SONDER, n. This is a new word (we could say “neologism,” sure), coined by the writer John Koenig in 2012 for his project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He invented it based on French “sonder” (to probe, to measure the depths of), and German “sonder-,” a prefix that indicates something is “nonstandard, special.” (Not sure if this is still a “productive” prefix—if people still make new words with it. I don’t speak German and am always open to corrections or better context whenever it comes up, so please reply if you want!)
You can hear the pronunciation of Koenig’s English neologism “sonder” in this video he made if you wish. Luckily for me and anyone else who would one million times rather read text than watch video, he also offered a text definition in this ancient tumblr post:
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
As far as I know, “sonder” is the only one of Koenig’s words that has developed a life of its own—I’ve seen it crop up elsewhere on the internet and it’s been adopted as a coffee shop name by more than one business. People obviously like having a word for this feeling. I think it’s because it isn’t that obscure. The unknown depths of other people’s lives might slip our minds sometimes, but we’re often reminded of them. This passage from A Tale of Two Cities describes essentially the same thing, so Charles Dickens was lamenting it at least as far back as 1859:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.
I wrote about this passage once before, way back in the lost world of 2019. I won’t bother to link it because the only important part is that I listened to A Tale of Two Cities as an audiobook, so I heard this particular part while driving down the highway at night. Through Springfield, Massachusetts, specifically. Dickens might not have considered it “a great city,” since he lived in what was at the time the largest city in the world, but he also died before the invention of the incandescent light bulb, so I bet my drive passed by more electric light than he saw in his whole life. And still the solemn consideration of all the darkly clustered houses persists. You win, Charles Dickens. I can’t drive at night without thinking about the secrets they enclose.
Photo by Benjamin Sow on Unsplash
Dickens gets to the heart of the sorrow: all the things we’ll never know because we’re going to die. We are small and mortal and can only ever get a fleeting glimpse of the vast complexity that surrounds us. Koenig doesn’t mention death, but still perceives “sonder” as a grief.
I don’t think it always has to be, though.
We do spend much of our lives reducing strangers to obstacles—the person in front of us paying for their groceries, or blocking traffic, or knocking on the door to sell us religion or solar panels—but sometimes, in rare moments of illumination, there’s more. It happens a lot now that I’m out in public with a small child. People want to talk to us. Often it’s because they have their own kids, maybe the same age or maybe old enough to have a mortgage, and even in that brief interaction, they’re sharing that they understand what it’s like. You see it, then: a glimpse of the vastness. These people, their families, other generations extending backward and forward through time. Sometimes the people we meet don’t have kids of their own, but either they remember some of their own youth or they’re buoyed by running into a small person who doesn’t yet know that the rest of us don’t usually stare at the mail carrier for many minutes on end, or run into a neighbor’s yard and hug all their Christmas decorations, or point and shout DOGGY at every stranger’s dog. We can’t know exactly what our encounters mean, what connections strangers will draw from them, what’s inside all those darkly clustered houses, but the possibility glows. That’s not a grief, that’s a wonder.
Fiction pulls from this same well, I think—our yearning to know the secrets of each other’s hearts, to sense some web of connection that we can’t normally see. Koenig talks about “an epic story” and Dickens makes reference to reading, too. There is such satisfaction in being the reader invited into a character’s private thoughts. There is satisfaction, too, in witnessing that character revise their understanding of the people around them.
Both of the romance novels below have big reversals where characters finally break through their limited idea of who someone else is and see that person clearly. In The Roommate Risk, Jasmine can’t see that Rahul is in love with her, because to do so would mean reckoning with her own wants and fears. When she finally does, it’s hard work—but worth it, of course. In Georgie, All Along, Georgie experiences a moment of revelation when her best friend, whose perfect, put-together life Georgie envies, confesses that she’s terrified and unhappy. Georgie has been treating her best friend like a supporting character, with no problems of her own to resolve, no story, and that turns out to be false. Isn’t it always?
Here they are, the hearts and their secrets, those two small-r romance novels.
The Roommate Risk (het m/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Talia Hibbert, previously published under the title Wanna Bet?. This is as sparkling and as sexy as Talia Hibbert’s books always are, but it has a lot more angst. Rahul, the hero, has recently lost his beloved father and is still grieving, while Jasmine, the heroine, grew up loved by her father and abandoned by her mother, which left her with trust issues. She only has casual sex, never relationships, and if she happens to get very drunk to do it, well, that’s not a problem (it absolutely is). Rahul and Jasmine met in university and have been best friends for the seven years since; he’s been manfully repressing his romantic feelings for her so they can maintain a friendship, and she’s repressing all her feelings, so has no clue about his. Except her apartment gets flooded and she needs a place to stay, and he has a place to stay, and then they’re living together and they both really like it, and naturally Jasmine freaks out. This is sweet and delicious, messy, messy friends-to-lovers romance, and I remain in awe of Talia Hibbert’s ability to write a perfect book every time.
Georgie, All Along (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kate Clayborn. Georgie, devoted and competent personal assistant to a successful Hollywood director, loses her job when the director retires. Since Georgie didn’t have much of a life outside of work, she feels aimless and goes back to her hometown in Virginia wondering if she’s a failure. A chance encounter brings her into the orbit of Levi, a gruff loner dogged by his bad reputation, who’s just enough older than her that their small-town paths never crossed. This book is the story of them figuring out who they are and who they can be to each other. It’s well documented in this newsletter that reading a Kate Clayborn novel makes me lose my mind a little bit, like I need to carve every word in stone and bury myself curled around the tablet so that future archaeologists will comprehend what sorts of things their unknown 21st-century ancestors wanted to hold onto forever. But let’s not worry about my tomb just yet—Georgie also made me want to live. To text my friends. To sit by a river in the evening and cherish the world and everyone in it. A few days ago on Bluesky, I asked what the word “romantic” meant to people and got a lot of good answers. My own examples, when I listed them, tended toward the big and dramatic, drawn from historical romance and fantasy, highlighting daring feats, unexpected gestures, overwhelming emotions. One of the few contemporary romances on my personal list was this one: real but sweeping, both in the off-your-feet sense and the grand-panorama sense, with still-life clarity for the details (a can of spray paint from the clearance rack, a little smudge of peanut butter next to someone’s lip) and everything they mean.
(I’ve stopped doing content guidance in this newsletter, but since this is my particular deal and it didn’t come up in what I wrote above, The Roommate Risk has a “babylogue,” i.e. an epilogue chapter where the couple has a kid, and Georgie, All Along has pregnancy and birth in it as part of a supporting character’s story. Both are beautifully written and suit the characters, but there were times in my life when they would not have suited me.)
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read another perfect gem of a fantasy novella, Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo, which has that wonderful quality of short fiction where the ending makes you flip back to the beginning and all of a sudden it seems like you’re reading something totally different. Longer works can achieve this effect, but the immediacy of short fiction gives it such impact. I’ve read three of Vo’s novellas and they’re all fun as hell, and this one has magic martial arts in it so it’s even better.
I wanted to highlight two of Vo’s (many) strengths as a fantasy writer. The first is how much her imagined world comes alive because she’s so good at naming things—you really get the sense of overlapping but distinct cultures within the empire just through the character names (Lao Bingyi, Mac Khanh, Chih), titles (the Shaking Earth Master, The Cruel Wife of Master See), and places (the Abbey of Singing Hills, Verdant Islands, Ko-anam Ford, Betony Docks). The second is that every story and bit of folklore recorded by our protagonist, the traveling cleric Chih of the Abbey of Singing Hills, seems to enfold dozens of others. While another character is telling Chih the legend of a woman called Wild Pig Yi, that character gestures toward many untold stories:
[…Wild Pig Yi] lived on the riverland roads for ten years. She protected the heir to the Phoenix Throne as she returned to claim her maternal title. She defeated the Wild Rock of Anpur in a wrestling match fifty-one throws out of a hundred. With the help of a sly fox girl with eyes painted over her eyes, she broke the Four Dams, an attempt by a wicked governor to starve out the people downriver.
The fractal nature of the stories is tantalizing and wonderful, and it’s founded on Vo being so damn good at naming stuff. The whole world has the feeling of being mapped in stories, which makes Chih’s travels feel that much more meaningful.
Also, the dialogue is impeccable:
“You hit like an old grandmother swatting at a fly,” Wild Pig Yi declared. “You are so slow the Huan River could run backwards and the emperor could give the realm to the rule of the people and they could breed a wise horse and an honest lawyer before you landed a blow.”
This series (The Singing Hills Cycle) can be read in any order, but the first one published is The Empress of Salt and Fortune. If you haven’t read it yet, good things await you.
I am still and always calling and writing and donating and reading for Palestine, and on that note, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” hit me like a rock through a window, perfectly aimed. He links Rasha Abdulhadi’s poem “Pocket Full of Warding Stones,” which is a furious howl of grief: “let them hear the holes when we sing.”
Text your friends, call your elected officials for a ceasefire, and ponder the untold stories of strangers. I’ll be back in your inbox on Sunday, February 18.