Some time ago, when my Twitter TL was having many conversations about genre fiction and fanfiction and literary fiction, and I was chatting to my brilliant friend Maureen about how to solve genre wars, I got the notion of writing some posts with litfic recommendations for lovers of fanfiction. Then, as tends to happen, I got distracted by life events and the world being on fire and I didn’t do anything about it.
BUT. Then I read this extremely litficcy book, America Is Not the Heart, by Elaine Castillo, and when I say extremely litficcy you should understand that I mean it has a prestige-y sort of cover (see below) and a review in the New York Times and several interludes in the second person and no quotation marks around the dialogue and a description that doesn’t do a great job of explaining what the book is but that’s kind of not the fault of the marketing department or the author or whoever because this is a tough book to encapsulate — and even with all of those trappings of literary fiction, it still shouted I AM PENNED BY A PERSON WHO CAME FROM FANFIC so loudly that it reminded me about this idea I had had.
(“You are being exceptionally cogent and eloquent today, Jenny,” yes yes thank you, I know, my sentence structure is always impeccable.)
(But really, I do sometimes wish English were like Latin in the way you can just pile clauses on and on and on and on and nobody will fuss at you because they will be too busy noticing how similar your writing style is to Cicero’s.)
America Is Not the Heart is mostly about a Filipina woman called Hero who comes to California in the nineties to live with her uncle Pol. She has recently been released from a government camp where she was tortured; her life with Pol’s family will be a fresh start. The book focuses on two of Hero’s relationships: with her small, fierce, angry cousin Roni and with another Filipina woman, Rosalyn, whose grandmother is a healer trying to help with Roni’s eczema.
I’ve already said what makes the book extra-litficcy, so let me try now to explain what makes it feel fanficcy. For one thing, its protagonist is queer and complicated and possessed of sharp edges that the story does not attempt to file off. Hero is a trauma survivor, an immigrant, an estranged daughter, a stranger to the family members who take her in, a bisexual woman who enjoys sex but has little patience with romance; and the way Castillo prioritizes these many identities rang true but was not what I expected from literary fiction. Though Roni and Paz and Pol are Hero’s biological family, the arc of the book is a found-family story, with Hero moving from isolation to community. It’s also a romance. (I shipped it.)
If your fanfic preferences extend to found family, slow burns, and trauma aftermath, roughly in that order, do please check out America Is Not the Heart. I am sorry about the quotation marks thing. Sometimes literary fiction does that, and you just have to sigh and power through. Here is the book quote I would tell Elaine Castillo to use for her AO3 summary if I were her beta and this book were a fic.
That this could be the actual condition of the world — a world in which there was still corny music, lechon kawali, heavy but passing rain, televised sports, yearly holidays, caring families, requited love — seemed to Hero a joke of such surreal proportions the only conclusion she could make of it in the end was that it wasn’t a joke at all; and if it wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a dream, that meant it was just. Real life. Ordinary life.