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A Horse at Night is Amina Cain’s first book of nonfiction, an essayistic rumination on the practice and philosophy of writing. The book mostly focuses on Cain’s own writing life—or, at least, the sort of writing life she would like to have. Throughout A Horse at Night she looks to the fiction of her literary foremothers (Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector) and contemporaries (Rachel Cusk, Renee Gladman, Claire-Louise Bennett), always finding something to admire or emulate.
Cain is the author of the short story collections Creature and I Go to Some Hollow, as well as the 2020 novel Indelicacy, which feels an apt companion piece to A Horse at Night. The narrators of Indelicacy and A Horse at Night are equally concerned with what it means to live and work as a writer, and Cain’s fascination with landscape painting—and its intersections with writing—finds its way into both books.
Cain lives in Los Angeles, where she’s at work on her second novel. She and I talked about authenticity, Annie Ernaux, and what writing A Horse at Night taught her about writing fiction.
Sophia M. Stewart: Early in A Horse at Night, you talk about how you’ve just recently read and fallen in love with The Possession, by newly-minted Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. Was this your first encounter with Ernaux?
Amina Cain: It was, yes. I came to Ernaux late. I’d meant to read her for a long time, but only did so a few years ago, and was immediately blown away. Why had I waited so long? The Possession was translated into English by my friend, writer and translator Anna Moschovakis, so it seemed like a good place to start.
SMS: And what has your relationship with Ernaux’s work been like since?
AC: After [The Possession], I read Happening, Exteriors, Simple Passion, and I Remain in Darkness, all along the way struck by the clean directness and almost severity of her writing, a longing or appetite that is shaped like a mallet. I’d never read anything before quite so pristinely uncouth. As a person who also writes slender books, I’m endeared by her ability to pack such a punch within slimness, with precision and an economy of words. There’s something so tough about what she’s doing with language, with sentences, with narrative voice, and she does it all with a light footprint. I still haven’t read The Years, which is heftier, of course, and written in a different form and style than the others, but I’m looking forward to it.
SMS: Ernaux of course is a celebrated diarist. In A Horse a Night you mention that you’ve never kept a diary. I think keeping a diary helps some people parse their own thoughts, but writing fiction can do that too—do you find when you write fiction that it, to borrow Didion’s phrase, help you find out what you’re thinking? You say in the book you don’t like to “write ‘emotionally,’” but have you ever used fiction to work out questions or ambiguities in your own life?
AC: It’s only now that I’m beginning to do that, in the novel I’m currently writing, work out questions in my life, especially of the emotional kind. The ambiguities I’ve always been interested in, and I suppose they’ve come in all along the way in what I’ve written, but they’ve changed in that they’re more directly related to my life than they’ve been before. I’ve known for a long time that writing fiction allows me to see what’s in my mind, which is not unsimilar to what Didion said about her writing. Through fiction, I come to know on a deeper level what my preoccupations are. Even if I haven’t been writing directly about my own life in a short story or book (i.e. I’m not a character who appears there), it is in a sense my life still, and sometimes I have used it to look back on or explore experiences I’ve had. As for emotion, I don’t want to ignore it anymore, but neither do I want it to take over what I write, take over my sentences. I’m finding my way through that in this current novel-in-progress. I’d say Ernaux does quite well with writing emotion: honest and unflinching with nothing to romanticize or cloud it.
SMS: You’re sort of obsessed with the concept of authenticity. Do you think there’s a difference between what it means be an authentic person as opposed to an authentic artist—for instance, to live authentically versus to write authentically?
AC: I want to say no, that they’re the same thing and that they can’t be separated. Yet even when I have felt my most inauthentic as a person I’ve still felt authentic in my writing. Sometimes I catch myself writing inauthentic sentences, sure, but those are easy enough to eventually see and excise, even if I don’t recognize them as such at first. I don’t think I’ve ever written a whole story or book that is inauthentic. Usually, I am getting closer to some truth when I’m writing rather than further away. My own definition of authenticity is fairly simple: that how I feel and what I say and do are aligned. It’s not that I’ve gone around lying or have been insincere, but I’ve not always expressed what is actually inside me, instead performing a certain kind of cheerfulness or politeness, not in my writing, but in my life. I realized it was destroying my relationship to who I am.
SMS: Throughout the book you put writing and art forms like painting and drawing into conversation with each other. Can you talk a bit about you understand the visual arts in relationship to your own writing practice? You clearly have such admiration for visual art—why do you think you became a writer and not, say, a painter?
AC: Well, first of all because I don’t have that kind of aptitude or talent, but I also don’t have the desire. Sometimes when I listen to music, I do wish I could sing and play an instrument, but otherwise, all of my desire is toward writing. What I want is to reach toward what visual artists, or dancers, or performers do, but through language, through sentences. I am always trying to figure out the place where they can meet. I probably really need art in order to write; I understand that it’s crucial. Art is what makes me feel the most, it’s what compels me. Last night I got to listen early to my friend Josephine Foster‘s new record, Domestic Sphere, which will come out this coming March with Fire Records, and it is so good, so haunting, it cut through every frustrated or bad feeling I’d been having, showed me in a clear way what I want my life to be, and sent me into some other realm that is the realm I want to live in always, the kind I love best, which is art itself. It makes me want to live in art and for art, which for me translates to writing. I can’t listen to Josephine’s music without wanting to write.
SMS: As you’re at work on your second novel right now, have you noticed any difference in how you’re approaching this one versus how you approached Indelicacy? Did writing A Horse at Night, which is very much about craft and the philosophy of writing, had any influence on you?
AC: On one hand, the way in which I’m approaching the new novel feels similar to how I approached Indelicacy in that I started from an open place, with setting and atmosphere, and with narrative voice, and I’m finding my way through it as I go rather than following a plot. This is how I’ve always come to my short stories too. On the other hand, as I say above, I am in fact working through questions in my life in this new novel in a way I haven’t before. I think it’s possible that raising questions in a nonfiction kind of way in A Horse at Night has led me to this, led me to more directly write about my own life. This isn’t craft, but the truth is that I don’t think about craft when I’m writing or as I’m approaching a book.
SMS: In the book you also wrestle with the internet, specifically Twitter, and how it coexists with your work. You don’t come to any grand conclusions about whether it impedes your writing but you do wonder about its value. In the past I’ve described Twitter as being a sort of modern-day literary salon, except instead convening at an appointed time it just goes on forever. How are you feeling right now about the commingling of your online presence and your writing life?
AC: Yes, it is a salon that just goes on forever. That’s a good way to describe it. I very regularly consider quitting Twitter, quitting social media, but haven’t yet done it. Ultimately I think it’s worse for me than better, especially Twitter. I look at it too often, feel hurt and offended if a writer I’ve met doesn’t follow me back when I follow them, and am deflated if no one responds to something I’ve posted. For someone who admittedly likes attention and hates feeling invisible, it’s not a healthy situation. I can take a bad review, I can take criticism—invisibility is much worse. Sometimes Twitter reflects back what you don’t want to see. There are lovely people I’ve met on Twitter, other writers, for instance, with whom I’ve gone on to become friends, that have slightly balanced this out—I met Sofia Samatar on Twitter, though she very wisely left years ago and has never come back—and I enjoy some of the conversations I have, especially of the literary kind, and ways of being in touch. That’s what keeps me there, that and the addiction. But I want to leave. Social media keeps me focused on the wrong things. And though I don’t think it ruins my writing, necessarily, but it slows it down, takes me away from it.
SMS: I felt a jolt of recognition when in the book you mention all the jpegs you have saved on your laptop of paintings of women reading—I also have a folder on my computer with images of women reading and writing, also women with cats. You say that these images relax you. Can you talk more about the feeling they give you and the value you get from them? Do you think you’ll ever turn them into an actual salon wall?
AC: I like this connection! And I like cats. Though last night when I was trying to do a virtual event [mine] were swarming me, jumping around and making noise—not relaxing. But the images of women reading, they are. I’m someone who can very easily become stressed out, I am prone to it, but things like looking at paintings and drawings, especially when they themselves contain something within them I find soothing, like women reading. I think they’re calming because they’re pleasurable, to see women doing something quiet and absorbing, and that pleasure does a great job of relaxing the body and mind, as does absorption. Pleasure is good for us physically and mentally, as is aesthetic experience, the enjoyment of resting our eyes on something beautiful or otherwise pleasing, which is why it’s important for all of us to experience it. I will probably never turn these images of women reading into a salon wall, just because I’m very minimalist in my house, in the ways that I live—not unlike in my writing.
