Editorial Content for Beings
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Reviewer (text)
I was quite taken aback when, upon describing one of the main storylines of Ilana Masad's new novel to my husband, he responded, "Oh, my grandma knew those people."
The first narrative strand introduced in BEINGS is based on the real-life story of Betty and Barney Hill, civil rights activists and (like my husband's grandma) residents of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. After a honeymoon trip to Montreal in the fall of 1961, they reported being followed by a mysterious glowing vessel, and then being abducted by aliens and kept aboard their ship for hours in the White Mountains. As Masad outlines in her book (where the couple is identified just as "the husband" and "the wife"), much of their testimony --- most of it collected while they were under hypnosis --- has shaped countless other alien encounter stories and works of science fiction.
"Like many novels that employ multiple independent narratives, it's perhaps inevitable that each reader will connect with one storyline over the others. But through voice, technique and format, Masad manages to make each one distinct, memorable and more than worthy of readers' attention."
In another of the novel's three main narratives, readers meet one of those science fiction authors, Phyllis, who --- also in the early 1960s --- writes letters to her best friend (and former lover), Rosa, recounting her mix of fear and excitement as she relates the experience of living alone in Boston and starting to explore the city's deeply hidden but still vibrant queer community. Phyllis' letters go unanswered, and her sense of heartbreak is palpable in these sections, which are balanced by her growing dedication to publishing (under a pen name) her science fiction stories and novels. In addition to hiding behind a male pseudonym, Phyllis has to decide how much to disguise the queer plots and themes she is desperate to write about, in a pre-Stonewall society where being gay is still against the law.
The third and final interwoven narrative is set in the present day, where a nonbinary researcher known only as the Archivist is cataloging Phyllis' papers while also struggling against their own loneliness and the pain of their mother's paranoia and conspiracy theories. But the Archivist finds themself at the center of one of those theories when they are contacted by a documentary filmmaker, who says that the Archivist was one of a group of schoolchildren who claimed to have experienced their own alien encounter.
The extraterrestrials who tie together these disparate narratives are not the only unifying strands. Throughout, Masad is playing with the idea of alienness, of outsider status. For the Archivist and Phyllis, it's their gender identity and their sexuality. For the husband and wife, it's the fact that they're an interracial couple at a time when such relationships were vanishingly rare. All three narratives --- which have some overlapping elements but ultimately stand alone --- explore experiences of feeling unseen, mistrusted or alone, and seek to understand what it means to find belonging, especially under circumstances where that belonging can feel elusive at best and impossible at worst.
Like many novels that employ multiple independent narratives, it's perhaps inevitable that each reader will connect with one storyline over the others. But through voice, technique and format, Masad manages to make each one distinct, memorable and more than worthy of readers' attention.
Teaser
In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. In BEINGS, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads. Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Ilana Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness and alienation in the repressive 1960s. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis' letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.
Promo
In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. In BEINGS, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads. Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Ilana Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness and alienation in the repressive 1960s. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis' letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.
About the Book
From the celebrated author of ALL MY MOTHER'S LOVERS, a new novel based on true events asks whether extraterrestrial life might be what ties us to one another, to history and to reality itself.
In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born: the alien abduction narrative.
In Ilana Masad's BEINGS, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness and alienation in the repressive 1960s --- as well as the joy of finding community. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis' letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.
Over the course of a decade, Phyllis wrestles with her desires and ambitions as a lesbian writer, while the abducted couple grapple with how to maintain control of their narrative. All the while, the archive shatters and reforms, redefining fact and fiction via the stories left behind by the abductees, Phyllis and the Archivist themself. Masad makes human what is alien and makes tangible what is hidden --- sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally --- in the archive.
Audiobook available; read by Hayden Bishop, Jesus E. Martinez and Renata Friedman
