Guest Post: Deby Fredericks on What Are We Fighting For?

Look, I love to write about terrible food. Life contains so much more of it than good food, or at least my life does. (I have limited funds and poor judgement for risk.) But more than the realism, I’m drawn to bad food because it infuses a scene with context, with a messy pathos. Someone failed before this dish was even served.

I think about the scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in which the spymaster George Smiley tells the story of his one meeting with his Soviet opposite number, Karla. Sitting in a greasy restaurant with his confidant, he takes a few bites of his chicken, murmuring, “There, that shouldn’t offend the cook.” By the end of the scene, he’s given up on the dish, “over which white flakes of fat had formed like seasonable frost.” I mean, the frost isn’t even unseasonable. It is correct that this is happening; it is meet. That chicken died for nothing and everyone knows it.

The cook may have made an unpalatable dish for a sad, unhungry man, but Le Carré prepares a nose-to-tail butcher’s feast of pathos and waste. One of the points of the scene is that Smiley tried and failed to pull a Not So Different Speech on Karla; he ruined it because he’s honest, and honestly lonely. The chicken fulfills its destiny in a way that’s perfect for the mood. It doesn’t symbolize Smiley’s feelings ““ nothing so cheap. Le Carré is a subtler chef than that. Each grim bite of Smiley’s chicken evokes a universe where no spymaster, no heroic fieldman, no great analyst, no chicken farmer or chicken or roadhouse chef, can catch a single break.

I come from a Patrick O’Brian family, and when I mentioned this post to my brother Aaron, he ran to find the bit in The Far Side of the World where Captain Jack Aubrey serves up a lobscouse on which “the liquid fat [stands] half an inch deep over the whole surface.” Later, a pie leaks “thin blood [thin blood!].” As Aaron points out, the pie is rich with social worldbuilding: “Jack has no cook and he’s had to rely on various sailors who don’t actually know how to provide dishes. He’s high class enough that he can’t cook, but he exists in a social setting where he can make one set of people cook for him and another pretend to enjoy the terrible results. […] I feel like a lot of bad meals in literature say stuff about power. One thinks also of the meals Charles’ dad attacks him with in Brideshead Revisited. First red dishes, then white dishes!”

I am myself, as I have said, a gleeful writer of tragic food. It’s true that my debut, The Breath of the Sun, doesn’t have the worst food I’ve ever written. This is because I cut a scene in which a character orders something called “chicken cogulare,” which beats out a scene from a previous manuscript in which a Potemkin village of breakfast pastries is served by an evil prince.

It’s also because The Breath of the Sun is a mountaineering novel, and the literature of survival has a very specific relationship with bad food: since these stories are about scarcity, they’re also about the miracle of having food at all. I remember a meal of spaghetti and fried garlic bread in Kim Stanley Robinson’s underrated Antarctica, which prompts a character to contemplate that Antarctic food, eaten in “extreme states of hunger,” “often tasted wildly delicious even if it was very plain fare.” By the same token, who could forget the “feast of hot water” with which Genly and Estraven celebrate their ice trek in The Left Hand of Darkness (or the hot beer, oddly pleasant in an ice age, over which they make the first moves of their complicated friendship)? Some of the food on Gethen is very fine, and some of it is bad, but it is always transmuted by the sharing at the hearth.

In The Breath of the Sun, when my characters eat dried chicken and biscuit (singular, because in Arctic narratives “biscuit” is a monolithic item), and when my narrator Lamat observes that this biscuit needs to be heavily hydrated with saliva before it can be swallowed, I want to evoke a purely practical un-food. Dehydrated and preserved, it doesn’t feel prepared by human hands. For my two cranky and embittered heroines, the solitude of climbing is both terrible and delicious, and so is the dried pap you eat from a tube. To climb is to leave the context of the earth, and I use food to stretch out that feeling as far as it will go.

Even a breakfast the characters eat when not on the mountain, served by Lamat’s velvety and brutal ex-husband, has this feeling of detachment. Served on “a dirty white table” in an empty courtyard, it is “an untidy heap of miscellaneous food “” rolls and dates and apples with an unpleasant touch of lemon-juice to them, boiled eggs.” The same preservation, the same detachment, but this time there’s nothing delicious or terrible about it, only a mess of context on a plate.

Lamat’s a bartender and innkeeper when not climbing, and I think the only food she really trusts anymore is what she makes herself. When she imagines the mountain from the city, she can only conjure “a morning like a clear glass cup of tea and an egg.” And when she comes home to her lover, she describes her as “a burning breath of coffee, a sense of solidity and strength […] a steady fierce look like some tame animals have.” Home is the right drink on the right breath, and privacy.

Good food is a joy of literature, of course, just as in life. But for subtle worldbuilding, for comedy, for the interplay of hospitality and power — give me the bad stuff. It is a dish of vertiginous depth. Plus, I don’t have to taste it.

Bio: Rachel Fellman is an archivist in Northern California. She writes sharp, painterly science fiction and fantasy about her various preoccupations: art history, extreme survival, toxic love, queer identity, and terrible moral choices. Most of her protagonists are great at exactly one thing and are continually prevented from doing it. Publishers Weekly called her debut novel, The Breath of the Sun, “an atmospheric, poetic, and occasionally wry and brutal story that moves with the gentle but unstoppable momentum of an iceberg.” She does not climb mountains.

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So, love’s great, right? All types. It’s a fascinating quirk of brain chemistry that leaves us caring about each other so much we’ll sacrifice resources and fight against oppression for someone else’s wellbeing. Spending time with people you love is, to my mind, what life is all about. I just want to preface this with that little disclaimer, so nobody feels like I’m attacking love or romance.

Let’s talk about how we often centralize romance in fiction, how friendships get short shrift, and how the romance that we get is usually pretty one dimensional. First, let me own a bias. I’m asexual and aromantic. If you’re not familiar, that means I don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction. Platonic love is my everything. So, romance and sex don’t usually top the list of priorities for me in any storytelling context. That said, from a distance, I’m all for it. Unfortunately, fiction has gotten into some bad habits when it comes to dealing with friendships and romantic relationships.

Friendships are rarely given the focus they deserve. They are one of the most common types of relationships people have in their lives, and yet rarely do they get any nuance. In most fiction, friends are just there. They’re taken for granted. A friend is a person you talk to about your dating angst. It’s not uncommon in a lot of fiction for the entirety of two people’s platonic relationship to consist of them talking about their paramours. I’m not saying friends don’t do that with each other, but is that everything you do with your friends? In reality, friendships have just as much drama and excitement as romantic relationships. There is a moment when two people become friends, and it’s an exciting and fraught moment filled with insecurity, hope, and intrigue. There are events that cause those relationships to deepen, and tragically sometimes friendships end, and those endings can be heartbreaking.

Meanwhile the general lack of focus on platonic connection undercuts romantic relationships. Healthy romantic relationships have a platonic component. The old cliché is two people don’t get along, but it secretly means they like each other. In every longstanding romantic relationship I’ve ever encountered, the people involved liked one another. They had common interests. Two people have to be something when they’re not in the throes of sexual ecstasy or performing grand romantic gestures. Most of us are going to spend the lion’s share of our time together in sweatpants farting into the couch cushions, a set of circumstances that is far from the pinnacle of grand romance.

Sometime when you’re reading a romance novel, a story with romantic subplot, or watching a movie or television show that falls into the trope “two good looking people alone in a room: they’ve got to get together,” ask yourself, “Do these two actually have anything in common?” To be clear, I’m not saying everything in common. Great friendships are often defined by the differences between people, but amidst the differences there have to be points of commonality.

So, why does this happen? The honest answer: it’s easy tension. Two good looking people, they don’t get along, but they’re so good looking. How could they not be interested in each other? It’s plausible they would date, then their totally incompatible personalities give writers a deep well of conflict and drama to draw from. And frankly, that’s okay. Who among us hasn’t leaned into a trope or two? Let those who have no ink on their fingers throw the first pen. However, it does become a problem when it’s done so ubiquitously that it starts to influence people’s conception of real-world relationships.

Here’s the thing: fiction matters. It has real-world implications. Fiction without diversity normalizes a segregated world. Fiction with diversity challenges the status quo. Fiction rife with fundamentally incompatible romantic relationships makes fraught, tense, and incompatible romantic relationships seem normal. Meanwhile, when we treat friendships like they’re set dressing, we end up with a society where nobody puts the time and effort into maintaining friendships that they deserve.

So, what’s to be done? Well, next time you’re writing a romantic relationship, ask yourself, “What do these two do when they’re just hanging out?” In the space between grand romantic gestures and passionate lovemaking, who are they to each other? Do they like the same movies? Maybe they both like to cook. Maybe they’re big board game nerds. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the grand romantic gestures and the passionate lovemaking; just add the platonic love as well.

Next time you’re writing a friendship, ask yourself, “What holds these two together as friends?” There must have been moments in the past when they could have drifted apart. Why didn’t they? What do they see in each other that the myriad other people they’ve met in their lives didn’t quite appreciate? Who is this friend to your protagonist besides a useful literary device to move the plot along or an excuse to explicitly state some romantic subtext?

I’m not trying to lay all the problems of the world at fiction’s feet. There are a lot of forces in our society that diminish the significance of friendship and promote the idea that every problem in life can be solved by getting a date. But all too often, fiction isn’t helping. It’s not that hard to add that extra bit of nuance to relationships. There are good stories to be told that center friendships, even if they include romance. Superficial romantic relationships, with drama built on cheap interpersonal tension, are lazy. Spend a few moments thinking about your best friend. Think about how they make you feel. I’ll bet it’s a love story for the ages.

BIO: Vincent Scott is a comedy science fiction writer and green tea… well, addict is a strong word, let’s say enthusiast. His new novel The Hereafter Bytes is being launched via Kickstarter to raise funds for a full release later in 2020. The campaign runs from March 11th to April 1st, 2020 and can be found here.

You can connect with Vincent at twitter.com/writeitowldown.

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