Amanda Michalopoulou's WHY I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND (Tr Karen Emmerich)

We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals. We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.

No, that's not a quote from Renee Good, dead only a week as I type this, but it sure could be, couldn't it? It's from a Greek novel, originally written in 2003, translated and published in English (by good old Open Letter) in 2014. History doesn't only rhyme with itself. Sometimes it rhymes with literature, too.

As the title of Amanda Michalopoulou's tense and affecting novel of odiasamato (we'll get to that), Why I Killed My Best Friend, the course of true love, or at least friendship, never did run very smooth, and while this story concerns two very cosmopolitan Greek women who effortlessly shuttle from Nigeria to Greece to France and around again, it's a book that I, a shut-in living in the landlocked and isolated heart of North America, found a lot within that spoke to me, and not just because I'm basically the same age as protagonist Maria and her titular bestie, Anna.

I, too, grew up with a best friend (though I called another that at the time) for whom I had feelings as strongly hostile as admiring. More than one, actually; my original frienemy, whose mother looked after both my sister and I after school during our elementary years ,moved away just before middle school, leaving me to drift into an almost identically toxic relationship before sixth grade was even halfway over. There's a reason I gnash my teeth at Margaret Atwood's doormat protagonists, who never quite manage to rebel against their more charismatic and domineering friends, only escaping at best, usually only to be re-ensnared later in life when the toxicity has only increased. I'm in this image and I don't like it. 

Such a fate looms ever larger for Maria, whose entanglement with the exquisite Anna begins soon after she is taken away from her childhood home in Nigeria (where her exiled Greek expat parents lived comfortably expat lives doing something bourgeois for a living) back to her family's native Athens. At first Maria feels unwelcome and singled out for misery: her classmates hate her. But then a newer new girl joins the class, also the child of returned exiles, but their return is from glamorous, sophisticated Paris, rather than primitive and mysterious Africa. Still, the girls' shared status as outcasts gives them a reason to bond, at least after they clear up a slight misunderstanding about whether or not Maria's parents were nasty, racist,  colonial oppressors. They weren't (or, at least, not exactly); friendship saved. 

Though this is far from the only misunderstanding that will threaten this pairing over the decades. 

For these two girls' families were not expats on a whim, like their American counterparts would be; their parents are leftists who fled into exile in the 70s rather than suffer, or even be killed, under the rule of the Greek Junta aka the Regime of the Colonels.* Anna's father is a famous philosopher, and her mother a ballet dancer, for instance. Maria's parents' leftist bona fides are a little less apparent -- her dad works for an oil company and her mom is kind of a socialite -- but at least they were very kind to their black live-in help, especially Maria's nanny, Gwendolyn, whom in true colonial fashion Maria thought was her actual mother for a while there.

I bring up all this political background because it's actually to the fore in this novel; indeed, it could be debated whether WIKMBF is a coming-of-age story with political characteristics, or a political story with coming-of-age characteristics. Anna has absolutely been raised on leftist politics and doesn't know how not to bring them up in every conversation, even as an angelic looking little nine-year-old new girl who is absolutely ready to judge her desk-mate as just another superficial right wing pigeon from outer space (IYKYK), while Maria is decidedly less so but willing to be influenced, falling under the spell of glamorous Antigone, Anna's mother, and very disappointed when her own mother won't join the consciousness-raising group Antigone is trying to put together before she and her daughter have even finished moving into their pretty house.

So of course the girls are soon competing with each other over who's the most doctrinaire leftist, who has the best ideas for incorporating good politics into their childish art projects at school, who's going to do greater and more important things when they grow up, and whose mother loves whom more. And yes, eventually the girls' fathers become part of the story, but never a very big part; just enough for us to see that Anna's future husband will be a carbon copy of dear old dad, and for us to see just how much Maria's mother has diminished herself to keep Maria's father happy, giving Maria a negative model of femininity to measure herself against as she goes on to live the life of a bohemian art student and political activist, i.e. neither a wife nor a mother.

And of course they spend some time in young adulthood accusing each other of insincerity, of doubting each other's commitment and effectiveness, while still joyfully reuniting and professing eternal love and best friendship... and Maria watching the prettier and more confident Anna steal pretty much every man Maria has ever had a crush on (and one or two of the women). Friendships as close as this only lack these aspects when there is neither a political nor sexual dimension to the friends' lives, like pretty much no friendship ever.

Someday, if I manage to figure out the why and the how, I'll write a novel. I'll tell the whole story, all that we lived through, from my point of view. I'll let Anna have the title, though: Why I Killed My Best Friend.  If you don't feel like reading it, the cover will be enough, you can skip the story: one friend kills another, big deal, human beings are killing one another every day all over the world. Sometimes, to give a logical structure to these conflicts, they fight body to body, hand to hand with the police. Or they fall down the stairs in a metro station without ever having been pushed. They'll even fight themselves, if there's no other worthy opponent around.

"Odiosamato" is the word Maria uses to name her relationship with Anna. I'm no scholar of Greek, ancient or modern, but I think our modern English slang "frienemy" works well enough for it, though I'm pretty sure the Greek, combining "love" and "hate" rather than the somewhat more tepid "friend" and "enemy",  deserves to remain in the translated text as it does. As we learn in a translator's note at the end, Karen Emmerich was able to work fairly closely with Michalopoulou on the translation, and Michalopoulou took this opportunity to revise the original a bit. As Emmerich observes, "Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translator's usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda's consent and involvement." I'm not one of those readers familiar with the Greek, but their keeping of "odiosamato" signals very strongly to me how carefully this work was prepared. As a certain gigantic publisher odiously prepares to end its relationship with translators in favor of letting large language models do it instead, I want here to take a stand against it and in gratitude to the work that only human beings can do with the care and skill and sensitivity required. 

But so, the question you're probably asking in your head as I blather about this book is, does Maria actually kill her best friend? But you know me by now; I'm going to tell you to read the damned book. It's an international hit for a reason (and not just for its hints of good praxis, my favorite of which is bringing rainsticks to protests, "which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police"), and it's not just for the unflinching honesty with which it portrays female friendship at its most troublesome. 

I'm pinching myself for letting this book languish in my ebook library for as long as it did; had I gotten it in a physical edition its various lurid and eye-catching covers would have made it stand out on my shelf, I think. But better late than never, and sometimes, best of all is right now.

*A situation I only just learned of through reading this book. I swear I didn't choose to read this in January 2026 because its background dictatorship reminds me of anything chilly going on right now. Regardless of what the conspirituality types keep insisting, there is such a thing as coincidence. I just wanted to read more contemporary Greek literature, and did my usual trick of going bananas when Open Letter had one of its sales. Which, if you're reading this right when I've posted it, they've got one going on right now. Go bananas! Or baklavas, if you prefer. 

Rachel Yoder's NIGHTBITCH

Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there- this idea had begun to weigh on her. Of course, it had crossed her mind before, but after her son arrived it took on a new shape, and unwieldy heft, and then even more after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. And once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable.

Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch is that relative rarity, a novel about which I have precise memories of how I first heard about it. Caitlin Luce Baker, a bookseller who, like me, occasionally crashes the fantastic Two Month Review Podcast, plugged it at the end of this episode.*

I thought it sounded intriguing as hell, but just having blown two months' book budget on other things, I requested that my public library acquire Nightbitch, which seemed like a request that was likely to be granted because the book was making a splash. 

That was two years ago, though! And, well, this site bears witness to how I've spent that time, reading other stuff. I'd all but forgotten about this book when seemingly out of the blue my library announced it had just bought it in June of 2023 and I was first in line to read it. So, yowza! 

It was only when I went browsing for cover images for this here blog post that I finally figured out that the library's belated decision to grant my request wasn't out of the blue at all; Nightbitch is soon to be a major motion picture starring a perfectly cast Amy Adams.

Nightbitch lays out its premise right away. Its heroine, whom we only ever know as "the mother," in lowercase, is a former artist and career woman who is now a full-time stay-at-home mother. We see her constantly reminding herself that this is only because her husband's job pays him more than her "dream job" in the arts was ever going to pay her, a thought-terminating cliche that she employs whenever she catches herself resenting her being trapped in traditional gender roles, thus conveniently sparing her husband the tedious job of doing the reminding and being the bad guy thereby, (which, get ready for the husband). As the story opens she has begun manifesting symptoms that would lead a less rational woman (married to a less reasonable man) to believe she was slowly transforming into a dog, specifically a female dog. As in unexplained and unexpected patches of coarse and bristly hair suddenly appearing on the scruff of her neck, a suggestion of her canine teeth seeming, to her at least, to have gotten longer and sharper, and the odd homicidal urge, or at least an urge to unspecified violence. And the symptoms are worse at night, hence the title. Boom. 

I suppose I should note here that I am not a mother, never wished to be one, am perfectly happy being part of the village, as it were. And this book is a perfect showcase of what I've always imagined, with horror, my life would be like if I had ever had the misfortune to become one. The mother, whose son is two years old and whose husband is constantly away on business trips, is trapped pacing in the smallest possible space which she must share 24/7/365 with a tiny tyrant wearing her out with his demands, his anxieties, and his complete innocence and ignorance of all the terrible accidents waiting to befall him. Even when she leaves the house, he is with her; strangers focus on his adorability and regard her as his adjunct at best; the only people remotely interested in what she might have to say are other mommies, but only if she says something mommy-related. And she is constantly, surreally exhausted.

Until all of this starts happening to her, the teeth, the hair, the oh my goodness is that a tail growing at the base of her spine? Supernumary nipples? What?????

And by the way, yes, I totally think this book is in dialogue with Ira Levin's 1970s suburban horror classic, The Stepford Wives; both books are, after all, portraits of how a woman's transformation into a technology for keeping a man's house and raising his child** can make her feel like she is losing, or has lost, her humanity.

I would submit that as an explanation for the book's first half, anyway.

As for its second... the best I can come up with, and I do mean best, is that Rachel Yoder turned a feminist lament into a healthy, inspiring and daring feminist inversion of Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club. And truly it is an inversion of that famous/infamous novel (and I'm already looking forward to treating myself to a double feature of the David Fincher film adaptation with Marielle Heller's of Nightbitch); we are completely privy to its strange protagonist's secrets and back-story, but unlike Tyler Durden and his Project Mayhem Space Monkeys, Nightbitch (the name the mother comes up for herself once she stops fighting and learns to love her fate) embraces its world and celebrates its weirdness and makes of it a positive thing, for isn't Nightbitch's experience -- motherhood and child-rearing -- in some fashion the most human story there is? Except maybe in the details?

She tipped her head back and filled the sky with a howl as big as her entire life, and, with that, was hell-bent on getting home, weeping now as her adrenaline surged and her muscles overflowed with blood and she crashed through the night.

A less brave author might have chosen to compound the horror by furnishing the mother with a typical suburban husband, happily benefiting from her dehumanization even if he's not consciously collaborating in it, insisting she "get help" when she begins embracing her strange transformation and starts looking to involve others in her discoveries. Yoder has dared to make of the mother's husband something much more interesting than merely the villain of an expected feminist parable, just as she keeps the mother/Nightbitch courageously and freely exploring what this all might mean and how far it's supposed to go. Then, too, the next logical villain would be the apparent frenemy figure of Jen the Big Blonde, a woman the mother knows from various kid-focused events at the library and the playground: the Big Blonde, after all, is never less than perfectly groomed and organized, always ready with toxic positivity and platitudes, making raising twin toddler girls look effortless and blissful, but again, Yoder isn't interested in making a villain of anybody but the incohate but near omnipotent forces of society that get women to connive in their own belittlement, that installs in most of us at a very young age a fierce internal critic that not only says we'll never be good enough but that we have no right to complain about anything or to feel badly about circumstances or to want to improve them, that it's wrong to ask for assistance when things get overwhelming. That it would be totally out of line for the mother to ask her husband to take on some more active parenting duties when he's actually home on weekends like putting their little boy to bed to give the mother a break from the nightly ordeal; that the perfect Big Blonde is anything but competition.

I still think motherhood would never have been the right choice for me, for so many reasons, but I've always at least intellectually understood why so many think I'm nuts for feeling this way. I've had many a discussion with my own mother, whose career as a pioneering female journalist at a time when that was still a bizarre novelty (she was actually the managing editor of a newspaper a little bit before Katherine Graham was, but it was a little podunk paper in a city barely worthy of the name in Wyoming, not the Washington Post) never got completely shelved but went into slow motion and stayed small when she and my dad started a family. To me it's always looked like she gave up all her dreams for the dubious pleasure of having me (though she did luck out with child #2, who is a genuine superstar), but she's always insisted she has no regrets and it was all worth it and like Nightbitch after her proclaims there is no greater love. I'll never know it, but I got a terrific vicarious experience of it from this novel and for that Rachel Yoder is to be celebrated for ever.

*The episode in question was devoted to a discussion of Virginie Despentes Vernon Subutex trilogy, a discussion to which Your Humble Blogger contributed in another episode.

**And yes, I've borrowed this insight from Sarah "You're Wrong About" Marshall, who shared it in an episode of her podcast devoted to the Levin novel and its film adaptations, which she viewed through two lenses: one of the popularity of Miltown and later tranquilizers, and of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother, which I own but still haven't read because it only exists as my reading nemesis, a trade paperback. But I think I'm finally going to have to read it soon now that I've got Nightbitch under my belt.

Annalee Newitz' THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE

It's been a while since I indulged myself in some fun time travel shenanigans, and my trusted guides to all things cool, the maginificent Prince Jvstin and the ever-correct Popqueenie, have often mentioned Annalee Newitz as a trusted source for the kind of shenanigans we like, so I kind of feel some egg dripping down the deepening crevices in my face that it took a big fat sale at Audible to get me to finally actually read them.

Better late than never. Even if it's time travel. Or especially if it's time travel?

The Future of Another Timeline starts off the way more cool science fiction adventures should, at a great big punk rock/riot grrl concert in the late 20th century. As described by narrator Laura Nicol, it's a thrashing good time that takes no prisoners or bullshit and just brings back all the great memories of wishing I had grown up somewhere where things like that actually happened in the late 20th century, instead of somewhere they have both kinds of music, country and Christian. It's so on the nose that at first one could easily not notice that this scene is not taking place in our world. My first clue was the Wonder Woman tee shirts celebrating the terrific Tim Burton Wonder Woman film that came out in the late 80s.

Oh. Oh...? Oh!

Before we know it, we have a woman folding herself -- well, not exactly, but she is observing the trail of effect caused by her own younger self in a world where time travel is not only real but also not a secret -- and in an incredibly intriguing way. Machines that make time travel possible are buried deep in ancient geological features in several out-of-the-way locations all around the Earth, including one on the border between Manitoba and Saskechewan, and another in the nation of Jordan, and are the subject of general knowledge. Nobody has to have that awkward conversation in which they have to try to persuade someone that no, really, they're from the future, not even in the late 1800s. AND... Nobody has to make the same tired observation about something being bigger on the inside. Etc.

I think this is a first, for me.

But, somewhat more conventionally -- because cool world building and neat set pieces do not a novel make, one needs a story -- there is a sort of temporal cold war between at least two factions over how much "editing" can happen and what kind of world that editing is to try to make for everyone. Agents from each side keep meeting up at different points in a history that is not, as currently understood by the "geoscientists" of this world (delightfully, since the time machines are buried in shield rock, time travel and its various academic offshoots are the province of geologists), governed by the "Great Man" theory -- someone once traveled back and killed off the tyrant who originally conquered almost all of Europe in the early 19th century, only to see some other guy named Napoleon rise up and take his place and do pretty much the same thing, for instance -- but can still be altered through patient nudging of social movements. A well-executed leaflet campaign can do more, in this world, than a well-aimed shot from a gun, whether that gun be period or anachronistic. I like this. So much.

But so, does this mean that Annalee Newitz has found a way to make the bog standard "time police" motif of science fiction into a fresh and new... metaphor for Culture War? In fact, they have. Meaning this is a hell of a novel to have been reading right when the United States Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe vs Wade, the law of the land for most of my adult life that has established abortion as a Constitutional right and done the most since the 19th amendment to uphold in no uncertain terms the right of a little over half of the human race to enjoy a certain standard of basic humanity to a greater degree than any generation born before us.

Which, along with other pesky ideas like offering education to all regardless of whether or not they have functioning uteruses, letting such people vote, choose their own marriage partners (or none at all) on their own terms, etc. (to say nothing of the rights of people who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, or Christian) are very much in the crosshairs of one of the factions involved in this version of the Time War, the Comstockers (named for and kind of led by Anthony Comstock, of Society for the Suppression of Vice fame).*

I think he's rather well represented in this, the best book trailer, maybe ever, by the way. I'd like to think the real Comstock had nightmares just like this.

But, back to the Temporal Culture War. Its other faction, to which our time traveling concert goer, Tess, belongs, call themselves the Daughters of Harriet (as in Harriet Tubman, who in this world was once a U.S. Senator). Headquartered in California in the year 2022, they meet in secret to plan operations to preserve the freedoms they have gained, to extend them to other marginalized people, and to expand them. Operations in pursuit of this goal include missions such as sending Tess back to the famous Columbian Expedition of 1893 to hook up with some sort-of-Algerian belly dancers getting ready to take the Midway by storm and open a lot of closed minds -- unless the Comstockers can succeed in persuading the Respectable White Ladies of Chicago that the dancers are a threat to the good moral character of their city and must be shut down. While there, Tess befriends a dancer, a crusading young muckraker, and no less a personage than Sol Bloom, who all enthusiastically join her cause.

Meanwhile, there are shenanigans going on in the sixth century, BCE that have the potential to render all of the Daughters' efforts moot forever. DRAMA BUTTON PUSH ALL THE DRAMA BUTTONS YOU GUYS.

In lesser hands, this could be an awful, hectoring, didactic bore of a read, or a chaotic mess, or both, but Newitz maintains a high standard of storytelling, especially character drama, focusing on Tess's adventures in time but also on the somewhat ordinary suburban life of her younger counterpart, Beth, the Riot Grrl who originally went to that great punk show in 1992 but whose teenage years seem destined to have rather a higher body count than any teenager since J.D. met Veronica and all the Heathers in suburban Ohio back in 1989, if you know what I mean. How very.

The novel comes especially to life as an audio book, by the way; Nicol has just the right kind of California cool to her delivery to sell Beth's story especially, but imparts just enough gravitas to Tess's chapters to help us see her as the kind of woman Beth might could become if wibbly wobbly timey wimey all works out. As an extra treat we get something that only an audio edition can bring us -- a sound clip from fictional band Grape Ape's hit single from another timeline "What I Like to See", and an interview between Newitz and Desi Lopez about the making of the book trailer and the writing of the seriously catchy song featured in it. Popqueenie and I agree, if Grape Ape had been a real band in the 90s, we would have moved heaven and earth to be at every show.

All in all, The Future of Another Timeline is one of the most amazing balancing acts I've ever seen in book form. There are so many things that could go wrong with it, and none of them do, and it still has plenty of surprises for even the most jaded time travel reader. It's a tremendous accomplishment and has definitely turned me into a Newitz fangirl. Which, I really already should have been, because of Io9 and Charlie Jane and all...

I would (ahem) read any number of sequels to this if (cough) certain parties felt like making those a thing. As such.

*That jerk's best appearance in literature since his side-cameos in various Robert Anton Wilson joints in the 70s and 80s.