In April 1965, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled an edition of the magazine guest-edited by photographer Richard Avedon and dedicated to “the off-beat side of Now.” Borne of a moment of upheaval not unlike the one we’re currently living in, the issue explored the people and ideas that were shaping the era. Sixty years later, we’re marking its anniversary by talking to some of our own era's most influential figures and faces about the idea of the Now.
In my forthcoming novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, one of the main characters is a young Black mother in Florida seeking an abortion. Over the course of the three years I spent writing this book, the policies around accessing abortion in Florida drastically changed.
At first, the obstacle for this character was that there was only one Planned Parenthood providing abortions in a three-hour radius of her, reflecting the realities of accessing care in the rural South. Then, months after I began writing, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping the constitutional right to abortion. Florida subsequently changed its laws to restrict abortions after 15 weeks. To stay current, the story had to change with new legislation, so I made edits. This character’s abortion became a question of not only place but time—still possible, but increasingly urgent.
Another year later, Florida passed a new bill instating a six-week abortion ban, though it took another year for the law to pass through the Florida Supreme Court and go into effect in 2024. The law went into effect at the same time as I was working on the final revisions to this novel.
The structures of my plot disintegrated in the attempts to keep the story in the here and now. I had a choice to make: Would this novel have to take place in some version of the past, months or years ago, or would I tear it apart once again to keep up with ever-changing restrictions? I opted to set the novel prior to the six-week ban, which made me wonder, is it even possible to write truly contemporary fiction?
By the time a novel is published, typically at least a year after the final structural revision, the story and its context have already been rendered history.
As we watch Trump produce executive order after executive order, if we look closely, the language he uses consistently invokes the past, using terms like restoration, realignment, and reinstatement. The goal is to go back, so we must remember exactly what it is we are returning to.
From the impending dissolution of the Department of Education and “ending [of] radical indoctrination in K–12 schooling” to “restoring biological truth to the federal government” and mass removal of federal DEI roles, the objective is no different than it was 200 years ago or than it has been among fascist regimes everywhere: maintain control, impose superiority, and create an order in which otherness is always at the bottom. Even the methods used to garner control are similar to those used during slavery and Jim Crow, making use of faith, detainment, limited access to basic needs, education, and the designation of a group of people as a threat to American sensibility and safety while simultaneously making use of them as free labor.
What is blurry to see now, in the censorship of our media and the constant cycle of new information, is clearer in hindsight. There is a reason many Black authors return to write about enslavement: This past is our most present truth. Along with World War II, the occupation of Palestine, and repression in North Korea, many of us are looking for the past to serve as a mirror of the loop we find ourselves in. Same beast, different mask.
These moments in history can be found laced in every contemporary work, but when written as historical, they can be presented blatantly and unapologetically, reflecting so much of our present without requiring a fight against time. The past is present. Now becomes then becomes now. We are constantly living in the last thing that has happened, never fully able to catch our breath and meet ourselves in the present.
I wonder how this current moment will be memorialized—if we will fast-forward or rewind, if we will attempt to reflect what is now even as it changes in mere hours and days. If we will return to history and let it do the work of our present, showing us exactly where we are without disillusioning us by mistaking our past as present. Or if we will be called to create a new way of reckoning with and documenting the present, even as it changes.
