In this month’s From the Archives, longtime TMR reader Jill Bronfman digs into one of our earliest stories “The Brothers Wham!” by Megan Giddings. First, read Giddings’s marvelously imaginative story, and then follow along with Jill below!
There’s a reason that we crave fame, and it’s the same reason that people who have it shrink away from it. It takes and takes, and then there’s not much left of what you used to think was you. George Michael had that kind of fame, the fabulous and destructive kind. Megan Giddings, in her story, “The Brothers Wham!,” excavates the persona of the man and adds to the mythology of the 80s pop band Wham!, including the brilliant and talented George and his musical partner, Andrew.
Giddings begins with an actual excavation, as a narrator reanimates from the dead and digs her way out of a grave. She gives us a vivid recreation of the process of re-fleshing and re-breathing a human body, and gives her narrator a reasonable approximation of a life thereafter. The first-person perspective in this piece brings us right into our own bodies as readers. Further, she gives us action. Not just hearing the music, not just remembering a song and virtually traveling to the time you first heard it. She put the music into dead bodies and that music makes them come alive again.
Giddings also carves a space in place and time for this meaningful interaction with music and the cult of personality. This story, this section of the story, it’s not for everyone, for every reader or for every listener. You have to be the right audience to reap the benefits of her craft. The bodies in the graveyard who were out of earshot of George Michael’s stirring lyrics? They remain dead. We can’t all be in the right grave at the right time.
She switches quickly, both in genre and point of view, whiplashing us into a hybrid reality-fantasy section. The center section of “The Brothers Wham!” explores a fantasy alt-life for George and Andrew, in which they arrive in China for a concert but are instead whisked away by ideal partners for romantic love and years of a meaningful life. George gets to express his love for a man, and Andrew has a good time with a Chinese fox woman, the latter based on traditional folklore and the former sheer wish fulfillment, which is what so much of all folklore is about.
Finally, there’s a section of the story about a sick boy, one who listens to forecasts of his future fame, fame beyond the wildest imaginings of his parents, his friends, himself. Millions of fans. Millions of records sold. Immortality of a sort that only the superstars of pop music and mythological creatures of your heart’s desire can experience. This third and final section gives us a clue about the point of view by telling us it will be from the Roman Coliseum’s perspective. What that tells us is that we are about to pull out to see this music and this musician from a wide-angle lens. We’re looking at the big picture: Who is this man, and how did he become so powerful in his influence and magic, and why, why, this man, and how does it fit within the grand scope of human endeavor? He’s the Coliseum, in a subtle metaphor. He’s both beautiful and eternal.
Giddings’s other story published in The Masters Review (see also “Double Exposure” from 2015) shows glimpses of the polished work she would later produce. In Giddings’s book-length work, The Women Could Fly (published in 2022), the protagonist has to deal with a mother who’s gone missing and is accused of being a witch in a world where witches are real, in danger, and highly regulated by the state. In fact, all women are highly regulated by the state including having to marry by age thirty or be monitored. Early in the story, she admits to herself as a child that there are going to be a lot of times in her life when she must censor herself. “What I did not say…” begins one paragraph of how she did not tell the full story of a supernatural occurrence. Toward the end, she says, “I told myself, If you keep acting normal, you can have a life.” It’s only when she needs to save her own life that she gives up her hard-won pretense of normality and uses magic to escape. And for better or worse, she tells herself, this is what women have to do. If the attention is on you, you may need some magic to escape, to find your heart’s desire.
In “The Brothers Wham!,” Giddings asks us to imagine the life of George Michael from a similar perspective, asking the reader for empathy and complicity in the escape plan. Giddings builds empathy by telling us that “George Michael was used to keeping the want off his face” when he sees a handsome man. Further, Giddings sets out in a separate paragraph in the center fantasy section: “‘I’m gay,’ George Michael said to Andrew as if he had not noticed Henry was a man. It was the first time he had said the words aloud and the effort made his esophagus feel small and pinched.” We feel his awkwardness and yet deliciousness in this revelation, which turns out to surprise no one. And then the seemingly simple escape plan, to live with his lover in the fantasy section. But no, this is just an illusion of escape. The center section of this work turns out to be just a blip in real time.
The real escape is into the starry night that is the inescapable and perpetual future of this character. Giddings lets inanimate objects tell us George Michael’s future, which is “your” future, closing the loop on empathy for the reader:
“You are destined to write and sing and dance,” said the buildings.
[…]
“You will see the world,” said the Eiffel Tower.
“You will bring great joy,” promised the Coliseum.
“You will sell more than twenty million copies of your first solo album,” the Empire State building said.
You looked at their strange black eyes and wished you could leap into the future.
The future, the past, the alt-present, it’s all wrapped up in Giddings’s story that makes us feel more for someone the world already loved. In order to capture George Michael’s essence, she needed to show us what he meant to the people who were close to him, and to people who only heard his music. She did this by using multiple perspectives and her grand imagination to create a portrait of a star who gave nearly all of himself to the world. This story was published in 2014, and George Michael died of heart failure in 2016. His heart had literally become too large for him to live.
by Jill Bronfman