Can fiction writers repress their knowledge of "the current political situation"?

Shelly was a hot girl. She lived downtown and did hot girl things that I don't know much about, to be honest. Going to nightclubs and fancy dinners and taking pictures of herself? Shelly had intellectual aspirations, and in truth she was very smart. She read those European novels that I would read too if I had any ambition left. You know, they're kinda like Krasznahorkai, but not him. The new Krasznahorkai, whoever he is. She was always telling me about some European writer, and how they were so graceful, so attentive to the delicate movements of the inner consciousness. Jon Fosse. She loved Fosse, of course.

But, you know...she was also hot. Like, being a hot girl who reads Jon Foss. That's pretty impressive.

Anyway, Shelly's roommate was a demon. They'd gone to college together, and he was actually really great. He paid his rent on time, he knew the best spots in town. He was the perfect man, because you knew he was evil, so he didn’t need to be a dick to prove he was a real man. If he asked how your day was going, you instantly melted. Like, oh my God, I’m talking to an actual demon! I found him very charming, though Shelly seemed largely to ignore him.

His line was to grant people their deepest desire and then see how it ruined them. It was very subtle, what he did. Some demons were not subtle. They were hacks. Monkey-paw demons, they were called. You know, the demon who's like, "I'll grant you a wish." And the person is like, "I want back my child who died." And the child comes back, but they're a psycho-killer.

Shelly's roommate, Valac, was much more subtle. One time he appeared to this old lady, and he said, "What do you want?" She asked for her child back, and he granted the wish, but...the child was still a toddler, since it’d died aged eighteen months. The mother was seventy, divorced, living in a 55+ retirement community. She tried to hide the child for a while, but eventually she was kicked out, lost her boyfriend, lost her social circle, because this place didn't allow children. She couldn’t afford daycare, but she was also too tired to play with her child, so she let the girl watch slop all day on YouTube, while the woman wore out her body cooking and cleaning and washing clothes for daughter. And when this mother finally had a stroke, she lingered long enough in the hospital to witness her five-year-old daughter being taken away by the social worker into foster care.

That's what Valac did. He really enjoyed it too. At the last moment, he appeared to the old woman, and he said, "I can restore everything. I can go back, undo your wish, return your health and your happiness." But of course she said no, because that would be the same as killing her child.

When she heard this story, Shelly said, "But...is this really demonic? It seems like you're not increasing the amount of misery in the world. This woman is sort of ennobled by this sacrifice, right?"

Valac said, "I don't know. What's your fondest desire? Your deepest wish?"

"Umm...no," Shelly said.

"But I can give it to you."

"No thanks."

"See?" he said.

After five years, Shelly was no longer young and hip, so Valac moved out. Shelly never married, never published a book, never achieved anything. Her only claim to fame was that she’d once lived with a demon, and over time she started obsessively trying to turn this experience into a manuscript of some sort. She sent the book to agents and publishers, but never got a response, so she went to a writing conference and signed up for a manuscript-review session to pitch her book directly to agents.

In the critique session, an agent said, “The writing is good, but it’s not sentimental enough to succeed as a commercial novel, and it’s not subtle enough to succeed with a literary readership. It’s about a demon, so you think perhaps he might be a love interest, but he’s not. And yet he’s so outrageously evil that the story feels very didactic and over-determined.”

Shelly protested that actually this book was real! It was true! That in her stories, there was a fuller and deeper reality than some European author's meandering description of how they’d cooked an omelette. Evil existed. Evil was real. Evil stalked the Earth unopposed, and…and…Evil had offered Shelly her heart’s desire, but for some crazy reason she’d said no.

---

That night, in her hotel room, she got a call from the lobby, saying she had a visitor.

“Send him up,” she said.

It was her old roommate: silvering a little around the temples, but still sly and amiable. He asked if she'd reconsidered his offer.

She had thought for many years about this moment, and she already had an answer prepared: "Sure."

"Okay...so what is your fondest desire? What is the wish that will come true?"

And she said, "I wish to be in love with you."

"What?" he said. "I don't understand..."

"I mean, you know..." she said. "You liked me, that was obvious. I never liked you back. So let's change that..."

"I...but you're old now," he said.

"Even so."

"I don't love you anymore," he said. "That's done."

"Even so."

After he granted the wish, she was filled with a desire to spend her life with this man, to please him, to love him. And she saw now that he wasn't really a demon. That he was a good person, an angel in disguise, someone who operated under the radar, granting these poor people the opportunity to be saved. He pretended to torture them, yes, but that was just an act, to please his demonic overlords, so they wouldn't strip him of his powers! In reality, he was working for the good guys, working for the other side.

In that moment, they exchanged a long, burning glance, full of pathos. She knew their courtship would be fraught, that he was being watched—that he'd have to pretend to hurt her, and she'd need to pretend to be hurt. But she could do that for him, because of her love.

When she spun this story to him, he said, "That's insane."

"I know you need to say that," she said.

He violently rejected her, castigated her, calling her delusional, selfish, saying finally she was repaid for ignoring him those many years ago.

But then they had sex. So it was really mixed messages, right? And it went on like that for a while, he'd be into her, and then he'd storm away. Typical fuckboy stuff, but...in this case there was a reason. He had to keep his heart hidden, in order to maintain the pretense that he was evil.

Several years into their relationship, she poured her feelings into a stand-alone novel called My Roommate, The Devil—a sexy romantasy about a demon who was tortured by his inability to admit his feelings for his roommate. It sold to publishers for approximately seven zillion dollars and set her up for life.

On some level, she understood that Valac probably didn’t reciprocate her love, and that she was delusional. But what if she was wrong? What if she just needed to hold out, to stay true to him, and they’d be reunited in the afterlife? He offered repeatedly to release her from this terrible wish. She could even keep the book deal, keep the money. She just wouldn’t be in love anymore. But she said, “No. No.” He screamed at her, fought with her, mistreated her, taunted her with the lifetime she would spend in hell.

Finally, she said, “But…that’s not really how it works, no?”

“What?”

“Either I’m saved, or I’m not. Because you exist, I know Christ exists, so…I must be saved, right?”

“I mean…that’s the view of some Protestants…”

“Yes, but even in a Catholic cosmology, is God really going to send me to hell because I wished for love? That seems unlikely. I believe in Him. I believe in you. I’m pretty sure Heaven is my destiny. Same thing with that old mother. She’s in Heaven, come on…”

“Once you’ve lost your soul—”

“Mmm, let’s see,” she said.

She died soon after this conversation, and she went to the good place, because that's how the cosmology worked in this particular universe. She was one of the Elect, predestined for Heaven from birth.

Valac wasn’t there, of course—he’d truly believed, all along, that he was somehow condemning people to Hell with these deals of his, the poor fool.

Source

Afterword

Nowadays, almost all my fiction is political. I can sometimes write critical pieces that aren't political, but when I delve into my own imagination to produce my own creative work, the result almost always has something to do with Donald Trump, oftentimes in an extremely direct way (examples of my direct style are here and here).

However, most Americans are trying, as hard as possible, not to think about Donald Trump. The amount of repression in the American psyche right now, at this moment, in March 2025, is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I feel it myself. We use euphemisms like "the current political situation" not because we're forced to use them, but because the truth—"Our president is lawless. His will is absolute. If his masked police decide to snatch you off the street and send you to concentration camp in El Salvador, there is no recourse, no court can save you"—is too horrifying to face. Not even in casual conversation, much less in a post online. Our country has changed. Our system of government is different.

So...what does this mean for literature? I dunno. I have no idea. Powerful forces are at play in the psyche of the average book-reader, and I'd certainly expect to see this struggle in our reading preferences, and in the kinds of fiction that gets written during this time.

I have sensed, myself, that there's no point in just openly discussing our current dictatorship. Because that just opens a wound, creates a bunch of pain, but...there's no outlet for that pain. There is nowhere for it to go.

---

“Our current political situation” is like the bad part of town: you only go there if you need something. You don't go there just for fun. And yet because you can't go there, you're always haunted by it. The bad part of town really exists, in reality, as a place where real people live, but it also has an existence in our subconscious, where it becomes a factor in our politics, our self-image, etc.

This regime haunts all my thoughts, feelings, plans, aspirations. It colors everything I read, write, and say. And yet…I know it would be tiresome in the extreme if this regime was all that I wrote about.

It’s easy enough to say “just write a story that’s not political”, but stories aren’t something you create mechanically. Stories come from inside, from the same place that gives rise to dreams. And if your psyche is concerned primarily with politics at the moment, then there’s simply no way of avoiding politics.

My solution was to sit down one day and write story after story after story until I finally completed one that wasn’t explicitly about Donald Trump. The first was about a secret prison in El Salvador. The second was about a trans woman going stealth in a hostile regime. The third was about a woman who belonged to a homophobic church. And the fourth was the story you see above.

P.S. I’ll be at AWP in Los Angeles next week. I have a signing at the Feminist Press table (Booth 626) from 1:30 to 3:00 PM on Saturday, March 29th, so feel free to drop by and say hello. I’m also doing an off-site reading that evening at 7 PM at 818 S. Spring Street, details below: