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<a class='reverseLink' href='http://www.therejectionist.com/2012/03/conference-call.html'>Conference Call</a>
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<h4 class='postDate capSans'>Tuesday, March 6, 2012</h4>
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<p class="postContent">I went to Chicago last week for AWP, which is a conference of writers, and one thing I should tell you up front is that "conference of writers" is, for me, analogous to "the ninth circle of hell." I didn't go to be a writer; I went for my job--for one of my jobs; I have a lot of jobs, these days. I stayed in a fancy hotel with a lot of businessmen. The hotel elevators had mirrors in them and a little television screen that scrolled the day's headlines. On my second morning in Chicago I got in the elevator with a businessman who held the door for me and then tried very hard not to look at me, and the headlines on the tiny television screen were "Hundreds of Wolves Killed" and "Fetal Personhood Bill Passes Oklahoma Senate." It was before eight in the morning and I started to cry, for the next twenty floors, wiping at my eyes and hoping the businessman wouldn't notice. He held the door for me again at the lobby without looking at my face.</p><p class="postContent">At AWP I was trying to tell people about the personhood bill but, you know, no one wants to hear that shit at a bookfair. No one wants to hear about my body. No one believes it will actually happen, except that it is happening. It is happening now. I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you are trying to warn people about something important but your mouth won't open. That bitch just doesn't know when to shut up. Sometimes people didn't know what I was talking about; "Personhood of what?" someone said to me, and I gave up and went into the bathroom and locked myself in a stall and cried some more. The bathroom had started to smell pretty awful by the second day--there were something like eleven thousand people there, I don't think the Hilton was really prepared. I don't want to feel like this all the time. I understand it is not comfortable for other people to be around me, to be around the bitch who will not shut up. I don't want to be the person wandering around the marble lobby of the Chicago Hilton having a fucking panic attack because no one feels like home to me, because I do not ever want to talk to anyone about whether I am a writer again, because right now, <i>right fucking now</i>, every fucking right I have is being stripped away from me, is being stripped away from people I care about, and no one seems to fucking care; but here I am, that person. I tried to meet people; I did a pretty good job, for me. I lost count of the number of people who came up to me and took my hand and gazed into my eyes and said, "It's so good to see you again," and when I stared at them in terror added gently, "You remember, we met last year," and each one of them seemed so genuinely pleased that I did not have the heart to tell them I have never been to AWP in my life.</p><p class="postContent">On the second night I went to a poetry reading at a hot-dog restaurant with some people from my work. It was a fast-food sort of place. Three employees of the hot-dog restaurant stood behind the counter, watching all the white people file in and read poems about trees or dildos or whatever. Language experiments. I probably don't need to tell you that the hot-dog restaurant employees were black, but I'll tell you anyway. In situations like that I want to do something, to clearly demonstrate that I am on the side of the help--you know, climb over the counter, spray down the dish pit. Like that would somehow alter the balance of everything that is fucked-up in the world. The poetry reading went on forever and the room got hotter and hotter and I went outside and stood on the sidewalk with the people from my work. We passed around a bottle of whiskey and talked about how fucked-up it was. I guess it made us feel better about ourselves, that we had noticed the palpably obvious. I couldn't understand the purpose of poetry in that moment, couldn't understand what there was to care about. The poems were fine and some of them were even good but all I could think about was the people who worked there, leaning up against the counter, waiting for us to leave. Later I found out that one of the hot-dog restaurant employees had been there since five in the morning, that she would have to be there again, the next morning, to open. When I went back to the hotel that night I got in the elevator with a different businessman--I think it was a different one; maybe not. They all look the same. I was wearing my favorite gloves, the ones with the skeleton hands on them. Both the businessman and I were very drunk. "Jesus," said the businessman. "Those are some awful gloves."</p><p class="postContent">I had a drink one night with my friend Bojan, who lives in Phoenix--Bojan Louis, that is a name I want you to remember, because that dude is going to be a big fucking deal--and we were talking about the book bannings in Arizona and how lost we felt at AWP, surrounded by people who were going about their business as if nothing was wrong, tenured and placid. "I'm not interested in language anymore," I said, "unless it's doing the work of revolution," and it was one of those things I didn't know was true until I said it and then when I said it I knew it had been true, for me, all along. "It can still be beautiful," Bojan said, and I said, "I want it to always be beautiful." And that's it, that's what I want: I want beauty that remakes the world. When I make jokes about guillotines people get uncomfortable but you know, I'm not really joking anymore, is the thing. I know how that one ended but look around you. Look around you and tell me you don't want guillotines a little, too. Tell me you don't want language that is a shear, cutting through; tell me you don't want words that leave the streets running with blood. Bojan gave a talk the next morning at the Indigenous Writers' Caucus and the moderator, LeAnne Howe, started out by taking off her gloves and slapping them against the podium, shouting, "I'm throwing down the gauntlet!" and I thought <i>Oh my god, finally, finally we are talking about it</i>, and we did. Talked about making language into a weapon. Talked about fighting, about never giving in--you know who knows about fighting in the face of impossible odds, about never giving in in this country? The indigenous people of the Americas, that's for fucking sure. "Personhood is something the Choctaw Nation could have used in Oklahoma a long time ago," is one of the things that LeAnne Howe said. Bojan read, read about being an electrician, about the movement of currents, of power, about the banning of stories, about working ten-hour days and watching the undocumented workers laboring alongside him get deported at the end of the workday, about how fucking angry and tired he is, all of us are, and it was--I don't even have the words for what it was. That language, terrible and gorgeous and necessary, a knife cutting me open; I am thinking now of those tools that split apart your ribcage and leave bare what's inside. <i>This</i>, I thought, <i>this is fucking poetry</i>, crying openly this time, letting it go, getting ready. Our anger is how we find each other, how we make a place that is ours. You'll know me in the street by the rage I live with, by the rage I will not hide.</p>
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<a class='reverseLink' href='http://www.therejectionist.com/2012/02/special-guest-post-meg-clark-on.html'>Special Guest Post: Meg Clark on Jonathan Franzen</a>
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<h4 class='postDate capSans'>Wednesday, February 22, 2012</h4>
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<p class="postContent">I laughed when I saw it: surely this was some kind of hilarious <i>New Yorker</i> meta-joke, <a class="postLink" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/13/120213fa_fact_franzen" target="_blank">an article by Jonathan Franzen</a>, a writer with whom I struggle entirely on the basis of his privilege, about struggling to sympathize with Edith Wharton on the basis of her privilege? What delicious irony! For who could be less qualified to discuss the writing of women than a straight white male writer, purportedly worth $70 million at this point, who once expressed his distress that women, <a class="postLink" href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1131456" target="_blank">encouraged by Oprah</a>, might read and ruin his manly, manly books? Could there be any better pot-kettle-black joke than this?</p><p class="postContent">Unfortunately, it was not a joke, and Franzen was not only interested in criticizing Wharton's moneyed background, but also committed the following sentences to print:</p><p class="postContent"> <i>Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty. The fine quip of one of Wharton’s contemporary reviewers—that she wrote like a masculine Henry James—could also be applied to her social pursuits: she wanted to be with the men and to talk about the things men talked about.</i> </p><p class="postContent">I do not think I need to point out the ways in which this is beyond horrific, as others have already done so, and I know I don't need to mention how INFURIATING it is to see the <i>NEW YORKER</i> writing about A WOMAN WRITER'S LOOKS, while CRITICIZING her for wanting to BE ONE OF THE BOYS, and going on to BLAME HER for the fact that her husband SPIRALED INTO INSANITY all thanks to her SEXUAL FRIGIDITY and SUCCESS. We don't need to talk about that anymore, because I already did, to myself, for two hours after I first read the piece, as I stormed around my apartment in a blind rage slamming doors and flinging dishes about, muttering under my breath and periodically sprinting back to my computer to send Le R another unhinged OH MY GOD I AM SO MAD CAN WE HAVE WHISKEY e-mail. No. We don't need to talk about that anymore, do we?</p><p class="postContent">So once you've stopped banging your head against the desk, let's note that wealth and privilege interfering with a writer's sympathies is not a critique I believe women are (or ought to be) immune to; such a critique is at the root of my vague discomfort with Jennifer Egan and Elizabeth Gilbert. But Franzen's critique of Wharton's privilege could benefit from the context of another little book written by another lady, nine years after <i>The Age of Innocence</i>. I am speaking, of course, of Virginia Woolf's <i>A Room of One's Own</i>, and in the half dozen or so times I have read it, I am reasonably sure that it sets out to prove that in order to write, one must have a.) privacy and b.) wealth, two things that all but the most privileged of women were (are?) consistently denied. J-Franz does our girl Edith a great disservice by contextualizing her work within the frame of her life, but not within the frame of what that life meant, what it meant to be a rich and ugly woman with a thorny personality in her time period. We can sneer at Wharton's leisurely existence and overbearing ambition, but it's essentially what enabled her to write at all. For Franzen to blatantly disregard this, and then to drag her looks into the argument too, is depressing, to say the least.</p><p class="postContent">Beyond that odious excerpt currently available online, Franzen eventually abandons his obsession with Wharton's looks, finances, and sex life and talks about some of her books. He focuses on Wharton's proclivity for complicated, nasty heroines that we still care for, suggesting that we find them sympathetic because we are able to align our desires (to be prettier, to have more money?) with theirs. He seems genuinely amazed that the manipulative, scheming, shallow women who populate Wharton's novels elicit sympathy at all, suggesting that his idea of ladies is perhaps slightly less nuanced than hers, but whatever. His list of similar antiheroes that he's cared about, from Atticus Finch to Raskolnikov, includes but one woman--Becky Sharp in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, who was, incidentally, written by a man. Unsurprisingly, as I have talked about <a class="postLink" href="http://morningmidnight.com/post/16531198621/girl-antiheroes-plz" target="_blank">this antihero lady thing before</a>, I was less than pleased.</p><p class="postContent">Franzen's conclusion--"As if aware of what an unlikeable figure she herself cut, she placed unlikable women in the foreground of these novels and then deployed the storyteller's most potent weapon, the contagiousness of fictional desire, to create sympathy for them"--is not even a statement I can completely disagree with. But in the context of his previous comments about her ugliness, her wealth, her persnickety and selfish nature, her frigidity ("heinous prude bitch who doesn't even need me financially") I found no consolation. I didn't feel any less angry than I did two paragraphs into the article, despite his ever-so-gracious concessions to her skill. I felt angrier.</p><p class="postContent">To be honest, I felt hysterical: that Victorian word for the tantrums of unstable estrogen-addled women, but that I know actually describes a rage forcibly contained, the hot burn of the involuntary tears, the snap in your composure when you are told for the millionth time that what you feel or think or say or do does not matter. I thought that complex, nuanced, funny, difficult, despicably lovable characters were the emblem of a good writer, not evidence of the insecure woman thieving our sympathies through sneaky writer-succubus tricks. And yet one hundred and fifty years after Edith Wharton wrote a number of canonical, excellent books, some rich white straight dude gets paid--what does the <i>New Yorker</i> pay for that kind of piece, like ten grand?--gets paid like ten grand to come to the riveting, breathtaking conclusion that she might be human, and maybe even A Writer, like him?</p><p class="postContent">As a woman with writerly delusions, I took it personally. It validated so many secret worries, the worries above and beyond "is my writing any good." Is anyone gonna care? Should I just keep trying to figure out what I want to do, even if nobody will ever pay me? Am I being a bitch for writing about this? Does this matter?Am I pretty enough for people to like me, or too pretty to be taken seriously? If I ever create anything noteworthy, will people spend the next century and a half critiquing my looks and my sex life, pelting me with insults for trying too hard to be one of the boys? If one of the most famous female novelists of our time is still critiqued for her looks and sex life, what the hell can I expect? And Wharton was <i>straight</i>! I'm <i>not</i>! It's entirely hopeless! Why even bother?</p><p class="postContent">Which, if anything, is the only thing to take away from this debacle. That 150 years after the fact, Edith Wharton's work is still fighting the same fight I am, every day, and that I will for the rest of my life, and that every last woman I love and admire will as well, because to do otherwise feels like death. To be real and to be whole, to create and learn and celebrate and screw up and to be taken seriously with the boys, as a real human, to slam my head against every wall until it gives and to fight tooth and nail with every ounce of my skinny little girl body, whether it takes another century or not, for what I know I deserve and know I can do. To keep on, despite and in deliberate spite of what is said. To not give up.</p><p class="postContent"> <i> <a class="postLink" href="http://morningmidnight.com/" target="_blank">Meg Clark</a> is my friend and a writer and really fucking smart.</i> </p>
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<h4 class='postDate capSans'>Thursday, February 16, 2012</h4>
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<p class="postContent">Back in December I dragged le R to the main branch of the New York Public Library to see "a conversation" between Wells Tower and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Literary events such as these typically do not set me on fire, but Wells Tower and I go way back, to when I was fifteen and he was the guitarist for a punk rock band I absolutely fucking lionized. More recently I have become an avid fan of his non-fiction essays, a number of which revolve around his deeply contentious, intermittently violent relationship with his older brother. ("At least a decade had passed since we'd really laid hands on one another," Wells writes in one essay, "but at that instant an old madness got hold of me. I felt myself spirited back to a time when I knew no greater longing than to punch my brother squarely in the face." This is the sort of stuff I can really get behind.) His fiction is pretty killer also.</p><p class="postContent">The audience at this event was not only disproportionately white and male, but also myopic, based on the number of black-framed glasses I could observe from my seat. I wondered how many of these dudes were named Jonathan, and how many were currently enrolled in Columbia’s MFA program. When the featured writers began their discussion about the art of the essay, I tried to reconcile Wells' slightly awkward, sweater-over-button-down demeanor with the raging punk I’d listened to in my youth ("If everybody's so creative, how come we all look the same?" he sang once). And while Wells and JJS had a conversation that night that was insightful and funny and I'm glad I was there etcetera, when they discussed things like their influences and other writers, not a single lady's name came up, or a single person of color. Afterwards le R asked me if it's possible Wells has read a book by a lady since the end of his formal education and after thinking for a minute I said, "<i>Goon Squad</i>. But only after it won the Pulitzer."</p><p class="postContent">A couple of days later, I went to see two of my favorite bands, Titus Andronicus and the Hold Steady, perform in some Williamsburg warehouse as part of a holiday flea market (or something), the kind of place where people will gladly pay $35 for a t-shirt silkscreened with an iconic Brooklyn image (Kentile Floors, anyone?), $350 for a pink typewriter, or $7 for a ten-ounce cup of flat Brooklyn lager. The show took place in a cavernous back room, the acoustics of which were not designed with the enjoyment of live music in mind, but it did give the audience plenty of room to dance.</p><p class="postContent">When you live in New York City and your two great loves are books and punk rock, it's inevitable that you will find yourself surrounded by white dudes with glasses whilst indulging these passions. I've seen the Hold Steady about twenty times in the last three years, and the scene is usually the same--me, my friend Gina, and a sea of guys. These are the only nights the line for the men's room snakes around the bar at the Music Hall of Williamsburg while the ladies have their choice of stalls. And while you might not think that I would feel more at home in a mosh pit filled with eighteen-year-old boys from New Jersey than I would surrounded by other writers, the truth is that's where I’m happiest, because there is a camaraderie that happens there that I've never, ever felt at a reading. I've fought, made out with, tripped over, helped up, high-fived and embraced the people I've encountered in the pit; I've grabbed the shoulders of a stranger and sang the bridge of "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" into his face and had the same thing done to me; I've walked out of shows on shaky legs, covered in other people's sweat, thinking <i>That, that is what I want my book to feel like</i>; rarely, if ever, have I left a reading so inspired.</p><p class="postContent">Maybe it's because shows are about pure entertainment. Craig Finn, lead singer of the Hold Steady (a glasses-wearing white dude himself) starts every show by telling the crowd, "We're gonna have a good time tonight," and not once have I been disappointed. People are there to dance, to drink, to get pressed up against the stage and pump their fists and sing along; it's a catharsis I find myself needing as badly as any medication I've ever been prescribed. Unlike at many readings, the majority of the crowd is not, in fact, picturing themselves onstage instead of Craig; even I have been guilty of spacing out during literary events and imagining my own launch party or how much more interesting the panel would be if le R and I were up there in our respective resplendent outfits, perhaps having shared a little drinksy backstage before our names were called. Readings and writer's appearances are so overwhelmingly attended by other writers that the undercurrent of envy in the room is practically tangible. And watching a bunch of white dudes lining up to be the next Wells Tower is just another reminder of how little room there is in the world of literature for the ladies, the queers, the people of color--pretty much anybody who isn't a white guy wearing glasses and named Jonathan.</p><p class="postContent">At that warehouse show, the guy standing next to me caught my eye after a few songs. He was singing along, as was I, but still he seemed surprised that I was able to recite all the lyrics along with Craig Finn.</p><p class="postContent">"Wow," he said. "You know all the words."</p><p class="postContent">"Yeah, I do," I replied. "I know all the words."</p><p class="postContent"><i>
<a class="postLink" href="http://www.therejectionist.com/search/label/cherie%20l%27ecrivain" target="_blank">Cristina Moracho</a> (<a class="postLink" href="http://twitter.com/#!/cherielecrivain" target="_blank">@cherielecrivain</a>) is a writer and my bestie and the author of the best book ever written about teenagers and bad decisions and sex and punk and finding yourself, which I have read something like fifteen times, and which you can read too in the fall of 2014 when Viking publishes it.</i>
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<a class='reverseLink' href='http://www.therejectionist.com/2012/02/todays-book-review.html'>Today's Book Review</a>
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<h4 class='postDate capSans'>Friday, February 10, 2012</h4>
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<p class="postContent"> <a class="reviewLink" href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312585945" target="_blank"><img class="postImage" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-YTz9MzJ8U7s/TzUhvFCHDhI/AAAAAAAABY8/WpvRku4hnks/s400/available%2520dark.jpg" style="width:265px; height:400px;" alt="" /></a> </p><p class="postContent"></p><div class="postReviewInfo postContent"><span class="reviewAuthor">Elizabeth Hand</br></span>
<span class="capSans reviewTitle">Available Dark</br></span>
<span class="reviewBiblio">256pp. Minotaur Books.
9780312585945</span></div><p></p><p class="postContent">It is not any secret to regular readers of the Rejectionist how I feel about Elizabeth Hand, and I am ever more convinced that she is constitutionally incapable of writing a book that is anything less than magnificent. <i>Available Dark</i> is the follow-up to 2007's <i>Generation Loss</i>, and it is, like its predecessor, a gasoline burn of a book; but it's also a tightly-plotted noir thriller that is, as they say, unputdownable. <i>Available Dark</i>'s narrator and taciturn antiheroine, Cass Neary, is the kind of no-holds-barred fuckup whose downward trajectory is, dare I say, not so much repulsive as inspiring. She works so well because Hand is unafraid to take her to the edge and then push her right off it. But no matter what, Cass survives, thanks to her own wits, a handy bottle of whiskey, and a stash of speed perennially awaiting her in her back pocket. Philip Marlowe and then some.</p><p class="postContent">I find it particularly appropriate that <i>Available Dark</i>'s release date is Valentine's Day, given that it is a kind of valentine to the kind of lady who lurks in more than a few of us: the lady who does all the bad things and keeps going and wins, the lady who has no fear, the lady who is going to fuck you up so hard if you mess with her and maybe it won't work out so well for her either ("There had been more trouble, as usual," is Cass's dour opening line) but the fallout, the fallout will be amazing to watch. Id without the lid, as my friend Cristina says. Cass Neary is my totem animal, I think, the lady whose response to dire crisis is "do some crank, get violent," and it's epic, transcendent, funny ("I passed a line of anorexics waiting to get into a restaurant specializing in... truffle macaroni and artisanal cheese"), wild, great. But also real. Real in the way Cass deals with her past, in the way she thinks about the future, and in the way her demons are both barrier and fuel; this is no slick superhacker sexpot, whose inner torments conveniently lead her to conform neatly to dominant-culture fantasies about slutty punk sexual assault survivors. Cass isn't a genius, she isn't a supermodel just waiting for a shower to put the shine on, and she isn't an avenging angel sent from god to act out torture-porn revenge fantasies for an invisible camera. She's fucking human: messed-up, tough as shit, and so relatable it hurts.</p><p class="postContent">Elizabeth Hand is, as you either already know or are about to find out, relentlessly brilliant, whether she is writing operatically gothic postapocalyptic sci-fi excess or fine-tuned murder mysteries scrubbed clean of so much as a single extra sentence. <i>Available Dark</i> starts out Henning Mankell and ends up Hieronymus Bosch, by way of a field trip to Iceland and a brisk tour of Scandinavia's death metal scene (seriously, that is all I should have to say to you, right? Elizabeth Hand; Iceland; death metal). Cass is a photographer who's sent to Helsinki to authenticate a series of photographs by a famous fashion photographer who's sent himself into exile. The photos are real, and they're of dead people; rather than ask questions, Cass pockets her fee and heads to Reykjavik to track down an erstwhile love from her distant past. But it turns out Scandinavia's a small town, and when the photographer ends up dead, Cass is sucked into a downward spiral of murder, treachery, and <a class="postLink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayhem_(band)" target="_blank">Mayhem</a>. Through it all Cass is funny, ferocious, heartbreaking; perhaps her greatest gift as a narrator is her ability to stare into the abyss without blinking, to see beauty in darkness and photograph it so that we can see it, too.</p>
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<h4 class='postDate capSans'>Wednesday, January 25, 2012</h4>
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<p class="postContent"><a class="postLink" href="http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Kate Zambreno</a> is the author of the novels <a class="postLink" href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780983022633" target="_blank"><i>Green Girl</i></a> and <a class="postLink" href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780615334554/o-fallen-angel.aspx" target="_blank"><i>O Fallen Angel</i></a>. Her book of essays, <i>Heroines</i>, will be published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. </p><img class="postImage" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-HpSvsCzOkNY/TyANoKYovyI/AAAAAAAABY0/D7ylKP8RGlQ/s301/katezambreno.jpg" style="width:200px; height:301px;" alt="" /><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">I read Green Girl as part of a larger body of literature--I guess you could say "literature of the girl," which deals with a lot of different ideas of femininity and the female experience but also I think specifically talks about femininity as a kind of labor in exchange for a (usually limited) degree of material comfort provided by male lovers--like Jean Rhys's narrators, or Doris in Irmgard Keun's <i>The Artificial Silk Girl</i>. So in a certain sense, that performance isn't entirely consensual, and it's dictated by the demands of male desire, and it's also very explicitly informed by class. There's always the sense that the narrator is being observed, and knows she's being observed, in all these books, and in <i>Green Girl</i> as well. Can you talk a little about how you see your work fitting in with, or writing against, that literature?</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">Hi Rejectionist! Yes, I think it's become my sort of <i>idée fixe</i> , this idea of the girl, how she has been written, rewritten, whether she herself writes. This obsession ran parallel with my desire to become a writer, to excavate the experience of being a fucked-up girl in my early twenties, because I wasn't reading literature reflecting that, I wanted to write something that made the toxic girls I knew and that I once was say <i>aaahhh</i> with recognition like <i>Infinite Jest</i> , or Kerouac's <i>On the Road</i> did. Of course, I had Jean Rhys as a precursor but didn't know it yet. And then while working in a bookshop in London while 26 or 27 I read all the silver Penguin Rhys paperbacks, devoured them whole--and was like, oh, well, she did it, Rhys did do it, she wrote of a demimonde almost a century earlier that was still so immediately recognizable and real today, of a feminine economy, where girls use and are used. And to some extent I think my character Ruth in <i>Green Girl</i> fits into that tradition--both "preyed and prayed upon," as I write in a reading of Rhys in my upcoming critical book <i>Heroines</i>, but she needs the approval of the outside in order to existentially exist, more passively pulled by the force of others' desire, less so dependent on them for material survival, like Anna with her protector in Rhys' <i>Voyage in the Dark</i> (I love that scene in <i>Voyage in the Dark</i>, the 18-year-old heroine Anna is reading a book, and her older, brazen chorus-girl friend Maudie says of the "dirty book"--"I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way or another.") But yes even in <i>Green Girl</i> there's a class system to all of this--Ruth is Woolf's nameless, powerless "girl behind the counter"--or her power is in her youth and beauty. She will let a man buy a dress for her and just hope she doesn't have to sleep with him, or she'll sleep with someone to have power over him. I wrote a toxic girl character more broadly drawn in my first novel, a triptych of Americans during wartime called <i>O Fallen Angel</i>, and a reviewer classified my character, Maggie, as a prostitute, because of a passage in which I wrote that Maggie occasionally slept with men to get help moving, or for money for a ride home. Just like the modernist women I'm fascinated with are classified often in Wikipedia as "prostitutes"--like the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven or girls mentioned only by first name in Surrealist texts. It's actually that these muses of modernism were just very conscious of their roles in the exchange, conscious of what they had to perform (Miller in <i>Tropic of Cancer</i> goes on and on about the "whore" but he too is a "whore" himself, bartering himself and his services for money, for survival. I guess the power is in who gets to name). I discuss a lot of these ideas in the upcoming <i>Heroines</i>.</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">But to get to your other question, in <i>Green Girl</i> my narrator is the one doing the observing, she has created and is constantly watching the girl, much like the girl always watches herself and is watched. She is kind of an ambivalent mother-figure, sometimes quite cruel and dismissive, other times maternal. In some ways the novel became my meditation on youth in general, and more of a philosophy of the girl, so became more hyper-aware, of the literature she fits into or she's been excluded from. In my creation of my narrator, who is Ruth's author, I was really inspired by Clarice Lispector's <i>The Hour of the Star</i>.</p><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">It's also very interesting to me, and by "interesting" I mean "deeply depressing," the extent to which these kinds of perspectives are totally erased from what's considered literature--I think the "power of who gets to name" is a very nice way of putting it, and who is doing the naming hasn't changed at all between Rhys and <i>Green Girl</i> (I mean, between Marie de France and <i>Green Girl</i> , if we are getting technical). I would consider myself pretty rabidly anti-essentialist, but I think there is also a real truth to the idea of <i>écriture féminine</i>--where you have this body of writing by women that is basically united in having difference imposed upon it, of having specific stories devalued or erased altogether. And obviously particular women--queer/poor/trans/of color--are erased more routinely, but even the idea of telling a story like Ruth's is still seen as not a worthwhile project. It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, because I also write (so far exclusively) about women, and I wonder sometimes if it's possible to really understand work by and about women if you haven't had the experience of being read as female. I also just read Dodie Bellamy's <i>Barf Manifesto</i>, where she describes "the Barf" as a literary form that "comes naturally to women" ("The Barf is feminist, unruly, cheerfully, monstrous... not so much anti-logocentric, anti-dichotomy, as outside the whole fucking system"). Do you believe in a kind of writing that is, I guess for lack of a better phrase, inherently female? Or that that shared experience of exclusion leads to a different kind of literature?</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">I mean, I think the literature's out there‚ in contemporary American writing, just in the past few years, I'm thinking works by Danielle Dutton, everything Danielle publishes on her Dorothy press, Laurie Weeks' <i>Zipper Mouth</i>, Bhanu Kapil's recent <i>Schizophrene</i>, a lot of writing done on women writers' personal blogs, like by Bhanu or Suzanne Scanlon or Jennifer Lowe or Jackie Wang. I think our work is often just pushed to the margins. We are often shuttled to the "minor" in the public literary conversation. A few things to parse out here--when I think of <i>l'écriture feminine</i> as interrogated by the French feminists, I think of a radical mode of writing, that is the writing of voice, of the body, by the outlaw. That to me is also a question of style, closely associated with the Surrealist idea of automatic writing--and maybe some of what Woolf was talking about when she wrote about breaking the sentence in <i>A Room of One's Own</i>, which to her looked a lot like Dorothy Richardson's stream-of-consciousness. A lot of Cixous' examples of this type of radical writing were men--Thomas Bernhard or Joyce's Molly Bloom monologue. I would add to that Eliot's "The Waste Land" or the monologues of Artaud or Bataille's Blue of Noon or Céline or Henry Miller (and for women examples--of course Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles and Violette Leduc and Marguerite Duras and etc.). But another aspect of this idea of feminine writing is not only the style but also the experience--that of being subaltern, silenced. And I think the explicit, the excessive, the emotional, is a vital way to write against the system, to revolt--and for precursors of this I think of the queer and feminist practitioners of New Narrative, including Dodie, but also Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz's <i>Close to the Knives</i>, Dennis Cooper, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, how these writers subverted the novel form and inserted their monstrous and messy selves into the conversation. I don't think the reader should be excluded from the conversation, though--there's this weird idea in our culture that women writing is only for women (I'm thinking V.S. Naipaul and his dismissal of women writing as "feminine tosh")--I don't think that's true at all. I think these works are just less visible and known, and so are not regarded as canonical. I write a lot to this in the critical text that's coming out.</p><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">Oh, for sure, I don't meant to say that you have to be female to read women's writing; but I was thinking about this conversation when I was walking to the subway the other day, and some guy started following me yelling "It's my birthday! Why don't you fuck me!" and I thought, "You know, this is a very particular and visceral type of experience that a large group of people will never have, and it certainly colors my perception of the world whether or not I want it to." For me, I think that kind of externally enforced essentialism is pretty central to my experience of reading, of the kinds of stories I'm drawn to and the kinds I lose patience with very quickly.</p><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">"Feminine tosh" is a nice segueway into Marie Calloway--you wrote that brilliant piece that was republished at <a class="postLink" href="http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/all-the-sad-young-pretty-girls/" target="_blank">Thought Catalog</a>, and there's so much there I want to ask you about--but I think one thing you didn't really talk about that interests me is whether you think that kind of confessional writing is altered by the medium it's transmitted in. Do you think the Internet has affected what you call "the decision to write the body"?</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">Why didn't you fuck him? I mean, it WAS his birthday! Very little to ask for, after all. Yes. We need women to write to revolt against THAT. Agreed. And more than that, I think it was Simone deB who said in <i>The Second Sex</i>, I'm rewording her, that yes largely we are equal, but it's these little upsets and humiliations that we burrow under our skin, the experiences of living in a patriarchal society. We need a literature to viscerally reflect that. As Jean Rhys does for me, or Virginia Woolf, the modernist wild women I love, as well as more contemporary writers, Kathy Acker or Elfriede Jelinek or Ingeborg Bachmann. I find myself lately reading *mostly* women writers, and women writers who write of the fucked and fucked-up experience of being female, although my mentors on the page are equally male (Thomas Bernhard, Beckett, Henry Miller, Bataille, I love so many assholes it seems). What I guess I was reacting to, which I don't think at all that you were implying, is that the feminine experience is not universal or human enough for great literature (which even Simone deB in <i>The Second Sex</i> suggested). Or Caitlin Flanagan just recently in The Atlantic hurrahing about Didion being for girls, Hunter S. Thompson for boys. Fuck that.</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">I think there's a whole other revolution of <i>l'écriture feminine</i> happening on the Internet--I know that seems hyperbolic, but I really do believe it. The blog is such a fascinating, confessional, diaristic, form, that has something in common with the notebook form, Camus' notebooks or Elizabeth Hardwick's fictional notebook <i>Sleepless Nights</i>, or Montaigne's longform essays. I'm thinking less of Marie Calloway and more the notebooking you do, or the subsubculture of writers who keep personal literary blogs that comment often on my own blog, Bhanu Kapil or Jennifer Lowe or Suzanne Scanlon. I think there is something particularly feminine about this form--also that we can publish ourselves, and that it's uncensored except what we choose to censor, that we can be pseudonymous or develop different literary personas. This sort of blogging is part process, part performance art. And I would connect it in a lineage to girls writing in their Tumblrs, and before that Livejournals. What I find fascinating about Marie Calloway and mostly the older school, traditional reaction, is that she is a writer who grew up with these forms, so being confessional in public was second-nature to her, part of the way writers and girls like her compose and mediate their existences. Probably the last third of <i>Heroines</i> meditates on the girl-blogger, and her previous incarnation as a diarist in the modernist period, Jean Rhys' diaries or Anais Nin's notebooks.</p><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">Right, his birthday! What an asshole I am.</p><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">Another thing that's so fascinating to me about the reaction to that story is the obsession with whether or not it's "true," or how much of it is "true"--which, to my mind, is one of the least interesting questions you can ask about a piece of writing (I mean, other than journalism, where "truth" takes on a whole different quality--but anyway). Personal blogging seems to blur that line quite a bit in interesting ways. Eileen Myles is a writer who plays with that pretty brilliantly, I think--in all her prose, but especially in <i>Inferno</i>. And as I told you, I read <i>Inferno</i> and <i>Green Girl</i> back to back, and they complement each other and intersect in these fantastic ways. Two very different blueprints for your potential life as a girl, but the problems faced by the narrators are the same: being fundamentally hampered by other people's readings of your body (there's that great line in <i>Inferno</i>: "I always hear about men feeling humiliated by the army, or something. They should try being female"; which dovetails with <i>Green Girl</i>'s narrator's observation that "being a girl is like always being a tourist, always conscious of yourself, always seeing yourself as if from the outside"). So collapsing all of that writing, which comes out of a lived experience--I mean, it has to, I don't think you can live the experience of being female without being affected by it on some level--into "Is it true? Or not?"--seems so tremendously boring to me. I guess that's not a question. But maybe you have a thought about it?</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">Yeah, it's really interesting how short-sighted people can be in terms of literary history. I keep on saying again and again that I'm boring myself--nonfiction and fiction are genre terms, worse than that, they're publishing house terms, but this strict division wasn't always there. And the writing I'm most interested in blurs these boundaries, blurs boundaries in general--and I definitely see the New Narrative writers as fitting into that. I recently reread Kathy Acker's <i>Great Expectations</i> and I was really thrown with how she was fucking with the notion of autobiography, she's writing her life, she's writing the life of the girl, but she complicates it, she fractures into all of these personas, she tries to insert the girl back into literature, she writes the girl coming to be an artist, which was before seen as the province of the great men, which I think Eileen M. does as well with taking back the poet's novel in <i>Inferno</i>... And I am really interested in Eileen Myles' recent prose work, as well as my editor, Chris Kraus', I feel they have really revolutionized and made feminine, or queer, the nonfiction novel. But there are precursors to this, Christopher Isherwood's <i>Berlin Stories</i>, where the narrator is named Christopher Isherwood, Henry Miller's novels. But the naked memoir was often seen as taboo in modernism, Scott Fitzgerald getting shit from his male contemporaries for his "Crack-Up" essays, or Ezra Pound furiously scribbling PHOTOGRAPHY next to the lines of marital distress in Eliot's "The Waste Land." But... but... a point I try to make in <i>Heroines</i>... that I really wrestle with... is that I feel it's considered more dangerous, more taboo, when the girl who was previously muse or character takes back her own narrative. And I really focus on the shitstorm that happened when Zelda Fitzgerald attempted to circle around her experiences of breakdown, while writing <i>Save me the Waltz</i>, the "madness" material Fitzgerald was stewing over for years and years with <i>Tender is the Night</i>. Or Jean Rhys' drawing from her life as material in the novels.</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">The Marie C. situation, added to that the immediacy of blogging, is not a strict parallel. She initially wrote the piece as memoir on her blog, then when Tao Lin published it some names were changed and it was "ta-da!" fiction. I don't deny there's perhaps some ethical dubiousness about writing so confessional in a blog format, involving potentially unaware parties (I'm referring to people's concern over the girlfriend in the unknowing ménage). But the point I think I was trying to make, at least one of them, is that this is not a new conversation. And yes the question "is it true?" is totally boring. And the defense "yet it's fiction," also boring.</p><p class="postContent interviewAnswer">I think people draw such strict lines between "fiction" and "memoir"--perhaps MFA programs are to blame, with their genre divisions? What you say here about <i>Green Girl</i> is true. I wrote from, I always try to draw from, to plumb, the material of my existence. I did with <i>Green Girl</i> go into a space of fiction, I did begin to regard Ruth as this character outside of myself, and Agnes, who truth be told are both versions of myself at one point, and began to model both of them on others I had known, the girl living down below from me, celebutantes, wordless girls that stared blankly at me from fashion advertisements. And <i>Green Girl</i> did start more as autobiography, but as Jean Rhys has said, real life doesn't have shape, and then as I began to work more and more on the book, and it became this world more distanced from myself, the novel itself became a meditation on fiction, on what it means to be a character, what it means for a woman or girl to always feel like a character in a novel, and with the appearance of the narrator--which came later--also a semifictionalized character, I began to meditate on this character, Ruth, this former self, on youth in general. But in terms of "truth"--I think, I hope, there's a lot of truth in the novel. I am not a blonde Deneuvian ingenue, I have never worked as a perfume spritzer in a major department store, when I lived in London I was an impoverished new married, working in a bookshop, and a few years away from those mythical fuck-up years. But the stuff of the novel--the real stuff--is true. And the other stuff--the icing--where I lived, who I worked with, characters in my path, experiences being out in the world, my experience of being a girl in a city, of being a foreigner in London, of getting my hair cut--lots of that is taken from my life, my lived and observed life, taken up and twisted and planted where I saw fit.</p><p class="postContent interviewQuestion">I am always reminded of this when I see the way men sit on the subway--the unapologet