Danielle Evans On the Necessity—And the Consequences—Of Telling the Truth About History
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“You know how white people love their history right up until it’s true,” says a character in The Office of Historical Corrections, the hotly anticipated second collection of stories from Danielle Evans. Such questions of race, history, nostalgia, and memory are the animating forces of this bravura collection, Evans’s first since 2010’s sensational Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self put her on the map as an emerging literary superstar.
In these sly, spectacular stories, each one haunted by the sinister intersections of racism and misogyny, Evans interrogates the American story—and who gets to tell it. In the showstopping titular novella, a citizen army of public historians are tasked by a new government agency with remedying “the contemporary crisis of truth.” Cassie, our heroine, and Genevieve, her lifelong frenemy turned colleague, are dispatched to investigate the decades-old death of a Black man in rural Wisconsin, where they encounter a right-wing vigilante who styles himself as White Justice. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a co-ed whose life has been sundered by grief is sucked into the maelstrom of campus cancel culture when a photograph of her in a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. In “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” dozens of women wronged by a high-profile artist are invited to his ambitious new exhibition, a series of public apologies that call into question just who an apology is for.
Evans illuminates a harrowing world where Black women must “audition for their lives,” and where the historical record is a “daily trauma,” one that is “always a noose if you look at it long enough.” In each story, Evans’s unforgettable characters must assert their humanity in a world hellbent on squelching it, with hope, humor, and joy powering them through unfathomable sorrow. Ahead of the book’s release, Evans spoke with Esquire about the performativity of history, the dangers of civility culture, and the thorny relationship between pleasure and hope.
Esquire: This book was ten years in the making, but where did it begin for you, and how did the stories coalesce into a cohesive collection?
Danielle Evans: I didn't know that I was writing a short story collection, because I wasn't supposed to be writing a short story collection. I was writing a novel, but I was, as I often am, always working on short stories. I think I'd written more than half of the stories before I started to see the shape of it as a book. For awhile, I was calling it my Midwest project, then I was calling it my project on whiteness, then I was calling it my present tense project. When I looked at all of the stories together, none of that turned out to be true. It felt like they were in conversation, so I tried to figure out what kind of work would finish it as a collection.
The second-to-last thing I wrote for the book was the story “Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want,” which in some ways is an outlier, but in other ways, it revealed the thematic core of the book, which is apology and correction. I’m interested in this emotional question of apology and what we want in an apology, or what it means to try to correct something that in some ways can't be fixed, but I’m also interested in who the narrative of apology belongs to. I started to understand the stories more clearly in conversation, and shortly after that, I started to work on the novella, which I didn't think was a novella at the time, but immediately realized that it was. It was the clearest articulation of the question that I felt was at the core of all of the stories.
ESQ: I was so enthused to see a novella in this collection, because it’s such an under-appreciated and under-published form. What attracted you to the novella form, and how was the experience of writing it different than short stories, at which you’re so practiced?
DE: I started the novella thinking it was a novel, then started to write what I thought were the first two chapters. I realized I had all of these threads that felt excessive. I was just stalling, adding pages to the book for the sake of adding pages.
At the same time, it did need more than a short story, because it had a lot of world-building to do, and I wanted to linger there. I also realized that it was very much in conversation with the work I'd already done—that in some ways, what I'd been writing was a sort of shadow book. All the years I’d worked on this novel, and it turned out that the novella was just a deconstructed version of the same project I'd been trying to do before, about US history and family history. It was all in there, just in a different shape than I'd imagined it.
ESQ: The collection interrogates so many contemporary themes, from misogynist violence to white supremacy. At times, the stories point to the headlines, yet other times, they seem more “of” our world than rooted in it. What's the relationship of our lived reality to your fictional worlds? How much does what you read in the news enter into your alchemy of creating a story?
DE: The only story that was in any way deliberately responsive is “Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want.” With all the others, I’d write the story, then a year or so later, something would happen in the news, and I'd think, “Someone will probably think I was responding to that when I wrote this.” Unfortunately, the reality is that racism is the gift that keeps on giving. You could write a story about racism at any point in history, and at some point, something topical would happen. It would simply be a function of whether or not it happened to be in the news that week.
I wrote “Happily Ever After” for a project Roxane Gay put together on writing about the body. It was scheduled to appear at the end of a month-long series. There’s an incident in that story where one of the characters is accosted in a public place for performing a basic task. The week it was set to publish was the same week there was an incident in a Philadelphia Starbucks where the police were called on two Black men. There was a national conversation about shared spaces, and the way people of color are treated in public businesses. In the story, there’s this constant question of race, which came from purely imagined things and also my lived experience. It suddenly seemed quite topical because everybody was having this public conversation about how people of color are treated in public spaces. That happened over and over again.
I also wrote a story about someone who wears a Confederate flag bikini. I wrote it in 2013, and it ended up being published in 2017, right around the time that there was this huge national debate, which actually, to my surprise, shifted some of our energy around the Confederacy. I grew up in Virginia and thought, “This will never change, so it's safe to write a story about this.” The change surprised me, though I don’t think it’s a complete change, but even the minor symbolic change shocked me.
It’s a negotiation, because I never want fiction to feel like I'm repeating a story you could've read in a newspaper. What I try to do is make sure that, even if I'm not sure where we'll be in regard to a national conversation, the big, old, meta-questions of the story still exist. “Boys Go to Jupiter” is a story about a viral controversy about the Confederate flag, but it's also a story about privilege, about grief, about the way people evade violence. It's a story about social media, yes, but also about social media as a performance of the self, which is what all of my writing is about. I felt like I could tether it to the bigger questions and it would survive whatever happened to the more topical questions.
ESQ: In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” we see Claire gaining traction among certain groups by donning the costume of a Southern history that is not her history. In “Alcatraz,” Cecilia describes the modern iteration of Alcatraz as a place where “people can pay for the luxury of being reminded what privileges were.” Was this much on your mind as you wrote the collection, how history can be commodified, appropriated, and twisted?
DE: I think it's always on my mind. It feels to me like a version of the larger question of most of my work, which is always about the gap between our internal lives and our external lives. It’s also about the way we're always engaged in some kind of performance. My fiction is particularly interested in that, in part because I’m writing queer women and Black women for whom the structural conditions of the world demand a kind of performance.
The question of history feels like a larger extension of that. There’s a way in which what we choose to believe about history is a kind of performance, one that gestures toward what kind of people we are, what kind of country we are, what stories we tell about our families, what we believe without evidence versus what we ignore when we have evidence. All of this is a cumulative performance—a constant negotiation between what's real and how we want to be seen. That certainly feels like a very charged question right now, but it's always been a question, and that's why there's so much at stake in telling the narrative of historical events.
ESQ: One of the most fascinating attitudes about history in the book is Genevieve’s assertion that we must set the record straight about lies of omission, as well as standard lies. We see the characters debating what the right amount of truth is, if there is such a thing. Where have you arrived on that idea? Is there such a thing as too much truth?
DE: I'm going to give you two answers that might contradict each other. James Baldwin wrote, "It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." He's talking about American history, saying that it's a denial of guilt—it's being naive about how much damage and violence has been done. That’s what fused Americans, especially white Americans, to this inability to grow or change or reckon, because there has to be a confrontation with that evidence. To approach history from the idea that no atrocity has happened, or that all of the atrocities were accidental, is to doom any project of meaningful change before it starts. I think about that a lot. I think about the innocence as the crime—how even if somebody is acknowledging that something happened, if they can't acknowledge their role in it, that's not an honest conversation. Part of me is very much on the side of arguing that the more we know, the better.
At the same time, part of the reckoning in this book is with the fiction-writing truth that everybody has a version of the story, in which they are usually not the villain. Everybody has a self-narrative, but the reality is that sometimes there is a true story which exists independently of that. There is harm done, regardless of whether anybody sees themselves as a villain. It’s important to see around that, especially in the narrative of the person who isn't sorry, who doesn't see why they should have to be, sometimes erases the narrative of the damage they've done by centering their own kind of explanation of it. That negotiation is at the heart of the collection, because I do worry that we've raised generations of writers on the idea that everyone has their own truth.
It’s not the job of writers to be didactically political, but I do think there's a relationship between that and the moment of crisis we're in, where people have trouble attaching anything to any objective reality, or acknowledging any harm that wasn't the explicit intention of the person who did it. I think it's important to be aware of the existence of individual human stories, and also to be aware of structural realities. I hope that in the collection, they intersect in different and complicated ways.
ESQ: Then we see someone like White Justice who, when faced with the truth, does a heinous thing. Is there a point at which the complete truth punishes the teller more than the listener?
DE: That’s the other thing—there are often consequences for telling the truth. You don't want to enter an organization and be the reasonable Black person, because that's a non-starter, but you also don't want to exist in an organization as the unreasonable Black person, because that's a non-starter. There are consequences and penalties inherent in those negotiations. You pay for having any interest in telling the truth to people who are not interested in hearing it.
ESQ: In “The Office of Historical Corrections,” you depict a complex friendship and rivalry between Cassie and Genevieve. Were there any particular ideas about how Black women relate to one another, whether it's professionally or personally, that you sought to animate in that story?
DE: The dynamic is interesting to me, because they've known each other a long time, and have been mirrors for each other for a long time. As time has passed, one of the women has learned to be more aggressive and less conciliatory, and the other has become more conciliatory and committed to working within the system. I don't find either of them to be wrong. There's a way in which both of those kinds of work feel necessary, and also a way in which both of those kinds of work feel doomed.
Part of my ambition with this story was to reckon with how to exist in a space that isn't really designed for what you need it to do. Even when it ostensibly should be a space in which it's possible to do meaningful work about racial justice, it requires all of these contortions and negotiations, all of which are in some way fraught. But I also think that when you know somebody a long time, so many of their decisions become a reflection of your own. I'm interested in longterm friendships in general, or frenemyship in this case, because it's a choice. We don't have a choice about family, although people can choose to what degree they are engaged with their family. We have choices about romantic partnerships, but once you've made those choices, it can take a lot to unmake them. It's interesting to see how a long friendship evolves over time, because when do you choose that friendship, and when do you not? I liked having that long echoing, and the way in which the friendship exists or doesn't exist at different times. Ultimately, there is no correct way to be a Black woman in an institution that isn't fundamentally designed for Black women to thrive.
ESQ: You mentioned calling this book your “Midwest project.” So many of the stories in this collection circle back to the Midwest, a place where manufactured niceness and racist violence can operate in a sinister tandem. Can you speak more on your own impressions of the Midwest, and what makes it such a fruitful setting for racist terror?
DE: I was nervous about how much of this book was set in the Midwest, because I'm from the East Coast and my background is on East Coast, but I realized as I was writing that I had spent more than a decade of my adult life in the Midwest. I think it's a complicated space. There are places that have this enormous progressive history that is the best of this country's traditions, but there are also places that have an enormous progressive history that feels predicated on whiteness. I think there’s an interesting cultural space in the way that civility culture can transcend respect culture. Civility culture says, “Be nice to everybody no matter what,” and respect culture says, “Sometimes people can un-earn the right to politeness.” That often marks people who don't prioritize civility above everything as an outsider, when their demands for respect are actually defending people in the community or defending themselves.
I do think that there's something fraught about that dynamic, and it makes it easier for something dangerous to build slowly, because every day you can pretend it's not happening until it's a crisis. Obviously racist terror and racist threats exist everywhere. But I think there's something uniquely Midwestern that amplifies to become uniquely American, because we’ve placed so much of the idea of what this country is in that imagined Midwestern space, that imagined white space, that space of civility, which excludes anybody who can't simply coexist with violent racism or everyday racism. I did want to think about that psychological space—what it costs to ask people to engage in that performative civility, that performance of making nice with something that wants to harm them, and ultimately, the ways in which that is unstable.
ESQ: One of the very resonant through-lines of this collection is mothers and daughters. One of my favorite lines touching on that theme was Genevieve saying, “The beauty of motherhood is that all the choices are wrong.” What is it about motherhood and daughterhood that you find so enduringly interesting?
DE: That’s what I didn't understand about the book initially, which is less of the intellectual project and more of the emotional project. As much as this book is a work of fiction, I was writing it while my mom was sick and then after she died. She was very sick for four years until she died in 2017. A lot of the stories were written in that period. That was also my early to mid-thirties, when it became clear to me that I probably wasn't going to have a child. I was doing a lot of caretaking, but it was for my mother. I wasn't in the position to have the life I'd imagined, and I'd always imagined that I would be a mother someday. Those themes were very close to my mind in ways I wasn’t aware of until I saw them all on the page.
In the larger space, it’s really a question about the future. What kind of world are we raising children in? I think part of the space of hope, fear, and anxiety in this book is about the weird relationship between hope and joy. My mother was sick for a long time. Some of those days were awful—the worst kind of despair—but other days were some of the most joyful we had, because instead of going through these painful medical procedures, we’d just enjoy the day. I'd never had this much time with my mother. There was nothing more exciting than that, and nothing I wanted to do except figure out what would make us happiest.
Then there were days when there was hope, but it was a very difficult hope. Do you want to take this risk? Do you want to try this treatment? Can you afford this? All of these accumulative questions that are about the actual work of hope in a difficult situation, and all of the miserable medical procedures my mother had to endure. The days when someone said, “Maybe we can actually do something” were religiously important and also horrible, miserable days. Every time we'd have a really great day, one where we didn't really have to think about it anymore because there was nothing to be done, I would end up sobbing, wanting any hope that anything could be done.
I emerged from that into this country that often feels the same way, where on the worst days of politics, fear about the environment, or fear of all of the things that say maybe there isn't a future, it's easy to find some temporary and even nihilistic joy, but then that just makes you want to find a way to stick around.
What does it look like to have a livable country, a livable planet, a livable world? That work feels enormous. It's difficult right now, and I don't know how to do it. But the balance of those things has changed me, because sometimes when I have the least hope, I have the most pleasure, and when I have the least pleasure, I have the most hope. For me, that’s related to the question of mothering and daughtering, because it's about the question of inheritance, and the question of how we imagine passing an inheritance into the future, which doesn't have to be the literal continuation of mothering. It’s about the faith that what we do matters for the future, which, for all of this despair, people have to keep finding their way back to.
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