“AN IMAGE IS A RELATIONSHIP.”

An Interview with Director and Cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson

Kirsten Johnson is a documentary film director, producer, and cinematographer whose credits include Citizenfour, Trapped, The Invisible War, Darfur Now, and Fahrenheit 9/11. In her new film, Cameraperson, she weaves together unused footage from her work as a cinematographer with her own home movies, creating a cohesive narrative about memory, trauma, representation, and the power of images and human connection.

Johnson (or KJ, as she’s known) elevates these remnants of previous films—including footage of survivors of the Bosnian genocide picking blueberries after returning to their home, a lawyer displaying the chains that white supremacists used to drag James Byrd to his death, and a midwife in a Nigerian maternity ward attempting to revive a dying newborn—and intersperses them with scenes of her mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, receding into an unknown space. KJ only appears on camera once, but her presence behind the camera is unmistakable.

KJ and I met a few days after a Cameraperson screening at a film festival, and we talked for a little over an hour about how she approaches her craft and the dilemmas she faces as a cinematographer—and as a human being.

—Stephanie Palumbo

I. I’M SEEING YOU NOW

THE BELIEVER: You’ve said the camera brings you closer to people. What does that mean?

KIRSTEN JOHNSON: For me, the camera allows. It allows me into someone’s home, into their intimacy. I filmed testimony of Holocaust survivors for the Shoah Foundation, and I remember going to this woman’s house in Brooklyn. She had this amazing photo of herself from when she was a little kid, where she was wearing a fez on her head with a fake chocolate cigarette in her mouth. You could see the most beautiful little life in the photo, and I got to be close up to film it, enter into her eyes, and be in her pre-Holocaust childhood. And then the same woman—we were filming and smelled something burning, and she was like, “Oh, I’m cooking my lunch.” So I go into her kitchen, and there’s this funny little metal bowl that’s cooking slowly on the stove, and I was like, “What is this bowl?” And she was embarrassed about it. It was her bowl from the camp. And it was what she makes all of her food for herself in. That tells you something about what the Holocaust was.

So there’s that level of intimacy, and then being allowed into a space like a prison or someone’s place of worship or a factory—places you don’t get to go otherwise, but you show up with a camera and you’re allowed in. Anytime you can get in closer physical proximity, you know more. If I get closer to you, I see the way you smile differently than I did when I was over here. And that’s what I do with the camera.

I could sit next to you, and I might actually touch you, and once you feel the quality of someone’s touch, you know different things about them. There have been times I transgressed inadvertently—like in Nigeria, I tried to touch this imam who was Boko Haram, and all of the security people came and stopped me.

BLVR: But then that tells you something too.

KJ: That’s information! I’m not allowed to touch this man, and how the world would end if he was touched by me. That’s profound. I respect and understand the differences in our experiences, and on another level, I’m interested in ways to break down the barriers. We’re humans, we’re bodies. How do I read the codes in a place, in a moment, so I can actually say, I’m seeing you now?

BLVR: Cameraperson highlighted connective threads between disparate people and places. Certain images recur—axes and firewood, or ripped jeans.

KJ: It’s so crazy that all these connections exist. I really looked at this film and never noticed the ripped pants, but it immediately has a connection in the story of my mom and in the story of memory. In 1957, my mother went to Haiti, and she didn’t know that Haitians were black. She got off the plane and was completely terrified. In my lifetime, she always talked about Haiti with fear. One of the things that she described was a man who had a rip in his pants, and she could see his butt. It was horrifying to her. She would always talk about the ripped pants.

I loved Haiti and went there a lot, and it always made me so angry that all she remembered were the ripped pants. But one time I was talking with her about Haiti when she was in her Alzheimer’s state, and she was like, “Oh, those beautiful girls, with their hair so beautifully brushed, and those big fat ribbons, and the way their shoes were so shiny on their way to church.” She had this memory—she had seen all these beautiful things, but she had only let herself see the poverty and the fear and the racism. This is why I love the scene in Cameraperson where a physicist explains the phenomenon of entanglement, a kind of magic alchemy. It does make one feel like it is our shared experience.

II. WHERE IS THE SELF?

BLVR: The film deals with the loss of your mother. Did you ever feel too immersed in the footage of her, where you had to step away?

KJ: I had very little footage of my mom. I had filmed her tentatively, because she didn’t want to be filmed. When I filmed her at her family ranch, I was sneaking it. The shots are very short—I’m constantly turning the camera off because I didn’t have her permission. But I also filmed her when she was so in her other space with Alzheimer’s that she stopped being self-conscious. What I find so interesting in that is—where is the self? The person who cared about her appearance and her representation didn’t exist anymore, and yet what did exist was her primal connection to my hair.

BLVR: She brushes your hair in the film.

KJ: My hair was always a place of contention. It never looked quite right to her when I was a teenager. She’d want to brush it, and I’d resist. In this moment of her Alzheimer’s, some part of her brain remembered that hair mattered—like, you can’t film if your hair is a mess, you can’t be the person that I want you to be if your hair is a mess. But we also had this moment in that period where she’d spend every day saying to me, “Your hair is so gorgeous and lustrous and shiny.” That’s what I find amazing about Alzheimer’s—that somehow the brain holds onto these touchstones and then works and reworks them. Someone told me that the structure of Cameraperson is not unlike Alzheimer’s—it’s out of chronology, it’s focused on the emotionally significant events. That never occurred to me, but I was fixated on how Alzheimer’s functions because it’s so painful and fascinating and oddly poetic.

BLVR: Did working on the film change the way you grieved for her?

KJ: Making this film was a contending with my relationship with my mother and who she wished me to be. The fact that there’s tenderness in the film is a beautiful revelation and a gift that gives me back so much about her, about our relationship. That wasn’t what I experienced when I was struggling with the loss, so to have it emerge as this delicate, tender thing—I feel grateful. She now gets to go forward into history.

III. HERE ARE OUR DILEMMAS

BLVR: Your mother’s story is an important part of Cameraperson, but you also featured people you’ve filmed in places of conflict around the world. I think another filmmaker might have appropriated other people’s traumas as their own, but you never did.

KJ: I worried a lot about that. I’ve spent my life being obsessed with race and the representation of people who are not in power. I really cared about showing—I’m a white person representing other people’s stories. It’s something I fight when I’m filming. I have all of these images of brown people in prison, or in groups, or not in their homes but on the run. It’s challenging to represent humans who are deserving of the same kind of respect I would like to have, and I’m including my mom in that. Here’s a vulnerable person I’m taking advantage of in certain ways. Showing that I did that with my mom, and I know what that means, and that hurt me, and the audience can understand that it hurt me—that’s a way of speaking about it.

Something nobody picks up on is that almost everybody in the film is Muslim, just not the cliché representation of what it is to be Muslim. But I really struggled around the representation of brownness in the film, because for me, there wasn’t enough. I kept pushing for one more shot of this woman we’d filmed in Liberia, and my editor Nels [Bangerter] was like, “I understand why you care about this, but it’s not in the footage. So in a way you are patronizing the audience. You’re trying to prove something about yourself and how smart you are about racism.” And I finally got it. It’s not about proving what I know. It’s like, here are my dilemmas. Here are our dilemmas. Let us consider them together.

BLVR: And it’s not an answer to the dilemmas.

KJ: No, not even close! It’s an acknowledgment of them. It is terrifying to acknowledge your dilemmas, because that is acknowledging your impotence, your power, your privilege, where you fudge things. It’s like acknowledging your humanity. It’s not noble! It’s kind of a mess. But we can reveal the struggle of it and say, “Yeah, I’m concerned about showing a vulnerable person in a vulnerable state against their will. Yet I’m going to do it, because it also has these beautiful aspects.”

IV. I WANTED THE FILM NOT TO STOP

BLVR: You chose not to include voiceover in the film, which forces the viewer to consider the juxtaposition of the footage more closely. For instance, when you’re in danger in Yemen and the camera turns off, the next shot we see is you at home, with your kids.

KJ: In my safe apartment.

BLVR: Your point was clear: You were in danger, and you could leave and go home to safety, but the people you filmed didn’t have that option.

KJ: I imagined being ripped to shreds over this film. I imagined many ways people could critique me and say that I appropriated other people’s stories. But at a certain point, I said, it’s okay if someone misunderstands me. That’s an acknowledgment of my vulnerability, which is a relinquishing of power. To think that you can protect your image, you’re not fooling anybody except yourself, which is a little bit of what I was saying to my mom. Protecting your image doesn’t work. What is ownership of our own image? It doesn’t exist, actually. Who does an image belong to?

BLVR: Somebody is looking at it, so…

KJ: It’s a relationship. An image is a relationship. That’s why I wanted to call it Cameraperson, because it’s a relationship between a camera and a person.

BLVR: And these images affect people differently. In the film, the filmmaker Charif Kiwan says images of death can strip people of their dignity, but a man counters that the photo of a drowned Syrian refugee galvanized people.

KJ: I included that as a stake in the sand—not to say that’s what I think, but that there are people who think this, and there are moments in history where this feels true to certain people, and then there are moments where you must transgress that. I filmed Mamie Till Mobley for Deadline, and she, at her moment in history, opened her son’s casket and said, “Look what they did to my son. Look at the horror and brutality. Photograph it.”

BLVR: Right.

KJ: Emmett Till’s body sends people into a state of recognition and outrage—that’s one place in this spectrum. And then the James Byrd photos are another place. I am traumatized by seeing those photos. They literally made me ill. And but—how do you evoke the betrayal, the wrongdoing, without sending a person into that state? What does the indelible image do? Does it just mark us and mess with us? Does it send us into a place of new understanding? Does it send us into a place of action? This is my practice, this is my artistic commitment, so I think about it all the time—what does it mean for me to film this moment of history?

That’s part of what I wanted to have happen with this film—by not having voiceover, by not nailing down any of these things, I wanted to pose the questions and let them float, to expand this conversation about what cameras do and what they can be. What are we doing with our gaze, why do we preserve things? All of those questions are multi-faceted, and so I wanted to open up the space for that. This is exactly what I wanted to happen. I wanted the film not to stop.

BLVR: There is also a great deal of love and beauty in the film. It reminded me of this quote from Howard Zinn: “Human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness… If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.” So we’re facing this systemic injustice, the weight and burden—how does a human cope?

KJ: Exactly. Exactly.

BLVR: I don’t know if this is enough, but celebrating and cherishing humanity might give you energy to fight those structural problems.

KJ: There are some days where I feel like, if we memorialized all the trauma and loss—we’re just walking in a graveyard. And yet you also have new things growing and little kids, and there’s so much joy in life. The creative act is something that humans value so much. It’s always harder to achieve than it appears. And yet when it appears, it helps. It gives you some piece of you has the courage and excitement to say, I want to do this thing next for me, for my world. And that’s why I wanted to become a filmmaker—because films helped me. They help us beyond this planet that is so heartbreakingly fucked up everywhere, and we need help.

Stephanie Palumbo is a documentary film and television producer, and a former assistant editor at O, the Oprah Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend and cats. You can follow her @sjpalumbo.

“All of my interesting opinions are based on shit, really.”

An Interview with Philosopher and Author Bryan Frances

An incomplete list of absurd things:
Donald Trump
The NBA
Climate Change
Suicide Bombers
Life

Bryan Frances is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds in England and Fordham University. He is the author of three books: Scepticism Comes Alive, Disagreement, and Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil. Frances has also written dozens of essays on topics ranging from the rationality of religious belief, to how and why people disagree, to “radical skepticism,” the belief that nothing is truly knowable. In his writing, Frances is measured and objective. He seems to revel in dealing with opinions that oppose his own, treating them with as much respect as he gives himself. As he writes in Disagreement, “Unless you are delusional, you are aware that a great many of the people who disagree with you are just as smart and thoughtful as you are—in fact, you know that often they are smarter and more informed.”

Frances has spent much of his career writing about issues that can be connected to the philosophy of absurdism. As expounded by French writer Albert Camus in his landmark essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, absurdism rests on three truths. One: we want life to have meaning. Two: life has no meaning as far as we can tell. Three: those truths in conflict make life absurd. People deal with that conflict, according to Camus, in one of two ways. Some commit suicide, negating the absurdity of life by ending it. Others commit “philosophical suicide,” by turning to religion, negating absurdity by giving life meaning no one can prove it has. Camus offers a third way to deal with absurdity—acceptance. His answer to the absurd conflict is to acknowledge it, reject all hope, and revolt by living a full life in spite of it.

I met Frances at Blue Ribbon Downing Street bar in the West Village, Manhattan, where we discussed absurdism as it pertains to three current issues: suicide bombing, Donald Trump, and global warming.

—Travis Atria

I. I TRY NOT TO BE A DICK TO PEOPLE; I TRY NOT TO KILL PEOPLE.

THE BELIEVER: I’m interested in Camus’ idea of the ways people deal with absurdity—suicide and philosophical suicide—in the context of suicide bombings. By Camus’ understanding of the terms, it seems like both at the same time.

BRYAN FRANCES: Let me talk about absurdity. There’s moral absurdity, and that has a couple of components, which I’ll talk about in a second. There’s intellectual absurdity. There’s political absurdity. When it comes to moral absurdity, it has two components. One is, if you’re even semi-reflective and you’re not an asshole, you feel this pull that you should be doing all sorts of shit for people that you’re not doing. You could totally invite some single mom in with three kids into your house. You could make her life a million times better, but I’m not doing it, and you’re not doing it. No one’s doing it. That makes me feel absurd in the sense that I feel I should be doing it and I’m not even coming close. Another component of moral absurdity is that this pull, this feeling that I should be doing all this stuff, it’s totally not based in any fact. We actually don’t have any moral requirements whatsoever. That’s just a fiction. And that makes me feel absurd too, because on the one hand, I really do live my life according to some semi-reasonable moral principles. I try not to be a dick to people; I try not to kill people. But on the other hand, I feel that there’s no real basis for these rules other than that they make society run a little smoother. And I don’t want to go to prison. That’s about it. And when it comes to terrorism, maybe there’s a third component to moral absurdity. Doesn’t that somehow show that morality is a sham when there are so many people out there who completely go against all morality?

BLVR: But they believe they are being moral.

BF: They do. So there’s moral absurdity. Then there’s intellectual absurdity, and Camus was big on this. On the one hand, we’re just intellectual sheep. We just go along with what we’re told. Look, we know lots of stuff. [Pointing to his glass.] I know this is red wine. There’s lots of trivial shit that we know, and there’s lots of cool stuff we know based on reliable methods. I know the planet Jupiter has dozens of moons. Why do I know that? Because astronomers say so, and they have their shit together. But when it comes to religion, economics, politics, I have no idea. I have no knowledge of that stuff myself, and I have no idea who to trust. You know, I read the New York Times, I read Paul Krugman, he’s got a Nobel Prize in economics but why the hell should I believe him? He doesn’t have a track record like a physicist has a track record.

BLVR: He might be making educated guesses, but they’re just guesses.

BF: I just have no idea, so all my interesting opinions are based on shit really. So my intellectual life is absurd. There’s this kind of meaninglessness to life, and you can feel that on an individual level and you can feel it on the level of all humanity. I think Camus was talking about both. There’s the obvious idea that nothing you do in life is going to have any real meaning. You have no impact on the world, and then you’re going to be dead, and that’s it. All your work is like water that’s absorbed by the sand and it’s gone. Then there’s the idea that all of humanity, it’s the same thing. But on the individual scale, even if you tell yourself there’s no meaning to your life, you can also try to tell yourself, “Look, I raised some children, and I did a halfway decent job.” That’s meaning. You write your stuff and that has some positive impact. It gives people some joy; it gives them some insight. These are just trivial things, but they count. But there’s still a part of you that longs for some meaning that is eternal and is untainted. Because no matter how great you are as a parent, sometimes your kids are assholes. No matter how great your writing is, there are always bad parts to it. Everything is always tainted and everything is always temporary, and you have this longing for something so much better than that.

BLVR: As Camus notes with the concept of philosophical suicide, religion offers an escape from that meaninglessness. So does physical suicide. But I don’t think he saw that a person would do both at the same time. Kill themselves because of religion.

BF: Do you want to say something like the suicide bombers have some sort of existentialist thinking going on that life is hopeless and this is their last chance at meaning?

BLVR: I wonder. It’s hard to believe every one of them is a purely evil person who only wants destruction and death. Surely some are, but they can’t all be.

BF: I’m with you. After the Paris attacks, there were a lot of interesting articles written about people who become suicide bombers, about the psychology of these people. These are young men who have shit lives. The only politics they become aware of is that, “My country has been shit on for many decades, and the rest of the world is doing great, and there’s no future for me, my friends, my community, nothing. We just live our lives, we have no impact on the world, we die, and most of us spend most of our lives suffering.” Then, something like ISIS or al Qaeda or the Taliban comes by and says, “We can give your life meaning.” They’re dying of thirst, this is the only drink in town, so they grab it. Many of them know next to nothing. They haven’t read the Koran, they haven’t read the Hadiths. Some of these guys had recently bought the book Islam for Dummies like the month beforehand because they are just grasping at a straw and they know next to nothing about the straw. So it’s physical suicide, but Camus would say it’s philosophical suicide because it’s offering hope where there’s no reason to hope. Whereas for Camus, you’re supposed to embrace that. There’s no hope for any kind of ultimate meaning, but that’s okay. You can still live a full life.

II. “THE ABSURD IS SIN WITHOUT GOD.” —CAMUS

BLVR: The second aspect of absurdity I wanted to discuss relates to Donald Trump and fascism. Even though Camus wrote Sisyphus in Nazi-occupied France, he didn’t see fascism as a form of philosophical suicide. My feeling is that fascism is a secular religion. Just like religion offers Heaven as a sort of return to the Garden of Eden, the fascist leader promises a perfect future where we return to some glorious past. I think people are drawn to Trump because they’re confronting absurdity—they’ve been sold out by the American Dream, the curtain has been pulled back on the meaninglessness of it all—and he’s promising them the fascist version of Heaven.

BF: I’m just an amateur here, but I suspect if you asked a Trump supporter what his qualifications are, they’re going to say something. They’re not going to be stupid. They’ll say things like, “He’s managed all these businesses well, and that’s relevant.” It’s like if you ask someone who’s a religious believer—say you ask a Catholic why they believe Catholicism is true. They’re going to say something. But it doesn’t really count, because evidence doesn’t really count.

BLVR: Is there a better way out of the absurd conflict than turning to suicide, or fascism, or religion? I don’t like Camus’ answer, that we just have to accept the absurdity and revolt against it. I still want meaning.

BF: Well, let me say this. Part of me is kind of religious, but I can’t believe anything. I can’t believe God exists. I can’t believe Jesus rose from the dead. I can’t believe the prophet Muhammad actually spoke to an angel. No fucking way. So one thing I’ve been interested in is, can you be a member of a religion even if you’re totally agnostic on everything? Can you be committed to a religion without any of the beliefs?

BLVR: It seems the person in the religion would say you can’t.

BF: My best friend, she’s a Muslim, and she says, “I don’t think so.” And then another guy I know who’s very worldly—he’s actually a Catholic but he knows a lot about different religions—he thinks you can. You can’t really trust a lot of religious figures. You go to a Catholic priest, he might say no. You go to another one who’s a little more liberal, he might say yes. That’s the intellectual absurdity again. You can’t get answers to important questions. The best you can do is muddle through and hope for the best. But what does that hope for the best mean? You want a real hope; Camus says, “No, forget it. It’s not going to happen. The best really sucks, man. The best is going up the hill and back again [like Sisyphus].” The thing that gets me about Camus, though, is that Sisyphus, the thing that makes him this honorable person who has meaning in some sense is that he’s totally aware of his situation. So really, when it comes down to it, Camus is saying you have to have knowledge. You have to have consciousness of your situation.

III. “SEEKING WHAT IS TRUE IS NOT SEEKING WHAT IS DESIRABLE.” —CAMUS

BLVR: That leads to the third aspect of absurdity I wanted to talk about. We seem to be living in an age where knowledge has no meaning anymore. Expert opinion is discounted. Science is ignored.

BF: I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

BLVR: So the question is, if there’s no meaning to life and no way of truly knowing anything, how do you go forward? Take global warming. Doesn’t the idea that nothing is truly knowable—which you’ve written about as “radical skepticism”—hurt the case of people who believe the science?

BF: Well, take Barack Obama and Dick Cheney. Two completely different people. Democrats are going to say, “Look, I disagree with Cheney, but he knew how to get shit done.” Republicans are going to say that of Obama. Part of being able to get things done when you have such enormous power is you need to be able to consult experts and figure out what to do with their advice. And that’s why Donald Trump is a disaster, because he doesn’t know how to do that.

BLVR: He said one of his advisors would be himself.

BF: I know. I know. In order to be president, you don’t have to be an expert yourself, but you have to know who is an expert and how to balance their different opinions. Even Camus—I’m going out on a limb here because he’s dead and I can’t ask him—he’d say when it comes to action, even if you can’t know anything big or important, when deciding what to do, your best bet is consulting experts. Knowing how to deal with the information they give you and the disinformation they give you. There’s this midway where we can’t know the right thing to do, but we can do better than going with our gut.

BLVR: While Camus doesn’t agree with religion, he also doesn’t agree with putting too much faith in human logic and reason. I wonder if today’s total discounting of expert opinion is the end of the Enlightenment ideals—the primacy of logic and reason—and an embracing of absurdism.

BF: Existentialists—and even though Camus said he wasn’t really an existentialist, we throw him in that category anyway—you could say that they, plus Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and Heidegger and all those people, they’re saying, “Reason is not nearly as good as you thought it was going to be.” I’m not a basketball person, but I went to an NBA game, and I was shocked at how many shots they missed. They suck. They’re missing constantly. But that’s the best there is. The same thing with reason. You do your best and it’s still not nearly good enough. The people at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton—for the 20th century, it was like the United States’ Oxford—you go to the best people there and ask them the big questions, and they say, “I don’t know.” Whereas you go to Fordham University, where I taught, you’ll get a bunch of people who will say, “Oh, let me tell you the answer.” But you ask the greatest minds and they don’t know because reason’s actually not that powerful.

BLVR: Why?

BF: There are all sorts of things that reason is great for. Like this [picks up iPhone]. This is a fucking miracle. But when it comes to lots of things we really care about, reason doesn’t seem so great. The Japanese in World War II, they had this tool. It was a screwdriver, it was a weapon, it was a shovel, it did all these amazing things. It really was this fantastic thing, but there’s tons of stuff that it just couldn’t do at all. Reason’s kind of like that. Reason is fantastic for certain things and we think that it’s going to be good for figuring out what to do in politics, what to do in relationships. Reason just doesn’t really help much. It has much more severe limits than the Enlightenment thought, and the existentialists really did us a favor in helping point that out.

BLVR: It always comes back to the same problem. What do we do? How do we choose? I saw a man in the subway the other day hunched over and talking to himself. He was clearly…

BF: Distressed?

BLVR: Insane. And I believe it’s important to help people going through that. They deserve to be taken care of. But say we get to a point where there aren’t enough resources, where the survival of the species is at stake. Doesn’t the morality flip? Isn’t the moral choice to not help them if it hurts our overall chances at survival? And if that’s true, what do I actually believe?

BF: This has happened. Think of Native American tribes, they’re in Montana, it’s winter, someone gives birth to a child that is severely disabled. You have to let it die.

BLVR: So is morality situational?

BF: In philosophy, everyone is going to say that it’s situational. Whether or not it’s morally permissible to do a certain thing totally depends on your circumstances. It’s morally permissible for me to kill you right now if you have a bazooka or something and you’re trying to kill everyone in here. But in another situation, of course, it’s not morally permissible. That’s a crazy case. But there are normal cases.

BLVR: Where it gets tough is, who gets to make the call? To take it back to terrorism, if I believe that someone is invading my country, threatening my way of life, exploiting my resources, killing my people with drone strikes …

BF: What am I allowed to do to strike back?

BLVR: Is it permissible to be a suicide bomber?

BF: I think a lot of people in these countries would normally have nothing against Americans, but they feel we’ve destroyed their country, we’ve bombed them and killed so many people. Given that situation, they might think, “It’s morally permissible for me to strike back in these incredibly violent ways because nothing else is going to work. There’s nothing left for us to do.”

BLVR: One of the problems with dealing with this issue is that even talking about it like this is forbidden.

BF: Right. In a lot of circles it’s totally forbidden in this country.

BLVR: It’s seen as sympathizing rather than just trying to understand the root of the issue. And it is terribly complex, which makes it especially confusing to know who gets to decide what is right and wrong.

BF: Having the power to make those decisions is a curse, really. I had a colleague at the University of Leeds in England who said, “Having free will sucks.” You have all this power to make these big decisions, and if you have any reflection at all, you realize that you really don’t have the requisite skill to make the decision. But you have to do it.

BLVR: I can see why people pick philosophical suicide.

BF: Questioning everything is a curse.

Travis Atria is the co-author of Traveling Soul, a biography of Curtis Mayfield, out October 1 from Chicago Review Press. His album, “Boa Noite,” is out on October 14 from Gold Robot Records.

“A beautiful thought is a beautiful thought, no matter what the sign above the shelf where you encounter it.”

Photograph of David Lipsky by Shaun McDowell

An Interview with David Lipsky

David and David. Two strangers with a lot in common took a five-day road trip in 1996, a trip that wound up becoming as public as it was private, that travelled as far into being a writer as into being a person. “I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that’s coming across,” David Foster Wallace told his interviewer, Rolling Stone’s  David Lipsky. “I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not, because I’m too worried about whether you like me…. How do you learn to do this stuff? Did you go to interviewing school?”

Lipsky had to fight to convince his editor about the assignment, then had to win Wallace’s interest and trust. The story, published in 2008, received the 2009 National Magazine Award. The book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—containing the entire trip—followed in 2010, a Times bestseller and NPR Best Book of the Year. Which lead to 2015’s The End of the Tour, with Lipsky portrayed by an awed and avid Jesse Eisenberg, and Jason Segel masterfully playing David Wallace.

“Why are we,” Wallace asks in the movie and book, “and by ‘we’ I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy—why do we feel empty and unhappy?”

Lipsky collected and sorted Wallace’s testimony during the rise of grunge and the everything-online generation. (“We’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen,” Wallace says, “given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”) In the book, the young writers discourse on junk food, junk movies, good books, bad relationships, loneliness, fame, and addiction.

Lipsky is a professor of creative writing at New York University and a powerful voice in American fiction (Three Thousand Dollars, The Art Fair) and nonfiction (Although of Course, Absolutely American, the forthcoming Parrot and the Igloo). Disproving the axiom that journalists make terrible interviews, Lipsky responded to my questions with enthusiasm and curiosity. We talked about Gabriel García Márquez’s genre-bending The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor—appearing nine years before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood warped the genre entirely. Also Roberto Bolaño, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, and Jorge Luis Borges, who Lipsky read while studying at Brown University.

—Laura Ventura

THE BELIEVER: What are your impressions of The End of the Tour? Did you talk to the crew before or during the process? Did any of Wallace’s relatives contact you?

DAVID LIPSKY: I thought they were true to David Wallace’s words in the book—which was very important to me, and something I talked a lot about with the director and actors. I haven’t been contacted by any members of Wallace’s family. They did contact me about the book, and were kind and wonderfully helpful.

BLVR: To what extent do you feel David’s influence in your work? 

DL: He always has, as he’s influenced every smart reader and writer since the mid-90s. His basic advice—stay awake, as he puts it in his political essay—is the only advice that really matters for writing, but there are a hundred bits of smaller advice. Vary your voices; look to your modifiers; be willing to personalize. That’s the gift writing gives you; you get to ride for a certain number of pages in someone else’s brain. Wallace reminds you to make it your brain; to listen to how you experience people and the world. That that’s part of what your ride offers.

BLVR: Why wasn’t the interview published by Rolling Stone until 2008?

DL: When I came back from Illinois, Jann Wenner reassigned me to an emergency story: a spike in heroin use. He wanted me to live with needle addicts in Seattle. It took about six weeks; when I was back from the Northwest it was May, Infinite Jest had come out in February. Ancient history for a magazine.

BLVR: Wallace had a TV addiction, before streaming existed. People now spend weekends watching TV shows, are these two overdoses similar?

DL: Yes! [Laughter] Streaming lets everyone be like Ken Erdedy, without waiting for the woman who said she’d come. [Edredy is a character in the novel’s harrowing, funny second chapter.]  I just spent twelve hours with House of Cards: a full Saturday. Bliss. Compared to now, Wallace is a teetotaler.

BLVR: Wallace, throughout your book, talks about being humble—courtesy and kindness, and his will not to hurt people. Do you find this often in the intellectual world?

DL: I don’t think kindness, humility and courtesy characterize the intellectual life anywhere on the planet. The not-hurting people thing about Wallace’s work is a bit of a received myth—there’s plenty of cruelty in his fiction and essays, moments of acute impatience, of a thrilling ungenerosity. He’s being true to the inside of the skull, and all kinds of things flower there.

But in general, there’s a cuttingness and slashingness to the intellectual life that David was a respite from: he wrote one mean essay about Updike, but otherwise was intellectually generous. He characterized literary New York as the hiss of egos in various stages of inflation and deflation.

BLVR: Do nonfiction authors still have to prove that this genre can become literature?

DL: If anything, Wallace is the proof, and sometimes people have to be talked into picking up Infinite Jest. It’s a fast novel, but there’s a lot of it. And people look at it as a mountain they’re being asked to climb without the hiking gear of a classroom and assignments.  Capote’s work—the stuff that still lasts—is his journalism. The long snark on Marlon Brando. The Clutters. With Hemingway, it’s A Moveable Feast. Joan Didion’s lasting stuff all stars Joan Didion. And then at the opposite end, there’s someone like Pauline Kael, who never wrote anything but crit. She gave us a prose style, a certain way of punctuating, and a great brilliance. Here she is on Joan Didion. “The smoke of creation rises from those dry-ice sentences of hers.” A beautiful thought is a beautiful thought, no matter what the sign above the shelf where you encounter it.

But yes: I think there’s been kind of a renaissance of nonfiction—four decades, five. People don’t talk about it. Even if it’s what they read. It’s kind of where TV was fifteen years ago. Not quite respectable. 

You feel bad, as a reader, for not doing the work of animating an untrue situation with the truth of your interest. Just the way we felt bad a decade and a half ago for not getting off the couch and sloping off to a movie theatre.  But I think that’s changing: the memoir thing—a kind of halfway form—is changing it.

BLVR: You read a lot of Borges when you were at Brown, if I’m not mistaken?

DL: You’re right—and then especially in grad school with John Barth, who David was a great fan of. Borges is an astonishing figure. With his great, strange insight, from “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” that you could write the review of the novel instead of the actual novel. A lovely insight, his combo of the literary essay on non-existent subjects and literature itself. Amusingly, Nabokov had the same insight, in a novel he wrote around the same time, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Nabokov’s chapter on the novels Sebastian Knight wrote allowed him to summarize half a career’s worth of plots and notions.

BLVR: Can you teach someone how to be a writer?

DL: I think you can. Many of our best writers come out of the programs. George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, Karen Russell, and of course David Wallace. It’s the two years of focus: like training for the Olympics, knowing you’ve got twenty-four months on a kind of team that’s practicing skills. The students come in with talent, and the profs try to sharpen it, bring it out. I’ll assign Jhumpa Lahiri, Nabokov, Borges, Alice Munro, and we’ll look at it the way film students check something by Scorcese or Jim Cameron: How was it put together? Why should film students have all the fun?

BLVR: In which ways do journalists and nonfiction authors feel Truman Capote’s influence? Is it still so vibrant? Do you think that if In Cold Blood wasn’t published, chronicling and nonfiction would have still managed to make its way in media and books?

DL: I think so, don’t you?  There were enough posts along the way: Hemingway wrote “Che ti dice la Patria?” in 1927—that was the original title, “Italy—1927”—and it’s just nonfiction: pre-fascist Italy. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina—both had their birth in (local) news stories.  

What Capote had developed is a style in excess of his material: it was greater than Other Voices, Other Rooms or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He needed something to shine it on. And the idea of applying the full fury of a beautiful prose like that to a news story, at complete length and force, was exciting. It hasn’t been entirely followed up on: But in someone like Knausgaard, it’s being a little followed up. One objection is that with Capote in between, you had Proust doing it in the previous century. Knut Hamsen, too. People were reaching for it—the amazing thing was Capote somehow writing a first-person style, a first-person sensibility, in a third-person story.

BLVR: You spent a year chronicling the lives of at-risk gay and lesbian teenagers [Lipsky’s piece won a 1999 GLAAD Award] and then time in West Point. Do you sometimes forget you are a witness? After some time there you start to develop relationships with the people you interview. How did you deal with that?

DL: With West Point, yes, at times. The adult officers sometimes did, too. They’d see me after hours and say, “Get back to barracks, cadet.” They forgot why I was there. And with the teenagers, a very strong identification, because in the late nineties their lives were so stark: you wanted to help. And I wouldn’t want to deal with it in any way except feeling it. It’s a fascinating thing to feel. Capote, of course, took that to an extreme. But it’s one of the things we read nonfiction for—and one of the things you write it for, too. That vacation in another sort of life.  Capote was so locked into his particular style of prose and thought, it must have been—since Dick Perry was so much the other—a tremendous relief.

BLVR: You show in your book that the market often pushes writers into road trips and book tours. Is that still so? How do you feel about it?

DL: I keep reading and hearing those tours are gone, though you still go on them. In what Wallace would’ve called a po-mo development, I went on one for the book about his road trip.  I think it’s trying to redress a thing about writing: you can love someone’s words and mind and not see them. Movies, music, TV: you see the people you love. With books, you don’t get that so much, and I think it was a way to both glamorize the field and also provide that service. I have loved Infinite Jest: now let’s see how this person moves and looks, let’s see them in the process of seeing this world they so well understand. When someone experiences so quickly, we want to get to watch them doing it.

BLVR: Do you have any impression of Latin American nonfiction authors writing at the present? We have a sort of nonfiction wave linked together thanks to Gabriel García Márquez Foundation. How is American nonfiction different from Latin American nonfiction?

DL: I don’t know Latin nonfiction well enough: Borges’—the nonfiction I know best—is so donnish and speculative and playful. Owlish, is the British word.  “Three Versions of Judas” or his Shaw piece or the one about Pascal’s sphere. They’re fireworks of learning, but a model no one has really followed; they have a quality of dustiness, like rubbing between your fingers the grains on top of a wall. Those grains are the little crumbles of civilization that Borges liked to be playful with. Dry in a terrifying way. And of course Márquez’s first work was the The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor—nine years before In Cold Blood. A good idea will get expressed in a number of places simultaneously. It’s the kind of thought that would have pleased Borges.

I do know that Bolaño has been like a thunderclap for American writers-in-training. His rigor and looseness at once. That for young writers here, there’ll be excitement about these two peaks, Wallace at one end, Bolaño at the other, with the attempt made to string themselves somewhere in the middle.

This interview first appeared in La Nacion.

“Really everyone is making up their own religion.”

An Interview with Graphic novelist Chester Brown

I first encountered Chester Brown’s starkly beautiful cartooning in a Canadian Literature class. His graphic novel, Louis Riel, had recently unearthed a piece of uncomfortable Canadian history—the execution of a 19^th century political leader—and liberal arts professors across the country were collectively swooning over a comic book they could finally approve of. I too was impressed, if only for the book’s extensive “Notes” section—unusual for a genre where pictures usually replace most words. I argued with his notes in the margins. “Why exaggerate the linguistic divide?!” I scrawl-yelled nonsensically on one page.

Only a couple of years later, I found myself arguing with Chester in the margins of his next book, Paying For It, a graphic memoir about paying for sex, which this time included not only an extensive notes section, but a full-length manifesto for the decriminalization of sex work. By then I was an intern learning Photoshop at the publishing house Drawn & Quarterly, making sure the margins were properly aligned before the book went to print. “It’s not that I totally disagree with you,” I wrote in the back of an advanced copy, “I just think the argument is more complicated than you are making it out to be.” His writing can sometimes feel like he’s chosen to argue with you personally, after getting to know the contents of your brain.

Now, after my third time reading Chester, I’ve come to expect and appreciate the margin-arguing experience. It’s not every day that a book can engage its reader fully enough to keep her up all night considering her position on prostitution. This is what Chester does best, and what he continues to do best in his latest graphic novel, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus: prodding and unearthing the uncomfortable, forcing you to engage, raising your blood pressure a touch. Mary Wept contains several graphic adaptations / interpretations of Bible stories that deal with prostitution in some way, and his major controversial claim is that Mary, the mother of Jesus, might actually have been a prostitute (hence, the mystically-explained pregnancy). I didn’t have as many margin-arguments with this book, but I definitely had some.

The thing is, in person and over the phone, Chester is not even remotely close to the man-behind-the-margins who I had imagined myself arguing with. He is actually the kindest, most non-confrontational cartoonist I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with.  It’s hard to believe he is the same man behind such strongly-articulated claims as: “we should all be paying for sex.” But this is part of his brilliance. When we spoke over the phone last month, I immediately forgot my margin arguments and instead just had a really pleasant, honest conversation about faith and biblical scholarship.

—Shannon Tien

THE BELIEVER: My background is “super lapsed Catholic”. I know my Bible stories a little bit.

CHESTER BROWN: Does that mean you went to church every Sunday? Or…

BLVR: Sometimes even during the week.

CB: Wow.

BLVR: I’m not practicing anymore, but the book brought back a lot of memories.

CB: I could never go all the way over to being completely an atheist. But I certainly went through my agnostic phase for a while.

BLVR: Could you tell me a little more about your own spiritual beliefs and background?

CB: Both of my parents were Baptist. We went to church every Sunday and I had to go to Sunday school and then when I was older, to the actual church services. At a certain point we changed churches. From about age seven or eight we started going to the local United Church of Canada, which, as opposed to the Baptists, is quite a liberal church. They ordain women now and have gay ministers.

In my teenage years I started to question everything. By my early twenties, I was living on my own. I was no longer going to church anymore, and wasn’t really sure what I believed about God or Christianity. And then I met a young woman and we fell in love. Early in the relationship she made it clear that she was a Christian. She asked me if I was also a Christian, and I said, “Oh yes. Of course I’m a Christian.” But despite growing up in the religion, I wasn’t really sure what that meant.

I found the whole topic of early Christianity and the creation of the Bible really interesting. I read a lot of books of that sort. And also, I was reading the Bible itself. But that was the thing that took me in the direction of being agnostic because biblical scholarship points out all the contradictions and all the reasons why the Bible can’t be the literal truth. I’ve gone in and out of calling myself an agnostic, or calling myself vaguely religious without having a name for what I am. These days I’m back to calling myself a Christian, even though I don’t believe that Jesus was divine.

BLVR: Why do you think you would never lean all the way toward atheism?

CB: I see too much meaning in life. To me, one can only be an atheist if one thinks there is no meaning. And everything seems meaningful around me.

BLVR: Mary Wept is essentially a layman’s interpretation of the Bible. But Catholics, for example, aren’t really allowed to interpret the Bible; the Pope does that. Protestantism makes it clear that everyone’s free to interpret the Bible as they please, but did you ever think, “Who am I to question the traditional interpretation of these texts?”

CB: Yeah, there is a much stronger tradition within Protestantism of interpretation of the Bible. And, of course, that has led to this ever-growing list of schisms within Protestantism. Really everyone is making up their own religion. The Protestant tradition just talks about it more openly than Catholics do.

BLVR: Another thing I’m wondering is: arguments for the empowerment and valuation of sex workers—and also just female sexuality in general—can be found in many areas of literature throughout history. Why the Bible specifically, for you?

CB: My previous book advocated for sex worker rights, although it came from an autobiographical perspective. This time around the book was triggered when  I encountered an alternate version of the Parable of the Talents. I found this alternate version of the parable that deals with prostitution. The biblical version of the story does not have prostitution at all.

I became convinced that the alternate version was the way that Jesus actually told the parable. Once I decided to do that story, I recognized the connection to the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I began to see connections to other biblical stories, and suddenly I realized I had a book on my hands. The whole process of creating the book was exciting for me: writing the script, doing the drawings. I enjoyed it more than I usually do, creating graphic novels.

BLVR: Why do you think that is?

CB: As I said, I grew up in this religious family, and my mother would read children’s versions of the Bible stories to me and my brother and. We loved them. I really have a deep affection for these stories.

BLVR: What were some of your favorite Bible stories from back then?

CB: From the Hebrew scriptures, probably my all time favorite is the one I got to put in this book: the story of David and Bathsheba. The moment when David is condemned by Nathan has always struck me as very powerful. I also really love the book of Ruth: the story of the deep love Ruth had for her mother-in-law. That might be the most powerful love story in the Bible.

BLVR: That’s interesting. Between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law. Not the traditional romantic love story.

CB: Right. It’s not a romantic love story, although some people project romantic love onto it. Some lesbians like to interpret it as a lesbian love story. I think that’s going a bit far, but I can see why they would do that.

BLVR: Do you think there’s such a thing as a “correct” interpretation?

CB: If we’re talking about the book of Ruth, I don’t think it has any historical basis—or I doubt it does. I believe there was an original author of the book and I believe that author did have an intent in creating the story. So, we read the book and we have to guess at the intent. Every reader’s doing that with every text. With modern writers it’s a little bit easier because usually there are interviews like the one you’re doing with me now where the author will make more explicit his or her intentions in creating a work. Unfortunately we don’t have interviews with the author of Ruth, so we read the text and we interpret [Laughing].

But yes, of course more than one interpretation is possible. This book of mine is a book of biblical interpretation. It’s going to be up to the readers to decide whether or not I’ve correctly interpreted things.

BLVR: Speaking of readers, who did you write this book for?

CB: It’s for anyone interested in either biblical matters or sex work matters, but I’ll admit—I’ve got a few friends who are in the sex worker rights movement, and I also know some sex workers who aren’t as politically engaged, it was them I was most thinking about when I was creating the book. I was thinking “Oh wait till they read this part!” But obviously I hope it appeals to people outside the sex worker rights movement too.

BLVR: That’s interesting. Because when I read it, it seemed most to me like an argument for people outside the sex worker rights movement, or who might take part in what you call “whorephobic” behaviour.

CB: There’s that too. But people who are strongly whorephobic, I don’t expect this book to win them over. I think they’ll have their own reasons for dismissing it. You never know. While I was on this book tour I met a person who I’ve been corresponding with by email and she first started writing to me after she read Paying For It and she had been very much anti-prostitution. And reading Paying For It completely turned her around and she’s become very pro sex worker.

BLVR: How does that feel to you when you’re able to see the effect that your work has on changing people’s minds so immediately?

CB: Not all of my books have been an argument, but I do enjoy books where the author makes an argument. That was the case with Paying For It and Mary Wept. If readers accept what I’m saying and think I’m correct, I love that. But I also understand that’s rarely the case. I don’t expect each reader to buy everything I’m saying. I try to make the book entertaining even if you don’t accept all of what I’m saying.

BLVR: Is it harder to deal with criticism when the subject is so close to your heart, like in Mary Wept and Paying For It?

CB: Yeah. There have been reviews of Paying For It where I was—I guess “upset” is the right word, though it sounds a bit strong—fired up reading the review. But I’ve got to admit that those reviews are also fun to read. I enjoy encountering the opposite point of view from mine. The world would be boring if everyone believed the same thing. I also think the world would be a better place if the laws against sex work and sex worker clients weren’t there.

BLVR: Right. One of the most controversial things you suggest [in Mary Wept] is that Mary the mother of Jesus was a prostitute. Does this idea make Jesus more or less attractive to you as a spiritual leader?

CB: It did make me see his teachings in a different way. It made me more likely to interpret the Parable of the Talents the way that I ended up interpreting it. I think Jesus had a friendly attitude towards sex workers. That does make me see him in a more positive way.

BLVR: Does the difference between seeing Mary as a victim and seeing her as an agent of her own fate affect your sense of Christianity?

CB: I don’t know if that idea changed how I was thinking about Christianity. Originally when I first wrote the script, I had nothing about Mary Magdalen, who was very definitely portrayed in the Gospel of John and also in the Gospel of Luke as a prostitute. And thinking about the scene where she anoints Jesus, it occurred to me what a strange thing it was, that a prostitute would be the person who anointed Jesus. The anointing of Jesus was significant because that was the ceremony that made Jesus a Christ. The words Christ and Messiah both mean “anointed one”. For the person who did that anointing to be a prostitute, it seemed obvious to me that that person must have also had some sort of spiritual authority, which turned my thinking in a completely different direction.

BLVR: An equally powerful interpretation for me is that Mary Magdalen was a “sinner” but that Jesus chose to hang out with her anyway.

CB: Yeah that’s the traditional interpretation, that Jesus saw her as a sinner and befriended her. That position is articulated in the Gospels. Personally I think that the Gospels are incorrect on that point. I think Jesus didn’t think the so-called “sinners” he hung out with were sinners. He didn’t necessarily believe they were doing anything wrong. But that’s my opinion.

BLVR: By the way, I love when the angels are just hanging out in heaven in Job.

CB: [Laughing] Yeah everyone seems to be pointing to those panels, where they’re just standing around.

BLVR: The story of Job just captures everyone’s imagination. We can all imagine asking “Why did this terrible thing happen to me? What did I do to deserve it?”

CB: It is the fundamental difficulty with the religious point of view. If there is a god, why does god allow bad things to happen? It’s a difficult one to answer.

BLVR: Do you think that story of Job satisfactorily answers the question?

CB: It does for me. And actually you asked me earlier what was my favorite story from the Bible and it didn’t used to be but during the creation of this book, Job definitely did become my favorite story from the Hebrew scriptures because I think it’s brilliant. I think the person who wrote it was a genius.

BLVR: You mention somewhere in your notes that during biblical times prostitutes were thought of as women who had made a “choice”. And for me that word is really hard. I’m just wondering if you think these stories would be different if they had been told by the women themselves, if the prostitutes’ voices were the main voices. Choice is at the heart of the sex worker rights movement, right?

CB: Yeah. Look, if we’re talking about the situation today, there are definitely women who have been forced into the work or strongly coerced, however you want to phrase it. There are women who would not have chosen to be sex workers. But it seems to me, and certainly it’s the belief of all the people I encounter in the sex worker rights movement, that the vast majority of sex workers do choose the work.

People who are against sex work are able to point to the women who have been forced, who genuinely are trafficked, and say “This characterizes all of sex work,” and I think that’s false. Although, if we’re talking biblical times, women had fewer options. Really your significant options were “marry a man and let him support you” or “become a prostitute”. And where you’re not reliant on one man, you’re reliant on many men who are going to give you money.

BLVR: Yeah it really complicates the term “choice” in that scenario. How much of a choice is it, really?

CB: I mean we’re all “forced” to work to get money. When I was younger I worked in a photo lab and I didn’t want to do that work, but I had to have money to be able to buy food and pay my rent and so on and so I worked in that photo lab and working in that photo lab was not an ideal situation, but I didn’t feel like I was being forced or had no choice. It was just the job that was available and I was willing to do it for that period of time until I was able to make a living as a cartoonist.

BLVR: I haven’t done the historical scholarship, but I’m a little bit uncomfortable thinking that most of these stories were probably told and retold or authored by men and thinking about how that affects their telling. I would just love to hear from Ruth herself, did she think she had a choice? The Bible is this patriarchal document that I think many women or sex workers might not think to look towards at all to justify their actions or existence.

CB: It is a question whether or not women had any role in the creation of the Bible. Harold Bloom contended that Genesis was written by a woman. And of course Genesis is the one that contains the story of Tamar. But who can say? I suspect even if the Bible was completely written by men, these are stories that were told and retold and I’m pretty sure that some of those storytellers were women at some point along the way, and that women to some degree shaped that material. But it’s impossible to say to what degree.

BLVR: So do you think the prostitutes have a voice in these stories?

CB: I do think that most of the Bible or all of it really was written by men and if that’s the case it’s hard to say that the voice of the prostitutes at that time is really coming through. Although the story of Tamar, it shows Tamar outsmarting the men around her. That does feel close to the voice of the prostitute.

BLVR: What religious rules and laws do you live by? And then on the other hand, what kind of commandments have you broken?

CB: [Laughing] Really the only important rules I think are the significant ones that Jesus pointed to, love god and love your neighbour. Do I break those laws? All the time. There are definitely times when I’m angry or annoyed with people around me and I’m not seeing them with the loving heart that I should. But I do think that the more you approach life and everyone around you with a loving heart, the better your life will be.

Shannon Tien is a writer and editor living in Vancouver.

Writing and Idiocy

An Interview with Writer Mario Bellatin

The Mexican writer Mario Bellatin’s latest book to appear in English is The Large Glass, published by Phoneme Media. The novel presents itself as an autobiography, and in doing so scrambles the very idea of autobiographical writing, suggesting that the truth about our lives isn’t in the telling of facts, but in their transmutation. The book also allows Bellatin to continue to play with his mercurial public persona. He is well known in the Spanish-speaking world for his thirty-plus books, as well as for the flamboyant prosthetic limbs he used to wear at events in place of the forearm that he is missing. 

The Large Glass offers no straightforward insights into its creator, which is the point. It is broken into three parts, each with a Beckettian feel of perfectly off-key humor and strangely dislocated narrators: a boy whose mother charges customers at a bathhouse to behold her son’s transcendent testicles; a Sufi writer who has an odd encounter with his sheika; and a woman-child whose family was kicked out of their home and now can’t stop lying about who she is. The secret of the novel seems to exist in the spaces between the three stories, and between them and Bellatin.

Mario and I emailed about his new book over the course of the past few months.

—Aaron Shulman

THE BELIEVER: Labeling The Large Glass feels slippery. It could be called an autobiography cloaked by fiction, an autobiographical fiction, or a work that lives on the smudgy threshold between reality and imagination. How would you describe it?

MARIO BELLATIN: I think it’s an autobiography down to its smallest details. Moreover, I think this is how all autobiographies should be. The traditional approach, as it is framed, almost always produces fiction that betrays the truth as a function of the classic format. If I had the time and the desire to do such an exercise, I could rewrite the book in a strictly realistic sense. But it would lose a good part of what a book needs to be for me to see myself honestly.

BLVR: Do you think that there is a brutal honesty embedded in lies? After all, fiction at its core is the art of lying and making things up.

MB: More than lies I think of impostures. And, of course, only a fool would waste the opportunity to express what can’t be said in other spheres when they have created a space to do so. I don’t believe in the art of lying—that wouldn’t go further than Pinocchio or the Boy Who Cried Wolf—but rather in an Art of Wielding False Innocence.

You’ll never see me write a parallel realist book because there isn’t time to do it: Ars lunga vita brevis…

BLVR: What made you decide to reference Duchamp with the title of the novel? What conversation is taking place between his work and yours?

MB: The title has to do with another book of mine called Lecciones para una Liebre Muerta. The name makes reference to another central figure of 20th-century art, Joseph Beuys. 

Beuys and Duchamp are two icons who are impossible to refute. They have stayed intact in a supposed hyper-vanguard in spite of the fact that the decades full of their ideas reflect a different way of looking at things. If I stop and think that when Duchamp was growing up there were barely any cars, or that Beuys flew warplanes for Hitler’s air force, I see that it is impossible to speak of advancement or change if we don’t ask ourselves in a radical way if what is presented to us as art and literature are truly that. 

It seems that this way of understanding the unnamable is how we should express what traditional forms block us from transmitting. The books have titles that are rather like parodies, that seem to mean that that which supposedly is—museums, bookstores, the paranoia surrounding art—in fact isn’t.

BLVR: In your book, you (or one of your narrators) describes “writing as prophecy,” and mentions how previous books of yours have predicted things that later happened. What prophecies from this book would you like to see fulfilled?

MB: The prophecies are secret. They belong to the universe of the author and not that of the reader. Some of them have been terrible. But I don’t want to turn—for others at least—my writing into something esoteric. I think the purpose that every book has is to lead uniquely to writing another book. Like that strange race in which the first prize is to participate in another race.

BLVR: How does having your novels translated into other languages make you feel? Is it another mask for the text?

MB: Naturally it’s a different book. Just looking at the pages, without reading them, I can see this. And I feel that translations fulfill to perfection my idea that books are only platforms so that another creator—in this case, the person who translates—can make their own work. Which they will hide with their own mask.

BLVR: There was recently an interesting dust-up between you and your publisher Planeta. Could you tell me a bit about that?

MB: It’s true. A good deal of the second half of last year I had to confront an abuse related to the truculent publication of what many consider to be one of my most important books [Salón de Belleza, The Beauty Salon]. 

The point for me, as a creator, wasn’t so much in this particular infringement—which ultimately I could have let happen, since it was a book that was published twenty years ago, and which was going to be read by a new number of readers—as it was in my commitment to my writing in general, above all, to my future writing. In some way, I believe that my work, scattered in different books and plastic actions of various types, is like one unique book, the writing of which I have given a great part of my existence. And this abuse affected all of my writing and I felt that, until that irregularity was fixed, as a person I wasn’t going to feel one with my writing. It terrified me thinking of betraying something to which I had dedicated my life and not be sufficiently able to repair the opprobrium, to count on the moral transparency that is needed to keep exercising my craft. In other words, I wasn’t trying to defend a specific book from the past but an inexistent one from the future. Something that perhaps would never come to exist. I was defending, I think, a vocation, and an ideal.

It was interesting to see what happened during this process. I came to understand, among other things, that in some way my Writer-I had tried to camouflage himself in my own fictions. I saw put into practice that well-known phrase that writers either flee from the world or remake it. It was important that this happened, in spite of the discomforts of all sorts that I had to escape from. I think it was a kind of late baptism, which made me recognize how fundamental writing is to my life. The funny part is that nothing external changed. I kept writing with the same tenacity as always. But my Writer-I, if such a thing exists, isn’t that same as before. Lately I have the feeling that I’m taking on projects that are more rooted and, with the invaluable help of my new literary agents, we’re “cleaning” up the dozens of my books scattered all over the world, which keep being printed without any authorization or with the contracts not only expired but not even with their most basic clauses fulfilled.

BLVR: Where are things now, and did having to deal with the business side of the writing life so directly stimulate you in any valuable ways?

MB: Things ended well on both sides. I felt that with the full return of the rights and the withdrawal of copies I was able to reestablish my commitment to writing. In exchange, I didn’t sue, since many irregularities were demonstrated not just on the moral balance sheet but the economic one as well. And well, I should admit that I used the situation. I sought out the solution, carrying out a series of actions with a performative character. I used social media—to see if it it’s true that they really can achieve an effect of perturbation in the passing of daily events. It wasn’t, in all, wasted time. 

Furthermore, on a personal level, I reconnected with people, friends, and journalists that showed solidarity. And looking at the articles published about what happened in magazines with worldwide readership, I now think that the classic, modernist relationship in terms of the manipulation of literature, of art, has changed. I even wonder if this relationship is not only otherwise, but we now find ourselves facing something very distinct when we talk about these categories. What is an author? What is a book? What is a reader? These are questions that are still unresolved from new points of view.

BLVR: Who would Mario Bellatin be without writing and literature?

MB: A few years ago a friend of mine who I’m very close with told me, directly to boot, that if I didn’t have writing I would be a complete idiot. I remember in that moment that her claim alarmed me. For a time I tried to decode its possible implications. Until finally I couldn’t help but agree with her. I even suspect that to not be a complete idiot is one of the reasons I started writing. This is because it’s a labor that I’ve been engaging in, in an uninterrupted way for almost 40 years, and I can’t find a reason, within a rational framework, that justifies performing such a task. And I think that that point, the relationship between writing and idiocy, shouldn’t be disdained or reduced to anecdote. I myself have experienced moments, long ones at that, of idiotic writing, repetitive, obsessive, hermetic, without an end that justifies it. Idiotic writing that, if I hadn’t acted in time, would have led me to spend my days in an institution of the mentally alienated or something like that. And lately, I feel that many aspects of my daily life have very little do with what can happen in my writing. It is as if they were two independent proceedings moving at different velocities. And sometimes it’s not very pleasant to notice the unbalance. Sometimes I think to myself that the time others spend experimenting with and solving the issues of life—one of those being love—in many of which I feel myself absolutely lost, I spend locked away for days at a time with only the company of a dog and my typewriter.

BLVR: You’re known for making things up when people ask about your work—like a fictitious Japanese writer with a large nose who you ended up writing a book about. Will I discover things here you’ve invented? (I hope so.)

MB: Of course. Answering questions is an art. I’m actually about to write a book about this topic. The central point is that when you answer a question you should always have in your mind the possibility of saying exactly the opposite and it would be equally logical or absurd, depending on how you look at it.

Aaron Shulman is currently working on a book about the Panero family of Spain for Ecco/HarperCollins and tweets here.

Redbeard’s Castle

A Conversation with Screenwriter Matthew Robbins

After spending his junior year in Paris watching movies with Johns Hopkins roommate Walter Murch and graduate film school at USC, Matthew Robbins began his long and distinguished career in screenwriting and directing with contributions to George Lucas’s first feature, THX1138, followed in rapid succession by Sugarland Express with Steven Spielberg, Corvette Summer, The Bingo Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings, Dragonslayer, and batteries not included—a still timely tale of alien gadgets from outer space who put the kibosh on urban gentrification.

In the 1990s, mentoring an up-and-coming young Guadalajaran through a film program in that city led Robbins to a rich collaboration with the director Guillermo del Toro that so far has produced Mimic, the remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and Crimson Peak, which was released last month on DVD, and today on Netflix.

From his home in west Marin County Robbins spoke with me about Crimson Peak, the Gothic romance, and a trunkful of movie scripts he and del Toro have yet to make.

—Victoria Nelson

I. REVERSING EXPECTATION

VICTORIA NELSON:  After twenty years of working together, you know Guillermo del Toro very well. What do you feel are the qualities you bring to this relationship that Guillermo doesn’t, and what are the qualities he brings to it that you don’t?

MATTHEW ROBBINS: Guillermo is a master director, a multitalented leader who has a tremendous empathetic way with his actors and command of the camera. His staging is inventive and he’s also fascinated with design and style—he’s got the whole package for leading a big orchestra every day. He also has the gift of having obsessions, which is very useful for a film director. Guillermo’s obsessions [insects, mechanical devices, ghosts, the Gothic, many more] are well enough known that I don’t really have to mention them.

On my side of the fence, it’s always the same thing no matter what genre I’m working in. I try to identify what the movie is about. Is there a theme working in all this detail and set decoration and atmosphere and genre? Is there something nourishing enough in there to merit two hours?

The other area in which I’m very invested is the creation of characters. Do the characters have enough meat on their bones to merit development and hold our interest as people? That’s the foundation of our partnership: I’m always the one who harps on those things; Guillermo’s eyes start to sparkle when he begins to see how he’s going to shoot it and direct it and cut it. We’ve worked on many screenplays, and maybe eight or ten are in his trunk, I’m not sure. He treasures them all and can probably tick them off, not only rapidly but in order; he’s got an amazing memory.

VN: When Guillermo has talked about character, he’s said that in a fairy tale you want the villain to be a real villain, and that’s exactly how it pans out in Pan’s Labyrinth, where the stepfather doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. It’s different in Crimson Peak: Thomas Sharpe is briefly broken out of his incestuous spell [with his sister Lucille] and is able to have sex with his bride and actually feel love for her. That transforms his personality, even though it’s not in time to save him. What I appreciated the most in Crimson Peak is Lucille’s  speech near the end, when she says: We were trying to protect ourselves from a monster and our love turned us into monsters. That adds a three dimensionality to the classic melodramatic characters they are.

MR: That was in the DNA of the movie from the very beginning. Its most complex elements are the feelings we have about what turns out to be a very sad story. You don’t sympathize with the villains, but you empathize with what happened to bring them to such a pass. The movie’s heart is on its sleeve because Guillermo’s feelings are so overt for the genre and for these people.

It’s interesting to hear from some of the critics—especially for a movie that was released at Halloween—that it took so long to get to the last ten minutes where everyone’s running around with knives whacking each other. Guillermo had been worrying for a long time that everyone involved in promoting the movie be aware it wasn’t generic good guys and bad guys and creatures popping out of the closet and a lot of blood and guts. He’s got a lot of deep feeling about that. He’s a very sophisticated author and this was an opportunity for him to make what he describes as his first adult English language film.

VN: In interviews del Toro has emphasized that Crimson Peak is a Gothic romance, a different genre than the kind of horror of the last ten or fifteen years we’ve been trained to respond to, where every five minutes there has to be another scary thing happening. What I as a Gothic scholar noticed was the sources you and he have cited elsewhere, Jane Eyre and Rebecca. Jane Eyre was actually the first true Gothic romance. In the original [18^th-century] Gothic novels by Hugh Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, and all the women novelists after them— it’s a great touch that Edith is an aspiring Gothic writer, that’s right in the demographic—the heroine is menaced by an older man, a male patriarch Devil figure and in the end, if all went well, she would escape with the young man. Brontë’s Jane Eyre turned all that on its head because for the first time the young girl mates with the man who seems like the Devil, until she domesticates him. By the end of Jane Eyre Rochester’s blind and helpless, very much the damsel in distress that Alan becomes at the end of Crimson Peak. What happens with Edith is very much in that vein, with the addition of the warrior woman trope of the twenty-first century, where she and Lucille engage in hand to hand combat.

Another great, longstanding convention of the Gothic is the Gothic house or castle, which always burns down or blows up whether it’s Carrie’s high school gymnasium or Thornfield Hall. In Guillermo’s The Devil’s Backbone, the bomb in the courtyard of the monastery never explodes, and here Allerdale Hall stays intact if still a little leaky. You and he have managed to do that reversal of expectations right through Crimson Peak—six or seven times, by my count. Viewers think Carter Cushing’s razor will be used to kill him and it isn’t. The evil-looking ghosts are actually positive figures who come to warn her. I myself was waiting for Thomas to fall into his infernal clay-extracting machine and get chewed up; that’s another pistol put in the beginning that never quite shoots.

MR:  We never thought of that. We had many, many endings, but that’s not a bad idea.

VN: Were you consciously aware that you were reversing a lot of these genre expectations?

MR: Not really. The choreography of the razor, the water washing the floor, that’s pure Guillermo. With the machine, Guillermo in his typical way hired someone to design and fabricate it, and it makes a certain sense on its own. The way the model and the machine are featured in the film, the reality had not sunk in for me so that the way of interacting with it you described had not occurred to me. The point of the ending as it now stands is the terrible mix of love and destruction, that Thomas dies at the hands of the incestuous beloved sister—we had so many endings, but this is the ending that makes the most sense.

VN: Speaking of Gothic houses, what about the two totally contrasting houses and places—Buffalo and what I assume was the Peak District in Derbyshire?

MR: The idea is pretty plain. America is dynamic, industrious, teeming with activity, and the color scheme was designed to enhance that so that the shock, the atmospheric shock, of the change would be as extreme as possible. It’s one of the great, great achievements of the production, that extraordinary design.

II. ZOMBIES

VN: Now in Mimic, which you two cowrote, I’ve always thought the underworld of the New York subways was pretty anal. In Pan’s Labyrinth the underworld was very uterine, and del Toro explicitly mentions that, even though its resident male figures are either evil or at best ambiguous, like the Faun. My association with Crimson Peak, when I first heard the title, was—and believe me, I don’t go looking for this kind of stuff—menstruation. Here we have this blood oozing out of the ground, it’s a matriarchy of mother-daughter evil, you go down into the basement, the underworld, and here are these circular vats of blood-looking liquid! So I have to say I think the underworld in Crimson Peak is vaginal. What do you say to that?

MR [Laughs]: Take it up with Mr. del Toro! When he was designing the movie, he was very focused on the color palette of the movie being devoid of red until you see Lucille with her garnet ring and her red dress. As for the vaginal/menstrual female element, I take no responsibility whatsoever!

VN: When you were conceiving and writing it, did you have those vats of clay in mind?

MR: No, when I was writing it I had in mind the iron ore that leeches up through the snow.

VN: Ferrous oxide?

MR: Yes, and there were old Roman mines in Cumbria, so it all tied together. Guillermo really wanted the house to be a dying beast, a bleeding dying beast bound in the clay. It’s not in the movie nearly as much as it used to be, but the idea of the walls oozing and running, a slow drip, was in earlier versions. Edith even talks about it in one of the kitchen scenes—this oozing, we must do something about it. It’s barely touched on now, but it used to be a more overt element.

VN: Most of the colors inside the house are blueish or very bleached out as a contrast to the red. I was thinking of the great theme of Bluebeard’s castle in that famous fairytale, but this is the flipover female version. You could say it’s Redbeard’s Castle. Those little touches, such as Lucille’s drawer where she keeps five little braided hair souvenirs from the women she’s murdered. A lock of hair is something a mother does for a child. Was that part of your original conception as you were working through or was that another visual that was added?

MR: I think it was in a draft that she had those mementos, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. This was written seven years ago and was acquired by Universal right away, but Guillermo went to New Zealand and was engaged for two years in the writing and production of The Hobbit. When he had to withdraw from the movie because there was no green light forthcoming, he came back and almost immediately went into production with At the Mountains of Madness, the long-lamented adaptation of the H. P. Lovecraft novel. He worked nine months on that and they canceled it—they had their reasons but I won’t get into it—and he was able to take his entire team, his whole art department and production team, and put it onto Pacific Rim because he’d been consulting on that.

The upshot of all this was that years and years went by after I completed my many, many, many, many drafts of Crimson Peak. Then Guillermo formed a very wonderful relationship with Legendary Pictures and Thomas Tull, the founder. They were exposed to Guillermo’s brilliance and wanted desperately to make another picture with him. He showed them several of our screenplays and they chose Crimson Peak.

VN: I always imagine there’s a special kind of limbo for all these movies that were written and never got produced. For you in this collaboration it would be At the Mountains of Madness and also Pinocchio. I wonder if you could say a word about both of these projects. Do you think possibly, at some time, At the Mountains of Madness might go into production?

MR: It’s unclear if either of them will ever see the light of day. Before the advent of zombies and vampires on TV, that was my definition of zombies: all those scripts in Guillermo’s trunk that have not been made. Yet every once in a while something will happen, one of them will be encouraged to rise up and stagger around the room for a few weeks before it falls back into the box and the lid slams shut. They’re all actually alive; he really does have a remarkable memory for detail, far better than mine. The difference with Crimson Peak, this picture we’d written six, seven years before, was that it came back to life and was reanimated successfully.

Tom Cruise was going to be the star of At the Mountains of Madness, and James Cameron was going to produce. It really would have been one of the most exciting things in Guillermo’s full body of work, because he did as much with that as he did with Crimson Peak, with further design opportunity with the creatures…

VN: The tunnels under the South Pole, and all those murals, and the shoggoths and the Elder Ones—

MR: The city under the ice! It is my dearest hope that someday we’ll get the resources to make that picture.

VN: Can you say a few words, without giving away the show, about what your approach to that novella was?

MR: Yes, that’s where I really felt the heavy lifting on that adaptation, and I say this with all due fondness for the book. One of my favorite stories is that At the Mountains of Madness has no story and no characters. It’s very hard to tell people that, especially if you’re not familiar with Lovecraft, but we had to bring the characters to life so that you could feel something. Otherwise it’s just silly.

And the danger with Lovecraft always is this pomposity. That overripe style that creeps up on you is very hard to describe to people who don’t actually enter into his pages. It’s a little bit like the Gothic romance, where if you choose you can sit back, fold your arms, and not yield to its charms. To make the characters interesting, and then put a shape to the drama so that there’s an increasing sense of dread and suspense that actually accelerates toward the ending—we wrestled with that for quite a while, but I think it’s very gripping.

VN: What did you use as the actual engine of suspense? Of course, there’s the very layered discovery of [the South Pole] region, and this city under the ground—

MR: It had elements of a procedural. They begin to put together the clues, the architectural clues and the murals, as to what must have happened there.

VN:  What is the city, why was it abandoned? That’s the clincher: oh my God, we humans are descended from the amoebas the Elder Ones brought?

MR: The idea was to see if you couldn’t bring people to the dizzying edge of the precipice, where you’re looking down into this absolutely shocking and enormous origin story of all life on earth. To make that—dare I say—plausible while you’re watching. The conceit is so extravagant that it really doesn’t bear a lot of scrutiny in the light of day, but you’re talking theater and it really could be an unforgettable, disorienting theatrical experience. That was the design.

III. LET THE BOY RUN FREE

VN: I also wanted to ask you about Pinocchio. It seems like everyone’s announcing they’re doing a live action Pinocchio or an animated Pinocchio, and so I’m just curious what your take on Pinocchio would have been, will be, in the script that you came up with.

MR: The idea of our screenplay was a celebration of Pinocchio’s anarchy. The public knows the story mostly from the Disney version. The goal of that movie was for him to become a real boy, and a real boy is neat and goes to school and spells his words correctly and does his sums. Collodi, writing at the end of the 19^th century at the time of Garibaldi, was worried about the Italian people and whether or not Italy would be a real country, just like whether Pinocchio would be a real boy. Guillermo had a very instinctive reaction against that and he explicitly wanted to celebrate the anarchy, and the extravagance, and the selfishness, and the ecstasy of the id released by this piece of wood and just let the boy run free! So in our screenplay Pinocchio never does become a boy. This was the biggest change. We also put in many episodes of the book that never saw the light in of day in all the versions made and certainly not the Disney film.

It then became a question, in our screenplay, of where do you go with this character? One of the discoveries we made was that the primary relationship was Geppetto and Pinocchio. And so we used the boy’s transgressions to separate them, and we had the father figure, Geppetto, looking for him. He comes upon the devastation left by his boy, the chaos that Pinocchio sows when he perpetrates his childish tricks. Geppetto thinks: What have I done, unleashing this creature on the world? That’s how dark it gets.

VN:  What you’re telling me about Pinocchio is really poignant. Here’s a character we expect wants to become human as the crowning goal of his existence—we know that outsider who wants to be normal and accepted, from teenage movies on. But here’s an outsider who doesn’t have that yearning; he’s rebelling against all of it. That’s another very interesting reversal of expectations.

MR: In our story Geppetto is a widower who had a wife and child, the child’s clothes are still up in the attic, and Pinocchio is already up in the attic throwing the clothes around and putting on the dead boy’s outfit. Right from the start there’s assumptions, frayed nerve endings, undigested grief, so the relationship is unstable from the very beginning. There’s a very complex and I hope highly emotional spine running through the story, and the climax is a very powerful set of scenes with high adventure inside the fish—it’s not a whale—and a father-son understanding that’s the end of the film, where they learn to live each other on a new basis. That is the emotional track of our Pinocchio.

Guillermo has very appropriately seen the film as a stop-motion puppet movie. He wants to do it the way they did The Fantastic Mr. Fox, frame to frame. This movie went down many storyboards and they made maquettes of Geppetto and Pinocchio, and an absolutely stunning design. The illustrations from Collodi’s books were the visual wellspring for the design, and the vision came from artists generating illustrations of various locations and characters—beautiful, beautiful work, but too costly for something that wasn’t a happy-happy story, one that had a reputation of being fun, with music, Jiminy Cricket. It’s hard to get out from under the shadows, no, the sunlight, of that. Various attempts were made to put it in a pipeline and to get the costs down, but I’m pessimistic about the film ever seeing the light of day. Producers are scared off not by dark material as much as the cost of generating it.

VN: It seems as if making a puppet show of a story about a puppet who becomes “human” adds another layer to it, because then all the human characters are puppets, and that is a kind of funny wonderful commentary of its own. Was that part of your thinking?

MR: Yes, sure, he’s getting on that trope. One of the most ambitious elements in our adaptation was the set. We created an imaginary Italy that vaguely resembles something prior to the First World War, a fictional universe populated by a fascist atmosphere, a working black shirt presence, where the adults who he meets on the road are militarists: “You should be a soldier, young man!”—or in the church he goes to, Pinocchio looks at the carved wooden Christ. He’s absolutely fascinated by it, climbs up on the cross: Why are there nails in his hands? And the hypocrisy of the priests and the authority figures as he goes through this world, a landscape full of barbed wire and artillery and biplanes. It’s a very great leap of the imagination to take the story and push its elements into the 1920s with that atmosphere of turmoil.

VN: Your Pinocchio could be a prototype for a little Sacco or Vanzetti, a real Italian anarchist in America.

MR: He’s a little Sacco and Vanzetti, yes! Except he’s much too crazy and much too susceptible to his hedonistic impulses. He loves to eat, he loves to do everything—it’s a celebration of those appetites.

VN: That doesn’t sound dark as much as the anarchy of 1930s cartoons, the Krazy Kat characters. That wild and crazy stuff is something adults and children could really savor.

MR: I have very vivid memories as a child reading stories like Pinocchio and being thrilled but afraid at the same time when they go into mischief. Mischief is irresistible, but there’s always the expectation of punishment and you don’t know what form it will take and how bad it will be. When Guillermo and I are writing, there’s an overlap of our sensibilities—that idea of how afraid you can be of the dark, Guillermo’s belief in ghosts, all that came from his childhood—and the atmosphere of this Pinocchio, the thrills and chills of this childhood transgression, is something I remember vividly.

VN: I can’t remember the original, are there ghosts in your Pinocchio?

MR: There’s the cat and the fox who hang him. We kept that from the book. It’s not easy to watch. Some of the scenes where Pinocchio turns into an ass are really nightmarish.

VN: That’s actually a very ancient Roman motif. There’s a famous tale called The Golden Ass of Apuleius, by a writer in late Antiquity, about this young carouser called Lucius who is turned into a donkey by a spell.

MR: Shakespeare was fond of that, too.

VN: I think he got it from The Golden Ass. It’s not until Lucius is initiated into the cult of the goddess Isis that he’s turned back into a human, but I think Collodi’s blue fairy is also a vestige of that ancient myth—seeking the woman goddess or whatever to finally gain redemption… What are your next projects?

MR: I’ve written something else for Guillermo, but I can’t discuss it because it’s top, top secret, so much so that I haven’t even told my own children.

VN: You’d have to kill them if you told them?

MR: Yes, sorry. Bang! I have a film I wrote alone that I’d like to direct. It’s called Storm Track, and it’s set in 1933, the bootleg era, Prohibition, in Texas. A guy from Brooklyn has a truckful of whiskey he’s selling as he works his way north and a ten year old boy, a strange kid who never speaks, stows away in his truck. The kid’s traveling to Leavenworth in Kansas where his father is about to be hanged for murder. The fantastical part of the film is that the child affects the weather around him when he’s upset. The boy is hoping to blow the prison down by producing a storm, and the man is trying to figure out how to profit from his gifts.

VN:  What a wonderful story.

MR: It’s full of Americana. Dustbowls, speakeasies, people with handcarts on the road. I cooked it up on a bicycle ride on the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, where I live for six months every year. My next goal is to step back into directing and make that movie come to life.

Victoria Nelson’s books include The Secret Life of Puppets and Gothicka, two collections of short stories, and a memoir.

“EVERYWHERE I GO, I’M MORE OF A NOVICE OR AN OUTSIDER THAN THE OTHER PEOPLE IN THE FIELD.”

The following is an excerpt from the 2015 Fall Issue of the Believer. Get it here.

An Interview with Miranda July

For each of her sundry projects, Miranda July requires herself to inhabit a slightly different identity. In her performances, often staged in museums, she cultivates the extrovert; in her fiction, the homebody; for her recent experiments in digital media, the technophile; for managerial duties, the taskmaster. She achieves this malleable persona through daily meditation, near-abusive self-discipline, and a rigorous schedule that requires her to question the efficiency of every moment, including sitting on the toilet.

July’s work gained some public attention in 2005, with the release of Me and You and Everyone We Know, an idiosyncratic, kindhearted film she considers the most accessible artwork she’s ever made. Before that, her very early projects were more often conflicted and unpredictable—zines and a series of wild, dramatic plays staged at 924 Gilman, a seminal punk club in Berkeley, California. In the late ’90s, amid the Riot Grrrl culture of the Pacific Northwest, she recorded a batch of audio pieces that float between radio drama and sound collage, which she released through Slim Moon’s Kill Rock Stars record label. She has continued her work in performance with new, live pieces every few years, including the recent New Society, which she performed at the Walker Art Center in October 2014, and at SFMOMA in April 2015.

A new development in July’s body of work is Somebody, an app she designed that asks people to serve as human text-delivery systems, receiving a digital message they must physically relay to a stranger in their vicinity. July has long been infatuated by the concept of strangers. Her book It Chooses You chronicles her adventures with the PennySaver, as she entered people’s homes and lives to purchase curious, quotidian items (the first one is a leather jacket). She uses these objects as talismans to cultivate a fantastical, complex world out of the banalities of daily life, a process that continues to inform all her work, including her second feature film, The Future, and her first story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You.

Her most recent project is her debut novel, The First Bad Man, the story of a fastidious woman whose household habits mimic July’s own. I spoke to her over the phone about her life and work. Toward the end of the call, our connection faltered, but we pushed through.

—Ross Simonini

I. “THE KIND OF CRUCIBLE I’M ALWAYS IN”

THE BELIEVER: Let’s talk about the art of the domestic ritual, which plays an important function in The First Bad Man. Do you have rituals around your life?

MIRANDA JULY: Well, it’s funny: when my husband read this book—which he only just did fairly recently, after it was done—he was like, “Oh, well, this is just you, this total insanity.” Not the whole character of Cheryl, but the part about cleaning the house, thinking of yourself as your own servant so that you’renot cleaning the house. I appear to be really into cleaning, but actually I hate it so much that I have to disassociate—it can’t really be me doing it. And in my office, which is its own little house, I’m even more Cheryl-y. I don’t use plates. I often just eat out of the thing, and I—I did some exaggeration in the book, but this, this level of efficiency, is near and dear to my heart, to the way I live, which is funny because it’s so un-fun and un-free. I’m trying to ease up a little, but it’s almost impossible to change.

BLVR: Your life is regimented.

MJ: Yeah, I’m a real tough boss. It’s very hard for me as an employee.

BLVR: You think of yourself as these two selves, the boss and—

MJ: Kind of. I’m always just trying to get the work done so that I can be free—like, with the sense that, like, the real me has no interest in this? I just gotta do it for my boss. But the catch is that I’m never free, I never finish the work, so I don’t know who this freewheeling employee with extracurricular interests is. I mean, for example, the whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it’s just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Like, I’m supposed to be writing this book, but—heh heh heh—I’m writing a movie, secretly. I’m procrastinating, and in my off-hours I’m working on this movie that I’m not allowed to do, because I’m supposed to be writing this book! And then the book’s done and I’ve got this movie started, and I’m secretly working on a performance. That’s the kind of crucible I’m always in. I mean, a more normal, mature way to think about it would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.

BLVR: Do you have a strict sense of time management?

MJ: Yeah. I’m very disciplined. And now I have a two-year-old, so I have from, like, nine to four every day, or nine thirty to three thirty, and I’m always trying to figure out the best way to use the time. If a project is in the business phase—like, it’s already basically done—then I do the uncreative work early in the day, then I do a ten-minute meditation and turn off my internet, and that’s to, like, really switch gears and make more room. Then I’m trying to be this totally different, looser, idea-having person for the newer work that I’m doing.

I just debuted a new performance, New Society, at the Walker last week, so I knew I had to be working toward that every single day. But I’m also trying to figure out how to deal with this app I made, Somebody. So halfway through the day I would stop talking to lawyers and agents about Somebody and try and transform into this other person. And it worked. It helped that every Friday I had scheduled a New Societyrehearsal with an audience of ten people in my studio, so I knew that no matter what, I’d have to do an iteration of this show. That enforced my discipline of it—I couldn’t fall behind. I had to learn my lines or I’d be humiliated.

Sometimes I’ve started out days by writing down my dreams and then going right into ideas, and that’s lovely, but basically, like, the internet killed that. It’s really hard for me not to look at what kind of fires need to be put out first thing in the morning.

BLVR: Is the routine a part of your art?

MJ: I suppose the daily disciplines are just a reflection of the qualities of my inner world—a mixture of paralysis and terror and a lighter, freer, kind of rebellious woman. So those are just constantly pushing against each other, and that’s played out in every area of my life. I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one’s ever done that before. As if I’m literally the first person to ever write a book.

BLVR: How is that different from any other approach?

MJ: Well, I don’t know that it is different. I think probably a lot of people do that. But maybe in my case, because it’s always been a long time since I last worked in that medium—many years—maybe it’s not just that I’m the first person to ever write a book, but that I have no recollection of ever having written anything. So it’s not part of my identity the way it might be for other writers or filmmakers or artists. Everywhere I go, I’m more of a novice or an outsider than the other people in the field.

BLVR: Do you find that you’re generally drawn to the outsider aesthetic and the look of amateurism?

MJ: Yeah, I have kind of a resistance to people who talk about their “practice” and who are just so professional. Someone like Lydia Davis is as much of an insider as you could be in, like, the literary world, and yet her work maintains this outsider quality, so that when you read it you get a hint of, Oh right, there’s not any rules. You could do anything and call it your work. I’m drawn to that quality in children, nonartists, and really great established artists.

BLVR: You were saying a second ago that you started out in performance.

MJ: Yeah, my first professional art thing was a play that I wrote and directed and put on at 924 Gilman Street, a punk club. It doesn’t normally have plays, so that was, like, a rebellion within a rebellion. At the same time, I was also putting out a fanzine with my best friend. I was writing short stories, or, like, proto–short stories. So I was sort of figuring out writing through both those things, the plays and the fanzine. While dreaming of making movies.

BLVR: With a lot of these different mediums, do you think the content is entirely specific to that medium?

MJ: It’s specific to the medium. Most often I actually have to make something in that medium. Like the book—I’d already sold it to Scribner. I had to write a book. And right now I’m like, Shit, if I don’t make another movie soon I don’t get to be a filmmaker anymore. They revoke that card that was very hard to get in the first place. That’s actually inspiring, somehow. So then I just kind of herd my loosest, freest level of thoughts into that direction and try to break down what’s stopping me.

II. BORING X3

BLVR: How long did it take you to write the novel?

MJ: I had the idea right before The Future premiered, at Sundance, in 2011. Then I took notes for it all year as I promoted The Future and wrote It Chooses You. Then I started writing it at the end of that year, right after I got pregnant. I finished it when my son was two.

BLVR: What was the idea?

MJ: The idea came pretty fully formed, on a long car ride. A middle-aged woman who lives alone and has all these hang-ups is forced to take in this young, blond bombshell, and they’d have a very antagonistic relationship, but it would change, and then change again, and then change again. Everything else, all the secondary characters, came along the way. I have to say, it was the most enjoyable creative experience I’ve ever had, writing that book.

BLVR: Not usually the novelist’s experience.

MJ: I know! I don’t know if it’s because I was, like, on various natural hormones the whole time from pregnancy, or maybe I just like writing. The people around me were like, “God, you’re so much happier than you are making movies. Maybe this is your job! Maybe you’ve found it!” And I’m like, “Nooo.” It was still super hard, but even on bad days, I would come home from my office and say to my husband, “Well, the writing’s horrible, but I still like the story!” Like, “Too bad I’m not writing it well, but I’m a fan of these characters, and I wanna do better by them.” That was kind of my feeling the whole time. I was aware that the love of the story was pulling me through.

BLVR: When you say it came to you fully formed, do you mean—

MJ: In a flash! Sounds so corny, but I remember writing it down, and I looked at that journal page recently, just scrawled things.

BLVR: It felt novelistic as an idea, not cinematic.

MJ: Yeah, but I was just coming off a movie, so I kept saying, Would Scarlett Johansson be too old for Clee, do you think? It took me a while to just sit down in the chair and realize, Nope, Clee is just how you describe her. No one’s gonna come along and play her. Eventually all those filmy notions went away, and I also knew that I really needed a novel idea, because this actually wasn’t the original idea that I had sold to Scribner. I had already written and sold about eighty pages of another idea, a fictionalized story from my life. Then I had to put that on hold to make The Future, and in the process of making that movie I realized that the hardest parts of both my features has been my character. I don’t really want to have this skinny hipster girl in my work, but I’m not, like, a great actress, and so far I’ve needed to be in my movies… so I’ve worked with that handicap. After having this realization, I wondered why the hell I would write a novel drawn from my life instead of just making everything up like I did in my short stories. I looked at this novel idea, the original one, and I thought, You’re gonna hate this. You’re gonna hate every second of it, and it’s not gonna be good, because the truth is not your superpower. I so admire people who can write from their actual life—Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner—and it looks so easy and why can’t I do that? But I need more distance. I need a story, some kind of veil to work through.

BLVR: Is your relationship with film different than your relationship with literature?

MJ: Well, I don’t think I’m more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I’m more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I’m not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way. Most great filmmakers are good atplace. Like how people say, like, “The city itself is a character in the movie,” you know? I’m so interior. I always forget there’s such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt?

BLVR: Were you reading other novels while you were writing the book?

MJ: Yeah. Sheila Heti sent me this thriller called Breed. Do you know that book? The writer [Scott Spencer] wrote it under a pseudonym because it’s such not a literary book. I don’t usually read things like that. It’s a page-turner and people are dying and there’s monsters and I was very aware of how visceral the reading experience was. Oh my god, I thought, I can’t put this thing down! This is reading, too! I mean, picture that I’m mostly reading, like, Lydia Davis. Not that my novel is likeBreed, but I did think there’s no good reason my novel shouldn’t propel you forward; it doesn’t damage the work.

BLVR: What other books are propulsive in that way?

MJ: I mean, I want to say all good books, but that’s not true. You really enjoy reading things slowly sometimes and going in and out of them.

BLVR: Some of my favorite books are ones I’ve never read straight through.

MJ: Yeah, totally, and then there’s books that you read and you wanna whip through them. I just read the new Ian McEwan book in two nights, not because I loved it, but because I skipped so much of it because I was dying to know what happened. It wasn’t worth it to me to read all of it to figure that out. I just, like, did that kind of reading where you’re, like, searching for the key name, you know, to see what happens.

BLVR: Yeah, you’re just skipping to the first word in each paragraph…

MJ: Yeah, you’re like boring boring boring—oh!—boring boring boring.

Keep reading.

“The book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life.”

An Interview with Writer Tony Burgess

Tony Burgess is best known for the horror novel Pontypool Changes Everything, about a zombie virus that is spread through language. The book served as the basis for Bruce McDonald’s film Pontypool, which Burgess also wrote. In a genre often considered formulaic and staid, Burgess is strange and extreme; his recent novel, The n-Body Problem, contains a chapter that is unreadable because mathematically encrypted. The books read as if written by, to quote Burgess, “a deteriorating consciousness.” They are things that should not be, novels that disconnect themselves from the conventions of both horror and literature.

—Jonathan Ball

I. “I AM INTERESTED IN GIVING THE READER TRUE VERTIGO.”

THE BELIEVER: Your books, from the beginning, have embraced horror—a much-maligned literary genre—while at the same time having few similarities with other horror novels. Your influences are almost untraceable. I can detect Burroughs, I think, and Cronenberg, but maybe a good place to begin is where you began. How did you come to horror, and to cultivate your own particular strain of experimental, literary horror?

TONY BURGESS: It’s natural, isn’t it, to assume influence is primarily literary? And along the way it has to be, but my experiment began with, and still includes, non-literary influences.

I’ll be plain about this—I sought out horror at a very young age because I understood it. More than that, though, it was occurring. I have been frightened for as long as I can recall. I am shocked by this and feel isolated. That we aren’t holding onto things, like trees and rocks and screaming, surprises me. That was sort of the environment in my head as a child—that there is mindless violence in everything, and anything quiet and welcoming is so because it knows you by name, and that name marks you for sadism. Everything we think is real is made of elegiac materials.

So that was my backdrop as a kid. I couldn’t articulate it but I sought out things that could. At first it was horror films—extreme panic and terror, grotesque and maniacal. These films calmed me and made me feel more connected in my experiences.

As I got older my psychic life grew dire and started to resemble paranoid schizophrenia: disordered thought, a terror of secret, malevolent designs, an overwhelming sensation of being deformed. I had to seek out stronger medicine, and so I started obsessively reading surrealist and Dadaist texts.

That was when I started to have a tiny bit of control. Jarry, Beckett, Artaud, Bataille, Lautréamont, Genet, Gide, Cocteau, Apollinaire, the inframince of Duchamp. Then from there, outward to devour anything I could get my hands on—not just out of intellectual or literary appetite, but as a fairly urgent project to make my thought work. So it wasn’t really a question of, “Oh, I like this, I’m gonna be smart now.” It was a real attempt to figure out how I can be here.

I am answering this question in a confessional mode because the answer isn’t yet an academic one. Anyway, things got much worse for a very long time. I am still a feral person. I have no bank account. I am unemployable. I own nothing. I lose my shoes sometimes when I go out. Ha ha. It sounds like I’m making a case for my own exceptionalism, which I suppose I am, but I wish it wasn’t true.

My fear now, as a writer, is that I am a curiosity. That I can only bring you this peculiar condition from far away, from outside, and if you look at it then it will mean nothing. So, I have to pretend it’s more than that. Horror writing lets me do that.

BLVR: Typical of your style is unstable narration, which often shifts between character perspectives or narrative voices without warning. You describe this in the afterword of your book Fiction for Lovers as an attempt “to tell stories with a deteriorating consciousness.” Can you unpack what that means to you, and why you committed to this approach in your early novels?

TB: Well, the backdrop is always the chaotic environment of my thought, such as it is…and the deteriorating consciousness takes up Artaud’s challenge to be slipping into disintegration and still able to imagine what that feels like.

I like the separation there. The frantic shell game to discover where you might be. Your agency is a colonizer, a deterritorializer. The idea of a deteriorating consciousness also sets it apart from conventions like unreliability, which really just stabilizes the book’s themes, story, etc, as a carefully cooked voice in service of meaning. I am interested in giving the reader true vertigo.

The size of things, the meaning of things, the intention, the proximity of a convention are not absent—they are trying hard to be discovered in an indifferent and malformed organizing principle. Ultimately, I look to deteriorating consciousness as our inevitable condition and I am trying to make it work the same way I did with my juvenile mind—that is, to imagine how we are suffering. To record it being actual and then virtual.

BLVR: One thing I like about your unstable narration is that it stands opposed to the detached, transparent narration commonplace in genre fiction. The nature of the horror genre complicates the seeming neutrality of this ubiquitous style of “sober” narration, since it should be difficult to speak of horrors. One thing I have always thought is that the narrating consciousness, if sane, should be driven to madness by the events it is required to relate. Lovecraft has this problem: he always struggles against language, to describe monsters that are sublime and should therefore be indescribable, and inspire silence. Where do you see your work standing in relation to other horror authors and stories?

TB: Lovecraft is very important, as is the idea of the unnamable, the incommensurate record—that is, the destroyed record. I have said this many times: I believe the book should be something you protect yourself from by returning to your life. But it has threatened your life. Not by saying something it believes is true, but by attacking it.

A horror novel should reveal to you that you are falling apart. That there are ways your imagination can be made different. Can threaten what you think is. You should be holding onto that tree or rock and screaming. Or laughing. Not at absurdity, either: absurdism is just a bourgeois and reactionary nostalgia for good, stable meaning.

I think horror should have occult elements, not as its subject but as its ambition. It is a machine that destroys illusion. I, of course, never achieve this, but I always act as if I can.

Other popular horror writers I have great respect for: King, Barker, Piper, etc. But I think we have very different projects. I like Ben Marcus a lot and have recently discovered Guyotat.

II. “IT HAS TO FEEL LIKE IT WILL ALL FLY APART.”

BLVR: I heard that you wrote The n-Body Problem in nine days? How is that possible?

TB: It would have been ten but I took Monday off. Not kidding! It’s the way I do things. I thought about it and wrote a fair bit in my head for a year.

BLVR: What does your life look like when you are in the middle of these books?

TB: Oh, I get a bit hypomanic, not sleeping or eating properly. It’s not entirely comfortable. The books are recordings; that’s what they have to be, recordings of the writing. They have to be happening to me. But I do prepare for them, about a year in advance. 

BLVR: I like that idea, that they should be recordings of the writing. What do you think attracts you to that idea, pushing it all to that metafictional level?

TB: I don’t think really think of it in metafictional terms, or at least I try to avoid what metafiction is supposed to be doing. In fact, I want to get closer to the thing happening. It is a record.

BLVR: With you as a recording angel.

TB: A record is an analogue. Fidelity to unmeaning lines. A path to being there. Bataille and Artaud, to some extent, helped build my little book machines.

BLVR: It feels like what you are doing is very close to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, trying to close that distance between the audience and the work, while paradoxically using a lot of the techniques that in a different book would widen the distance.

TB: Yes. I think that’s right. It’s a radical collapse of metafiction, something almost like phatic fiction.

BLVR: Phatic fiction—that would certainly describe passages in Pontypool Changes Everything, where I am sometimes unclear whether two people are eating each other or watching TV.

TB: Haha, that’s the right reading! That makes me smile. So the fast writing isn’t some kinda balls-out feat, it’s a record of my writing without a moment to think. It has to feel like it will all fly apart.

BLVR: Were you always doing the books like that? In that headlong rush?

TB: Yeah. That sounds sort of crazy, and maybe it sounds impressive, but you have to be prepared. I’m getting close to preparing for the next book, but it’s two years of reading, thinking, of finding the voice, of breaking it down, of sitting and—like, I have days where people think I’m crazy.

My family thinks I’m insane, because I sit and do nothing for fucking months. I make no money, I stare.

BLVR: There is this madness to the books, this headlong rush and almost surrealistic, automatic quality, but at the same time there are clear structural elements. Like in Caesarea, it begins and it ends with the image of writing on paper, and it has a real symmetry to it even as it takes weird leaps. The latter half is almost a mirror image of the first half.

TB: Absolutely.

BLVR: In that novel, the mayor goes into his house and then comes out as the smaller version of himself. Then the book almost breaks and starts to reverse itself.

TB: Yeah, absolutely. And it changes: it begins to eat itself partway through the book so that it’s actually digesting itself, and coming to understand itself, so that the structure repeats itself as a mirror of its beginning.

That’s a function of the writing more than, “Well let’s balance this, and let’s balance that.” It’s the way the book ate itself as it was writing.

BLVR: So what is it that you’re looking for? What are you trying to get in your head before you start writing?

TB: First of all, I listen. I’ll get a conceptual idea, which I hope is not very compelling. Because the more compelling ones tend to be a bit distracting.

Pontypool Changes Everything was a very compelling idea, but I didn’t want to treat it that way. But now that’s the one everybody talks about, and asks me about. “Eh, viruses and languages, it’s so fantastic!” Well, you know, it’s not that hard to find that idea, it’s around.

BLVR: Well, yeah, it’s literally out there, with Burroughs saying “Language is a virus.”

TB: That’s not where it came from, but yeah. Caesarea was a deliberate attempt to find a concept that was unworkable and undevelopable: that the town is smaller, slightly smaller inside itself. The book will never find a way to make that idea legible. And because of that, in its attempt, it will set up an absolutely perverse stage wherein it becomes this horrifying painting of a market, that’s just excess.

So I’ll have a concept that’s sort of, “maybe, maybe,” and then I’ll try to figure out a fairly conventional, “this and this and this,” for a story. “This and this and this—the town was there, this happened to the town, or one fellow was blah blah blah, and then he ended up meeting somebody or they went to another place and they found a plane, blah blah,” to the end.

Then I’ll corner people selectively, and I’ll go, “I’ve got a story I want to tell you.” I’ll narrativize it—it has to satisfy a kind of conventional thing so that the person goes, “Oh, oh, oh wow, oh that’s a great story!” I look for that, where the listener goes, “Oh, I like that story.” Because that’s part of the bait.

BLVR: That’s the spine?

TB: Part of the spine. But not really, because that’s not the story that the book is going to be. But it has to satisfy what people think a clever or good story is. So then they trust it.

And then I’ll listen. Takes a long time to do sometimes, and it’s very strange where it comes from, but I’ll listen for a voice. Somewhere out in the wild. It can be somebody I hear at a grocery store, it can be somebody on a TV commercial, it can be something I read in a book, or it can be something else—but I hear the voice and it starts telling the story that I’ve been telling for the last year.

And it will do something to the story that I can’t really control. For instance, People Live Still in Cashtown Corners is the ShamWow guy.

BLVR: That’s interesting. It kind of makes sense, now that you say that.

TB: Well, I love the way he goes, “Hekini, Bikini, Batoni, Padoni, batadada.” He’s sort of aggressive and crazy, and he throws in words that don’t make sense in order to rhyme his way to the next sentence, as if that was allowable.

And everything was speculated into being: “What if you do this and what if you do that and what if you do this?” So it was this series of scattered speculations about what is, combined with this wholesale rhyming, and providing structural ways of getting from that idea to this, things that aren’t related to the idea. 

And the other thing is—there’s the voice, there’s the concept, and there’s the narrative to take the voice and take it somewhere—nowhere near that story anymore. So that story will now be something that that voice hears about.

It may hear about it once, it may be hearing about it all the time, but it is never that voice’s story. That voice will actually have no story. It sort of loiters and kills time, and tries to get on with things, or whatever, but it is sort of empty of that story. That story is primary or secondary, but it is not the narrative voice’s story.

So then the book that I was going to write is overheard, or spied on, or seen from a distance by the voice. A narrative voice I listen to instead of occupy.

BLVR: You’re almost setting forth this antagonism between the voice and the story. The narrative voice is supposed to be telling the story, but is really destroying it, in a manner of speaking.

TB: In a manner of speaking, yes it is. And weird things will happen. The story will have a kind of envy, and will have this agency.

It’s bizarre. It will try to interfere with the voice, or try to work its way in front of the voice, and insist—but it can’t, sort of like it’s not legible or not available to the voice, the governing principle or the governing body of the thing that’s in front of it.

III. PHATIC FICTION

BLVR: Was this always what you were doing? Was there ever a moment where you were writing standard stories in a standard manner?

TB: No. This was always happening. There’s a bunch of different things, there’s a bunch of reasons. Influences on me when I was a teenager, really. And some of those were disastrous lifestyle choices. [laughs]

BLVR: At one point you tried to burn down the Hotel Isabella [a historical Toronto landmark], is that correct?

TB: [laughing] Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Bill C-51 [Canada’s “Anti-Terrorism” bill] was passed, bitch! Kill it! Jesus Christ, that never happened!

BLVR: [laughing] That’s right, sorry. Didn’t you work as a telephone psychic at one point as well?

TB: I did. I worked as a telephone psychic for about a year and a half.

BLVR: How did that work?

TB: I loved that, man. I got a degree in fucking semiotics at U of Toronto, which was ridiculous. So the job I got, which I thought was a perfect job, that I was absolutely qualified for, was to read tarot cards. And it was perfect. It was in fact the high end of the jobs I could expect with a degree in semiotics. You know what I mean?

BLVR: There’s science in it.

TB: So I took that job very, very, very seriously. Even though I had zero belief in it whatsoever. It didn’t matter. 

BLVR: It’s semiotics, I suppose. In its purest form.

TB: Yeah, and I didn’t interfere with it. I just did my best job as a reader, as a medium.

BLVR: You’re describing a medium-like writing process. At least, that seems to be the intention—to set up a system or a structure that is going to produce a text that you can channel.

TB: Yeah, and to me that’s the big difference. Automatism is an element of that, as is the notion that it is a recording of the writing as opposed to something else.

BLVR: Fidelity to the event—  

TB: Fidelity to the writing, yes. It is, and it’s preoccupied with that all the way through.

BLVR: I want to jump back to how what you see yourself doing is “phatic fiction,” and how it has this phatic interest or goal rather than what we might otherwise think of fiction doing. We think of phatic speech as something that is expressing, rather than having a meaningful component. And so what I’m wondering is, what are these things expressing?

TB: Phatic is emptying the instrument of content so that it becomes apparent to you that I am here, because that’s all that this can do—say that I am here. There is no other freight, there is no other direction, there is no other lesson, there is no other content or material. Anything that I might put there will interfere with the signal and you will no longer know if I’m here or not.

This is going to sound so insane—but I don’t believe that I’ve ever said or thought or heard or read anything that was of any value unless it was disposable or ephemeral. The far more important feature of that instrument is to let you know I am here.

Everything else interferes with that; everything else is a problem. The only thing that can possibly be successful in any—we call it a meaningful way—is for you to know that I am here and me to know that you are here.

I’m sounding like a mystic now, but there isn’t anything else, and so this is one of the reasons why I’m quite comfortable with my books falling apart and the freight disappearing. It sounds ridiculous, I know.

BLVR: I don’t think it sounds ridiculous. What I think is interesting about it, though, is that you’re working with horror. Why is horror the best material to work with, to indicate that I am here? Is “I am here” producing horror?

TB: Well, that’s a very good one! It could be that they serve each other well. Maybe you could go to something like Stephen King’s hierarchy [of terror, horror, and gross-out—the latter being “lower” than the former, according to King’s book Danse Macabre].

Maybe what I want to do is say hello, that’s my “A” game. All this other content would be my “C” game, which is going to give other people something else to talk about.

BLVR: I find the idea of phatic fiction so interesting, because it produces this situation where maybe it’s horrible that you’re here.

TB: Oh no! Exactly.

BLVR: Or maybe it’s horrible that you might lose the message, and then the here-ness will be lost.

Or maybe the form is horrible. I find, when I teach one of your books, that it becomes very disturbing for the students that it is not a normal book. They find the formal difference—the way that it violates category—upsetting, more than the content. The violence and atrocity they can accept, but the way it is not a normal book makes them uncomfortable.

TB: It’s perverse and it’s embarrassing because it shouldn’t be that way.

BLVR: They find it disturbing that you’re talking to them. With Pontypool Changes Everything, students are very disturbed by the segments that are clearly meant as an autobiographical intrusion. They find that really disturbing and—

TB: Disruptive.

BLVR: It’s disruptive, yeah. And I think it comes out of that tension that you talk about, and which I see in David Lynch a lot. Where it becomes horrible often, in Lynch’s films, is when it seems like it is a movie but it’s not operating like a movie. It just feels wrong, like it shouldn’t be—yet here it is, insisting on its presence.

TB: I love that, and that goes to a whole bunch of different things—one of them is that to be here is a disruption.

Something phatic is something we quickly get rid of and treat as if it isn’t there at all. You know, “Hello”—“Yeah, hello”—it’s the most formal thing, but these things that are the most spontaneous are often the most codified.

BLVR: Makes me think also of Thomas Ligotti. In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which is his non-fiction book about pessimism, Ligotti has this interesting idea—it’s not original to him, he’s kind of just talking about the history of it—but the idea is that somehow consciousness is a monster, a monstrous thing.

And so the presence of you here is potentially horrifying in and of itself, from a certain point of view, whereas from another position of course the monster is out there, but trying to intrude, and you have to get rid of the monster.

Either I am here in the nightmare, or I am here is the nightmare. I am the monster and I am here. Your books seem radical in taking on the mantle of the monster like this, so they do produce an anxiety. But they don’t seem concerned about their own monstrosity.

TB: No, no, no—and nor would they, because that would require them to occupy the position of you looking at them, or you understanding them.

It’s not like a snapping turtle goes running around in the muck saying, “Oh my god, my horrible mouth!”

Jonathan Ball holds a PhD in English and is the author of Ex Machina, Clockfire, The Politics of Knives, and John Paizs’s Crime Wave. He also co-edited, with Ryan Fitzpatrick, Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Poetry, and writes the humor columns “Haiku Horoscopes” and “What Rappers Are Saying.” He lives online at www.jonathanball.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.

“Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily.”

An Interview with Ghostwriter Hilary Liftin

Hilary Liftin has two large Amazon boxes waiting for her when I walk up to her Sherman Oaks home. When she opens the door I ask her what she ordered and she says, “Earthquake supplies for the Big One.”

In earthquake terms, the threat of the Big One is still fairly vague—sometime in the next twenty years. But Liftin is about to experience her own personal big one on July 21st, when her first novel debuts: Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper. The title’s built-in meta-ness is warranted, because over the last ten years, Liftin has published fifteen memoirs under the names of other people. She’s one of America’s top celebrity ghostwriters.

Lizzie Pepper resembles a certain story we’ve all seen before—a young actress with glossy brown hair from a beloved American television series that could almost be Dawson’s Creek (but isn’t) is seduced into a fairy-tale romance by one of the world’s top actors who is part of a cult that could almost be Scientology (though it absolutely is not.) The relationship thrives, then falls apart, under the omnipresent lenses of the paparazzi.  

On the surface, Liftin has created a beach read of the highest order, but at its heart, Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper is a very sound rumination on human loneliness and existential alienation. And it is further complexified by Liftin’s career of encouraging Hollywood A-listers to share their secrets with her—the book is labeled as fiction, but is it Jurassic Park or The Devil Wears Prada? Or something else entirely?

Hilary Liftin and I spoke for over an hour, over coffee, on a Tuesday afternoon. She was warm, smart, and evenly hilarious. Her earthquake preparedness kit does not have a gun in it, but she’s thinking of buying cyanide capsules.    

—Kathryn Borel, Jr.

I. A ONE-SIDED RELATIONSHIP

THE BELIEVER: How does a person make the decision to say to themselves, “OK, I will make my career writing as a ghost”?

HILARY LIFTIN: My big break in ghostwriting came when I was still new here in LA and I had no life. That helped, having no life. My book agent put me up for a job for which I didn’t have the credits. It was a book for an A-list actress on a hit TV show and—

BLVR: Can you tell me who it is?

HL: No! But she made the unusual request of the three candidates to write a sample chapter in her voice, over that weekend, without having met her. I turned to my husband and said, “These other two ghostwriters who have both ghostwritten New York Times bestselling books probably have other plans for the weekend…”

BLVR: And maybe they won’t be able to make the deadline.

HL: Exactly. Or, maybe they don’t want to work all weekend. So by sheer man hours I’m going to clinch this one. I spent all weekend on it, and I got that job. Then I had my first ghostwriting credit. No one grows up thinking they want to be a ghostwriter. No one plans on that job. But what I discovered over the course of that job—and the subsequent books—was that this was actually a perfect writing gig for me… It had all the elements that I love and none of the elements that I don’t really want to do.

BLVR: What are those elements?

HL: First off, it’s collaborative. You’re not sitting by yourself trying to have brilliant ideas. Secondly, I really love memoir. I’d already written two very personal books. So I was done talking about myself. But I still really loved the intimacy and self-revelation of that form. Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do—and getting to take on that life temporarily—is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

BLVR: Because part of the appeal of writing, in a way, it the fact that you put an artifact in the world that, in a way, inoculates you against your inevitable and eventual death.  

HL: You create a legacy.

BLVR: And when you’re writing someone else’s story you are subsuming your own voice in favor of theirs. But that voice also might not have the same value system as you. How do you reconcile that potential gap?  

HL: I have a particular role: to represent the person I’m writing for and to create a voice for that person. But the other thing that I bring to it is empathy. There are certain jobs I don’t take because I feel no connection to the person. But if somebody is open with me, and honest about their motivations, and has some level of self- awareness, then I’m going to understand them. The same way you’d feel if you sat down with a criminal and they told you their life story. You would probably understand the crime and forgive it. None of my clients are criminals, but to a much lighter degree that’s what goes on. I hear the story, and I hear it with the level of detail that breeds empathy.

BLVR: Is it escapist at all?

HL: Well, it’s a little bit of being a therapist and a lot of being organized. I’m handed a bunch of existing data. My job is to put that in the best narrative form. That is a puzzle I love to solve.

BLVR: You talk about creating a voice for your clients. In the case of actors, for example, whose job it is to rid themselves of their selves and take on the mantle of whoever they’re playing, is the job of “creating a voice” more difficult?

HL: I’m not creating a voice out of thin air. Everyone has a public voice, and a lot of actors have developed sound-bitey public voices. But that doesn’t translate to paper. That’s why they can’t just dictate a book, even if they’re good storytellers. So the question is: how can I manifest the quirks and thoughts and uniqueness of their own personalities? In part, I do that by typing when they talk. I don’t record. That is a way for my brain to take in the voice. My goal is that when my client reads a book they feel like, "Hilary did something but mostly she just made it happen quickly.” I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that’s definitely not true for anything that I write.

BLVR: Can you give a specific example of someone whose brain you couldn’t get into?

HL: I went to an interview once and it was at a hotel across the street from where the person lived and she was three hours late. I pretty much knew then that I wasn’t going to take that job.

BLVR: Has anyone ever been unhappy with the way you’ve characterized their lives?

HL: Ha. Not that I’ve been told. But I’ve had people have second thoughts about significant chunks of content that they just decided they weren’t ready to share.

BLVR: Do you have a flop that you feel in your heart is a flop?

HL: I wouldn’t call it a flop. There’s one book that I felt didn’t hit its potential. Two maybe.

BLVR: What were the circumstances? Were they not being revealing enough?

HL: I had a person who decided to protect others. That limited the content but I respected that. And I had a person who had amazing stories but was not a natural storyteller.

BLVR: A function of your job must be to very quickly foster intimacy with these people. That must feel like a real friendship. How do you leave that after you’ve finished the book?

HL: It’s a one-sided relationship, and even though we share things together, the basic structure is that they tell me things and I listen. It’s hard to make a transition to an ordinary friendship after that. But if someone’s going to share their secrets with me then I’m loyal to them for life.

BLVR: Do you ever get the midnight phone call from your clients?

HL: No.

BLVR: Has anyone ever fallen in love with you?

HL: No, at least not in the context of ghostwriting!

BLVR: Have you ever fallen in love a little bit with anyone? Actors are great at seducing people!

HL:  I’ve taken on some of the emotional weight of the stories I’ve worked on. I was writing about a very difficult time in the life of one of my clients and I burst into tears at a small, crowded café. My husband, who was on his computer across from me, was completely freaked out because I’m not a crier at all in my own life. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter.

II. I’M NOT SURE THAT’S THE VACATION I WANT

BLVR: This is a good place to transition into talking about your book, because what struck me about it was how quickly you were able to conjure compassion within me for the other-worldly, charade-seeming affair that was the marriage between Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. Because Lizzie Pepper and Robert Mars are based on Katie and Tom, right?

HL: Lizzie Pepper is pure fiction! The character is pulled from tabloids. But I think we all look at these celebrity marriages and invest in them. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner just broke up and people were sad. We exploit celebrities by caring about shallow things like whether they’ve gotten a facelift. And we violate their children constantly. But we also love them in a way. So I think one of the big things that’s come out of ghostwriting for me is real compassion for the complexity of fame.

My main character, Lizzie, is very young when she starts to act. So she never really knows what she’s signing on for. But she admits that as a hungry actress she would have done it anyway. These people obviously don’t get any sympathy from the public because they’re rich. But it’s much better to be a rich financier than it is to be a celebrity, because financiers keep their privacy. The fictional Lizzie is more willing to risk the public’s ire in being honest about her situation. In the book we see her celebrity through the lens of, “I know I’m really lucky to get to vacation on a private island, but I’m not sure that’s the vacation I want.”

BLVR: You can’t go home for Christmas anymore.

HL: Or it won’t be the same.  I was trying to write about that in a way that people wouldn’t mock. And also to do it without exploiting any actual celebrity’s privacy.

BLVR: One of the biggest takeaways from the book was that privacy is the hottest commodity in the world.

HL: And you pay for it.

BLVR: And it’s so, so expensive.

HL: You wonder how all these celebrities go broke, and maybe it’s because they spend all their money on privacy. “I need a private plane…” “I need a compound…” “I need a driver…” “I need to rent out a restaurant instead of going in to eat with everyone…” And it’s like, boo hoo, poor them. But it is a thing money cannot buy.

BLVR: Is that a gripe you’ve heard from your clients?

HL: No, they are grateful. By the time I get them they’ve come to terms with it. But it’s different when it comes to their kids. I think the intrusion on their kids’ lives is a surprise. It’s a surprise for Lizzie too, in the book. That nobody gives a shit.

BLVR: You see it—the paparazzi are totally happy to put a huge lens into a three-year-old’s face.

HL: I saw a paparazzo yesterday and I looked at him and was like, “I do not see that guy caring.” But he needs this job, and he needs his money, and he’s going to get it. I understand his side of it, but last year they made a law against harassing kids by photographing them and I’m all for it.

BLVR: The book felt like an articulation of a Faustian bargain. Because it’s so exhilarating and escapist and fun for Lizzie in the front half of the story, and then she has twin baby boys and suddenly she is protecting them not only from what is an incredibly cruel world, but from becoming actual currency in that cruel world. And that is so alienating. More alienating than early motherhood already can be.  

HL: Yes, you could look at it that way. Ambition makes her blind to the bargain she is making. Then it comes time to pay up, and she starts to understand what she has sacrified. Imagine not being able to trust anyone. And for Lizzie, there’s a cult involved. But I think that just amps up this feeling of there always being a lens.

BLVR: Are you allowed to talk about how the cult in your book, One Cell, is based on Scientology?

HL: It’s a made up cult. It’s a mind-body cult based in California. It’s small and it’s new.

BLVR: [Laughing]

HL: The cult is its own character in the book. I had two things I specifically needed it to do. I needed it to be something that we could believe my character, who is not an idiot, would go for. It had to be intriguing to her. She had to be caught up in it enough to roll with it for a while. It had to offer her things she might want.

BLVR: Like privacy for example.

HL: Yeah. An escape, an opportunity to develop more as an actress, and the promise of bringing her closer to her husband. And bonus it’s supposed to make you thinner! Which is important for every Hollywood movement. I also wanted it to shine a light on the marriage. Even though this is a marriage between celebrities and it’s very Hollywood, ultimately I wanted it to be a book about what goes wrong in a Cinderella story. In part it’s about rushing into marriage. Prince Charming comes along and he does everything right. So you say yes and then you ask questions later. That’s obviously inflated but what it represents is the initial romance and dawning practicality of marriage, and how kids change things. I wanted her issues and the way she thought through them to be normal. Her first thought when things go wrong is, “I have to stay for the kids.” A common and admirable stance. And then for every person there’s a point of no return. That’s supposed to feel recognizable to the reader.

BLVR: How much research did you do?

HL: That was the fun stuff. I had to research, “If I were going to get married and I were a celebrity, where might I go and what would it be like and what’s a really cool spot in Ireland?“

BLVR: What was the most opulent detail about celebrity life that you discovered in your research?  

HL: My favorite “lives of the rich and famous” detail was that you can rent these movie trailers that have LCD screens instead of actual windows. The screens project the image that the camera is seeing right outside your trailer. So it’s this contrived sense of what’s happening outside – a fabrication of what the view is. Yet nobody can look in.

BLVR: I know that One Cell is not Scientology but do you fear backlash from Scientologists?

HL: The book is fiction, so no.

BLVR: How many lawyers do you think combed through your final manuscript?

HL: [Laughing] It just went through the regular publishing process.

BLVR: What’s your greatest hope for the book?

HL: Other than that people will be entertained… Well, I think that the celebrity memoir as a genre is looked upon as a lesser form. One of my missions as a ghostwriter has been to elevate that form. Maybe that sounds pretentious! But I don’t think you can take a whole genre of very popular books and say, "This is all trash!” When we read a memoir that isn’t by a celebrity, we feel like we’re about to go on a journey and we don’t know where the journey will lead. But when we read a memoir by a celebrity we feel like we already know the journey and we just want to travel it. Part of my goal is to say, “You might not know what journey you’re taking.”

BLVR: What’s your greatest fear about this book coming out? I mean other than it doing poorly and being in the bulk bin under the counter for $1.99.

HL: I’m so used to being separate from the publication process. I turn in the book to the editor and then I’m done. And then it gets published and it does what it does and I’m on to the next project. I’m much more invested in the publication of  this book. I’m working hard to get my friends to talk about it and to make sure it falls into people’s hands. But the stakes are different for me than they are for a first time novelist because I’ve been writing books without ego for a very long time. I feel like it will get what it deserves. Or won’t get what it doesn’t deserve. Either I’m a little alienated from my own book, or protected from the agonies of first time publication.

BLVR: Based on recent rumors do you think Tom Cruise will leave Scientology?

HL: Oh God.

Kathryn Borel Jr. is the Interviews Editor at the Believer.

Subjects That Interest Most People

An Interview with Nell Zink

Nell Zink is irrefutably smart and sharp. Her first book, The Wallcreeper, became prominently known through the praise and guidance of acclaimed fictioneer Jonathan Franzen. Soon Zink’s debut was receiving accolades from The New York Times Book Review and appearing on numerous best-of lists for the year.

Mislaid, her second novel, was published by Ecco this May. In it Zink tackles race, sexuality, and class issues through the story of Peggy Vailliancourt, a woman who, upon leaving her husband, starts a new life for herself and her (very white) daughter by stealing the identities of a black woman and child in Virginia during the 1960’s. Peggy turns out to be a lesbian; her husband turns out to be gay. Everyone turns out to be miserable. Zink’s characters are moving parts in a satire that—to paraphrase Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker—makes the term irreverent sound tame and innocuous.

What pulled me towards Mislaid was the unusual narrative of her characters’ respective sexual orientations, particularly during this not-so-distant past. I spoke with Zink about this and other issues in February at a friend’s home in East Williamsburg, where we sat on the floor instead of in chairs. 

—Amy Feltman

I. THE ENDLESS MASS OF BOOKS

THE BELIEVER: Where did the inspiration for this project originate?

NELL ZINK: Mislaid was very directly the result of having another novel rejected by Akashic Books. Johnny Temple, who runs it, didn’t like my first novel, Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Schats. And it was very clear to me that he wasn’t going to like it, and it wasn’t my idea to submit to him, so after I looked at what Akashic did, I noticed what seemed to be rather exploitative gender and racial material on their list. And I thought, well, I’m going to show that guy. I originally had the idea almost out of spite; to prove that I could push people’s race and gender buttons in a way they weren’t used to having them pushed. 

And I wanted to create a manuscript that would be easier to sell. I wasn’t trying to be a commercial sell out. I was just trying to make life a little easier for the people who were trying to help me. You know, people wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren’t getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I’ll do something that’s just a tad more normal.

BLVR: When you say your early work was “so weird,” what does that mean? What sort of themes were you grappling with, then?

NZ: Well, my first novel, Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Schats, is ostensibly about a Masad agent who’s received orders to find and kill the family that might give rise to the messiah. He has to murder the last surviving members of the House of David. It’s sort of an inside joke for my very secular, very leftist Israeli friends whose parents, most of whom emigrated a long time ago to Israel, were socialists. And, as we all know, in the Socialist Revolution in Russia, they did away with the royal family. So I thought, well, to have an effective socialist revolution in Israel, you have to get rid of the royal family. Okay, this is not really the sort of mass market appeal material you can sell to everybody and their brother.

And at the same time this book was also very postmodern. I was pretending to translate a book in Hebrew that I couldn’t understand because my Hebrew wasn’t that good. So I would read little bits of it, and based on what I understood, embroider this story. This is a book that some people like a lot, and wanted to get some small press to publish, but it didn’t work out that way. And then, I thought, well you know, I can write. Why don’t I just write something that directly addresses subjects that interest more people?

BLVR: How have your experiences of a highly racialized America impacted this book? Did you find yourself drawing on personal observations, or did you conduct any sort of research in writing about growing up as a light-skinned Black woman in order to engage with Karen’s storyline? 

NZ: I drew exclusively on personal observations. I didn’t want to write a book that someone else could write. Why bother writing a book that someone else could write—just a historical novel that you research in libraries and on the Internet? Okay, fine, people want to do that, no problem. But I see that as a waste of my time. If I’m going to add a book to the endless mass of books out there, then it should be a book that only I can write. 

So I did no research at all. I sat down with a notebook and made notes about what I remembered, starting around 1970 when I was eight years old and we moved from Southern California to Tidewater, Virginia, and I began having experiences of a racialized America. Because where I was living in Southern California, there were basically two races: us and Mexicans, and Mexicans were definitely much better than we were. They had the pretty dresses and the good food and the piñatas; the fun folk art in their houses. 

And then when I got to rural Virginia, where the schools had just been integrated, it was like two opposing camps that didn’t have a common language. Not all of the black kids, but some of them, I couldn’t understand a word they said. The bus that I took to get home from school was a heavily white bus, because we lived near the subdivision that was all white. But the bus I took to this old plantation where I took riding lessons, which went deep into the woods, had a bus driver who basically looked white, but she was black. One day she pulled the bus over because some kids had been making fun of her, and she made this long speech, just yelling and crying about how she wasn’t half-white, she was a black woman. Now, looking back on it, I think: why was she so adamant about not being half-white? Four years before that, it would’ve been illegal for her parents to be married, if she was half-white. Using the experience that I have now, as an adult, I tried to look back at my memories of my childhood and extrapolate the world they must have taken place in. Because it was so complex and hard to explain. There was this strict segregation, and at the same time, black culture was so central.

BLVR: Can you tell me about the challenges you faced presenting white and heteronormative privilege in this book?

NZ: I’d say it’s never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way. The white hegemony was so strong. All those who didn’t conform, even if they were white, were going to experience themselves as outsiders. That’s another thing that I remember from my childhood. In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow. But if you were constitutionally bent on being a lesbian or something, you were forced into an outsider perspective and would just end up being a much more interesting person than someone who was able to play the role of a good ol’ boy asshole, or play the role of a sweet feminine girl doing the right thing all the time. You know, with nail polish and Greek letters on the butt of your sweatsuit, or whatever.

BLVR: How did you balance political vs. character-driven concerns in the narrative? There are places in the text where I can feel you lean forward and give a direct perspective on an issue. Like that conversation where it’s asserted that gay men are carrying the torches of misogyny.

NZ: Oh, where they’re running the literary magazine, and the Maoist comes out and says that gay men are ruining feminism. And then Lee says, well, women are getting a free ride on the backs of black men.

BLVR: And then he uses the word faggot, and everyone’s like, “Oh, God.”

NZ: Well… I really shouldn’t say this in an interview. However, when he says faggot, he just as easily could’ve said the n-word. But he doesn’t, because I’m not a complete idiot! I’m not going to say the n-word in my book in a place where it could be ascribed to me, because these days everything is autobiography, and if a character says X, it looks like I said it and I’ll be quoted. I figured that out shortly after selling a draft in which I had failed to do that. I had left in sound bites that could reflect poorly on me. In the mouths of characters who were clearly complete racist assholes, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone. I had editors saying things like, “Well, this book is interesting but I don’t like the queasy-making racial stuff,” and I was like, oh fuck. At the same time, I can say faggot!

BLVR: What I wanted to get into with this question was, do you think of the book as a journey of these characters? Or when you were formulating the novel, was it more a political text about representing different points of view?

NZ: I didn’t do that deliberately, because I just counted on the fact that I’m a political person. The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics. Those are the people I’d like to address, because they’re my favorite people. So I make it as political as I can, but I don’t feel the need to make that explicit. Some of the stuff that’s very directly political in the book was put in later at the request of editors, who just kept saying to me: I can tell there are things in this book that you left on the cutting room floor; there’s too much that’s oblique and tangential and people have to read between the lines and you can’t always count on them to do that in the way that you wanted, so maybe you can give them a couple of hints.

BLVR: What sorts of things did you have to add?

NZ: Well, one thing I’m glad I added, for example, was my pointing out that school vouchers were invented by Harry Byrd—under the unbelievably charming rubric “massive resistance to integration.” That’s what they called school vouchers! It just makes me laugh. 

II. SIMPLE MACHINES

BLVR: Can you speak a bit about how you approach sexuality and sexual orientation within the book?

NZ: I wanted to go back in time from the current American belief that everything is genetic. I’ve been living in Germany, where they hesitate to say anything is genetic at all. You talk to a German scientist, he’s not going to say, “Autism is genetic.” He’ll say, “Autism most likely comes about from a grave insult to the embryo during the tenth to twelfth day of pregnancy.” Well, no one’s going to come out and tell American women that. You know, “You got drunk so your kid’s autistic.” And I’m not saying it’s true—I have no idea what the truth is in a case like that. I just see the difference between believing everything is genetic and believing that environment rules the roost, the way they do in Germany as a result of their past.

I have known so many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults. I think that’s a very taboo topic, especially as women. But I can name three women who I know personally who were seduced by their gym teachers. It sounds like a totally absurd cliché, but…

BLVR: Three different gym teachers?

NZ: Yeah. You know, people don’t think of predatory lesbians seducing twelve-year-old girls. It’s not really a huge topic in the media, and I don’t think it deserves to be, either.

At the same time, I thought—it’s interesting for purposes of fiction to play with the idea that people could be pushed onto a certain path of sexuality by their environment. In the first draft, I had Lee actually remarking on it. Because it was something, growing up in the South, that I knew. I knew a gay guy who was extraordinarily good looking, and at college and looking to switch back and be heterosexual. Because, he had simply gotten taken up, at the age of eleven or twelve, by this gay circle, and passed around because he was so gorgeous. You know, like, friends of his father. Like golf partners. It sounds, like, completely nutso. These are just my memories. And, you know, I can’t verify them… I’m not going to track this guy down, find out his name, interview him and say, “Well, was it that you were genetically gay, and those guys could just smell it? And you’re still gay now? Or were you, in fact, a victim of child abuse?”

I don’t know. But when you’re writing fiction, you can think about these things. And the age of sexual initiation in the rural South is sometimes really not what you would wish it would be. While at the same time, of course, most people were Born-Again Christians and not having sex until they were twenty-seven. 

BLVR: I’m just thinking of Peggy’s union with her new female lover as so empowering, so I’m… trying to reconcile that with what you were saying about the history of abuse.

NZ: She’s come to think of herself as a lesbian, she’s a very romantic person; she wants to be loved, and she finds somebody who completely goes for her. And who is definitely attractive. I mean, when I was young there was absolutely no acceptance of the existence of bisexuality. There was a one-drop rule for sperm. If a guy slept with two-hundred women and one man, he was gay. That was among white people. Among black people, it was a little different. If he was always on top, he was straight. Because people only imagined sexual intercourse; it never crossed anybody’s mind that gay men would do anything else. And the same thing with women. Bisexuality is accepted now as a sexuality, but when I was young it was very few people who would claim to be that. Most people I knew would say, “Oh, I’m not one way or the other. I’m just sexual, and sometimes I like somebody in that way and they could be anything—man, woman, whatever.” 

BLVR: So—do you think that’s bullshit? That you can be drawn to a person apart from their gender?

NZ: I think on a certain level it’s bullshit, because people are not like, sea slugs. If I’m talking to an ugly old man and feel myself becoming sexually aroused… you know, do I ask him on a date? No! Because you also have a social sense of yourself, there are so many other factors than just sexuality, per se. People will be turned on by the most absurd things. They’ll see some sort of porno image of a woman who appears to be twelve years old doing splits in a Catholic girl plaid skirt, and feel a rush of desire—well, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It just means you’re a primate and your eyes are where you get messages that it’s time to feel sexy now. And so, I think there are just so many factors affecting people’s actual behavior. Human beings are just way more complex than they’d like to be.

BLVR: I can agree with that.

NZ: They like to be simple machines. And they’ll set up fantasy scenarios where they’re simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret.

I knew a lesbian woman who was from deep in Appalachia. Way out in the tip of Virginia. She had joined the army, thinking she was a man. Basically thinking she was trans, but not being able to figure out what she really was. But thinking, okay, I’m into girls, I’m definitely not female, something’s got to give. Then when she got to the army she found out there was such a thing as a lesbian. Like, how are you going to find that out? There was no Ellen DeGeneres on T.V., there was no L Word. Nobody told you.

BLVR Well, but she still was a lesbian, even if she didn’t have the vocabulary to identify as such. Somebody exposed her to an idea, and it was like—this is what you are.

NZ: Right. Right, but at the same time—I had a friend who had been seduced when she was very young, she was extremely cute, and she was living as a lesbian in her 20s, and said, “You know, I often think that I like men better. But this birth control thing, I don’t know, it sounds like such a pain in the ass to try it.” (Laughs) I mean, how do you separate… it seems like a different world from the way people think today. It’s like you can get your embryo tested to see what sexuality it’s going to have. People are like, watching a two-year-old to see how it’s “expressing.” How’s it presenting?

BLVR: Do you mean that we’re obsessed with it in some way?

NZ: No, it’s just different. It’s cute. The main thing—what’s important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that’s progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.

BLVR: I do feel like it is genetic, so I’m sort of coming up against you here because—there are a lot of gay people all the way back in my family, so it’s like… never occurred to me that’s purely social. It’s about Uncle Arthur and his “wife,” Dale, is how I thought of it as a child. Of course that’s his wife. That made as much sense to me as anything else. But I do… see what you mean about the shift in the way that our society presents it.

NZ: Well, that’s—it is a shift. What’s interesting to me is the shift. I mean, obviously there’s been tremendous progress on both the racial and the sexual fronts since I was a kid. But you can—although in some ways the racial stuff has gone backwards. The incarceration nation issue is beyond anything… and back then, it wasn’t quite as bad. The sentences were shorter. A lot of the black guys I knew had been in jail, but not for like, eighteen years for stealing a loaf of bread. That’s basically the situation now.

III. COLLECT MY FREE CDS

BLVR: Who would you say has influenced your voice as a writer?

NZ: One thing that influenced me tremendously back when I first started writing longer work was an essay I read by Virginia Woolf. She was writing about the contrast between stuff written by men and women, and she talked about DeQuincy, who wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. She was saying that DeQuincy was the kind of writer who could never be a woman, because DeQuincy thinks everything he has to say is worth saying. If DeQuincy wants to digress, he just does it. If DeQuincy wants to interrupt a story about one thing with a story about another thing, and then tell you about the time he ran into a poet, and then skip back to eating opium, he’ll just ramble on. And this is a result of his white male privilege. He was, more or less, an aristocratic, spoiled little dude. So Woolf said, there’s a huge contrast in the control and mastery and craft you expect from women authors and DeQuincy’s casual acceptance of himself. So I thought: okay! If I want to rise in the world, and not be a girl, maybe I’ll write more like DeQuincy. 

BLVR: I’ve never conceptualized you as someone full of digressions like DeQuincy.

NZ: That’s probably why you can’t say it’s a direct influence. But the willingness… maybe because, when I’m writing, the whole thing is a digression. You know, I could be sitting, drinking hot chocolate somewhere, but I’m writing a novel. Maybe it’s more digressive for me than it is for the reader. I certainly hope so. And of course, when I’m writing, I am always trying to be entertaining. But I find DeQuincy entertaining; I don’t think he’s a bore. And God knows, maybe that same essay by Virginia Woolf has been responsible for some of the worst writing done by men, who can just be endlessly in love with themselves sometimes, when they write. Women too, but I think of it more as a boy thing. That they’ll just write two thousand pages and it’s like, what was that? Whereas DeQuincy was telling a funny anecdote, interrupted by another funny anecdote, which is sort of the effect I’m going for. I’m enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art—I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

BLVR: I have sort of a splotchy idea of how you came to writing, but I’d love to hear about it in more detail.

NZ: I had been writing since I was a kid. I had stories and novels I’d worked on and never showed anyone. In retrospect, it seems almost hard to believe, but it’s the truth. The same way, in retrospect, now that I have these readers and selling books, I think—a year, two years ago, I was writing for one person and that seemed like plenty. Before that, I did this fanzine; I did that for zero people, and that also seemed enough. I didn’t think I was good enough to publish anything. But what brought me to doing a post-punk fanzine about animals was just that I had always loved writing about animals, because I think people have an aversion to human beings. They’re not willing to anthropomorphize them. The first thing, when you read about a human being, generally, if he’s not just like you or made to be so vague that you can identify with him, you’re going to feel a distance to him.

BLVR: Like “The Everyman” or nothing?

NZ: This is one of the problems faced by minority or women writers. If you say, this character’s a woman of color from another country, you might as well have said, “And by the way, don’t identify with her. She’s meant to be Not-You.” Whereas if the character is a kangaroo that happens to live in Philly and work in a bank, he can be totally unlike you and still an object of identification because it’s just ridiculous. And I like taking advantage of that. So I loved writing stories about animals, and my husband at the time was really heavy into indie rock, and, looking at the indie rock fanzines that were out there, they had very focused topics, like… there was one just completely focused on cars. So I just thought I’d do one with animals. I would write about animals, and other people I knew—guys, mostly—would write about the CDs, and then I would just type it up at work, where I worked as a secretary, and copy it on the weekends for free, and send it out. Collect my free CDs.

BLVR: How long after that did you become acquainted with Jonathan Franzen and start thinking about publishing books for a wider audience?

NZ: Well, the ‘zine was when I was living in Hoboken and then Jersey City and then Philly, in the early 90s. Maybe ’92-’96. And then I moved to Israel for awhile, in 2000 I moved to Germany. Southwestern Germany, not Berlin. I do not live in Berlin.

BLVR: Is that a point of contention?

NZ: Well, people keep saying or assuming I live in Berlin. But when I moved to Germany it was to Tübingen. I continued writing to this friend of mine in Israel, Avner Schats, with no plans to write publically, because I just didn’t see a way to do it. 

In any case, I was in Germany and still writing for this Israeli guy, and not really considering doing anything else, when, because of some guerilla PR I was doing in the enviromental area, for this ornithologist who’s now dead, Martin Schneider-Jacoby, I ended up getting in touch with Franzen.

I had this little project, just for fun. It was my hobby: I was going to make Martin Schneider-Jacoby an international star. And to do that, I needed the help of Jonathan Franzen to get him into The New Yorker. That was my plan.

BLVR: And it worked?

NZ: No, I got him into National Geographic. The Franzen article appeared in National Geographic. However, Franzen’s article—no one ever quotes me on this! If The Believer publishes this I’ll be so happy! Taulant Binot, the former secretary of the Environment of Albania, told me that it was Franzen’s article that led to the hunting ban in Albania. Not that the hunting ban is observed by every hunter, but I would say a 2-year hunting moratorium as a result of a magazine article is more than most journalists can claim. A very happy occasion.

BLVR: I wanted to ask you about something you said in the Paris Review interview with Matthew Jakubowski: “Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.” I was wondering if you could talk a little about that concept, the purity of true art. How do you think of The Wallcreeper and Mislaid within that framework?

NZ: I think there was a lot of heavy irony in what I wrote to Jakubowski that maybe doesn’t get picked up on by everybody. Because what I did was, I came out of college thinking I needed reeducation through labor. I didn’t get any kind of vocational training; I had no qualifications to do any job. I couldn’t even really type. I was on my way to get a job as a cocktail waitress, and ended up running into a bricklayer and getting a job as a bricklayer’s laborer and trying to really hard to keep my mind free of outside influences. I didn’t get any job skills that would allow me to work less than full-time. And what you need if you’re a writer is some really lucrative thing that you can do freelance, that gets a really high hourly rate. Which is why my life got so much better when I moved to Germany, where I could work as a translator. But in America, as an employee, I was just absolutely bottom-feeding. I’d either be working full time to have health insurance with no time at all to do any writing, so I’d be doing the indie rock fanzine for which I’d write one very short short story every three months, or I was unemployed and just running through my savings a mile a minute, because that’s America. You spend so much money just paying for your health insurance and so on. So—I mean, in that sense, I think that answer in The Paris Review gets misunderstood.

As far as there being no market for “true art,” I think that’s also true in the sense that the market isn’t what sanctifies something as art. Literary fiction is not a lucrative genre, and artistically valuable fiction is a small subset of literary fiction and it’s just a loss leder. You know? For most of its practitioners, they work hard so they can do this in their spare time, and the benefits they get are purely social, most of the time. They don’t even get a fellowship. Maybe some of them have jobs teaching. Mostly what they get is the regard of their peers.

BLVR: How do you feel that working as a translator impacts your relationship to language?

NZ: I don’t work as a translator anymore because the impact was just hellish. I know for other people this is different and there are many happy translators out there, but the risk that I was running while living in a foreign country… I really need to keep my English English. Keep it American. Those languages take up different lobes in your brain, and when you first learn a language fluently, if you learn it through immersion in a foreign country, you find translating incredibly difficult. If you learned it in school and people say, like, “The duck. El pato,” you can translate, but if you just learned it just by being there, it’s really difficult to get these neurons to talk to each other. The synapses just aren’t there. And when you start translating, you start hooking them up—getting these two parts of your brain to talk to each other, and what then happens is that, if you spend twenty years outside of the country you just start making mistakes in English. Which I need like a hole in the head, because I really like writing in English, and it’s the best job I’ve ever had. I didn’t want to have to stop doing it. So I was really happy when I got a big advance for Mislaid and I was able to tell all my translation customers to go to hell. I almost had to because they were so in love with me. I always worked—for me it was a lot of money, but maybe I was relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things. I mean, I’d be billing people seventy Euros an hour. It’s not a bad job. But maybe it’s hard to find someone who’s German is as good as mine and who writes as well as I do in English. So I had some very loyal customers that were very disappointed when I got out of it.

Amy Feltman is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Fiction at Columbia University. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Sonder Review, Two Serious Ladies, and The Millions, and is forthcoming in Gigantic and Lilith Magazine.