Since the publication of feminist writer Lindy West’s latest memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane in March, online commenters and columnists have fiercely discussed West’s description of her polyamorous marriage. While West was at first devastated by her husband’s request for an open relationship, she comes to accept non-monogamy; she and her husband eventually form a happy and stable throuple relationship with their current girlfriend.
Online discourse about the memoir hits predictable beats in mononormative debates about polyamory: that West has been manipulated, brainwashed, and emotionally abused; that polyamorous relationships never “work out,”; that West has abandoned her feminist politics; that West has abandoned herself. Whether or not West’s particular relationship is healthy, these tropes tend to reproduce stigma about polyamory more broadly.
I was thinking about this discourse while reading Vernal Thaw: A Novel of Love at a Slant by widely published queer writer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist Frances Cannon. Cannon is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship.
Vernal Thaw traces the entangling and unraveling of a queer relationship through love and tumult over the course of a year in Vermont. Franky, the narrator of the novel, is a young adjunct professor haunted by encounters with violent men. She falls into an intense relationship with Vera, an older neurosurgeon shaped by a traumatic childhood in homophobic Soviet-era Ukraine. Their relationship structure is a major source of conflict: Franky is polyamorous, but Vera is monogamous. To be with the woman she loves, Franky decides to compromise: she ends her other romantic connections to be with Vera monogamously.
While most texts about polyamory explore what happens when a relationship opens up, Vernal Thaw reverses this trope: the novel explores what happens when a polyamorous person chooses to close off other connections. This time, monogamy is the experiment and a major source of anxiety for the narrator. A sample passage:
When I tell Vera that I broke it off with Jacob and Ava, she simply smiles and says matter-of-factly, “Good.” I’m relieved to hear this approval, that in Vera’s eyes, I made the right choice, yet not without effort and consequence. Part of me wishes that Vera would acknowledge this; how heavy this choice is for me to make, to break it off with my other romantic connections, to turn toward her and her only, to experiment with monogamy, but I don’t want to push my luck with her. I want ease. Here we are, the odd couple. Here is my dog, snoring on the rug at our feet, there is her cat, lurking in the hall. Together we witness one of the first snowstorms of the late autumn obscuring our view of the outside world.
By reframing polyamory as the default and monogamy as an experiment, Vernal Thaw raises questions about relationships through a non-monogamous lens. Will monogamy feel too simplistic, or will it provide more ease? If we crave multiplicity, what happens when we struggle with singularity? If we’re used to defying social scripts, how do we feel when our relationship reproduces the cultural norm? How do we know if a relationship is worth compromising our politics, ethics, wants, and needs?
I spoke with Cannon about writing this novel, which they consider to be a piece of autofiction. Cannon and I first met a few years ago when she and I were both non-tenure-track faculty members at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Walking their dog Tintin through campus, we bonded over discussions about teaching queer theory and literature, the precarity of our academic positions, and our experiences with relationships and non-monogamy.
“I’m always taking notes about my life, including relationships and events, activities, friends, trials and tribulations. This grew out of my true life experience,” Cannon tells me. “I was perhaps just going to write a personal essay, or maybe some form of autobiography. That began over six years ago.”
Over time, the book evolved and became a novel that experiments with multiple genres: It’s at times a romance, a drama, and a thriller. Cannon shares that it still contains the “emotional truth” of one of her prior relationships, a toxic monogamous relationship with a controlling older woman.
I asked Cannon what it was like to revisit that relationship in the context of the novel and how she sees it now.
“Both Franky and Vera know there’s so much that should maybe have been read as red flags, but they are really attracted to each other and they really want this to work. And in so many other ways, it seems like a really good fit. I just feel like Franky sees in that potential relationship so much excitement and thrill and love, and maybe she doesn’t find the love that she’s looking for, but the temptation is stronger than the warnings.
In all of my relationships, past up through even the present, I have to constantly ask myself: Does this feel good? Is this healthy? What do I need? What am I looking for? Am I asking too much? It’s always a compromise. Nobody’s perfect. The simple framing of, ‘you should have seen the red flags,’ really doesn’t apply to real life, because all of us are strange, flawed creatures.”
This kind of ambiguity is a central theme in the novel. As the narrative progresses, and as her relationship with Vera becomes more unhealthy, Franky finds herself recalling hazy memories of a violent encounter with a man in her past and has a series of increasingly creepy interactions with a different man in her present. “To me, it feels like layers of almost the same fear, and yet they’re different events, different traumas. They feed into each other and then are layered into that pain,” Cannon shares.
Across these moments in the novel, Franky repeatedly describes seeing ghostly feminine shapes in the water. Are they mermaids? Mythical Melusinas? Drowned women? The motif hints at the violence to come later in the novel, as Vera becomes increasingly cruel.
Over the course of the novel, monogamy itself is used as a method of control. “It’s not only just that [Vera] prefers monogamy. It’s that she wants Franky to change to suit her needs. It’s not necessarily that she’s actually threatened by these other relationships, it’s that she wants to own Frankie,” Cannon says.
Online discourse often imagines polyamorous women as trapped in toxic, non-consensual relationships, but Vernal Thaw explores how monogamy can produce these same dynamics. While reading, I was reminded of my main takeaway from the book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Non-Monogamy by Jessica Fern: that emotional security in relationships is developed not from the relationship structure, but through honesty, trust, communication, and vulnerability.
Towards the end of our conversation, Cannon shared the benefits and drawbacks to publishing work independently. “In the literary industries, there are so many levels of gatekeeping,” they say. Being an indie author “comes with some interesting freedoms, including working with open-minded, experimental, non-conformist editors who are open to including hybrid forms.” Working with the publisher Set Margins allowed Cannon to illustrate the book in her signature style.
“There are the challenges of global distribution, working with a European press. I’m based in Edinburgh mostly, sometimes Burlington. The books are being printed in the Netherlands and then I’m organizing all these events in the US. The distribution is a little wacky,” Cannon adds. “Some of that has been a learning experience and a worthy challenge, with beautiful results.” You can follow the Set Margins website or follow Cannon on social media to learn about the upcoming promotional events for the book.
It’s a fitting unconventional process for an unconventional book: an illustrated, autofictional, experimental novel. After we say goodbye, I sit with a question Cannon offered in our conversation: “How do you know if a relationship is ‘quote unquote’ normal, if nothing’s normal to begin with? And then if no one tells you that there’s some threat, and you’re the only one who can perceive the threat, is it a threat? Until it’s too late?”
In queer relationships, we often have to create our own set of standards for navigating life outside the social norm. Sometimes we ignore abusive, self-destructive, and controlling behaviors or excuse them as forms of intimacy, even when we’re hurt. How do we know what’s healthy and right for us? Vernal Thaw shows us one way to answer these questions, so we can navigate our queer desires, careers, and relationships, within or outside of the norm.
