If you made little forts for yourself in the crannies of your childhood home—a personal theater underneath the basement stairs, a recording studio in your mother’s wardrobe, a confessional booth in the family coat closet—then Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson will stay with you, living in your quietest moments.

As a young boy, I wanted things I knew I should not want. Sweet things. The Butterfinger on the highest pantry shelf. Another packet of Sweet’N Low to pour over the three scoops of rainbow sherbert in the plastic, turquoise bowl. In one way or another, I suppose, this is a trait of childhood that most of us remember—how we tested the waters of our independence, breaking the rules to satisfy our cravings.

Yet, as a queer kid in middle America, what I found sweet often set me apart from my friends. I wanted to play doctor with them, to press a hollow stethoscope to their bare chests, shirts crumpling up around their necks as they laid on my makeshift examination table. During sleepovers at my house, I wanted us to sleep together on a big gymnastics mat I covered in blankets and pillows; at their houses, we slept in individual sleeping bags. By the time I turned eight, I was banned from more than one household on my street for asking to see what was underneath the neighborhood kids’ underwear. Over time, my desires forced an inlet of shame between me and my supposedly normal friends. They did not seem as curious about my body as I did theirs, and my stomach would twist when I considered why. I coped with the sharp edges of that shame by retreating into the domestic darkness of wardrobes and closets, dresses brushing my cheeks, my small frame snug in-between the vacuum and a pile of winter boots.

Autobiography of Red is adapted from the Greek poet Stesichoros’ Geryoneis, a retelling of Herakles’ tenth labor, and one of which only eighty-four fragments remain of the estimated 1300 lines that make up the complete poem. In the most common poetic renditions of the labor, Herakles is the prototypical Greek hero who must kill Geryon—a giant, red-skinned monster—and his two-headed dog, Orthrus, in order to secure Geryon’s cattle and bring them to the king of Tiryns. Stesichoros’ version is different. 

This normative understanding of the myth relies on what Carson calls the “fixed diction” of Homeric verse which “fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them there for epic consumption.” A hero is a hero; a monster is a monster. In Geryoneis, however, Stesichoros rejects conformity and chooses to release Geryon from his cage of monstrosity and Herakles his altar of heroism, imbuing them both with something like humanity.

At the beginning of Autobiography of Red, Carson translates and shares a group of Geryoneis fragments, maintaining their lack of punctuation and syntactic irregularities. One fragment tells of Geryon’s inner turmoil:

Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully

Every time I return to this fragment, my throat thickens as tears begin to well up. Over two-and-a-half millennia have passed since Stesichoros wrote those words, and shame still shuttles young boys into isolation. 

Geryon’s humanity is not only evident in his tender, uncertain shame. In one fragment, Geryon reflects on his mother’s care for him as she “neatened his little red wings and pushed him / In through the door” on his first day of school. Later, Stesichoros suggests Geryon’s budding sexuality as a centaur sits next to him and a “Reddish yellow small alive animal / Not a bee moved up Geryon’s spine on the inside.” Even with only eighty-four fragments of the poem left to inhabit, these human moments in Geryoneis turn Geryon’s eventual murder into a tragedy instead of another example of Herkulean valor. Stesichoros’ description of the murder, however, is remarkable for reasons beyond its emotional reverence. When Herakles’ poisoned arrow splits Geryon’s skull, his neck leans “At an odd slow angle sideways as when a / Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze.” 

Geryon’s death in Geryoneis is brutal, but there is a brazen gentleness in Stesichoros’ verse that complicates what might otherwise be read as rote antiquity. The quick violence of the arrow is altered through the poet’s simile, offering an intimate view of the monster’s last breath. Stesichoros lingers on the bloody image, but instead of utilizing the “fixed diction” of Homeric verse, he compares the monster’s limp neck to a flower whipping in the wind. Using adjectives and metaphors—what Carson calls “the latches of being” —to push against a clean account of good versus evil, Stesichoros rips open the narrative. When a monster can be held in union with a flower, what else becomes possible? What swims beneath the surface of the story? As Carson writes: “Stesichoros [studied] the surface relentlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped.” By introducing new adjectives and metaphors, Stesichoros undoes the latches of being, allowing what was beneath the surface of the story—a monster’s humanity and a hero’s villainy—to spill all over the place.

And Carson’s Autobiography of Red is more than a new English translation of Geryoneis. The bulk of the contemporary text, written in loose verse, is a restructuring of Stesichoros’ poem. It follows Geryon as he grapples with a shame not unlike that of the Poppy: one of the body, of desire, of reality. 

As a child, the red-skinned boy must cope with a precarious, sometimes violent outside world. A school corridor that is “a hundred thousand miles / of thunder tunnels and indoor neon sky slammed open by giants.” A bunk bed, shared with his older brother, where Geryon is manipulated into performing sexual favors for his brother in exchange for cat’s-eye gemstones. To survive, Geryon disassociates with the outside world by connecting with what is on the inside. 

The inside, a metaphysical space that Carson smartly withholds from the reader, is Geryon’s alone. To connect with this space, Geryon begins his eponymous autobiography, within which he writes what he knows, or what he terms Total Facts Known About Geryon. “Geryon was a monster,” he begins; “everything about him was red.” It is unclear to me exactly how much of Geryon’s autobiography Carson allows us to see. The novel’s verse is written in a purposefully fragmented voice, and it is often difficult to determine what is spoken aloud, what is an inner thought, and what is an entry in Geryon’s autobiography. This difficulty alludes back to our fragmentary relationship with Geryoneis: We may not be able to read all of Geryon’s autobiography, but we know, in the small glimpses we receive, that its writer is reckoning with his world. Through this practice of autobiographical writing, Carson’s Geryon foments an understanding of self which seems to transcend the Geryon of myth.

But the threat of death still lingers in Autobiography of Red. 

Geryon does not raise cattle or confide in a loyal dog, but Herakles still comes for him. In this telling, Herakles is an egotistical and irresistible man with whom Geryon falls in and out of love for the remainder of the verse novel. When they first meet as teenagers, Geryon’s world changes in an instant: 

it was one of the moments
that is the opposite of blindness.
The world poured back and forth between their eyes. 

At first, their relationship is a typical story of first love. Together, they create art, they have sex, they visit Herakles’ hometown, they argue, they separate. Geryon’s life “enter[s] a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste” as he longs for Herakles from afar. Then, in the span of a page, eight years pass. At twenty-two, Geryon travels to Buenos Aires, where he again runs into Herakles, who is visiting South America with his boyfriend, Ancash. The intensity of their past relationship surges back into Geryon’s life as he joins the pair in their travels. On a plane to Chile, while Ancash sleeps, Geryon and Herakles reunite. 

He felt Herakles’ hand move on his thigh and Geryon’s
head went back like a poppy in a breeze
as Herakles’ mouth came down on his and blackness sank through him. 

As their relationship flourishes and crumbles and flourishes again, there is little threat of physical violence. There is little worry of a poisoned arrow splitting a skull. Yet Autobiography of Red still, at this point, relates a deadly story: the death of the self for another. As Geryon grapples with his “wrong love” for Herakles, he wades into the danger of his attraction:

In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
Geryon knew he must not go back into the cloud. Desire is no light thing. 

Physically and metaphysically, every time Geryon gives into this desire, he opens himself up for Herakles to inhabit, and through that process, Geryon is split in two.

***

Once I grew too large for closets, I created new spaces within which I could hide from my shame. Thinking I could counterbalance my queer desires, I threw myself into the evangelical Christianity my parents raised me on. Unlike the cultish, narrow, post-factual evangelicalism that seems to dominate the American right today, my church was oddly corporate in its mass-appeal, watered-down ministry. Jesus was a friend more than he was God. He was more a confidant than an idea to revere. That might be why it was so easy for me to believe, to play the role of the young evangelist, resolute in my faith. I knew if I asked for forgiveness and meant it, I could masturbate to porn before bed and still go to heaven if I died in my sleep. 

By sophomore year of high school, though, prayer and panicked declarations of faith were no longer enough. As I grew older, my childhood curiosity for the bodies around me had morphed into an insatiable hatred for my own. Over the course of one summer, I developed an eating disorder, losing sixty pounds in a matter of weeks. Like Geryon, I was aware of an inside and of an outside that pressed up against it. Yet, my inside was not a safe place to confide in. It was too large, too loud. I tried my best to shrink it, to furl it up. The things I knew to be true, the things I might’ve written about in my own autobiography—my queer desires, my body—were aspects of my being that I desperately wanted to be untrue. The outside was alienating, but it was better to let it subsume everything than question what was beneath the surface. 

By the time I turned eighteen, I was a depressed and anorexic quasi-Christian. I would daydream of dying, imagining what it would be like for my loved ones to find my body, to wonder why I did it. I thought I wanted my pain to become their pain. What I really wanted was to be understood. I thought I wanted my Herakles and his poison arrow. What I really wanted was a reason to live.

There is a moment late in Autobiography of Red when Geryon, before reuniting with Herakles, finds himself at a bar in Buenos Aires with a group of philosophers. A conversation with one of the philosophers wheels from God to death to olives to children and back. The dialogue is energetic; it brims with half-resolved inquiries on mortality and divinity. As I read, I enjoy the chance to decipher the fragmentary knowledge that surrounds Geryon as he subsides into his overcoat, “letting the talk flow over him warm as a bath.” It is not clear if Carson intends for the philosophizing to bring forth any meaning, but the intellectual coziness of the scene rubs off on Geryon as he bites into a tomato sandwich.

He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how
slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.
He would like to discuss this with someone.
And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.

Only a few pages later, Geryon runs into Herakles and falls into the same trap of longing and desire that captured him in his youth. He is not safe from the outside world. Yet, in this moment, as the slippery tomato sandwich emulsifies in his mouth, Geryon delights in it. It becomes a part of him. Unlike his younger self, who might have retreated into his autobiography to observe “how slipperiness can be of different kinds,” Geryon realizes that he wants to share this experience with someone else. Goodness, however frail, emanates out from his inside “in a widening happiness.”

I know there will be days where my inside feels inhospitable. Days when the shame overwhelms my body and I am helpless, like a flower in the wind. But like Geryon, I, too, have known what joy feels like in my body, what happens when I pause, embrace, and reflect on “things good on the inside.” Joy lingers in the starchy, sweet scent in my kitchen when I do not bother the onions in their caramelization, waiting for them to brown and condense before I fold them into an autumn galette. I feel joy pulse along my adductors when I rest in a butterfly pose after a hard set of slow, rhythmic leg lifts. It puffs out of my mouth in little flurries of cold as I chase my dog in the fresh snow. There will be days like this too. Tomorrow, perhaps. 

Autobiography of Red is a book looking backward and forward at the same time. It looks back at Stesichoros, at poetry and myth, searching for latches of being to undo. It looks forward to an ontology of dissolved boundaries between the outside and the inside that may not ever be realized but can be glimpsed momentarily in the body. When I read it, I look both ways too. Or, perhaps, it helps me realize that I’m always looking both ways. I will always be the boy framing my body within the smallest spaces of my childhood home, attempting to know what my body can contain.