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I came to this topic as an eater first. My partner and I fell in love through food. We met during the pandemic and got to know each other through long walks and home-cooked meals. On an early date, she put a glistening mound of pasta in front of me and I thought how lucky I was to have fallen for an Italian. (She was born and raised in Rome.)

Most Italians have a strident pride in their cuisine; a passion which occasionally verges on the maniacal. The food and beverage industry makes up a quarter of Italy’s GDP and a substantial portion of its tourist draw. Food is tightly bound with ideas of national identity and politicians often rely on a kind of gastronationalism. (When running for election, current Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni posted a video of herself making tortellini with a stereotypical Italian nonna.)

And it’s not just Italians who hold this enthusiasm—Italian cuisine is one of the most popular in the world. Home cooks love to prepare Italy’s dishes, and about one-eighth of restaurants in the U.S. serve Italian food. Shows like Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy and the Netflix series From Scratch highlight just how ravenous audiences are for luscious, almost erotic depictions of Italian food.

But in researching this list, I’ve learned that beneath the promotional language and tired clichés, Italian food has a complex and often contradictory history. Academics question the true origin of classic dishes like carbonara; migration from Italy to the U.S. makes it almost impossible to disentangle the two gastronomic traditions. 

Italians often obsess over this cultural purity. When Italian chef Gino D’Acampo appeared on morning television in the UK a decade ago, he was horrified by the suggestion that you could substitute ham in carbonara. “If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike,” D’Acampo responded incredulously. The clip went viral, bolstering the stereotype that Italians can be fussy about their food. But the history of Italian cuisine—like the food of any nation—is a melting pot of influences.  

But what of the future? Migration patterns, together with demographic trends and climate change, mean that the cuisine must adapt. Since 2003, Europe has experienced an unprecedented number of heatwaves, prompting Italy’s largest farmers’ union to estimate that almost a third of national agricultural production is now threatened by climate change. Italian food—so rooted in tradition and adamant in its authenticity—will have to change. 

But for now, I’m excited to visit Rome for the holidays and soak up the city’s culinary delights: creamy cacio e pepe, indulgent layers of tiramisu, and moreish slices of pizza. I’ll photograph the food, luxuriate in it, and come home with a suitcase full of olive oil and cheese. This time, I hope to enjoy the food while knowing more about the context that underpins it. Like the best Italian dishes, this topic is rich with complexity and nuance. So please devour this collection of articles that complicate the understanding of Italian food and what it means both within Italy’s borders and beyond.

Everything I, an Italian, Thought I Knew About Italian Food is Wrong (Marianna Giusti, Financial Times, March 2023)

In this fascinating piece, Italian journalist Marianna Giusti aims to uncover the truth about classic Italian dishes like carbonara, tiramisu, and panettone—which are celebrated for their authenticity despite being relatively recent inventions. She speaks with older family members and friends from across Southern Italy, asking about the food they ate as children (lots of beans and potatoes) and how it contrasts with the food on menus today.

Inaccuracies about the origins of Italian food may be considered harmless—if it wasn’t for how gastronationalism influences Italian politics and culture. She cites the example of the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggesting that pork-free “welcome tortellini” be added to the menu for the San Petronio feast. What was intended as a gesture of inclusion to communities that don’t eat pork, was slammed by far-right Lega party leader Matteo Salvini. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said. To me, food is one of life’s great unifiers. I love to bring people together around food, but just as often, food is used to divide people. This piece made me reconsider what I thought I understood about Italian food and think critically about who and what is welcome at the table.

It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says. 

There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food (John Last, Noema, December 2022)

In this provocatively-titled piece, journalist John Last examines how climate change and immigration patterns are changing food in Italy. It examines how ingredients from abroad and the labor of migrants were used to build one of the world’s most loved cuisines. It also cites a study that found that the role of immigrants in Italy’s farming and culinary sectors has been systematically ignored. Italian food is often celebrated for connecting eaters with unadulterated, authentic cuisine. The reality is much more complicated. I enjoyed how this deeply-reported essay challenges ideas of culinary purity and questions who that narrative excludes. I was interested to read how Italy’s microclimates produce regional specialities, and how they will be forced to adapt due to climate change. If you’re curious about the future of Italian cuisine, this is the essay for you! It has also been anthologized in Best American Food Writing 2023 for its examination of how food shapes our culture.

It’s this obsessive focus on the intersection of food and local identity that defines Italy’s culinary culture, one that is at once prized the world over and insular in the extreme. After all, campanilismo might be less charitably translated as “provincialism” — a kind of defensive small-mindedness hostile to outside influence and change.

What the Hole Is Going On? The Very Real, Totally Bizarre Bucatini Shortage of 2020 (Rachel Handler, Grub Street, December 2020)

The early months of the pandemic were characterized by lockdowns, widespread anxiety, and a national pasta shortage. In this funny, engaging piece written by the self-described “Bernstein of Bucatini,” I learned why some pasta shapes were especially difficult to find due to production challenges. This piece is an enjoyable, twisty romp that points to the sensual delight of pasta during a dark time. 

I’d like to go a step further and praise its innate bounciness and personality. If you boil bucatini for 50 percent of the time the box tells you to, cooking it perfectly al dente, you will experience a textural experience like nothing else you have encountered in your natural life. When cooked correctly, bucatini bites back. It is a responsive noodle. It is a self-aware noodle. In these times, when human social interaction carries with it the possible price of illness, bucatini offers an alternative: a social interaction with a pasta.

America, Pizza Hut, and Me (Jaya Saxena, Eater, March 2016)

I really enjoyed this thoughtful personal essay about a young girl’s obsession with Pizza Hut and the influence of food on her identity. The author questions her intersecting heritage: she’s a mixed kid with an Indian father and a white mother, a New Yorker who craves stuffed crusts in Pizza Hut rather than an “authentic” dollar slice, and a pre-teen who wants to eat “white food” while her family enjoys soupy dal and potatoes flavored with cumin and turmeric. This piece is also a useful primer on the history of Italians in America, tracing the path from “other” to mainstream acceptability. 

I was half Indian, half white, and all New Yorker. In simple assimilation calculus, going to Pizza Hut with my Indian grandparents in Fort Lee should have earned me points for eating in real life what the cool kids were eating in commercials. And yet, I was still a New Yorker: My ideal sense of self was white, but worldly, opinionated, and judgmental.

Finding Comfort and Escape in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (A. Cerisse Cohen, Lit Hub, November 2022)

I loved this essay about how the author learned to cook during the pandemic and the comfort she found in the reassuring, authoritative voice of Marcella Hazan. The piece vividly describes the flavors of Italian food (“mellow, gentle, comfortable”) and the solace found in cookbooks at a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Before learning to cook, the author considered it a domestic task inextricably linked with traditional notions of femininity and heterosexual marriage. But Hazan, who is widely considered to be the doyenne of Italian cuisine, teaches her that cooking for herself and her chosen family is an essential element of survival, not only literally but existentially. This essay brought me back to the early days of 2020. As the pandemic spiraled out of control, I found my equilibrium through brisk morning walks and the comfort of a pot bubbling on the stove. I still cook most days. Sometimes, it’s a pleasure. More often, it’s a chore. For me, this beautiful essay evoked the visceral, bodily demands of appetite and how satiating them can provide not just culinary satisfaction, but a feeling of peace and wellbeing.

Hazan helped me see that nourishing oneself, and sharing a family meal, is simply foundational. To privilege invention and labor outside the kitchen, but not inside it, is to play into patriarchal distinctions of value.

Hazan herself was a cook, an educator, and an incredible creative success. She remains influential for many contemporary cooks. Her adoration of the anchovy—“Of all the ingredients used in Italian cooking, none produces headier flavor than anchovies. It is an exceptionally adaptable flavor”—foreshadows the long reign of Alison Roman. Her careful ideas about layering flavors and her scientific approach to the kitchen find their echoes in the methodologies of Samin Nosrat (who, in her blurb for the new book, also credits Hazan with beginning her obsession with the bay leaf).

Eating the Arab Roots of Sicilian Cuisine (Adam Leith Gollner, Saveur, March 2016)

My partner and I recently returned from a holiday in Sicily. The island is considered to be a melting pot of North African, Arab, French, Spanish, and other cultures—which for me, was best understood through the food. We enjoyed regional delicacies like deep-fried lasagne, cookies made with beef and chocolate, and cremolata, a sherbet-like dessert that originated in Arab cuisine. It was a delight to remember the trip while reading this mouth-watering travel essay which aims to disentangle how Italian and Arab culinary history mixes on the island. What begins as an academic question quickly becomes a catalog of exquisite meals as the author explores the island’s rich, colonial past through its food. He traces the ingredients that are core to Italian cuisine—including the durum wheat used to make pasta—to migrants who arrived on Sicily’s shores and “gifted this land with what’s sometimes known as Cucina Arabo-Siculo.”

Sicily has had so many conquerors, and there’s simply no way to pull apart all the intermingling strands of culture in order to ascertain what is precisely “Italian” and what’s “Arab” and what’s not anything of the kind. At a certain point—ideally sometime after having a homemade seafood couscous lunch in Ortigia and sampling the life-changing pistachio ice cream at Caffetteria Luca in Bronte—you have to give up trying to isolate the various influences and accept that countless aspects of life in Sicily have been informed by Arab culture in some way. It’s deep and apparent and meaningful, but it’s also a cloud of influence as dense and intangible as the lemon gelato sky that greeted me upon my arrival.

Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes about food (among other things) for her newsletter and is working on her first book.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the most consequential choices most people make. As I edge past my mid-thirties, it’s a question that has dominated my thinking. When faced with a dilemma I can’t solve, my usual strategy is to read. I order a bunch of books and immerse myself in other people’s experiences. It allows my thoughts to coalesce around a few themes; from there, I can see where I agree and where I diverge. To paraphrase Joan Didion, I read to understand what I think. 

A decision as monumental as this is too complex for a straightforward pro/con list. Instead, I’ve found it useful to consider the choice through a variety of lenses. These will likely differ depending on the person and their life circumstances, but my considerations include: the practicalities of having a child as a queer woman in a lesbian relationship; the impact children might have on my often fragile mental health; how parenting would impede my freedom, in particular, my ability to write; and what it would mean to raise children as the devastating consequences of climate change worsen. I think about the impact a child would have on my finances, the lack of high-quality caregiving infrastructure available to me, and the physical toll birthing and raising a child would have on my wellbeing. Inevitably, I bump up against society’s judgments about women like me. The seminal book on the choice not to have children is called Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed, which echoes the criticism directed at childfree women. 

That having a child can even be considered a choice is a very contemporary idea. The first oral contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA in 1960. Before that, many women spent the majority of their lives either pregnant, worrying about becoming pregnant, or caring for small children. Following the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the rights of pregnant people have been dramatically eroded. Forty percent of women in the U.S. aged between 15 and 44 now live in states with limited or no access to an abortion. The freedom to choose whether or not to have a child is a privilege shaped by race, wealth, health, and citizenship status. Those of us who can choose should do so carefully, acknowledging that not everyone will be so fortunate. 

In my own life, I’ve settled comfortably into the don’t know camp. My partner and I are happily cohabitating (living in so many different kinds of sin!) with our two cats. Our lives are full of travel and friends and work, and most days it doesn’t feel like anything is missing. There is no chance that we—two cis women—could get pregnant accidentally. If we decide to have a child, they would cost time, money, and intention, to create. 

The internet is full of guides that aim to streamline this decision and finally steer the reader toward the right choice. But there is no right choice when it comes to a question as monumental as creating life. There is no way to know which path will be the correct one. I find it much more interesting to explore the messy process of making a decision, of weighing the various factors against your own desires and preferences. In my view, how we think about the decision is as important as whatever the eventual outcome will be. 

This reading list offers a range of perspectives that I hope will shape your thinking as you consider parenthood. From the impact of climate change to the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the choice, I’ve selected pieces that I hope will challenge our assumptions and encourage us to consider the question more deeply. I’ve also included stories that explore how this topic can be more complex for queer people, and how race and ethnicity shape both our historical and current approaches to child-rearing. 

We may never be sure we are making the right decision, but we can strive to understand our choice’s contours thoroughly and fairly. For now, I am happy to embrace the uncertainty—to know that whatever the future might hold, I have found joy and contentment in the present. 

Is it OK to Have a Child? (Meehan Crist, London Review of Books, February 2020)

The choice to have a child as climate change continues to warp our lives is fraught with fear and anxiety. This thoughtful essay refuses to shy away from the horrors of what’s unfolding, while also challenging the idea that individuals opting not to have children should be part of the solution. The author’s helpful reframing of climate catastrophe as a scourge fossil fuel companies must be held accountable for, rather than paid with reparations from our bodies, has stayed with me long after I finished reading. If concern for the climate is impacting how you think about your decision, I really recommend this piece. You may decide not to have children rather than subject them to the horrors of climate change—or you may benefit from realizing that climate change is a consequence of corporate greed, and instead refocus the blame where it belongs. 

I remember, at one point, being distinctly aware of my mind – the conscious everyday mind that talks to itself and to other people, the self where language is loud – floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now labored, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access. I was two selves at once. A double consciousness. If I had to, I knew I could still speak to the people around me, but it seemed so silly and small up there. I let it go.

Black and Child Free (Houreidja Tall, Harper’s Bazaar, December 2021)

The choice to have a child is influenced by many factors, which vary depending on the identities of the prospective parents. This piece examines the history of Black motherhood and speaks with Black women who’ve decided not to become parents. US maternal death rates have risen sharply in recent years, with many experts predicting that they will continue to worsen. Black women are more than twice as likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth as white women. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that Black women are opting out of motherhood. This piece also rebuts the idea that childfree women don’t like children or that children won’t be an important part of their lives. Rather, it celebrates the decision to invest your time, resources, and energy into yourself. As Aria, a 28-year-old journalist from Long Island, tells the reporter, “My life is for me, my time is for me, my money is for me, it’s all for me. I am going to invest all of my energy and resources into making my life as excellent and comfortable and happy as possible.”

In the United States, Black women’s children were considered property, sources of wealth for white slave owners during slavery. As such, they didn’t belong to their parents, and their parents ultimately had no say over their care. That legal and historical framing of Black birth and motherhood echoes down through culture today, most prevalent in the phenomenon of state intervention in Black parenting that some have called Jane Crow.

We Are Family: The Struggles of LGBTQ+ Family-Making, and How It’s Changing (Emma Specter, Vogue, June 2023)

If my partner and I wanted to become parents, our first step would be to visit the fertility clinic. As with all queer couples, the work toward childbearing would begin long before conception. We would look at donors, test our hormones, and prepare to spend thousands. We would need significant medical intervention to do something many straight couples can do accidentally, and yet in our heteronormative society, these stories are rarely told. This expansive piece recalls the experiences of queer, trans, and non-binary people looking to become pregnant and bear children. Collectively, their stories highlight the persistent biases that exist in the medical community against trans and queer people. It is also a celebration of the families who strive to break down traditional, gendered ideas of what it means to have and create a family. Despite all the information that exists around birthing and raising children, there is very little that centers on queer and trans stories. This piece is an excellent place to start. 

Obviously, the pregnancy and family-building processes aren’t easy or straightforward for all cishet pregnant people. When you’re a queer or trans person of color trying to start a family, though, things can be exponentially more complex.

Why Choosing to Have Children Is an Ethical Issue (Christine Overall, The MIT Press Reader, December 2019) 

When deciding whether or not to have children, people tend to draw on their emotions, instincts, memories, and desires. Few people actively consider the ethical dimensions of their decision. This piece argues that the decision to procreate needs to be thoughtfully considered through an ethical lens, particularly in light of the child’s inherent vulnerability and dependence: Choosing to have a child means taking responsibility for a new life. I enjoyed the clear, ethical framework this piece put forward, and how it locates the decision to have a child in a broader societal framework. It also reinforces the need for this decision to be a choice, rather than an inherent assumption, and calls on prospective parents to carefully analyze their decision before taking action. 

No one says to a newly pregnant woman or the proud father of a newborn, “Why did you choose to have that child? What are your reasons?” The choice to procreate is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.

The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us (Cheryl Strayed, The Rumpus, April 2011) 

Sometimes I just want someone to tell me what to do—and I can’t think of a wiser guide to all of life’s messy questions than Cheryl Strayed. In one of her most celebrated “Dear Sugar” columns, she responds to “Undecided,” who is considering the possibility of becoming a father. Strayed, of course, can’t answer that question, but she frames it as one of parallel lives. In one life, you bear children and devote yourself to parenting. In another, you don’t and devote yourself to other things. Neither choice is inherently better than the other, though you might find yourself better suited to a particular path. She encourages the questioner to write, to make lists about how he imagines his future life. It’s advice I’ve found to be very useful. She concludes by embracing the certainty that, whatever we choose, there’s no way to know the path not taken. That, she argues, is less a tragedy than an acceptance of the unknowable mysteries of life. 

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Life’s Longing For Itself (Rosie Spinks, What Do We Do Now That We’re Here?, December 2022)

For me, the most useful resource toward making this decision has been other people’s stories. In her newsletter, Rosie Spinks writes about her decision to have a child and how, in the process of childbearing and rearing, she hopes to challenge the capitalistic instincts involved in modern parenting. She celebrates the chaos that comes from leaning into the messiness of life and embraces the human frailties that exist beyond the narrow lens of optimization. She quotes Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On Children”: “Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.” This mystical perspective helps to deflate the self-importance that sometimes accompanies the decision, balancing it with the knowledge that whether or not you decide to have children, it is often a choice that’s beyond your control. 

In my twenties, I used to observe the act of modern parenting as a kind of capitalist slog, where the goal is to optimize another first world consumer to succeed under this wretched system. I know that sounds dark, but I suppose that’s because back then, I subconsciously saw my own life that way, too. Bringing another human into that would only make that task harder—and submit someone else to the messiness, chaos, and disorder of life. Why would I do that to them, and to myself? The answer, I’ve come to find, is because doing so reminds you of how human you are.

Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regular newsletter and is working on her first book.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copyeditor: Peter Rubin

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Media coverage of the natural world rarely acknowledges it, but queerness exists everywhere we look. Homosexuality can be found in 1,500 species. In the wild, there are also examples of asexuality, gender fluidity, polyamory, and sexual voraciousness, including gender-swapping fish, sadomasochist snails, genderqueer lions, birthing male seahorses, partially asexual ants, same-sex songbirds and flamingos, aroused bonobos, and exuberantly sexual dolphins. 

It’s ironic when you consider that homophobia originated from the idea that homosexual behavior is a crime against nature. What is considered “natural” or “unnatural” has been used to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people, as well as people of color and Indigenous people, for generations. And yet, nature has always been flamboyantly queer, insatiable in its appetite for sex, pleasure, and new life. 

Queer ecology is the application of queer theory to nature. It seeks to challenge dominant systems of heteronormativity, cisnormativity, colonialism, and capitalism and show how these destructive ideologies distance us from our natural environment. How we understand the natural world, and our place in it, has been heavily influenced by media that positions nature as pure and bountiful. The moniker “Mother Nature” emphasizes its life-giving and nurturing qualities. But nature also rages and destroys and fornicates as if life depended on it which, of course, it does. 

Some scholars argue that heteropatriarchy is fueling environmental collapse. In contrast, queer communities of care and support, built by people who are ostracized from their families, better reflect the symbiotic relationships in nature. Our planet is home to immense diversity in terms of both sex and gender. This should inspire us to expand our understanding of human identity, sexuality, pleasure, and desire. 

Consider the New Mexico whiptail lizard, which reproduces through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction that allows the female to create a viable offspring without a mate. Consider, too, the “birds and the bees” talk: It’s the clichéd story parents use to explain how babies are made, though as Micha Rahder notes, it’s an insult to birds and bees to have their ravenous sex lives reduced to a heteronormative fable. Both are infinitely more sexually adventurous than (most) humans.

The natural world is much wilder than we can ever imagine. We have so much to learn.

As we bear witness to the destruction wrought by climate change, we need new ways of interacting with the environment. As you’ll see in this reading list, queer ecology offers a new lens through which we can reimagine our relationships with our bodies, our peers, and nature. 

How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time (Alex Johnson, Orion Magazine, March 2011)

This thoughtful personal essay by queer conservationist Alex Johnson, laid out in the form of a lesson plan, joyfully challenges the double standard inherent in believing that nature intended for only a man and a woman to love each other and that humans ought to tear the earth apart to extract fossil fuels. Nature writing tends to be either beatific in describing the wonders of the natural world or despairing at how we are destroying it. But Johnson’s essay calmly collapses that dichotomy, noting how we “call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children.”

Writing about nature means accepting that it will prove you wrong. And right. And render you generally confused. Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means that there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist.

At Last, An Entire Institute for Queer Ecology (Landon Peoples, Atmos, January 2021)

Established in 2017, The Institute for Queer Ecology (IQECO) is a collaborative “organism” that is guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonized thought. Landon Peoples’ wide-ranging interview with its founder, Lee Pivnik, explores the institute’s creative mission to champion inventive solutions to the climate crisis. The institute aims to challenge mainstream ideas of humans versus nature and celebrate opportunities for synergy with the natural world. Lee, who identifies as queer, reflects on the intersections between his own identity, evolution, and the false binary that exists between culture and nature. This conversation offers a useful framework on how to find “beautiful fluidity” in a time of constant change.

The Institute of Queer Ecology acts as a visioning tool to speculate and imagine a new world that we can inhabit together—thinking of change as this grounding, universal principle that we first see in ourselves, and then acknowledging ourselves as individuals in the beautiful fluidity that queerness promises at the individual level—where you have the ability to constantly make yourself resistant to categorization.

Brigitte Baptiste: “It’s Time to Reframe Sustainable Work Through a Queer Lens” (Najit Benrabaa, Welcome To The Jungle, March 2022)

“There’s nothing more queer than nature,” Brigitte Baptiste argues in her short but compelling TEDx talk. Baptiste, one of the world’s most influential environmental experts, founded the leading biodiversity research center in her native Colombia. She has advised the U.N., written more than a dozen books, and won international prizes for her work. Najit Benrabaa’s interview covers Baptiste’s unique career path, “green capitalism,” and how a queer lens informs her work. Her fascinating personal story runs in parallel to her work as a biologist in Colombia, which is the most biodiverse country in the world per square kilometer. 

The queer view of biodiversity helps us assign new words to the transformations instead of reducing ourselves to canonical parameters or stereotyped descriptions. There is multiplicity in species and ecosystems. Queer ecology is a different way of looking at nature—it insists on the fact that we can enjoy, without prejudice, the diversity of life forms and sexualities being expressed.

On Not Becoming an Ecosexual (Meghan Flaherty, VQR, Winter 2022) 

Grassilingus, anyone? In her funny and thought-provoking essay, Meghan Flaherty examines ecosexuality and wonders how we ought to interact with nature. Her essay is carnal and complex, layering works of indigenous wisdom like Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass with the teachings of Instagram personalities like @MyOrgasmicLife, who calls herself the “Brené Brown of pussy.” Flaherty discovers, as both a gardener and an intellectual, that engaging with nature without exploiting it restores us in ways we can’t yet define. Quoting Kimmerer, she concludes that “any action on behalf of life will be reciprocated: ‘We restore the land, and the land restores us.’”

There is no dualism. There is no big divide. We are all connected, with or without souls. Hierarchy, any domination in the web of life, hurts everyone. “All flourishing is mutual.” We flourish, all of us together, or we flourish not at all. We start respecting all these “others”—nature, perhaps, first and foremost—or we die.

Qualities of Earth (Rebecca May Johnson, Granta, May 2020)

Rebecca May Johnson’s piece also begins in her garden. During the COVID lockdown, she passes her time growing vegetables and experiences how challenging it is to contain nature’s voracious appetite for life. Dividing land into allotments rented by individual gardeners proves futile as the vegetables copulate underground; growing courgettes and pumpkins side by side, she harvests strange hybrid crops with ombréd colors and alien textures. As she weeds, she listens to podcasts about gay women in France who are banned from having children through IVF. She thinks of her friends trying to become pregnant, of the “the intense, repressive hell” of making babies under patriarchy. Her essay expands into an argument for generosity — in terms of both material things and one’s frame of reference — as she shares the produce from her teeming garden with friends, lest they rot in the soil. 

That violent heteronormative cultures of sex and reproduction among humans are attributed to ‘nature’ feels astonishing after spending time on the allotment. The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural.

Queering the Food System (Daphne Chouliaraki Milner, Atmos, June 2022)

The food on my table is a persistent connection I have with nature. Whether it’s the herbs I grow on my windowsills or the veggies I pick up at the farmer’s market, it’s thrilling to think about nature’s queerness as I prepare dinner for my girlfriend. Like most people, we rely on an agricultural industry that exploits the earth’s resources for profit. Queer farmers, many of them nonwhite, are redefining what it means to farm the land respectfully, thinking of their crops “not as resources to be extracted, but rather as members of an ecosystem.” Daphne Chouliaraki Milner writes about mindful land practices and behavior-based animal management, reimagining one of the most environmentally damaging industries on the planet. This piece highlights the many challenges with monoculture farming and charts a path toward a more equitable and healthier future for the planet and all of its inhabitants. 

“Queer theory complicates reductive binary understandings of the world; it complicates ideas of hierarchy; it complicates the idea that there are better positions and worse positions”, said Benedict Morrison, member of Quinta, an ecovillage and LGBTQIA+ community project. “Queering our food systems is an attempt at radical empathy. It’s an attempt to always find the value in difference.”

Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regular newsletter and is working on her first book.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

By Clare Egan

Every year on St. Patrick’s Day, I brace myself for a flood of articles about Ireland. Almost always, these stories rely on a series of well-worn tropes that caricature the place I call home. No doubt you’ve read stories which reference Irish people’s love of alcohol and seen images of random things dyed green. While living in the U.S., I became accustomed to talking to strangers about Ireland. I have curly red hair, blue eyes, and a freckled complexion. My Irish accent is inescapable. When you look as Irish as I do, strangers want to talk to you about it. I didn’t mind but the stereotypes did grow tiresome.

For a while, I worked with a nonprofit focused on developing leadership skills among college students from Ireland and Northern Ireland. The program was established in the ’90s in response to the sectarian violence euphemistically known as “The Troubles.” Though the island has been relatively peaceful since the late ’90s, I would occasionally meet Americans who still imagined my homeland to be a dangerous, frightening place.

St. Patrick’s Day is, in essence, a great story. According to the legend, Patrick was “a sinner, a most simple countryman.” At 16, he was kidnapped and brought to pagan Ireland. He spent six years working as a shepherd and during this time, found God. He later converted Ireland to Christianity. This simple fifth-century story was the foundation for Ireland’s identity. 

In recent decades, Ireland has changed fundamentally. It is no longer the twee caricature that exists in our collective imagination. When I was born in the late ’80s, Ireland was powerfully discriminatory toward anyone who veered outside its so-called “Christian values.” Once married, women who worked in the public service were fired. Divorce was illegal. Rape within marriage was legal. Abortion was illegal, in almost all circumstances. Homosexuality was a criminal offense. In 1982, an Irish gay man named Declan Flynn was murdered in Fairview Park in Dublin. Despite two of his attackers admitting their role in his death, they served no jail time. “All of you come from good homes,” the judge said. In Northern Ireland, “The Troubles” seemed destined to continue indefinitely.

Since then, Ireland has modernized. I was 8 when, in 1995, divorce was finally made legal after a bitter referendum. It passed by the narrowest of margins: 50.28% in favor and 49.79% against. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement ended most of the violence in Northern Ireland, though peace remains fragile. Declan Flynn’s murder sparked a queer movement and, in 2015, 62% of people voted to allow same-sex marriage. Ireland was the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage by popular vote. In 2018, 66% of people voted to allow access to abortion. 

The Ireland of my youth was almost uniformly white. When I left secondary school, there was one black student in a school of more than 700 pupils. These days, Irish towns and villages are home to vibrant, diverse communities. Equally, as a child, I had almost no interaction with the Traveller community which was formally recognized as an ethnic minority in 2017. Irish Travellers have a rich cultural history which merits a list of its own. For those interested in knowing more, I’d really recommend Rosaleen McDonagh’s latest book, Unsettled.

Ireland has changed and yet, I’m not sure that international audiences have updated their mental image. To be fair, our tourism industry has long understood that there’s money to be made selling Ireland as “the land of saints and scholars.” That is part of Ireland but it’s not the complete picture. This reading list offers a more complicated portrait of Ireland. It is necessarily shaped by my sensibilities as a queer feminist. I’m white, middle class, and able-bodied, a set of experiences that have undoubtedly informed my worldview. Other Irish writers would compile a very different list and I hope they do. But this is my take.

For a tiny island on the edge of Europe, we get outsized attention today. I hope that this collection of longreads pushes people to examine their simplified notions of this country I call home.

Ann Lovett: Death of a ‘Strong, Kick-ass Girl’ (Rosita Boland, The Irish Times, March 2018)

In 1984, 15-year-old schoolgirl Ann Lovett died after giving birth to a baby boy in a grotto in Granard, County Longford. The story shocked the nation and the world. Overnight, the small village of Granard was swamped with national and international media. The community banded together, refusing to speak to the media. Her death sparked a seminal national debate on women giving birth outside marriage. Just four months before she died, two-thirds of the Irish people voted to enshrine the right to life of the unborn in the Irish Constitution. This controversial Eighth Amendment to the constitution wasn’t overturned until 2018.

To mark what would have been Ann’s 50th birthday, award-winning journalist Rosita Boland spoke with her friends, and eventually her boyfriend, to remember her life and the impact her shocking death had on Irish society. This piece goes some way toward restoring Ann’s dignity as a complicated, rounded person in her own right. Ann Lovett’s name has been synonymous with Ireland’s horrific treatment of women but, as this piece shows, she was so much more than that.

Ann took the scissors out of her schoolbag, leaving the bag near the entrance. Sometime between 12.45pm and 4pm, she lay down beside the workhouse chapel railings, removed her underwear, and gave birth in the rain.

She cut the umbilical cord with the scissors she had brought from home, and wrapped her dead baby in her coat.

He was full term and weighed 6½ pounds. Then she lay down again on the wet mossy gravel, in her school uniform, in the persistent rain, without her coat, her body beginning to go into irreversible shock.

He Had His Reasons (Colin Barrett, Granta, September 2016)

Looking at the grim statistics in Ireland, the most dangerous place for a woman is her home. Since 1996, 244 women have died violently. Of these deaths, 62% happened in their homes and 87% were killed by a man known to them. Eighteen children have died alongside their mothers and in all but one murder-suicide case, the killer was the woman’s partner. Despite this epidemic of violence against women, many Irish media outlets fail to understand the true scale of the crisis.

Colin Barrett examines the August 2016 murder of Clodagh Hawe and her three young sons Liam, Niall, and Ryan. The killer, Alan Hawe — Clodagh’s husband and the boys’ father — died by suicide. Often in Ireland, cases like these are framed as “family tragedies.” In this case, media coverage emphasized how well-respected the killer was in the local community and speculated as to some unknown mental distress he must have been experiencing. This piece rightly focuses its attention on “the invisible tyranny of domestic abuse,” situating these murders as the terminal act in an escalating pattern of violence and fear.

Language, in its quest to be accurate and as concise as possible, can be callous, and the hyphen in the term ‘murder-suicide’ is a violent coupling, a forcing together into a state of symbiotic equivalence two things that are not, of course, symbiotic or equivalent at all. The hyphen welding ‘murder’ to ‘suicide’ implies that each state is as bad, or as tragic, as the other. That the murderer who then commits suicide is, on some level, as much a victim as those he murdered, is paying a commensurate price within a larger, indivisible spectrum of suffering signified by that conjoining hyphen. But what happened to the Hawe family was not only a ‘murder-suicide’. It was, first and foremost, a multiple murder committed by a man who then committed suicide.

Are You Somebody? (Nuala O’Faolain, New Island Books, first published in 1996)

Perhaps the best way to introduce Nuala O’Faolain is to recount the time she went on The Late Late Show and told the bemused host that she’d had lots of sex often just for the exercise. It was 1996 and women’s sexuality was simply never discussed. Her candor was part of what made her memoir a bestseller. She describes the Ireland of her youth as “a living tomb for women” and recounts her experiences with men, alcohol, and the Catholic Church. Many American readers with an interest in Irish literature have read male authors like Colm Tóibín and Frank McCourt. Books by both of these men have subsequently been made into Hollywood movies, reaching even larger audiences. Irish women almost never get that opportunity. O’Faolain’s book gives an important snapshot into the life of Irish women who, in many cases, suffered while the men in their lives flourished. If she were alive today, she’d be celebrated as a virtuoso of the personal essay and an authority on living your life on your own terms.

They were Mother and Father, and does a child know any different? Sure it made me bedwet when he came home pissed and pummelled my mother. Her cries for help were heartrending, and made me try to sleep in a chest of drawers.

Where The Bodies Are Buried (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, March 2015)

Throughout the Troubles, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had a policy of killing suspected informants. The case of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was especially heinous. She was taken from her home in 1972. Her remains were eventually discovered 31 years later. A police investigation found no evidence that McConville was an informant. Many thousands of articles have been written about The Troubles. I’ve selected this piece as a useful introduction for readers interested in learning more about this long and brutal conflict. It evokes the particular cruelty of “disappearing” a young mother, leaving her children “in a purgatory of uncertainty.” Patrick Radden Keefe’s article was later expanded into a book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

Jean McConville had just taken a bath when the intruders knocked on the door. A small woman with a guarded smile, she was, at thirty-seven, a mother of ten. She was also a widow: her husband, Arthur, had died eleven months earlier, of cancer. The family continued to live in Divis Flats—a housing complex just off the Falls Road, in the heart of Catholic West Belfast—but had recently moved to a slightly larger apartment. The stove was not connected yet, so Jean’s daughter Helen, who was fifteen, had gone to a nearby chip shop to bring back dinner. “Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke,” Jean told her. It was December, 1972, and already dark at 6:30 P.M. When the children heard the knock, they assumed that it was Helen with the food.

How the Truth of ‘The Troubles’ Is Still Suppressed (Alex Gibney, The New York Review of Books*, February 2019)

On June 18, 1994, in the small village of Loughinisland, County Down, a pub was crowded with patrons watching the Republic of Ireland play in the World Cup. Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gunmen burst into the pub and opened fire. Six people were killed and five were wounded. Documentarian Alex Gibney set out to make a documentary about the events of that night, interviewing victims’ families, former terrorists, officers from Northern Ireland’s police force (then the Royal Ulster Constabulary), and other government officials. Despite an extraordinary amount of physical evidence and damning testimony, no one was ever charged with the crime.

While making the documentary, filmmakers uncovered evidence of collusion between police and paramilitary forces. Rather than investigating these allegations, the police arrested two of the film’s producers, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey. The case attracted worldwide attention and sparked a campaign on the importance of press freedom. This article asks whether secrecy should be the price for peace and how the families impacted by The Troubles can move forward without achieving justice for their loved ones.

From the perspective of the government, keeping secrets is the price of law and order. But from the perspective of victims and survivors, a secret that hides the truth is not any kind of justice; it means getting away with murder.

On Liberating the History of Black Hair (Emma Dabiri, Literary Hub, June 2020)

The Ireland of my childhood was almost entirely white. Living in a rural area, I rarely encountered anyone who didn’t look like me. Growing up in Dublin, Emma Dabiri was having a very different experience. Through the lens of black hair, she writes movingly about how being different meant living under constant surveillance. Ireland’s identity as the “land of saints and scholars” dates back more than 600 years. In that time, it has almost always been associated with Christianity and classical learning. Dabiri’s work as an academic, broadcaster, and author expands this narrow interpretation. This piece is an extract from her book, Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture, which explores how black hair has been appropriated and stigmatized throughout history.

As a black child with tightly coiled hair, growing up in an incredibly white, homogeneous, socially conservative Ireland, I certainly wasn’t considered pretty, but that started to change in my midteens. I remember being told that I was “lucky I was pretty,” which meant I could “almost get away with being black.”

No Shelter (Caelainn Hogan, The Stinging Fly, Winter 2017–18)

In recent decades, Ireland has become home to an increasing number of asylum seekers. Migrants seeking asylum in Ireland are forcibly housed in a series of Direct Provision centers which are often located in dilapidated buildings in isolated parts of Ireland. Asylum seekers receive a meager daily allowance and many live in shared rooms without access to a kitchen. Caelainn Hogan speaks to several people caught up in Ireland’s inhumane asylum system, which sees a small number of companies profit from human misery. Her reporting on individual stories illuminates the details of how the lives of asylum seekers are warped by a merciless bureaucratic system and shows just how difficult it is for them to establish safe and independent lives in Ireland.

The first reception centre Joy was sent to was Balseskin, the entry point for most asylum-seekers to the direct-provision system. It is known by many as the ‘camp’: a maze of Portacabins hidden off a narrow road, near to a sparse expanse of industrial estates in Finglas, close to IKEA and the airport. Most people would only pass near to it to buy furniture or to go on holiday.

Troubles in Quinn Country (Kit Chellel and Liam Vaughan, Bloomberg Businessweek*, June 2020)

Sean Quinn’s name is ubiquitous in Ireland. In 2008, he was the richest man in the country, with business interests across health insurance, construction, and hospitality. His status in the local community was almost messianic. But by 2011, following a series of risky investments, he had filed for bankruptcy. What followed was a campaign of torture, terror, and revenge that rarely made the national news. As The Irish Times noted, if the same thing happened in Dublin, it would have been treated as a national emergency. This deeply reported story deftly reveals the complicated dynamics of rural communities, particularly in regions suffering from historic under-investment.

There has been a Mafia-style group with its own ‘Godfather’ operating in our region. Behind it all is a powerful paymaster and his criminal gang.

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Clare Egan is a queer writer based in Dublin, Ireland. Her writing has appeared in The Irish Times, TheJournal.ie, and others. She is currently working on her first book.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands