Malinda Lo

Last Night at the Telegraph Club author Malinda Lo returns to the Bay Area with another masterful queer coming-of-age story, this time set against the backdrop of the first major Supreme Court decisions legalizing gay marriage. 

Aria Tang West was looking forward to a summer on Martha’s Vineyard with her best friends—one last round of sand and sun before college. But after a graduation party goes wrong, Aria’s parents exile her to California to stay with her grandmother, artist Joan West. Aria expects boredom, but what she finds is Steph Nichols, her grandmother’s gardener. Soon, Aria is second-guessing who she is and what she wants to be, and a summer that once seemed lost becomes unforgettable—for Aria, her family, and the working-class queer community Steph introduces her to. It’s the kind of summer that changes a life forever.

And almost sixty years after the end of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, A Scatter of Light also offers a glimpse into Lily and Kath’s lives since 1955.

A Scatter of Light

Lily Hagen

That ache: If I could bottle it, it would make you drunk.

“But I’m in love with you,” I whispered.

Lindsay

I didn’t know it was possible to want to be in a place that ached like a bruise.

Julia Rutgers

[ . . . ] twirling slowly in the air like graceful dancers made of silver mesh.

As Saturday evening settled into Saturday night, growing shadows blurred the city's hard edges and turned them into soft-focus suggestions.

The constant hum of recycled air seemed to press against me, pushing me deeper into the hard plastic window shade. I began to imagine my body passing through it, envisioning my skin and bones as individual cells and then singular atoms and then only photons-energy itself. And each photon, each tiny particle of light, could be instantly inside the wall of the airplane and simultaneously beyond it. My whole body could be suddenly outside, thirty thousand feet above the earth's surface. I imagined the whirling air around me, nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor in the clouds and in me, the dawning sunlight scattered by microscopic particles of water and the atoms of my body.

[ . . . ] I looked out and down, and far below me the Rocky Mountains looked the way they do on topographical maps: wrinkled blue and brown, unreal.

If only, I thought. If only this wasn't real.

In the titular poem, "Diving into the Wreck," the narrator puts on scuba gear and dives into the ocean to explore a shipwreck. I saw the ocean that Rich described, colors shading from blue to green to black as the diver descended. I saw the diver with her oxygen tank strapped to her back, poking through the ruins of something that had once been beautiful, taking photographs to record it. I saw the body of the diver morphing, female to male, male to female, the shape of her/him outlined by the shifting light.

I was captivated by that imagined image: the diver hanging in mid-water as if suspended between past and future, as if trying to make a choice.

[ . . . ] the water sighed onto the shore

A Scatter of Light quotes

Join the club