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I don’t talk about my Horse Girl era much.

Maybe it’s because of the assumptions I fear people will make about me based on the cultural stereotype. Maybe it’s because I feel other childhood obsessions — sled dogs, Greek mythology, the Redwall series, various Nintendo franchises — had a more formative impact on the adult I became. Maybe it’s because my time as a Horse Girl felt so brief and casual compared to the denim-jacketed diehards that define said stereotype; as if I was merely a pony poseur, not a true Horse Girl. 

But I cannot deny that from the ages of roughly 7 to 10, I was fully, unapologetically, a Horse Girl. 

Here’s what I remember: Listening to the audiobook (back when they truly were “books on tape”) of Misty of Chincoteague on a family road trip. The trail ride in Estes Park, Colorado when I was 7 — probably the happiest day of my life. The sirenic allure of the bright pink and blue Grand Champions collectible boxes. The thick Dorling Kindersley breed guide I read over and over again, cover to cover, memorizing every detail; I could tell you the difference between a Russian Don and a Budyonny, although I definitely couldn’t today. The one summer I attempted a riding camp, with the mustiness, the satisfaction of cleaning the muck from a hoof, and Coley, the small, curmudgeonly black mare who kicked if you didn’t approach her right and who I loved with every fiber of my head-in-the-clouds being. 

Over the past several years, there’s been plenty of writing exploring our cultural obsession with the idea of the Horse Girl. This identity holds so much — in examinations of Horse Girls, we find odes to untamed femininity, searing indictments of insularity and privilege, and a swinging pendulum between romantic nostalgia and reality. She is both the awkward and O-M-G-relatable Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers and a stirring voice in the poetry of Ada Limón. In 2021, Electric Literature executive editor Halimah Marcus edited a collection of essays reclaiming and recasting the stereotype; two pieces from that collection are included on this list, along with some other favorites that explore the idea of the Horse Girl and the bond at its center. So saddle up and enjoy.

An Autistic Girl’s Guide to Horses (Katie Rose Pryal, Catapult, December 2022)

Katie Rose Pryal was diagnosed with autism in 2020, at the age of 44. Upon receiving her diagnosis, she writes, much of her childhood “came into focus,” particularly her special interest in horses. Around the same time as she recognized her autism, she was learning how to ride again, with her horse, Leroy. Her bond with Leroy intertwines with her further understanding of her own self and experiences. The resulting reflection is introspective and healing. 

For an autistic person, to be able to communicate, to touch, to care, all without fear, is a gift. Too often, our words, our very actualities, are rejected. With Leroy, I could share all of my secrets, spoken or unspoken, and he would listen with one fuzzy ear cocked in my direction. I could drape my body across his back and rest my head on his side, listening to the slow beat of his heart, steady as the dirt beneath our feet. Even when his coat was glossy, I could brush him, aligning each tiny red hair across his flank.

Black Californians Have Long Celebrated Cowboy Culture. We’re Just Catching Up. (Tyrone Beason, Los Angeles Times, December 2022) 

Beason profiles riders of all genders for this gorgeous feature for the Times’ “My Country” series, so I’m choosing to count it for this list. This piece takes readers on a journey from the bucking thrill of the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, an event celebrating Black cowboys and cowgirls, to a peaceful morning at the end of a trail ride on a Northern California farm —  a painful past being reclaimed to the celebratory current zeitgeist of Lil Nas X and Beyonce. Come for the stories of Black joy and community; stay for Jason Armond’s stunning photos. 

It originated as an epithet used to demean Black cattle drivers and ranch hands, who made up as much as a quarter of all such workers in the Southwest in the late 1800s, says Boyd-Pates. When Black men call themselves ‘cowboys’ and Black women refer to themselves as ‘cowgirls,’ Boyd-Pates says, they take pride in being able to transform a painful history into something they can glorify.

Finland’s Hobbyhorse Girls, Once a Secret Society, Now Prance in Public (Ellen Barry, New York Times, April 2019) 

Barry’s dispatch from Helsinki is not the first exploration of the community around hobbyhorsing, a sport in which adolescent girls trot, hurdle, and race astride wooden toy horses. The hobbyhorse girls of Finland have been the subject of viral videos, documentaries, and trend pieces — both praised as unique confidence-builders, and derided for being too childish, or worse, cringe. 

What happens when the hobbyhorse girl grows up, though? One of the key voices in Barry’s exploration is Alisa Aarniomaki, a spokeswoman for the sport who is now in her early twenties. Through profiling those who have stuck with the hobby, even as they grow into teenagers and young adults, Barry highlights the importance of the community to its members and how we may all need a space to safely rekindle our sense of childlike joy. Cringe is dead, the earth above it tamped by thousands of imagined hoofbeats. Long live the earnest pursuit of wonder. 

Once, she was invited to a party in France where adult guests were given hobbyhorses, provided as a way, she said, ‘to run away from your boring and maybe exhausting normal life.’ The one thing that drives her crazy, she added, is when people describe her hobbyhorse pursuit as playing. ‘If someone says we are playing, it strips away everything we made, it strips away the reality.’

Horse Girl (Heather Radtke, The Believer, February 2019)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is a Horse Girl, one must have a favored Horse Girl book or series. These are often pillars of the genre, standalones like Black Beauty or series like The Saddle Club, Pony Pals, or Thoroughbred. 

As a former Marguerite Henry girlie (if you were also a big King of the Wind fan as a child, know that I see you and I love you), I was thrilled to see a dispatch from the famed Chincoteague Island Pony Swim, an event that has captured the imaginations of Horse Girls ever since its appearance in the iconic Horse Girl novel Misty of Chincoteague. 

In its encapsulation of the wild, murky, and sometimes uncomfortable space between two ideas, Radtke’s reflection on her visit to Chincoteague feels like the pony swim itself. As the horses make their perilous journey between islands, we find ourselves in the messy middle space between hazy nostalgia and harsh reality, wonder and horror, the desire for something to exist in our imaginations as both unclaimable and wild, and as an accepting friend. 

Watching the scene asked me to hold two truths at once. The ponies are wild creatures that, like deer or raccoons, need to be managed. But in the mythology of the swim, the ponies are also presented as transcendent companions, animals who might offer up their manes for braiding and their backs for riding. Here, the ponies were both docile pets and feral beasts, animals that need to be convinced to swim so they might be ridden by little girls.

Horse Girl: An Inquiry (Carmen Maria Machado, excerpted for Them from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, August 2021)

The Horse Girl stereotype is associated with privilege — whiteness, wealth, thinness, hyper-femininity — despite, as Carmen Maria Machado points out, a multitude of non-white riding cultures and traditions. Typically, when thinking of Horse Girls, we project our collective assumptions about what a Horse Girl is or isn’t, and mix in our own desires or insecurities. 

Machado’s contribution to Marcus’s anthology explores identities and desire — those we cultivate, like the author’s wish to be around horses and burgeoning queerness, and those projected onto us as an assumption, fetishization, or other intrusion. (In one section, she notes she is “exasperated” that this essay includes, among other things, inappropriate comments from older men and sexual innuendo.) In a stunning personal inquiry, Machado tracks that desire, from a covert moment with a coveted toy horse to briefly revisiting riding as an out queer adult. 

There are so many moments that will stick with me from reading this that it’s hard to pick just one, but a particularly intriguing parallel she makes is between horses having barn names and show names and the magic people find in names for drag or roller derby.

Are Unicorns Horses? Unicorns are horses that can only be ridden by virgins. 

Are Horses Unicorns? Horses don’t care what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you.

What Are Horses? A species of odd-toed, ungulate mammal, primarily domesticated, belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. Useful, expensive, dangerous. Beautiful.

How Horses Helped My Ancestors Evade Colonizers, & Helped Me Find Myself (Braudie Blais-Billie, excerpted for Bustle from Horse Girls, edited by Halimah Marcus, July 2021)

Braudie Blais-Billie’s connection to horses derives from both sides of her family: She describes the thrill of watching barrel racing at the Seminole rodeo with her paternal grandmother and feeding apples to her maternal grandparents’ horses at their home in rural Québec. Her great-grandfather, she learns, was a prominent Seminole cattleman. 

In addition to reflecting on her family’s deep connection to horses and how it shaped her identity, Blais-Billie digs deeper into the history of Seminole resistance to colonization, and the role that the shared knowledge of horses and cattle husbandry played in their survival. It’s a reminder that the bond between humans and horses has been about more than childhood fantasy as displayed on Trapper-Keeper stickers — it’s been a means of resistance and resilience, of deep connection to one’s history, culture, and community. (Also, at a time of attempts to repress teaching histories of non-white and other marginalized peoples in the U.S., it’s a reminder of the power that comes in keeping those histories and stories accessible.) 

Tia and I have settled on the loose term ‘Seminole horse girl.’ It seems simple, but the specificity allows just enough space for the intricacies of our biracial identity. Like the Seminole peoples, ‘Seminole horse girls’ originates from a conglomeration of cultures adapting to their environment; sometimes not belonging to one group exclusively can be empowering. I’ve found that, in our family, horseback riding is more than show titles and prestigious stables — horses are how we survive.

I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won (Lara Prior-Palmer, Longreads, May 2019)

The Mongol Derby is a test of will for even the most experienced rider, a grueling 1000-kilometer (621-mile) run recreating the messenger route of Genghis Khan through a variety of terrain on semi-wild horses. Riders change horses every 40 km, which means less exhaustion for the horses but an even greater challenge for the riders, who switch horses just as they’ve grown accustomed to the quarter-ton beast under them. In 2013, British equestrian Lara Prior-Palmer became the first woman to win this equine gauntlet, which she writes about in her memoir, Rough Magic, excerpted here for Longreads.

Those looking for the visceral awe of the race itself will have to read Prior-Palmer’s memoir in its entirety, but what makes this section so engrossing is the strong sense of place. We’re with her as she finds herself lost in the “concrete nowheres” of London, then in the green expanse outside Ulaanbaatar, and inside her mind as she longs for the adventure and freedom so often romanticized within the Horse Girl canon. As she trains by riding bareback through a field of ragwort — at full gallop, gripping the horse with all her strength — it’s hard not to feel that dangerous thrill, that reminder of why these animals have such a chokehold on our imaginations. 

I was expecting quite the holiday — a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to… By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.

My Little Pony Broke All of the ‘Girl Toy’ Rules (Seanan McGuire, Polygon, November 2020)

As there is for all the semi-universal phenomena of millennial and Gen-Z childhoods, there’s a TikTok about this. In a clip that has been seen more than 1.5 million times, user @funkyfrogbait compares how people think girls play with toys (bubbly, idle chat about shopping) with how they actually play with toys, wherein wide-eyed plastic critters become players in a harrowing trial before a shadowy council. The comments are full of affirmations, memories of Barbies in divorce court, Polly Pocket murder mysteries, and even re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic with Littlest Pet Shop toys. 

It’s difficult for a child of the ’80s or later to imagine this kind of narrative-heavy pretend play, full of high fantasy and even higher stakes, as being out of reach. My own childhood memories are spotted with dramatic courtroom scenes with stuffed animals and battlefield epics with Beanie Babies. But in this essay for Polygon’s “Horse Girl Canon” package, Seanan McGuire explores how My Little Pony, a fantasy-focused toy line “for girls,” shaped the way we still play today. It’s a fascinating look at the cultural significance of the toys, and their evolution from a realistic companion for horse girls with aspirations of stables to juggernaut — a rainbow-tinted powerhouse that sparked imaginations at a time when only “boy toys” were centered on this kind of fantastical play. (Of course, as McGuire correctly notes, the American toy industry still enforces a rigid gender binary, but kids of all genders have always enjoyed “girl toys” like My Little Pony.)

The 1980s were a time of fantasy adventures for children, with little attention paid by the censors to anything that had been preemptively dismissed as an attempt to sell toys… Death was generally off-screen, but it was present, and dangers were both real and manifest in the worlds we were told our toys and imaginary friends inhabited. But at the time of My Little Pony’s launch, all the grand, sweeping adventure was reserved for the blue side of the toy aisle, intended for the male** audience. Toys aimed at girls were much more likely to be domestic in nature, filled with baby dolls and pretend kitchens — in other words, training them for adulthood.

People Ask Me to Write About Horses (Adrienne Celt, Tin House, June 2018)

Author Adrienne Celt achieved what most Horse Girls only manifest in fantastical notebook scribblings: owning a real live horse. But like most things romanticized from afar, reality can be bumpy — horse ownership is messy, expensive, and can be heartbreaking. Celt tenderly reflects on what draws “rational adults” to horses, and on her emboldening bond and uncertain future with her own horse, Lady. 

Celt admits that reflecting on the pain points of horse ownership sounds like #ChampagneProblems, but it’s, as always, about more than that. It’s an essay on horses and their romanticization, but also an essay about seeking and pursuing joy, digging your heels in and spurring it on, chasing it cantering into the wind. 

Of course, when I say that horses are romantic, I mean for people who don’t spend much time with them. To most actual horse people, the animals lose their mystique rather quickly. On farms and ranches they’re beasts of burden, livestock of the same order as cows or pigs or dogs or goats. To a pleasure rider like me, they’re funny and corporeal: they fart in your face when you try to pick their back feet, and get scared when they see things out of the corners of their eyes, thinking that any abandoned truck tire or garden hose is about to kill them.

Who Gets To Be an Equestrian? (Rita Omokha, Elle, October 2020) 

As millions of people took to the streets following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, so began a reckoning over anti-Black racism in many sectors and communities, including equestrians. In June 2020, teen equestrian Sophie Gochman wrote an essay for The Chronicle of the Horse, calling out the race and class privilege of the community; a white trainer responded in the same publication with defensiveness and condescension while quoting MLK. Rita Omokha continues this necessary conversation, speaking with Black women equestrians about the discrimination they face — both overt and systemic — and how they are working to make the sport more welcoming. 

Omokha’s thoughtful profile of Black equestrians serves as a reminder that should undergird conversations about representation in any community or sport. Behind this discourse, you’ll find real people with real passion and expertise, paying a real human cost (be it financial, emotional, or otherwise) that they should never have had to pay. Omokha takes care to discuss the struggle of being “one of the few,” and the conflict between excelling in the world you love, and, as equestrian Shaquilla Blake puts it, “whitewashing [yourself]” to do so. 

Under the shade, the air thick with the scent of manure, they take a moment to catch their breath before the day’s trail rides begin. As Blake cools off, she feels a tug at her dreadlocks. “Can you feel that?” a giddy voice says from behind her. It belongs to a 13-year-old girl whose profile matches what Blake calls “your typical equestrian”—namely, wealthy and white. Can I feel that?? Of course I can! You just yanked the hell out of my dreads!

Lindsay Eanet is a Chicago-based writer, editor & performer. Her writing has been featured at Polygon, Longreads, Serious Eats, Block Club Chicago & others. But enough about her, let’s talk about you. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

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Hope Reese | Longreads | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,125 words)

“The nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her memoir In the Dream House. “We see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.” In this new book, which draws attention to the rarely-written issue of abuse in queer relationships, she hopes to provide an antidote to the problem.

In her elegant and piercing story, Machado, whose 2017 collection Her Body And Other Parties was a finalist for the National Book Award, fits fragmented memories together to tell her own story of abuse (chapters appear as vignettes, with titles such as “The Dream House as Utopia,” or “The Dream House as Diagnosis”).

“The Dream House” — although entirely real — is a bit fantastical, and Machado writes in the second person to turn the lens around. Her partner is, simply, “the woman in the dream house.” And Machado’s use of footnotes from the Motif Index of Folk Literature is uniquely striking.

I spoke with Machado, currently the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, ahead of her book launch, discussing the dearth of literature about abuse in queer relationships and how we think about women as perpetrators of abuse, among other topics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

*

Hope Reese: When did you first notice a lack of stories about abuse in queer relationships? And what happened when you began digging for more?

Carmen Maria Machado: I was in San Diego for the summer and a friend of mine sent me this beautiful essay by Conner Habib, If you ever did write anything about me, I’d want it to be about love, about his relationship with an abusive man who put him in the hospital. I kept looking for stuff about this, about queer domestic violence, and I’m finding a lot of statistics and a lot of articles that are like, “this is a thing that happens,” but no accounts, or creative nonfiction.

The same way if I want to read a creative nonfiction piece about a cancer survivor, I could find that in a second — you’ll find 50 books like that. So I was looking and just couldn’t find anything and this essay was really beautiful. But it was also published on someone’s blog, and I was like, certainly there must be more of these, right? Like in a book somewhere? There’s another one by Jane Eaton Hamilton, about lesbian abuse, which was published in an online magazine.

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But I was like, why is it so hard to find these things? The more I looked, the more I realized that there wasn’t anything there. As a writer, both books that I have written are books that I wanted that didn’t exist, so I decided to fill that space myself. I would love to hear a queer historian’s take on this topic, you know? I really hope someone writes that book.

Is the empty space due to the fact that it might make the queer community feel vulnerable in a certain way? What are your thoughts on why these stories are missing?

It’s a bunch of things. It’s homophobia. It’s the fact that we don’t place any cultural value in telling queer people what their experiences mean. This is just an example of that. I think it’s partially the community protecting itself and not wanting to talk about abuse within its ranks. Not to be very dramatic, but it reminds me of And the Band Played On, about the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. One of the most interesting things about it is when you read it, because it’s a matter-of-fact, chronological progression of the conversations that were happening around HIV — on a scientific level, on a government level, within the queer community itself — and as you’re reading it you’re watching everyone drop the ball, all in a row. Literally everyone. There’s something astonishing about that. This is similar — it’s a lot of people dropping a lot of balls.

When I was reading all these accounts of people talking about this stuff in the ’80s, a lot of lesbians were like, “Oh, women can’t batter other women, that’s not possible,“ or “it’s a paradise here, why would you say otherwise?” Or “only Butch lesbians beat their femmes because they have male privilege,” or whatever. And outside our community, no one gave a shit. A lot of organizations on domestic violence would accuse lesbians of taking away resources from straight battered women. We didn’t know how to talk about these things.

Is it also that we don’t talk about women as abusers, in general? Did you find examples of it being written about in heterosexual relationships?

It’s interesting. I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people saying, “I know you didn’t write this book for me, I’m a straight woman, but I recognized like the dynamics of emotional and verbal abuse that you describe here, which I never see represented anywhere.”

People get really fixated. People like their abuse narratives very neat and clean. And that involves like black eyes, not steady psychological torment. I had somebody write me, saying, “I am a man who was married to a woman who abused me. And I was just really relieved to see a narrative with a woman abuser, because it’s not something you see.” We don’t write about these things enough.

The abuse I suffered was primarily emotional, verbal. There were some physical elements. I think a lot about what would’ve happened if I stayed. If it would’ve escalated. I’m not an expert on domestic violence. I think sometimes people do transition from verbal to physical. But I feel lucky I didn’t have to find out where the bottom was. It felt like the bottom for me, but I don’t know if I hit the bottom of what could’ve happened. It’s really terrifying. One of the hardest things about writing this book was going back to those places. Those really bad moments, the worst of it … I remember thinking, “I didn’t know this could happen.” I was so scared, and I had no language for it.

If I could say anything to anyone, it would be, “you should never feel that way.” I want to convey the deep fucked-upped-ness of it.

You draw readers immediately into very vulnerable moments — locking yourself in the bathroom, for instance, to escape from your partner’s rage. What was it like to write about things that are happening, as they are happening? Did you take notes as it was happening, or rely on memory?

I kept a for LiveJournal for ten years, in my teens and early 20’s, and that was the first way I ever wrote for an audience. I remember discovering when stuff was happening to me, like a bad shift at work, thinking “oh man, this is going to make a great post.” It’s kind of a writer’s instinct. You know that something is happening that will eventually make an interesting story. Some people who aren’t writers think it needs to be a pure thing. But if you’re a writer, the whole way you observe the world is through this lens of narrative. The more you write and live, you develop the instinct.

So in my head, there was always a sense of purpose. The thing that defined that relationship was the feeling that I was trapped forever in this present tense, which is why I wrote those pieces of the book in second-person present tense. Even once I was out of the relationship, I had a sense of shape but was trying to make sense of it.

There’s a scene where you and your partner are grading standardized tests together. You leave for a bit to help someone, and miss her phone calls, which makes her angry — she tells you not to write about it. What was happening in these moments?

She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of exposure. Of the narrative that I possess. I’ve never forgotten that. When I wrote that scene, I was thinking about that moment. It was so early in our relationship. Now when you think about it, you think: Red flags everywhere. But at the time, I didn’t see them.

Do you feel conflicted in any way about how you represent her or what she might think of it?

No.

Your book is nonfiction, but has elements of fantasy — even the concept of the “dream house“ seems a bit like a fairytale. What was your intention with bringing elements of fiction into your story?

Well, one of the books that helped unlock something for me was Kevin Brockmeier’s memoir, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade and it’s this really beautiful, spare memoir of middle school. Otherwise, it’s very traditional in terms of the way it’s told. But there’s this moment where he goes to the bathroom or leaves his classroom somehow in the middle of the day, and time freezes. He encounters his adult self, and they have this really beautiful conversation. So it’s the adult Kevin, the author, talking to his younger self. I remember reading that and thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that.” I didn’t know that you could invoke this very obviously fictional gesture into an otherwise nonfiction book. I was moved by the way it opened up something in the book that was so special and so beautiful. So I began thinking a lot about nonfiction, as it exists.

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The idea that nonfiction always has this active resurrection. You’re reconstructing dialogue. You’re trying to remember, and memory is weird. Leaning into the part of that process in which like fiction is actually a useful tool as a writer. I also was thinking about Proxies by Brian Blanchfield, an essay collection where every essay is on a certain topic, and he writes it from memory. But the final essay is a correction to all the essays that come before. So it leans into how memory functions, and how the past functions.

When you’re writing about a topic like abuse, that involves gaslighting, all of these things benefit from that kind of inquiry. I think about genre and about the way stories get shaped by the expectations of the genre. I decided that there was enough space in the memoir to have [fictional] bits. For example, like the murder mystery, which was like clearly a fictional gesture, pulling in Alice in Wonderland to an otherwise factual scene. And sort of moving into a fantasy space. Or using a fairy tale, like The Queen and the Squid, to basically do a thing I couldn’t do — reproduce some emails from my ex. I wasn’t allowed to because they’re copyrighted to the person who wrote them. So I had to create another way of showing the reader what I was experiencing, and what I was reading, without actually violating copyright.

A fairy tale is a transformative space. Part of it is that I am a fiction writer. That’s where my training is. So my instinct is to think about things in this way. So even though I had to recreate scenes of my own past, as best and faithfully as I could, and I had to do all this historical research, it feels like a form that I had to push into in my own way.

How do you think your book will be received by the queer community? How would you like it to be received?

When I started writing this book, I thought: This is the most niche book I could write. Both the premise, the structure. But I’m interested to hear that people are finding something in it that I didn’t expect them to find. Which is interesting and rewarding. I do have a lot of anxiety about how the queer community will receive the book, and I don’t want to articulate them because it stresses me out to think about them! I won’t necessarily be part of the conversation, but I’m glad people will be having the conversation.

I want 50 more books like this. I want people to write a book and say, “In the Dream House was insufficient, and I’m going to rewrite it in my own way.” I want mine to be a tiny piece of a canon; I want people to feel free to tell their own stories.

* * *

Hope Reese is a journalist based in Louisville, KY. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Village Voice, Vox, and other publications.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

In a profile for Vulture, writer Carmen Maria Machado, whose short story collection Her Body and Other Parties is in development as a TV series similar to “Black Mirror,” discusses the broad spectrum of behavior that causes harm to women, the nuances of “benevolent sexism,” who gets to define the #MeToo movement, and how it should progress.

“What is #MeToo, really?” Machado thought aloud, over a duck egg balanced atop a tower of crisp potatoes. “What does it mean at its core? Is it about power? Is it about gender? Who decides?” She’s thinking about these questions as she writes her next book, which will also explore the thornier regions of #MeToo, but has nothing to do with Díaz, or any man. In March, she wrote a long Facebook post about her abusive ex-girlfriend and the anguish she’d felt about not naming her sooner. This relationship will be the subject of her untitled speculative memoir, forthcoming from Graywolf next year. “There is no council saying, ‘This is the meaning of #MeToo,’” she continued. “There’s no magic council of women in really long robes.” So how did she define this moment that we’re in? “It’s about previously unspoken elements of sexual harassment, rape, and power being brought to light,” she concluded.

But what comes after? “God, what should we do with them?” she said with a laugh. Clearly, men who have committed crimes should be held accountable, but for all the rest, she imagined a sort of fantastical body-swap experiment. “If all things were equal, if it was fair, men would get to experience what we get to experience. In terms of having their art utterly devalued at every turn. In terms of not being taken seriously. Obviously,” she added dryly, “I don’t think that will happen.”

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At Medium, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body author Roxane Gay created Unruly Bodies, an excellent pop-up magazine, to be delivered in installments over four Tuesdays in April — “a month-long magazine exploring our ever-changing relationship with our bodies,” she writes in the introduction. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human.”

She tapped a diverse group of 24 writers to contribute. This first edition features an introduction by Gay, and essays by Randa Jarrar, Kiese Laymon, Matthew Salesses, Keah Brown, S. Bear Bergman, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. Writers to be featured in the next three editions: Carmen Maria Machado, chelsea g. summers, Kaveh Akbar, Terese Mailhot, Casey Hannan, Samantha Irby, Tracy Lynne Oliver, Kelly Davio, Brian Oliu, Mike Copperman, Danielle Evans, Jennine Capó Crucet, Megan Carpentier, Kima Jones, the writer known as Your Fat Friend, Gabrielle Bellot, Mensah Demary, and larissa pham.

In creating Unruly Bodies, Gay was influenced by her experience after publishing Hunger. Readers reacted in ways that were intrusive, inappropriate, and hurtful. Unsolicited (and unqualified), they offered diet and exercise advice. They judged her. They insulted her.

I wrote about my body and strangers, with both good and bad intentions, generally missed the point of what I had to say. They viewed my body as a problem to be solved, as something they could discuss and debate. But I put myself out there. I wrote the story of my body so what could I do but grit my teeth and get through it?

After getting through it, she was inspired to ask others to write about their experiences living — in one way or another — outside the straight, cis, thin, white mainstream.

I first began thinking of the body as unruly after reading Hanne Blank’s collection Unruly Appetites. It was such a provocative, honest phrasing, this acknowledgment that the things we most want and crave are rarely easily ruled or disciplined. The bodies harboring our unruly appetites are unruly in and of themselves — they are as weak and fallible as they are strong. In many ways, our bodies are completely unknowable, but oh, how we try to master our unruly bodies, nonetheless.

When Medium approached me to curate a pop-up magazine, I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human. I asked twenty-four talented writers to respond to the same prompt: what does it mean to live in an unruly body? Each writer interpreted this prompt in a unique way and offered up a small wonder.

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Carmen Maria Machado’s stunning essay in Guernica on the power of women who take up space is an important read for people of any size. Midway through the piece, she describes what happens to self-perception when you live in a world where there’s little representation of your physical self, and what representation there is is mocking or shaming.

Every day, I look for myself in other women’s bodies. This is what happens when you never see yourself in television shows or catalogues or movies—you get hungry. In passersby, I seek out a faithful replica of my own full chest: my plastic-bag stomach pooched over jeans, my milk-carton hips, and my face with its peach-pit cheekbones set in coffee grounds. In this way, I see myself in pieces, mostly, and have to assemble my body in my mind.

It isn’t like my mother and the woman buying the peppers; I’m not disgusted or afraid. I just want to know what I look like to other people. And every so often, I get to see all of those pieces together, and it feels like the reverberations after an orgasm—a low, deep satisfaction.

The beautiful fat woman is across from me on the subway platform, chewing on her nail. She’s trying on really nice shoes in the same store where I am trying on really nice shoes. She’s catching her reflection in a window in the hatched streets of our shared city, and I can’t stop looking at her. Does she resemble me, or do I just hope that because she’s so beautiful? Does that make me vain, or stupid? Why does seeing a woman who might actually look like me make me want to sit down on the pavement and cry?

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