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When the American novelist Lauren Grodstein visited Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2023, its citizens were dancing in the face of riot police. She had come to research a novel that she was writing about an American woman at a personal crossroads; what she found, instead, was a nation protesting growing repression from its pro-Russian government. As Grodstein wrote this week in The Atlantic, Georgia’s mass protests changed not only her novel but also her ideas about the choices she now faces at home.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
The Tbilisi marchers’ stamina impressed Grodstein the most; people came out, night after night, even as the likely futility of their efforts became clear. One regular attendee was, according to Grodstein, “fairly certain her protests won’t change a thing.” Nevertheless, this woman felt that she had no choice but to show up, even as the ruling party, Georgian Dream, continued to tighten control over Georgia’s citizens and appeared to rig an election. That protester’s worldview echoes the observations of my colleague Gal Beckerman, who has recently written about the mindset common to lifelong dissidents. Late last year, for example, he spoke with Benjamin Nathans, the author of a recent book on Soviet dissenters, who told him that many of them share “a remarkable ability to appreciate the hopelessness of what they’re trying to accomplish, but persevere nonetheless.”
Beckerman and Grodstein have been looking out for relevant lessons that could apply to the U.S., as the Trump administration attempts to erode pillars of American democracy—checks and balances, the right to due process, freedom of speech. Still, Grodstein acknowledges that neither repression nor resistance appears the same everywhere. The perseverance of Georgians is notable, she writes, because for them, “self-determination is not a centuries-old tradition but an objective that has been repeatedly thwarted.”
Yet the uncomfortable parallels between the two nations are forcing Grodstein to think more about the decisions she makes every day in response to her own leaders’ actions. “In my work as a writer, I now find myself actively accommodating the priorities of the government,” she writes. She has stricken words such as diversity from federal grant applications and reframed projects to sound more patriotic; she has scrubbed some of her social media, for fear of being flagged at an airport. But after returning from the street battles she witnessed in Georgia, only to hear that ICE agents had detained a mother in her community, she asked herself: “When do I, too, put myself on the line?” It’s never too early, she concludes, to ask such questions. As Georgians have taught her, “the fight for democracy is not the work of a month or two, but of years—of, perhaps, a lifetime.”
Irakli Gedenidze / Reuters
What I Learned From the Georgia Protests
By Lauren Grodstein
A novelist traveled to the former Soviet republic in search of food and a story. She found a new understanding of how to stand up for democracy.
Read the full article.
What to Read
Made for Love, by Alissa Nutting
I love to suggest Nutting’s work to people, even though it’s been called “deviant”—if folks avoid me afterward, then I know they’re not my kind of weirdo. She has a talent for developing outrageous concepts that also reveal earnest truths about what people expect from one another and why. One of the best examples is her novel Made for Love, perhaps better known as an HBO show starring the excellent Cristin Milioti. The book, too, is about a woman whose tech-magnate husband has implanted a chip in her head, but it grows far more absurd. (A subplot, for instance, features a con artist who becomes attracted to dolphins.) Nutting’s scenarios sometimes remind me of the comedian Nathan Fielder’s work: You will probably cringe, but you’ll be laughing—and sometimes even nodding along. — Serena Dai
From our list: The one book everyone should read
Out Next Week
📚 This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, by Tim Berners-Lee
📚 All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation, by Elizabeth Gilbert
📚 Middle Spoon, by Alejandro Varela
Your Weekend Read
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: belterz / Getty; DNY59 / Getty; Pictac / Getty; spxChrome / Getty; enjoynz / Getty.
What’s the Point of a High-School Reunion?
By Jordan Michelman
The origin of reunions is unclear; scholarship on the tradition is scarce. They seem to have begun appearing on social calendars in the late 19th century, in some cases inspired by college-alumni events; in the early 20th century, they trickled down to high schools. By the 1980s, high-school reunions were widely depicted in popular culture: Falling in Love Again (1980), National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). By the time I was cruising Blockbuster Video aisles in the late ’90s, the must-rent specter of Romy and Michele, the protagonists respectively clad in their pink and lavender outfits, loomed large. The film solidified the reunion as a rite of passage, and imprinted in me what the experience of going to my own might someday be like: earnest, awkward, perhaps triumphant, and a referendum on what I’d done with my life once it had well and truly begun.
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