Far From the Tree

How Did I Get Here?

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 12:08:46 GMT

Far From the Tree is a letter to anyone who ever wondered if the stork left them with the wrong family. If today’s essay spurs something in you—a knowing smile, a moment of insight—I’d be honored if you shared it on social media or right here on Substack in the form of a restack.

Dear You,

This week’s essay is a mediation on the way life unfolds in unexpected ways, if we allow it.

For example, had some two-dollar psychic claiming Gypsy heritage said to me some quarter century ago, “I see you living among palm trees on reclaimed swamp land in Florida,” I would have laughed heartily, pleased that my assumptions about her had proved correct. I hated Florida.

Now, had there been such an encounter, I’d wonder if she could see into the future, or whether she recognized some inkling of my unconscious desires based on our conversation that led me to settle in one of the least glamorous places in the state.

Given that Election Day is Tuesday, this is your politics free zone. Instead, I throw out an opportunity for you to reflect on your life in response to what I share below about how much mine has improved in ways I couldn’t have planned or imagined.

If you aren’t already a subscriber, you will need to sign up for a free subscription to read the rest. I use “freewalls” rather than paywalls to protect my work from LLMs trawling the web to feed the AI industrial complex.

County Sheriffs: The most powerful cops in the country.

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 10:33:34 GMT

It’s election season in the USA. Let me share a few reasons why it’s important for everyone to pay attention to their local sheriff’s races and cast an informed vote.

Today’s essay is a departure from the usual subject matter at Far From the Tree, but it’s one I’m passionate about. All politics is local, especially when it comes to police and public safety.

Recently, I read Gilbert King’s book, Beneath a Ruthless Sun, his follow up to Devil in the Grove, chronicling the gross injustices in Lake County, Florida that took place under Sheriff Willis McCall, who served from 1944 - 1972. It’s the shocking story about how an intellectually challenged white man was railroaded for the rape of a white woman and sent without trial to an infamous state hospital for the insane, where he was trapped for fourteen years while his mother and a local journalist tried to get him out.

The rape victim was married to a man who’d eventually become mayor of Leesburg, the town near my house in Lake County. The evidence suggested she was actually raped by a Black man. Initially, she herself claimed it was a Black man but later changed her story after her husband pointed out how he would look bad, socially speaking, if people believed his wife had been violated by a Black man. So, he and the sheriff found a way to make this problem of “Negro” violation go away.

An elaborate scheme that included manufactured evidence and a denial of the accused’s civil rights sent the disabled teen Jesse Daniels to Chattahoochee, a notorious mental hospital first established in 1876, without a trial. That way, the victim would never have to testify in public.

While confined in the criminal wing at Chattahoochee, Jesse wasn’t permitted to go outdoors, fed poorly, and beaten regularly by other inmates and guards. For fourteen years. It’s a staggering miscarriage of justice for which he received little compensation when he was finally released.

The question that I couldn’t get out of my mind after I finished reading the book was: How could McCall continue to run for the job of Sheriff and get re-elected until 1972 even though everyone knew he was a murderer and corrupt, making money from illegal gambling, graft, and forcing inmates to work his ranch?

I understood from Gilbert’s book that no one seriously opposed McCall out of fear for their lives and their family’s lives. But couldn’t the governor do something about it? The answer is the governor could do nothing unless McCall was convicted of a crime. No jury in Lake County or Marion County would convict the man. Not for the murder of Matthew Shepherd, one of the Groveland Four in 1951, nor the killing of Tommy Vickers in 1972.

It was shortly after his acquittal in the killing of Vickers that McCall lost re-election.

McCall was said to have bragged that he had been investigated 49 times and that five different governors had tried to remove him.He liked to say “I’ve been accused of everything but taking a bath and called everything but a child of God.” (Wikipedia)

A few days after I finished Beneath a Ruthless Sun, I stumbled upon Linda Greenhouse’s review of Jessica Pishko’s book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.

Here were the answers to my head-scratching questions about Lake County’s most famous sheriff: Why did McCall have such power? How was he able to get away with his crimes in pursuit of that power and also his personal fortune?

Most people who, like me, have always lived in cities where the presence of a county sheriff is invisible have no idea about the system that creates a branch of law enforcement that isn’t just above the law, it becomes the law itself.

City police departments are subject to civilian oversight by boards, mayors, and city councils. County sheriffs have no such oversight.

Yet, they not only enforce laws within their jurisdictions, according to Greenhouse, they are also responsible for county jails that admit some 10 million people across the county per year. In that capacity, they transport prisoners between courts, state and federal penitentiaries.

“These jails, under the control of sheriffs, operate with little oversight or staff training and without requirements for medical care.” (Greenhouse).

All sheriffs are elected county officials, some of them representing places with fewer than a thousand people, and others with populations in the millions. Not all sheriffs are corrupt, and the situations vary because the circumstances of each county are highly individualized. But no sheriff reports to a local police chief or any elected official.

It’s no wonder they can become a law unto themselves, teaming up with vigilantes and other bad actors in pursuit of their personal power and agendas. All they need to do is get re-elected. It turns out this is remarkably easy.

Most elections for sheriff are uncontested. Where there is competition, the incumbent is re-elected 90 percent of the time. They lose re-election bids mostly because the county has grown, and new voters are not amused.

Consider Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was convicted of criminal contempt for randomly arresting anyone suspected of being undocumented. Voters kicked him out after his conviction, but he’d held the job for 24 years. He was one of Donald Trump’s first pardons.

Or the recent story of a small town in Oklahoma in which the long-time sheriff was manipulated by his lover, a deputy who worked for him, into committing many crimes, including threatening to murder the people who ran the town’s local newspaper and were investigating his office. He was never charged.

Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, decided to leave it up to voters to decide whether the man should continue in his job rather than trying him for threatening journalists with death, as well as unlawful search and seizure. Voters defeated the sheriff in 2024, a year after the story broke nationally.

In Rankin County, Mississippi, five sheriff’s deputies and a former Richland police officer were convicted in 2023 for the torture of two Black men in a no-warrant house raid. The deputies called themselves “The Goon Squad” and behaved like a gang of vigilantes with police shields for years.

“… in one-third of US counties, the sheriff’s office is the largest law enforcement agency. Sheriffs employ a quarter of all sworn law enforcement officers and control 85 percent of local jails. Their offices are responsible for 30 percent of killings by law enforcement, and at least one thousand inmates die every year while in sheriffs’ custody.” - Linda Greenhouse

This issue of lawless sheriffs and deputies highlights how local elections are the most important ones. It’s so easy for sheriffs to turn deputies loose to do their bidding, and it’s local people, more specifically, ourselves, who suffer.

This thing called constitutional democracy that we are so proud of and want to export around the world is extremely vulnerable. It depends on honorable people taking responsibility from the bottom up and the top down. The most important step and most overlooked is to show up and vote in all local elections rather than waiting for a presidential election year.

If there is a sheriff’s race happening in your area, pay attention. Your life could depend on it.

That’s it for this week. I hope you’re well, happy, and loved.

Thanks for reading Far From the Tree! If you think a friend would be interested in this essay, please share it.

Sources and Links:

Gilbert King. Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A true story of violence, race, and justice lost and found. New York: Random House. 2018

Linda Greenhouse. “Are Sheriffs Above the Law? [Review]. New York Review of Books. Vol LXXI, No. 15. October 3, 2024. pp. 31-32.

Digital: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/10/03/are-sheriffs-above-the-law-jessica-pishko-greenhouse/

Pishko’s book:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/707263/the-highest-law-in-the-land-by-jessica-pishko/

Florida Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_State_Hospital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_V._McCall

Oklahoma Links:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/31/a-small-town-paper-lands-a-very-big-story

https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-sheriff-journalists-threatened-lynching-0c497f606098d012ff7fffc1586e1841

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ree_Drummond

Mississippi Links:

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/21/nx-s1-5120530/goon-squad-mississippi-justice-department-investigatioThanks for reading! If you think a friend would like this essay, please share it.

The Root of the Matter: Untangling hair, aging, and my mother’s ghost

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:02:13 GMT

Hair salons hold a special place in my heart. In this nomadic life of mine, they’ve held up as places of reassurance. Across continents, they look remarkably the same. My favorites are independently owned, where the décor reflects the personality of the individual running the show. When I find a stylist I like, working in an environment that suits me, I am as loyal as a Labrador retriever.

The Cut House. Adelaide, Australia. Photo from the salon’s web site.

Why I fell for the Rolling Stones

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:01:28 GMT

The Rolling Stones animated joy in a way no one I knew did back in 1989. My boyfriend and I went to their Steel Wheels show in Toronto on a night in early September at the CNE Grandstand, next to the lake, the skyline beckoning in the distance. Pyrotechnics silenced the crowd. Then a familiar strumming of chords announced the tune, and Mick popped into view, strutting and singing, “If you start me up I’ll never stop,” green satin tails flying behind him. And I was hooked.

Rolling Stones in 2015. Image By Jim Pietryga - Used under Wiki Commons license

The Pedal Car Caper and After

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:03:24 GMT

Memory is a strange thing—unreliable, requires fact-checking, and yet the thing that makes us who we are. What we remember tips our identities, tells us something about the kind of person we are and how we arrived at this juncture in our lives. Probing memories can feel dangerous; danger exists in the possibility of misinterpretations and, therefore, inaccurate beliefs about ourselves and others; worse, we might get it right.

Memories that peck at us in unexpected moments—washing the car, pouring a glass of Burgundy, watching a mother strap her child into a grocery cart—tend to be those bracketing deepest pleasure or pain, sometimes both at once. In my memory lies a story, an anecdote from my brother’s childhood, which hip checks its way into the present moment as sharply as any about me.

Why would a story about my brother pester me now? Well, that’s the thing, the danger in examining this memory lies not in what it says about my brother, but rather in what it says about our family and how I arrived on this planet, the way I have lived and now live. In other words—its implications.

The Jackal in the Corner Office

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:20:56 GMT

Have you ever wanted to delete your boss? Like, get rid of that person forever because you’re certain the world would benefit? If you could bump ‘em off without getting caught, would you do it?

Maybe you’ve fantasized about shoving the bastard in front of a speeding subway train? Or thought to book the beast on a surfing holiday off the coast of Australia where there are no shark nets? Perhaps you’ve considered bludgeoning old ferret-face with a golf club at the Midnight Sun Charity tournament in Yellowknife and leaving the corpse to the wolves? Maybe The Dementor likes to go hiking in the desert and your pet tarantula is looking for a purpose beyond the terrarium?

Rupert Holmes wrote a novel that satisfies such a fantasy called Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide. Holmes has two Edgar awards under his belt, Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his work on Broadway, and multiple Billboard hits including “Escape,” otherwise known as the “Pina Colada Song.”

Bread, Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Martina R. Williams — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:02:17 GMT

Hey, fam!

I’m away in Greece and Turkey for all of July. Today I’m in Athens and have a stable enough Wi-Fi connection to post a letter to y’all.

Below is an essay from a couple of years ago that still holds up for me. I hope it speaks to you.

Like so many of you, I went through a mad bread-baking phase in which I produced sourdough loaves at least once a week. This lasted well into last year.

My favorite thing about keeping a starter was the need to nurture it in order to give my hands a chance to communicate love through mixing, stretching and folding dough. Sharing bread with others became a way of sharing myself. I’ve been accused of reticence more than once, and I suppose baking is an antidote to that.

I wonder if Philip Seymour Hoffman would still be alive if he could find a life-affirming antidote to his own inner turmoil? His death from a heroin overdose in 2014 shook me at the time.

He and I sort of crossed paths a couple of years before at the Sydney Theatre Company where he directed True West for a season. Seated in the orchestra, I looked up before the curtain lifted and noticed him in the director’s booth working with an intensity that comes from a commitment to making something excellent, exceptional, and meaningful. He delivered that night. His particular interpretation of Sam Sheppard’s masterpiece has stayed with me decades later.

His work as an actor held me close to the screen. There was something in him I recognized in myself. Maybe you did too.

If you’re indoors protecting yourself from smoke and heat, I encourage you to watch one of his movies. He made 55 of them in every genre. My favorite dramas include A Most Wanted Man, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Capote. Of his lighter films, Boogie Nights and The Hunger Games are fun to re-watch.

Sourdough with dried cherries from my oven.

On Hometowns and Home Towns

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:55:46 GMT

If one’s hometown is understood as the place where one’s kin are buried, then I last visited mine two years ago to lay my mother’s ashes to rest next to my father’s at Mount Hope Cemetery in Brantford. The only people without a hometown are those who never moved away. Instead, they have only a “home town” — the place where they have always lived and continue to live. Such people in 21st-century America are rarer than the Florida sand skink.

The Dog Rules

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:59:14 GMT

Curl up on the bed where Mommy’s body heat is strongest.
Eat the good stuff first—leftover bbq, cheese, and toast.
Play with the lamb squeak toy as long as the humans are around to play with me.
Run off the rabbit into the neighbors’s yard.
Wait for the squirrel to come down from the tree.
Get dirty digging in the hole under the dead tree in my favorite park.
Put up with a bath so the humans will allow me onto the furniture again.
Make friends with the crow-bros.
Ostracize the dumb Lab at the park who eats his own poop.
Sniff the ground for news of who’s in heat.
Hide the frozen bone in the couch for later.
Self-pack for a road trip even though the human’s won’t be finished loading for an hour.
Bark when the doorbell rings on TV.
Take treats gently from an open hand.
Hide in the corner of the closet at the first rumblings of a storm.
Jump in Mommy’s lap when merging from Queen Anne onto 99.
Lie in the sun and follow it around the yard.
Humor Mommy, who isn’t ready to accept the reason I’m not eating.
Follow her every where.
Trust she’ll be okay without me.

Benny. 2011-2025

My beloved pooch died one year ago. There will never be another Benny.

That’s it for this week. I hope you’re well, happy, and loved.

Sweater Love

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:01:29 GMT

London, Ontario. 1991-ish. I walked out of my boyfriend Patrick’s apartment wearing his Irish fisherman’s sweater over a black turtleneck and jeans. He didn’t notice what I wore until we were well on our way to St. Peter’s Cathedral. He was Roman Catholic, while I was nothing in particular beyond vaguely Christian because my heritage rolled that way—towards Rome—versus further east towards Mecca or Lhasa or beyond.

We went to the Catholic cathedral together, but I didn’t take communion on account I’d never been baptized. One draw was the choir—truly spectacular. Good church music has always touched my soul, touches it still, as does the ritual of Mass itself. The ritual succeeds for me despite the flawed men who lead it from the altar. It’s the rituals that hold me back from adopting the philosophy of radical atheists who blame the world’s problems on religion rather than the men who exploit the people looking for something to believe in; people seeking to make sense of the nonsensical, uncontrollable, unpredictable wild world in which we must survive as social creatures, and must also live with ourselves: nonsensical, unpredictable, wild individuals prone to self-destruction.

What Fancy Plates Meant to a Child of Immigrants

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:31:04 GMT

My mother’s china tells the story of a Depression-era child of immigrants desperate to join the middle class—become the kind of person who holds dinner parties, and in so doing shows a measure of wealth, demonstrates that a wedding with a registry has taken place, and the etiquette of place settings has been observed and is observable in the first place.

The dishes are English bone china from Minton, a fine china manufacturer once based in Stoke-On-Trent, now demolished. Each piece is rimmed with gold and decorated with a raised pattern of meadow flowers in that mid-century modern shade of pink-rose popular when she married my father in 1952. Worthless today, despite the gold or perhaps because of it: no one wants dishes that can’t go in the dishwasher or microwave. What once was precious is discarded on eBay to the joy of collectors who remain committed to the beauty of vintage china.

Welcome!

Martina R. Williams — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:27:28 GMT

Glad you landed here. Pull up a chair and stay awhile.

Far From the Tree publishes personal essays that seek to derive insight from lived experiences in an effort to fuel the never ending journey towards love after our parents messed us up.

Did your parents make decisions that impacted the course of your life without your consent?

“Is the Pope Catholic?” you might say. If so, you could see yourself reflected in these essays.

Why write personal essays at all?

To reflect beyond our own churning innards and arrive at knowledge that’s useful to others. The whole point of these essays is to offer something to you, the reader—solace, validation, a laugh.

Readers have noted that each essay on Far From the Tree is both insightful and relatable, demonstrating vulnerability mixed with a touch of grace.

Common themes in these pages include notions of belonging, impacts of migration, and seeking home.

All of my essays lead here:

Thank you.
I love you.
I forgive you.
Will you forgive me?

If slowing down and reading other people’s stories from life in order to connect to your own truth appeals to you, then I invite you to subscribe.

Subscribe now

What Subscribers Can Expect

Short personal essays that seek to develop an understanding of what it means to truly grow up and set our own terms of belonging in this world.
Discussions of books. Actual books, tactile things made from paper and ink.
Occasional photos of migratory birds and dogs.

Emails go out two Sundays a month.

Popular recent essays:

He took us to his childhood home.

Language is the only homeland.

How morning coffee changed my life.

Sixteen hours and a tomorrow away.

About Me

With my dog at Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle when we were younger. We lost Benny last year in his 14th year.

In many respects I’ve fallen far from the tree, but in others it’s clear that this apple is not so different from those who ripened earlier. We are all acidic and sweet in our own ways.

I’m baffled by the choice my parents made to move from Canada to communist Hungary in 1967 and live there for five years. It’s where I was born. This decision set me up as an outlier within my family, my country of citizenship versus birth, and in my own mind. I’m convinced this origin story is the cornerstone to everything that followed.

My midlife crisis came early. When I was in my late 30s I learned I couldn’t have children, got divorced, left my corporate job, sold my house in Toronto, Ontario and moved to Adelaide, South Australia by myself.

I thought I’d be there for two years to do a masters in creative writing at The University of Adelaide and then return to Toronto refreshed, hit my friends up for a job and life would go on. Instead I stayed in Australia for six years, earning a PhD in creative writing under the mentorship of one of Australia’s foremost literary writers, Brian Castro. I also had an opportunity to work with MJ Hyland, Booker-nominated author of Carry Me Down and This Is How.

In addition to my work as a writer and an academic, I met husband number two, an American born in Florida. Since then we have settled in the United States.

Martina Newhook Williams studied creative writing with Booker Prize nominee MJ Hyland, Jane Rogers, Ken McGoogan, Tom Jenks, and Brian Castro. She is also an alum of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Beach Metro News, Wet Ink: the magazine of new Australian writing, and most recently in Meat For Tea: The Valley Review. The opening chapter of her unpublished novel, She Wore Pants, placed first in the 2012 Lightship International First Chapter Contest. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Adelaide.

At home in Florida 2026.

He Took Us to His Childhood Home. The Consequences Wrecked My Family.

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:01:46 GMT

Longing for a familiar place known in childhood is a way to cope with estrangement from one’s homeland, and when taken to extreme you get my father’s misadventures in 1967, in which he packed up my mother and brother and returned with them to Matraballa, Hungary, his childhood home, making tremendous promises about how great it would be for all of them. It’s where I was born a year later.1

But what of someone like me raised by him? When I moved to Australia people would ask what I missed most about Canada, something uniquely Canadian that couldn’t be found in Adelaide? I had no answer. There was nothing in particular I longed for. Maybe butter tarts.

Verso of a postcard sent to me from by my brother circa 1971. He may have gone to Budapest on a class trip. “Szia!” means “Hello.” Proof that he’s always been a person of few words.

Due to my father’s inability to hold down a job and inexplicable need to migrate all over Canada, I lived in so many places vastly different from each other both culturally and geographically that I never really created a psychological homeland for myself tied to a physical place. Or so I discovered when I left for the other side of the world where the Southern Cross revealed itself during the Antipodean nights, a constellation new to my northern eyes. No magnet attracted me back to the northern hemisphere. Not even my family. The distance was normal to me. Nostalgia was my father’s disease, not mine.

Language is the Only Homeland

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:46:40 GMT

My childhood migration story was unusual in that the country of my birth wasn’t my official country of citizenship. I was born a Canadian in Hungary. For reasons no one in my family has ever felt they understood, my father chose to move my mother and brother from the leafy suburbs of Toronto in 1967 to Hungary, the country of his birth and the one he’d consider his homeland until his death. In essence, I became an immigrant to my own country at age four when my family returned to Canada after spending five years living in Matraballa, my father’s ancestral village.

Is That You?

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:58:36 GMT

It’s time to move my parents out of their apartment. They’re moving in with my brother. Dad is waiting for a bed in a memory care unit and will move again soon. It isn’t an ideal situation. Moving an 87-year-old Alzheimer’s patient twice within a few weeks seems reckless to me, but what choice do we have? They can’t take care of themselves anymore.

Emily Dickinson's Lantern & the Self

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:02:59 GMT

Recently, I stumbled upon the source of one of the most famous quotes attributed to Emily Dickinson, a quote you’ve surely seen popping up all over social media garnering likes from millions of people who’ve never read a Dickinson poem.

Groundhog Day

Martina R. Williams — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:10:44 GMT

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day—my grandmother’s birthday. Born Pearl Kun in 1907 to peasant farmers in Hungary, she experienced whiplash-inducing change during the twentieth century in both historic and very personal ways, right to the end. She died in 1999.

My grandparents, Pearl & Andy, with me in 1973 in front of their house in Brantford. I was four-and-a-half. We’re dressed for church, but we never went to church. I have no idea what the occasion for this picture might have been. Note the handbag on my shoulder. Will manufacturers ever put sufficient pockets in girls’ clothes?

My grandmother witnessed two world wars, the pain of immigration and the loss of kin; the mass production of passenger cars, TVs, and personal computers; Sputnik, Stalin’s crimes, the moon landing; the rise of the women’s movement and rock ’n’ roll; the madness of left-wing splinter groups such as Weatherman, the Red Army Faction, and the FLQ in Quebec, who murdered Pierre Laporte, the deputy premier; and towards the end, the decline of manufacturing, enabler of home ownership and a plot of land big enough for her to cultivate a garden—because once a farmer always a farmer.

In enumerating this list I am made aware of how these times, the today times, aren’t much different from those times. Reviewing them on Groundhog Day Eve seems appropriate.

How Morning Coffee Changed My Life

Martina R. Williams — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:30:58 GMT

The rising sun dries sweat from my legs while I stretch out against a picnic table in front of my local coffee shop waiting for Claude to make my cappuccino. Steam whooshes from the espresso machine. A galah flits to the ground from a gum tree to peck crumbs.

Aussie cappuccino circa 2008

Soon it will be blazing hot; the forecast high is 40℃ (104℉). I’ve just finished a run through North Adelaide along the Torrens.

The Weight of Okay

Martina R. Williams — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:07:29 GMT

While browsing at Barnes and Noble, I picked up David Szalay’s novel Flesh following its 2025 Booker win and read a few pages. Given the current state of prize-winning literary fiction I had my doubts about the book.

Not long ago, I tossed a Booker winner from just two years ago into the trash, unfinished, furious. The Booker nod of approval isn’t enough these days to convince me to fork over cash for a novel. But after reading about ten pages of Flesh I decided to give it a shot.

I liked Flesh, appreciated its author’s attention to craft and storytelling, along with the development of a realistic main character, someone who is recognizable, if not always relatable or likable. In the character of István Szalay has created a man who reflects the zeitgeist and social reality, a man who tells everyone, including himself, he’s okay even though he most definitely is not okay.

The book follows István from the age of fifteen through his prime adult years, and ends at retirement. He begins in his mother’s Hungarian apartment and ends up there following a spectacular rise and fall. He goes to jail for killing a man when he is still a juvenile, then becomes a crook, joins the army for something to do and serves in Iraq, later becomes a bouncer in a London strip club, then intervenes in a mugging; the man he rescues hires him as a bodyguard and introduces him to London’s high society, where he meets the Nymans who then employ him as their personal driver and security specialist, moving him into their London mansion, giving him access to a lifestyle and experiences few men of his social class aspire to because to aspire to them means living with perpetual disappointment.

István smokes a lot of cigarettes. Smoking fills up time, while he waits for the next opportunity or interaction to find him. He also has a lot of sex. This novel isn’t for the prudish reader. But the sex isn’t something he seeks so much as an action that finds him, just like everything else in his life. This is not a reflective man. He isn’t a planner or a striving goal setter. He spends his time reacting to whatever appears before him whether it’s a woman or a landmine.

He has his redeeming qualities, however, otherwise he’d be unbearable for 353 pages. When he finally takes reflective action, demonstrating his moral center, he does so even though doing the right thing is not in his own personal best interests. In fact doing the right thing is the reason he lands back at his mother’s apartment in a provincial Hungarian town.

The language throughout the novel is unornamented, just like István’s. He conveys full sentences, even paragraphs from an uttered “okay.” Kevin Power, who reviewed the book for The New York Review of Books, counted 340 okays in the novel, not all of them belonging to István. Make no mistake, just because the language makes this an easy read, this is a literary text. Szalay uses subtext to say a great deal about the world and a certain kind of man suffering from unacknowledged trauma. All those okays carry far more weight and meaning than any hundred-dollar word could. And this is big reason why I liked the book. Language that actually communicates something true, reveals a real person, without being the least bit self-conscious in literary fiction is refreshing.

I even came out respecting István as a proxy for a kind of man who is everywhere and also nowhere. A man who does’t think too deeply about the options in front of him or how he feels about them, mostly traveling the path of least resistance until one day he is tested.

Moreover, the economic language communicates something about the economy of the story world. There will always be scarcity of one kind or another, and we all experience it in our own way.

For more on the novel check out Kevin Power’s terrific review contextualizing all of Szalay’s work within a continuum of English literary fiction over the past thirty years here.

An excerpt from halfway through Flesh:

He meets his friend Claudiu in a pub near the Cheyne Walk house1. It’s an unexpectedly scruffy place for the area, mainly frequented by builders who are working there, it seems. It’s one of those pubs without music. There’s just the sound of people talking, and sometimes laughing.
“How are you?” Claudiu asks.
“Yeah, okay,” István says.
For a while they talk about the old days in east London.
István asks after some of the others from that first house share. Claudiu is still in touch with a few of them. Tibi and Botond, Jerzy and the Lithuanian. They used to go out on Friday nights sometimes, to the General Havelock, or the Faces, or into the West End. They talk about some particularly memorable occasions, laugh about them.
“Those were fun times,” Claudiu says fondly.
István shrugs, sort of agreeing.
Claudiu himself doesn’t go out on the pull these days. He has a girlfriend now, he says.
She’s Irish apparently. She works in an office.
When he asks István about his situation, whether he’s seeing anyone, István wonders whether to say anything about Helen Nyman. “Sort of,” he says.
“Sort of?”
István nods.
“What do you mean?” Caudiu asks.
István tells him what’s been happening.
“Your employer’s wife?”
“Yes”
“You’re shagging her?”
“Yes.”
“How did that happen?” Claudiu wants to know.
István suggests they step outside for a smoke, and standing on the sidewalk in front of the pub he describes what happened in the Mercedes that day, when she told him she had “the hots” for him, and then how she appeared at his apartment a day or two later and he thought something like, Actually, why not?
They laugh.
“What’s she like?” Claudiu asks him.
“She’s okay,” István says.
“Okay?”
“Yeah”
“Yeah?” Caudiu is smiling at him.
“How’d you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” Claudiu says.
István sort of laughs again. “Yeah, she’s all right.”

The mansion the Nyman’s live in is called the Cheyne Walk house

Have you read Flesh? What did you think? I’m curious to hear your perspective.

An Imperfect Christmas in Vietnam

Martina R. Williams — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:30:11 GMT

Back in 2012 my not-yet-husband and I spent Christmas Eve stinking up a Hanoi hotel room from a tsunami of intestinal explosions. It took just three weeks of not getting sick in Vietnam for us to succumb to overconfidence and eat a sandwich in Lao Cai while waiting for the night train to return us to Hanoi. Luckily the sickness didn’t take hold until we made it to our very clean western-style hotel.

Hanoi, Dec. 2012. I wait with a guide to board the night train to Sapa.

So, there we were. In bed on Christmas Eve anticipating another round of porcelain consultations, when at around seven o’clock there was a knock at the door. I wrapped a robe around me and went to answer, all pale and dehydrated. A distorted Santa Clause and an elf were visible through the peephole. I opened the door.