Who exactly was Butler? And what influences led her to write some of the greatest novels of American science fiction? There's an excellent new biography of Butler out, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, by Susana M. Morris, that brilliantly answers these questions. Morris focuses on the intellectual movements that shaped Butler's thinking: the Civil Rights movement; Black power and Black nationalism; feminism and Reaganomics. Butler's archives are full of journals with both her affirmations and her doubts; she was acutely aware of the challenges around her. "Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say?" she asked herself in her 1989 personal essay "Positive Obsession." "Did I have anything to say? … Whatever it was, I couldn't stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all."

I have to say, the manifestations work. I share with Butler the very old belief of Black folk that breath is life, that you only give utterance to things you wish to be, that the Word is strong enough to stand on. It's a tough belief to have for an eternal pessimist, but I have to say, 10 years into life as a published writer, I can only see further evidence that it is true. For my last novel, inspired by Butler, I made a giant color-coded planning list with phrases and images and belief systems that made up my understanding of it. The novel wasn't written yet; it existed only in emails to myself and half-drunken rants I would make to uninterested people at parties. But I wrote that list on the day of a solar eclipse in 2017, and I have to say—everything I wrote on that list came true, and that book profoundly changed my life. This is a strange thing to write here. Another thing that comes through in the biography is how much of writing fiction is a kind of alchemy that doesn't translate to many in the "real" world. That it requires a sense of faith that borders on madness. 

So be it! See to it!, though, feels like the perfect mantra for our times.

Who gets to seek enlightenment? Who gets to go on a quest for self-discovery? That's the question at the heart of Quiara Alegría Hudes's new novel, The White Hot. The quest for self-knowledge is the basis of classics of modernist literature, from James Joyce's Ulysses to Virginia Woolf's The Waves to Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. There is a whole school of thought that believes the recording of consciousness, the interrogation of self, is the greatest reason for novels to exist. I tend to agree with that; I read novels to enter into a consciousness that is not my own. But novels, like everything humans make, do not exist in a vacuum. They are a recording of the cultures that produce them, and in the bleakest sense they can often double as a ledger of who matters in an author's world and who does not. Whenever I read a novel, I'm always curious who gets to be fully human and who doesn't. (Look at Emma Copley Eisenberg's excellent analysis of fat characters in fiction to consider one of these tropes in action.)

The best writers, in my opinion, turn this calculus on its head. That's why it matters that The Bluest Eye is about a young Black girl who everyone–even other Black people in her community–dismisses and overlooks. That's why it matters that Our Lady of the Flowers examines the inner lives of drag queens and criminals. 

April, the main character of The White Hot, gets to experience a journey of self-discovery, but most readers will probably feel she doesn't deserve it. Hudes, a playwright who wrote the book for Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights and won a Pulitzer for her play Water by the Spoonful, has crafted a truly maddening character. April is a single mom who lives in Philly in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother, grandmother, and daughter. April got pregnant in high school, refused all help, dropped out, and is now raising a daughter just as stubborn as she is—a child prone to outbursts of anger and violence, the kid April always has to leave work early to go pick up at the principal's office. April is not a good mother. She is, in fact, a spectacularly bad one. She refuses to attend anger-management classes with her daughter, even knowing that doing so will allow her daughter to stay enrolled in a program for gifted students. She resents her elderly grandmother, a woman whose bed pans she has had to clean since childhood. She yells at authority figures, and when her daughter seeks connection, April instead puts on Beats headphones at the dinner table, blocking her family out.

After one disastrous family dinner, April storms out of the apartment, buys a bus ticket for Pittsburgh, and flees. She tells herself that it will only be for a day, but she falls in with a group of "grad student hikers," bums a ride to a state park, walks into the wilderness wearing "Rainbow Shops jeggings and a sequined halter" and gladiator sandals, and gives herself over to nature. Sometimes she checks her phone for messages. When she sees none from her young daughter, she takes it as a sign to keep going.

April describes what happens when she gets angry and overwhelmed by the poverty of her life and her lack of choices as "the white hot." "A white-hot blanket shrouded my body. A white-hot veil blurred my vision in a milky sheen," she thinks as she gets into a confrontation. She knows this rage gets her in trouble. She tries to chant to herself to calm down, but it is the bleakly funny mantra "dead inside." Unsurprisingly, it does not work.

April has every reason to rage. But because she is a poor, young, brown woman, unconnected to any man, her rage is unacceptable and has no place to go. So she heads to the woods. Early in the novel, we learn that April wrote a paper on Siddhartha not long after she got pregnant. "In [this] book only the noble get to search for meaning. The rest of us are non-Buddha idiots: left behind." But. But. Hudes also imagines April falling in love with the language of Hesse. "Hermann Hesse makes you feel like, 'Damn, my own soul be aching, too,' " April writes. The novel is a deeply empathetic recounting of how April manages to revive her inner self, no longer "die inside" each day.

For this newsletter, we will ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week's writer is Jessica Hoppe, author of the memoir First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream.

Jessica Hoppe: "Halfway between Fifth Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard, in the heart of a reliable hardware store, I found my creative oasis. A hub, tucked between the all-purpose home goods, paint swatches, and tea lights found on the south side of the store and the plant shop teeming with prickly cacti, verdant monsteras, and ceramic pots on the north side, where I bought my ficus tree. The space is tall and raw, with cement floors and industrial piping exposed, eclectic vintage furniture throughout, the work of local artists decorating the walls, neighborhood actions and resources advertised in flyers, and rare books for free on the shelves of the book exchange. The room, packed by 9:30 a.m., orbits around the affable barista, Youssoupha, who, when he says, "I appreciate you," you believe him. You appreciate him too. It's the kind of space that reflects our homes, perhaps even our lives—its purpose intended for a limited use, but transformed by the imagination, love, and collective contribution of community."