essays have appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times, n+1, Bennington Review, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Albert applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Human Blues, and reported the following:
From page 69:Learn more about the author and her work at Elisa Albert's website.But isn’t it dangerous to reduce women to their menstrual cycles? the writers and critics and Twitt-heads demanded. Isn’t that what we’ve fought so hard against? Yes and no, Aviva had spent all these long, hard, pointless weeks repeating on stages and across tables and in hotel rooms and recording booths. No and Yes. Maybe! Sort of! Not at all! Absolutely! Whatever! I don’t know! But no matter: let it all drain out. This had been a bad one. A long and hard one. So be it. She had made it to the other side, and now she would bleed and bleed and bleed, and feel better and better and better, until it was all gone. Then it would begin again.What a perfect entrée to a novel structured around the menstruating body – seemingly the first of its kind. Aviva’s story asks difficult questions about personal agency, freedom, “control”, fertility, technocracy, bodies, and the functions of creativity in a post-capitalist culture. Everyone is so eager for easy answers, but there are no easy answers to these questions. There is only getting more and more practiced with and habituated to the fascinating difficulties inherent in the questions themselves. If we can’t engage the questions at all, do we really want reproductive justice? Can justice ever exist in stasis? Politics are all well and good for purposes of banter and social alignment at dinner parties (aka social media), but bodies have their own ideas. Aviva is someone who would very much like to become pregnant, but cycle after cycle after cycle leaves her disappointed, frustrated, grief-stricken, and increasingly convinced that this commonplace, wild, sometimes brutal cycle itself has something important to teach her.
To my mind, the page 69 test works well not because of random coincidence, but because the novel as a whole was intentionally built in a fractal, cyclical way – the universe in a drop of water. If every page didn’t offer a representative slice of the book, then could I be said to have done my job? Anyway: it works!
The bleed is not the end of the cycle; it’s the beginning of a new cycle. So Aviva’s story continues spiraling outwards (and inwards). Thus ends chapter two and begins the next cycle, chapter three. Welcome to the flow.
The Page 69 Test: The Book of Dahlia.
The Page 69 Test: After Birth.
--Marshal Zeringue
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