Person to Person Archives

Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts was published by Tin House Books in early May. The seemingly inauspicious timing of the book’s release, in the midst of our present moment of chaos and uncertainty, was in its way perfect—Beha’s novel is set in New York during our last great moment of political crisis, a decade ago, following the economic collapse. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a big, rich, complex novel of ideas, and I found it to be enormously soothing to spend time with a serious intellect working through not only a story but through the philosophical problems of our moment. How do we produce real knowledge in an era of overwhelming, infinite information? And how, if at all, might a person live decently in our troubled world? As The Millions’ own Nick Ripatrazone writes, “Beha’s earlier work has been rightfully compared to the work of Graham Greene, and in this new novel Beha does what only Greene and a handful of other novelists have been able to accomplish: make God, belief, and doubt the stuff of serious fiction―even down to the probing dialogue of his characters.”

The Millions: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a big book, and unlike many big books I’ve encountered lately, it deserves to be a big book—that is, you could not adequately tell this story, which encompasses the lives of seven principle characters as well as the socio-cultural landscape of New York in the late-aughts, in 250 pages. I wonder if you could talk about the expansiveness of this novel, if it began as something smaller, and when it was that you realized the scope of the project.

Christopher Beha: I take that as a real compliment, coming from a known long-book skeptic. The first thing I’d say in response is that my previous books are all sub-300 pages, so I am not someone whose first impulse is always to go big. In this case, however, I did know before I started that the book would be longish, because I knew I wanted to do certain things that you can’t do adequately in a short number of pages. And I might as well just say candidly that I have always had the ambition of writing a big, thick, doorstopper novel. (This book actually wound up being a few hundred pages short of that; but there were drafts that certainly would have qualified.)

That is probably not a very fashionable thing to say. We are in a moment where slim works of auto-fiction are the standard of “seriousness.” Setting out to write a “big” book feels like a very male—or maybe Mailer-ite—ambition, in the worst possible way. “Have you got what it takes to step into the ring with Tolstoy?” and all that bullshit. I get that. But for me the ambition came from what I hope is a purer place: I love long novels. I love a lot of short novels, too, but a disproportionate number of the novels that have had truly lasting significance for me have been notably long: Middlemarch; Anna Karenina; In Search of Lost Time; Kristen Lavransdatter; Dr. Faustus; JR; Underworld; Little, Big; just in the last few years, My Struggle and Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: these are the books that have most nourished me. (And, yes, I might as well just be honest and include Infinite Jest on this list, since so many people have come to view it as the embodiment of all that is wrong with the straight white male obsession with length.) To me, there is no better feeling than being three or four hundred pages—a normal novel’s length—into a truly great seven- or eight-hundred-page book, walking around with it in your head, letting it interact with the world outside the page. This thing that happens when you spend a week or two, rather than a couple of days, reading a book, the way it takes over your life, that is to me one of the pinnacles of what literature can do. My ambition was to write a book that might have a shot at doing that for a reader.

Of course, it doesn’t work at all if it’s a bad long book, particularly if its badness consists in its being long for no good reason, or long because the writer felt the need to prove—to himself or anyone else—that he could do it. So I was excited to hit upon material that I thought could sustain a good long book, and I appreciate hearing that you think it did.

TM: I couldn’t imagine it being otherwise. Remaining on the subject of pulling together a large project like this: I think novels tend to be about a problem or subject that nags you, that won’t let you not write it, or create the imaginative space that allows you to explore it. Did you find this to be the case with this novel? The book covers so much ground—probability, destiny, politics, media, race, and baseball, among others—but was there a central issue or problem that insisted the book get written?

CB: I suppose the nagging problem here had to do with the nature of knowledge about the world and how that knowledge ought to be put into action. One of the main characters, Sam Waxworth, believes very strongly in empiricism, formulating a theory and putting it to the test. Another, Frank Doyle, believes in following your instincts, acting with commitment despite the fact that we never have all of the information. In Frank’s view, we are all, in a sense, 1 of 1, and thus no amount of data can make our choices for us. This is the view expressed most elegantly by Kierkegaard: Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. I was interested in bringing these worldviews into contact with each other. To your point, though, if I’d thought that one of these characters was absolutely right and the other wrong, I would not have been interested in writing a novel about them. It is easy to satirize the mania for quantification that Waxworth exhibits, but its opposite is on its way down the road to the dismissal of experts, the refusal to learn from experience—Trumpism, basically. There is something both appealing and repulsing in both views, which is what makes them novel material.

But I hasten to add that novels—at least of the more or less realist sort I’m trying to write—are built out of people, not ideas. At a certain point, you want your characters to behave as human beings and not just as embodiments of your own preoccupations, which means giving them the freedom to act inconsistently. Then this becomes the nagging problem: figuring out how this particular person (as opposed to a stock character with these particular beliefs) would act in this particular circumstance. This is the hardest part of writing a realist novel, I think, and when otherwise well-made realist novels feel fake and “made up” in the way that realism’s critics complain about, it is usually because this work hasn’t been done.

TM: You are the editor of Harper’s Magazine and were previously the fiction editor. I’m really curious how you think this might impact your writing. I mean, in one sense, all writers are simultaneously writer and editor, creator and critic, so to some extent, I’m sure you work the same way most people do. But I do wonder how the specialized skills you’ve developed might affect process.

CB: My career as an editor has mostly reinforced for me one of the things that aspiring writers are constantly being told by workshop professors and other more established writers, which is that the real work begins once you’ve got a first draft. That recognition, in turn, has freed me up to write looser first (and second) drafts. I used to the kind of writer who really labored over sentences before I had any idea how they were fitting into a larger scheme. I still care a lot about my sentences, of course, but I’ve learned to get something down on the page first and then worry about it making it shapely or beautiful or whatever you want it to be.

You say the all writers are simultaneously writer and editor, but for me the big lesson was to be first one, then the other. Try to turn the inner editor’s voice off while writing, trusting that he will have his say in due course. I think working as an editor, developing a strong editorial sense while working on other people’s writing, has had the perhaps paradoxical effect of making it easier to turn my inner editor off at certain points in the process.

TM: Elaborating on the last question, when you edited a story of mine that ran in Harper’s, you suggested cutting off four pages from the beginning—I was horrified at first, but quickly realized you were dead right. Are you able to bring that kind of editorial mercilessness to your own fiction, or do you have as much trouble killing your darlings as anyone else?

CB: I try to be pretty ruthless with my own stuff. I cut hundreds of pages from this book. This is the flip side to what I wrote above. If you’re going to turn the editor off while writing your first drafts, you have to really give him license once it’s his turn. Once you are in edit mode, you are no longer the person who wrote these words—now that person has been shut off. You don’t even know which ones are the darlings. You’re not thinking about the amount of blood and sweat that went into any particular sentence or scene, you’re just thinking about what’s there on the page. You get to a point where the excitement of cutting stuff is almost as great as the excitement of creation. Because cutting involves a kind of faith that you can do something better. That’s a question I really try to ask myself while reading my own work—almost in a taunting way: Is this the best you can do? To refuse to cut is implicitly to say, Yes, I am incapable of making this any better than it is right now. Which sometimes is the truth! But it is a kind of defeat.

TM: Related, I think the importance of having good readers through the drafting process cannot be understated. Do you have any strategy with this, certain moments when you find reads are most helpful, and certain readers who are best for a particular stage?

CB: I show everything to my wife—who is both a great reader and a great writer—pretty early in the process, and I have a handful of trusted readers I turn to once I’ve got a presentable draft of the whole thing, which usually means after my third or fourth go through. But without exactly disagreeing with you on the importance of readers, I’d like to offer a counterpoint. I’m one of those people who started taking writing workshops the moment I stepped on to campus as an undergrad. I went straight from college to my MFA. I had some really amazing teachers, and I learned a lot, and I don’t regret that time, but I think there was ultimately something a bit damaging to me about it. I developed the habit of writing ten or twenty pages, bringing those pages to a roomful of readers, taking in all their opinions, and going back to rewrite those ten or twenty pages, and that is not, in my opinion, a good habit for a writer to have. Part of it is related to what I wrote above. If you’re trying to write a novel, and you’ve got twenty pages done, you should not be spending a lot of time thinking about what is and isn’t working in those twenty pages, getting them into presentable shape, assimilating fifteen different people’s opinions into a revision. At that point, you should just be piling up more pages.

But there is something more than this. I was a teenager when I started writing fiction seriously, with a real single-mindedness, and I was in my thirties before I published any fiction at all. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first decent thing I wrote was the first thing I wrote entirely outside of the workshop context. I worked for six years on the novel that began as my MFA thesis, a novel that got workshopped to death, and it was very painful to admit that it wasn’t good enough, that it would never get published and didn’t deserve to be published. Once I did admit this, I spent about a year and half writing a draft of a new novel without showing it or even really talking about it to anyone, and there were moments when I thought I might be nuts and wasting time. To do this—to keep showing up at the desk every day, without any real encouragement from anyone else, without knowing whether you’re good enough to do this—you must develop a particular kind of faith in yourself. I came to think that this faith was actually an essential part of being a writer and that, for me at least, the workshop culture was holding me back from developing it. I think often of a line from John Gardner: “A writer must take infinite pains, and finally the pains the writer takes must be his own.”

I should add that of course there does come a time when you have taken things as far as you can on you own, and trusted readers become indispensable. But it’s important to learn how to take your own pains.

TM: I completely agree with this. I remember being so conditioned by year after year of workshop—I also went right from undergrad to MFA, though in my thirties—that it was almost strange to finally graduate my MFA program and suddenly have to answer to no one. Which, of course, is the reality of writing, not the artificial, though often useful, situation of workshop. As you say, developing faith in yourself and your instincts is a skill you must hone, every bit as much as narrative craft.

Changing subjects: the main character in Index, Sam Waxworth, a statistics nerd who created a predictive baseball model and then successfully turned his abilities to politics forecasting, seems to be inspired at least in part by Nate Silver. I can’t help but ask about this the genesis of this character, as I find Silver to be one of the more continually interesting and amusing figures in public life (going back to my days on a poker forum that he frequented).

CB: A quick caveat: I do not know Nate Silver personally, and I only borrowed the broadest elements of his public-facing life. Indeed, Silver is actually among the more thoughtful of the data journalist—far more thoughtful than Sam Waxworth, I’d say. He is at least as interested in what numbers can’t tell us as in what they can. And he has grown into a fairly high degree of humility about a lot of this stuff, which I admire. So I don’t want to overstate the degree to which Sam is “based” on him. But it would be silly to deny that he was a major inspiration for the broad swathes of Sam’s story.

As far as how that came to be so, there’s a long and a short answer. I’m a lifelong baseball fan, one who has always prized both the romantic, narrative power of the game and the way it allows for a particular kind of precision. And so I was very interested in, to use the common shorthand, the Moneyball revolution. It’s worth noting that numbers have always been important to the game. Indeed, certain numbers—300 wins, 3,000 strikeouts, 500 homeruns—have had an almost magical power to them. Now you had a new crop of people saying we were using the wrong numbers. Plus they were saying that the point of the numbers was not to create this mystical aura, but to cut through all that and arrive at a clearer picture of reality. And that term “Moneyball” is really telling, because the whole point in Lewis’s book was a that small market team that was at a resource disadvantage was using these new-fangled numbers to exploit inefficiencies in the market. There’s so much rich stuff here—metaphysics and epistemology, but also something really elemental about the way capitalism works. So I’d wanted to write about it for a very long time. Then Nate Silver comes on the scene, and he’s such an interesting figure, because he’s come out of this sabermetric baseball culture, but he’s taking those lessons into politics, just as we see the rise of this amazing political figure, Barack Obama, who styles himself as a non-ideologue, a technocrat coming from the legal-academic world, who is going to move us past a lot of the magical thinking about America and its role in the world that had dominated the Bush years, but who at the same time is capable of truly soaring rhetoric and ultimately gets himself elected on the basis of a very powerful story he’s telling about himself and the country. And then in the midst of all that, we’ve got this catastrophic financial collapse that is on a superficial level about the collapse of the American Dream of homeownership and upward mobility, but is really about the evolution of capitalism, and the in retrospect facially absurd idea that you can eliminate risk from the world by way of financial engineering, which is really magical thinking disguised as quantification. So, yeah, a Silver-like character seemed to give me right of the bat so much to play with, which is part of the reason I knew this book would be long.

TM: Finally, I like to end these Q+As with an inane question. So: are you a write every day type that hews to a schedule, or more catch-as-catch-can?

CB: Whenever I’m asked this kind of process question, I think of William Gaddis, who said he didn’t like doing interviews because he didn’t want to be asked which side of the page he wrote on.

I very much aim to be an every day writer, and when things are going well
on a project, I am pretty disciplined about it. For me this is a matter of
necessity: it’s too easy to lose the thread if I go more than a day or two
without writing. So I think of myself as an every day writer. I tend to tell
people that’s what I am when they ask, and I tend to encourage younger writers
to be every day writers. I do believe there is something—something almost
mystical—about the commitment itself.

At the same time, life is life. I’ve got a three-month-old and a three-year-old and a full-time job I’m doing from home and a wife who’s trying to get through copy edits on her own novel—Who is Maud Dixon?, coming in Spring 2021 to your local bookstore! A daily writing routine is so far from my present reality that I would be too embarrassed even to lie about it. At the moment, catch-as-catch-can is definitely the order of the day.

The Millions Interview

Always Make it Personal: The Millions Interviews Adrian Tomine

Alex Dueben | 1

Adrian Tomine was a teenager when his self-published comic Optic Nerve first received attention, and in the years since he’s carved out a career as an illustrator, occasional New Yorker cover artist, and one of the great cartoonists of his generation. So much of his work revolves around silence, unexpected encounters, characters grappling with time and change. Tomine has made short nonfiction projects before, but his new book The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, which is designed to look like a journal, with pages in a simple grid layout, is as revelatory and complex as anything he’s ever made.

The book consists primarily of awkward moments, slights, humiliations, uncomfortable scenes that have stayed with him over the years. At the same time, Tomine drops the reader into each scene, jumping ahead months or years, his circumstances changing sometimes radically with few clues as to the details. The book, like in all his work, focuses on small moments and interactions that so often define our lives, and we see in these pages how Tomine thinks about and sees the world. It’s a moving portrait of the passage of time, the struggles of the artistic life, and the joys of fatherhood.

The Millions: You’ve made nonfiction comics before, but this is a very different kind of book for you. What made you interested in making something so different?

Adrian Tomine: For that very reason. Since around the time of my book Shortcomings I started trying to make each subsequent book in response to the previous one. Not wanting to repeat myself, at least in terms of form or tone. I felt like after finishing Killing and Dying—which was fiction, full color, short stories—this seemed like the natural alternative to that.

TM: In the final scene of the book you depict yourself getting this idea and starting to make the book. Was that how it started? Did you have this rough idea of the book more or less when you first sat down?

AT: I started an early version of it in a sketchbook and later realized that that might be my next book. Because I’ve had this job since I was a kid basically, whenever something negative happens in my life there’s some well-meaning person who says, it’s all good material. Usually it annoys me at the time, but I have to play along gamely. This book is a case of trying to make that true. Accumulating memories and experiences that might have been painful or annoying at the time, and trying to take control of them and make them into something that might be enjoyable or entertaining to other people. Including myself.

TM: Do most of your projects start in your sketchbook?

AT: To a degree. If you look at some other cartoonists’ sketchbooks you see that it’s their subconscious put down on paper. They’re compulsive in their sketchbook work, and they just open up their brain on the paper. Over the years I’ve moved away from that. Partly for practical reasons. I’ve got two young daughters I’m spending a lot of my days with, so I don’t have the time to mindlessly doodle the way I used to. But you can find evidence of all the books and stories in my sketchbooks. It’s not so much I stumbled upon it in the sketchbook and turned it into a book, but a lot of the work was done in my mind and getting it down in a sketchbook was a way of not forgetting it.

TM: You’re not making a whole book or even necessarily stories in the sketchbook, it’s just where they start.

AT: This one was different because I did start to sketch out very rough versions of some of the incidents that I described in the book. But it was much more rough than the printed version.

TM: The design of the book resembles a sketchbook or diary. And maybe this is obvious because its nonfiction, but it felt like it was your most personal book.

AT: It is. I think people will pick up on that right off the bat, as you said, because of the format and the main character is supposed to be me. The challenge for me with this book was to make an explicitly autobiographical story try to approach the level of revelation or confession that I’ve embedded in my fictional books. I feel like for my personality and my style of art that maybe these fictional stories like Shortcomings or Killing and Dying are the best way for me to express myself. When I took up the challenge to do an autobiographical book I didn’t want it to be like the Scenes from an Impending Marriage book, which was autobiographical but very lightweight and maybe a little bit generic in terms of how deep in delved. If I was going to attempt this, I wanted to get into a deeper level of introspection.

TM: I was thinking about how I know many cartoonists have similar stories. In thinking about what stories to include and how to approach it, were you thinking about not just how personal you wanted it to be, but how relatable?

AT: The first priority for me is to always make it personal—and make it true to my own experiences. With an autobiographical book like this I almost have to trick my mind into not thinking about an audience much and not worry about how it’s going to be received. Along with that, not worry about who’s going to relate to it. I’ve always said that I’m constantly trying to trick myself into the mindset of when I first started making comics as a teenager. I was making them purely for myself and when they ended up getting published, it was an extra bonus on top of the pleasure of having created them. Now that this book is going out in the world it’s interesting to hear from people who have had similar experiences or can relate to it. It’s really nice to hear from other artists of any kind that there’s something they found in common with these experiences. That’s a real reward for me.

TM: The book collects moments that are painful and awkward as you said, but they take a lot of different forms. There are moments of awkwardness, uncomfortable scenes of tour. There are moments of casual condescension towards comics. Odd moments of racism.

AT: Right now people are seeing excerpts from the story and it’s important to read it in full and get the context. A pretty long span of time progresses over the course of the book. There’s a lot of threads that keep coming up, but some of those things like the condescension towards comics is more in the earlier section of the book. Later on I’m at a New Yorker staff party. Hopefully when people read the whole book they’ll see there’s a primary action that’s happening in these very specific anecdotes, but with the passage of time there are background stories about the way that comics and cartoonists are treated. The fact that I go from sleeping on comic shop owners’ floors on tour to staying in hotels. You see my personal life evolve in the background. Suddenly there’s a kid—and then another kid. I hope that people will read an excerpt and think it’s funny but then get a little more out of it when they read it in the context of the full book.

TM: Narratively speaking, I couldn’t help but think that is one of the things that attracted you to this book and this idea. Getting to tell a story and depict time in a different way.

AT: I definitely started with the idea of all the anecdotes of being a professional cartoonist and then almost by default when you tell those stories in chronological order you have to show where you were living at the time or what the circumstances were. I started to see that it was hinting at other stories beyond the specifics of the personal embarrassments.

TM: The moment that really got to me was at the end. Where you imagined you were going to die but you weren’t thinking of work but of your family and that line “I guess I’m not as much of an ‘artist’ as I thought I was.” I’m sure you’ve heard this from others, but that was gutting.

AT: I’m flattered that people take that in an emotional way, but I wanted to present it as something of a relief. Something that might inspire people to give themselves some leeway. Especially among the cartoonists and artists I know, there’s such a pressure to be a great artist. And to be an artist above all else. When I had that experience, in a way, it was a pleasant thing. I took it as a positive thought to come to terms with who I really was and what my priorities are.

TM: Obviously having kids changed your life. Do you think it changed your work?

AT: I think so. Of course there’s no way to see the alternate path and see what the work would have been like otherwise, but my suspicion is yes. I was working on the book Killing and Dying over the course of both my kids’ births. It took me that long. I don’t think that the book would exist the way we know it if it weren’t for those experiences. Obviously the new book ends up being very explicitly connected to being a parent and being a husband.

I am totally open to the idea that some people might find it changed my work in a direction that isn’t to their taste. I think that the longing and loneliness of being a single guy in the Bay Area was really tied into the early years of my work. As a fan of other works of art, sometimes you want an artist to stay the same and keep delivering what you fell in love with about their work in the first place. I’m hoping there are some people who have aged and evolved alongside me and can still find something to enjoy now in my work. I can definitely understand if someone was just discovering my early work, they might be perplexed to see what I’m doing now.

TM: I understand that. I haven’t read 32 Stories in years, but I know I wouldn’t respond to it now like I did when I first read it in my early 20s.

AT: I sure don’t. [Laughs.]

TM: I know the film and story The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, but where did your title come from?

AT: That’s a good question. I think people would be shocked to know how much time and energy I waste on my titles. It’s not like they’re that exciting or explosive, but for some reason I fret over them a lot. The other autobiographical book that I’ve done was the wedding book and the title was based on the Bergman film Scenes from a Marriage. I thought, maybe my autobiographical books will take their title from a much grander and more respected work of art and pervert it for my own uses. That helped narrow it down for me. In the end I found the title that I settled on was the best description of what was inside the covers for me.

TM: Do you like the film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner?

AT: Yes. The funny thing is sometimes people will assume that those allusions are done in tribute to my favorite works of art. It’s not the case. I definitely am a fan of the things I’m riffing on, but I don’t know that that would be my favorite Bergman film—and I would be stretching the truth to say the film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is something I watch on a regular basis. The author of the source material, Alan Sillitoe, is great as well. A lot of times it’s just a balance of what’s something I can use that works best with my material. If the reference was something I really didn’t like, I probably would shy away from that.

TM: The story and the film were about running to find this physical and emotional escape from life. Being out there alone. It is the perfect metaphor.

AT: I feel a kinship with those themes. I’m sure actual athletes would scoff at the idea of comparing drawing comics to what they do. While I was working on the book I was thinking about cartoonist friends of mine who are older than me and have devoted their life to this. Trying to sort out the different feelings I had of admiration and thinking of them as role models, but at the same time feeling a little conflicted about whether I wanted to spend the next chunk of my life as devoted to the work as some of them had been. I think the loneliness aspect is open to interpretation. Especially now. I miss the solitary aspect of sitting in a room all day by myself and drawing. But I also would not want to miss out on a lot of the other aspects of my life that that might get in the way of that.

TM: The simple fact is that your life has changed, and your relationship to your work and to loneliness has changed.

AT: Now it’s a struggle to find alone time. I don’t have a separate studio. I’ve always worked from home. People will have their own opinions about it, but like I said it’s a bit of a relief when you can let yourself off the hook to a degree. “My friend did three graphic novels in one year and I didn’t do anything!” You can really drive yourself crazy sometimes.

TM: At end of the book, you’re questioning: Should I have spent my life on this? Do I want to keep doing it? It sounds like you’ve found an understanding and a balance.

AT: Yeah. I don’t know why it is exactly, but making these books is not easy for me. I’ve talked to other cartoonists and some feel the same way, but some have no idea what my problem is and don’t know why I can’t bash them out faster. Every time I’ve finished a book—probably going back to Shortcomings—there’s a part of me that thinks, this might be it. Maybe this is the last one. The idea of getting from that point to the finish point of another book just seems so daunting. I guess I’m in that same phase again where I finished this book—which in my mind was going to be a quick and easy one. I would make it sketchbook style, it would be autobiographical, and all these things that I thought would make it easier, but it still consumed my life more than I expected and took longer than I expected. It might be that I’m forcing myself to do something I’m not very suited to. But then I’m once again in this position of finishing another book somehow.

TM: Have you started thinking about or working on other ideas since?

AT: I have been. If I’m honest, the quarantine ended up falling at a fairly convenient time in my life. The book was done and was in the process of being printed. I gave me the opportunity to put being an artist on hold and assume the full-time responsibility of homeschool teacher–full-time playmate–personal cook–butler, all the jobs I’m doing for my kids every day. But I have a little bit of time here and there to do things. It’s nice to have this parallel career as an illustrator where I can take an assignment and be done with it in a week or two. I’m grateful that a few of those opportunities have popped up. Also I haven’t talked about it too much, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time the past few years screenwriting, which is another daunting and slow process. Over the last few years, there have been projects where someone else was adapting my work. Stuff where I’ve adapted my own work. Stuff with me generating something completely original. It’s been a little bit of everything. I should mention that none of it has come to fruition yet, so it’s possible that this will be the only record of that work!

TM: I’m glad all this happened at a moment where you could catch your breath.

AT: I’m grateful for that. My children don’t know it, but they are benefitting from the timing of this. I’ve always been in a bit of a bind about juggling my work and my parental obligations—especially since I work from home. I think this would have been a lot tougher if I was just finishing this book or trying to make a deadline on a book. Who knows what it will mean for my career or my income, but I’m trying to enjoy being a full-time parent as much as possible.

The Millions Interview

Dissecting Desire: The Millions Interviews Sarah Gerard

Greg Mania

Sarah Gerard arrived on the literary scene with her collection of essays, Sunshine State, three years ago, garnering much praise and being hailed as a “writer to watch.” Her debut novel, Binary Star, received similar praise two years earlier. The Florida-born writer just published her highly anticipated novel True Love, but not before the book made its presence known vis-a-vis every book preview under the sun. And for good reason.

Nina, a struggling writer, college drop-out, and professional bad-decision-maker, forgoes the muted suburbs of Florida for the calamity of New York City in pursuit of the kind of love that will countervail the past she’s left behind. Her search for fulfillment is anything but linear, oscillating between the various people in her life like her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a polycule; Odessa, a single mom with a similar penchant for toxic men; Seth, a detached artist who’s lack of commitment permeates every facet of life; Brian, who sets the bar for stability low, but whom Nina considers her most stable partner; and Aaron, a former classmate and aspiring filmmaker who lives with his parents, with whom Nina initially develops a creative relationship with—leaving her life as a writer in the middle of it all.

Told with acerbic wit, keen observation, and elements of dark humor, Gerard’s True Love is a timely tale of yearning for connection in a world that is fragmented by default.

The Millions: I see pieces of myself in Nina. Did she come to you like that or did she arrive on the page fully formed from the get-go?

Sarah Gerard: She took some massaging. I went through a few different names and occupations, and at one point had given her a very cumbersome backstory. Hardest was landing on what her motivation is, moment-to-moment, and also long-term—and how those two things might be in conflict. The tone of the book was also difficult to land. For the first several drafts, Nina just had no sense of humor, probably because, ironically, she wasn’t being totally honest with the reader.

TM: How did the idea for True Love come to you?

SG: I was asking broad questions about what love is and how it operates, in my life and in the world. It’s both ambient and directed; a state of being and an action. It’s ecstatic and painful and joyful and crushing. Very often, we can’t seem to find love—or what my partner and I call “good love”—though we want it very badly. A character is a mode of inquiry, so I used Nina as a vehicle to explore how people might get in their own way, looking for love; where we learn to love; how we know love is present; and what love, or the desire for it, leads us to do. I was also, as the title might suggest, curious about the relationship of love and truth.

TM: Your previous novel, Binary Star, hones in on addiction and codependency, which are also, in some form, present in this book. Why did you want to continue your exploration of these themes?

SG: One definition of love that I offer in the book is that of an addiction. Another is a trance. In either case, it’s an altered state of seeing and sensing and understanding. In the book, I define trance as an inwardly directed, selectively focused attention, to the exclusion of all else. I was also thinking of love as a substance that could be just as easily used to manipulate and exploit and traffic in as a drug.

TM: Florida lit is a genre in and of itself. Your debut collection of essays, Sunshine State, I believe, stands at the helm alongside the work of Alissa Nutting and Kristen Arnett. What nod to Florida did you want to give by having your new book start there?

SG: Structurally, my intent was to divide the story into two parts. Florida is much slower and lazier than New York City, so there’s a tonal shift midway through the book when Nina and Seth leave. The world of the story becomes darker, in my mind, and more claustrophobic, threatening. The Florida setting is somewhat disturbing, yet edges toward absurd and provincial, whereas New York is dangerous and exploitative, as Nina experiences it. She’s also separated from her friends and her support network after she leaves Florida, so although the city seems to close in on her, it is also lonelier.

TM: I love the specific references to the neighborhoods in New York City, especially the bookshop where Nina works. I know you were a bookseller at two of NYC’s beloved indie bookstores. What other similarities do you share with Nina?

SG: I love independent bookstores. They really do the Lord’s work. I’ve worked at McNally Jackson Books and Books Are Magic, and would work at another bookstore in a heartbeat. There’s nothing better than talking about books all day, then spending half of your retail-wage paycheck on books because you get a staff discount and have been shopping at work. Seriously, though, bookselling has taught me so much about writing and publishing.

TM: I’m particularly intrigued by Nina’s friend Odessa. She offers this contrast, makes certain things about Nina stand out more. Was this your intention in writing her?

SG: Especially in a first-person narrative, the catalyst for character transformation has to originate outside of a character. Change comes about as a result of friction in the narrative. Nina and Odessa are very different people, but they have a long history, and know each other on a fundamental level. So, Odessa both offers a counterpoint to Nina, as well as a touchstone for who she is, on a base level, when she may feel as if she’s losing herself—or as when, as Odessa points out, she’s lying. Odessa also calls Nina out for her class privilege and her selfishness. A lot of characters call Nina out for various things. Ultimately, each one of them offers a window onto a very tangled situation.

TM: As someone who, at one point, could have been the brand ambassador of toxic relationships, I sometimes fear of stepping back into my old habits. Like, I have to consciously remember the emotional work I’ve done in years of therapy. Do you think we can become addicted to those types of relationships and, if so, do you think we can ever truly move beyond them without them haunting us?

SG: Toxic relationships are hurtful, and exist on a continuum of uncaring and manipulative behavior, ranging from microaggressions to violence. It haunts us because it hurts us. Unlearning it takes self-reflection, and practice acting with compassion, as well as setting boundaries. Forgiveness is also important, and that includes self-forgiveness.

TM: Nina’s mother is very much a presence in her life, even though her absence—especially when she constantly dodges her daughter’s attempts to visit her—is what mostly comprises that presence in Nina’s heart and mind. Do you think her relationship with her mother holds her back, maybe even influences her bad decisions?

SG: One of the questions I was asking in writing this book is where we learn to love. Early relationships are foundational, and patterns are very hard to break, especially when they’re deeply ingrained from a young age. Nina and her mother are more similar than she realizes. There is a lot of her mother in her desire to please, her martyrdom, her inability to take responsibility for the ripple-effects of trauma, her bossiness—just to start. Nina’s path to healing her relationship with her mother begins when she finally sets a boundary with her that she can hold.

TM: Has writing this book taught you anything about yourself?

SG: Everything I write teaches me about myself. It also teaches me about the world.

Bonus Links from Our Archive:
—Transforming Florida: On Sarah Gerard’s ‘Sunshine State’
—The Path to Destruction: On Sarah Gerard’s ‘Binary Star’

The Millions Interview

Nobody’s Martyr: The Millions Interviews Shannon Reed

Nick Ripatrazone

In Why Did I Get a B?, her memoir about teaching, Shannon Reed writes “I enjoy teenagers. I like that they have to be convinced to like you.” It’s one of the many lines in Reed’s book that feels authentic.

“Authentic” gets thrown around a lot in the world of secondary school teaching because, like the teenagers peering at a new teacher, educators are a skeptical bunch. We’ve been misrepresented by politicians and bombarded with assessment fads. I say this ready—as one can be during a pandemic—to start my 17th year teaching high school English.

I’m happy to report that Reed’s book about her life as a teacher is not only authentic, it’s quite moving. Early in the book, she writes that “to be a good teacher is to care very much about people.” Ultimately, that’s what makes a great teacher: compassion. Kids are often hurting, and we’re not there to simply teach them content—we’re there to help them to live.

Reed is hilarious and humble about the teaching profession: the exact right mix. We see her struggle and thrive, teach and learn, help and hope. It’s a great read for educators—rookies and veterans alike.

Reed has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Poets & Writers, Buzzfeed, Vulture, and The Guardian. She is a visiting lecturer in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.

We spoke about the dangerous myth of teacher-as-martyr, the adjunct life, and what this upcoming academic year might look like—in or out of the classroom.

The Millions: When people who don’t work in education pontificate about the profession, I often want to spontaneously combust. So I loved your great and accurate list: “If People Talked to Other Professionals the Way They Talk to Teachers.” Later in the book, you note these myths or perceptions continue for you, even as a professor: “I hate that even in the halls of academia, there are folks who feel teachers should be nice, but not funny; hardworking, but not ambitious; proud of their students but not proud of their own accomplishments.” What are one or two of the most troubling misconceptions about teaching and teachers—and why do you think they persist?

Shannon Reed: Truly, I know that all professionals rightly complain that people make assumptions about their jobs, but is there any other profession about which so many people make so many assumptions than teaching? I suspect not. You’re absolutely right—I am obsessed with the mythologies around teaching, and often ruminate about how they hurt teachers (and, more selfishly, me). What never seems to get factored into the conversation, but which might be changing now, due to what the pandemic has taught us, is that our society cannot function without teachers. We really ought to be doing everything we can to keep good teachers in the profession, including giving them the opportunity to become good teachers, and pulling in as many new ones as we can. Eliminating those belittling misconceptions would so help with that.

Because I deeply appreciate an opportunity to go off about this, I’ll unpack my three most troubling misconceptions. First, because most people attended school, they think they understand what teaching is as a profession. A moment’s thought shows this is nonsense—I go to my car mechanic all the time, but can barely check the oil—but it’s pervasive. Many peoples’ understanding of teaching is located in their recollection of their least favorite high school teacher. I find that this problem is true for many professions—I’m constantly asking my emerging fiction writers not to set their stories in hospitals unless they’ve spent time in one as an adult—but because school is so much a part of our growing up, many more people have a blind spot about what they don’t know about teaching that they simply do not realize.

Second: the idea that teachers must personally like a student in order to teach them well. This baffles me. If I again go back to the car mechanic, while I expect him to be fair to me, I don’t get upset if he doesn’t want to chill with me outside of the half-hour I spent getting my oil changed every few months. He does his job well, and I get what I needed. We don’t need to be besties. Yet some parents deeply believe that their children’s teachers can only do right by their children if we actually really like them. It’s weird. I wouldn’t trust an adult who wanted to befriend my 12-year-old, you know? But people confuse what good parenting is with what good teaching is.

And, finally, my biggest annoyance is the idea that a good teacher must be a martyr—always available to students, always giving of herself (Let’s be honest, the martyr teacher is usually a woman), never full of dreams and desires and needs and wants of her own. This is so harmful, both to the students and the teachers, while being extremely helpful to those who’d like teachers to have to work so hard they never have the energy to raise concerns about low salaries and stuff like that. I’d offer just two examples of supporting evidence, and leave the reader to think on the harm this misconception causes. First, when I taught first year composition at Pitt, I’d ask students to write about their favorite teachers in high school. The vast majority of them would write about some poor soul who came in at 6 a.m. to tutor them before swim practice, or who came back to school on weekends for test prep. This, my students would always assert, made them the best teacher, unlike the rest of those who just wanted to go home at the end of the day! In a discussion, I would then ask my students if they would like to have a job like that one. Turns out: they did not. Secondly, I cannot tell you how many times a graduating senior has sat in my office and mentioned that they’d like to be a teacher—they like kids, they like education, etc.—but they don’t want to give up their entire lives to their job… or they’re not going to do it.

Sigh.

TM: Your father and your grandfather were pastors. Some people thought you would be one, also: “I liked to be center stage, and pastors often are.” But you never felt that calling. Do you feel like there is a pastoral element to your vision of teaching, and working with students?

SR: My dad and grandfather were ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) pastors. I’m really proud of being Lutheran, and prouder still of the way the ELCA has become more progressive in my lifetime, ordaining women, performing same-sex marriages, and being a leader in protecting immigrants and refugees.

To answer the question, yes, I think so. I am not interested in converting my students (or anyone, for that matter), but I welcome the chance to talk about faith and religion with them. They often are struggling to reconcile the principles they were taught by their faith homes with the often-more progressive ideas of academia, and trying to find a way to hold onto both, especially when dealing with a new understanding of their own identity. That’s a tough road to walk, with as many different pathways as there are people, and I hope to be there for them as they do. Of course, this never comes up in the vast majority of student relationships I have, and that’s cool, too.

For me, being a pastor is rooted in working in love to support your congregation through their life journeys. I see being a teacher very similarly. As I write in the book, I do try to love all of my students, and meet them where they are, then help them move a little bit further down the road. That is a wildly different process—for some students, I may help them discover that they’re fine writers and that they want to start that career path; for others, my big help is to teach them that they have to come to class to pass. It does remind me of what I saw my father trying to do with his congregation—he might have visited a dying member in hospice and then driven directly to counsel a couple getting married, then written a sermon, all in four hours. Flexibility, clarity about the goals of the work, and an overarching desire really help when you’re doing work that varied and intense, whether it’s as a teacher or as a pastor.

TM: You write about your experiences teaching preschool through college. Were you writing about teaching while teaching primary and secondary students (during lunch, breaks, after school)? Or did these pieces arise afterward?

SR: I’ve been asked this question a number of times, and I think it’s because teachers desperately want to cling to the hope that if they just organize their time correctly, they will be able to pursue an artistic calling while also teaching. So I am truly sorry to say, nope, I didn’t write a single word of this book until I left full-time teaching to go to Pitt’s MFA program. I did teach then, but it was one college course of 20 or so students, not the five different classes of 30 students I was teaching in a New York City high school. I did write a little while I was teaching high school, mostly on weekends and in the summer, but at that time I was focused on writing plays.

But I don’t want to neglect the other part of your question—I think I would have found it impossible to both teach secondary students and write about teaching secondary students at the same time. (I didn’t think of myself as a writer when I taught preschool, so I don’t know if I would have felt the same.) I remember thinking very carefully about what was happening around me, and writing emails about my work to my parents and friends, and talking to my best friend Andrew about everything, as if I was trying to form the core that I could return to later, when I was ready to write. And when I got to Pitt and finally took a creative nonfiction class in my last year (I was a fiction major) one of the first things I wrote was the first draft of what became “Paulie” in the book. So I think I was subconsciously preparing, and just waiting for the right time to write about teaching. Two years into my three years at Pitt, where I felt safe and appreciated, and knew I would get helpful revision notes from my classmates and professor, then I was ready to dig back into that core.

TM: You share your experience adjuncting. It’s a perilous situation, as you note, for both exhausted and under-paid (and under-appreciated) adjuncts, as well as the students—who often don’t realize they are being taught by contingent faculty. In “On Adjuncting,” you make an effective case for why the particular sense and security of full-time professors is good for students, so I was wondering: was there a full-time professor during your college years who especially inspired you?

SR: Thank you for this! I want so much for readers to know and think about adjuncts. I had no idea that all of the professors at my college weren’t full-time, tenured professors, and I think about how differently I would have treated those who were adjuncts if I had recognized that they didn’t have any job security and were paid very little.

To be honest, I’ve taught in so many schools and gotten several different degrees, so my recollection of specific professors before Pitt is somewhat fuzzy. But I can say that I had amazing professors at Pitt, many of whom are now my colleagues, which is weird, but great! Everyone I took a class from in the MFA program was a full-time, tenured professor, I believe, and not a single one of them failed to teach me a great deal about the work of being a writer. I remain grateful to all of them, but Irina Reyn, Peter Trachtenberg, Angie Cruz, and Michael Meyer really took the time to connect with me and my work. It is a strange thing to teach someone who is around your age, but all of them handled that gracefully with me. In many ways, their belief in my abilities went beyond my own sense of what I would be able to do and gave me the courage to pursue writing as a career. I think that’s a nice thing, to believe in your students a little bit more than they believe in themselves.

TM: “I think the best part about teaching is the academic year,” you write. “The rise and fall of the seasons.” This is a marked contrast with time spent working in an office, where: “We were never working toward anything—no finals, no breaks. Just a relentless corporate slog to perhaps getting promoted or whatever, something, someday.” I always tell people that the seasons—throughout the academic year, and after—are what make teaching a magical experience for everyone, students included. We are in an unprecedented time, though, for education (and everything else!). What about our seasonless pandemic? How do you feel about the coming academic year?

SR: So unprecedented! I seem to have called down some sort of Office Cubicle Spirit who’s laughing at me now teaching from my home instead of in the midst of Pitt’s beautiful, bustling campus. I apologize, world. This is not what I wanted.

That said, I don’t see the pandemic as seasonless. Yes, I have spent too much time peering into a laptop from my dining room over the last four months. Yes, there is a strange sameness to the days—I just wondered to myself, “Why are you working so hard on a Saturday afternoon?” It’s Thursday morning.—but I am still aware of the passage of time, and the change of the seasons, and I would encourage everyone to connect with the environment around them if they possibly can, in order to help that awareness grow. I try to take a walk every morning, and note what’s blooming, what’s dying off, how the sun is hitting the sidewalk today. This is the information I’d take in without really realizing it if I was on campus, from the way the acorns bop me on the head early in the semester to my switch to entirely sensible duck boots as we finish off finals in the snow. I’m just trying to be more intentional about seeing its subtleties.

How to translate that intention into my courses, which are very likely to be online, is something I’m thinking a lot about. Whereas I might have begun an in-person class with a casual comment about the weather, I’ll need to be more intentional about that online and find those little moments of human connection—what are you doing over the weekend, has anyone watched that new Netflix show—that would otherwise not happen. Intentionality can feel forced, but I try to think of it more as a deliberateness, which is not a bad quality in a classroom. I’ll tell my students what I am doing, and why, too.

I have my concerns about the upcoming school year, as does every educator I know. In many ways, I will have an easier time of it: I do not have kids that will need my supervision, I’m not worried about a partner’s job loss, and I generally teach small classes of motivated students who have elected to be there. All of that will help, and I’m lucky. My deepest concerns are about how my health and disability will affect my students’ experience. Because I augment my bad hearing with lip-reading, classes in which everyone is masked are essentially pointless for me, unless I wanted to lecture for the entire time, which I do not. I also have some autoimmune issues, so I really doubt that I can safely be teaching in person this coming fall. Thus, it’s on me to make my online classes as engaging, worthwhile, and accessible as possible, so I am doing a lot of thinking about that. My supervisors in the English department are, too, and I feel a true confidence that our department’s classes will still be worthwhile for our students.

At the same time, I try not to sink into despair. While it’s important for teachers and professors to plan as enriching a classroom experience as we possibly can, there are always factors out of our control—if the course meets in a sunny room without air-conditioning, it’s nap time for everyone. If that unique mix of students really hit it off, it doesn’t matter if I’m on my A game or not—they’re going to have amazing discussions. So there are always things out of my control, and those seasons I can’t force are part of the fun of teaching for me: the season of 8 a.m. composition class, and the season of the math professor who never erased the five blackboards he filled with problems before he turned over the classroom to us, and the season of having a student who worked for a pizza place who would bring free pies to Wednesday night classes. This will be a different season of over-earnest how-are-yous and sketchy wifi connections and never really knowing how tall any of my students are, I guess. There will be benefits to teaching online I haven’t thought of yet. I’m still excited about the new school year!

The Millions Interview

Our Private and Public Lives: The Millions Interviews Sanaë Lemoine

Crystal Hana Kim

I met Sanaë Lemoine in graduate school nearly a decade ago, when we were both in our 20s. We often spoke about literature, writing, and teaching, and yet, we were never in workshop together. I was always curious about her writing, so when I received an early copy of her debut novel, The Margot Affair, I eagerly began. Reader, I gasped when I finished the first page. I then read the page again—aloud this time. Just take a look at this opening line: “On stage my mother was her truest self.” I love the seeming simplicity here, the power and confidence beneath those words.

Again and again, Lemoine’s sensuous sentences surprised me. The Margot Affair, out now from Hogarth, is the story of Margot, the secret daughter of a French politician and actress. At its heart, it’s about our public and private lives, family secrets, and what happens when our desire for acceptance supersedes our need for caution.

Lemoine and I had planned to meet in person for this interview, but the pandemic altered our plans. Over the phone, we discussed debuting during this time of uncertainty, transforming the personal into fiction, and the connection between language and home.

Crystal Hana Kim: This is a complicated, stressful time for all of us. I feel deeply for writers, particularly debut writers, who have books coming out now. How have you been feeling about the publication of The Margot Affair during the time of the coronavirus?

Sanaë Lemoine: I always imagined that the weeks leading up to book publication would be a stressful and emotional time in my life, no matter what else was happening around me. The thought of having to appear in public to talk about my book, of having strangers read it for the first time, especially as someone who is shy, was already causing me anxiety. But now, those stressors have either shifted or heightened. Maybe the most difficult thing is finding space to think about the book and self-promotion. I was sick for a few weeks, and during that time I wanted to curl up on the couch and forget I had ever written this novel! Some days, talking about the book or promoting myself feels near impossible, or at the very least, fraught.

I am hopeful in the sense that on a personal level, books and especially novels have always provided me so much solace, especially during difficult times of my life. They were incredibly soothing and comforting, especially in their ability to transport me to other worlds. I hope I can provide that experience for someone else.

The other thing I’m grateful for, which feels like a relief, is that I finished writing the book months ago. In a sense, the hard work is behind me. I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve found it more difficult to generate creative work, especially fiction. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to be in the middle of a project with a deadline looming over me. I think it would be hard to find the same focus and energy.

CHK: I feel the same way. I’ve found it harder to have the sustained focus to write fiction. Yet, that’s why it’s so important to celebrate your book. Writers put years into their work. Art is critical during times of isolation and uncertainty. For those who are unfamiliar, can you tell us what your book is about?

Sanaë Lemoine

SL: The novel is set in contemporary Paris and is the story of a 17-year-old girl named Margot. She is the hidden daughter of a longstanding affair between a French politician and a well-regarded stage actress. Margot’s father divides his time between his official family and hidden family. Margot has spent her entire life yearning to be recognized by her father as his legitimate daughter. The summer before her last year of high school, when the novel begins, she meets a journalist and makes the impulsive, reckless decision to reveal her father’s identity to him. This shatters her world and reconfigures the dynamics of her family. The novel takes place in the aftermath of this reveal. It charts the relationships that Margot forms as she’s confronted with the consequences of her actions.

CHK: When did you start writing this book? What was the process like?

SL: So long ago! I started writing the novel in my early 20s, and now I’m 30. It was my first year of the MFA at Columbia. I found myself writing stories that circled around the same characters and themes, that all took place in the same world. I kept returning to this character, Margot, who would eventually become the narrator of the novel. But it was a slow process. There was one class at Columbia that was really instrumental, a year-long novel workshop with Victor LaValle. It was his first year teaching this class—it was a kind of pilot program. His thinking was that it’s difficult to workshop a novel in one semester by only looking at excerpts of 20 or so pages at a time. He wanted us to workshop 50 to 100 pages so we could tackle structure, character arc, and plot. Several of us were writing interconnected short stories as opposed to novels, and without really noticing what we were doing. He helped us understand how a novel is made up of tension and plot.

After the MFA, I continued writing the novel for five to six years. I was working full time, so the way I wrote was quite on and off. There were several rounds of rewriting from scratch on my own, then a few deep revisions with my agent, and finally edits with my editor. The novel went through so many iterations. There’s a part of me that thinks I could have endlessly revised it.

When I think about the process of writing the book, what’s most interesting to me is how it evolved as I went from my early 20s to my 30s. There’s this interesting thing that happens where you as the writer are changing in important ways, but the fictional world you are working within is quite contained and restricted. My narrator is young, and the novel takes place over the short time frame of one year. I could feel myself becoming restless and wanting my narrator to also grow with me, make wiser choices, but instead I had to stay in her world, refine it and dig deeper into the questions I was exploring.

CHK: I know that Victor LaValle is always impressing upon students the importance of plot, which I don’t think is discussed as much in the MFA. A catalyst that drives your book is that Margot realizes her own invisibility as the daughter of this secret relationship. She decides to take action. How did you come up with the plot points of this book?

SL: Plot doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s not how I create a fictional world or what drives my writing. The plot for this book was like pulling teeth. My approach to writing is through characters, scenes, and observations. For a long time, my novel just read as a series of scenes where nothing much happened, and the plot points that I believed were there were so subtle that I don’t think anyone else could pick up on them. One of the most helpful exercises Victor had us do in the novel workshop was a reverse outline. We had to break down our book by chapter to look at what was happening scene by scene—whether there were gaps and missing connections, whether we were exploring the consequences and repercussions of significant events.

The other piece of advice that has stayed with me is something that he said—I’m forgetting how he phrased it—but it was something along these lines: when you come to the end of your novel, you want to think about where your main characters land. Who is safe and unsafe? Who needs protecting and defending? Who protects who? That was useful in thinking about the character arc as a journey, especially for this novel which has a coming-of-age element.

CHK: I love that advice; I’m going to hold onto that as I write.

SL: Yes, it gave me shivers. I feel like you really do that in your novel, If You Leave Me, perhaps subconsciously. At the end, you have a clear sense of who is safe, who is well, and who isn’t.

CHK: Thank you. I want to talk more about the themes in your book. The Margot Affair examines issues of power, sexuality, exploitation, and the secrets we keep from those around us. Were you thinking actively about these issues while writing or did they form over time?

SL: Yes and yes. I was thinking about these themes early on. My entryway into the novel was actually imagining a friendship between a ghostwriter and a teenage girl who happens to be the illegitimate daughter of a politician. Together they start writing the daughter’s memoir. From the beginning, I was interested in family secrets and what happens when those secrets are spilled, especially when the stakes are so high, and when they move beyond the private sphere of the family.

I was also interested in exploring this relationship between a 17-year-old girl who is learning how to exercise her independence and coming into her own, and this older woman who is already established in her career. I wanted to understand the dynamic between these two characters, what their own desires were, and how they would fuse and conflict.

As the novel went on, I became more drawn to the question of Margot’s agency. I wondered what it would be like for this young woman who is between adolescence and womanhood, to go from invisibility to visibility. Why would she have made that decision and how would she grapple with the repercussions?

Until a much more recent draft, Margot wasn’t the one to spill the secret of her father’s identity. For a long time, I resisted that—it’s obviously the more interesting and complicated choice because if she’s the one who breaks the silence, then she has to confront the consequences of that action. It’s a decision that encapsulates that time in her life, where on the one hand, she feels wise and believes she understands the world, especially because she’s lived this different life, but at the same time, she’s naive and there’s a lot she can’t anticipate or see. I wanted to capture that contradiction in her.

CHK: What were the personal, literary, or cultural inspirations for The Margot Affair?

SL: On a personal level, I was inspired by events in my own life. My father hid a second family from my mother and me for several years. I was 21 when he told me about them. My parents had started the process of divorcing. That same summer, coincidentally, I was in Paris working as a researcher for a journalist who was writing a nonfiction book on France through the lens of seduction. One of my assignments was to read a novel written by the daughter of former French president François Mitterrand. He had an illegitimate daughter whose identity was only revealed to the public when she was 19. This daughter, Mazarine, became a novelist.

I was drawn to her novel, and looking back, it’s not that surprising why, but in the moment I’m not quite sure I connected the dots. There’s something that I loved in the way she portrayed the intimate father-daughter relationship behind closed doors. It was less about him as the president of France and more about their bond, away from the public gaze. At the same time, my family was going through a complete transformation. A couple of months later, I started writing what would become The Margot Affair.

What I can now see, and maybe it wasn’t fully formed at the time, was that I was taking a private upheaval that I was experiencing with my parents and exploring it in a heightened way by raising the stakes.

CHK: We were talking about your handling of plot, but the language is also so beautiful in this book. I underlined all throughout my reading. Can you tell me more about how you approach language? I know you’re also fluent in French and Spanish; do those tongues affect your writing in English?

SL: The way I approach language is to write longhand. I love writing on paper; I don’t always have the time or patience, and I didn’t write the entire novel longhand, but I find that writing by hand slows me down. It opens more possibilities for images and sentences that lead me to unexpected places. I’m not someone who is constantly tweaking sentences and word choices when I’m revising, so I think it’s really helpful for me if I can slow down during the drafting process. When I can allow myself to be led by the writing more, there’s something magical that can happen.

The truth is that I’m self-conscious about languages, and I haven’t really spoken to anyone about this. I think I’m just formulating it for myself thanks to your question. As background, my father is French, my mother is Japanese. She raised me and my brother speaking Spanish because she spent most of her adult years in Argentina, and she’s most comfortable in Spanish. Until I was four, I spoke exclusively French and Spanish at home. Then, I moved from Paris to Melbourne and was put in an Australian school, where I first learned to read and write in English.

We moved back to France when I was 12, and I found it difficult to assimilate into the French schooling system. I had to learn French grammar and spelling from scratch. I was at a strict Catholic private school for a year, and the students would tease me for not being completely fluent, the teachers would read my tests aloud to comment on my spelling mistakes. It was humiliating. I’d come home in tears every evening. The greatest challenge was that French literature, unsurprisingly, was my favorite subject. I loved to read and write, so I was very motivated to do well in that class. I worked tirelessly to make up for lost time. But even today, I’m most comfortable in English.

Specifically, in writing this novel, I had a lot of fun playing around with French and English, especially when I was stuck in dialogue. For instance, I’d say the sentence in French and then translate back into English. It gave me more flexibility in terms of images and metaphors. I felt like it allowed me to play with word choice in a way that was perhaps more liberating. That felt true to the book, which is written in English but presupposes that you as the reader will suspend your disbelief and imagine that all characters are speaking French.

CHK: That’s so interesting because I think a lot of people in America want to know more than one language, and would perhaps be envious of your knowledge.

SL: It’s of course such a privilege to have learned languages without really trying, aside from when I was learning how to read and write in French. I guess it’s always going to be something that’s linked to my sense of self and identity, not feeling quite French or Japanese or American, and trying to make sense of my heritage, and whether your language, or the language you feel most comfortable in, defines who you are and your sense of home. I struggle with the idea that English is the language I’m most comfortable speaking and expressing myself fully in—my language of comfort. Sanaë is a Japanese name and is easy to pronounce in French and Spanish, but impossible to say properly in English. And France as a physical place still is so much my home, even though my parents no longer live there. When someone speaks to me in French, or I read a French book, or watch a French movie, I feel that indescribable pull towards home. When someone says my name in French (or in Japanese, of course), I think: Oh, that’s me.

CHK: Let’s talk about the delicious food-oriented details in this book. I noticed that you have a “What Margot Ate” section in your website, with recipes from the novel. How has your cooking and editorial background influenced your writing?

SL: Food has always been a great passion of mine along with writing. After I graduated from the MFA at Columbia, I started working in a test kitchen and then as a cookbook editor at Martha Stewart and Phaidon. What’s funny is that I didn’t start out writing a book about food, but of course it managed to seep into the world of the novel. Food is a vehicle of communication for the characters—it’s a way that they show their love for one another. For example, Margot’s mother, on her daughter’s birthday every year, prepares hot chocolate. It’s such a simple thing; she’s not a woman who enjoys cooking, but it’s this ritual she does year after year. She doesn’t tell Margot that she loves her, but this act is one of true affection and care.

The relationship between Margot and her father is also centered around food. He is someone who loves to eat, enjoys going to restaurants, and has imparted that love to Margot. Food is sometimes used as a tool of seduction. Early on, Brigitte, a ghostwriter who befriends Margot, invites Margot into her home for afternoon tea. She serves a homemade pear clafoutis. When Margot walks into her home, she smells butter and caramelized pears. There’s something immediately exciting and comforting in that.

I’m always thinking about what my characters are eating and cooking when I write about their world. It seems just as important as what they’re saying to each other, maybe because that is how it is in my own life. When I was thinking about building the world of the novel beyond the novel itself, I thought about writing recipes from the book. I took the different dishes that appear throughout and transformed them into recipes, in case readers would want to recreate them in their homes. (You can find a few on my website.)

CHK: I started the with a somber question about the pandemic, so I’d like to end on a more hopeful note. During this strange period of sustained crisis, where are you finding joy? What kind of art sustains you?

SL: On a very basic level, what has sustained me is my love of cooking and food. That’s something that I was mostly able to do even when I was sick. I miraculously didn’t lose my sense of taste or smell, and I think there’s a god out there because I had every other Covid-19 symptom! Especially for a writer, I find it wonderful to have that balance, to be able to stand in the kitchen and make something with my hands, and then see and taste a concrete result. I feel so lucky to be able to do this in a low-stakes way in my kitchen day after day.

In terms of turning to art for comfort, I was finding it hard to read early on. Now my mind has calmed down a little bit. When it was difficult to turn my attention to novels or longer forms of writing, I picked up The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. They’re so brilliant. In a sketch or couple of words, she’s able to conjure an entire world. Her stories have the depth and feeling of novels. I fell in love with her writing all over again. My favorites, unsurprisingly, are the ones with food, like “St. Martin” and “Kafka Cooks Dinner.”

I’ve been reading more nonfiction lately. I’m reading Minor Feelings right now, which I’m really enjoying. I don’t usually read as much nonfiction, but I’m feeling very energized by it. I also find myself returning to novels that I’ve already read, especially books that transport me to another place. I wonder if other writers are doing this as well. For example, Yoko Ogawa and her strange short novel Hotel Iris, which I’ve now read several times. I also never tired of Ishiguro, specifically his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. I love his ability to capture a feeling, and his sentences feel spun out of magic.

Bonus Links from Our Archive:
— A Year in Reading: Crystal Hana Kim
— What Are We Willing to Sacrifice? On Crystal Hana Kim’s ‘If You Leave Me’
— Lucy Tan and Crystal Hana Kim in Conversation

The Millions Interview

Art Imitates Life: The Millions Interviews Sam Lansky

Greg Mania

Listen, I’ve never had my chakras realigned but I do have a crystal somewhere that probably needed to be charged four full moons ago. When it comes to new-age spirituality, I’m probably a bit cynical. But I’m not one to look askance anyone’s religious, spiritual, mystical—or anything in between—practice.

Especially after I finished reading Broken People by Sam Lansky.

Like any good book, it challenged my ideas on how we practice self-care, self-awareness, and introspection. Without being prescriptive, Lansky’s exploration of how pain and trauma live in the body is triumphant in its careful, sensitive, and often humorous exploration of complex and nuanced topics.

After Sam (the protagonist), overhears a conversation about a globetrotting shaman at a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills—“he fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days”—he’s skeptical but his interest is piqued. A young man on the edge of emotional collapse, Sam agrees to sign up for a weekend—a three-day ceremony—facilitated by the shaman who promises to tap into the divine by using ayahuasca, a powerful South American psychoactive, as a gateway. Whether the ayahuasca was a placebo,,magic, or myth, the ghosts in Sam’s memory prove to be a powerful force of their own.

Broken People explores the space between the material and the mystic,, and carves a space for the neurodivergent in the midst of it all: a place to coexist with pain and, eventually, learn from it.

The Millions: As someone familiar with your work, including your memoir, The Gilded Razor, it’s apparent that this novel is a work of autofiction. What made you go this route instead of writing another memoir? Did it have anything to do with you experiencing resistance when pitching another memoir, like your protagonist does?

Sam Lansky: Greg! You’re not going to let me off easy here, are you? This is what I’ll say about this: The publishing market is its own slightly temperamental thing, and I’ll admit to some anxiety about memoir fatigue, particularly from a relatively young writer. But I also had a genuine desire to get away from the trap of the “I” voice, which was a place I’d been living in for much of my career, and this felt like an opportunity to mine some of my own experiences while experimenting with a medium I hadn’t explored yet.

TM: Your protagonist is also named Sam. Why did you choose to name him after yourself and not create greater distance with another name?

SL: I don’t want to be prescriptive about what readers should take away from this book, but the story I most wanted to tell—and the one I tried to tell with Broken People—is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and how sticky our seductive tendencies to self-narrativize can be. Naming the character after myself felt like a way to address that head-on—I intended it less as a way of saying, “This is a book about me!” and more because I have thought so much about how my own propensity for storytelling can be my worst addiction. To call the character Sam points out my complicity in that pattern.

TM: Every body of work—be it a memoir or a novel—follows an arc and aims for tonal consistency. What was it like fitting your real life story into the narrative framework of a novel?

SL: After my first book came out, I spent about a year writing without much sense of structure or narrative cohesion—it was just a familiar, therapeutic way of processing my experiences. Then, an encounter with a healer—not unlike the one Sam has in the book—shifted the way I had been thinking about my own loss and heartache. Very quickly this narrative snapped into place, and I felt like I had a really clear sense of the shape of this story, which I’d been missing up until that point.

TM: What tools did fiction equip you with that may not have been utilized when writing another memoir?

SL: As a journalist and writer of personal narrative, I long felt beholden to accuracy, even if the pact you make with a reader as a writer of memoir is more about memory than the facts. Having the freedom to compress, imagine, or rewrite stories or characters that may have started as lived experience but then got to shape-shift into something more dynamic or imaginative felt like such a gift.

You know, I came up during the golden age of the personal essay (which critics like Jia Tolentino have written about so smartly), and I felt very steeped in the culture of so-called “confessional” writing; it’s almost been something I’ve had to deprogram from, both my perception that it’s inherently positive or valuable to write about yourself and also the way that doing so serves my ego and fuels my narcissism. Writing this book as a novel felt like a very gentle tug away from personal narrative. My next book will be much more of a departure. I’m giving you my word on that. Mercifully, I’m not as interested in myself as a subject as I once was.

TM: Your novel moved me to my core: that’s a pun (Intended, thank you very much), because the shaman identifies a mass in Sam’s core, which basically stores the years of trauma he’s experienced. It made me think about what I live with, things I’m learning to live with. Was writing this novel a way of coexisting with the pain in your life?

SL: I’m glad to hear it resonated with you so viscerally. (Sorry.) This is tricky: I think there’s a tension between learning to live with your pain and refusing to fight your demons because they feel intractable. I should also say that I’m not a guru; if I wrote a self-help book, it would be terrible. Far be it from me to dispense life wisdom! But, both with my first book and with this one, I discovered a lot of grace in the phenomenon of, for lack of a better term, releasing it—that I had turned some tale of personal struggle into something useful that no longer belonged to me, because it now belonged to readers, and so it wasn’t mine to carry anymore. I do think we continue coexisting with pain, but I also believe, more and more, that we can learn to transcend it.

TM: Do you think that, as a society, we need to move away from the language that includes “healing” and “being fixed” and focus more on accepting the role of pain and trauma in our lives?

SL: Yes! Although I might draw a distinction between “healing” and “being fixed.” I’m definitely suspicious of anything being fixed, but I am more willing to consider a vocabulary of healing. (Maybe too willing, if I’m being honest with myself.) For those of us who’ve had access to resources like therapy or self-care—and that access is a tremendous privilege in and of itself—there can be a tendency to pathologize everything, or to view our feelings as problems to be solved. A lot of my own growth over the last couple years, as a writer and as a human being, has come from asking myself questions like: What is this discomfort trying to show me? Is there wisdom in this pain? Which I realize sounds very witchy, but I mean it in a real, practical way.

Let’s say I’m at a party and I’m having a ton of anxiety—which has been the case at every party I’ve ever been to, by the way. My first impulse is to make the anxiety the problem, and by extension, myself. But what if the anxiety is my body’s infinitely wise way of telling me that the party sucks? Can I embrace the anxiety as a teacher instead of as a fault? And can doing so allow me to be more forgiving with myself? I also think that, as the extraordinary pain of the last few months has laid bare—both from the pandemic and then more recently from the reckoning around violence against Black people and police brutality in America—we have an urgent responsibility to honor pain and trauma in our society, both the personal and the collective. It’s tempting to want to compartmentalize, or to shut down whether we are feeling our own anguish or witnessing that of others. But as we process and move through our own pain, we crack open and become more capable of empathy. That, to me, feels like its own form of healing.

TM: Towards the end, I was reminded of something my therapist has been trying to teach me: radical acceptance. Is this something you practice in your life?

SL: It’s something that I aspire to, but I don’t know if I’d call it a practice! I’m not someone who’s historically done a great job of embracing life on life’s terms, and that’s something I’m still working on. When I got sober, people in recovery talked a lot about acceptance, and I always felt uneasy about it. My unwillingness to accept what was happening was the primary driver of my ambition—if I was truly in acceptance, wouldn’t I become complacent? But I’ve come around to it much more, or I should say that my resistance has softened. Even if I’m not in radical acceptance, I push back more gently now. Also, it sounds like you have a good therapist.

TM: I feel like the people in my life fall largely in the middle of the Venn diagram, between cynic and believer. What do you want your reader to take away in regards to the intersection of materialism and mysticism?

SL: One of my biggest frustrations with the rhetoric of self-care, especially as it’s tied up with contemporary mysticism, is that it can feel so rarefied and so classist. But self-love and self-acceptance should not be solely available to people of a certain tax bracket or race—bluntly, they are not the exclusive domain of wealthy white women, regardless of how they are sold—and I don’t really believe that you need a fancy shaman to “fix” you. Part of my goal with Broken People was to interrogate that bougie New Age culture, about which I feel so much ambivalence, even as it continuously props me up through my life. I’ve been reflecting on my own potential for healing and the extent to which change can be incremental, and function outside of a capitalist framework; my earnest hope is that it leads readers to do the same.

TM: What did you learn about yourself while writing this book?

SL: You know, it’s funny—I think I learned that I am capable of saying the thing that I need to say, even if it scares me. Though it’s fiction, I poured so much of myself into this book, and it feels like a radically vulnerable act of public nudity. But for whatever reason, I needed to tell this story, and so I did, as plainly as I could. Now there are no more cobwebs.

The Millions Interview

Bulletproof Coffee to Bulletproof Vest: An Object Lessons Interview

Dinah Lenney and Kenneth R. Rosen

As contributors to the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury, Dinah Lenney and Kenneth R. Rosen each chose to investigate the deeper meaning and implication of a thing they encounter with some frequency—Dinah as a writer of memoir and personal essay, Ken as a war correspondent.

Dinah’s book, Coffee, turns out to be a personal history in which she confides and confronts the challenges of the day-to-day. And in Bulletproof Vest, Ken grapples with an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of his object on a molecular level and on the world stage.

The authors caught up to talk about not only coffee and bulletproof vests, but research and writing, process and metaphor, the things we can afford to take for granted, and the things we can’t and don’t.

Dinah Lenney: I’m remembering my daughter once had a teacher who was all the time saying, “Everything is connected to everything else.” (She never mentioned she was quoting Da Vinci…) So can we connect our objects, you and I? Did you know there’s a brand of coffee called Bulletproof?

Kenneth R. Rosen: I do—I remember it from my post-graduate days of putting grass-fed butter into my coffee, or something like that—something about being bulletproof in the gym, or bulletproof under the stressors of cubical office life.

DL: Says here on their site: “For the CEOs, the churners and burners, the parents, the dreamers, the people who want to be the best versions of themselves.” I’ve never tried it, though. And I know that’s done, butter and coffee—I haven’t tried that either, myself. Nor have I ever seen, so much as worn anything bulletproof. How did you decide you wanted to write a whole book about bulletproof vests? And how did you know where to start?

KRR: Bulletproof vests were an easy conduit to writing about safety and security, perceived and actual, as most of my travels in conflict zones were marked by fears not typically associated with bulletproof vests or what we might call Personal Protective Equipment (PPE): I was more terrified of working with fixers I never met, of missing deadline, of not being sympathetic enough to my subjects, of failing to answer questions correctly while detained at airports across the Middle East and once back stateside. I knew that the bulletproof vest, always located in the trunk of whatever car I travelled in, was a symbol of protection but suppressed anxieties rather than quelled them completely. Likewise, the vests themselves stood for the products we use and effort we make to do things that might otherwise scare us.

DL: I love that, the thing standing in for other things. In my case, I hoped coffee would be a way to talk about time. As in where does it go, and how to make it last. But coffee seems so ordinary (that’s what I thought at the start anyway). We mostly take it for granted, right? Even if you don’t drink coffee, chances are you’re acquainted with people who do.

The thing about your object (the bulletproof vest in the trunk of the car); if the feelings around it are familiar—or universal (anxiety, fear)—the object itself is very evidently anything but. So I wonder how far you take the metaphor. Like, do you consider the case of the sensitive flower who needs a bulletproof vest (in the guise of a good cup of coffee, maybe?) to deal with her day job, for instance? Or do you mostly tell stories about times when an actual bulletproof vest did or didn’t come in handy? Or even saved a life?

KRR: Never in a tactile sense. I have never been shot and never really wore my bulletproof vest while on assignments in Iraq and Syria. What made me most at ease, what offered me the most protection, were the people I travelled with: the fixers and interpreters and my editors with whom I emailed with every night. I look at bulletproofing from that perspective, as something we come to develop through relationships and rituals. Say, a heavy set of blankets at night or a piping-hot coffee in the morning.

DL: And was there piping-hot coffee in the morning? Kidding. I’m kidding, you don’t have to tell me (but you can!).

KRR: Coffee always. Always. And forever. Which is how I imagine you felt…you wanted from the outset for time to play into the writing and themes throughout your book. Was there something that came of the writing which was counter to what you had thought you’d find in coffee? I’m thinking of Dave Eggers’s The Monk of Mokha and the shocking story behind where our coffee comes from.

DL: Well, yes, that’s always true, isn’t it? That things come of the writing—there’s the reason to write in the first place. But in terms of what came of my research, definitely, yes, that, too. Starting with Eggers—early on I read his book, and it was shocking all right. High stakes coffee, coffee to literally die for. But there were other things that surprised me—the sweetness of a coffee cherry straight from the tree; the political history of coffee, and its longtime presence in art and song; my own growing fascination with the variations of taste and smell.

The interesting thing, though, for both of us sounds like, is that you start out writing about an object, whatever it is, and you wind up thinking about people, right? Or place? Relationships, personal history, yada yada. Some writers might want to avoid that sort of thing. Might shake it off, and force themselves to get back on track. Whereas for me— it’s so useful to have a way to fool myself into the kind of writing I most want to do.

KRR: This makes me think of the description of a mug through which Philip Roth traced his father’s father and their family lineage, in the opening sequence of Patrimony. A mug wasn’t simply a leak-proof vessel and holder of a shaving razor, but rather the grounding Roth needed to understand he came from elsewhere and that sometimes a family line can, overnight, or however disturbing to our ontological security, cease to exist—like the potential meaning behind an object, replaced as lives overturn and the object changes hands.

DL: Exactly. We endow objects much in the way we endow relationships. So the way we feel about things (and people, and place) says as much about us as those things (people, places). And, in particular, the thing about a thing—an object, I mean—is that it very often contains all of the above. It’s a vessel of meaning, right? And now I’m wondering if my job wasn’t easier than yours in the sense that I was dealing with something so common. Coffee is ubiquitous, it turns up everywhere, that’s what I discovered. Never mind all the stuff in the news, and on the shelves in your local bookstore. Coffee is a prop, if not a bona fide character, in literature, and film, and TV. It appears in galleries and museums. And almost everyone has a coffee story. And is eager to tell it. Truth is (now I can confess), I spent some months feeling overwhelmed by my object. Whereas a bulletproof vest. That’s so specific. Did you know from the outset how to approach? What you wanted to say? What sort of research did you have to do, and how did the writing itself surprise you? What did it yield—the writing, I mean—that you couldn’t have known when you started?

KRR: Actually I think yours was more difficult, precisely because of its ubiquity and the place it holds in the negative space of our collective imagination. As you note, a coffee (mug, bean, machine, etc.) is such a fixture—from the home to the office, to communal and ceremonial gatherings, to everywhere in between—I empathize with your struggle. Yours was the harder task. Sure, not everyone has a few sets of bulletproof vests and ceramic plates lounging around their home office, but I had to impose certain feelings onto the vest that might not be necessarily associated with it. I took pains to underscore that these vests do save lives, that I was thankful enough never to have seen them in action in that way. I likewise took pains to relate the vest to something people do recognize—like coffee. Something that brings a sense of continuity and comfort. We might now be talking in circles.

DL: Well, not so much that we’re talking in circles as that our objects really are connected. In the sense that they turn out to be ways to write about some of the same things. Continuity and comfort. There it is, well said. And you knew you wanted to write about those things?

KRR: I knew from the outset that I wanted to write about the vest as an anxiety blanket of sorts. And I knew that in order for me to succeed with downplaying its role as a physical protector and upping its role as an emotional guardian, I had to juxtapose the vest with what actually—in my few years traveling through war zones—made me feel safe. It’s why I splice chapters of memoir with reported, historical, and cultural sections. In this structure, the writing came fast and easy. I completed the manuscript in about three weeks, followed by a few editing run-throughs. I also hired an independent fact-checker to review the manuscript, which is a profession of protection and security in its own right.

DL: Three weeks! Ken, three weeks. I’m guessing this sort of sustained focus makes for a smooth read. Whereas coffee-the-book happened (happens) in fits and starts. (I just looked that up, that expression—dates back to the 1500s, just like coffee.)

KRR: Do you still feel that same sense of being overwhelmed when you have a coffee now? I’ve heard writers talk about their process as a total divestment from the world, with the eventual gradual return to the news cycle, families, vacations, something of a shock. What might surprise me that I may not have already known about coffee? Any strange traditions you came across in your research? (Likewise, where did you begin your research?)

DL: I really did start with Dave Eggers’s book. Or no, wait—even before I read The Monk of Mokha (and talk about daunting: to sign on to write about coffee only to find out that Dave Eggers got there first), I went to see a coffee farm in Goleta. I tasted the cherries—I got an idea of how labor intensive is the process; what it takes to get coffee from the orchard to pot; and all of us taking the stuff for granted, as if it grows on trees, which it does, but not in vacuum-sealed bags.

As for strange traditions. Well, the strangest might have to do with our fetishizing the process the way we do. I mean coffee has been delicious for centuries, right? For hundreds of years people have been brewing the stuff with their eyes and noses—checking the color, the aroma at every stage—but now. Now we have gadgets galore—we’re madly weighing, measuring, investing in special kettles with special thermometers.

KRR: But those newfangled gadgets are a way of elevating what we’ve come to know about coffee, no? In a way, they further that centuries-old tradition of sniffing and sipping and enjoying. An object has that power: to take something recognizable, something mundane or otherwise ever present, and reintroduce it. Think of seltzer! Man, they used to deliver that stuff in wooden cases. Now the majority of us enjoy it more regularly, with our own carbonation machine at home. An object can make something cool, or desirable again.

DL: Well, yeah. I love my Sodastream, love, love, love it. Although I also love the idea of people delivering things in wooden crates—Ken, I’m old enough to remember the milkman, and the galvanized box on our back porch where he left two glass bottles of whole, two of skim, red and green tops, depending. Crate/box/package, gosh, there’s a whole array of objects to reckon with, right? Altogether? As in “Containers”? One at a time? “Paper bag”?

KRR: Oh my god, those galvanized boxes—I forgot all about those! And there I go, swept off into memories of my childhood at the Jersey Shore, all at the behest of an inanimate square.

DL: Exactly. Anyway. I’m not overwhelmed anymore, no. Only grateful, not just to be done, but for the doing itself. It’s nice to simply look forward to getting up and making that first pot of coffee, which, having written the book, I appreciate more than ever. Not just because it’s actually better—though it is. But having given it all that time and thought (in fits and starts), I’m not likely to take coffee for granted ever again. At some point in the process, I had enough material to write, I dunno, three books, at least, and each from a different angle. Did you feel that way, too?

KRR: I’ve never had enough assignments. My “unpublished” and “story idea” folders grow by the day, as well as objects I could totally see myself writing about one day.

DL: Did writing the book change your relationship with the anxiety that first prompted the idea? Or with the vest itself?

KRR: For bulletproof vests, it did further my ability to witness events and visit regions, countries I otherwise would have felt out-of-place visiting. One of the first scenes in the book takes place at a hostile environment training course where myself and other journalists and aid workers are taught to treat ballistics wounds (as best we can) and to evade capture. The training manifests itself in its final form as the vest, which takes all the knowledge of safety and literally displays it.

DL: Are you still working in war zones?

KRR: I do still cover armed conflict. Though I had worked for three years in conflict zones before writing this book, my fourth article from Iraq was a personal essay on how traveling to a conflict zone as a naturally anxious and depressed person enlightened me to my own baseless woes. The bulletproof vest was a natural foil.

It seemed to me that everyone is scared, always, whether it be worry surrounding the start of a new job or entering into a new relationship or deciding to enlist in the military or go off to college. To crib from Michael Herr, we carry things (physical, emotional, spiritual) to help us pull ourselves through. In war, for me, that ends up being the friendships I have formed with my fixers and interpreters.

Were you to write about a new object, what would it be and why? Have you taken closer looks into other objects as a result of your writing an OL book?

DL: I know a writer who wants to pitch “Orchestra”—which is a great idea, isn’t it? But I tend to think small—if I were to do another OL book, I might go with piano or guitar (or singer!) as opposed to band. Although I like the idea of a book titled Band. But you know what I’d really love to write about? Windows.

KRR: Perhaps another OL book is in your future? Didn’t you write a book called The Object Parade?

DL: It’s true; I can’t seem to get enough. That’s why I pitched Coffee, along with other items, and that was the one the editors liked. Honestly, I feel like I could write about objects for the rest of my writing life. (Herr is absolutely right—they pull us through, and also they remind us where we’ve already been.) How will I ever move on? Why should I?

The Millions Interview

Fate, Capitalism, and Football: The Millions Interviews Katherine Hill

Hannah Gersen

Katherine Hill has always been an omnivorous sports fan, someone who can get caught up in March Madness, World Cup soccer, Wimbledon, and the Olympics. But football was the sport she wanted to explore in her second novel, A Short Move , which follows the life story of Mitch Wilkins, a high school football star who makes it all the way to the NFL. For Hill, football was the perfect sport for thinking about fate: “There were so many formal aspects of the game that were interesting in terms of thinking about a lifespan—the stopping and starting of the clock, the specificity of each position and what each particular player’s skills are, what they’re good at, what their job is on the field. And with the intensity of its collisions, with its demands—it’s such a physically demanding sport—it really felt like kind of the perfect metaphor for life under capitalism.”

Told from a variety of perspectives, A Short Move begins when Mitch is in utero, and his parents are deciding whether or not to have him. (Spoiler Alert: Mitch is born.) The reader then meets Mitch at different points in his life, sometimes seeing the world through Mitch’s eyes, other times inhabiting the perspectives of Mitch’s parents, coaches, wives, and teammates. It’s a kaleidoscopic approach that looks beyond one man’s individual talent to the ecosystem of people, places, and industries that both nurture and exploit an athletic gift.

Hill is a friend of mine, our connection forged in part by the fact that we both have school administrator parents, an occupation that entails a certain amount of moving around. Born in Washington D.C., Hill grew up in Manhattan, small-town Ohio, central Virginia, and suburban Maryland. A Short Move hops all over the country, but the heart of the book is in central Virginia, where Mitch is born and raised. It’s a region that Hill remembers well, maybe because she left it at a formative age, in her early teens, to go to high school in the suburbs of D.C. “When you move a lot, you notice differences in culture. Amherst, Virginia, and Bethesda, Md., are just three hours apart, but the climate is different, the people are different, the politics are different. It’s night and day.”

I had hoped to interview Hill in person, in her Brooklyn home, but in these times of quarantine, we ended up talking over the phone. The following interview has been edited and condensed.

The Millions: Tell me how you came to write this particular story, a cradle-to-grave
story about a football player.

Katherine Hill: It started with a short story that I wrote that was about a woman who drops out of college and finds herself working in retail. Her name is Alyssa, and her father, a minor character, is a former NFL football player. I wrote that story, thought it was a one-off, and published it in n+1. The editor asked me if it was part of something larger, and it actually wasn’t, but sometimes you just need someone to ask you that question. I was really interested in the father, so I wrote another story about him, when he is basically the same age that Alyssa is in the first story. He’s 18, about to go to college, and he has an awareness that he’s about to become the person he’s going to become, that he’s on the cusp of some new self. In that story, I met his mom and his girlfriend and I wanted to know more about all these people. I also found it interesting to think about the huge changes in his life, from his late teens to his early 40s. I wanted to fill in the gaps knowing I could never actually fill in the gaps. But I wanted to plot out his life and its trajectory.

TM: What
do you mean you wanted to fill in the gaps knowing that you couldn’t fill them
in?

KH: Well, one of the really important features of this book is the absences, which is something I’ve always been interested in, artistically. In theater, it’s the stuff that happens offstage. In visual art, it’s the negative space. And in novels, it’s the stuff that’s off the page or between the lines. From the beginning of this project I was attracted to the idea of a novel that would invite the reader to supply a lot—the actions and events that are not put into words by the author. I thought this structure made a lot of sense for a story about an athlete who wears many different identities, who experiences blackouts as a matter of course, and whose body develops rapidly, and also falls apart rapidly within a compressed period of time. He’s a retired old guy in his late 30s. For most of us, late 30s is prime.

TM: You use
a lot of different points of view in your novel: Mitch, Mitch’s wife, his
father, his coach, his teammate, his mother. I wondered how you decided which
points of view to include?

KH: I centered the book on the family: I started close and then moved out. I was really interested in his mother, first of all, who raised him on her own. And also, the absent father. And then his first wife. Perspective from the family seemed really important, because it’s a life narrative, not a classic sports story. It’s a family novel. Some of us grow up and have our full story from womb to tomb without family being a huge part of it, but for most of us, the family that you leave, the family that you raise, the family that you work hard to build—in many ways that is the plot of life. But Mitch also has an important public life, so I had to include some perspectives from that world. And I think, in a way, the perspectives I found there were also familial. His teammate, D’Antonio Mars, is like a brother, a fellow traveler. So there’s a family quality to those sections of the book, too.

TM: Were there points of view you attempted and then decided not to do?

KH: I
considered doing something with a reporter, and someone involved in the corporate
sponsorships of athletes. But in the end, I just went deeper on the family. Even
though I was interested in gaps and leaving things out, it’s inevitable—for me,
anyway—to want to get to know my existing characters better. And so I worked
that out by going very deep in short sections. You get to know the characters
very well during a particular moment in time.

TM: Was
there a character who surprised you?

KH: They
all did. One of the bigger surprises for me was the solidarity between Mitch’s
mother and his first wife. They clash in the beginning, so realizing that they
might find a way to get along was a lovely surprise and kind of a
counter-intuitive one—but one that I was really committed to once I realized it
could be true. The more standard and more boring story is one of rivalry and
irreconcilable differences. In this case, that seemed like the direction it was
headed in, but it emerged in a different way.

TM: Do you
think of this book as linked short stories? Can they stand alone?

KH: I did think of it as a novel in stories, or an episodic novel. A book that was really important to me when I was writing was A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is a novel but also kind of a collection of stories. I just admired so much of what Jennifer Egan did, the way we had to imagine what had happened to characters between what she calls point A and point B. I actually think you have to fill in a lot more with her book because she has so many characters, whereas with my book, Mitch is always there at the center. He’s the spine of the novel. His life is the structure.

TM: I think A Visit from the Goon Squad has been pretty influential to writers, it gets mentioned a lot. I think it gave people permission to think about how to structure things in a different way.

KH: Agreed.
Permission is a great word. I think many of us are looking to bust out of the
current conventions of novel structure, which somehow feel so fixed. Which is
interesting to me because the novel is actually a pretty unregulated form,
unlike the sonnet or the tragedy. It’s a kind of wonderfully lawless form.
Maybe it’s something about the commercialization of it, or the institutionalization
of creative writing as an academic discipline, that’s tricked us into thinking
the novel has a set form. But Egan reminded us that the form has so many
possibilities—that it’s actually defined by its infinite possibilities. The
only one standard feature being: figures over time.

TM: This
is your second book. How did it compare to writing your first book?

KH: My first book, [The Violet Hour], is the one that taught me how to write a novel. And it felt very exciting because I was doing this big thing. I was writing a novel—it was so ambitious! But it also felt scary because I had no idea what success was going to look like. I mean I sort of had an idea, because I’d read a lot of novels, and I was trying to enter their company. But until you’ve done it, you haven’t done it. So there was this kind of incredible relief and elation at the end, and I started the second one on the high of having completed the first. I thought, I know how to do this now! I’ll just do it again! It got off to a great fast start. Much faster than the first one, which required a lot of wrong turns and starting over and re-outlining and all that. But the second one, once I had the first two moments in time—the daughter and the father—was easy to outline.

The first novel had a very
complicated structure of going forward and backward in time, and it was also a
family novel. So there are similarities between the two. But the structure of
the second novel is more radical. I’m not sure it’s more ambitious, or harder
to pull off. It’s just aesthetically more radical from what we consider to be
the standard form. And as I was making it, I had to have a lot of faith that
the choices I was making were good ones. Because once you start building
something, it becomes more itself and harder to pick apart and rearrange. It ran
into a lot of trouble getting sold. I was tested on that front, and it hurt,
but I always believed that I had made the right choice.

TM: What
was the trouble you had in selling it?

KH: It’s a pretty typical story. I actually think what happened to me is what happens to many novelists writing their second books. My first novel was published with a major press, and got some nice review attention, but it didn’t light the world on fire and it wasn’t a bestseller. So when the time came to sell my second novel, and it was more formally daring than the first one—which happens a lot, too—my first publisher declined to publish it. That was a big blow. They had an option on it, and I thought once you’re in, you’re in. Which is so naïve. But I had to believe that to write it. That kind of stupid confidence is really necessary when you’re working on a big, risky project.

My agent was like, it’s fine, this book is amazing, it will sell. I made a few revisions because I always have to revise after rejection, and then he took it out pretty widely in New York. They just all rejected it. I don’t even know how many. It was probably 30 or 40—a huge number of publishers. I was numb at first, then I was devastated, and then I was determined. It was a very emotionally volatile time, because I had devoted my entire artistic and professional life to this book. I’m a professor, I teach writing, and I had to get the book published to keep my job. But I’m also pretty stubborn about my creative work. My agent and I had some hard conversations. He still believed in it but had felt pretty discouraged by the response.

The one theme that emerged
was that people weren’t into the structure. But for me, the structure was the book. It’s a life narrative,
chronological, from before our protagonist’s birth to after his death, and it’s
told episodically through a relay of perspectives. I was so committed to the overall
effect. I didn’t want to write a different football novel, and I didn’t want to
write a different family novel. And so I went out in search of independent
presses that would be more open to formally challenging projects. I got a
couple of offers and Ig was really enthusiastic. They got it right away and
were excited about it. It was all the affirmation I needed.

TM: How
has it been coming out with a book during this strange time of Covid-19?

KH: Well, fortunately for me, it’s corresponded with the strange and wonderful time of having my first baby, so I was home all the time anyway. I knew at some point during the first months of her life that I would turn my attention back to promoting the book. And that is all still true and the same as I imagined. But one difference is that everything physical has been canceled. I was going to have readings in several places, a mini book tour. So that’s a bummer, because I love the chance to do big readings in the cities I’ve lived in—D.C., Boston, Philly, and New York. But, I guess because I have this wonderful baby, it doesn’t really feel like a loss. If anything it’s like, oh well, I don’t have to worry about the trip. Maybe that’s short-sighted. But a book lives for a long time, so I’m hopeful there will be opportunities in the future when we can gather again. Which I do believe will happen, maybe not as soon as everyone wants, but at some point.

I think a lot of publishers
have been cancelling and postponing or moving their books, whereas we just
stayed the course. So it remains to be seen how affected we will be by that
decision—to be coming out in June when people are still at home or only
tentatively going out. I’m hopeful that one of the things people do at home is
read. And maybe they’re sick of screens, so maybe having a book with pages will
be appealing to more people in this moment. I think if it had come out in
March, when everyone was getting used to this new life, that would have been
worse, but with June I’m bizarrely hopeful.

TM: Since
this is a football book, I have to ask you about football: What team do you
follow?

KH: I follow Washington. I can barely say the name out loud. So yeah, we have a racist name, it’s really bad, and we should change it. But I said it for many, many years before the current effort to stop. So, that’s my team. It’s a terrible franchise, the owner is despicable, and the team has been a disappointment for, I don’t know, 20 years? They last won a Super Bowl in the early 1990s.

D.C. is the closest thing I have to a hometown and I married a D.C. local. I followed them obsessively throughout the 2000s, in my 20s, especially in the years I lived in Philadelphia. Every Sunday my husband and I went to this ramshackle sports bar called Cavanaugh’s and watched the team play. We had to go out because unless you have Direct TV, you can’t follow anyone but the local team on television. And the local team was the Eagles.

On the one hand it was it was kind of nice because we couldn’t just stay at home and have our private obsession; we had to go out to a communal space, which is what sports want. And in Philly, we had all these wonderful fan friends. They were friends from, I think, a Quaker camp in Maryland. Many of them had gone to college in Philly and stuck around and they were all involved in social justice in some way—just the most decent, best people you could ever meet, and all die-hard Washington fans. Not only that, they were our kind of fans: in love with the players, optimistic, and really faithful. So we would watch with them. We literally met just sitting next to them at the bar.

I think that experience was something that led me to write this book, just that kind of die-hard fandom in my 20s. And, as I think often happens when we devote ourselves to a subject, the process of writing the book or going deep on the subject actually cures you of the subject, a little bit. I’m now watching less football than I ever have in my life. It’s not because I’m protesting the treatment of the athletes or anything like that; they’d want me to watch. It’s just because at this time in my life, I feel like I did football. Though I’m also pretty sure it’ll always be there for me to come back to. I have a daughter now, and I’m sure watching the game will be something we do together, which is something I did with my parents.

TM: What
was your research process like for the book?

KH: I read a lot of football memoirs and journalistic accounts of football seasons. It’s sort of a classically clichéd genre, so I had to work hard to find the ones that would be illuminating and interesting—that would spark my imagination in some way. I have a shelf of pretty good books that got me thinking about the day-to-day experience of the athlete. I read Warren Sapp’s memoir, Sapp Attack, which is really outrageous but has a terrific voice; and Tony Siragusa’s memoir, Goose ; and Nate Jackson’s memoir Slow Getting Up. He’s a pretty decent writer, and he wasn’t a star, which is such a valuable perspective. There’s also a really wonderful book by Nicholas Dawidoff called Collision Low Crossers, about a single season with the New York Jets—that’s full of really great details. So, books like that, that’s where I started. I also watched a lot of old game footage and did some in-person interviews. I spoke to a few former players, and I found this really wonderful YouTube show called The Real Rob Report, with Michael Robinson, who was a fullback for the Seattle Seahawks. It’s really hard to find now, you can only get little bits and pieces of it, but it was basically a behind-the-scenes perspective. He just had so much great locker room footage, which was the one thing I was never going to get access to. I toured one practice facility, the Baltimore Ravens, but they wouldn’t let me in the locker room.

A lot of the research was
just armor I needed to convince myself that I could write about this world that
I had never participated in myself. I had to make sure I got the football
details right, or right enough, and I had to make sure I was representing a
possible truth about our world. The harder stuff was the emotional and
psychological stuff that no amount of research can teach you. You just have to
let the characters discover that themselves, and you have to discover that with
them.

The Millions Interview

The Desire Not to Be: The Millions Interviews Garth Greenwell

Adam Vitcavage

In Cleanness, Garth Greenwell’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut What Belongs to You, the author brings readers into an intimate and explicit relationship between an unnamed narrator and a student named R. Greenwell’s first and second books aren’t necessarily a pair. One does not need to be read before the other, but they both do revolve around the same characters, location, and time.

Cleanness expands on what Greenwell built in his first book. Long passages explore the queer body and the love and sex that comes with it. The narrator and R. live in Sofia, Bulgaria, where they are happy together, but there is a sense of end looming over their heads. The book begins and ends with explicit scenes of sex—more than the fleeting moments in his first book. Greenwell delivers these moments with such beauty and frankness, without shying away from the sadomasochism and voyeurism that fill these men’s relationships.

I spoke with the author about the relationship between his first two books, his approach to crafting his novels, and why Cleanness needed explicit sex scenes.

The Millions: What Belongs to You Came out three years ago. When did you start thinking about Cleanness?

Garth Greenwell: I started writing the earliest sections of Cleanness in 2011. I wrote several of the chapters at the same time as What Belongs to You. I would finish scenes for that book and turn and write scenes I knew would be for a different book. By the time What Belongs to You was published in 2016, I probably had about half the book written. The other half was written in the years since.

TM: How did you know what was meant for your debut as opposed to this book?

GG: It was really clear to me. I had a very early intuition that What Belongs to You needed to be a streamlined container and really focused on the relationship between these two men. I knew there were other aspects of the narrator’s life and world that I wanted to explore.

What made it okay for me to leave that out of What Belongs to You was that I knew there was this other book that was more of an ample container that could contain more places and more characters.

TM: R. played a vital but small role in your debut and is now back for Cleanness. What made you return to him?

GG: The earliest thing I knew about Cleanness was that the heart of it would be the relationship with R. It was interesting to have What Belongs to You be what it was and write the scenes with R. who only really appears on Skype. It was interesting to leave so much out and so much of that relationship untold because I knew I wanted it to be in this other book.

I hope the books are independent and that someone can read Cleanness without having read What Belongs to You, but they do intermingle. It’s not that one is a sequel or a prequel. They occupy the same geographical and temporal space. If someone reads What Belongs to You and then Cleanness or Cleanness and then What Belongs to You, I hope they would be much richer books.

TM: The books are siblings in a sense that they coexist and touch each other’s lives but you don’t need to know everything about life for another life to make sense.

GG: Also, there is a tension in me as an artist where on one hand I desire well-made or well-shaped things and enjoy a formally satisfying object. On the other hand, feeling the artifice of that and how inadequate those perfectly shaped objects fail to represent the reality of our lives.

It’s a way of trying to have my cake and eat it, too. To have these books that are elaborately shaped, but there is an acknowledgment between the two that there is an openness to these shapes. My hope with What Belongs to You was that the first two sentences lit a fuse and the bomb that it led to went off in the last chapter. That book was a thing in it of itself and shaped in a way that it was as satisfying as I could make it.

If you put Cleanness next to it, the shape that book made is forced to open up again. Cleanness filters in and then What Belongs to You filters into Cleanness. That is something very appealing to me. Having books that are their own thing but also constantly opening up into one another.

TM: I was very engulfed by your sense of place and how you present Sofia to us in such a manner where you don’t beat readers over the head with place and setting. What is your approach to writing about Sofia?

GG: I think my approach to writing, in general, is that it is a discipline of looking. It is a way to observe the world in the fullest intensity of all of my faculties. My physical sensorial apparatus and my moral faculties. It’s something interesting to me, and is something I can’t explain to myself, about what I can invent in fiction and what I can’t invent in fiction.

Something I cannot invent where there is a complete block is place. I wrote What Belongs to You when I was living in Bulgaria. Much of Cleanness, about half, I wrote after I left Bulgaria. That was really difficult. I found I would be blocked in a scene, let’s say if I couldn’t remember what a particular street corner smelled like at 10 o’clock at night. I would wrestle with myself and tell myself to make it up and I couldn’t.

I spent one to two months in Bulgaria every year I was working on this book and I would go around with a notebook seriously recording sense data. I was trying to make verbal sketches in case they would become helpful to me writing this book.

When I work with students about scenery, I do think it’s true that much of the art of conveying reality lays not in perfusion but in selection. It’s not a matter of accumulating sense data, but trying to sniff out that particular detail that will bring a world to life.

TM: Do you think you’d ever be able to write about a place you haven’t spent a lot of time in, or will your works primarily be set in Bulgaria or even Iowa?

GG: I do think as I was finishing Cleanness that the chapter of my creative and affective life that has been about Bulgaria has come to a state of completion. It made finishing the book very hard, actually. Place has been the start and finish of everything I have written. I can’t imagine writing well about a place where I had not had a profound experience in. I don’t think the profundity of experience is equal to time spent. I can imagine being in a place for a weekend and having a profound experience enough to write about it or spending 10 years in a place and feeling the same way.

I can’t imagine setting a book somewhere that I didn’t have a profound experience in. Who knows, maybe in 10 years I’ll feel that way, but can’t imagine that right now.

TM: The body of this book also features a lot of long passages. What about those long takes on a subject appeals to you?

GG: It doesn’t really feel like a choice. I think I tend to think slowly and I need to dwell in order to think through a thought completely. When I was writing both books or when I am writing anything, my mantra is to be patient and to dwell in a scene until I feel like it taught me everything it could teach me.

I like writing where I feel like a writer is wringing a situation dry and they are not eager to move on. The feeling that they want to stay with a particular moment until it has done all of the work it can do.

That said, the center of the book, which is called “The Frog King,” is in fragments. The new project’s early material has also been in that fragmented vein. It was a surprise to me when “The Frog King” was written that way. It’s been a surprise with the new project. I’m not sure where that is going to lead, but it is exciting to see significance driven by juxtaposition as opposed to by a feeling of wringing a scene dry.

I feel that feels constant with poetry writing, which I have done most of my life as a writer. It feels the way poems are composed. I adore writers like Michael Ondaatje who use fragments in very brilliant ways. That is to say, I am interested in other forms as well.

TM: I always adored how your passages, as you say, wring a moment dry because it feels like the mundane is cinematic and dramatic. I’m drawn to that because mundane is what most of our lives are.

GG: I believe that revelation lies all around us. One of my most central beliefs about literature is that literature is a way of looking. It doesn’t have to do with extraordinary or unusual events. It has to do with a particular attitude taken toward the world.

TM: This book also deals with sex, which you have written about in the past, but this book feels a little different. How has writing about sex and the body changed for you between books?

GG: I actually think Cleanness is quite different in that respect. One of the biggest surprises about the reception of What Belongs to You was how much people talked about sex when there was very little sex in that book. I think that does say something about where mainstream, literary American publishing was in 2016. The fact that a book like mine, which did have explicit passages that equaled maybe two or three pages, seemed so surprising to people.

Some of the most explicit scenes in Cleanness were written before the What Belongs to You came out, but I did feel in response to that reaction, I felt I’ll earn that conversation in that book. I wanted to push what I could do in writing about sex.

I feel like sex is this extraordinarily complex and dense act of communication. Wringing a moment dry of its significance is really fascinating and to try to see how one can untangle the various kinds of communication that are happening during sex. I am also just interested in sex. Sex seems to be interesting in a scenic way. I am interested in how bodies occupy space during sex. I am also interested in it in an emotional way and what people feel during sex. I am also interested in a philosophical way. I think sex is the source of our metaphysics and where we have our greatest intimations of transcendence. It’s something that can do a lot of work in fiction.

I was also just interested in the challenge of writing something as explicit as I could make it, as well as making as high art as I could make it. These characters are in moments that they themselves view as degrading but I wanted to treat that situation with all of the serious and dignity bestowed upon high art.

TM: Were the scenes featuring sadomasochism and more explicit content scenes you wanted to write previously but couldn’t for whatever reason?

GG: One of the things that concerns me when I write about multiple characters is the question of power. In What Belongs to You, the question of power is layered in many ways. It has to do with nationality and class and beauty and desire. There is a way in which that was fertile enough and complex enough without the added layer of S&M.

In some sense, both S&M and sex work raise questions of consent and what extent we can consent to things and what extent we can’t and how difficult that is to discern. In writing Cleanness, I knew I wanted to write about sadomasochism and think of questions of consent and coercion. I wanted to write about the desire not to be. Sex is an expression of that desire not to be.

The book is called Cleanness and I think there is something in us that longs very much for cleanness. I think cleanness often represents the desire not to be. I think there is also something in us that longs for filth. I think the longing for filth can also be the desire not to be. I think those things can also be the desire to occupy the body and connect with another body. Sex seems like such an emotional and moral tangle. I wanted to view it from as many different angles as I could in this book. The different kinds of communication that sex can be, like communicating with a stranger or communicating with a beloved; I wanted there to be a kaleidoscopic surveying of sex as human activity and communication in the book.

TM: How has sex and queerness changed in literature since you were a young student learning to write to now as a teacher teaching others to write?

GG: I think it’s hard to say anything that is really true about that. I’ll hear others and hear myself talking in really simplistic ways about that, but I actually don’t think it’s simple. I think queer sex, but also sex in general, I feel our culture is constantly losing and having to reinvent the resources for addressing sex in art.

I often hear this narrative that people weren’t writing queer sex before the 1980s or stopped in the 1980s because of the AIDS epidemic but started again in the 2000s. I think if you look closely, none of that is true. Gordon Merrick wrote The Lord Won’t Mind trilogy which is still jaw-droppingly explicit and that first book came out in 1970. Maybe there is more latitude for explicitness in mainstream publishing right now in this moment. I do think there is more latitude for a range of possibilities for queer life. It doesn’t shock me if there is a book about a monogamous gay couple or if there is a novel with a polyamorous community. I think there is much more acknowledgment that various ways of life are legitimate and have a place in literature.

Something I think about in Cleanness is anal sex and it does feel our culture is very adverse to talking about anal sex and especially anal sex between men. In What Belongs to You, there is no representation of anal sex. In Cleanness there is a lot of it. I wanted to think of anality and what it means to try to represent that in a way that doesn’t let people look away from it. I do think a lot of acceptance of queer people in our culture is dependent on not thinking about men fucking each other. Writing that book has made me more sensitive to anality in general in literature. D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterly’s Lover is so good about writing about anal sex and it is jaw-dropping to see how willing he is to go there.

So every time I think our age has allowed us to do x, y, or z, I look back and realize others were able do it.

The Millions Interview

I Didn’t Have a Plan: The Millions Interviews Nick Flynn

Jeff Makos | 1

In 2000, Nick Flynn’s debut poetry collection, Some Ether—which examines family, childhood, and trauma—won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He followed it up with collections like Blind Huber, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, and My Feelings, as well as the memoirs Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award—The Ticking Is the Bomb, and The Reenactments.

Flynn’s latest book is a memoir about his early childhood and mother, who committed suicide when he was 22. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, in which Flynn reflects on his dysfunctional family and its effects on his life, was hailed by Publishers Weekly, which said, “Readers will devour this powerful memoir of letting go.”
We caught up with Flynn to talk about family and the difference between writing poetry and memoir.

The Millions: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was an immediate success in 2004, and became a film. Was it always your plan to write a trilogy?
Nick Flynn: Immediate success? I’d say the surprising success of Suck City! It was never the plan to do a trilogy. My relationships with my parents were complicated. After the first book about my father’s homelessness, and then the second about my daughter, the third grew organically out of all the time I had spent writing about family and how interesting it was to see them projected onto the movie screen. At a certain point, it felt like the three memoirs were talking to each other. One might say that it’s all just writing one book.
TM: For this book, you took your daughter with you to visit the house that your mother tried to burn down when you were seven years old. What inspired you to take her along?
NF: Again, like writing the memoirs, I didn’t have a plan. It just worked out that while I was teaching in Boston, my wife was out of town, and I decided to take my daughter on my road trips. The interesting thing to me was that when we started our trips, she was seven years old, and she was interested in knowing what I was doing at age seven. Every summer for the next three years we would travel to Scituate. It was like showing her a map of my childhood, showing that these things had happened to me.
TM: Did you rely on journals from your life during these trips with your daughter?
NF: Actually, I had nothing written about those times. In a way, I did the work of getting the material for this memoir by working collaboratively with my daughter, by her wanting me to tell her stories but also the way those stories would bring back memories of other stories. It wasn’t until the third trip that we walked into the house that my mother had tried to burn down. It’s still standing, and it felt odd. But I was lucky the house was standing, to be able to go in with my daughter and see it again.
TM: Is your approach to writing poetry different than writing memoirs?
NF: All writing is different. My approach to memoir writing demands a different schedule than other writing. It may be more organized. I take notes, I write in condensed bursts. I do that with poetry also, but the process is more alchemic. It’s uncontainable. It’s fluid, I can drift in another realm. I can’t really do that in a memoir. The stuff in this book actually happened. It doesn’t always put me in the best light, but it’s not my job to put myself in the best light.
This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.