In Ilana Masad’s sophomore novel, Beings, a modern-day archivist excavates voices from the 1960s to find connection. Reflection. Proof of life. In the isolation of their own apartment, the archivist repeatedly ignores questions from a reporter about a video on the internet where, as a child, they claimed to have witnessed a UFO in their schoolyard. They don’t remember that moment, don’t want to watch that video, and certainly have no answers to the questions in their inbox. Instead, the archivist digs into the lives of a couple rattled by their own alien encounter on the backroads of New Hampshire. They scour the unanswered letters of Phyllis, a young lesbian living on her own for the first time in Boston. They pull these threads through time to prove they’re not alone in the world—and, perhaps, not even beyond it. They invite readers to hold onto these threads, too; to tug at their impossible truths, to hang on to their elusive beauty.
Beings is layered, thoughtful, and deeply—for lack of a better word—human. These pages are full of yearning and questions that, in the end, I didn’t want answered. Why—this story asks—do we try so hard to understand the whole universe when we can’t even fully know ourselves?
I was lucky enough to talk with Ilana about her evocative second novel, the pain and confusion of alienation, and the human history she mined for all of Beings’ wonder.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jen St. Jude
Beings follows three stories across different timelines: a couple rattled by a UFO encounter on the backroads of New Hampshire, a lonely lesbian writing letters to an ex-friend (or more) as proof of life, and an archivist trying to connect to these people all these many years later. Which story or characters came to you first, and how did that shape the others?
Ilana Masad
The couple came to me first when I found the real-life story of Barney and Betty Hill. I was fascinated by them, but felt very early on that I could not tell their story in isolation. The only way I could write about them without feeling like I was exploiting them was to acknowledge that I was imagining them. It was important to interrogate that instinct of “I want to write their story,” and add that meta-textual element.
I also wanted to follow a lesbian in the 1960s because queer history doesn’t actually start at Stonewall. I wanted to explore this decade that led up to Stonewall, partly because when I learned about the Hills and how they were written about, I kept thinking that it felt like they were outed. And that was what was happening to queer people in the sixties; if they were arrested at a gay bar, their name and address would be printed in the newspaper. Their bosses would find out, and it was totally legal to fire them.
The archivist character started out as someone with a much bigger storyline set during the early days of the pandemic because that also felt very relevant to me. This time of: What do we know? What do we not know? How scared are we of things that we can’t see or don’t understand?
Jen St. Jude
As a queer history nerd, the archivist resonated with me. Why do you think some of us reach for people who might tell us about ourselves but can never actually speak back?
Ilana Masad
Part of it has to do with queer ancestry. Often, our lineage is not so much familial as it is chosen. As a Jewish person, I’ve always had this strong sense of lineage because I have texts literally thousands of years old from people who thought about things in similar ways to how I think about things. I have a clear sense of where my family came from, even if a lot was lost during the Holocaust.
Whereas with queerness, I’m very lucky that my aunts are queer, so I knew that I didn’t invent being attracted to women or people of multiple genders. But when I was doing research for this book, I was listening to a lot of Making Gay History, the Eric Marcus podcast. He has recordings of people from past decades, many of whom by now are dead. I felt so close to them. They had all of these ambitions, motivations, ideas, and personalities. Like us, they carved spaces for themselves in the world and found their people.
In 1919 Germany, Anna Elisabet Weirauch wrote The Scorpion, where she describes this queer milieu of people. It shows this whole world of chosen family, and this is a hundred years ago. People were doing this even then, which means people have always been doing it. That feels affirming. The archivist is very introverted and isn’t a naturally social person, but this connection to history is deeply meaningful because they can feel less alone. We read books to feel less alone too.
Jen St. Jude
In addition to historical texts, what other media inspired this story?
Ilana Masad
I studied a lot of sci-fi from the forties and fifties, because adults in the sixties would be thinking of media of earlier eras too, the things they grew up with. I read Ursula Le Guin, Judith Merril, Leslie F. Stone, and other classics of the era, like Robert A. Heinlein. I went to used bookstores and found magazines for fifty cents or something. I got stacks of Weird Tales, of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I just read those cover to cover. I kept being surprised by how either regressive or progressive these writers were. And I kept finding gay themes in Heinlein, which confused me because I had always had him in my mind as hella straight. It seems like he was maybe a little more flexible, or at least knew a lot of people who were queer, which I guess I should have expected. Sci-fi was a place where marginalized people could write differently than they could in the mainstream. I mean, that’s why lesbian pulp also existed, because you could write adventure stories about women. Maybe they had to kill themselves at the end, but people would just skip the ending.
Jen St. Jude
As a metaphor, aliens speak to this double-sided coin of isolation and connection. What’s beyond us? What does it mean to be alive, sentient? What’s the truth, and does it matter, and if so, why?
Ilana Masad
Aliens, as a metaphor, are similar to God as a metaphor. Science journalist Sarah Scoles wrote this incredible book called They’re Already Here about UFO communities, and she takes them very seriously. She’s interested in why people see and believe in UFOs, and how community is formed around this belief. She describes going into a UFO convention and how she could see everybody was relaxed in a way she hadn’t seen in other spaces. And she was like, oh, this is how I feel when I walk into a lesbian bar. We might not have anything in common except for this one thing that we know that other people think is weird, but it allows us to be a little bit more ourselves in the space.
Jen St. Jude
I’ve often reflected on the luck that led me to being out; meeting the right people, reading the right books, and learning I’m not alone. Only then could I believe myself about myself. Beings explores how people of marginalized identities interact with credibility. How did you think about these characters’ identities, and how they shaped how they were believed by the world—and by themselves?
Ilana Masad
The world is always trying to gaslight us into conformity, so part of what was so interesting about my characters and the Hills was that they did come to believe what they’d experienced despite there being no physical evidence. They had nothing but their own minds—and the memories they unlocked (while unconscious) through hypnosis. I imagine the wife had some trust in herself, in part because she was a white woman in America, but she was also a white woman in America when women were not counted. It’s true that she’d been in a very abusive marriage, but was now in a stable place with a husband she loved, a job she liked, and doing good in the world with her activism.
Whereas the husband—because of his experience living as a Black man in America—was trying at all times to prove his humanity to corporate boardrooms and shit. So, he already knew he had to play respectability politics to do the activist work he was doing, whether he wanted to or not. That would shape how he trusted himself when something totally out of the ordinary happened. He was already trying to convince people that racism was real, that his people were being harmed because of systemic issues. And so how might he deal with this completely wild thing that happened to him, especially when it became public?
When Republicans are like, well, trans people aren’t real, it just drives me crazy. You think trans people aren’t already asking themselves that every day? If we’ve already reached the point of being out, that means we’ve worked through it to some extent. That doesn’t mean that it goes away, at least for some of us.
Jen St. Jude
So, the tough question then: Do you believe in aliens? And what’s more, do you believe these stories of alien encounters?
Ilana Masad
I don’t know one way or another, but the universe is how many millions of years old? How many societies and peoples might have risen and fallen and gone extinct and developed? Who am I to say that no aliens have visited Earth? I am on the skeptical side, but I’m open to believing things as long as they don’t seem to be actively harming people. The universe is endless and expanding.
FICTION
Beings
By Ilana Masad
Bloomsbury Publishing
Published September 23, 2025
