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The Rumpus Interview with Isaac Oliver

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Isaac Oliver is the author of Intimacy Idiot, a debut collection of essays about dating, living, working, and being single in NYC. Interspersed throughout the book are recipes, wry poems, and subway observations, providing a deeply personal take on what it’s like to be looking for love—or a connection—in New York. Oliver’s self-deprecating, overanalyzing take on his mishaps and encounters is one that readers will inevitably be able to relate to and commiserate with.

Originally from Baltimore, he is an award-winning playwright (New York Innovative Theatre Award, Outstanding Original Short Script for “Come Here”) and performer, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a graduate from the Carver Center for Arts and Technology at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

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The Rumpus: Everyone thinks being single in NYC is so easy, but it’s really hard to meet someone. You talk about Grindr and social media; do you think it actually makes it harder for people to meet other people?

Isaac Oliver: It’s funny, on the way down here, I was thinking to myself about when the 1 train goes above ground for a brief stretch at 125th, and we all, myself included, get our phones out, and I’m on Facebook, and I looked at the person next to me, and they’re on Facebook, and everyone’s on Facebook or Instagram, and we’re all seeking this social interaction, but we’re all buried in it on our phones. I think it does make it harder. The Grindr thing turns sexual interaction or sexual energy into a feature on an app or something. I did go to a Grindr wedding, so it does work! It works for some people. Yeah, I think it does make it harder. You used to have to leave your home and go to a bar. As a gay person, it’s a different era, and it’s better to be gay now, but you used to have to go to a bar to meet other gay people, and now, with these apps, we can be at home and distill it down to just sexual urges—I want this, I’m looking for this—and you find someone who will fulfill that and it makes it less complicated and less complex. It’s making it less social, I think.

Rumpus: You also mentioned OkCupid—

Oliver: I have had terrible luck on OkCupid, but I have straight female friends who clean up on OkCupid.

Rumpus: Really? Who are they meeting?

Oliver: They go to dinner three to five nights a week, and everything. “Clean up” isn’t the best term—they’re eating well, at least. But I don’t have the same luck on OkCupid. I don’t know, I haven’t really thought out what the differences might be, but there is sort of a dating construct for men and women that the gay community can either subvert or abide by, but there’s a whole new slew of young people on Grindr and SCRUFF and these apps who say they aren’t looking for sex. They’re looking for friends, or to talk, so there’s this new wave of subverting of one of the things that was celebrated by the gay community, not having to abide by the sort of courtship rituals that you could just sort of have sex and have fun, and if you clicked with someone that way, then try and develop a relationship from that. I don’t know, it’s interesting. I haven’t been actively participating in it recently, because it takes a long time to write a book, and I’ve been focused on that.

Rumpus: One of the things you talked about is that your family reads your writing. You talked about teaching your mom the phrase—

Oliver: “Come on your face?” Yeah. I didn’t directly teach it to her, but she learned it from reading the pieces.

Rumpus: That was one of the things I laughed out loud at, because I couldn’t imagine my grandmother reading something like that and being like, “what does that mean?”

9781476746661Oliver: My grandmother has not read my writing, at least I don’t think so. I don’t think she has the book. THAT would make me nervous. I had a blog for many years where a lot of the pieces sort of started, and I was an idiot and used my full name in an entry, and my dad was Googling, and found it, and they read the blog for a full year before they told me that they had found it. That was actually a quite generous act for them to do that, you know, because if they had said to me, we just found this, what is this, it would have just pulled the plug on it and ruined it for me. But by reading it for that long, it gave me permission to continue. I looked back and thought, well if they read that, then I might as well keep going. I don’t think it’s easy for them, I think things still make them uncomfortable—they don’t necessarily need to know about their son’s sex life in graphic detail, but they either skip over ad stuff or have a glass of wine and read it. Like I say in the book, there is a cost to it. There were a couple instances where they sort of tried to intervene and say, we think you might be having too much sex or your relationship to sex is unhealthy, which is a generational thing as well. I told them that I think the difference is you just know about your kid’s sex life and your friends don’t know the specifics of what their kids are doing, so in comparison, I’m the whore of Babylon. But it’s a new era and, sure, would I like to be having sex in a relationship with someone I love? Of course. But what am I supposed to do in the meantime? And it is a way of reaching out to people, for lack of a better phrase.

Rumpus: Does it ever censor your writing? How do you overcome self-consciousness?

Oliver: No, but there have been several pieces where I thought, oh God, I’m essentially telling this to my parents. When I had the blog I would write disclaimers like “Mom and Dad, you might want to skip this one. Love you. See you at Thanksgiving,” but so far I’ve been able to successfully push that voice aside, because I think deep down they know what I’m trying to do, and they wouldn’t want me to censor myself. I’m not out to be shocking, or needlessly provocative. I try to be elegantly frank, or if there’s a funny way to write about brief moments of being graphic, but I think it’s manageable.

Rumpus: The first thing that came to my mind was when you were on Skype, with the dust—

Oliver: (Laughing)—the dusty dildo.

Rumpus: Yeah, you crawled back in—

Oliver: my mom thinks that story’s funny, so—

Rumpus: You’re just reading that story, and laughing, and there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘Thank God that wasn’t me” but at the same time, you’re being graphic, but I’m not even sure that’s the right word, because it sounds really judgmental.

Oliver: Graphic is a word that has been used to describe the book in a couple of reviews, and I understand, but it does sort of have a judgmental tinge, and I don’t think they mean it. It’s more of a warning, like, we don’t want you to be shocked. But it’s funny—you’re a straight woman and I’m a gay man, and you’re recalling that story and it’s funny. In the couple years that I’ve been collecting these stories and performing them, and the stories that people mention to me are often the most graphic pieces. I’ve had women come up to me and say, “I’ve slept with a guy who had a dirty dick, too.” It’s these specific moments—that’s the word I’d use instead of graphic—the specific details that are sort of salacious or shocking, but they are portals into a moment, and I think those are what makes it for me, when I’m reading something else, for lack of a better word, transports me to that moment where I can imagine putting a dusty dildo in my mouth or swallowing soap, and the humiliation when those things happen. For me, as a reader, that makes the experience rewarding, because the writer wants to include me in that.

Rumpus: I really enjoyed how the work was interspersed with the subway observations, because when you’re on the subway, you see so many different things. What made you decide to include that?

Oliver: The subway and work stuff had been long features on the blog and were important for me to include. I wanted the book to feel like a collage, a sort of New York-paced quilt of pieces that, even thought they’re not a linear narrative, are taking you on a journey with me. And I wanted to try and capture my experience in New York, and God knows I’m not the first writer to be like, “New York is crazy!,” but these moments of listening in on people on the subway, people having affairs or breaking up, or trying to sleep together, or fighting, or Breastfeeding Awareness Week—all these sort of magical, intimate (for lack of a better word) moments. They were stories that I thought were funny or rich in some way. Same with the Box Office. I worked that job for 12 years, and I just left it. But you know, it gave me just a diamond mine of material, in what should really be a pretty simple transaction—coming to a window to by tickets for something; and people really seized those moments to interact with me. Just the fascinating stories, ones I didn’t even include, like people calling to exchange tickets after being in a car accident. The weirdness of human impulses that can be revealed. I wanted to juxtapose how liberated we can be when being with a stranger. It gives us permission to be honest in a way we couldn’t be with someone in a more formal intimate moment, like a date or interview. It’s like, I’m never going to see you again, so sure I’ll tell you this story—there are things we allow ourselves to say when we think we’re off the hook. Those darker moments in the book are where we realize, oh, we’re not really off the hook, are we? It all counts, it all matters.

Rumpus: They’re all different forms of intimacy.

Oliver: Yeah.

Rumpus: The things people say when they think someone is either below them, or owes them something.

Oliver: Exactly. I think everyone should have to do at least six months of food service or something. If you’re on a date with a person and they’re rude to the waiter, it’s like, I know everything I need to know about you. It’s so elemental. If you don’t have compassion for someone in a service position, we’re done.

Rumpus: What made you decide to write the book? Was it a natural progression from the blog?

Oliver: I’d always wanted to write a book, always always. But I didn’t know what it was going to be. As a kid, I just devoured books, and I thought about writing a novel, and I went to school for playwriting, so I took some detours. But I was always writing short stories, poems here and there, but I didn’t have ideas for any novels, per se. Then I had this blog, and was treating the blog as a side project, thinking of it as not quite creative writing. After a year of doing it, I was like, I’m having so much fun with this, and telling stories I think are funny and worthwhile, and meaningful, and maybe this could be something. Maybe what I’m looking at is a book of personal essays or humor pieces. A good friend of mine became my book agent, and we put together a proposal, and sold the book. Luckily, Scribner was the best home for it; they had no objections to any of the content, they embraced it and came up with that cover, which I’m so grateful for. I’m learning all about the book industry as I go. It’s not a world I knew anything about. I mean, I knew Sex and the City, so I came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and hopefully they found that endearing. Each step of the way, they had me adjust and explained it to me. They were very funny; they said “We have to have the Sex and the City talk with a lot of new writers.” So I was like, okay, good, it’s not just me.

Rumpus: Did you go to a writing program for playwriting?

Oliver: I went to Fordham, at Lincoln Center, and majored in playwriting and got a BFA there. I haven’t gone to grad school but toyed with the idea. I liked MacDowell; that was wonderful. I try to read as much as possible. That’s sort of how I see my continuing education—I learn a lot from reading, and from performing, from developing material as well. I’ve been doing a show at Ars Nova every few months; it’s been part of my education.

Rumpus: I think that’s important for young writers—and by young, I guess I mean anyone under forty—that you don’t have to do the MFA.

Oliver: I don’t think you have to, either. If I have any advice, and I’m not sure I have any business giving advice, but it would be to share your work as often as possible, get it out from under you and send it to people, share it with people, read it out loud, go to open mic nights, even if you’re terrified and reading from the page. I read from the page—over my dead body will they tear that page from me! Just get an audience interacting with it as much as possible. I think it made me a better writer to feel an audience’s energy move through a story with me. I saw David Sedaris read at BAM—he’s my idol—and he was reading new pieces. He had a pen with him, and as he was reading, he would take the pen from behind his ear and make an crossing-out motion or circle something. He was working as he was reading, and I felt that to be so inspiring, to have that sort of rigor and to view it as work. It’s part of the process, to let the audience in.

Rumpus: I agree; I think it’s important to get out of the classroom, to get out there.

Oliver: It’s very insular, being in the classroom. The adult world is scary, to be constantly banging on doors, trying to get seen and heard. It’s painful and humiliating, so I understand the allure of going back to school and having writing expected of you and being in a room with people who care about you. But it’s not the real world. You have to get out there.

Rumpus: You mentioned New York earlier, and it felt like New York was a character in the book—and I remembered the Sex and the City episode—

Oliver: (Laughing) Oh god, the fifth lady?

Rumpus: Exactly! But reading your writing about the apartments, and the neighborhood, that scene where you talk about the street guy where the woman takes the cane from him and you’re a little horrified—but you really got the everyday intimacy of neighborhoods; it’s forced and it’s intimate, but not. It felt like not only was New York the background to the stories, but also its own character. Did that come organically?

Oliver: I think so. I didn’t set out for that, but it’s certainly a subject of my writing, via the people in it. You can’t help but write about New York as well. Yeah, I mean, it’s a fascinating place to live, and a very hard place to live. I love it, but I don’t always like it. Like in the lonely Christmas poem, all these concurrent lives happening so close to one another, but not being connected, there’s comfort in that. When I leave the city, like when I was in the colony in the woods, I was really terrified. Living in NY, knowing there’s a roommate in the other room, or a neighbor, knowing there’s people all around, that feels more safe.

Rumpus: Toward the end of the book, when you got the call about your grandmother, it felt like you weren’t necessarily an intimacy idiot anymore. There was a quiet intimacy. Did you choose to end with that?

Oliver: I wanted to. That story for me, the minute I finished a first stab at that piece, I had a feeling that I wanted that to be the end, or second-to-last piece, but I thought that was the penultimate piece. It grapples with a lot. When I removed myself from my daily life and put myself in the woods, it came down to my relationship with myself. They say we all die alone, and I think you have to say, who are you, to yourself, can you be alone, how are you when you’re alone? That was something I really struggled with when I was there. I tried to capture and write about it in that piece, and that’s sort of what the book was leading toward, and I don’t know if I have the answer to who I am. But it’s what I learned in that interaction with that guy, and making that choice to leave his bed, and needing to be alone. I need to take this time and ride it out and be by myself. It’s a scary thing. It’s a scary thing. Sorry, I’ve taken us to a dark place.

Rumpus: No, the reader feels it.

Oliver: I didn’t want it to be a simple book of trifles; I wanted something to be at stake. When I was working on it, I thought, this could be a good end.

Rumpus: What about the recipes?

Oliver: (Laughing) The recipes! I don’t know, they were something—I’m a terrible cook, and I was trying to cook for myself, and I was trying terribly, and also on Grindr, trying to get laid, and was going from one to another, and it just sort of came to me. I thought they could be a nice little thing sprinkled throughout. Fun little diversions.

Rumpus: What do you see next, what’s on the horizon for you?

Oliver: Some things are planned, I can’t go into specific details, but I’m trying to develop this into some sort of television—something visual, so I’m starting to envision that. I have a great team of people helping me with that. I’d like to write another play, write another book. I left my day job, so I’m trying to be a full time writer, at least for the next few months, so I’ll see what happens.

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The Rumpus Interview with Mira Ptacin

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Mira Ptacin is a Maine-based writer whose work has been featured in Guernica, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, and more. She is also the founder, curator, host, and executive director of Freerange Nonfiction, a reading series and storytelling collective in Manhattan, and (soon) Maine. Currently, she teaches memoir writing at the Maine Correctional Facility, which is Maine’s only women’s prison. She was the 2014 recipient of the Maine Literary Award.

Her memoir, Poor Your Soul, out in January from Soho Press, is a book that skillfully braids her family’s story of immigration, adoption, and loss, with the author’s experience of unexpected pregnancy and loss. It is much more than a book about loss, however—it examines the intricate threads of family, how our histories get woven into tapestries, and how to rebuild when it feels hopeless. It is a story of becoming, of renewal, of life.

Ptacin and I chatted over email about her book, writing, and motherhood.

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The Rumpus: This is such a powerful story, and a very intense one; what was the impetus for putting this down on paper? Was there one single thing?

Mira Ptacin: The events of the main narrative of Poor Your Soul took place during the summer between my first and second year of graduate school, where I’d been working on a totally different project: my MFA thesis, which was to be a nonfiction book about the murder of undocumented immigrants working in an erotic/exotic massage parlor in my hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan (Cereal City, USA). Just when I arrived at the point to spread out my research and begin composing, I got pregnant, and soon after lost the baby, and soon after, got married. Just like that. And when summer ended and school started up again, I tried to go back to writing about the murder at the massage parlor but every time I sat down to write, the silence of the room actually became so distracting, deafening, and disorienting with the confusion and anguish and bewilderment that I was feeling after my sudden pregnancy and its violent end that I just couldn’t not write about it. Just like I couldn’t not think about it. I couldn’t avoid my grief, and needed to own what had happened and find the meaning in it. It was like stubbornly a heavy elephant in my mind and refused to move or get out of the way. I had no choice but to stop writing about the massage parlor and started writing my own story.

Poor-Your-Soul-final-covUntil then, I’d always avoided memoir and was pretty adamant against being a navel gazer, but I realized that this was one of those times when navel gazing was not a bad thing—that it wasn’t just important, but I could use my story to connect with others, make them feel less alone, and make my loss into a piece of art. The process was just like sculpting a piece of clay into a statue: slapping down my raw, unfiltered feelings, the ugly wet, honest, and messy thoughts going through my head so shortly after the event had happened. By looking at it all, I could confront what was in my head, look at it, explore it, get it out of my system. The next step was to sculpt the clay, but to first just look at all the material in front of me. I had to just look at it, marinate in the events in order to find meaning and the essence of it. Not to mix metaphors (okay, to mix metaphors), but this stage of things was like staring at those Magic Illusion posters: you relax your eyes, expect nothing, don’t try to look for anything in particular, perhaps even look slightly away from the poster, and if done correctly, eventually a 3D image pops out at you if you. The “truth” just kind of shows up. And once I had that “truth” (call it what you will: a thesis, a summary, the moral of the story, etc.) and it was real and pure and true, I held on to it and let it guide my editing and revisions, my pace, my tone, and so forth. Once I finished the book, I felt like that event was the past, and that I’d in some ways put a tombstone on it, rather than run from it.

Poor Your Soul took less than a year to write. But took nearly eight years to get published by a publisher. During those eight years, and through all those rejections, I became more and more determined to not only get the book published, but to make sure the publisher wasn’t going to shelve it under “feminist” or “political” sections of the bookstore. A handful of publishers turned the book down because they said they didn’t know how to market a book about abortion. But Poor Your Soul is not just a book about abortion. There is an event in the book that is an abortion, or a termination of a pregnancy, but still, this isn’t just a feminist or political book, exactly the same way stories about death or sex aren’t just to be shelved in the feminist or political sections of the bookstore. I feel blessed to have found a publisher who gets the book, and knows it’s important: it is one person’s story that explains how one person came to make a decision that was right for them. It doesn’t generalize women, or abortions. And we need to let voices and stories be heard, rather than run from them because they’re “taboo” or “political.” Andrew and I felt very alone and polarized after losing the baby, like it wasn’t something people wanted to talk about or hear about, and we were sort of left to deal with things on our own. I can empathize that pregnancy, whether it’s successful or not, is so very traumatic, so isolating, so profound and baffling that it needs to be a safe topic, a supported topic and experience. A mother needs to feel safe and supported and important. We need to provide comfort and support and empathy, not isolation. In writing this book, I hoped to not only heal myself, but to provide companionship and support to other people who have experienced a similar loss. After all, even if we do not have children, we are all born from a mother. And by sharing our stories, we can evoke empathy in other people, and understanding.

Rumpus: How/why did you choose to braid the two stories (that of your daughter, and that of your brother)? Was it an idea from the start?

Ptacin: In its earlier drafts, I focused only on the story of my pregnancy. The book was short and muscular. But I kept coming across threads that traced back to my childhood, and in studying them (and being encouraged to expand the breadth of the memoir by an editor-friend), I dove into my past, like, my youth, and found that childhood events led to other events that led to other events that led to other events that influenced my decisions and behaviors and thoughts behind the main narrative of Poor Your Soul. And by digging deeper, by having the story be more than just what was on the page (or the main thread), I could make the story three-dimensional, not superficial.

Rumpus: Women are often labeled “confessional” when we tell the stories of our lives or share anything remotely personal. How do you feel about this label, and would you call your book “confessional?”

Ptacin: That word rarely comes to mind to me when I think about memoirs (that are good) or my own book. In my memoir, I don’t think I’m confessing to anything. Rather, I come to an understanding of my recent past and my childhood, how the latter influences how I am where I am, and I own it. I suppose I hope my memoir isn’t thought of as confessional, but more of a declaration. I try to make sense of the truth, my truth. I think mediocre memoirs, by both men and women or whomever, don’t do what good writing should do: they should be well-crafted and have something somewhat profound yet universal that it says. I’m a big fan of thesis statements, or story questions. There is nothing new under the sun, just a new way of looking at it or telling it and understanding it. A good memoir shows one person’s way of making sense of things, whether things are traumatic or dull.

Rumpus: Who or what inspires you as a woman, a writer, a mother?

Ptacin: Human injustice, ignorance, lack of empathy. Generalizations and stereotypes. Apathy infuriates me, as do prejudice and self-righteousness. I try to change minds to be more peaceful, loving, empathetic when I report, or write essays or long-form narrative. On a more positive note, my curiosity and creativity is charged by a handful of things: my family inspires me. Successful people inspire me. I get my story ideas from talking to people I wouldn’t normally talk to, from walking around and snooping, from overhearing conversations, from small newspapers or specialized publications/magazines. I love dogs. I love walking around graveyards (we have several on the island where I live)—I like to sit in them and just think. I like to write stories about the daily life stuff we tend not to think about—like how things work (like pregnancy in prison), or a subculture I never knew about (which is the topic of my next book: mediums and spiritualists in Northern Maine.)

I’m not going to write another memoir; I consider my genre “creative nonfiction” and my beat “the uterus and the American Dream.” This is kind of the lens with which I see the world.

Rumpus: Has being a writer influenced you as a mother, or vice versa?

Ptacin: After raising a two-year old and an infant successfully (so far; they’re healthy and happy and, to my knowledge, not damaged), I feel like I can do anything. After writing a book and not giving up until it found a publisher, I feel like anything is possible.

But the most profound to me is my experience of motherhood. Motherhood requires so much care, not just of another child, but also of the self. You have no time for ego because your personal time is so fleeting. So every choice must be genuine: is this good for my kids’ growth and development as a human? Is it good for mine? If not, you move on. Motherhood has influenced the way I see the world: I now look outside myself more than I ever have. I see the world that my son and daughter have come into and will inherit. And this has caused me to see things that aren’t right and focus on them more rather than turning inward and being passive about it. Writing is my tool, my sword, and I can use that to make a difference in the world, rather than bring attention to myself. Everything I do, everything I commit to, since I have so little free time, must be worth it and good for my family and me. So since I’ve become a mother, my choices are more genuine (or at least most of them are).

When I was single, I wrote during my own time, when inspiration struck, and my motives were all over the map, and sometimes my need for validity influenced my reason for writing. This is not the case anymore. Also, I can’t write for free anymore. I have to take care of a family, do my part. When I became a mother, shit got real. At the same time, the result of my hard work as a mother continues to blow my mind: I grew two humans, and fed them with my own body. The bottom line, really, is that I would do anything for my children. I’ve never loved anything more, or more purely. My family trumps my writing ambitions, but so far I can balance motherhood and writing. It just requires discipline and good timing. Also, after becoming a mother, I take the reception of my writing less seriously.

What else? After becoming a mother, I respect mothers more. My awareness of the value of a woman’s instinct has changed profoundly. Mothers are responsible for keeping a human alive, growing it, feeding it, teaching it. Being the caregiver of another human and sharing that responsibility with a loving, hardworking, good person (my husband Andrew) has made me realize how good I have it. I have a roof over my head. We have food and an income and a nonviolent environment. Our kids are healthy and happy. I’m very grateful.

Rumpus: In your book, you talk about being in an MFA program, you talk about being a writer—what advice would you give to other writers?

Ptacin: Omit needless words. Talk your story out. Have a thesis statement or a story question. Be genuine and take your time, but be disciplined and dig deep. Learn to read like a writer. Don’t be trendy. Don’t assume anyone owes you anything, but don’t give up. Hang around with all kinds of people. Say thank you to your mentors and pay it forward. Write something that doesn’t have an expiration date. Know your audience, but chose your imaginary audience that will make you write your best. Take care of your health. Live life as a person, not just as a writer. When you have an idea, write it down. No, but really, do write it down. Watch movies with the subtitles on. Marry a structural engineer or architect: they have stable minds and can help you with the structure of your story. Spend time outdoors often. Live where you want to live. Read The Elements of Style often. Be kind.

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The Rumpus Interview with Alida Nugent

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Feminism has been a major part of the cultural conversation the past few months, especially with abortion rights, women’s healthcare, and rape culture making headlines.

Alida Nugent’s second book, You Don’t Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism, takes on a multitude of topics, including being multicultural and finding one’s identity, the messiness and realness of sex and sexuality, and discovering how feminism applied to her life. The book is alternately serious and laugh-out-loud funny, and people of all ages will see themselves in her writing. She dares to “go there” about womanhood, sex, friendship, identity, and family; sometimes in cringe-inducing, but always honest, ways.

The day of our interview, Nugent showed up with her signature strong lipstick, friendly forthright, and quickness to laugh. In this interview, Nugent shares more about her inspirations for the book and various essays in it, thoughts on feminism and writing, and more. In addition to being a novelist, she runs the blog The Frenemy, and has been a contributor to the Huffington Post and xojane, among others.

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The Rumpus: I loved this. Obviously, it’s about feminism and coming into your own as a feminist. What made you decide to choose that topic? Did it have to do with everything going on in the world right now, or something else?

Alida Nugent: Oh, thank you! I’m so glad. It was probably right after I finished my first book [Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse] that I knew I wanted my next book to be about feminism. While writing the first book, I was a lot younger and growing into myself. As I was writing it, I started kind of learning more about feminism and coming to a lot of the conclusions I came to in the book, focusing more on body image, and unpacking a lot of that stuff. But I wasn’t ready to talk about it in the first book. So I knew when I was writing a new proposal, that that’s what I wanted to tackle.

Rumpus: What are your favorite feminist books or icons?

Nugent: Well, I love Roxane Gay, of course. She’s incredible. I also love Janet Mock’s book Redefining Realness, and I recommend it to everyone. I think it’s important to speak your truth and talk about what your female experience is like; Bad Feminist and Redefining Realness, to me, are about those kind of things.

I think there’s a pressure for women to reveal themselves in a very specific way. For example, when I wrote my first book, I talked a little about body image issues, but not my own eating disorder, because I wasn’t ready to talk about it. There was so much pressure because if you’re going to talk about yourself, you have to tell everything, in the way that we want to hear it—you have to be the “good” feminist, you have to have the “good” abortion, you have to have the “good” sexual assault—these stories that are assigned to women in a very specific way. I think women talking about imperfections or talking about things in a different way, or not revealing everything, is way more important. Women don’t want to be forced to talk about anything.

I think the idea of being perfect is so “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” because if you say everything, then it’s not right and people say they don’t believe you, but if you don’t want to talk about it, then….

9780142181683Rumpus: Right, like how women’s writing is labeled “confessional,” or messy, or too much.

Nugent: Confessional, there’s a great word. (Laughs) Whereas men who are confessional are honest, moving, daring.

Rumpus: One of the lines in an essay in your book was “When people find a home, it sticks with them.” I loved this, because I’m Jewish and Italian, and I often get “What are you?” So I really loved that line and essay. How has your identity shaped you as a writer, as a woman, etc? I know you talk about identity and trying to find yourself through both sides of your family.

Nugent: We’re obsessed with labeling people by the way they look, whether it’s race or sexuality or gender. As a society, we feel the need to place people into the boxes we want to put them in, and if you fit outside those boxes, people are get concerned about it. I grew up with a lot of, “Well, if I don’t look this way, then how could I be that?” And I felt that a lot. So I think declaring who you are—and your identity doesn’t have to be only one label or one word, it can be many words—once you start assigning those to yourself and embracing them, is where you start to grow as a person. It took me a long time and it’s something I struggled with, because especially in feminist spaces, I don’t want to take away words from anyone else who should be able to speak. Like if you think about white feminism, I don’t want to take anyone’s voice away, because I do acknowledge the certain privileges I have, so I still struggle with whether I’m saying exactly what I want to say, and how I’m going to say it. I’m getting more comfortable with it and learning that this is who I am, and I will figure out the rest. It’s up to me to figure out how to fit myself in to every place I want to be in.

I think it’s important to feel uncomfortable when you’re learning a lot about something, to realize that you can be part of the problem, too. I think as a female, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not just about being a woman, it’s about being a BLANK woman, and it’s about how we fit all of those people into the story, and I know that makes people uncomfortable, but that’s good—it’s important to feel that way. Because then you’ll start listening to other people.

Rumpus: Right. Especially as a writer, it’s so easy to stick to one storyline, or one thing—but the things you read influence the things you write. As a writer, you constantly have to push through being uncomfortable. If you’re too comfortable, that’s a problem.

Nugent: Exactly—and you also have to shift. When I first started writing the book, the big focus in the media was on rape culture. But as I kept writing, the media started to focus on other issues, like police brutality, trans people being murdered—there’s a lot of stuff happening, and we have to adjust ourselves and open ourselves to all of those issues and make sure we’re talking about them, even if they don’t apply to us.

Rumpus: I love your lipstick—is that the shade you talk about in the book?

Nugent: (Laughing) It’s not, it’s a new shade from NARS, called Cruella.

Rumpus: It’s perfectly matte.

Nugent: I love it! I love matte lipstick, but I used to not get into it, but now…

Rumpus: That was one of the most interesting essays to me, because I didn’t wear makeup until grad school and even now, rarely wear lipstick, and when I do, it’s something very natural, so your essay about unnatural colors and embracing makeup was great.

Nugent: I think it’s important—I struggled a lot about liking typically feminine things, probably more before I became a feminist than after, and I think stuff that we do to our bodies that we do for our own pleasure, whether it’s lipstick or hair color, or earrings, we should embrace that and find the things we want to showcase ourselves with, and not worry so much about whether the world is going to find it attractive.

Rumpus: You do talk about a lot of personal things in the book, like a pregnancy scare—what have the reactions been of family or friends? How does that affect you as a writer? Do you share beforehand, or do you give it to them later?

Nugent: It’s hard. I think some people knew a lot of the stuff in those essays beforehand, some people didn’t, and some people still don’t know. There are some people that I haven’t had those conversations with. I always write in the mindset like I’m saying it to someone who’s been there, and I know there are so many people who’ve been in those situations. It’s so much easier revealing yourself to someone who knows you already. I’m sure I’ll have some of those conversations after the book is out.

Rumpus: I think there’s always that struggle to censor yourself as a writer. How do you overcome it?

Nugent: I think because there’s no one talking back at me when I’m writing, and I think sometimes for people, in your own life, they take your experiences personally, and they’re like, what did I do, could I have stopped it, etc. So when I’m talking to no one and sorting out my own thoughts, and no one is echoing anything back to me, it makes it easier.

Rumpus: What was your favorite chapter to write?

Nugent: My favorite chapter to write was probably the diet chapter. The diet chapter and the sex chapter were just fun for me. I could be a little silly, and I didn’t have to dissect my emotions. They contained a lot of stuff that I’d thought about for a long time, so it was easy.

Rumpus: I seriously laughed out loud at those, because girls get these sanitized versions of what to expect about these things, and it’s not real life.

Nugent: Yes! People don’t really talk about these things, even with my girlfriends! I wanted to explore the middle part. Feminism to me also includes if a guy doesn’t want to have sex, or a guy’s a virgin, I think a lot of men are of the mindset that if they don’t get a date out of an interactions, or a party without having sex, they’re a failure of some sort, and it’s like, no, you’re not, it’s just a thing people think. I wanted to talk about that, too.

9780452298187Rumpus: That’s so interesting—can you talk more about your definition of feminism, or how you see it? People often don’t include men in that definition.

Nugent: I think that a lot of times, I’m even hesitant to talk about this, because we need to talk about these female issues and they should be at the forefront, but there’s a benefit to men from feminism, too—they’re not allowed to cry, or straight men can’t wear lipstick—there are such gendered roles, and feminism is about that not having to be the case. So it’s important for them, too.

Rumpus: Do you have any advice for writers, especially female writers?

Nugent: Oh yeah! I think the advice I would give is that you don’t have to be liked to be smart or to offer something. Worry about likeability last. Say what you have to say, figure out the best way to say it, and don’t worry about who’s not going to like you because of it. The whole likeability thing slowed me down for a long time. People aren’t going to like you for some reason. Getting rid of that and not apologizing is important, because then you can start writing about a lot of things.

Men can be the anti-hero, like in Breaking Bad—for women, I think that space is a lot harder to take up. Like the show Unreal on Lifetime—these women are very unlikable, but there are things in them you can identify with.

Having unlikable aspects doesn’t make you uninteresting, or mean that there aren’t parts of you that are likable. There are “unlikeable” characteristics that are positive—being assertive, going after what you want, or being persistent – these things are good, but they can be seen as really bad. Every time I’ve called a bitch, it was because I got something I wanted, or said how I felt. These things aren’t always celebrated.

Rumpus: I think there’s something intimidating about a woman who knows what she wants, and goes and gets it.

Nugent: Yes, exactly. There’s a Meryl Streep quote that goes something like, “you have no idea what you’ll get until you quietly and assertively ask for it.” It’s a useful skill to have, asking for what you want.

Rumpus: What do you see next for yourself?

Nugent: I’m not thinking as far ahead as I was when the first book came out, but I’m interested in going into fiction. I went to school for it, and have done a lot of fiction writing. I sort of fell into essay and nonfiction, so I want to think about fiction next, because I loved it so much.

Rumpus: Do you have advice for young women about feminism?

Nugent: Young women should take a lot of everything with a grain of salt. You’re smart; come to your own conclusion on things, and don’t be afraid to take your own stance on issue. Don’t let feminism put things in your mouth. Come up with your own thoughts and feelings.

***

Author photograph © Virginia Ahern.

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The Rumpus Interview with Kerry and Tyler Cohen

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Kerry Cohen, author and psychotherapist, might best be known for her memoir Loose Girl (2008). She’s back with another memoir that details another intimate part of a woman’s life: female friendships. Girl Trouble: An Illustrated Memoir (October 2016, Hawthorne Books) is a collaboration with her older sister, Tyler, an accomplished illustrator (Primahood: Magenta, Stacked Deck Press). Told in a series of character sketches of friends, from childhood to the present day, the vignettes illustrate—no pun intended!—how we define and find ourselves through others, as well as the lessons they teach us. Each friend is drawn by Tyler, giving the reader a visual aid as they read.

One of the beautiful things about the stories is how true they ring. The details might be different for each person, but we all have that friend who faded away with no warning; the friend we can’t really believe is our friend and then breaks our heart; and the friend that reflects our best self back to us. And, of course, everyone in between. Cohen pieces together a mosaic of herself through these stories, which is what makes it so fun to read.

I emailed with Kerry and Tyler to find out more about their book, and what they were up to now. Here’s what they had to say.

***

The Rumpus: First, I loved reading this and really loved having an illustration to go with each story. It helped me see each friend in my mind’s eye as I was reading, and, though this may sound silly, I would come up with expectations or judgments about them from just looking at the picture before reading that section. Tell me about how/why you came up with the idea for this book, and why you chose to illustrate it.

Kerry Cohen: I began developing the idea for the book pretty much right after Loose Girl came out. I realized that I had this nagging anxiety about the females in the book. Here I’d written a book about my relationship with boys and men, but it wasn’t the males I still had confusing feelings about. Whenever I come up against a question about myself like this, a book starts forming. It’s how I get through my life. I tried tackling the book back then. I must have thrown out about one thousand pages of writing. I couldn’t seem to find the form, which in so many ways is the key to writing memoir. A long time ago, I found a book titled Was She Pretty? by Leanne Shapton, which is an illustrated exploration of jealousy and relationships. I fell so hard in love with it. At some point, I realized the form for this book would be vignettes, and, at another point, I knew illustrations would bring a magic to the stories.

Tyler Cohen: Illustrations have a way of getting under the skin before a reader even takes in the words. When we first meet someone, before we even talk with them, we are reading them by how they are dressed, by their energy, and by their body language. A lot of the time, that first impression is spot on, but not always, and we have to get to know the person to know for sure. The illustrated vignettes work like that, too.

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Rumpus: How did you guys come to work together on Girl Trouble?

K. Cohen: I asked my sister because I’m a huge fan of her art and because our relationship seemed poignant for this exploration of friends. She was, after all, my first female friend. I think it also bears mentioning that I asked her shortly after we’d come back together after a number of years of silent discord. Our relationship had been strained and difficult for most of our lives, until one day we had this wonderful talk. I remember I was in my car, parked and due to meet someone, but she called, and we ended up having the most honest, connected conversation we’d ever had. It changed everything.

T. Cohen: On the phone, when talking about the potential of collaborating, Kerry brought up this idea she’d been gestating. I’ve done a lot of artwork exploring both intimacy and social violence in relationships between women, so, it seemed a natural fit.

Rumpus: How did you decide Hawthorne Books was the right place for this book?

K. Cohen: First of all, unusually formatted books are hard to sell. The book industry is so tight right now. It almost feels like every decision is coming from a place of fear. I knew Rhonda Hughes (of Hawthorne) personally and admired her integrity when it came to her selections. She and I have similar taste in books, too. Hawthorne’s books are beautiful. I knew they’d value the book as it is, and, indeed, the end result maintains the original vision for the book.

Rumpus: Kerry, several times in the book, you go back to the idea that memory is fluid—with Chris, you say “memory is a slippery eel”; with Elisabeth, who dropped who is reversed, and, with Gaby, the story you tell in the book isn’t from your perspective, but from hers. I loved the feeling of your memoir being told through your relationships with friends. How do you think—as a psychotherapist, as a writer, as a woman—friendships, and especially female friendships, shape the memories of our lives and selves? Maybe another way to put it is how do they shape the life stories we tell ourselves?

K. Cohen: As clichéd as it sounds, relationships between women do shape so much of our understandings of ourselves, starting with our mothers. I think all women can relate to the feeling of having merged with best friends. We begin to look alike, talk alike, even take on the same mannerisms. They are as close as family. We give a lot of attention to the heterosexual, nuclear family, but our friends determine as much, I bet, of who we are, how we feel, and how we behave.

But, to get closer to your question—when I interviewed memoirists for my book about writing about others, Kim Barnes said that whatever we write in memoir becomes the truth. Other people start remembering it that way, even though it’s your memories, not theirs. She said it as a warning. That stays with me now as I write memoir. Writing memoir is a huge responsibility! So, I definitely wanted to highlight that in Girl Trouble. Our feelings about female friends are often so intense that it’s easy to get lost in our own interpretations of what happened, i.e., she’s just jealous of you, etc. I wanted to use the writing to get past these assumptions and find out more about what really happened.

Rumpus: How did you decide which friends got to be in the book? Is there anyone you wanted to put in the book, but consciously kept out? Reactions of friends haven’t been 100% positive about the book—what are some of the supportive ones like?

K. Cohen: OMG WHO IS TALKING BEHIND MY BACK?

Okay, calming down… first part of the question: There really isn’t anything that interesting about the process of who I decided to write about from the early years. Certain girls, like Lisa, Ashley, and Tiffany had haunted me. Something I don’t think I’ve told anyone is that, for many years, I dreamed about the three Jennifers from high school (all three appeared in Loose Girl and one is featured in Girl Trouble). Once I delved into my adult years, including friends I still have or made in the past five to ten years, I did start to prune based on the purpose of the book. If a similar point was conveyed in a previous woman’s story, then I chose between the two—that sort of thing. I did consider my friends’ and former friends’ feelings about being in the book, but I struggle often with this question: what’s more important? The person or the art? (I was interested enough in this question to explore it in a whole book—self-promotion warning—The Truth of Memoir: How to Write About Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity.) It’s easy to say a person is more important. But for us writers we know that art changes lives. We’ve seen it happen constantly. So, the question posed above is really about the value of one person’s feelings over another’s. Someone reading the book may feel seen in a way she needs, even as the person written about is frustrated by what the writer wrote about her.

All of that said, people get just as upset about not being written about as being written about. You can’t win! Ha. The people who are still friends mostly love the vignettes about them. One was unhappy with the illustration, but only because she felt insecure and worried she really looked like that. But she values Tyler’s art and would never ask for it to be changed.

girl_trouble

Rumpus: Tyler, it’s really amazing how the illustration just feels right for each story; each picture feels like how the friend truly is, there’s no drawing that feels “off.” How did you draw each girl? From a picture, from Kerry’s description, or from your imagination?

T. Cohen: Thank you! I’m so glad you had that experience of the illustrations! Kerry sent me early versions of each story, and I would let my imagination grow the character—sometimes with a little Internet research on fashion appropriate for the time (when my memories weren’t enough). I had rough memory of about six of the people the stories were based on, but didn’t let this predefine the look since I was after character, not the person. I thought about what the clothing would signify and how the character would inhabit her body. Then, I sketched her. Most of the time, Kerry would respond with “perfect.” A couple of times, I came up with a second version, and Kerry chose.

Rumpus: Do you think guys and girls can be “just friends,” and if so, how does the nature of the friendship differ than that of female-only friendships?

K. Cohen: Yes, of course they can! After they have sex. I’m kidding. I have had many platonic friendships with men (admittedly, at least one was after we had a sexual relationship for a few months, and my ex-husband is one of my best friends in the world). Also, I have a bunch of gay male friends, which isn’t what you’re asking, I understand. I love my male friends in the same way and with the same intensity that I love my female friends, but it’s true that they can have a different flavor. I consult a few of them regarding male behavior, such as when a man I’m dating does something I don’t understand. Once I asked my ex-husband Michael, “Can I ask you something, as a man?” He answered, “Sure. Can I answer as a woman?”

I often say we have a lot to learn from men regarding friendships. They tend to be less crazy about their friendships. They don’t care if you don’t call them back. They don’t get hung up on who you’re dating. I love men! But I also love women. There is richness in both types of friendships.

T. Cohen: I’ve always had friends who were boys, men. People connect to each other in many more ways than physical chemistry. I find true friendship in the meeting of minds, openness to other people’s stories, and in compassionate hearts. In person, I’m a talker and engaged conversation is key. When I was a young woman and everyone’s hormones were in overdrive, it helped when there was no attraction; now, I don’t even think about it. My most intimate friendships have more often been with women, partly because we share the experience of moving through this life as a woman and don’t have to explain or argue over certain things—especially in systems of male dominance/rape culture. But I also have overlap with others around being queer or weirdo artists. And trans friends have brought their own insights into gendered experience. So… that was a long ramble to say, “yes.”

Rumpus: From where do each of you draw inspiration (in general)?

K. Cohen: I draw inspiration mostly from conversations with other people, and from reading, which is basically the same thing.

T. Cohen: I love observing people, day-dreaming, reading, looking at art that stirs, through either content or composition, and having interesting conversations.

Rumpus: What’s next on the horizon for each of you, and do you have any plans to collaborate again on a project?

K. Cohen: We don’t currently have a plan to collaborate again, but it would be fun to do so! Every now and then, we’re talking about something and say, “Hey! We should do that!” Most recently it was when I had to have a talk about pornography with my then nine-year-old son. I said I had searched the Internet for Babies First Porn, and found nothing. We laughed, but we considered that we could make a pretty cool children’s book if we did it.

Next up for me is a fourth memoir. My mother has asked, “Exactly how many memoirs are you going to write?” because she’s in all of them. My then-agent joked, “As many as it takes.” It’s under contract with Sourcebooks, and because I’ve only written half of it, I’m not sure yet when it will be out. It’s title is Lush, and it is about my middle-aged, out-of-nowhere problem with drinking.

T. Cohen: No current plans to collaborate, but who knows what the future holds?

I just debuted a book of comics and art: Primahood: Magenta, published by Stacked Deck Press. The book combines autobiographical comics and surrealism to explore femaleness, gender, race, and parenting. Full-color! Available now!

New stories are (thankfully) gestating but I believe it kind of kills them if they are talked about before they are born.

***

Photos © Heather Hawksford.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #83: Lauren Grodstein

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After writing several books (A Friend of the Family, The Explanation for Everything) from a male point of view, Lauren Grodstein’s new novel, Our Short History, is an intimate glimpse into a woman’s life, at a critical juncture between life and death. Karen Neulander, the protagonist of the novel, has a six-year-old boy, Jake, whose father hasn’t been in the picture since Karen told him she was pregnant. There’s just one problem—Karen is dying.

Jake begins asking about his father, Dave, and when Karen gets in touch with him and tells him she had the baby all those years ago, he is more than happy to meet the son he didn’t even know existed; the son he couldn’t handle six years earlier. As the bond between Jake and Dave gets stronger, Karen is faced with the fact that her time with Jake is limited, especially as her body begins to give way. Written as a sort of extended letter to her son, Our Short History is Karen’s exploration of how to best spend her remaining time with her son, where Dave fits into Jake’s (and her) life, and the ever-shifting notions of love and family.

There is something very immediate about the book; perhaps it is knowing that Karen has ovarian cancer, but Grodstein’s prose cuts to the quick and vividly sets up a story filled with colorful, thoughtful characters, a good, consistent pace, and a hook that pulls you in, before you even realize what’s happened. Despite the looming cancer diagnosis, this is not a book about endings or death; it’s about different kinds of love, and essentially, about living.

*** 

The Rumpus: How did you come up with the idea/storyline for this book?

Lauren Grodstein: Out of nowhere, in my late thirties, it suddenly seemed like cancer was all around me. My sister-in-law’s mother, who was a good friend to me, died of ovarian cancer—and then my sister-in-law’s sister was diagnosed with it. An acquaintance from college died of breast cancer, leaving behind three small kids. Another woman I knew, a talented poet, died of stomach cancer, also leaving behind little kids. I couldn’t stop thinking about these women; sometimes they’d be the first thing I thought about when I woke up. What must it have been like to let life go? To let their children go?

Eventually all this thinking led its way to a character, Karen Neulander, diagnosed with ovarian cancer but still very much alive—at least for the time being.

But of course, a terminal cancer diagnosis is a situation, not a plot. So then I started thinking about what else might be complicating this woman’s life, and I imagined a reappearing ex, and a disappearing job, and the book sort of took off from there.

Rumpus: The book is structured as a letter of sorts to Jacob. What made you go with this form? 

Grodstein: I think I imagined what I would do if this were happening to me—what I would want to say to my own son, and how I would say it. I would probably write him a letter, or a series of letters, or—most likely, since I’m an author—I’d probably write him a book. Although Jacob is not the same kid as my son, they do share certain similarities (a fondness for Nintendo, a keen interest in scoop-your-own-candy establishments). So it was easy for me to imagine a mother trying to address her six-year-old, imagining him in the future, writing for the person he might become. 

Rumpus: When I mentioned the last name—Neulander—to you in a message, you replied that you chose the name deliberately. Jacob is, of course, a Biblical name. Did you choose all of the names on purpose? If so, how do you decide?

Grodstein: I think a lot about names, and feel very strongly that naming your characters is one of the most crucial parts of the job. Names can signify everything about a character: age, race, class, aspiration. Karen was born in the early 1970s, when there were a lot of middle-class Jewish Karens being born, and Jake was born in the late 00s, when there were lots of Jewish Jakes being born in New York. As for Neulander, it’s a German-Hungarian name, which aligns with Karen’s heritage. It means “new ground,” or “new land,” which suggests, to me, Karen’s passing from life to death.

Rumpus: You’ve written several books from the male POV. This one, obviously, is not. What sorts of things are different about the two POVs? How does this (if it does) affect the process, etc?

Grodstein: I always liked writing from a male POV because it allowed me to separate myself entirely from the character. If I was writing about, say, a fifty-three year old male physician, I was writing about someone who was very much not me, and therefore I was free to let my imagination go wild. I was afraid, for a long time, that if I wrote a character who shared too many of my demographics, she would end up feeling false, like a sort of stilted version of myself. But Karen came to me fully formed—I knew her, I knew who she was, and I knew that, although she and I have certain things in common, we weren’t the same person. And so she was as easy to write as my male characters were.

Rumpus: Who inspires you?

Grodstein: My son. My husband. My parents. Great readers and writers I know. People doing surprising things—living in tiny houses all their lives and then giving millions to charity upon their deaths. Leaving New York City to move to farm in rural Idaho. Teaching poetry to people in prison and finding remarkable talent. I’m inspired by people who are really deliberate and careful with their lives, and people who are kind. And of course I’m inspired by people who work hard and don’t complain about it. I myself work hard but sometimes, I admit, I do complain.

 Rumpus: What are you currently reading/listening to/watching?

Grodstein: I’m reading a wonderful novel by a former student of mine that’s currently out with an agent. It is beyond exciting to see this thing that was once sort of a batshit idea in a classroom become a fully developed, beautiful and page-turning novel. I’m so excited for it to find its readership in the world.

I’ve actually been reading a lot since the presidential election—some nonfiction, to help explain the current insanity that is our American cultural landscape, but also a lot of fiction, to escape. I read The Nix, which was fun and nutty; and A Separation, which was pretty absorbing. And I reread Mrs. Bridge, because I was teaching it and it’s just one of my favorite novels in the world.

I tried watching The Santa Clarita Diet because I aspire to Drew Barrymore’s hairdo, but it was too gory. Oh, and I listen to Pod Save America as soon as a new podcast comes out. It’s a sarcastic take on politics by some chastened Obama bros (they used to call people scared of a Trump presidency “bedwetters”—but who’s soaking now, friends?). It’s amusing and sometimes even reassuring, despite itself. 

Rumpus: What advice do you have for writers?

Grodstein: I have so much advice, but I think my best advice is that you should only do it if it makes you happy. Don’t do it because you think you’ll find some sort of gratifying success—I’ve found a bit of success in my career, and I’m very relieved by it, but the success that comes after a book is published is never as happy as the feeling of writing, of knowing you’ve written something good, of feeling like you’ve had a worthwhile day in the chair. That’s the best feeling I know, and as soon as writing stops making me feel that way, I’ll stop doing it.

Rumpus: The current political/social climate is one that we’ve never really been in before. Do you think writers/artists have an obligation to do anything in this regard?

Grodstein: Man, I don’t know. I think about this a lot. Right now my feeling is that writers and artists have the same obligation as anyone else: to use their time, money, and talent to stand up for the America we know. We have a responsibility, all of us, to defend our country against an evil administration. And that means calling lawmakers, protesting, giving money to organizations like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the International Rescue Committee, and refusing to acquiesce. Beyond that—I really don’t know. I’m as optimistic as I am scared, however, because never in my life have I seen so many people stand up for our country’s true values: inclusion, openness, and generosity. 

Rumpus: What’s up next on the horizon?

Grodstein: We’re adopting a baby! So, you know, diapers. Car seats. Temper tantrums. Adorable baby giggles. I am so excited. It’s been a while, but man I miss the feeling of a soft, squishy, beautiful baby in my arms. After that—I have no idea. Nap time, maybe? Let’s go with nap time.

***

Author photograph © Ken Yanoviak.

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The Woman Behind the Curtain Pulling the Levers: Talking with Zinzi Clemmons

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When I first read the synopsis of What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I knew I had to read it. We overlapped in Columbia University’s MFA program, and although she was Fiction and I was Nonfiction, I knew who she was, mainly because of Apogee Journal, of which she was a co-founder. Apogee promotes underrepresented voices, particularly artists and writers of color. I’d read snippets of her writing and knew how powerful it was.

Thandi, What We Lose’s narrator, is a biracial woman, born to a South African mother and an American father. Told in nonlinear pieces, this is a story about watching a parent become ill and die; about reconciling family history with the present; finding love and wallowing in its glorious, miserable mess; and untangling threads of identity and belonging (or not). It is a story about origins and futures, immigrants and community. The prose is carefully measured, clear and sparkling, creating a vivid picture of Thandi’s life, immersing the reader in her experiences.

Clemmons was gracious enough to do an interview via email, where we discussed life’s influences on writing, what it means to be an artist in today’s world, and representations of blackness.

***

The Rumpus: You talked about the book being based on your own experiences—why did you decide to write it as a novel, and not as a memoir? Were there challenges in fictionalizing your experiences?

Zinzi Clemmons: My personal story encompassed many topics I wanted to explore: race/racism, how we treat illness, how mothers and daughters interact, how different generations of immigrants interact. I decided that the best way to do this was to write it as a novel. Fiction just allowed more flexibility for me to explore the topics I’m interested in in the way I wanted.

I’ve been asked this question in every interview I’ve done (so please don’t think I’m singling you out), and I want to take this opportunity to address it in more broad terms.

Every fiction writer draws on their own life in their work. I hope that the reason this question keeps coming up is because the book feels authentic and resonates strongly with people. However, I can’t help but think there is something else to it; that it has to do with peoples’ expectations of what I, as a young black woman, can or should write.

I write and think a lot about hip-hop—not just the music itself, but its place in society. For almost as long as it’s existed, white listeners have been unable to distinguish between a rapper’s persona and who they are. So, particularly in the 90s, there was an assumed connection between violent lyrics and violent behavior, where people assumed that if someone rapped about it, they had done it. This led to the condemnation and censorship of many artists who, oftentimes, were simply performing personas concocted by record companies to sell copies. But, because the public thinks of black people as inherently violent and less capable of complex thought, they also falsely assumed rappers were incapable of the kind of sleight of hand that it takes to construct and play a convincing persona. It’s as if the public thought: I don’t believe you could have made this up, so it must be real.

I think readers should ask themselves why they are interested in the truth behind this story. If it serves to interpret or appreciate the story, that’s a productive question, but if it’s to satisfy curiosity about me, it’s not really useful. I also won’t ever fully distinguish what’s true and what’s not; that’s the liberty I’m granted by calling it a novel.

Readers should assume that—just as is the case with any other novel—there is a lot of sleight of hand involved. I’m the author, not the protagonist, and at the end of the day, it’s what’s on the page that matters. I’m merely the woman behind the curtain pulling the levers.

Rumpus: I really enjoyed the format—how it wasn’t a traditional, linear, chapter-by-chapter format. You also include photographs and graphics. Why did you decide to write it this way, and how do you think it impacted the novel?

Clemmons: I’ve always written in this style. It represents how I think people see and interact with the world. People don’t just sit down and dictate stories from beginning to end—they allude, they pause, they deceive, they ask, they gesture, they reference. The fragmented nature of the story also reflects the reality of memory and trauma, which causes us to recall in little bits, and to travel from one topic to the next associatively. In that way, the style reflects the subject matter of loss, but everything else is just how I write.

Rumpus: The concept of belonging is woven throughout the book, and especially today, politically and socially, it seems that people are so quick to place labels on us and want to put us in one box or another. As if our identity is static and not able to be fluid at all, lest it cause anyone discomfort or challenge “safe” ideas. How has the concept of belonging/outsider-ness influenced your work (if you think it has), and how do you think writers/artists can utilize this part of themselves—particularly now, since Trump was elected?

Clemmons: This is a huge part of my perspective as a human being and as a writer. My nature, as a person, is to stand outside and question. I am very uncomfortable with any kind of group membership, and I tend to just flit from one to another in a kind of rebellious, confused, lonely way. Again, that’s just how I see things, and I naturally bring it to my writing.

As far as the current political moment, I see a lot of problems emanating from that conflict, and it’s drawn mainly along generational lines. The younger generations are very resistant to categorization, which makes older (particularly white, but not only) generations feel very threatened. I think that’s part of why Obama and bathrooms have become flash points: because, in addition to being a black man, Obama represents an integrated, multiracial society, and the acceptance of blackness; bathrooms represent the demolition of the gender binary. Younger people see both gender and race as fluid, and many people find that scary. We are finding very little common ground between the two, and it’s exacerbated by economic problems. We’ve locked antlers. In the end, I think the young will win, but it’s going to be a hard fight.

In terms of how to deal with it, I say double down! History is on our side. My dad is a centrist who supported Hillary Clinton, and I am very much to the left of him. My parents—as is true of most black people of their generation, supported Clinton before Obama. They thought I was crazy for supporting him early, but he turned out to be one of America’s best presidents. I recently reminded my dad that, basically, I was right! It’s time they listened to us.

Rumpus: You write, “Our heroes tend to be orphans. Hercules, Batman, even Harry Potter… Or do we simply view the loss of parents as the most tragic of situations, so that a person who overcomes such a circumstance is necessarily imbued with some aspect of heroism?” This struck me especially hard, because it is something I’ve often wondered with fairy tales—in so many Disney movies, for example, even Finding Nemo!—the mother dies, or there are no parents. Though your book deals with the loss of Thandi’s mother, you manage to avoid tired tropes or stereotypes. Were you conscious of this when writing the book, and if so, how did you sidestep that?

Clemmons: Thank you, I take that as a compliment! This ties into my previous answer. I constantly question accepted knowledge: how a protagonist should be, how blackness is portrayed, how a novel should be written. That passage is a riff on the hero archetype, and what I’m doing there is attempting to pull it apart and lay the pieces bare.

In an earlier version of the manuscript, I had written a much happier ending in the central relationship (I won’t get more specific so as not to spoil). I stepped away from the manuscript for a little while, and it kept niggling at me—it felt clichéd, too rom com-y. I love rom-coms, but that wasn’t what I wanted this book to be. So I changed it and made it darker, more unresolved. After I did that, my soul felt right. Because—even after tragedy—things don’t end up happily ever after, and I try not to lie to readers about matters as important as that.

Rumpus: What are you reading now, and what five books would you recommend to others as “must-reads?”

Clemmons: This is a bit of a shameless plug, though an honest one: I’m currently reading a manuscript that was translated by my husband from the Italian, which will be published in a few months. It’s an eleven-cycle epic about Libyan colonialism called The Confines of the Shadow by Alessandro Spina (a pen name). It’s one of the few works of literature on that period, and it’s tough to read, but extremely important.

I’m going to recommend my five of my all-time favorites, that anyone who’s interested in my book should also pick up: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich, Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, and The Cancer Journals by Audre Lord.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #105: Miranda Pennington

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When friends write books, it can be tricky. What if it’s no good? What if it’s downright awful? Thankfully, that hasn’t been the case with any of the books written by people I know, and Miranda Pennington’s debut is no exception. A mix between memoir and literary commentary, A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work is a love letter to the Brontës woven together with stories of self-discovery, love, friendship, and exploration. In between book launch events, Pennington found time to discuss her bibliomemoir and more with me.

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The Rumpus: Back in grad school, I know you wrote a lot of essays, both personal essays and comic essays. What made you decide to do a sort of braided memoir book, and one that tied in your love for the Brontës? Was it something about the form?

Miranda Pennington: I used to always be skeptical when fiction writers said their characters told them what to write, but this book really did begin to emerge almost involuntarily. One of the courses I got to take during my MFA coursework was a research seminar with Patty O’Toole, and after spending a semester researching and reading, I turned out a fourteen-page essay about my life reading the Brontës and thought that was it. The great thing about nonfiction workshops is people are nosy, so they didn’t want to just know, “Reading this book reminded me of my childhood,” they wanted to know all the whats and whens and whys, and how did that make me feel. It was really important to me that the Brontës, their lives, and their work be what really propelled it; I never set out to write a memoir, but I realized that in order to care about my enthusiasm for all things Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, readers needed to know who I was, so I figured out how to braid all those elements together in a way that’s harmonious, I hope!

Rumpus: Were there any advantages/disadvantages to this, as opposed to straight memoir?

Pennington: I really love reading showbiz memoirs—Jane Lynch, Mindy Kaling, Carol Burnett—people whose voices you recognize, so you know you’re actually hearing from them, not just a ghost writer. But if you’re not famous, your life just has to be really interesting in some way. Braided memoir allows writers to showcase our voices and introduce people to what we love in a way that’s accessible, with enough personal experience to make us present as narrator/characters, without the weight of the whole narrative being about what happened to us. Anchoring my coming of age to these timeless books—especially the ones way fewer people have read, like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Villettegives this book a non-self-aggrandizing reason for being, which made me feel less self-conscious. Which can only make the writing better.

Rumpus: Why do you think the Brontës have managed to stay so relevant in literature? Is there anyone today who might compare to them?

Pennington: Back in the day, the Brontës’ prose was considered shockingly unrestrained. People found it scandalous. But when you pick their works up today, you have to wade through stylistic choices that most modern novelists wouldn’t make, like taking too long to get the plot moving or total McGuffin characters. The people who really fall in love with the Brontës are the people who hear that fierce energy thundering away behind this somewhat formal, old-fashioned prose. I think it delights us to know that two hundred years ago, there were women who were just as angry and depressed and amused and excited as we are. They may have led very different lives, and made different choices, and been limited by the knowledge that was available to them, but they had the same feelings we do. It’s liberating, and exciting, to feel affirmed in that way. Your feelings of anxiety or inadequacy or discomfort are totally normal, and you just need to read Charlotte’s letters to find confirmation of that.

There are plenty of writers alive now whose work I think we’ll still be revisiting in a hundred years, but there’s also something special about the family unit. The only voices I could think of that might compare in terms of having a unique perspective and this essential family of origin context are Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris, maybe? But that reflects my extreme bias for comedic observational essays, and is perhaps not the answer a more well-read person would give!

Rumpus: I found it so interesting to read about Charlotte’s last two years, where her writing took a backseat to her husband. You mention your own writing and the precariousness that might occur if you have children. Do you think this struggle, this constant tension about carving out our own time, our writing time, and family time, is one that is unique to women writers?

Pennington: I feel like you’d be better equipped to answer this than I am because you have a small human terrorizing your house! I do think that women who write bear the burdens of emotional labor and mental labor, particularly around household-running, more than most men. (I’ll just preempt the inevitable #notallmen by acknowledging there are exceptions, and that I myself refuse to be “in charge” of housework. If it’s not shared equally, I’m paying someone else to do it).

It’s only to the good that women’s voices around motherhood (or the decision not to pursue motherhood) are growing more prevalent and more varied. I think Charlotte made the decision to get married because she was lonely, worried about what would happen to her father if he grew too frail to work, and because Arthur Bell Nicholls had kind of grown on her. I think she was happy, even if it meant she had less time for writing because one of her ambitions was to be a “proper woman.”

It requires significant mental effort to shrug off the internal and external expectations that come with being a writer who’s a woman, I think, whether those have to do with kids or spouses or household decisions or the logistics of other paid and unpaid work. I still worry about the prospect of having kids, given that a bad day or a really crappy commute home sends me straight to the shower for twenty minutes of decompressing time. I understand kids tend not to let you have that autonomy. But maybe my kids would be introverts, too, so once we got through those high-need early years, we’d be okay. I have zero answers in this department.

Rumpus: What do you see our role as writers being, in this current political/social climate?

Pennington: We have to keep our eyes open, tell the truth, and try not to let being afraid stop us. I just finished Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck, which does a tremendous job of unpacking the way we, as a group, look at women in the media, how we celebrate them and punish them and why. I think maintaining our own critical reading skills to question narratives being pushed on us is really important right now.

Rumpus: What are you reading now?

Pennington: I’ve been rereading Mercedes Lackey’s entire Valdemar series for comfort; it’s so all-encompassing and spans decades and Good tends to prevail—it’s medieval fantasy where there’s all different kinds of magic and we get to watch people form happy relationships and overcome their hangups in partnership with magic horses. It’s… it’s not what the Brontës would do, probably, but it’s a self-care choice.

Rumpus: If you could recommend five books to anyone, what would they be?

Pennington: Impossible! There are as many kinds of readers as there are books! But, if bibliomemoir is up your alley, my favorite iterations of the genre are: My Life in Middlemarch, H Is for Hawk, Out of Sheer Rage, this new one, My Life with Bob, and what the heck, read Shirley!

Rumpus: What inspires you?

Pennington: I tend to figure out I need to write something down when I’m going in circles or can’t let go of a particular phrase or idea. I really like to be immersed in things. I can’t have too many irons in the fire if I’m going to make significant headway on something big, so to get inspired I tend to book a weekend away—or as long as I can manage—someplace where I can take a stack of books, get in a good wake up-shower-work-relax routine and block out the noise. For about six months after I turned in A Girl Walks Into a Book my mind was totally blank and I thought Oh no, that was it, I used up all my material, but then just as with that initial Brontë essay, I revisited a draft I could never get to work—it was really unsatisfying, because I couldn’t get to the root of why I had started trying to write this essay. It kept poking me in the back of the brain until I yanked it into the foreground and started unpacking it. And now it’s my next book project! So I guess being annoyed inspires me, eventually.

Rumpus: What advice do you have for other writers?

Pennington: I give this advice to my students all the time—find some way to get low-stakes practice, whether it’s a blog, or essays, or a zine, or a writing group with your friends. Get creative in how you visualize what you’re writing—I come up with these mildly deranged drawings or graphic organizers when I’m trying to hammer out the scope of a project. Save your crappy first drafts—in a document called TRASH if you have to! Don’t just sit down to a blank page without having spent some time mulling things over. Take a walk, take a shower, eat something, so you don’t just sit there staring at that white space, thrashing around while you try to come up with the perfect first sentence. Write a terrible first sentence and trust that Future You will be able to improve on it eventually.

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Author photograph © Eric Titner.

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Miranda will read from A Girl Walks Into a Book with Melissa Scholes Young and Iggy McGovern this week at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 14th, 2017 at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza

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Erica Garza and I first met online in a group for new moms. It was only later that we discovered we had gone to the same MFA program, albeit several years apart. We talked about what we were working on—typical stuff of MFAers—and she told me about her memoir. I was instantly intrigued.

A few months later, I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, which chronicles much of Garza’s life—from childhood through her early thirties, with a focus on her relationships to masturbation, porn, and sex.

What the memoir is not is titillating or full of shock value. In this day and age, that might be surprising, given the content. What it is, in the end, is a story about connection: to oneself, and to others.

Recently, Garza graciously found the time to speak with me over email about her work.

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The Rumpus: Tell me about what led you to write about this aspect of your life?

Erica Garza: I had never written about sex addiction before my essay “Tales of a Female Sex Addict,” which I published at Salon.com in 2014. I was a newlywed and had recently completed this intense seven-day retreat called The Hoffman Process, which is all about taking a hard look at our negative patterns and learning how to dismantle them. It was becoming unavoidably clear to me that my sexual behavior had been causing me great unhappiness for a long time and I desperately wanted to change. I usually use writing to figure things out, and I really wanted to figure out why I had this relationship to sex, how it all started, how it got worse, and how I might find a way out so that I would no longer stay stuck in unhappiness or destroy yet another relationship. After I published that essay, I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. So much of my sexual history made me feel ashamed and I lived a very lonely, secretive life for a long time in fear of called a pervert, a loser, or a slut. But there was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame. Also, the response I received from readers who had similarly battled with sex and porn addiction made me feel less alone.

Rumpus: Though the subject has to do with sex, I felt like relationships—friendship, romantic, platonic—were woven through the narrative of your book, building a sort of scaffolding that the story rested on. The relationships you had with Leslie and Anna were so fascinating to me. Leslie, because it’s that childhood infatuation kind of relationship, and Anna, because she was so different. They seemed to play a significant role for you, too.

Garza: It was important to me to include my challenges with other types of relationships besides romantic. The subject has to do with sex, but it mainly has to do with intimacy. I didn’t know how to nurture relationships with people if I wasn’t having sex with them—what else did I have to offer? I thought so little of myself and thought people only wanted to hang out with me because they pitied me and it was so uncomfortable feeling like an object of pity. It was easier to stay cut off from other people, but it was also incredibly lonely and unfulfilling. It became clear to me that if I started to think more highly of myself and embrace my own worth as a friend, a sister, a daughter, a person, then I would feel more worthy of intimacy beyond the sexual kind—something I desperately wanted.

Rumpus: The subject of the book—sex and porn addiction—is one that has often been more of a “man’s” topic than women’s.

Garza: I think our culture is finally starting to warm up to the idea that women can like sex and porn as much as men do, and that we can even develop compulsive sexual behaviors. It’s an old and outdated idea that men are the only sex addicts, but sadly most of the data that exists on sexual addiction says the same thing. I think what’s more true is that women might still feel too ashamed to come forward about sex addiction out of fear of being slut-shamed or seen as weird or different. I hope that my small contribution in sharing my story might help other female addicts come forward about their own struggles so we might change the conversation to be more inclusive of women.

Rumpus: Piggybacking off of that, early on in the book, you draw the correlation between sexual pleasure and shame. How has that played into the writing of this, and the “outing,” so to speak, of your experiences?

Garza: Shame is a knee-jerk reaction for me. I have such a thick history of feeling ashamed that sometimes it’s the first thing I feel when I think about other people reading this deeply personal account. However, the shame never lasts long. I have put a tremendous amount of work into allowing myself to accept the shame or humiliation or guilt I feel at times and move forward to healthy acceptance instead. Simply writing and talking about shame has really helped reduce its power over me.

Rumpus: I found it fascinating when you talked about Tim Fountain and how he viewed his relationship to sex. Do you think there are marked gender differences in how addiction and recovery are framed and how they play out, especially with sex and porn? 

Garza: In the letters I receive from sex and porn addicts, I don’t see much difference between men and women. Whether they’re married or single, old or young, male or female, sex and porn addicts typically feel ashamed, isolated and out of control. However, when I went to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, I did notice a difference between the men and women. First, there were more men than women at most of the meetings. Second, many of the women talked about being sexually anorexic, which means they compulsively avoid sex, while men talked about frequent casual sex encounters. What was interesting, though, was that in both scenarios, men and women felt like they were lacking true intimacy with another person. Even though that was my experience in the meetings, I still don’t think it’s an accurate representation of women and compulsive sexual behavior. Like the data (or lack of data) that exists, I just think women feel uncomfortable sharing those aspects, even in a relatively safe place like a twelve-step meeting.

Rumpus: Would you say that you’re “recovered,” to use addiction parlance?

Garza: I think one of the reasons the concept of sex addiction is a controversial one for doctors and scientists is because “recovery” and “treatment” are difficult to define. In most addictive behaviors (like drugs and alcohol), recovery has to do with abstinence, but recovery in sex addiction is more about balance and eliminating harmful behaviors, which are manifested differently in every addict. My harmful behaviors were mainly porn bingeing, compulsive masturbation, secrecy, and needing to feel an element of shame in my sexual experiences. When I first started to face my addiction and desire change, I stopped watching porn altogether and committed myself to an intimate, monogamous relationship. A few years on, I now watch porn occasionally and my husband and I are open to sexual experimentation. I feel more connected, more present, and more at peace with my past, but I’m not sure I would’ve gotten here if I hadn’t taken a break from porn, stopped sabotaging relationships and chosen honesty and vulnerability over secrecy. These choices were imperative to interrupting my patterns and starting to do things differently. I do not consider myself a sex addict anymore, but I do know that falling back into harmful behaviors is a possibility that comes with being a sexually open person with a history of addiction. The best I can do is to remain honest, respectful of myself and the people around me, and resistant to the urge to shut down and escape when stressors and triggers come up.

Rumpus: What are your top five books? What are you reading now? 

Garza: Hard question! Top five books are: This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, Wild by Cheryl Strayed and A Moveable Feast by Hemingway.

Right now, I’m reading The Art of Misdiagnosis by Gayle Brandeis, Mean by Myriam Gurba, and Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Rumpus: What are you working on next?

Garza: Sleep! Just kidding. I have an eighteen-month-old and I can’t help but want to write something about motherhood. I don’t want to give specifics because I’m still working it out, but it seems to be a logical next step.

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Author photograph © Rachael Lee Stroud.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #166: T Kira Madden

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It would be easy to describe T Kira Madden’s debut memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls as a coming-of-age story, or as a memoir about trauma, or a memoir of growing up biracial or queer. The truth is, the book is all of those things and more. It is an examination of privilege and wanting, of the components that make up family, of addiction, and of healing. It is an apt representation of growing up in a culture where appearance matters—especially for young women—and finding out where you belong isn’t easy for many people.

In the blurbs, Claire Vaye Watkins compares the book to Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, which is pretty apt. If you combine Allison with the fluid, raw style of Lidia Yuknavitch and the poetic language of Joy Harjo, you’d have Madden. Unafraid to face the things that threatened to destroy her again and again, she’s written a memoir that breaks open truths that she’s still discovering.

In addition to being a writer, photographer, and amateur magician, Madden is a founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a journal of art and literature that has a staff comprised of women and non-binary individuals. Her writing can be seen on a variety of sites, including Guernica, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Alma, and more.

I recently caught up with Madden via email to discuss her memoir, just released earlier this week.

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The Rumpus: On Facebook recently, you posted a picture of yourself from ten years ago and wrote that at the time, you were taking night classes in fiction and were a fashion design student by day. When did you first start focusing on writing/think being a writer was doable?

T Kira Madden: If there were a movie montage of my life as a writer it would feature me, in various rooms and at various desks looking very confused, as if I accidentally and mistakenly made it to this book by some comedy of errors. The truth is, I work so hard. Ever since those first night classes at eighteen years old, I have approached writing as the greatest privilege and spiritual becoming of my life, but I’m still plagued with imposter syndrome every day, with every word. So, is it doable? Somehow, yes. But I still don’t believe it. 

Rumpus: You’re one of the founders and the Editor-in-Chief of No Tokens. How has this influenced your development as a writer and your work? 

Madden: Being an editor sharpens the eye and ear, yada yada, of course, but really, if we’re talking artistic development, founding and editing a journal has taught me everything about generosity and community building. The longer I’m here, the more I believe those qualities matter as much as craft. Spending time with so many submissions is heartening because it reminds me that we’re all in this, making things. For the most part, we’re all doing our best. As an editor, I’m approaching every piece looking for the best of it, the most stinging, awe-striking, crystalline moments, because I want to always fight for art, not against it.

Rumpus: At one point in the book, you say that “Maybe the unfinished story is the story.” Is that what spurred you to write the book? If not, what did? 

Madden: I wish. If I knew that was the answer up front, it would have been a much easier book to write. Though perhaps if I’d known the answer I wouldn’t have written it at all. I’m always writing into questions. I’m writing to make shape out of that which I don’t understand. The most unshapely moments or people. I wrote the book to story my life and my father, and to find a linear tidiness to what’s happened to me, and, spoiler: I never found it. The unfinished story is the story, yes. Unfortunately and blissfully, that’s the truth. 

Rumpus: One of the things that struck me as I read your book was the vivid sense of place. Having lived in Ft. Lauderdale for a brief time years ago, I felt that you really captured the surreal quality of South Florida—which can be so hard to describe on the page; it’s a feeling. Funny enough, in the same Facebook post referenced above, you had mentioned you hated Florida. Has that changed? Florida feels like such an important character in its own right in your book.

Madden: I want to love Florida. I want to cherish it. I want to feel changed and made by it. But honestly, my feelings about Florida are still too gnarled and close to parse out. I will say that reading Kristen Arnett’s “The Problem with Writing about Florida” for the first time—that really got to the bone of it. The impossibility; the “ache I can trust.” I’m glad Florida is a character in my book, and—as I hope all my characters are—I’m glad it’s complicated.

Rumpus: The section “Can I Pet your Back?” is almost a meditation on “pretty,” if you will. For me, it felt like a meditation on womanhood in general, on what it’s like growing up as a girl, navigating life and expectations as a female, etc. Where do you find “pretty” now, and where/how has that changed?

Madden: I think the simpler, crowd-pleasing answer might be to say I’ve put all the Boca behind me, and I no longer care about pretty and beauty and what it takes to ‘achieve’ it, but I’m from Boca! Beauty has its fangs in me. And also, that’s okay! There’s something incredibly icky and counterproductive and anti-feminist and anti-queer to say that true beauty and feminism is pure and without makeup and without vanity. Why the fuck can’t we send nudes to our friends and feel hot in a new outfit or splurge on skincare and a new Hi Wildflower lipstick when and if we can? Pretty, for me as an adult, is owning and maintaining a healthy relationship to pretty, a relationship full of boundaries and respect and always, always desire.

Rumpus: You included pictures in the last part of your book. Why pictures, and was there a reason they were only near the end?

Madden: I’ve always tried to sneak photographs into my work—fiction or nonfiction—blame W. G. Sebald. I like visual components as punctuation. If I had it my way I’d litter the whole book with photographs, but then you have to request various permissions, which can be tedious. Also, as I’ve learned, formatting can be tough when you’re working with images. Using them in the final section felt manageable and appropriate for the section; the section itself is very much about piecing together a mystery by going through old records, journals, and scrapbooks and revising the mythologies we’re told about our lives. The photos, and so many more photos that were cut, were the literal footprints I followed to find my way through the story. 

Rumpus: I’m always interested in titles of books, and you have a section of your book with the same title as the book title. This section was one of my favorites, actually. For me, the sense of chosen family and how we find our groups was something with which I really identified. How did you choose this section’s title as your book title?

Madden: The short answer: I didn’t! “The Rat’s Mouth” was always the title of this book in my heart, but my editor had a great point that “The Rat’s Mouth” is a punchline. It closes, rather than opening. I always wanted titles that skewed darker, because I think the book is quite dark, but my agent and publishers really felt Long Live was a more triumphant title with more spirit. Now I can see they were absolutely right; people have found the book because of the title alone. There’s a sense of family or community in it, for sure. I’m so grateful for that. 

Rumpus: How did you come up with the structure of your book? For me, it read almost like a series of connected snapshots, rather than a standard linear memoir of “this happened, then this, now this and this.”

Madden: I’m very much of the Lidia Yuknavitch Chronology of Water school of Grief Isn’t Linear. Why should our renderings have to be? I hadn’t read too many memoirs when I began this project and I think, in a way, that served me. I had no idea what a classic memoir was “supposed” to look like, so I wrote it the way I write everything: shattered, fragmented, out of order, thematically random. Later, with the help of my fantastic agent and my dream editor, I was able to begin ordering and composing the fragments into a piece of music. I’m so grateful that they helped me find a narrative arc but also supported me leaning into my weird. It’s a weird book. I don’t know how to write any other kind.

Rumpus: Who are the writers that inspire you, and what are the books you return to again and again?

Madden: In my book acknowledgements I mention Grace Paley, Lynda Barry, and Heather Lewis, and those three will always be my truest. Jayne Anne Phillips’s Black Tickets was The Book that made me want to write. I constantly return to my childhood Encyclopedia Brown series; I’m not great at plotting so reading page-turning plot on the most basic level is helpful for me. I love Kenzaburō Ōe and Kawabata and Gogol. Katherine Anne Porter! Annie Proulx and Joy Williams and Daniil Kharms and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which I find structurally perfect. Che Yeun and Justine Champine are two emerging writers who are about to split the world open. Alice Sola Kim and Osama Alomar are writing some of the best stories out there. Kristin Dombek and Jaquira Díaz, some of the best essays. And I will read any-fucking-thing Samantha Irby writes, ever.

Rumpus: What do you think you’ll be pursuing next? Are you working on anything in particular? 

Madden: I, like almost every writer, am currently At Work On A Novel. I’ve been unwaveringly in love with this project for years now, and I hope it will show. Also, I’m going to finally take a shot at some lesbian screenwriting because I want to watch some goddamn lesbian movies and therefore somebody’s got to do it.

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Photograph of T Kira Madden © Jac Martinez.





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