In our seventh annual look at the debut authors of some of the year’s most poignant, meditative, and experimental memoirs, essay collections, and memoirs in essays, David Martinez details the watershed events that led to the writing and eventual publication of his memoir about brotherly love and the wounds, both literal and metaphoric, that shape us; Wei Tchou compares the process of writing her innovative book on ferns, family lore, and selfhood to growing a propulsive tomato plant; Zara Chowdhary describes how finally reckoning with what was brewing inside her from a childhood spent surrounded by anti-Muslim violence allowed her to free herself; Lydia Paar explains how the privacy of the writing process and outside feedback led to an essay collection that untangles varied topics on the notion of transformation; and Neesha Powell-Ingabire reflects on the rebellious and healing act of writing a memoir in essays about the history of the Geechee Coast. This year’s The New Nonfiction feature includes five distinct debut journeys that reveal the thoughts, feelings, and actions behind each author’s writing and publication process, a process that started more or less the same for them all. As Tchou recalls, “Sometimes I think about how for a long time it was just me staring at a blank Google Doc, trying out some lines.” Below are excerpts from this year’s five debut books; read essays by the authors in the September/October 2024 issue.

Bones Worth Breaking (MCD, April) by David Martinez
Little Seed (A Strange Object, May) by Wei Tchou
The Lucky Ones (Crown, July) by Zara Chowdhary
The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape (University of Georgia Press, September) by Lydia Paar
Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays From Georgia’s Geechee Coast  (Hub City Press, September) by Neesha Powell-Ingabire

Bones Worth Breaking 
David Martinez

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David Martinez, whose memoir, Bones Worth Breaking, was published by MCD in April. (Credit: Veronica Martinez)

Just a Flesh Wound

When I was maybe eleven, I walked into the bathroom and burned a piece of skin off the back of my hand on a curling iron. My aunt had left it plugged in for hours—it was hanging off the edge of the sink, waist high, and when I made contact the first layer of skin peeled away, leaving an indent the size and shape of a kidney bean. I thought it was okay at first—at least I don’t remember when it started to hurt, if it came with the shock of seeing a piece of my epidermis melted off, or if it was when I’d put it under cold water.  I know it hurt when I applied the toothpaste—a neighbor had once told me it soothed burns. I had a hard time scrubbing the toothpaste out from the melted flesh. It burned mint-fresh for days. I didn’t let anyone see how bad it really was. My parents asked if I was okay. They scolded me on paying more attention and told me not to ever listen to irrational medical advice from stupid neighbors. They asked if I needed to see a doctor. Gripping my hand, careful not to put any weight onto the paste-filled concave, I said no. It was fine. I was fine. I didn’t show it to any adults until after it healed over. It seared red and infected around what had become a black scab mixed with fragments of white paste. It lasted days. Weeks. Longer. I hid it under a Band-Aid, and it eventually healed. Now I have a smooth, oblong scar between the bottom knuckle of my right index finger and thumb. But it’s okay. I’m okay.

There is nothing on my skin that shows where I was hit by a car, and then abandoned, while walking across a street in Rancho Mirage, California, when I was thirty-three. I have no scar. I wasn’t hurt. With no definitive proof of the incident, I’m not sure what to say. How can anything be important if it doesn’t leave a mark?

I don’t have a mark from when I broke my arm when I was ten. But I know it was my left arm because I was grateful that I could still write. It happened while I was visiting my grandparents for the summer in Genesee—on the sometimes green, sometimes brown and red, or white, rolling hills of the Palouse in northern Idaho and Washington. I broke my arm skating alone with loose, plastic Rollerblades at a school that sat on top of one of the infinite hills. By the time I hit the patch of grass that had been creeping up from the cracked sidewalk I was going so fast that my legs shook from the speed. Luckily, I managed to defy physics and push my body backward.

My arm didn’t go crooked or anything. It was just a hairline fracture. It wasn’t even immediately apparent it was broken. My great-grandmother—who was raised on a no-nonsense, Depression-era farm—assured me that I was fine. All I needed to do was roll my wrist around and move it as much as I could. “Like this,” she said, and twisted her hand in the air. I don’t remember how many days it took before we went to the hospital; it was sometime after I tackled my brother Mike, who had deep brown skin and straight black hair and an almost perpetual smile that showcased his crooked teeth. My best friend. We were in the neighbor’s slanted yard playing some game we’d made up. My bone was already broken, so falling on top of it with Mike just broke it a little more. The doctor said, “Hey, you want to see what a broken arm looks like?” before pulling up the X-ray. I can’t see it now, but I know I did see it then. Plus, there were witnesses. It’s always better to have witnesses. It doesn’t hurt anymore though. It’s okay.

I knew the car was coming before I stepped off the sidewalk. It was one of those moments when time slows and the body moves on its own and everything is silent except your thoughts. I knew the car was coming, but I kept walking, no longer in control. The car was low and blue and expensive, the driver oblivious and small—her head not completely visible over the steering wheel. By the time she made contact, I was in the middle of the street. My body reacted like it did in my skateboard days; I jumped without thinking. My body said up, and I went up, landing with both feet on the hood. Everything was so slow that I had time to look at my shoes and consider how the Converse-pattern soles would leave a distinct mark on her car. Already familiar with the rhythm of collisions, I felt velocity beneath me and imagined how much force I would have to transfer to fall onto the windshield if the woman’s reaction was too slow and she kept moving. But she stopped, and time resumed, and I fell backward. My right foot hit the asphalt. I crouched as I fell, my left arm behind me, and rolled. I felt the thud on my arm and thought, it’s okay if it breaks again. I’ll still be able to write.

Excerpted from Bones Worth Breaking: A Memoir by David Martinez. Published by MCD, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by David Martinez. All rights reserved.  

Little Seed
Wei Tchou

Spores

Ferns begin with spores instead of seeds. A spore is a single-celled reproductive unit capable of generating life on its own, without sexual interaction. This is what distinguishes the fern from the nonfern. Trees, cacti, flowers, and vegetables require fruit and the lavish colors of flowers to attract birds, bats, and honeybees to reproduce—they are reliant on the community of other creatures to create a new generation. But ferns don’t ascend into fervent color each spring, they don’t rely on pollen to be carried from anther to pistil, they don’t wrap a seed in fruit. Instead, they set golden dust into the wind, each microscopic speck a potential new fern borne over stretches of ocean and desert. 

Reproducing by spores has meant that ferns are often the first species to repopulate razed areas, carried terrific distances by breezes, over land and sea. They make a home of catastrophe: hurricanes, forest fires, a fallen tree, their spores propagating easily on the freshly agitated soil. After the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, for instance, the ashen, rocky outcrops were soon grown over by the tangled beginnings of ferns, their leaves unfurling like afternoon shadow—the spores of at least one species had crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan. 

Until the invention of the microscope, the reproductive cycle of ferns was hidden from observation, which stoked wild speculation about magic, that fern seeds were of another realm. While flowers and trees produced observable fruit and seeds, ferns had gold dust on the backs of their leaves. Preindustrial Western cultures spun fables about the lengths one had to go to collect fern seed, and the glories one might experience upon doing so.

From Little Seed by Wei Tchou. Published by A Strange Object. Copyright © 2024 by Wei Tchou. All rights reserved.  

The Lucky Ones
Zara Chowdhary

Indefinite Postponement

Our board exams should have taken place on March 11. But two weeks after the train burning, on March 16, it’s officially announced: The Education Board has indefinitely postponed board exams for the whole state. We watch the words come out of the local Gujarati news presenter’s mouth, same as we watch news of death and blood.

I don’t feel a great sadness. If anything, there is a modest certainty. I feel convinced these exams, which were made into life-changing, career-making finalities, are a joke. Young teenagers in India end their lives over a bad board exam result. Now ending Muslim lives has taken precedence over them.

My mind wanders to the invisible bodies lying just beyond the reach of my fingers, across curfewed windows, through the fog of the city’s lockdown. We’re living in a tower from which nothing is visible, not the mob, not the dead, not the surviving, not my school friends. There is only this idiot box, and the idiots—the BJP, VHP, and Bajrang Dal—in it, given free rein to spew hate at us, their captive audience all day.

The city police commissioner’s face appears on the screen. Four people stabbed in Ahmedabad yesterday. This morning in another clash one person shot and killed in police firing. I don’t need exams. I’m learning right here, feet glued to this tile on Dadi’s mosaic floor, how passive voice changes everything, how words cover unspeakable things. How a clash is really a Hindutva mob running over yet another Muslim home/business/neighborhood, cowering, terrified innocent people. How stabbing means tridents, those holiest of weapons, smeared in human blood. How killed in police firing means shot when they resisted their slaughter. I’m learning that as I stand here safe in Jasmine, tenth graders in refugee camps a few blocks away have forgotten what homes and schools look like. I don’t give a fuck about the boards. I haven’t learned to effectively use the word “fuck” yet. But I’m learning there are words in which this seething fever I feel must pack a punch. I need to punch something.

Apa seems oddly quiet about the whole boards-postponement news, even though it’s all she has pestered me about since she and her mom moved back in with us. What if they cancel it? All of you will get a free pass? Even the dummies! I guess we’ll never know how you could have scored.

She’s only a year older, and this same time last year, in 2001, she was taking her boards. She’d spent all her tenth grade in stress-induced fevers and loosies because being a stress bucket had become her entire personality. She’d given herself mock test after mock test, crammed piles of textbooks, solved every possible math problem in every practice workbook she found. Then in January, a deadly 7.9 earthquake had struck just weeks before her boards. Thousands dead and displaced across the state. We had left Jasmine and moved in with our Hindu family friends, the Shahs, in their modest bungalow. All students statewide had gotten a free pass from school under the previous chief minister, whom Modi would soon replace. Except tenth graders. The boards were held despite the dead. Apa, quaking from the sleepless, displaced nights, had taken her exams and gotten straight A-pluses. Our jeweler cousins in Mumbai had gifted her a diamond-and-pearl necklace for her bravery and brilliance.

When Phupu moved into Jasmine Apartments after her marriage ended, she had Apa, a tiny baby girl of six months, in her arms. In a home that didn’t know how to deal with failure, especially involving a daughter, Apa was both a constant reminder of it and a reproach to the men, urging them to overcompensate for the man missing in her life. Dada was always fiercely protective of her. Especially when Dadi venomously attacked the child for bringing “bad luck.” Manhoos, she called her. Sometimes Dada needed to protect her so much that if Apa got into trouble, he would come looking for me to scold me and equalize the scoreboard. Papa was also similarly programmed to temper his affections toward his daughters so Apa wouldn’t feel left out. He took the shortcut and ignored all three girls equally.

When we were very young, Amma would sit Misba on one side of her lap, Apa on the other, and me across, and take turns mashing rice and dal into tiny, perfect, bite-size niwalas to feed us each from the same plate. She would eat last and least at the emptied table. When I turned three, she sat me at the dining table with a plate in front of me and whispered, “You can do this. Those two still need me. I know you can do this.”

I remember staring at the plate—dal and chawal and sabzi all swimming across the steel, melding into one another in a way I hated. I remember the exhaustion in her voice. I remember struggling to make a niwala of rice and dal, the sloppy mess slipping down my fingers, sliding down my elbow, dripping onto my dress. I remember shame at being too old to be learning how to feed myself. I remember going to the kitchen, reaching over the large sink, washing my hands, and grabbing a spoon. I would never learn to use my bare hands to eat.

As she watches me now, digesting the news of the postponement, Apa simply curls her lower lip and makes a “mtch” sound. Mild condolences. I know what she’s thinking. Genocide totally trumps an earthquake. But our home has been quaking for years. If I don’t take the boards, it will be yet another thing added to my list of underachievements. Meet Zara. Slim, tall, convent educated, sure. Soft-spoken, mild-mannered, yes. But probably not very smart. We can’t say. She didn’t take her boards.

Excerpted from The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary. Copyright © 2024 by Zara Chowdhary. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.  

The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape
Lydia Paar

The Cockroach Prayer

Although Sergeant Driver wasn’t entirely right about the equal-opportunity nature of the army, at least most of the time the chain of command treated all the trainees like equal puddles of pond scum. About a week or two after we arrived, two of the female drill sergeants took the women from my platoon into a large ladies’ latrine and gave us a talking-to about what it means to be a female in the military. They were the buggy-eyed one and the one who wore makeup and never raised her voice. (“If I get to the point of yelling, I’ll just smoke you,” she used to say calmly.) 

What they said went like this: Don’t fraternize with the males, for fuck’s sake don’t sit on the toilet seats, always wash your hands, eat extra food during your period, and if your period stops, it’s normal with all the pt we’ve been doing, so don’t worry about it. At the end of this “discussion,” I had to admit, I started to feel like they cared about us especially; here they were, taking their time to forewarn us about the dangers of STDs, the ways our particular bodies would change, and disciplinary trouble with boys. At the end of it, though, the makeup-wearing drill sergeant stood up, put her finger to the corner of her plum-colored lips and said, “Now, get on the ground.” And they had us do push-ups for half an hour, right there in the powder-blue latrine together, our hands pressed at odd, cramped angles on the tiles. 

At the same time that our unit began to get used to the grim monotony of basic training, other moments became memorable against the swirl of routine: 

The Alpha Pathfinder platoon learned how to belay and rappel. We ran beforehand, a tactical run, scattered across a thicket, one soldier every few paces, through the wood to the field station where our drill would be conducted. 

There, in the ground next to a narrow pine tree, hid a gnarled brown root. It hadn’t moved in years, and water had rushed below the center of it, making the root into a kind of trap for the toes of combat boots. I saw it just before it grabbed me and took me chin-to-ground. My glasses had gone flying, and I would be screwed if I didn’t get them before they were crushed. But when I tried to pull myself up to scramble for them, I realized I couldn’t really move. Then I realized I couldn’t really breathe, but there was a drill sergeant coming, so I had to move. I felt myself inhale sharply as I was pulled up from behind by my ammo belt. The pressure on my chest vanished. Someone had got hold of me, and as I was returned to a flat-footed stand I realized it was Private Neil’s giant-sized hand on my left shoulder, righting me.

“You okay?” 

“Glasses!” I stuttered, and he leaned over to lift them out of the leaves. 

“Thanks, man.”

“Yeah, you okay?”

“I think so.”

“Try and jog, then.”

I tried. I could do it a little. My lungs felt a little like a bellows stuck shut. I wondered if I’d popped a hole. 

“The Cockroach Prayer” from The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape © 2024 by Lydia Paar. Courtesy of the University of Georgia Press.