This is the year of the girl. From the sudden rise of coquettecore, balletcore, and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” being the highest grossing movie of the year globally, 2023 seemed like the moment of reclaiming girlhood. Wherever you go online (and even offline!) girlhood is ever present.
But the thing about girlhood is that it’s difficult to pin, classify, or characterize no matter how many ribbons you tie around it. A challenge met head-on by 26-year-old writer Zea Asis, whose reflections on girlhood and all its demonstrations glimmer in her newly released book “Strange Intimacies.”
As do all creative projects, “Strange Intimacies” started as essays written in the middle of the pandemic as a way to survive. Asis ultimately self-published “Strange Intimacies: Essays on Dressing up and Consumption” at the tail end of 2020 with three essays, and illustrations by artist Beyza Durmus. “I have, with considerable amount of effort, attempted to fashion something beautiful out of the most dire circumstances and relay that as best as I could,” she writes in the Instagram caption to promote the chapbook. Since then, the chapbook has been beloved by friends and potential readers alike, even enjoying several reprints.
The chapbook was initially envisioned to be a small project to give to friends or sell online.
Back then, Asis was a contributor to various online publications, so it was her first time putting out personal work outside of a journalistic setting. “I wanted to do something that was mine, and to let loose, experiment, and not feel held back by creative conventions since I was experiencing a lot of unfulfillment creatively, especially with my background in journalism, which reigned back my creative voice,” she says. “Of course, it’s different now, I think, with the rise of literary journalism.”
‘9’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:df2c8e41-9d18-4365-b463-db640681985a’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Writer Zea Asis’ reflections on girlhood and all its demonstrations
In 2021, the independent book publisher Everything’s Fine collaborated with Asis for a reprint of the book — and the rest was history. The “Strange Intimacies” book is out this December, with six additional essays that exhibit her growth and a kind of immersion into the world that only she can do best.
By observing a certain boy named Miguel who was always “quick to smile, and often bunched up his polo sleeves halfway, revealing the thick veins that lined his forearms,” Asis records phantasms of girlhood that only our diaries know about. Her paragraphs flit from one specific observation to an omniscient recollection of childhood, of desire, of her mother’s jewelry box, of psychology, and sometimes, of society.
Inspired by many great women writers like Annie Ernaux, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Rachel Cusk, Asis’ contemporary tone and subjects are refreshing to read, and a revelation too. In one of the newest essays written in 2022, titled and written after Pam Quinto’s art exhibit “lonely is the room,” Asis plunges into Quinto’s avowal of desire and all the intricacies new to her when it’s reclaimed through visual art — gaping, silvery, luminous.
Asis records phantasms of girlhood that only our diaries know about. Her paragraphs flit from one specific observation to an omniscient recollection of childhood, of desire, of her mother’s jewelry box, of psychology, and sometimes, of society.
She quips: “How have I always pictured a woman’s desire? Certainly not in pearls and lace undergarments. If I were to exhume my own memories, there would be in my mind’s eye a different scene: a bloodstained sheet, the refrain of gossip, the white-hot hand of shame. Not this. This reclamation, the utterance of passion and tenderness where there used to be only the story of a body’s defilement.”
Throughout the nine essays in “Strange Intimacies,” Asis’ voice as a contemporary woman amuses and bewitches. It has challenged me, as a reader, to look at the world embodied in my feminine energy because I am, in fact, just literally a girl in the world.
Reading “Strange Intimacies” made me feel that there’s a way of looking at myself not only by the rigidity enforced upon my girlhood, but also with keen respect to the past selves that my body has housed. The Other, finally in denouement. “My body as a source of narrative,” Asis quips in the last essay in the book.
In time for the “Strange Intimacies” launch, Asis talks to us about the intimate details of fashioning the book, girlhood, and everything in between.
’24’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:7dbd6e6c-9b4c-4396-942b-ae7ef3d27b17’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘”Strange Intimacies” is a collection of nine essays about larger
“Strange Intimacies” started as a zine during the pandemic. How did it go from being a chapbook to a book? Did you always have the intention of turning it into a book?
I felt that there was a part of my voice that would always hit a wall, or had to contort into certain shapes in order to be read, and it was an act of courage on my part to just write whatever I wanted, not knowing whether anyone would read what I had written and find it worthwhile. It was a risk, but what silenced those doubts was the desire to write freely and honestly. So the zine was the first creative project I did to prove to myself that I could create something that I envisioned from start to finish, from the writing to the design itself.
It took three years for “Strange Intimacies” to become a book. When Ms. Katrina [Stuart Santiago] from Everything’s Fine reached out to me to say that they wanted to publish “Strange Intimacies” in 2021, they wanted me to write two more essays to turn the book into a five-essay collection, using the same illustrations and layout design. But life happened. I got caught up in grad school. I moved jobs. I went through a break-up. So the book had to take a backseat. During that time, I was able to write six more, which eventually found their way into the book. I made the decision to forego the illustrations and layout design, and instead go for a more pared-back layout. This creative shift came from my own feelings of maturation as a writer, and perhaps as a young woman, in the past three years. I wanted to accommodate the six new essays that explored larger and deeper themes in my life.
Would you say that there were a lot of “experimental” creative decisions in the chapbook compared to the “Strange Intimacies” book?
When I was making the zine, I was definitely trying to do something new with the essay as a form, something I’ve never done before. But since it was my first project, there was a lot more creative exploration that I think is still being further distilled as I mature as a writer.
At the end of the day, I’m drawn to a really good story. In my early writing days, I read Alice Munro, William Trevor, Lorrie Moore, Jhumpa Lahiri — fiction writers who showed me that I can find deep resonance and complexity in a simple story.
Being perceived as “experimental” is an intimidating label for any work. I don’t think of my work as that, as meta or self-reflexive — not intentionally at least — or as trying to say something about the form or the genre. In workshops, we dissect some works based on questions like, “What is the work trying to do?” “What is it trying to say about language?” I didn’t think much about those things when writing the book. I let the story or what I want to say inform how the writing is going to be. You could say that my work springs primarily from feeling and memory, and it happens quite intuitively rather than intellectually in the beginning. There is so much history and poetry kept in reserve through the body, and it’s in slowly and instinctively arriving at those small epiphanies that the work of writing facilitates.
‘ ’38’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:b67f3bc1-aef0-426d-b5f0-e14372d83ca4’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘Throughout the nine essays in “Strange Intimacies,” Asis’ voice
What’s the essay in this book that took you the longest time to finish?
The hardest to write was “Red Hibiscus,” for many reasons. I remember crying through all the moments of writing and revising. It had to go through many iterations before it found its core story, and that was my father’s death in 2018. I knew that the piece would revolve around that singular moment and ripple toward other aspects of my life, both past and present.
In a sense, I had already been writing about my father since college but I couldn’t find a structure, and I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to say, how to frame an open wound that wouldn’t heal. Perhaps his death brought closure, albeit a premature one. A sense of finality to things. The distance via time and space also helped with that.
“Red Hibiscus” too seemed like the most “objective,” with rote facts on what happened. How were you able to collect those? And how was the piecing together of cold hard evidence vis-a-vis your personal experience?
I had to look for objective evidence because I didn’t think my own memories would suffice to reconcile my inner world with the outer one. I went through police files, family albums, testimonials from both my mother and sister, to piece together a portrait of my own relationship with my father. But I also knew that no matter the research, I still had my own flawed recollections to contend with, because I could never erase the “I,” the young girl, who experienced all that. She was still part of the narrative, a part of me, and was the one who sought answers for what happened and why.
In “Close To Shore,” you pondered over Butuan, a city of your girlhood, and your mother’s. What was it like writing about a place that you don’t physically inhabit anymore?
I always go back to themes of displacement in my work, because I feel like it’s the only constant thing in life. We lose and let go of things, people, and places that once formed a significant part of our lives. It’s what time does. Much of my life is demarcated by losses, and we accumulate so much as we go along. It is relatively common for families to have within them points of divergence, or gaps in understanding, or a lack of attentiveness, and this, to me, was also a point of loss, mourning the absence of what should be there.
‘ ’53’: ‘image’: ‘jcr:305bb773-4ba7-41f8-8fdd-f5364c1840ed’ ‘imageCaption’: ‘”I always go back to themes of displacement in my work, because I feel like it’s the only constant thing in life,” says Asis. Photo by JL
I think the reason why I go back to my mother in a lot of my essays is because I realized that she is still a stranger to me. So much about her choices, regrets, and sacrifices eluded me as a young girl. While my mother is a key figure in my childhood, I really can’t say that I know her, and I feel a sense of loss for the unknowing. I relied on her for so many things as a young girl but the eventual fraying of that relationship brought to light many areas in which we were alike, but also very different, which formed a rift between us. That’s a fact that I can’t change, and can only spend my whole life defining and circling back to. Maybe you could say the same thing about a person’s relationship to their hometown.
Conjuring the place where I spent most of my girlhood with my mother is almost like being in dialogue with that loss, giving it shape from which I can examine it and bring it to life again. A way of surviving.
Your writing is so refreshing because it’s lingering and sensorial, and reading you always gives me a sense of, “Wow, I’m seeing this certain mundane experience in a new way.” Did you have experiences of not “measuring up” to the literary community because the things you write about are not as philosophical or cerebral?
I have always wondered if my experiences were meaningful enough to be turned into an essay or a book, until now. And maybe to some, they are trivial and out of touch. But that’s where craft and technique come in. Maybe the things most valuable to us can be as simple as the necklace handed down by your mother, a skirt you thrifted, the light caress from a young man you naively thought you could love. It is the writer’s task to help us see our everyday experiences with new meaning and imbue it with deep feeling and resonance.
“Maybe the things most valuable to us can be as simple as the necklace handed down by your mother, a skirt you thrifted, the light caress from a young man you naively thought you could love. It is the writer’s task to help us see our everyday experiences with new meaning and imbue it with deep feeling and resonance.”
While some have said that my writing is very feminine, it’s not a conscious decision on my part. I’ve always believed in the aphorism, “write what you know,” because some of the best writing in the world has come from a very personal sense of place and identity. What would Alice Munro’s writing be like if she didn’t write about small-town rural Ontario, where she lived for much of her life? Or Annie Ernaux’s? It felt oddly disingenuous and contrived for me to write about anything else that wasn’t my experience of being a young woman living in the city grappling with trauma, family, dating, identity, sexuality, and self-expression. It was a way of survival for me, of writing my way through.
How has being in an MFA program improved your writing discipline?
My first term in grad school was the most rewarding and productive one, when I got to learn about creative nonfiction under Dr. Marjorie Evasco, an inspiration and mentor of mine. That same term we read Mary Karr’s book “The Art of Memoir,” where I learned the concept of carnality. In the process of writing, Karr mentioned, the writer must effectively use the five senses in their work to fully situate and immerse the reader in their own experience. It also speaks to the validity of subjective truth, by presenting totemic evidence culled from the five senses, because for her, our senses are the ways that our bodies experience the world, well before our mind begins to process and interpret our sensorial observations. Since then, I’ve paid more attention to writing the five senses in my work. I find that it’s made it richer somehow, and it’s the quality that I’ve come to admire most in the writers that have shaped me through the years.
’78’: ‘contentWidth’: ‘100%’ ’embedCode’: ‘
