court in our
land is proof like no other that, to bor-
row Quito Ziegler’s words from these
pages, “we’re at the early stages of a
reckoning.” Our fight has only just
begun.
Indelible in the Hippocampus:
Writings From the Me Too Movement
will be released by McSweeney’s
Publishing in September. As the
anthology’s publication date was
approaching, I invited four of the
book’s contributors—Karissa Chen,
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lynn Melnick,
and Elissa Schappell—to discuss some
of their thoughts on the current state
of the #MeToo movement and their
experience writing on this topic.Oria: Had you written “#MeToo
pieces” before—whether framed that
way or otherwise—or was this your
first time writing about this topic?Greenidge: I think this is the first
time I’m publishing a piece on this
topic, but I’ve certainly written about
it before and thought about it often.
Writing about the aftermath of sexual
violence and sexual abuse was always
something that interested me, from a
pretty young age. I came to the sub-
ject from the intense public discus-
sions around familial sexual abuse
and workplace sexual harassment in
the 1990s. For me, #MeToo is less a
revolutionary moment and more a
continuation of that discussion that
happened very publicly and very in-
tensely for much of the ’90s. I dis-
tinctly remember the cultural shift,
when gatekeepers kind of decided
“that’s enough of that,” and the hor-
ror and destruction of sexual violence
was ignored again. It was so jarring,
and I think many people forget that
when they talk about the trajectory
of #MeToo.Chen: I had written a short piece for
the Rumpus a couple of months before
McSweeney’s approached me, and
at first I hoped to just republish thatstor y. A lt hough t hat piece wa s, i n pa r t ,
about someone close to me who’d been
assaulted, it was a piece that I managed
to keep a bit more distant from myself,
le s s per sona l a nd more g rou nded i n my
views on the topic. When approached
by McSweeney’s, I had a sense of “I
don’t think I have anything else to say
about this,” which in retrospect was
more, “I don’t know if I can handle
saying anything else about this.” But
when you and the other editors asked
me to consider writing a new piece, I
decided to try to push myself to write
about a personal experience I’d avoided
discussing because I wasn’t sure it
“counted.” It turned out to be one of
the hardest things I’ve ever written—
so hard that the act of writing became
the anchor. I’m so glad I did it.Schappell: I think in some way I’m
always pushing back against the
subjugation of women in my work,
whether it be in fiction or nonfiction.
I’m angry. Writing allows me to let
my anger off the leash.Melnick: From the time I began writ-
ing as a teenager, most of what I’ve
written about has been rape culture,
in all of its many terrifying forms.
From the time I was a kid, my life
and experience was so steeped in toxic
masculinity and violence that there
was sort of no way to write literally
any experience outside of that lens. I
mean, that’s our world.Oria: If you’d written about this topic
prior to October 2017—pre-Harvey—
did the experience feel different in
any way? Did your prepublication
thoughts or concerns differ, regard-
ing the reception of the work, back
then compared with now?Melnick: Oddly enough, my second
book, Landscape With Sex and Violence,
about rape culture as I lived it inside
1980s Los Angeles, came out ten
days after the New York Times ran its
Harvey Weinstein piece and literally
the day that Alyssa Milano tried to41 POETS & WRITERS^