Megan Giddings & Sandra Newman: A Conversation

Megan Giddings is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Her first novel, Lakewood, was one of New York Magazine’s top 10 books of 2020; it was also named an NPR Best Book, a Michigan Notable Book for 2021, a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, and a finalist for a Los Angeles Times book prize. In The Women Could Fly (Amistad), Josephine Thomas has heard every theory about her mother’s disappearance. That she was kidnapped, took on a new identity to start a new family, or perhaps was murdered. That she was a witch is the most worrying charge in a world where witches are real, and peculiar behavior raises suspicions. A woman – especially a Black woman – can find herself on trial for witchcraft. But 14 years have passed since her mother’s disappearance, and now Jo is finally ready to let go of the past. Yet her future is in doubt. The State mandates that all women marry by the age of 30, or enroll in a registry that allows them to be monitored. Jo, 28, is ambivalent about marriage and losing control over her life. Suddenly, she feels she has never understood her mother more. And when she’s offered the opportunity to honor a final request from her mother’s will, Jo leaves her regular life behind in an attempt to feel connected to her one last time.

Sandra Newman is the author of the novels The Heavens, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Country of Ice Cream Star. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s and Granta, among other publications. The premise of Newman’s The Men (Grove Press) is that all people with a Y chromosome mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth. Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband Leo and their 5-year-old son, Benjamin. At dusk, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. And it’s at that very moment that every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world – doctors mid-surgery, drivers behind the wheel, men in arguments and acts of love, children, adults, and even fetuses are gone in an instant. After the Disappearance, Jane enters a world she barely recognizes. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, she focuses on reuniting with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, a video called “The Men” is broadcast online, showing the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?