The Days of Yore joined Harrison for lunch at a sushi restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Five text tattoos in Aramaic, Latin, and French wrap around the author’s right wrist, but she won’t translate them for anyone. Not even her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison.

Tell me about growing up in California.

I was born in 1961 and grew up on Sunset Boulevard, right smack in the middle of L.A., with my mother’s parents. My mother lived with us until I was about five. After that, it was just me and my grandparents, both of whom were quite old, even for grandparents. My grandfather was born in 1890 and my grandmother in 1899. Both of them had lived in many far-flung places, and they both taught me about them. Not that I thought so at the time—I entered college as a pre-med—but it was probably the perfect beginning for a writer. My grandfather grew up in London, and my grandmother grew up in Shanghai. She came from ridiculous wealth, at least for a little while. In Shanghai, labor was cheap, so she lived in a house with forty servants.

Forty servants?!

And my grandfather had been so poor as a boy that he was sometimes hungry. So there was that spread. He was a tall, elegant, and athletic man who left Europe in the early teens of the last century. A young man with wanderlust. His education was incomplete, but he was a math whiz and could always get work as a bookkeeper. It allowed him to indulge himself. He traveled all the way across Canada and ended up in Alaska, though Alaska wasn’t a state yet.

Then came The Seal Wife.

Exactly. The book was very much inspired by his experience. My grandfather lived in Alaska when it was a tent city. He trapped fur. He did fall in love with a tent singer, in the dark, based on her voice. They married, and then she died in her thirties.

My grandfather married my grandmother when he was fifty-one, and she was forty-two. They never expected to have a child. So my grandfather ended up with a daughter when he was in his fifties. When I came along, my grandfather was seventy-one.

Did you have an early desire to write?

Writing was something I always could do. I was considered an unusually good writer by the time I was in the seventh grade. I read a lot. I was an only child. Toward the end of college, I thought, this is something I might do. I backed into it, in a way. I started doing it before I said I wanted to.

Even while writing my first novel, I never referred to myself as a writer or it as a novel. It was my “thing.” The “thing” I was working on. The “thing” I did in private when I wasn’t working at my job.


Did you enter an MFA program directly after college?

When I graduated from college, I thought the last thing I wanted to do was to spend two years in writing workshops. They’re hard, and they’re exhausting, and they make you feel vulnerable, and the idea of devoting all of one’s attention to that seemed pretty excruciating. There were three years between college and graduate school.

What did you do in the interim?

Mostly fuck up my life. I was entangled with my father, and my mother was dying, and my grandfather was dying. I had one job—not even a job type job—and I was going back and forth between Los Angeles and New Mexico, where my father was living at the time. For years, I just disappeared into that void. As for why Iowa, I’m old enough now that back then there were really only about three places to apply to [for an MFA] that anybody had ever heard of.

Was Iowa pretty competitive?

Iowa had a serious pecking order and everyone knew where everyone else stood. The top positions were the teaching-writing fellows. The directors and teachers decided the ranking.

We were all dropped down into this weird little bubble, and we all got to know each other, and nobody knew anybody from Iowa. It heightened the amount of attention you paid to the workshop itself. It had this incestuous pressure cooker aspect. Rivalries and affairs and gossip, both careerist and personal. A place where you had to make an effort to protect your privacy.

Did you find it difficult to create in an atmosphere of competition?

I didn’t like it. I don’t know how much of an effect it had on me because I’m an introvert. I’m sort of a loner. I wasn’t the person who was out drinking with people after workshop. I pretty much went home and tried to get work done. During my first semester, my mother died, so I had this huge distraction. It put things in perspective. It conferred a certain immunity. And I became a teaching-writing fellow [laughs] so I wasn’t worried about my place in the pecking order, which I’m sure made a difference, too.

Tell me about meeting your husband.

When I first arrived at Iowa, my life was a complicated mess. My mother was about to die. I had asked to defer, and was told I’d have to reapply, so I had had to make a difficult choice. Jack Leggett, the director, was a very avuncular person—disarming in the best sense—and at our first workshop, he said, “Some of you will even meet your husbands and wives here.” I looked at him, thinking, “As if.” And of course I was the one.

Colin never said, “Will you marry me.” We always knew. After a few years, we got married.

Where had you lived before you moved in with him?

Nila Kelso, a farmer’s widow, had a house and she rented out her extra bedrooms to students. I had a weird garret. Colin came over and spent the night once and said, “I’m never going to spend the night here again.” You sat up in bed and bumped your head. I was used to it.

When you lived with him, would you go back to your weird garret and write?

I kept writing in my place and always spent the night at his.

So you basically had an office?

I guess I did. It was a rather odd living situation.

Were other people milling about?

I shared the upstairs with a young woman named Alice. She was an undergraduate who hadn’t declared a major yet and she’d been there for eight years. Alice would stalk on the periphery like a small storm. It was okay. We figured out how to share the space. We had nothing in common. She had come from Iowa, and she thought I was a strange freak from outer space.

Because you were from Los Angeles?

I don’t know. Alice was an odd duck. I remember moving in and strolling past her room. She had maybe three books. They were I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and, you know, Jesus is gonna love you no matter what, and I thought, okay…

You knew all you needed to know.

I, on the other hand, came with a pet rat.

Wow, what color?

White and black. A lab rat. I’d had rats as pets for some time. My first rat, Wilhelmina, really was very smart and kind of a character. I kept her in the bathroom with the door closed and left her cage door opened. I kept my jewelry there, and I had a couple of earrings that she considered hers. If I took them out of her cage, she’d scold and bring them back. She was fun. Although once, I did leave my school uniform skirt hanging on a towel rack where she could get to it, and within eight hours, she had reduced it to a grass skirt.

Tell me about your move to New York in 1987.

My husband had been born here [New York] and had lived on the East Coast all his life. Having discovered New York when I was about fifteen, I was always trying to get back here. So when the time came to leave Iowa, we thought, what the hell, we’ll try to live in New York. So we came out in a wide-eyed dippy way and landed here. I flew to New York, and he set out in a U-Haul.

I stayed with an old friend in Manhattan, and in three days, I had to find an apartment. I went around on this accelerated tour of real estate in the boroughs. Manhattan wasn’t going to work for financial reasons. There were two up-and-coming neighborhoods, Astoria and Park Slope. In Astoria, the only places I saw were upholstered in linoleum. It went from the floor all the way up the wall. I found an apartment in Park Slope that we could actually afford. It seemed livable. There were a couple of restaurants and places to buy food. It’s very different now—somebody actually identified us as the “Park Slope problem.” With a couple of other people, we started the ghetto for writers.

Did you work in publishing?

I worked at Viking Penguin for three years. I began as an editorial assistant for Nan Graham, who is now the editorial director of Scribner, where Colin [her husband] works. Small world, publishing. I loved it. If there’d been thirty-six hours in a day, I probably would have stayed longer, but when I left, my grandmother had just moved in with us, and we’d just had a baby. I had one ancient baby and one new one on my hands. They were both in diapers by then. I just couldn’t do it, so I left the industry. It was the right decision. But it was also a decision that meant I didn’t have a job or an income. I was a full-time writer, which took some getting used to. I had to work.

Had your first book come out at that point?

It had sold.

The book sold after grad school?

My husband was key, in many ways, because when you work in publishing, you can spend an endless amount of time working. You take work home. After I had been doing it for about six months, my husband said, “This is really stupid. You spend all your time working on other people’s writing, but you’re not getting any done yourself. I want you to change that.” So I started getting up at five in the morning. I wrote between five and seven, before I went to work.

I was in her office on a Thursday and she’s very—she’s wonderful. Very direct and business-like. She said, “So! This is what I think we should do.” She wrote down all these editors’ names, and she said, “We’ll have an auction next week.” On Monday, there was a message on the phone. “It’s Amanda Urban. Give me a call.” I thought she wanted some information for the cover letter, and so I called her, and she said, “So! We have a preemptive offer.” I just stood there with the receiver pressed to my ear. She said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “What do you think I should do?” And she said, “I think you should take it.” Within one week, I had an agent and a publisher, which was certainly not the usual experience. I was really grateful to be spared because I was already wondering how I was going to deal. I’m not built for that kind of stress.

Did you ever get rejected?

By somebody other than my mother? [Laughs.] I didn’t have to deal with much rejection as a writer. I have written a novel and thrown it out, because my editor didn’t like it. Actually, the novel that I threw out was the one I was working on right before I started working on The Kiss. The reason that novel was so bad was because I hated everyone in it. Unconsciously, I felt that those characters were keeping me from writing The Kiss. I went into an editorial meeting for this big plan for revision, and Kate Medina, my editor, looked across her desk at me, and said, “What do you want to do?” I said—unexpectedly—“I don’t want to write this book at all.” She had bought the book, so she just leaned back in the chair, and said, “What do you want to write?” I told her I wanted to write a book about what happened between my father and me, and she said, “Oh…”

The novel that preceded The Kiss had been rejected in that sense—it was bad and we all thought so. It’d been bought, though, so it wasn’t the same sort of thing. I’ve had pieces rejected by The New Yorker. I don’t do a lot of short work, and most of my short work, I sell once it’s done. Given that, the short work can be rejected, but not much.

Must be nice.

My life as a writer has been blessed in many ways. There’s so much heartbreak in this business. My older daughter’s a painter. She’s twenty-two, she’s got a lot of talent, and I imagine she must look at the art world and wonder how she – anyone – can make a living as a painter. A career in the arts is certainly not something you would wish upon your child, because it’s just asking for heartbreak, rejection, frustration, poverty.

This is not a meritocracy. There are a lot of very bad books that do very well. There are a lot of beautiful books that sink like little stones. There are so many opportunities for heartbreak.

Who were your early influences?

Flannery O’Connor, definitely. I’ve always loved Dickens. More and more as I get older… Oh, Faulkner! I’m trying to see my bookshelf and travel through it. J.M. Coetzee. Edith Wharton. Nabokov. Hillary Mantel. Martin Amis. I also like Japanese fiction—Kenzaburo Oe, Shusaku Endo, Ishiguro. Dostoyevsky. Bulgakov. I can point to books I love or writers I loved earlier in my life, but it’s difficult to say who’s a person who’s had impact on your work. Cheever. Updike. Madame Bovary is probably my favorite novel of all time.

That’s a good list.

I was a big fairytale reader, as a kid and still as a grownup. I was always interested in hagiography, stories about saints. I read a lot of theology and psychiatry. I love Jung, because he straddles. I was always somebody who was interested in religion and had a strange religious background. I was thoroughly indoctrinated as a Christian Scientist as a kid, and then my mother converted to Catholicism, so I became Catholic. My father is a protestant minister, or was, and my grandparents were Jews. I always had these different traditions and disciplines, in terms of theology, around me and it probably provoked some questioning. My Sunday school began when I was about three. I took it really seriously. I’ve read the bible a couple of times.

Do you love writing?

I do. Sometimes it’s horrible, but I love it. I love it a lot more than being a writer. Publication is hard for me. I want my work published of course, but I don’t like going out in the world and being that person who is, in some ways, separate from me, because she is someone who lives in the minds of other people. Whereas writing itself offers these transcendent moments… they don’t come along all that often, but when it’s great, it’s transcendently great.

The paradox is that I am most myself and least burdened by self when I’m writing. Hours can vanish. Sometimes hours spent on one sentence, which is not so good, but I do love it. I didn’t begin by loving it. I began in the Flannery O’Connor camp of “I love to have written.” I never thought it was fun. I was always in a crisis of anxiety. There were a couple of people at Iowa who said they loved writing, and I thought, “Wow, really? That’s weird.” I’ve come to love it. But I’ve also become far more addicted to it. It really is this thing that I have to do.

Why do you think you’re addicted to it?

Writing is a way of bringing order to chaos, as illusory as that order might be. It offers an arena in which I get to be the director. Even if it’s nonfiction, I get to choose the order in which the information is revealed and which details I use. As time goes by, you realize there’s not much in life you have control over. It seems to me some wonderful magic trick that I get to do what I love and get paid for it. It’s the way I explain the world to myself. It’s my coping mechanism. It’s the apparatus that allows me to approach the world. Without it, I don’t know what I would do.

What are your writing hours?

For many years, my hours were predicated by my children’s school hours, which meant that I got them out of the house and reported to my post. I’m very much a believer in Flaubert’s advice— to be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. A writer needs the same kind of work ethic as anyone else who wants to get anything done. Just show up for your job every day. I’ve never been one of those people who believed in the romantic notion of scribbling away from twelve midnight until four in the morning after having lived a bohemian life. I’ve always been pretty orderly by nature. So eight until whenever they’d come home.

My older kids are in college now, and it’s still the same. My husband goes to work, my youngest to school, and I to my desk. I prefer the house to be empty or for everyone in it to be asleep when I work. If I’m really working hard, I’ll be at my desk at five, and I’ll work until seven, until I have to start rousing people, then I’ll go back. It ebbs and flows. But I go to my desk whether I’m inspired or not. I just don’t have to get dressed and go to the subway.

How have you managed to balance raising three children and publishing more than a dozen books?

I’m driven. I don’t do a whole lot else besides take care of my family. I have a few friends… who really are family. I’m not someone who’s out at parties much because I’m shy—I don’t really want to be out socializing. Anyway, I’m not much fun to be around if I can’t write. I’m addicted to it. Even if I have only an hour in a day, I’m going to use it.

How do you switch from genre to genre so easily?

One relieves the other. Mary Gordon once said that the difference between fiction and nonfiction was that in fiction you get to change the ending. You get to mete out poetic justice. I’m getting better, but I don’t think that plotting is my strong suit. That’s a problem with fiction because you have to make up the whole thing.

What makes you think that plotting is not your strong suit?

I was somebody who was quite involved with character and details but not always able to lift myself out of the forest to see the trees, to be able to see the movement of the story, which is a problem my husband doesn’t have. His mom is an actress. He grew up cuing her. He had a really clear sense of what a play was. When I would divide pages up into what I thought were chapters, he would look at them and say, “A chapter is like an act in a play. It starts in one place, and by the time you get to the end, something has changed, it’s arrived somewhere else. And then the next chapter starts.” I needed a lot of remedial work.

Fiction does offer freedom, but there’s the working of plotting it. By the time I get to the end of a novel, the idea of having a nonfiction project, like a biography, is really welcome, because the plot’s been done. It turns into a different set of questions. I like that. I like doing both.

Have you faced any other challenges in writing fiction?

I do like writing because it is this whole world that I have the illusion of control over, but one of my challenges, especially in fiction, has been to sit back and relax and let things to unfold without worrying about it. The first time it happened it had seemed really scary—“Wait a minute, you’re not the main character of this book.” But I couldn’t banish them. Now I really love when that happens. The character that just pops out and runs away with the whole show. If you’re willing to sit in the passenger seat, it’s magic. You’re inventing it, and yet it’s pulling you along.

In The Binding Chair, the main character commits suicide toward the end. I remember feeling just grief-stricken. I was thinking, oh my god, I should have seen it coming. I knew she was depressed, I knew she was depressed! She had made that attempt earlier—why didn’t I see it coming?! One would think I’d been planning it, I was after all the one writing the book. But I was blindsided. She drowned herself, and I thought, oh my god, so that’s why she was taking those swimming lessons!

Tell me about writing The Kiss.

Writing The Kiss was not an act of altruism. Not every reader says, “This book saved my life,” but some do, enough that it’s redemptive. It’s a wonderful thing to take some part of your life and turn it into something that actually helps somebody else. But that wasn’t why I wrote it. I was just trying to save myself. I had one way.

When I was involved with my father, I had stepped outside of human society. Sometimes I would look in the mirror, and I would be surprised to see just a girl there. In my mind, I had turned into a monster. But the person I saw wasn’t frightening, she was frightened, and very alone. There was only one way for me to get back over that line, back into human society, and that was to write the book. For many people I will never be back over that line. It’s a taboo broken. I can’t un-break it.

But writing the book freed you.

I had gone through this strange passage in my life that had taken me all the way down. I was always one of those people who was eager to please, and of course it was my father, and I hadn’t seen him in years, and he was a charismatic and manipulative person. And I was incapable of walking away from love or what appeared to be love or what somebody said was love in any form, and that meant that I allowed myself to be dismantled. Finally, I got down to the bottom, where I really was considering killing myself, and then I had to pick up the pieces.

When I put myself back together, there were a few things that I left out, like doing anything so that somebody would love me. I’m not that person anymore. My opinion of myself has been hard won. I know who I am, and I could give a flying fuck if somebody says Kathryn Harrison is a bad person. I just don’t care. I do care what people think about my work.

How did you achieve such a consistent tone?

In the case of that book alone, I had written a lot of it in my head before I ever allowed myself to put it on paper. It was written in a very intensely pressured period of about six or eight months, which is very fast for me. It’s a short book. But I think it has that consistency because I wrote it in a white heat.

That was the guiding idea of the book, and that’s why it’s very nonjudgmental, and that’s why it pissed people off. I refused to say I’m a victim of anything. I told it in the present tense because, for me, that story will never be over. It was a way to get back to the young woman I was. It does have that shell-shocked aspect. Once I allowed that voice to take over, it was easy to keep it consistent, because that’s who that young woman is: I was so overwhelmed by what had happened at the time that I wasn’t feeling very much. I was sleepwalking through my life.

I thought the nonjudgmental aspect was the most important part.

I did, too. Not only did I understand the limitations of judgment, but I also understood judgment as an impediment. I knew that it was an unhappy story and that it had to be as compressed as possible because there was really only so much that anybody was willing to take, including me, and that my task was to make it understandable. The past that’s dropped in is only what I think is necessary to understanding what happened once I met my father. I needed to have certain scenes from my childhood, with my mother and my grandparents, so that you could see that this girl was a human being as opposed to a monster, and that it still happened. I took responsibility for a lot of it, and many people would say far more than I should. I’m glad I wrote the book when I did because I’m not sure that I have the same clarity anymore.

I had arrived at a window of clarity where I could see us as three people, none of whom meant… well, I think that my father did have some malignant qualities and some questionable motives. I really do think that he had the intention of ruining and destroying the family that he believed had destroyed his life or had tried to when he was a young man. But, you know, three people came together, and they had needs, and they fucked one another over—and fucked one another.

Was the publication hard on your husband?

The publication was very hard on my husband, because it was public, because he feels that I have no sense of self-protection and that I need a reminder to keep me from shooting my mouth off. I actually think that most people I know do think about what other people think of them, and I used to, too. But I went somewhere else and I came back and I wasn’t the same person. Of course I was the same person, but I had been through this intense and peculiar and hopefully relatively unusual situation that changed me, changed what I thought about myself, what I thought about life. I don’t even know what I knew before all of those lessons. I learned a lot about what people are capable of, how people betray each other.

Did any family members get upset with you for publishing the book?

My mother was dead. My grandparents were dead. I have no siblings or cousins.

What about your father?

I had no interest in exposing my father. The book doesn’t take place anywhere. He doesn’t look like anything. But I realized also that I was telling a story that he certainly wouldn’t have wanted out there. Somebody finally tracked him down, and he didn’t deny it. He said, “She’s a writer. She has a good imagination,” which was not exactly a denial. He did not act in outrage like any normal person would have, had he been wrongly accused. But I have no contact with my father and haven’t since I was twenty-four.

It wasn’t a book that needed publicizing, so I was excused from doing a lot of what I hate to do—go on book tours. I’m grateful to have a publisher. I’m grateful that they want to send me places. I don’t enjoy it. In the case of this book, it would have been especially gruesome.

Do you hate doing readings?

I actually like it at this point, but this has been my job for about twenty-four years now. I was a disaster in the beginning. I would have this stress-induced dizziness. I would stand in front of a podium and feel like the entire thing was listing to the side. I was so preoccupied by not falling off of the floor. That was a distraction. It took a while just to calm down.

Then when The Kiss came out, they came up with a punch list of questions they thought people would ask me, and then they tried it out. The publicist asked me a question, and I cried, each time, every question. They sent me back to a different media coach to train me not to cry.

How did she train you not to cry?

A lot of it was just practicing, but she was somebody who could help me more professionally than anybody at Random House. They didn’t really know what to do with me.

I care what I think about my work. I care what I think about myself. There are plenty of people out there who say I ought to be burned at the stake, and I just don’t care. It’s been a gift.

Do you have a process?

Let it go.

How do you just let it go?

When my first novel came out, I remember somebody telling me that when Gore Vidal’s books came out, he would leave the country and that he never read his reviews. As a first novelist, I said, “Of course I’ll read all my reviews.” And I still read my reviews, but if it looks like a hatchet job, Binky will say, “Don’t even look at this.” When I got my first negative review ever, I was tearful, like I’d gotten a bad grade. My husband looked across the table—we were at dinner—and he said, “Do you want to play with the big boys?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, take your hits.”

I do want to play with the big boys. I’ll take my hits.

Interview by Kassi Underwood

Photo by Joyce Ravid

She laughs sincerely and often and is as humble as anyone. She spoke to the Days of Yore from Berlin through the miracle of Skype.

Have you been traveling around Europe at all? Any EasyJets to Prague or Budapest or somewhere nearby?

EasyJet, yes! You’ll remember this conversation when you hear that someone died after paying one dollar for a flight to Bucharest.

How’s the fellowship going?

I think I’ve bamboozled them. Everyone else are these really serious policy fellows, writing about international law or women’s work camps or revisionist history things, and then I’m like, “I would like to write a story about the moon!” Seems like a Make a Wish or something.

Have you been learning German?

A little. Not too much. It’s one of those things where I really hope the postman comes so I can use this great dialogue I’ve learned.

So. You grew up in South Florida. Did you stay in the same house growing up?



We did, we stayed in the same place in Miami in Coconut Grove. A nice spot by the water. I was there till eighteen.

What did your parents do?

My mom is a lawyer and my dad was a father.


A stay-at-home dad.



Yeah, it was a little role-reversal where…Honestly, they’re a little horrified of this career I’ve chosen sometimes, just because they’re private people. They always want me to remind people that my work is fiction, which is understandable.

What did they think of Swamplandia!? Were they worried about it?

I don’t think they’ve read it, actually. They’re really happy and supportive but I think it’s tough. I might be the same, too, if my mom started writing books about moms and daughters. Very personal stuff.

Were they supportive of you writing when you were younger?



I wouldn’t say we were an extremely literary family or anything, but they’d make it clear that school was important. They both put themselves through college and didn’t have much. And they were big proponents of me reading.

Were you already writing in elementary school?

I was writing, yeah, but nothing spectacular. I had some unicorn notebook, and all of my stories were the same. And it’s funny because I actually think it’s the same plot I still use. Like, “Once upon a time a bunch of magical forest creatures lived in peace!” “And then,” new paragraph, “there was a flood!” [Laughs.] It’s really all the same.

Did you have a book you read a million times?

My mom would take me to the library and she was sort of distrustful of sci-fi books with, like, some dinosaur standing on Pluto on the cover. She just thought, “‘Magic with a J’ will not get you into good schools.” So I could get a “Magic with a J” book but then I’d have to read Jane Eyre. I was on a really weird diet where I could get Ray Bradbury, which I loved, but then I would have to read The Count of Monte Cristo or something way above grade level.

I guess I gravitated toward weirder stuff — all those books that play to kids’ egotism. Like, “There’s these four British kids and it turns out they’re kings and queens!” Your suspicions are correct: you can save the world. I really liked any kind of apocalyptic kids’ stories. Like Hatchet…

I loved Hatchet!



Yeah or Island of the Blue Dolphins. Why do teachers always choose age ten for these kinds of books? It’s like, “Now you’re ready to mourn!”

I remember Bridge to Terabithia killing me.

Oh, God, yeah. That one.

So what kind of kid were you in high school?

I was a fearful person in high school. I think I just sort of went way underground or something. I was sort of vanilla. I would crack jokes every now and then. But my school in Miami was this huge public school where it was easy to be anonymous if I wanted to be. And I was such a coward. I would read books and pretend they were for school.

I had a double life. You know, in my mind I had my nerdy friends and my “ordinary” friends. So I’m sure my “ordinary” friends were like, “Oh, here comes that nerdy one.”

“We have to hang out with this one nerdy kid.”

Right.

And then you went to Northwestern. Did you know going into college that you wanted to be a writer?

Yeah, I did. It’s funny, when I’m teaching now I get these kids who are so self-identified, so excited to be writers. And in retrospect I was, too. I thought, at eighteen, that this was my big vocation. I don’t know why I did, but I knew I wanted it.

George Saunders talked about how he tried for so many years to write what he thought was an “important” novel, and it took him a long time to trust his own instincts. Your writing shares a lot in common with his, I think. Did you have a similar experience when you first started out?

It’s so funny you mention [Saunders]. In a way, it’s probably frightening to him at this point– I’ve tried to actually stop talking about him in interviews, because I think if he ever sees one he’ll freak out. I thank him in the back of [Swamplandia!].

One of my first writing professors said, “Please write a story about adult characters.” But I couldn’t do it. I felt this anxiety to get the facts right. It was terrible, rigid, it read really self-conscious. But then we had this one class where we read Junot Diaz, I think, and it was very voice-driven, he was toggling between high and low vernaculars really easily, and it was funny, wise-cracking, but would have these lyrical boosts too, rat-a-tat rhythmic. That was so exciting for me.

Was there an early teacher that inspired you to trust yourself?

Dan Chaon. He taught at Northwestern, and he wrote these stories we all loved, and he had come through the Northwestern program, so he was our returning major leaguer. And you would meet with him one on one — a Yoda-like conference with the master — and I had given him this weird story that everyone was confused and horrified by. I think it was about somebody who used a starfish to tell the future. Something terrible. Some kind of marine psychic. And it was so long. Like a thirty page story about a marine psychic. And I couldn’t believe this man read the whole thing!

But he was like, “You need to read Kelley Link and George Saunders.” He just extended my horizons a lot. I read George…like a horse? I can’t think of the phrase I want. Like…

Like an endless horse. Running through the field.

I don’t know the phrase I’m looking for. Not like a horse.

But he taught me that it’s okay to play it straight, too. Because [Saunders] is actually very genuine. The emotion is very genuine. He taught me about the ratio of having this sort of fantastic architecture around it — you can do new things.

After Northwestern, did you go straight to the Columbia MFA program?

I did, I did. It’s so funny ‘cause now I give really hypocritical advice like, “Everyone should take time off!”

Do you regret not having taken time off?

I think I was a weird case where I really felt…I don’t really understand it now. It just seems so goofy pretentious to be like, twenty, and to think I would die with these stories inside me. Like, “I need to share these with the world!”

You had to purge yourself. You entered Columbia and said, “I’m ready to purge.”

Right! I was so excited about it. So excited to be writing. And I didn’t have a lot of other offers. It’s not like I was being asked to copy-edit math textbooks or something. I wanted to be in New York, and it seemed like an Emerald City place for me.

I think when I got there I felt very young. And that’s sort of why I wrote about early adolescence so much, because that’s what I felt like I understood. If I had waited to go to school, I might have had a different interest.

Were early workshops a rude awakening at all? Did you feel as though the stuff you loved of yours was received well?

It’s amazing. I seem to have a limitless capacity to manufacture insecurity, so I’m basically always sure that what I’m putting up is doomed and sucky. I find this works well as a defensive strategy.

If people liked something I’d written I was always like, “Wow!” And then if people were like, [in an Eastern European accent] “I just don’t understand what you are doing,” I’d be like, “Me neither!”

All those angry Russian kids never understand!

Yeah! So I was always right either way. And also, you know, Rivka Galchen was in my class. Reif Larson came through. These great writers. Affinity Konar, I think everyone should know about her. She would write these sentences that would radiate us, people would have to wear wrap-around shades to read her language.

Your classmates had incredible names.

So auspicious.

How were you paying the bills during this time?

I worked at the Stay Well Center, on 49th street. I don’t know why I got that job, maybe they just saw MFA and got confused and thought it said MSW? Like I really shouldn’t have had this job. I would go into homes of elderly, largely Hispanic, residents in this kind of government-funded building.

It was a great introduction to New York. I met Grandpa Huxtable! For a long time that was my New York celebrity sighting. I would be like, “Hey, Ethan Hawke on the subway? I just met Grandpa Huxtable.”

That’s a great celebrity sighting.

I’d have these checklists for them. I’d ask, “Do you have visual problems? How about neurological problems?” And sometimes it would be in my terrible Spanish, so I’d have to just write, “General pain. She’s in pain.” And sometimes I had to say, if people had a problem and were railing against me, “I’m sorry that you feel that way.” But it felt good. I liked it a lot. If I had done nothing in my workshops — you know, I erased three bad metaphors or something — at least I got guardrails for Freddy so now she can take a shower! And that felt really good.

So, you did that a few days a week?

I had to stop because I wasn’t writing enough. But then I got a teaching fellowship at Columbia. Teaching Composition which I thought I was quite bad at, actually. It felt a little like Halloween, I felt so grateful that they would go along with the ruse that I was their instructor.

Was that paying for your life at the time?



I had also taken out massive loans to live in New York. Somehow I hadn’t thought that through. I was like, “Citibank will never ask for this back! It’s for my dream!”

Were your parents supportive during these years?

They were really supportive, but I think it was a little baffling to them. They thought it was good I had this teaching fellowship – a teacher was something that sounded more viable. My mom at one point was like, “I’m worried about your economic future.” I remember when my brother — he’s a writer now — announced that he wanted to be a Russian and Journalism double major, my dad was like, “Fantastic! You can get a job in the 1940s!”

That’s when they gave up their dream of, you know, a beach house.

You could still have a beach house.

Maybe like a cabana that we occupy.

But you sold your first short story collection right out of graduate school, so that must have been a good sign…

It was a really lucky strike. My agent sent out a story to The New Yorker and they took it for their debut fiction issue. And I don’t know how that happened. To this day it remains the greatest phone call I’ve ever received, because I had not been published anywhere.

After the initial excitement of all that, though, did nerves kick in? Did you wonder if you could ever top it?

I was raised Catholic and always have this weird guilt hovering somewhere above me. Like I’m waiting to be eaten by a shark on land, or something.

Did The New Yorker acceptance kick-start everything?

Yeah. Originally, my agent was like, “Nobody’s going to publish this wack-tastic story collection.” And I had a bunch of pages I was calling “Swamplandia!” Which wasn’t actually Swamplandia! [her later book]. Lots of science. Basically, I just thought everyone needed a crash course in herpetology. I learned it, and you should, too! It’s sort of like grandmas showing slideshows.

Did Swamplandia! come out of another, shorter story?

When I was in graduate school, everybody else was writing a novel and I was writing these weird short stories, and I would write these epic, too long story drafts. And I kept thinking one would, on its own accord, take root and flourish in my brain. And I guess this thing sort of did. It wasn’t a straightforward flourishing. It was swamp sprawl. But it felt different than the other stories. And that was my starry-eyed honeymoon phase, thinking it would be done tomorrow.

What was your day job around this time?

When the first [story] collection came out, I was working at Symphony Vet on 96th street. The best veterinary clinic in New York!

Were you an assistant there?

I was a vet tech and then I was kind of demoted or…I was a receptionist, mostly. It turned out my love of animals didn’t translate into skill with animals. By the end days I would just wear scrubs and bring a clipboard to the back. Just wear polka scrubs and be like, [calling an imaginary pet] “Waffles!”

Was that your last side job before going full time into writing and teaching?

For a little while I was working at Symphony Vet and also teaching an adjunct class at Columbia. I would just lint brush myself and ride the train uptown. Like, “Who wants to talk about Beckett?” reeking of Chinchilla.

And you were working on Swamplandia! all this time?

Yeah, that was a hard time, I think. Because the stories: it was all bewildering grace. It was the sum of what I’d ever written in my lifetime. But I had a two-book deal, and I felt shady about it. The stories were the most joyful drafting because I expected nothing and I figured maybe eight people would read them. But then I wanted to do a great job for the publisher, you don’t want to be this dud bet. I had some very Little League feelings about it.

Were there points when you stopped being excited by idea of writing?

I think the toughest for me was I sort of…this is a Saunders moment…where I felt like a novel couldn’t be about adolescence and was going to have to be about something serious, or epic, or The War.

I had a bunch of jokey spoofs [of Swamplandia!] And the one I liked was Cormac McCarthy Ava. Like, “I’m gonna bring you in, Ossie.” Or no dialogue at all. “I reckon I’ll have to kill you.”

You should publish that.

Ava as a general on a boat during wartime.

How many drafts do you think you had over the years?

Oh, it would horrify everyone. Like, “This is the result of that many drafts?”

So during those periods of struggle, how do you keep going? How do you keep faith?

It was…really hard. I was pretty convinced it was doomed. And I felt like such a fool ‘cause I’d been given this amazing opportunity. I was getting a lot of help and encouragement and I thought I’d be this big choke artist. I’d listen to the 8 Mile Soundtrack. [Laughs.] I’m completely serious.

What other motivational things did you do for yourself?

I think at a certain point I just kind of capitulated. I started hearing Ava’s voice again and I took the pressure out of writing the Great American Novel and just remembered…this is the voice of the character that I know. It’s going to be about these kids, they really are the focus. The goal was no longer to write the Great American Novel. It became…just write a novel. Even if reviewers say it’s the worst book they’ve ever read, if they call it a “book.” That’s all. Just a book.

[To me] Apparently I’m screaming so loud that everyone in the Academy can hear me.

Tell them it’s all for art.

Oh, man. I’m sorry, I’ve been having too much fun.

I’ll just ask the last question. What final advice would you have for the younger you? Like, how do you keep going when you’re down? How do you sustain the energy?

This sounds like an amazing segue to a song I sing you now.

That would be good.

Just some Sting lyrics I now sing to you.

Sometimes you need to figure that out for yourself. I wanted some editor or outside reader to tell me exactly what to do. It can be difficult when you just hope there’s this doctor on the outside who can cure what ails your story.

But he doesn’t exist.

No. You have to figure out a way to manufacture the medicine from within.

Interview by Lucas Kavner

Photo by Annete Hornischer

True to her roots, Simone remains self-deprecatingly modest. The Days of Yore met her in a small coffee shop in Brooklyn, where she lives. She was busy working on a new novel.

Let’s look back at your childhood. What did you want to be when you grew up?

I’ve always wanted to be a singer. Ever since I can remember – ever since I was five and was able to formulate it, I wanted to be a singer. I was always singing – to myself! I grew up in the Boston area, and I would ride the subway with my grandmother. It would be really loud, so I’d be convinced that no one could hear me. And I would just start to sing as soon as the train got going. I’m kind of surprised that my grandmother never told me to stop. Now I have all these memories of riding the train and singing really loudly.

In high school, I’d skip lunch. I went to a school in an old building with wooden floors and high ceilings, so the acoustics were really good. I’d find an empty classroom and not eat lunch in order to sing in a room by myself. Occasionally, I’d be discovered and get really embarrassed.

Did writing play into it? Were the songs you sang famous or your own?

Mostly, I sang other people’s songs. A friend proposed that I write my own lyrics, and it was weird – I thought, I guess I could do that. But there were so many good songs that other people had written. I just loved singing songs that I loved.

As for other writing, I did actually write a lot. I went to this socialist high school where the seniors got a month off to do a special project. The project could be anything – it was completely self-guided. I don’t remember having to get any kind of permission. You just said what it was going to be, but then you had to turn it in, so it did have to be a month’s worth of work. And I wrote a book! I still have it, and I’ve never looked at it again. It was bad sci-fi – I’m sure it was bad.

What was it about?

Honestly, I haven’t opened it since senior year. I found it in my parents’ house, and I think I now have it in my apartment, in a box. I think it was just along the lines of what I’d read at that point. It was about a hundred and fifty pages.

I wanted to be a writer. Well, I wanted to be a singer, but I guess I didn’t think about that as a job. I thought that a singer was a really fantastical thing to be. I loved writing, and everyone thought I was going to be a writer. Then, when I got to college – I went to college in Boston – I realized that you could actually try to be a singer. There were bands and things. Then I really switched to pursuing music seriously. Still, I was an English major, and the editor of my college lit mag. I wrote a lot, even though my passion was music.

How did the music pursuit get more serious?

I started with open-mic nights and singing on the street. I had my little Maxima acoustic guitar. I was really inspired by Mary Lou Lord, a singer from Boston. She was a busker who eventually went on to a major label. She was the first person I knew about who was busking on the street, and who then made money and had people listening to her. She did an opening for Sheryl Crowe. And still, she looked like a normal person – not someone you see on TV, wearing an inch of makeup; someone I could never imagine becoming. She was just wearing jeans, and that was very inspirational.

What was the first band that you were a part of?

I had my own band at first. I formed a band with someone else, and I was the singer, but we collaborated on writing the songs. I did that for about a year, or a year and a half. The thing is, I was a really bad guitar player. I think I remain a really bad guitar player, but back then I was probably unlistenable.

It’s something I would definitely recommend, especially if you can sing but you can’t play. Just jump in and find other people. You do give something up – I wasn’t writing the songs for that band, I was just writing the lyrics – but the band was so great that it was a really good experience. When I was ready to form my own band again, I felt much more confident.

This was after college, right?

Yes, I was already living in New York.

And how were you supporting yourself?

I had several jobs. I was a crazy person – I had a full-time job and a part-time job, so I was working about seventy hours a week. I was a part-time vocational counselor at Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the country. There were about twenty-two thousand people that lived there, and there was one social services agency that was dedicated to it. They had funding for one part-time vocational counselor, and that was me.

So I was literally running this small nonprofit parallel to the impossible task of trying to get very poor, very down-and-out people into jobs. It was manic, and then I completely burned out. I went to grad school mostly to hide and read. Writing papers was amazing.

What did you study in grad school?

For undergrad, I got a dual degree in English and photography. It was an art school and a university, so you spent half your time in each. And then, I got an MPA at NYU, studying international development.

I got a good deal in grad school – I got a scholarship – and I went mostly because I didn’t want to have jobs anymore. But an equally valid response would have been getting a brainless job where you don’t have to invest as much of yourself. I know a lot of artists who do that, and it totally works out.

How did your parents feel about the joint art/non-art career track?

They thought I was a mess! My dad’s big thing was, If you’re going to do it, just do it. And now that I’m doing it, I get it. But I didn’t even know what he meant before: You have to go all in. Don’t stagger your intentions with all these other projects. Just do one thing.

I always felt like I had something to lose, but what I had to lose was a job I didn’t want.

How did things go after grad school? Did you have to immerse yourself in non-art jobs again?

After grad school, I got my equivalent of the brainless job. I got a really strange job working for a consultant who had business in Russia, but didn’t speak Russian or know anything about Russia. I became really valuable, and helped him get this grant. I worked part-time, but got paid well enough. It staved off total panic about money.

I didn’t love the job, but I did like getting sent to Russia. All those trips to Russia were gold in the bank of experience. Being a writer, a singer, an artist, experience is what helps you create. If you don’t leave your computer and your house, you’re not going to produce awesome stuff.

And one of those trips to Russia inspired your album, correct?

The cover of Yanka Dyagileva, yes. I’d actually heard her music before, though. But Novosibirsk, where she was from, was coincidentally where the foundation my company worked with was located. I kept going back to Novosibirsk, and gradually met people who knew Yanka. It was a small obsession that kind of grew over time. I kept thinking that when I make it, I’ll be able to do any quirky project I want, and then I’ll do a cover of Yanka Dyagileva.

It was a really pleasant surprise to me that people were interested.

Tell me about the year when you had the grant. What was that like?

It was a lot of work. A lot of being alone in a room, listening to many, many different versions of Yanka’s music. The thing about her music is that a lot of it was recorded live. She did have backup instrumentals, but the vast majority of her work has a samizdat quality. There’s also a sameness – many of her songs have very similar chord structure and tempo. A lot of my time was spent trying to find the underlying melodies of these songs, deconstructing them, and doing something else entirely. I didn’t want to just do exactly what she did, and I wanted each song to reflect a different melodic universe. I made a ton of demos, and spent a lot of time with better Russian speakers than I.

It was great having permission to spend a year in Yanka’s world. I read a lot about her and ordered her biography. I went to her grave – which was very hard to find! – and to her house. I don’t think it’ll be there for much longer, since it’s surrounded now by these high-rises in Novosibirsk. I went to the cafeteria-like places where she played, and talked to people who knew her. People in Russia are usually skeptical about your interest. Who is this girl asking all about Yanka Dyagileva? But beneath that is excitement. Things seem more important when Americans are interested in them.

And this was all during your consulting job?

Yes. Most of my trips to Russia were really piggybacking my own interests onto things I had to do for my job.

What did it feel like when the album was released?

It was pretty cool! There was a hubbub about it that I really didn’t expect. I did a show at Joe’s Pub, and that was the first time anything I did was sold out, with a line snaking out the door. People were calling in favors and being smuggled in. Afisha was there from Moscow.

The album got a lot of coverage. It was very, very unexpected – I had never gotten that much attention for anything before.

And how did that change feel?

It actually felt a lot nicer talking about Yanka than talking about me – having this other person’s biography, with a historical and cultural aspect. I was educating people about something that was in danger of being lost, and not just blathering on about myself the way I am now. [Laughs.]

But it did get wearing after a while, because her story is really tragic. It reached a point where it was seeping into my soul, always retelling the story of this suicidal singer. It did start to color things a bit. And that’s where the book came from.

How did the book happen? It sounds like you were immersed primarily in the music world as opposed to publishing or literature.

This editor contacted me out of the blue – Eric Chinski, at FSG. He’s the Editor-in-Chief for fiction. He literally wrote me fanmail: “I’m an editor, I really like your music, and would you be interested in writing a book?” That was his first email, and I thought it was a prank, so I ignored it. Then he found me on MySpace and wrote me another message. He’d actually heard my first album on Pandora, since the Yanka stuff was still in the works.

Finally, the fiction stuff just wasn’t working. Eric had wanted a fictionalized version of my life, and I found that very difficult. It was a time when publishers were very antsy about memoir, but finally he gave me permission to write what had actually happened – to make it nonfiction. I was in Moscow on my way to Siberia, working, when I wrote the ten pages that became the first ten pages of the book. It came really easily, to write the funny story of coming to Russia for the first time. I didn’t write an outline. And then, ten days later, I had a book deal! Eric took those ten pages to the magical meeting where things get decided.

So everything kind of came together at the same time – the Yanka album and the book?

I really, really think it was luck. But it also goes back to that thing: If you pursue your own idiosyncratic vision without caring what anyone else thinks, without caring what the cool thing is, eventually someone out there will listen. In part, that’s the difference between having a massive audience and having a small, but passionate following.

For me, it did feel like karmic payback for allowing myself to be very weird, and not releasing the kind of pop music that would have been more popular. On some level, you know what’s popular, and to some extent you can understand the mechanics of it. But allowing yourself to be uncompromising can be a very validating artistic choice. Ultimately, you’re probably better off being exactly who you are, unfiltered.

Looking back at all that – how does it feel now to see your book in print?

It’s crazy! But honestly, it feels like all these things are going away. Even as I’m looking at my book, or at CDs, I’m already nostalgic for them being in my hand. Soon, everything will be a file.

That’s a scary, scary thought.

And it’s no fun fondling a file! So yes, it was nice to hold my tactile book in my hands.

If that was the nostalgic moment, what was the moment when you realized that the book was actually coming together? That it was going to be published, and that all these people were going to read it?

The whole thing felt crazy because I fell into it in this fairytale way. I’m very conscious of how lucky I am, but if it’s any consolation, my book is solely a record of humiliation from the previous eight years. And that is sort of how it felt – like it was a gift for having stuck out all those sad moments in the music universe.

Really, the moment my life changed was when Eric sent me that email out of the blue. It’s a very magical moment in the life of any artist, when an opportunity comes along that literally changes the way you spend your days. Ultimately, the press and even the fans won’t change your days. They’re out there somewhere, and you’re grateful for them, but you wake up in the morning and still do the same things. Eric offered me something that I didn’t do before, and changed the course of my life.

Even though you didn’t believe it at first.

Well, no, because it was so bizarre. I mean, who does that, what’s wrong with him? I’ve asked him that myself, many times! Is this your process, that you find someone who’s good at something arbitrary and ask them to write a book? It’s kind of an odd way to go about things.

It’s an amazing story. We seem to have skipped over the release of your first album, by the way. Can we backtrack to that?

It was slow. My story there isn’t any different from other New Yorkers in indie rock. You start off recording a few demos, working your way through the lowest clubs to the higher level clubs, and releasing an EP and an album.

What was the point when it felt like you were ready to release an album for the first time? When did it start to seem feasible?

I don’t know that it was ever not feasible. If you’re a solo singer, the way I am, there’s a lot of motivation – I need the money, I need to organize this, I need to find a label to release it. At that point, self-releasing wasn’t as common as it is now. So it was just a lot of work, and I was more concerned with the logistics than worried about being ready.

The first time I got one of those one-line listings in the New Yorker, which had two adjectives at most, was also super exciting. That stuff can really keep you going in the absence of money. You choose the currency by which you judge your progress.

Do you remember your first paycheck for music?

I wish I did! It probably was one of those little shows. But at first, you’re basically begging your friends and family to come, so it’s not so much money you’ve made as money you’ve extorted. Probably touring and getting a college gig was the first time I got a check in the mail, and needed to provide my social security number. And then I held a check with my name on it, for music.

What college was it?

I played at the University of Pittsburgh – but not on the main campus – to six girls knitting in a room. It was some kind of commuter campus, and they were trying to instill a feeling of solidarity, with reasons not to go home immediately after class. They told me this, and said that I was part of that new series of incentives. It was literally in a classroom, to either the knitting club or just a group of women who went everywhere knitting. They were knitting and I was playing my indie rock on my amplified guitar. But, I got put up in a hotel and paid three or four hundred dollars, so it was a big deal.

There was definitely a lot of humiliation.

So how does everything feel now? Music has always been your passion, but the writing fell into your lap. Do the two fight with each other? Is one taking predominance?

Writing is definitely taking predominance right now. I joked to Eric, actually, that he took his favorite indie singer and that this will all end with her being a bad writer for some TV show. The transformation will be complete!

I really would like to get back into it. I just released an album in June. But for my next project, I’d like not to involve guitar at all – to actually leave the genre of guitar-based rock. And that’s going to take some time to figure out.

Interview by Ana Grouverman Follow her on Twitter: @anathewriter.

Photo by Vinciane Verguethen

Cautious at first, Doctorow opens up with a warm and steady chuckle, seeming to surprise himself by his own candor.

Did you have a sense when you were very young that a writer was something one could be – and did you want to be that?

Yes, I believe so. I was an avid reader. I read indiscriminately. I’d go to the public library and bring home an armload of books and go through them in a few days and then go back for more. I didn’t care what the books were, I read everything— comic books, detective stories, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, I made no distinctions. I remember finding a book called The Idiot by someone named Dostoyevsky. I think the title suggested to me that whoever the idiot was, it would turn out that he wasn’t.

How old were you then?

I was probably about eight or nine. And I took that one home and read it, though it was a struggle with all those long Russian names and their diminutives. I remember reading a young adult version of Don Quixote. Oh, and I was crazy about Jack London. London was very important to me because it was while reading The Call of the Wild and White Fang and some of his short stories that I began to ask the other question – not what’s going to happen next, but how is this done? And I think if you’re going to be a writer, that question will pop up pretty early.

And so, when I was about nine, I decided I was a writer, though I felt no particular need to write anything by way of verification. [Laughs.]

You had defined it. And that was enough.

I was loyal to the idea, and everyone in my family knew it. Yet there were moments of defection. One day I told my brother Donald that I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. Donald was very smart. He said, “You just like the sound of those words.” And it was true. I loved to say “aeronautical engineer.”

Well, it does sound pretty great.

So, the answer is yes, I did fix on writing. It turned out that I had been named after Edgar Allan Poe. That was my father’s idea because he loved Poe’s work. When we name our children there’s often some sort of unconscious wish involved, isn’t there? A prayer to the gods – send this child this way. Perhaps my father was wishing for me what he hadn’t been able to arrange for himself. He was very well read, philosophically inclined, but struggling to support his family during the Great Depression took everything he had.

At any rate, when I was in middle school, or what we called junior high school, I started to write stories imitative of Poe, of course – stories that took place in dungeons and crypts and haunted houses. “The cell was dark and dank,” that was a typical opening line.

And did you get appreciation for any of those dark early writings?

I avoided criticism by not showing them to anyone. But then by the time I reached high school, The Bronx High School of Science, I did publish a story in the school literary magazine, Dynamo. I was by then reading Kafka.

I read about that. The story was The Beetle, right?

Yes. Recalling Kafka’s Metamorphosis, his novella of etymological self-defamation. Unfortunately, a few years ago the school put my story up on their website without my approval.

You were not pleased to see it again?

Were they merely insensitive or just being cruel? I had them take it down.

Do you recall what it was like to see this printed thing back when it was first published? What it was like to see your peers reading it?

No, I actually…You know, at that age, if you have any kind of creative impulse, it goes out in all directions. In that same issue I also had a photograph of a painting I had done, and a poem.

You were heavily represented!

And I wasn’t even one of the editors! [Laughs.] I’d fled down the hall to the offices of the magazine and sought shelter there. This was a top notch high school, still is, and its student body consisted in large part of insufferably smart kids, who went around predicting, in some cases correctly, that they would win the Nobel Prize in physics.

That’s a little obnoxious, honestly.

Yes, it was unforgivable. [Laughs.] And so I holed up with the Dynamo gang and drew a line in the sand.

Did you continue to write after you graduated from high school and began college?

Yes. I went out to Kenyon because I wanted to study with a poet there named John Crowe Ransom.

So you made a very deliberate move to go and study with a particular person?

Well, the literary culture of Kenyon appealed to me and Ransom was in large part responsible for that. And so, while everyone was coming to New York to make their lives, I was setting out for Ohio, to this beautiful, rather remote campus.

You studied drama there too, right?

I was active in the theater, yes. Actually I did very little creative writing at Kenyon. A play in verse, a few poems, a story or two – that was it. Mostly what we did there was literary criticism. We did literary criticism the way they played football at Ohio State. It was that serious. I remember writing a paper, of about thirty-five or forty pages, on an eight line lyric of Wordsworth’s: “No motion has she now, no force/ She neither hears nor sees/ Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/ With rocks and stones and trees.”

That’s some serious training.

Eventually I gravitated to philosophy and that became my major. I also did some acting.

You acted?

Yes, because at that time I thought I wanted to write for the theater. So I needed some practical experience – what it felt like to be on a stage. I began to get some decent roles in the college productions after Paul Newman graduated.

He was at Kenyon at the same time?

Well, he was a senior when I was a freshman, and he was a veteran, so there was about an eight year difference in ages. We knew then that he was headed for a major acting career. When he left I played the lead in Golden Boy, the Clifford Odets play, I did Gloucester’s son Edgar in King Lear, and Pegeen Mike’s father in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.

Then you went to graduate school at Columbia.

Yes, that was to study English Drama.

Did you go straight to graduate school from college or was there time in between?

Well, I had been accepted at Yale, which offered a three-year program for playwriting. But there was universal military service back then – this was in the 1950’s – and the draft board told me that they would only give me a year before I had to go into the army. So I didn’t go to Yale, I went to Columbia, where they offered a one-year Master’s degree. You could take half of your credits in the theater – in practical theater – and study English Drama for the other half – which I did.

In fact, that’s where I met my wife Helen, at Columbia – so we have the Selective Service System to thank for that.

Yes!

From Columbia I went into the Army. After my training I was shipped to Germany and served with the army of occupation. I was a Corporal in the Signal Corps and I was in command of a radio truck. In the radio truck was a Teletype machine. So I’d be out in the field for maneuvers and to alleviate the boredom, I’d sit down at the Teletype machine and write a story. The Teletype printed only caps. That gave the stories a degree of importance. I did them at night, when I should have been worried about the Russians in East Germany. They held their maneuvers at the same time. You never knew when they might cross the line and start another war.

Did you enjoy your time in the Army?

No, I wasn’t a good soldier. I was living off the base, as married men were cleared to do, and my superiors had no way to get in touch with me in the event of an emergency. They kept telling me to get a phone that would connect to the army network and I somehow didn’t get around to doing that. One morning I drove to work and the base was deserted, they had gone out on some sort of alert. So, I was in a lot of trouble.

I’m surprised they didn’t make you live on the base, or make you get a phone.

Yes, well, I think I had to pull extra guard duty, or something like that…they were not happy.

I can imagine. What happened to those stories that you wrote on the Teletype machine, in all-caps?

I don’t know where they are. I donated my papers to the Fales Library at NYU, so they may be there, but I hope not. Now that the librarians have catalogued everything I’ll have to go through the collection, remove the juvenilia.

But when you were writing those stories, did you still have the same mind-set as when you were nine— that you knew deep inside that you were a writer?

Well yes, but it wasn’t as if I had taken vows. I was just going to do it. I certainly didn’t think about doing anything else. I wouldn’t even call it ambition. It was a state of mind, a foregone conclusion.

Did you feel conviction that you could, or was there self-doubt mixed in?

There was a lot of self-doubt because writing is hard. But it was in balance with a strong conviction. It was what I loved doing. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life.

How about the impracticality of being a writer in the very nitty-gritty, making-a-living kind of way? How did you come to terms with that?

Well, I was a little naive about all of that. Helen had come over to be with me in Germany and our first child was born in the U.S. Army Hospital in Frankfurt. When I’d served my two years and we came home, we were living in a flat in Jackson Heights and the only money I had was my mustering-out pay – a few hundred dollars. And there I was, a husband and father, head of a new little family at the age of twenty-four. I said, “We have enough money to live on for six weeks. In six weeks I will write a novel and sell it.”

Wow!

That’s what I said.

And what did your wife say?

She said, “Yes, dear.”

[Laughs.] Good answer, maybe.

After three weeks, I’d done about a page and a half. So we had this serious discussion, she and I. I went out and I found a job as an airline reservations clerk at LaGuardia airport.

What did that job entail?

You sat at the phone and people called in and reserved seats for flights. There was some sort of primitive computer you used and I remember I had the shift from midnight to seven in the morning or something like that.

Oh wow, that’s rough.

I was trying to write and do that and it got a little tiring. Helen tells the story that one night she woke me up just in time for me to go to work and so she pushed me out of bed and then she went back to sleep, and in the morning she put her feet over the edge of the bed and felt herself stepping on me because I had found the floor quite comfortable. I was a good sleeper.

And you hadn’t gotten up to go to work!

[Laughs.] Why am I telling you this?

Because it’s a wonderful story!

Finally, I got out of that hideous job. A good friend of ours, Bernard Miller, whom we had known at Columbia University, had gotten himself a very modest position as a production assistant at CBS television. In a noble gesture, he called up the network’s Story Department and, affecting an authority he didn’t have, he told them to interview me for a reader’s job.

Really?!

And they did. Why he wasn’t fired is a mystery.

Good friend.

He was at the time. He went off to England soon after and we lost touch with him. But I met the story editor and she gave me a book as a test and I ran home and I read the book and wrote the required synopsis. You had to write a synopsis and offer an opinion as to whether the book was right for filming, and on the basis of that, I became a full-time freelance reader. I would read a book a day, for either ten or twelve dollars, depending on the length of the book, and write and file the synopsis and report. I was making seventy-five or eighty dollars a week, something more than my salary at the airline.

And then another company, Columbia Pictures, offered me a staff job as a reader, and so I didn’t have to work as hard as I had as a freelancer. And there, at Columbia Pictures, as I’ve said many times, I had to read a lot of westerns, because in those days, the late 50’s/early 60’s, westerns were very popular. I had to read all these lousy westerns and they were making me seriously ill. So, one day, I decided to write a parody of the genre. I wrote a story and showed it to the man I was then working for, Albert Johnston, and he said, “This is very strong, you ought to turn it into a novel.” I crossed out the title of my story, re-labeled it “Chapter One” and continued from there. That turned out to be my first published work, Welcome to Hard Times.

And how long did it take you to write that first book?

Probably – since I was working full time, coming home, reading to children, then sitting down to write – about a year and a half. I’d gotten an option from a publisher, Viking, to show them the completed book. Do you know what an option is? A publisher will look at a chapter or two and if they like what they see they put some money down so that they’ll get first shot at the finished book. The option was modest, a couple of hundred dollars. When I submitted the completed manuscript, they turned it down. I think now it was too strong for them. As best I could tell, a decorous elder critic serving as their editorial advisor had made this decision for them. Well, that was their privilege but they also wanted their money back.

No way!

Yes, true. I was enraged. Fortunately, my agent turned around and almost immediately sold the book to a feistier firm, Simon and Schuster.

That must have been a great moment of triumph.

Yes, I went to the local bank, deposited the advance, opened up a checking account – I had never had one of those – and proudly wrote a check and sent it to Viking. Some years later, at a cocktail reception, I ran into the Viking editor. She said, “I guess we made a mistake.” [Laughs.] The book has never been out of print.

Somewhere along the line my intention to write a parody gave way to an interpretation of the Western Expansion that is quite serious. Nothing of the parody is left in Hard Times except perhaps for its structure.

When you were writing that book and you were still working as a reader, did you develop good habits for writing? Did you have a system, a structure that you imposed on yourself?

I must have, I must have developed some sort of discipline without being aware of it – but it was just life and…there was one useful thing about being a professional reader: you saw how many really bad books were being published. That was very encouraging. And to write synopses on a daily basis was useful. The art of that is not to follow the book’s organization but to smooth out the story, start where you can run it all off in a linear way. You learn a lot that way.

I held that job for three years and somewhere in some studio archive are the hundreds of synopses I wrote – in most cases better than the original books.

You worked in publishing for a long time. When did you move from your role as editor to being a writer full-time?

When I was writing The Book of Daniel. I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Dial Press at the time. It was an exciting job – I was editing James Baldwin, Norman Mailer. Putting out books against the Vietnam War. But I had gone about halfway through The Book of Daniel and I realized I had reached the point where it needed my total attention. I couldn’t expect to write this book as it demanded to be written while keeping my job.

So we consulted the I Ching. Do you know what the I Ching is? It’s an ancient Chinese book of divination. It supposedly can read your future. You have to understand, this was the 1960’s. You threw some sticks down and they arranged themselves so as to direct you to a passage [in the book] that would pertain. We didn’t bother with all that, we were only half serious, and it was just as good to open the book randomly to any page. And the I Ching said, “You will cross a great water.” And my wife said, “That’s the Mississippi, let’s go.”

[Laughs.] And so you did!

We put the three children and our bags and baggage in our car and drove across the country. To my first teaching job.

And what I discovered was that you could teach in the afternoon and the evening and for the first time in your life, you could get up in the morning and do your own work. That’s any writer’s idea of success.

Yeah, that is pretty great.

I finished The Book of Daniel there in California. It would have been a different book had we not crossed the great water.

The Book of Daniel was a very big success. Did you start thinking about your work differently when you knew you would have an audience?

No, you don’t think about the audience. I never have and I don’t think I ever will.

So it always starts from some little seed of this kind. It’s not a terribly rational way to work, I know – I’ve never used outlines or started with plans or had an aesthetic strategy directing me. Working this way, you are in a sense possessed, and so there’s no room in your mind for an audience, there’s hardly room for yourself.

That’s rather wonderful, isn’t it? If you were to give some advice to young writers, what would you say?

Read. Press on. Perseverance is all.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Francesca Magnani

The Days of Yore visited Karr in her Manhattan apartment, a multiple-story unit tucked so tightly into the Garment District that you might pass her door three times before you spot the buzzer. A recent vegan convert, she served tea laced with soymilk, but confessed that the vegetables she ate for dinner might have been buttered.

I often read your work before I write.

That’s so nice. I used to have so many people like that.

Who?

Frank Conroy, who wrote Stop-Time, Maxine Hong Kingston, who wrote The Woman Warrior. Nabokov’s Speak Memory is probably my favorite memoir of all time.

But that’s so great. When I was posing in the mirror with my beret on my head for my author jacket, at ten years old, that’s what I imagined would happen.

You imagined that people would read your work before they wrote.

Yeah, but I was deranged.

You were a prophet.

I was ten years old.

Did you ever want to be anything besides a writer?

In high school, for a while, I wanted to be in theater, and in college, I acted a little bit, but I wasn’t a very good actress. I moved to Minneapolis and auditioned for a professional children’s theater company—I think it was the Cherry Orchard—and I got a job playing the ingénue. It would have paid actual money. But I just thought, I hate these people. I never want to do this again. At that point, I decided I really had to start writing.

What made you turn to poetry when you were young?

I was really depressed. When you’re depressed, you don’t have the concentration to read a book. I mean, really depressed. So I would read a poem, and I would feel less lonely. I would lift my face from a page, even if it was a dark, disturbed poem, even if it was Eliot’s “Prufrock,” and I would feel more connected to everybody. I think all great art does that, no matter what it is. I memorized a lot of poems. My mother liked them; my sister liked them; my father liked them. My father wasn’t a reader, but anytime I ever recited a poem, he would say, “That’s pretty” or, “That’s really good.”

What did you memorize?

I started memorizing Shakespeare when I was real little. I mean real little, like before junior high. I don’t know how I found the speeches; that’s the interesting part. I memorized “To be or not to be.” I knew that that was a big deal, but somebody must have pointed it out. I memorized speeches from Julius Caesar—“Friends, Romans, countrymen”—from Richard III, Romeo and Juliet. We must have read them in school, too— Macbeth.

Let’s talk cash.

Absolutely.

What kinds of odd jobs did you have when you were young?

I trucked crawfish. My first year of graduate school was 1978, at Goddard College, in Vermont, and I didn’t have the money for tuition. My sister was married to a guy we called the Rice Barron, who had a farm, and he knew a guy who was starting a crawfish farm. Every morning, I drove to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, and I would hose down these burlap sacks. You can’t just spray crawfish, because they’ll drown. You’ve got to drape dampness over ‘em so it sort of seeps over ‘em. So I’d unload these eighty-pound bags of crawfish, put the bags down, reload ‘em. I did this for ten days, and I made about three thousand dollars. Hauling Crawfish from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana to Winnie, Texas.

Learning how to write becomes very useful. However people marginalize it now, there’s a lot of stuff you can do better than other people. It taught me how to think.

Did you have any awkward living arrangements?

I was just poor. After high school, I left Texas with my friend Doonie, who was in Cherry, and all these other guys. We lived in a pink Lincoln Continental in Laguna Beach. Eventually, we got an apartment in Dana Point. There were six of us paying the rent, two hundred dollars per month, and it was too expensive. Six of us, two hundred dollars, and we couldn’t afford it. So I lived in the car.

It seems like I was always really poor. Even after I was a professor at Syracuse, when I got divorced, I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have any furniture. My ex-husband was an academic. He didn’t have any money. It wasn’t malice. It was just how it was.

What was your artistic community like in those days?

When I was in college, I did this workshop with Etheridge Knight, and he was then a very important African American writer. It was an amazing workshop. Robert Bly taught there, Galway Kinnel taught there. Audre Lorde. Alice Walker. I met all these black writers, partly through anti-apartheid work, which is the only political thing I ever did. That little group of poets was my first real connection with other people who did what I did.

They taught me that it wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about publishing, and it wasn’t about all this stuff that I so desperately wanted. It was about finding a goal bigger than the marketplace, or more exalted than that.

Were they famous yet?

Louise [Glück] was the resident genius. She was very well regarded. Ellen Bryant Voigt started the program, and it’s a testimony to her wisdom that she gathered these people, because nobody was a big deal. Heather [McHugh] was thirty-three or thirty-four, [Robert] Hass was thirty-eight, Louise [Glück] was thirty-eight, [Charlie] Simic was probably forty, Toby [Wolff] was thirty-three or thirty-four, Geoffrey [Wolff] was maybe thirty-eight. None of these people had made any money. Frank Conroy made a little money with Stop-Time. Oh my god, and Ray [Carver]. Ray was the first person we knew who made a lot of money. It was astonishing to everyone.

You mentioned that it’s not about the market and it’s not about publishing. How do you get past all of that?

You’re not going to.

How do you get past it just a little bit?

Living in New York is bad. People are so focused on it. I’m lucky that I didn’t live in New York in the beginning, although I lived in Boston where it’s twee in the more academic way. I think my writing was so ego-driven that I wanted people to look at me and say I was a writer. I was so hungry and desperate for it. It was like I didn’t have a self, and so that was the self that I had to have. At a certain point, I began to realize—it’s kind of a spiritual thing—that it’s much more about adding a stone to the mountain.

My teaching, I know, is a very good thing. There’s nothing more pure in its motive. I know professors who begrudge their students. I’ve had students who do amazingly well, and I’m just wildly happy for them to out-write and out-publish me. A former student of mine, who’s thirty-five years old and has a tenure job, said, “Why do I love these kids so much?” And I said, “Isn’t it weird?” I don’t love anybody. I’m hateful. I’m a recluse. Strangely enough, I’m very private. But I love even the ones who’ve hated me or resented me—and you can see when they hate you. Somebody’s got to hate you, you know, they hate you all the time. And I would think, How can I get the information into this person who’s so resistant? I felt like it was my job to do that. Teaching is the work I love the most.

How do you teach and write at the same time?

I don’t really teach and write at the same time. I rewrite. I edit. I write lectures. I can do journalism. I can do an essay. But I can’t really write and teach. I work on poems, off and on, all the time.

So you’re able to go into poems, lectures, essays, and other forms of journalism, but not book-writing?

I couldn’t do it with a book.

The book swallows you.

I wrote The Liars’ Club over weekends and holidays, but it was hard. I couldn’t look at it during the week. I just had to turn it off. I never had any rest, but I was young, thirty-eight, and I didn’t need to rest.

Do you remember your first paycheck for writing?

I was nineteen, and it was for a poem in an anthology called the Minnesota Poets, and my second check was for Mother Jones, and I was twenty-one. That was a poem that actually wound up in my first book. I thought it was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened, seeing my name in print. All those things that mean nothing to me now.

They don’t mean anything to you now?

They don’t. It’s sad. I think it’s the human condition. It’s what the Buddhists say, desire is suffering. Once you get what you desire, you desire something else.

You’re credited for launching the memoir trend. Before you published The Liars’ Club, were you concerned about how such personal material would be received?

Geoffrey Wolff had written a book called The Duke of Deception, and when he was dealing with movie people, he told me that you make the people you love most in the world characters in a narrative, and then you lose control of the narrative as soon as it enters the public conversation. I was afraid that we’d be portrayed like Dorothy Allison characters, just grotesque, and these were people I really loved. I wanted readers to understand how remarkable they were. I wanted people to love them— that was my goal. I wanted the memoir to have the depth of a novel, the range of feeling that a good novel does, where characters are complicated and they’re not all black or all white, and they’re not demonized.

And afterward, many readers told you that they related to your childhood.

That was the most surprising part, people saying, “I really identified with your childhood.” I was like, really? That was the last thing I expected. I expected to feel like a bug under a microscope. I remember my first radio interview with Terry Gross. Right at the beginning, she says, “You were sexually abused,” in this very NPR, serious, concerned voice, and I said, “Oh, come on, Terry, I wasn’t raised in Rwanda. It was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.” Now I almost think it was worse than I thought it was then. So how you feel about it changes over time.

What changed your perception?

I think it’s your relationship with yourself. When I was closer to being a child, it would have been more dangerous for me to feel sorry for myself. It wouldn’t have been useful. The further I get from being a child, the more empathy I have for myself when I was a child. And having raised a kid, I knew how concerned and protective I was. It’s astonishing, really, that we weren’t protected more. Part of it was the time, though.

What are you going to do? You’re either going to have to move out or come apart. It’s funny, I almost dis-recommend young people writing memoirs.

Really?

Not because I think they’ll do a bad job. Well, I do think they’re handicapped… it’s a time when you have a complicated relationship with your parents, and if you have any sense at all, you’re trying to separate from them. You’ve figured out what your parents have given you that you don’t want.

I also think that the complications that come up when you’re writing are painful.

What kinds of complications?

It’s just sad. That’s the great thing about Nabokov. He had all this trauma and tragedy in his life, and yet his talent as an aesthete, as someone who is completely able to immerse himself in an aesthetic point of view, made having to flee Russia, from the commies, and his father’s assassination, a very minor event. Speak, Memory is so much about his falling in love with the world, and trying to capture a world that was lost to him. That’s, to some extent, what I was doing with The Liars’ Club. I felt that this world was going away, and I wanted to capture it and put a little bell jar over it.

How do you handle the moments when you have to write a painful scene?

I’m much better now than I was. At the time, I would be so exhausted that I would feel like I had driven cross-country. Like I could fall asleep sitting here. I would still push myself to go to the gym, to do what I normally did, and I was just barely holding on. I lost a lot of weight. It was physically stressful. Now I’m much more tender with myself. I’ve realized that I’m essentially a candy ass. Everybody else thinks I’m this tough girl, but really, I take a lot of hot baths.

I was much more gentle with myself, much kinder to myself. I got massages. I had money, the way I didn’t, certainly with the first book and less so with the second book.

You received your first magazine acceptance at nineteen, published your first book of poems at thirty-two, and published your first memoir at forty. You were getting acceptances all the time.

Not all the time. There were whole years when I didn’t get a single acceptance.

How did you handle rejection?

It’s not personal. My friend John Engman, a wonderful, under-recognized poet, who died very young, used to tape up his rejections on the bathroom wall. You become numb to them. You get mechanical. They come back, and you don’t reconsider. You just send them out, and you keep going, and you keep writing.

In The Liars’ Club, you wrote that your mother would swat flies with old New Yorkers. Had that magazine been your holy grail?

It was the only place that I could read poetry by people who were alive. I didn’t find The Paris Review until I was in college. Then I discovered all those great interviews with writers like T.S. Eliot.

What magazines should we be reading?

You read what helps you write. What you think will last instead of what you think is of the fashion. When I was at MIT and pregnant with Dev [her son], I lost a job that I really needed to a girl who was then all the rage. She had slept with Joseph Brodsky.

How did you know?

I knew her. We were in the same social circle. And she’d allegedly slept with Derek Walcott, which I couldn’t confirm, but the Brodsky I knew was true. I called Louise Glück after I’d lost the job, and she said, “You watch. She’ll sink like a stone.” This woman had won everything I had applied for. I said, “How will I ever catch up?” I remember saying that. And Louise said, “You watch. She’ll sink like a stone.” And she has.

When I went to graduate school, I was not one of the talented people. I was smart and I did very well writing essays, and that was a surprise to me, because I’d never written many essays. I was good at writing nonfiction. I was good at writing reviews. But in workshops, my poems were not the ones about which they said, “Wow, this is a really talented person.” Didn’t happen.

Did they say that to anybody else?

Oh, yeah. They said it to Mark Doty. They said it to Robert Long, who was publishing in The New Yorker when I was there, and rightly so, because he was writing these good poems. It was humbling. It was not about being the cutest one at the prom. If that were what it was about, I would have quit at twenty-six and gone into advertising or become a heroin addict.

So you take a long view of success.

You have to take the long view or else you’re in hell. Before George Saunders’ first book came out, he was raked. He couldn’t get it published. He had published a story in The Atlantic, before he even had a book, and some critic wrote this hideous, nasty thing. I didn’t know George at the time, but one, I had really liked the story—like really liked it—and two, I thought, why would this guy pick somebody with one story and no book to hop up and down on? Be a man. Go after one of the big dogs who’s writing shit. There are tons of us. When I was writing Lit, I called Don DeLillo, and I said, “Don, I’m writing a really shitty book.” And he said, “Who doesn’t?” It’s true. We all write poorly much more frequently than we write well.

Tell me about a Dark Night of the Soul moment with your writing.

Throwing away that last big batch of Lit, right toward the end. I’d been working on it for eight years, and the publisher really wanted a manuscript, and I really needed the money. I was backed into a corner and just didn’t see any way out. I went to bed for two days. I just cried, all day, every day, and said I’m never going to get out of the house ever again. It moved through me like a tornado—my disappointment and sense of being overwhelmed and unable to start. Then you just get up and wash your face and go to the gym, and, as Hemingway says, “the application of your ass to the chair.” What else is there to do? I can only do it as well as I can do it.

Do you enjoy writing?

No. When I’m really engaged, and I forget what I’m doing, that’s great. But that’s not the same as rubbing my palms together and thinking, Wow, you’ve really got it now. I don’t think I’ve ever had that. Ever.

I will have moments. I was writing The Liars’ Club, trying to think of how to make a transition, and my editor at the time, Nan Graham, kept saying, “How are you going to get from this part of the story to this part of the story, if it covers thirteen years?” I sat down one day and typed “thirteen years later, comma.” And I thought, I can do this. I’m going to say, “Thirteen years later,” then I’ll do a couple of pages of exposition, because people are going to need to know where we are, what I’ve grown up to, what my parents are doing, blah, blah, blah, but I can do that in two pages. And then I’ll just march along.

Do you have writing rituals?

I just sit down and write. I miss writing longhand, which I can’t do because I have a shoulder injury, but I edit longhand, which not everybody does. I just move around. I write in bed a lot. I’ll get in my bed with my laptop and write, but then I’ll kind of burn out, and I’ll have a cup of tea, and then I’ll come over here to the couch and write, and then I’ll go to that desk and write, then I’ll go to my desk upstairs, then I’ll get back in bed and write. Every time, I feel like I’m starting over.

Do you ever find that your ego wants you to write something that should be excluded?

Ego is a good thing. It’s being narcissistic that’s a bad thing. We each have a self and a set of values. The enemy in the memoir should be some part of yourself. You should be behaving against how you’re representing yourself, at least part of the time.

I always ask myself: Am I trying to defend some part of myself? With Lit, I initially wrote my ex-husband very perfectly, because I didn’t want to seem like someone who was bitter at her son’s father. But we got divorced for a reason. We fought, and I had to put that in. So I put myself as very bad and him as very good, and then I put him as very bad and me as very good, and then somehow I realized that what I was afraid of writing was how much in love we’d been, which wasn’t that long a scene. It was a few pages, but until the reader had that information, the other material wouldn’t ring true. It was like, why is she doing this? There’s no connection between her and this guy. Why is she having this baby, what’s her deal? So it’s figuring out what the reader needs at each step.

Do you have any additional advice for writers?

They should all be in therapy. [Laughs.] The big battle is the moral battle with yourself and with your vanity and with how you want to be portrayed.

There’s another Hemingway line about bullfighting. He interviews a famous bullfighter, and he says, “What exercises do you do for strength?” The bullfighter says, “The bull weighs two tons. Am I going to be stronger than the bull?” You’ve got to figure out what you have to fight with, what you bring to the party, and try to compete in that arena. Not in the arena that perhaps seems fashionable at the time, or perhaps seems enviable in other people, but the arena that’s really, as Faulkner says, your postage stamp of reality.

Interview by Kassi Underwood
www.kassiunderwood.com

Photo by William Mebane

The Days of Yore met up with Steve on a rainy afternoon at McNally Jackson Books in Soho. He was slated to read there later from his newest book, God Bless America, and to talk about his work with fellow writers Darin Strauss and Nick Flynn. It was late November, and Occupy Wall Street protesters had been cleared out of Zuccotti Park a few days prior. We found a quiet spot to talk in a basement section of the store marked “Ideas,” sandwiched between “Memoir” and “Religion.”

When did you first become interested in writing?

When I was a kid, I didn’t think, “I want to write!” I thought, “How do I get attention in this family?” and the way I had was being mouthy. I was a TV kid, but also really into reading. I remember reading Where the Red Fern Grows and A Cricket in Times Square and Encyclopedia Brown over and over, and thinking about particular books on my shelf as sacred objects: a dinosaur book, a book about famous sports people. But I don’t think I ever had a moment where I thought “That’s what I’ll do.”

I was more of a failed jock. I didn’t take creative writing classes. But I did work for the newspaper. I was a columnist in high school, a columnist in college—terrible columns. It was in my early to mid-twenties that I started reading short stories in Harper’s and other places, and I remember thinking that those writers were badasses. Those were the ones doing interesting work.

And you were in California during these early failed jock years?

I grew up in Palo Alto. It’s where Facebook is, where Apple started, the heart of Silicon Valley. But at that time it was a sleepy college town around Stanford, and we weren’t rich. My two brothers and I all shared one room until they remodeled when we were twelve or thirteen. Then my brother Mike and I moved to a different room together. Right before we went to college, we got our own rooms. I remember getting to college and thinking, “This room is huge!” It was tiny, but bigger than the room we’d shared.

Even through my folks were doctors, they treated people on a sliding scale, they were part of a collective, they were hippies. They were into not being materialistic, and some of that got into me, because extreme wealth is shameful to me. Donald Trump, to me, is the most embarrassing person in the world. At some point in adulthood you get that the rich person is never the good guy.

Unless he’s, like, Bruce Wayne.

Yeah, but the only reason Bruce Wayne is a good guy is because he has this anarchic, violent alter-ego that he can go into. And what does that person do? He goes into the bad part of town. He battles evil. He gets his noblesse oblige on. But it’s not like anybody goes, “Wow, that was awesome the way Bruce hosted that cocktail party.”

Both of your parents are psychoanalysts. Were there writers or artists in your family?

Like in a lot of families, I think there were people who wanted to be writers or artists. My mom was a wonderful pianist. She read like crazy. Later in life, she and my dad wrote a book, and she wrote another book a couple years ago that was very well regarded. It’s about women’s fears of giving birth to monsters and maternal ambivalence. My dad sang in college, they were both good cooks, and they did creative stuff as part of the countercultural movement. But they were from families where a lot was invested in them and it was expected that they were going to be professionals.

It takes either a tremendous amount of courage or a certain kind of privilege for somebody to say, “I can be an artist.” It didn’t occur to me that I could be a writer. I can remember reading Vonnegut’s books and, my freshman year, the teacher reading us Catcher in the Rye. He was this hammy guy; it was amazing. But I didn’t make the connection that you could try to do something like that, that there are people who decide that they get to write novels or stories.

So when did you make that connection that writing was your profession or calling?

This is one of those questions that writers always fumble, because it sounds presumptuous. There was never a moment when I was like, “I’m a writer.” If you say you’re a writer, everyone asks, “What do you write?” And you have to say, “Well, do you read The Crabapple Review?” and they’re like, “No.”

I guess I do remember feeling like when I got to grad school that it was recognized that we were all trying to do this thing.

That you were making a commitment to writing?

Right. And that was probably fifteen years ago, and doing an MFA wasn’t common. I didn’t know there was such a thing until an editor of the newspaper that I worked for in Miami told me. I was sneaking off after work to go to this workshop that the writer John DuFresne was running for free up at FIU, but I didn’t see the route to doing what he was doing. There really is no professional codification. It’s just, “Well, earlier today I did some good writing, and that makes me a writer today, but yesterday I fucked around and didn’t do anything useful, so I can’t really say I was a writer yesterday.”

Maybe your writerly-ness is something you can only see looking back on it?

Other people make that determination. Now that people are writing online, readers decide. If somebody writes a blog and one person reads it and is moved by it, can you say that blogger isn’t a writer? It’s a hard line for me to draw, even without that modern complication.

So give me a picture of the pre-publishing, struggling young Steve Almond. What job are you working to get by?

I sold lawn aeration door to door in high school. It was a corrupt job and I wrote a story about it. I worked in a kitchen washing dishes in college. I did catering. I was a shipping and receiving clerk. I worked in ice cream parlors. But I didn’t have a lot of mortifying jobs. I was very practical: I was going to be a reporter.

At The El Paso Times, where I worked straight out of college, I had a great job. I mean, the prose that I wrote was awful, but it was a Gannett paper, a USA Today paper. They didn’t want poetry. They wanted a funny pun. I reviewed concerts, I wrote feature stories, I met some interesting people, and I liked it. Journalism puts you at the end of the stick and pokes you out into the world. It says, “Here, find some interesting shit and organize it into a story.”

How did your work as a journalist shape the kinds of writing you do now?

One, I wrote every day. Two, I got over the idea that a lot of people carry who don’t work at a vocational writing job: they think their prose is sacred and they treat it preciously. I was used to getting edited, used to arguing but also used to the process.

It also forced me to listen. Everybody’s always telling their story; sometimes it’s disguised, but they’re always trying to tell the story of who they are, what they’re about, what their anxieties are. That’s always swimming underneath the surface. I’d parachute into these environments and talk with people. But the job—especially when I went from the daily paper to the weekly paper, where I could write stories with scenes and characters—was really just to listen and try to capture the scene.

Where were you living at that time? What were you eating?

The places I lived and the food I ate were crappy. But I also sensed that winter was coming, and winter meant trying to make a living at this. I don’t think the other kids in grad school understood that. It was, “Yeah, Tony Early’s in Harpers, and he probably got a big paycheck for that, but I’m not Tony Early, and that’s not going to happen for me maybe ever, and certainly not for years. I’m not going to subsist on my five-dollar check from The Crabapple Review.” I once did get five dollars for a story. It was clear to me: I’m undertaking a pursuit that is like a drug addiction, it’s not going to pay off, I’m going to lose a lot of money, and it’s going to make me very anxious.

And a lot of America’s problem is that people have too much shit. My wife and I get into this, because I look around and I say, “Why do we need all this shit?”

And you have two kids now. Kids are shit magnets.

[Nodding.] Oh my god. People give you shit. Shit just comes into your life. There’s this endless stream—preschool shit, and Target shit, and it’s plastic and awful and life is too short.

I guess I look back romantically on those days when I was alone. I put crazy stuff up on the wall; there was no design scheme, no fancy furniture. I bought my clothes from thrift stores. I still do that. But it’s an ongoing moral battle: we’ve reached this place where we must get nice stationery to write thank you notes to the people who come to our party, because they wrote us thank-yous when we went to their party. And I’m like, really? We’re them? We’re that?

You mentioned that you teach, and that makes me think of the time you publicly resigned from your adjunct position at Boston College in 2006 because they invited in Condoleezza Rice as their commencement speaker. You’ve written about your admiration for Vonnegut; he was very vocal about moral issues and politics. I was going to ask whether you think writers have an obligation to address political or societal problems, but what I really want to ask is: how do we fix it?

I don’t know. Americans have to make a decision that convenience is not going to be their godhead. Until they are willing to see what the dividends of inconvenience might be—spiritually, emotionally and intellectually—I think we’re headed in the wrong direction.

[Smiling up at a customer browsing a nearby shelf of books.] Howdy.

So what do you see as the role of the writer or the artist in that? Does having a megaphone of some kind mean having a duty to speak out about these things?

Everybody decides for themselves. I’m outspoken about my distress, but the only duty that writers and artists have is to do their thing, and to be good to the people closest to them. That’s your central duty as a human, and it’s where we mostly fail— in being nice to the people right around us, our family and close friends.

A writer doesn’t have to speak out for this or that moral agenda—their art does that. I mean, say I read Sam Lipsyte’s story in The New Yorker. I recognize the kind of person he’s writing about, and there’s this astonishing, moving sense of an entitled person who’s damaged in many ways and stuck, and it’s heartbreaking. I read it, and I feel more than I did before. That’s the artist’s only real responsibility.

How has becoming a father affected both your distress and your creative process?

Having kids has certainly given me a longer horizon. When I was first doing my thing, I was less of a moral loudmouth. Now it’s not just the thirty or forty years that I have left to live. My kids have got eighty years, and I don’t want them to be chased down by roving diesel mobs, so I’ve got to do something. We’re making terrible decisions, and they’re the ones who are going to pay the price. That’s made me more insistent about mouthing off about what I see going wrong.

I’m not super happy with anything that I’ve written recently, and I don’t feel able to pay attention for as long as I used to, but I can’t tell whether that’s just my feeling, or I’m blaming my kids but it’s my problem. You can’t fake it with kids, though. You’ve got to spend time with them, and it takes a lot of your energy. In the end, is the world going to say, “Oh, but you could have written that great novel?” Your kid doesn’t give a shit; they just want you to be around and play with them and pay attention to them. It’s not like it’s undercut my desire to write the great American novel, but either I’m not going to do that, or it’s going to take me much longer to get it done.

In This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey, you wrote that the internal conflict of a writer is a question of “what’s stronger: your compulsion to tell the truth about the things that matter to you most deeply or your fear of the consequences.” How does that wrestling match play out for you?

There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I probably should write about that I won’t because it would do damage to people who I love, and I don’t think that’s the worst thing in the world. Saul Bellow would write about anything, and with ruthless precision. Everybody knew he was writing about the failure of his marriage, and his wife and daughter. Herzog is that document.

Mostly I wrestle with being able to be at the keyboard and get everything else out of the way, all my little crazy ego needs, and just be with the characters in the fictional world. The world of your ego and needs is so intrusive and incessant, and now it’s been made so convenient. Ten years ago you couldn’t ego surf or check Facebook.

Do you think we all got a lot more done then?

Maybe we were finding other ways to waste time, but it seems like there was less distraction. Technology has monetized the process of getting distracted. That’s what your iPhone is. There’s no time when you’re able to be at loose ends with no readymade little world to plug into. It’s constant emotional and intellectual grazing. That’s the battle I find myself in: how do I get rid of that noise and do the deep work? It’s less about what I can reveal and more about whether I can quiet myself in the midst of distraction.

If you could time-travel back to yourself as a writer and a human at a younger age, what would your advice to that person be?

It took me a while to stop being a serious young writer and start writing stuff that was more honest. I was in this trap of writing obedient stories, and some of them got into magazines—it’s not that they were terrible, just that they were not who I was. They were earnest. And I’m earnest, but they weren’t the other things that rescue me from being insufferably earnest, like being a smartass, or having a certain moral outrage or a willingness to say impolite things or push characters into messy, dangerous situations.

I wrote this book about candy, and I thought it was ridiculous. But it turns out to be the thing that people enjoy, partly because it’s a subject everybody connects to, but also because it was written out of desperation. I had spectacularly failed at the big historical grand epic novel I was going to write, and my first book of stories had done nothing, as stories do. I was depressed and fucked up, and sometimes that’s the exact place you have to get to. I’m not trying to exalt being in that state, but I was not in a healthy place and that need to be distracted by other people’s stories and grab at this pleasure I’d had as a kid—I think that’s what people responded to and why they liked that book.

Did you start out seeing Candyfreak as a book?

I did a long freelance story for this weekly paper in Boston. I was like, “I don’t know what else to do, so let me research this. I love this world; I want to spend time here.” I got a bunch of people to say yes, and this is where being a reporter is useful, because you realize you can ask people things. They can say no, but who cares?

I had the idea that it could be a book, but there was a long fallow period. So at a certain point I was like, “I guess this is what I’m working on.” I wasn’t going to write another novel; I didn’t have it in me to fail that way. I needed the prospect of free candy or a trip to get me to the keyboard. That’s not a bad situation, because it strips away vanity and pretension. There’s something about that level of desperation that’s good for your work.

What advice do you give to beginning writers in your workshops?

Writing is mostly sitting there outlasting your doubt, figuring out how to develop a critical faculty. The main thing I would say is to keep going. Do what you’re trying to do. Not everyone cranked out of the MFA programs is going to have a big, bustling literary career. There aren’t enough readers for that. But people do these things because they’re going in search of themselves and are trying to figure out who they are and how to get some of their central preoccupations and anxieties onto the page, whether in fictional disguise or not.

So stay patient, stay at it, and make those difficult decisions. Also, run toward the shame. There’s never been a moment when I’ve said, “Oh boy, I wish I hadn’t revealed that.” There might be a moment when I’ve said, “I wish I hadn’t revealed that in an exploitative way,” or, “I wish I hadn’t used that particular detail in a way that was ill-considered or unexamined.” But when I admire a piece of writing, it’s inevitably because it’s made its way to some devastating truth through shame.


Interview by H. Henderson

Photo of Steve Almond and his wife, the writer Erin Almond, by Stephen Sette Ducati

Good place to pick up his new book:
http://www.lookout.org/godblessamerica.htm

Kulick is so laid-back, friendly, and quick to laugh that it’s easy to forget that you’re sitting across from a true theater power player.

I tend to wonder where the ideas come from to begin with. Do you recall the earliest memories of theatrical experience that meant something to you?

You know, I get asked this sometimes and, in thinking about it, I realized that my first theatrical experiences were more family related. My grandfather was a jewelry salesman. We lived in Los Angeles and he would do business in New York and he would come back and have seen all these things called plays on this thing called Broadway. And he would be at the dinner table with us and he would reenact the entire play. His greatest performance was A Raisin in the Sun where he did everybody— the entire thing and all of the dialects and everything. And this is a guy who was a first generation immigrant from Odessa, Russia.

I think those were my first experiences. Of my one grandfather performing and my other grandfather being an audience member. I learned the sort of dialectic of theater through them.


When was the first time you actually went and saw a theater performance of some kind?

It wasn’t until I was in junior high school, I must have been fourteen or thereabouts. My aunt got me as a gift a ticket to go to the Mark Taper [Forum], which is the regional theater [where I grew up], so I started to go see plays there. Again, the whole family would go and they would argue about it afterwards. One of the biggest arguments was about a play we saw called Black Angel. It was about an SS officer who returns to the very town that he liquidated without changing his name (it’s based on historical fact), and you realize that he’s there to be discovered and he’s there to be martyred or killed or punished. This play started a HUGE argument between my uncles about how could an SS man be the positive subject of any play. The amount of anger and animosity was so strong that I thought, This is an interesting form that can elicit this much angst and trauma in and of itself and not onstage, but being brought back home…So I think it was that production, and how it subsequently impacted the dialogues my family had, that got me more interested in theater.

But when I went to college, I was more interested in doing film and television work. So I went to UCLA because they have a very strong film program. At the time, it was easier to become a theater major and then transfer into film. But I fell in love with the program, I fell in love with the teachers in the program, who were amazing, and I fell in love with Molière, Chekov and Shakespeare… And then that was it! At that point there was no turning back. [Laughs.]

At that point, did you know that you wanted to pursue theater as a career?

I didn’t think I would be able to do it as a career, it just seemed too impossible… And my family is a very practical family…

Right, the jeweler merchant and the dime store manager. How did they feel about your desire to go into the theater?

My family was always very supportive of what we wanted to do, as long as you had a Plan B.

And the Plan B was going to be something in a more practical vein?

Just teach – teach theater, just as long as you can make a living. When I graduated and I got a Masters I remember my father saying, “Bri, if you want to go back to school and learn something else,” – because I was starting out and assisting, and it takes a while – “If you want to take something else, I’ll pay for you to go back to school. What would you like to study?” “You know, I would love to do either history or philosophy…” My father looked at me and said, “Brian, only you could think of something stupider for a profession.”

[Laughs.] What he wanted you to say was law school.

Exactly, or a doctor… But my family was always very patient with all that stuff.

Let’s backtrack a little bit. You were at UCLA in the theater program and loving that world. Were you already on the directorial side? Was that always your inclination?

I think people have certain predilections or are predisposed to something. In my family, I would make things “better.” If the mood was uncomfortable in the family, I would crack a joke, you know? My job in the family was to mediate, to smooth things over so that everything would be okay and nice. And in a lot of ways, directing is that. I think when you gravitate towards the theater there are all these different roles that you can do and usually you find the one that was like what your family dynamic was. Mine was the fixer or the negotiator, or the pacifier.

Directing is an interesting job because it is all about assisting people – assisting an actor, a writer…it is just about, Oh, they are so in what they are doing and I am outside here, so if they ask, “Should I turn left or turn right?” I say, “Well, from my vantage point, turn right.” You know, you could be an objective person for them.

That’s an interesting way to describe it because you could also say that the director is the king of the world – instead of saying “you might turn right,” saying “you will turn right.”

Yes, there is certainly a school of directing that is: we’re going in this direction and everyone’s going to follow me. And it’s very famous, Orson Welles, you can name a list. I think most directors do break down into either companions or visionaries. In other words, a companion is someone who goes along with you and might be like a tour guide for actors, to say, “Oh did you see this over here in the text?” It’s someone who walks along with the artists and who says – “Oh, you forgot about this wonderful thing you left at home.”

And you feel more like a companion?

I think, as I’ve gotten older, that has been more and more what I’ve been interested in. As I’ve been very fortunate to work with so many extraordinary people— writers like Tony Kushner, or directors like George Wolfe or actors like Dianne Wiest, or John Turturro and now F Murray Abraham— and most of the time they have a tremendous impulse and it’s just about being somebody on the other side who can say, “Yeah I get that,” or, “Oh I don’t get that yet, and maybe you need to do X or Y to help me, or maybe you don’t want to help me, maybe it can stay mysterious, maybe it doesn’t have to be explained.” So, for me the role has been as an interlocker, it has been a dialogue.

You obviously learned all of this over time. But when you graduated from UCLA, what was the first step for you?

I ran quickly into graduate school! [Laughs.] Instantaneously, because the real world was just too frightening of a concept. My teacher at UCLA thought if I was going to do theater, I should be on the east coast. I’d never been in snow before.

Oh wow…

So I was 21, in Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Mellon, and I turned out to be allergic to cold weather.

And you’re still here.

I’m still here and I have a cold all winter long, it’s just an ongoing process.

When I was in UCLA, there was a great program, taught by Michael McClain, the director of the program, and you learned exactly what to do. And when I went to Carnegie Mellon I worked with another amazing teacher, Mel Shapiro, who taught you how to break all those rules. It was easier for me to follow the rules than to break the rules, so it took a long time to really hone the idea of breaking the rules. But I have those two teachers’s voices in my head, one side on either ear: “You should do it this way,” and the other voice saying, “Then piss all over it.” [Laughs.]

So what was grad school like, besides the cold?

Grad school was very interesting because Carnegie at that time was filled with very extraordinary teachers, all professionals, who— and this happens in the theater all the time, so its not specific to Carnegie— these were teachers who at a moment in time, something sensational had happened in their career…and then not. And so, one of the lessons that you learned was not only craft, but how are you going to live with the fact that that you might be wildly successful and then not. And how will you deal with both of those, the successful, which could be equally damning and problematic, and the not. Because some of the teachers had not recovered from the not and were sort of taking it out on a generation…

So to me, there were two educations at Carnegie. One was breaking the rules and the other was how are you going to negotiate your life in such a way so that if your heart is broken you can still be a functioning, healthy person.

A huge lesson.

Yeah, and you don’t learn it.

But you’re made aware of it, at least.

You’re aware of it and then it happens to you, and then you go, “Oh, now I know why that person behaved the way they behaved or why that person started drinking or why this person…”

But my teacher, Mel Shapiro, was a very intuitive teacher. The program would change based on whatever Mel thought; there wasn’t a standard methodology, it was, “This is not working – let’s do this.” It was a very exciting place to be because depending on what Mel thought was working or not working it could just radically change. For me it was a very exciting time just to learn how to break rules, to learn that institutions should be flexible enough to make an immediate turn left if they need to.

And did you create a community there, of other people in the theater?

You know, the thing that’s interesting which I think is very, very true – and I think it’s true when you look at the interviews of a lot of the people that you’ve spoken to – is that the people who really help you are your peers. A designer, Mark Wendland, was going through the program at the time I was and so when we got out we were able to start working together. That was an absolutely invaluable relationship that continues to this day, some 26 or 27 years later.

Ironically enough, most of my relationships are more from undergraduate than they are from graduate school.

Oh, really? Why do you think that is?

UCLA attracts a lot of different people because it’s in Los Angeles, so my buddies were the guys that wrote Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, or a colleague was the guy that wrote the Lethal Weapon movies, Tim Robbins was a classmate of mine… So when I got out of school, I went back to the west coast and it was those friends who sort of helped me find ways to make ends meet, as I was trying to secure a play, a life in the theater.

When you finished graduate school, you went back west?

Mel [Shapiro] wrote a letter for me because he was good friends with Gordon Davidson who ran the Mark Taper Forum – which was the place that I first saw theater. Gordon ended up hiring me part-time, then full-time, to be an artist-in-residence at the Mark Taper Forum. But there was a period in time where my friends who were all in the film business would get me jobs, like reading scripts for Jane Fonda – a lot of script reading – that would help pay the rent. Between what the Taper could pay a visiting artist and this extracurricular work, I was able to sort of float for a little bit.

Reading a script for Jane Fonda, what else did you do?

[Laughs.] I was given anything that they just didn’t know what to do with. My job was to read that.

And evaluate it?

And evaluate it, write like a three-page report. So Jane Fonda came into the office and she said, “I really like your reports, I never want to do any of those projects, but you capture them very well.” [Laughs.]

Yeah, so I would do jobs like that. I got to drive a Soviet cosmonaut. I picked him up from the airport.

Why?

Because we were doing some play that had something to do with science, and one of the speakers was going to be this cosmonaut who had been up in space. This is still when the Soviet Union existed. So I had to pick up this cosmonaut, his translator and their attaché who was to make sure that they did everything properly. And I’m trying to fit everybody in, because I thought I was just picking up a cosmonaut.

One day, Gordon turned around and said, “What are you doing?” And I said, uh, “I’m assisting you.” He said “I know that, what else are you doing?” and I said, “Well that’s about it.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you take all the people who are understudies and make something with them, just make something – what do you want to make?” And I said, “Well, there’s a Marivaux play…” And he said, “Great! I don’t know what that is, but great, go do that!” So I took eight people into a room, I was given three weeks of rehearsal and then I presented it for the staff of the Taper and Gordon liked it and he said, “Okay, let’s do that on our second stage.” And that was that.

Wow.

But then they couldn’t afford to keep me on anymore, but they would always give me two or three jobs while I was freelancing. They’d give me a job doing dramaturgy or assisting or directing in their new plays festivals. So I always knew that I had at least one or two paying jobs from the Taper while I was trying to do other stuff.

But having done that [first] show gave me a seal of approval. “Oh, well, the guy did something at the Mark Taper Forum, so he couldn’t be too bad.”

What was the living like for you during this time?

I was living with two roommates from my UCLA days. We were living near the Fairfax area in one of those little houses that are like World War II 1940’s duplex. The kind of place that Philip Marlowe would go and find some dead body, you know what I mean? It was one of those types of places, with the smell of Eucalyptus, all the trappings of Los Angeles…

What was the sort of day-to-day existence like?

To me now, in retrospect, I don’t know how I was able to pay the rent. There was this period of time, seven years I think, where it was like, “How did I make rent every month?” You know? Just somehow between reading these scripts or delivering Gordon the dog or what have you, there would be enough there.

But there was a community of all of us that were just starting out, most of my friends were starting out in film and television, so my memory of that period in time was just going to different people’s places and doing potluck, having a party here, having a party there, and just making ends meet.

That sounds familiar…

I do remember that this was a time in my life of a lot of fast food. In Los Angeles, there are all these drive-thrus and I just remember constantly being so harried that I would pay my money and I would drive away and I would be like a half hour to my destination and realize that I forgot to get the food.

[Laughs.] And the money that you did have, what did you spend it on? What was your luxury?

Books. I remember there was a collected edition of A thousand and One Nights, a very beautiful, four-volume edition, and I would go to Book Soup, like every week, and I would just look at this edition. And then finally I just went, “I’m just gonna buy it.” I think I had to pull in a couple of other books to pay the rent for that month.

I like to read, so I would just go get rid of a whole bunch of books in order to get a whole bunch of new books.

There is that divide that begins to happen where you’re pawning books to pay rent and some of your friends have lives that are going in completely different directions. Sometimes there can be bitterness and I wonder, were you ever frustrated with your situation?

Most of my friends were in film and television and I was doing this thing in Los Angeles that was weird to them – with the exception of Tim Robbins who always was interested in theater. But a lot of my friends, their careers took off immediately when they got out of school. My memory was it created anxiety in me.

I think my friends took concern. They would help me get jobs. They were always looking out for me, and there was always this older brother or older sister who was like, you know, “Let’s help Brian,” that sort of thing. So my friends were pretty generous in that respect.

And when did you make your way back to the east coast?

Well, it was in slow stages. Many years ago, the New York Theater Workshop would select three young directors and they would present their work and they would open, and you would apply for this. I applied and I ended up doing that. That was my first time back on the east coast and I did this play called The Illusion that Tony Kushner did the translation for, and that’s how I met Tony. It went really, really well.

Then a colleague, Oskar Eustis who now runs the Public, got a to run the Trinity Rep – which is in Rhode Island – so he asked me to come and be the Associate Director. So that got me to the east coast. I went and during that period in time, Tony Kushner, who was a very kind advocate, kept saying to George Wolfe, who was running the Public, “You should hire Brian for something. You should hire Brian for something.”

That’s a good advocate to have.

Yeah, it doesn’t hurt to have the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Angels in America in your corner. I was doing a show in Cincinnati and George’s mother lived in Kentucky, so George thought, “I could kill two birds with one stone: make Tony shut up and visit my mom.” So he went to see a show I did, an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, or something like that. He went and then he hired me to do a show in the park [Central Park] – because the director that was going to do it, he had to do the musical, The Titanic.

Directing a show at the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, that’s a pretty gig to get.

Yeah, it was pretty wild. They gave me this show, Timon of Athens. I had never read it before and I went and did it and it went well and George, even before the reviews came out, came up to me and said, “You know, if you want to work for me, you know if you want to work here, you can work here, you want a job? You want a job?”

I was taken aback by this and I said “Ok, sure, why not?” So he offered me a job as an Associate at the Public, and so I said to Oskar Eustis, you know, “I’m going to go because it’s New York,” this sort of thing. I don’t think Oskar’s ever forgiven me for it. And so I went, because I couldn’t go to New York without a job, and George gave me a job.

All of a sudden, coming in at that level, you get a whole different kind of footing. To be able to go put on shows in that huge, iconic space, that must have changed things completely for you.

I’m very lucky with people like Ann Bogart and George Wolfe and Tony Kushner and Oscar Eustis who have been immensely helpful to me throughout my professional life, but I sometimes feel, that even though I had significant experiences, it’s those early formative [relationships]… My family and my extended friends are all still in LA. By the time I landed in New York, I must have been 35 or something like that. The formative relationships I forged are still there [in Los Angeles]. Even though I can go out to dinner and hang out with amazing people, it’s different. It’s that thing that happens when you’re young, when you share your dreams and your aspirations and your fears with your peers. So with me, I’ve always felt like I’m, in a way, an exile.

No thoughts of going back to Los Angeles?

When I go back with my wife, we go and we stay at a friend’s place and the birds chirp, you know morning light in Southern California is very beautiful, especially in the summer time, and I wake up in bed and my wife will turn to me and say, “And we left Los Angeles because?…” But there’s no theater work in LA – this is the city, this is a theater city, and Seattle is a theater city, Chicago is a theater city, Minneapolis is a theater city. Los Angeles is a film city. It does theater and it does very good theater, but there’s not enough there to do.

To me the best theater in New York City is the off, off, off, off Broadway theater, it’s theater like the Wooster group or Elevator Repair Service, or Collapsible Giraffe or Big Dance, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma… That’s the best theater I think in New York, because that isn’t speed chess – they are taking seven months to make something, you know, and it shows.

Looking back a little bit, can you think of some turning point that was important to you?

When I was in Los Angeles, a friend of mine came to me and said, “Peter Brook is working at the L.A. Arts festival, would you like to meet him?” And I said no, because I didn’t want to meet an idol, I thought I would be disappointed and stuff. So I said, “Would you do me a favor – tell him a little bit about me, and ask him what his advice would be for me.” Because it turns out Peter Brook had given advice for some friends of mine that had been really insightful. So my friend came back to me, and she said “So Peter says that you should not turn down any work – it doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s in a garage, if it’s good, people will hear about it, it’s a small community and work breeds work.”

At the time, I was deciding weather or not I was going to do a production of A Christmas Carol. I’m a Jewish kid, I don’t know A Christmas Carol. I thought, “Okay, Peter Brook says I should do A Christmas Carol, I’m taking a freaking Christmas Carol.” I took the job and it turned out that one of the people on the board ran Long Beach Opera, which is a very avant garde, chi chi Opera company. And because I did that little cockamamie thing, I ended up getting to do five operas back to back and they were like Carmen…

A very different category from A Christmas Carol.

And also just big. I was dealing with big budgets, big casts, and had I said no to that, I would not have been able to do that, which meant that when George Wolfe said to me, “Okay go do Timon,” [at the Delacourt in Central Park] I wouldn’t have had the experience of moving a lot of people around very quickly to get that done. So I guess one of the lessons is, you just never know what is going to prepare you for these moments.

So I agree with Mr. Brook. Just work, you do the work and it will lead to what it leads to. And I think it’s absolutely true, when you do something of significance and if it’s good, the New York Times will know about it two days later. That’s the magic of this field.

Would you say that would be your advice for young, theatrical types?

I think in theater it’s a ten-year commitment. There are certainly people that come out of school and they hit it right away, but for most mortals, it’s a ten-year proposition, a ten-year investment.

That’s not very good advice.

That takes a lot of courage though. Would you say you were courageous or would you say that you had sleepless nights about what was going to happen next week?

Oh, totally sleepless nights. But I have sleepless nights now, even though I sort of know what I’m doing next week [Laughs].

Now I teach at Columbia and what I tell my students is, it’s ten years. And over those ten years, it will become clear to you what it is you want to do, even if, ten years from now, it’s: I don’t want to do this anymore. But it takes ten years to sort of start to get your work known, start to know who you are in your work. Start to realize, is this really rewarding?

It’s dangerous, and a scary proposition.

Yes, but that’s what your twenties are about. I think your twenties should be about exploring. I think you end up regretting it if you don’t use your twenties to gamble.

Did you have any moments when you felt that you were going to give up, when you felt a kind of panic?

Oh yeah, so many times, so many times. I remember, I was riding in a subway and I was really thinking, “This is it, I’m not going to do this anymore.” And in the subway was an old friend from UCLA who I hadn’t seen in ages and she was working for HBO, advertising for HBO, and we just started talking. And I thought, you know, maybe its time to go to HBO. And the next day my friend Tim Robbins called me and said, “Why don’t you come out and do something in Los Angeles?” Had he not called, I think I would have called my friend and said, “I think I’m ready to go to HBO,” and then called it a day. Tim called and he has a theater company in L.A. so he said come and do whatever you want!

That’s a pretty good proposition.

Yeah. What has kept me going are friends like Tony [Kushner] or Tim [Robbins] or Ed Solomon. It’s those early friendships that create the net so when you do fall, the fall doesn’t hurt so much.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Photography: Reto Guntli Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Abramović is surprisingly warm and convivial, reserving that famously fierce focus for her performances. This conversation took place in her home in downtown New York, a few days after her controversial art direction of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Gala in Los Angeles.

Your parents were partisans in World War Two and you grew up in a rather special situation. Can you tell me about your childhood?

My theory is that the more miserable childhood you get, the better artist you become. I don’t think anybody does much good work from happiness, because happiness is a state that doesn’t really push you into making work. But difficult childhood problems, families, all those things, somehow become a treasure, become some kind of source of inspiration for later on.

So, my childhood was not easy, that is what I think. Even though people think I am very lucky coming from that kind of family. First of all, before I was born, my mother was dreaming that she was giving birth to a huge, big snake.

That’s not too nice. She told you that?

She told me that. And then she was sitting at a [communist] party meeting— my mother is a national hero, my father is a national hero, she was a Major in the army, later on she was the director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art— she was a very strict, hardcore woman. She was pregnant and she was the president of the party meeting. In the middle of the party meeting, her water broke which means that she is going to start to deliver child. She was very proud to say that she absolutely did not react and first finished the party meeting and then she got brought to hospital to give the delivery.

But it was 1946, just after the war…everything was so poor, the health care and so on in ex-Yugoslavia…So, the placenta didn’t come completely out, parts stayed in her body and she got really poisoned. She was almost one year in the hospital and almost lost her life delivering me.

So, I was immediately given to my grandmother. Six years I was with my grandmother and these six years were very happy, as I can recall. Then, my mother and father were just doing their careers. They would come sometimes on the weekends. To me, it was like two strangers arriving and smiling and giving me presents, which I didn’t care about because I didn’t like presents. I never actually had dolls or teddy bears. I always liked to play with shadows or some kind of invisible beings rather than to have objects. So every time they would give me something, I would just give the present to the first child I would see. I would just get rid of all these objects. I never kept anything.

Marina Abramović RHYTHM 10 1973 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

My grandmother was very religious and she was most of the time in the church. She was going every day to the church and she was always taking me with her. I was kind of bored and I remember that one day— I always see people coming into church and they have this big vase with water where people would put their fingers and cross themselves— so, I was thinking, Okay, maybe if I drink all this water I will become holy. So, I put up a little chair and I went up and drank all the water from that vase and I got terrible diarrhea—

Oh, that’s disgusting.

I think it was very dirty hands that had been in there…

But I was not jealous of him, I was just very sad. And I developed some kind of disease where I would start bleeding a lot— from my nose, and I would get blue spots everywhere on my body even if I just fell on the floor. And I remember that one day, one of my baby teeth fell out and it would not stop bleeding for three months.

Oh my God!

They had me sitting in a bed in a way so that I wouldn’t swallow and choke myself in my sleep. This was between six and seven years old. I went to the hospital. They told my parents that I had hemophilia and that I was going to die. I stayed in the hospital for one year. And this was the most happy time of my life, in my childhood, definitely. Because everyone was bringing presents, everyone was nice to me. And then, in the end, they discovered that it was not hemophilia, it was something which is actually that you have very long [slow] coagulation of the blood. And this disappeared after my first menstruation, it just went away.

My whole life at that time was books, and writing poetry and going to see classical music concerts. But I had to always be at home at ten o’clock. Even in the early performance years, when I started working as an artist, I had to be home at ten o’clock. So, I did everything before ten o’clock.

Marina Abramović RHYTHM 5 1974 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

How did you move toward becoming an artist? You said that you were writing poetry and listening to music when you were younger, when did you begin to find art…?

Oh, immediately! Already when I was with grandmother, I was always making drawings. I was kind of playing with myself, inventing invisible beings, I would go under the blanket and create these shadow plays against the wall. I was never attached to objects or things, material things…I mean, look at this home now!

Actually, the first thing I was doing as a child was that I was making paintings from my dreams.

Did that come from your grandmother? Since you said she would ask you about your dreams and interpret them in the kitchen…

Yes, probably. See, I didn’t even think about that! [Laughs.] But actually it was probably that. My dreams, that was what I was doing, that was my first work. And I remember that when I started painting, I was using green and blue, these two colors the most. Just green and blue. I don’t know why. It was always green and blue, everything was green and blue.

After that, I moved from painting dreams to car accidents. I was so interested in depicting socialistic truck accidents. I would actually hear that there was an accident and go there to make photographs and go home and paint them.

Why do you think you had this fascination with truck accidents?

I have no idea, I still don’t understand. Something, something…to me it was like the mechanical error in the trucks was something… You know, I was always interested in bulldozers. Or the big cranes that were taking things and moving the earth, stuff like that.

And I was always thinking that those kind of things were going to kill us. At a very early age I was even thinking about performances. Like, people would be in a gallery and at one point they just hear a sound and these big trucks start arriving and surround the gallery, projecting light…

That’s terrifying.

…and it’s like these machines and you have to kind of run for your life. All of that was really important.

And then I went to the children’s store and I bought a little truck. Then I went to the highway and I put the little truck on the highway to see if the big trucks would smash the little truck. And the little truck was always unhurt.

Really? It was never hit?

Never. Never. So I would take this little truck and I would make a new [painting] series of the truck accidents, where the big truck is colliding with the little baby truck and the baby truck is totally unhurt and the other truck is smashed to pieces, so that actually they gain the symbolic idea of innocence that can overcome the mechanical age.

There may not have been an audience when you were doing this, but it seems to me that it was still very much a performance.

Totally. I was painting but at the same time I was always selling these different ideas and I would propose them and they were always being refused. I remember one idea for my first show that I proposed in the gallery. It was refused, so I was forced to show my paintings. But the idea was to create sinks around the gallery and to call the exhibition: Come Wash With Us. People would come in and they would take their clothes off and there would be all these women washing, washing, washing and then cleaning, drying, then you’d get fresh clothes and then you could leave.

And the gallery didn’t want to do that?

No, no, it was an unrealized concept.

After the truck accidents, I started looking to the sky.

How old were you at that time?

For the truck accidents, I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. And then I start looking to the sky. And next I started looking at the clouds. This was a big thing for me. I created this very complicated theory – the clouds were there, the clouds were coming, the clouds were projections, there were the shadows of the clouds, and the clouds were attacking…. I created this whole thing! [Laughs.]

And then, once, I lay on the grass and looked up and there was not one cloud in the sky, it was a blue sky. And then came twelve ultrasonic planes and made this incredible drawing. This was a revelation for me. I never went back to painting after that. I said, what the hell, I can do anything, I can just take planes and make drawings in the sky, I can use fire, water, I can use myself – why do I have to make something two dimensional and so restrictive? Art has given me an incredible freedom to do whatever I want.

Marina Abramović RHYTHM 0 6 hours © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

At this point you were in art school. Were you met with resistance when you came with these kinds of ideas to your teachers and peers?

Completely. You know, when I start doing my performances, the teachers think I have to be put in a mental hospital. They think that I am absolutely deserted from what art means.

The first exhibition we made in that space was called Little Things. It was a very important exhibition because we decided that we were going to show the things which inspire us, but not the work itself. It was an amazing exhibition.

Tell me about it.

At that time, it was a much bigger group – maybe we were twelve artists, and after that the other artists went back to their own regular work and we stayed, the six of us, and continued doing different explorations.

One girl brought the door of her studio, literally, because she said, “Every time I open the door I enter into my own space, that inspires me.” So she brought the door. Another guy brought his girlfriend, and he said, “Every time, first I make love to her and then I go to the studio to work.” So she sat there on the chair. Another one brought a very old blanket full of holes. He said, “I go to my studio and I lie under this blanket, and I sleep a little bit and I wake up with really good ideas.” Then another brought a radio. He said, “I always listen to the radio.” He went to the radio station and when we opened the show, we turned on his radio, and in the radio station he was opening the show.

Ha! That’s great.

I brought a peanut, just a little peanut, which I opened and put up on the wall with a needle. I called it, The Cloud and its Shadow. Just a tiny little peanut, but it would change everything because it was really a shadow of kind, of what a cloud would look like. It was a minimal piece but it was important: To think in a different dimension.

So, this was the beginning.

The artistic community that you created with this group must have been very important.

Oh yes, it’s historical, it’s huge, there have been books about it. Actually now, looking back, this was actually the avant-garde. This was the beginning of conceptualizing art.

You had a strong core within your group, but how were you perceived from the outside? What was the public reaction to that first show, for instance?

See, this was very interesting. The Student Cultural Center was like an island, completely isolated, because it was not official art and everybody was against us. We had a group, the guys had their girlfriends, and the girlfriends were art critics…

[Laughs.] Smart!

So we were like, “This was our group.” It’s so funny. Then we just had a small audience. It was always the same people and we could not get anywhere, it was incredible! We didn’t…it was not present in any kind of newspaper, they would not write about us, they wouldn’t talk about us, we were ignored.

But you weren’t upset—

No! We didn’t care. We were very active for five years. After those first five years, we started to feel that we wanted to be international, that we wanted to work somewhere else.

In ’71 there was a very important visit— actually it may have been earlier than ’71— of Richard Demarco. He was the guy who was doing the Edinburgh Festival. He went to all the Eastern European countries to look for interesting artists for his festival. He went to Bulgaria, to Romania, to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and he came to Yugoslavia. When he came, he was an official guest, so they took him to all the official studios.

And not to yours.

Definitely the official never even mentioned that there was such a thing as the Student Cultural Center. He [Demarco] was there for three days and he looked at everything. He was bored and he wasn’t interested in any of this stuff, you know, social realist stuff. So, he was leaving and that afternoon someone told him, “Oh, but you know, there is this interesting group of artists in the Student Cultural Center.” And he said he wanted to meet us. It was already like ten or eleven in the evening and he was leaving the next morning. I remember at like midnight, we arrived with our little photographs to his hotel room to show to him what we were doing. And he said, “Oh God, this is what I want.”

We worked all kinds of jobs— in kitchens, washing dishes, whatever, to survive. And we stayed one year in England. Then we came back because it was just so rough…all the work.

Marina Abramović and Ulay IMPONDERABILIA 1977 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

Tell me about the jobs you had in England.

Oh, everything. The main thing was washing dishes in the kitchen of restaurants. But then I got a very interesting job as a post woman. I had this ugly English uniform. And I had to deliver letters. And I speak very bad English, so I would end at three in the morning still delivering letters in the streets. It took so long to read and find the streets and everything. Then, after about four weeks of this job, I made a very important decision. I said, “Okay, every letter that is written with a typewriter machine means something official and is bad news— I will throw it away. Only the ones written by hand mean love and emotion and something very romantic— I am going to deliver those.” So, my job became much less complicated.

[Laughs.] Were there any repercussions?

After about two weeks, something was going very wrong and they asked me to leave. They could not prove anything, but they just asked me to resign.

That was a kind of performance too though, wasn’t it in a way?

[Laughs.] Yes.

Then Richard Demarco said to me, “Do you have any architectural design skills?” You know, for every job they asked us about we just said, “Yes. We can do it.” So, I said, “Yes.” And he said, “I have a very nice job for you, and it’s well-paid, in a design office.” So, I went to the design office. And they said, “Okay, we are designing the interior of a dining room in a luxury boat. Give us some proposals.” And they would pay at the end of the week. I had no idea, I had never done such a thing. So, I take the piece of paper and I start drawing lines, you know?

Like a grid.

Yes, a grid! And all week I do this. At the end of the week, I was really well paid! And they said, “Can we see what you’ve been doing?” I showed them this paper. And they looked at me [laughs] and said, “But we have printed this paper, there are hundreds of sheets just right there in the office, you don’t need to do that!” But they were so amazed that they paid me anyway.

So, the next week, I had the paper and I had to leave the job because I could not do the job.

But you got one week out of it!

[Laughs.] Yes, I got one week. I got away with it for one week.

Then I was working in a factory packing toys. You know these kinds of toys… [She gestures.] How do you call them? You put together these elements…

You mean like Meccano? Putting buildings together?

No, not buildings. Like a puzzle.

Oh, like a wooden jigsaw puzzle.

Yes, exactly.

And then the owner of the factory got interested in how good a worker I was, so he invited me for dinner. And then he said he wanted to marry me…

Oh, great…

So I had to run away from that job, too! [Laughs.]

I am not really marriage material.

And how were you living while you were in England? Were you living together with the group of five other artists that you’d traveled with?

In that time, when we came to London after Edinburgh to stay for one year, we rented an apartment. Only two of us were working, one guy and me. And all the rest of them pretended they could not find jobs, so we actually were feeding them…

Actually, when I think about this, it was really ridiculous! They were doing nothing and two of us were working for them.

Paying for everything?

Yes, paying for everything.

And you were all living together in one apartment?

Yes, all living together because there was no money. To me it was very difficult. I was working all day, so I could not really concentrate on my own work. And it was becoming more and more miserable.

And I remember my mother, who was so unhappy that I was doing this out of her control and everything, she applied— without even asking me— for me to be an assistant at the [Arts] Academy in Belgrade. Then she told me that I was on the shortlist and that I should come for an interview. I have to say that I was quite happy to do that. So I went for an interview and I got the job!

And what kind of job was that?

As the assistant to the professors of painting. I was at that job for two years and my main thing was to tell them [the students] that their painting was stupid and idiotic, you should do something else. And the main thing [I said] they should do was to leave the Academy and travel and see the world.

I was also doing my performances. They put one of my performance images on the cover of a very important Italian magazine. And the Academy somehow saw it— it was a naked image— so they were planning to throw me out. And on the day when they had this meeting at the Academy and I knew it was going to happen— somebody had told me— I asked for the word and I said, “I would like to resign.” So they didn’t have the pleasure of kicking me out.

Marina Abramović BALKAN BAROQUE I June, 1997 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

When you moved back to Belgrade and got that job at the Academy, how old were you?

I was twenty-five.

Did you move back in with your mom, or did you get an apartment of your own?

No, no. I was always with my mom. There was no way. You know, the way housing was built in the system, no one had their own place. You lived not only with your mother, but with all generations. Like, a grandmother, a grandfather…you know. It was terrible.

When I left, I was twenty-nine.

How did your mother feel about you pursuing art, and this particular kind of performance art?

Terrible! I mean, there was a war constantly. She was screaming…

What did she not like about it?

How do you mean, what did she not like about it? Cutting myself with razors? Lying naked in a fire? I mean, just name it. She was criticized at communist meetings. You know, what kind of education did she give her daughter? I was like a black sheep, a rebel.

This kind of energy— that I needed to rebel, not just towards the family but also toward society— it was very important. After that, I could survive anywhere. I could survive anywhere. That was the hardest part.

When you did leave, at twenty-nine, what was it finally that made you leave?

At that point, there was an event… Finally, the museum of modern art gave me the space to show all my written performances, which were photographic at that time. I went to the opening, and I knew that I had to be home at ten o’clock. Everybody was going for dinner, but I went home anyway. I didn’t know that somebody had called my mother and told her on the phone, “Your daughter is hanging naked in the museum. There is a photo.”

She could not believe that I had left. She couldn’t believe that I could actually be on my own. And, you know, I went to live with Ulay at that time. We didn’t have anything.

Marina Abramovic THE HOUSE WITH OCEAN VIEW 2002 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY Photo: Attilio Maranzano

You were living in Holland?

No. We just got the car from this French police. You saw the show at MoMA?

Yes.

So you saw the car, it was in the show. It was not a luxury car with a bathroom or something. It just looked like a sardine can.

[Laughs.] Yes.

We had a dog. And we just traveled. We didn’t have to pay for electricity, for a telephone, for anything. We went to different places. We went to Sardinia. We milked the sheep at six in morning and then we would get food from the shepherds. I know how to make Pecorino really well, actually. Really well.

It was really a very pure life. No compromises in any way.

Back then, you didn’t have an audience, you really had to find one. But today, when you work, you know there will be an audience. Does that change the way you conceptualize your work?

No. Audience is so necessary. I always needed an audience, I could not work without an audience. Audience completes the work. For me, that audience was small and now it is big. But it was as important. Now the audience is much bigger. And the more audience, the more energy I can draw from it to do my work, so now it is actually ideal.

I just made this huge gala at MOCA where we had something like eight-hundred and fifty people. I made them dress in white coats, all Hollywood guys, which was unbelievable.

I read about that, how some of the stars just didn’t know what to do…

It was one of the most insane things…And Yvonne Rainer protested. And it was very interesting, the letter form Yvonne Rainer. Thirty-six years ago I made a performance in Berlin and she sent me almost the same type of letter.

Really?

Yes. Thirty-six years ago. Saying that I am abusing the female body, that I am anti-feminist. I think she never really understood what my work is about. She is always looking from her agenda, not through mine.

And you don’t share her agenda.

No! I really don’t. I come from a completely different background, in which the woman was extremely strong. Which is why I never really needed to be a feminist. I’ve always done everything I wanted to do, I’ve never felt fragile or mistreated. So, I don’t know, all her agenda is not mine. She is constantly projecting onto me. I feel so sorry for her, I really respect her work, but this was a strange thing…She didn’t even see it, she presumed.

I read the letter. It was very strongly worded.

Now there is another letter circulating among the people who participated [in the MOCA show] saying that they never felt so much abused as from her letter. Just thinking they are a bunch of idiots to be manipulated when really they are young artists who know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.

You know, I was so shocked that she doesn’t have anything better to do.

Marina Abramović SEVEN EASY PIECES: JOSEPH BEUYS: HOW TO EXPLAIN PICTURES TO A DEAD HARE (1965) 2005 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY Photo: Jason Schmidt

But at the same time, to have work that elicits such a strong response, whether it is positive or negative, compared to when you were living in a car looking for an audience, is pretty powerful.

It is so true. But at the same time, it is very important that people understand the right meaning. Because, you know, you can criticize rich people but before there was a Pope, and aristocrats and kings who sponsored art. Now, industry, business does it. This is fact, this is reality. Otherwise this art would not exist. So doing something for them [the business community] is totally fine with me.

The thing is that the artificiality of these galas can be changed by changing the atmosphere into something else. Which I tried to do. It is easy to criticize, but then give me a solution. You have to try things. I am for somebody trying. If I fail, I fail, but at least I try. That is my position.

Now you have all this maturity and experience, but if you were to look back at your younger years, perhaps when you were just beginning to perform and were living with your mother, how do you look back at that time?

I don’t look back. I don’t have time! [Laughs.] I don’t have time to look back. You know, things that are done are done. Everything has its time. I am so busy now with how much time I have left and what I have to do to really accomplish my mission on this planet. I am much more busy with that.

Because I think that one of the real problems, especially with my generation of people, is that they are looking back too much. And they are nostalgic— how it was then, how it is now, and how it is not like it was… Who cares? We have to take reality as it is. Now is now. What was then was then. I have no time for nostalgia.

Marina Abramović THE ARTIST IS PRESENT 2010 © Marina Abramovic, courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

But at the same time you described your grandmother and her spiritualism and your parents and their militarism, and you can see the way in which both those aspects influenced you and you realize how the past is a kind of core that still resonates.

Totally, yes, yes. As you see, this is an insane contradiction. And I am absolutely a product of it. Of the total iron discipline that I got from my parents, and the spirituality that I got from my grandmother. If I didn’t have that kind of education, I don’t think I could do what I am doing. Because you need an enormous amount of focus.

And determination.

Yes!

Listening to you, there seem to have been a lot of obstacles to overcome. You certainly didn’t have a smooth path, despite your parents’ prominent positions and all that. You had a tough ride. Was there ever a moment where you felt that it was almost insurmountable, where you wanted to give it all up?

The two things in my life that never crossed my mind: To doubt what I am. And, the second: To give up. [Laughs.] That is something that is totally unknown to me.

All my life I was an artist, it is the only thing I wanted to do. And that was everything. I didn’t want to have children, I didn’t want to have a normal life.

Since you knew it from when you were very young, did you always have an idea of what it meant to be an artist?

No, it wasn’t about what it meant to be an artist. I was always more interested in the idea of: What is my purpose? What am I here for? Everybody has a certain purpose. My purpose was to communicate through art certain ideas to the public. And that is always what I wanted to do.

And then, also, not to miss your chances. You don’t have that many chances in your life. You have to know exactly what to do next. You know, I’ve been in Europe for so long, and I moved here [New York] for a reason. Now I’ve been eleven years in America. In these eleven years, I’ve made three pieces. But they’ve really made a difference: The House with the Ocean View, Seven Easy Pieces, and The Artist is Present. Three in eleven years. You know, it’s not much, but it is an enormous amount… The impact was important.

And now you are creating an institute. Can you call it a school?

It will be an institute, which will be partly a school, too.

And, in that sense, you will be working with and serving as a mentor for young artists. So, I wonder, if you could offer some piece of advice to someone who is young and has ideas that people are not necessarily welcoming, what would you say?

[Laughs.] You know, most interesting ideas people don’t welcome in the beginning. That is why you have to have determination.

I can only say that a good work of art has many lives, and will always be noticed and discovered, no matter when and where. That’s the thing.

When you look at young artists now, what is it that draws you? Is it that passion, that determination?

Oh, sure. I can tell right away. I don’t need more than ten minutes to talk and see. You know, even in that moment when the work is not yet complete, or articulated, or can be developed better, but you can still see that there is something, there is a kind of charisma that you can’t actually learn. And it has nothing to do with practice. It is just genetic. You have it or you don’t have it. That’s it. And that’s a big selection, not too many people have it.

Your mother and father were so against what you were doing. Did their perspective on what you were doing change as you began to be successful?

They died.

So they didn’t get to see it?

No, they saw it. My father was not at all interested. He married a twenty-five years younger woman and had his career and we didn’t have much contact.

Baby, we have to go.

Yes, I know.

Do you know how much we’ve talked?!

A lot. But it was wonderful.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Eisenberg speaks with disarming bemusement and has the thrilling ability to make you feel like she is about to really level with you.

You had an unusual path to becoming a writer because you didn’t begin writing seriously until a little bit later, when you were thirty. Why did you begin writing when you did?

You’ve done some homework.

A little bit.

But yes, when you say I first started writing seriously…I hadn’t started before at all.

Well, did you have any writerly inclinations before, had you even thought about it?

No. I mean, my big experiences when I was a child were reading experiences. I loved reading. I thought writing was magic, and I thought writers were magical beings anointed by God— I still think so. Although I don’t know how I snuck in there, then. It never occurred to me that I could write, so I never did it. I thought either you were born a writer or you weren’t.

When I was in high school, all my friends said that they were going to be writers.

Really?

Yeah, and I thought, “Hey, how come you get to be a writer?”

But you never felt that you could say that?

No, it never occurred to me. It never occurred to me.

What ideas did you have about writers?

That they could write, that they were people who could write!

And why was this so distanced from who you were?

Well, it still is in a way. It does seem like a miracle to me if somebody can really, really write. And I’m still flabbergasted by the professionalization of writing and the prevalence of MFA programs. It’s just astonishing to me. Because it does seem uncanny to me, that it can be done. I never thought of it as an ordinary activity and I still don’t think of it as an ordinary activity.

Certainly, then, not as a career or a profession.

No, never, never.

When your friends said they wanted to be writers, what did you want to be instead? What did you think you could do?

I didn’t think I could do anything and my big ambition was to do nothing. But, of course, the matter of supporting myself did intrude.

So, what happened after high school?

I went to college. I was a very poor student and it was the 60‘s so I did my obligatory dropping out and then I dropped back in. I had not a clue what to do with myself.

Put it all together and it spells waitress. [Laughs.] Which is not so bad, actually.

No, and many writers do that, as it turns out.

It’s very compatible with writing. Much more so than teaching, for example.

You’re not exercising the same muscles you’d use for writing.

That’s right! It’s not competitive thought, competitive energy. When I’m teaching, I can’t possibly do any writing because I’m thinking about my students’ work the way I would think about my own. Whereas if you’re waiting on tables, you’re not thinking about bringing a hamburger in the way that you think about…you know.

Were you waitressing while you were a student?

Not so much. You know, you didn’t need so much money back then. Everything was so cheap, and you could live in New York on virtually nothing— live badly, but there was a veneer of money so thick that you could walk on it. You knew somebody could buy you dinner— I mean nobody bought me dinner!— but there were parties, and you could go freeload.

Well, that still happens.

Good! I’m glad to hear that!

But there’s none of that affordable rent situation anymore.

Not at all.

So, when you finished college at the New School, did you stay in New York?

I batted back and forth between New York and Vermont for a while.

What brought you to Vermont?

Well, I had gone to high school there, after I got kicked out of a superb public school in the Midwest…

Why? What did you do?

Improper dancing at the junior prom.

Really?! And they kicked you out?

Yes. I believe I was either kicked out, or next to kicked out. I mean I was persona non grata, I was unwelcome.

Was your dancing that inappropriate?

I can’t dance, so maybe that was the problem.

That’s hilarious. But, anyway, you had a connection to Vermont and you were shuttling between Vermont and New York. Were you waitressing in both places?

What was I doing in Vermont? I did this and that. Waitressing, I worked in a shop or two. You know, mostly I was sort of a lay-about.

Were you a lay-about alone or did you have a partner in crime?

Oh, just bunches of friends and we all kind of lived in houses together. It was the days when everybody just sort of lived in a heap. In New York, I waitressed. And I did that for years.

Did you have any other jobs besides waitressing?

For a while, I had some secretarial jobs. But I was very, very bad at it. Extremely bad at it.

Why?

Well, I’m very obsessive, as you may not have noticed. Very compulsive and you know, you’re seeing the slob side of me, but it goes hand in hand— the O.C.D. side and the slob side. So I couldn’t do anything right. I could not do anything right.

Do you have any stories from that?

Yeah, well I do, actually. One of my jobs was at the New York Review. And I was Bob Silver’s worst secretary ever.

He admits this, or you just think so?

I would say that it was indisputable, scientifically provable. Really, the fact that I then, later, decades later, [makes a “woooo" sound] the calendar’s pages flipping by, many decades later, I got to write for the Review, in a way, that’s the most gratifying experience of my whole life. But I really was Bob Silver’s worst secretary.

The first day he sat me down and he said, “Deborah, take a letter,” and I said, “Sure, I’ll take a letter.” So, I took out my steno pad and I had a pencil and— of course, these are the days you don’t know anything about, when you had to take a paper and pencil to transcribe what someone was saying. He is absolutely brilliant and unbelievably articulate and he was writing to Isaiah Berlin or someone, and he was pacing in his sort of elegant, handsome way, cigarette ash falling off his little German cigarette and sort of declaiming this letter. Meanwhile, I was grabbing the pencil with both hands— I could have been using a stone tablet and an axe. Anyhow, a half hour later, he stopped and said, “Thank you Deborah, now read it back please.” So I looked at it, and there was not one comprehensible phrase. I looked at it and said, “That’s the hard part, Bob.” And he said, “That’s the hard part, Bob. [Deadpan voice.] That’s the hard part, Bob.” [Laughs.]

It must have been incredibly gratifying to be writing for him later on.

It was unbelievable. I couldn’t believe it when he asked. When he asked me to write about something, really decades had gone by, and I had had almost no contact with him since. And it was not a chummy relationship when I was working there, I can tell you. I really almost fell over. I saw that there was the familiar envelope, with the bulky thing in it and I thought, can it be? Can it be? What can it be? Is it possible that Bob is sending me a book? And I thought, whatever it is, I’m not going to do it. I opened the envelope and it was the one thing I couldn’t resist doing – it was Peter Nadas’s A Book of Memories. Impossible book. I’m sorry, it wasn’t A Book of Memories, it was a book of his essays and early fiction, but it meant I could write about A Book of Memories. I obviously did write about the book I was sent, but I did write about A Book of Memories as well.

When you were younger, you thought of writers as magical beings. So, when you were working as an assistant at the New York Review of Books, in this literary environment, was it like entering into the magical zone?

No, I had absolutely zero interest in that, or thought of it. It was before I was writing by some years. I mean the writers seemed like gods to me.

They still do?

Absolutely. Sometimes sort of shambling weirdo gods…

Where were you living during this time in New York? What was life like?

I lived in crummy apartments.

Whereabouts?

I started in Cobble Hill, which was before Brooklyn was Brooklyn.

Yeah it wasn’t really “Cobble Hill.”

It was definitely not. Then I lived in the West Village, which also was just…I lived in a really crummy basement apartment.

What was life like? I mean mostly, looking back on it, I’d say I was depressed and had been depressed for like 15 or 20 years but I didn’t quite figure that out. And I kind of drifted around. You know, it was the 60‘s which was a great time to be young. But I mainly just sort of stayed in my apartment.

Who were you spending time with?

That is really a good question…[Pause.] Other slackers, basically.

Were they artistic types? Writers?

Vaguely. They certainly weren’t business people or doctors. You know, they were vaguely marginal and low functioning. Then I fell in love when I was 26, and so then I was living with the phenomenal person who I still live with.

That’s wonderful. So 26, that was the year. You described your parents as being from this striving middle class background. What did you think about your life decisions at this point?

Oh, they had a very low opinion of me.

Were they worried?

Well, when I say “they” I mean “she.” My father was a kind of mild-mannered pediatrician whose main attribute in regard to me was a kind of melancholy reservation. My mother was furious with me all of the time. Always angry. I mean she was a complete dragon, she was terrifying. I had as little contact with them as I could, but it was real, real disappointment. I was like a catastrophe, just a catastrophe. So, there just wasn’t a lot of contact.

How did you reach the point where you first picked up a pen to write? We’re at 26, we’re getting towards that age when you began writing.

Well, the man I live with is a writer, a phenomenal writer, and he said, “Well, what do you want to do with your life?” and I said, “Nothing.” And he said, “Well, nobody does nothing, you can’t do nothing.” And I said, “Well I’m going to approximate it to the extent that I can.” And he said, “You’re not going to be happy doing that.” And I said, “Watch this!”

But you weren’t happy.

I was not happy, not at all. Although I didn’t really quite know it.

He is asthmatic. There was a lot of information coming out about passive smoking and I was smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes day…

Oh my God.

I was more addicted than anybody I’ve ever met to any substance. Before this guy and I got together— let’s call him Wally— somebody tried to strangle me in my hallway. The way I conquered my fear and trained myself to go outside was to run out of cigarettes. So I had to go out in the middle of the night.

That’s so terrifying! Was there a vagrant person in your hallway?

Yeah, he was just some nut. It was very confusing. I guess he was kind of a mad strangler, the idea seemed to be coming to him as he went along. He didn’t seem to…[Pause.]

He didn’t seem to want to go through with it?

I don’t know, he sort of grabbed on to me and kind of dragged me down the hallway. Out of sheer terror, I grabbed on to him and then things got very confused, somehow, and he broke off, and of course I was yelling and screaming, and it wasn’t late at night. I guess he just got scared.

But anyhow, I was a heavy, heavy smoker and I couldn’t get through without a cigarette. I was just turning 30 and all this information about passive smoking was coming out. I thought, here’s this great guy I live with, I’ve never met another really fabulous guy, do I really want to kill him?

[Laughs.]

So I decided, I’m just going to quit smoking. And I did. It was a feat, and it was awful, it was horrible.

How can you do that if you’re used to three packs a day?

It was just awful, I can’t even tell you. I completely fell apart. I was just completely out of control all the time, I couldn’t do anything.

I never would have dreamed of trying to write, because I knew I wasn’t going to be good at it, and it was just too mortifying.

For yourself, or for someone to see it?

Oh, for myself.

For you to put something down that would be…

Yeah, and I had not really understood that everybody learns to write, nobody is born to write. I think everybody who writes learns how to do it. You can’t learn to be a great writer, but you can’t write without learning how to do it. But I thought either you could do it or you couldn’t do it and I knew I couldn’t do it. And it was true. I couldn’t write because I had never done it.

Anyhow, at a certain point in all this chaos of me being in total pieces, Wally sort of said, “Well, you don’t have anything to lose at this point, so here’s a notebook, here’s a pen…”

Since that was his reaction, he must have had an inkling, or you must of thought that you wanted to write and he must have known it. You must have exuded It somehow, that desire.

Well, I mean, I was a reader. A serious reader. I would read things and say, “How the fuck did he do that?” You know? That’s just amazing. And other people have always sort of said, “You’re a writer, right?” And I would say, “No, I’m not.”

Many, many more months passed with me trying to turn this into a piece of fiction, having a very, very hard time. I gave it to him to read again and he said, “Well, you’ve turned it into fiction but it’s lost its life, so do it again.”

You’re lucky you had a coach at home.

Oh yeah, he’s like the best world’s best writing teacher. But I thought I was going to kill him, of course.

[Laughter.]

Of course.

Anyhow I wrote it again over many months and he said, “Great, you’ve done it, you’ve written a story.” Of course it’s very autobiographical and it’s in my first book. It’s a lousy story and I’m sorry that I published it, though it is the only story of mine that a lot of people like.

Really? You don’t like it?

Yeah, I think it’s really crap. I have sort of a family feeling for it, but I don’t think it’s any good.

But it got you some attention. How? First you showed it at home, then who did you show it to?

Then I showed it to the friend of mine who’s in it. It’s the only story I ever wrote that has any autobiographical component and my friend Kathy was the friend who took me to the Y, so I put my friend Kathy in the story, taking me to the Y. And the story is kind of amusing, though the reality was not in any way amusing. But, anyhow, my friend Kathy is an actress and a director and she said, “You know, I’ve been invited to direct a reading, something at the Public Theater, and I want to direct your story.”

And that’s not a small gig. I mean, going from writing and tearing your hair in your basement apartment to having a reading of the story you thought you couldn’t write at the Public, it’s a pretty big Whoosh!

Yeah. I thought, “Listen I really don’t want to do that, it really belongs on the page, I really don’t think it should be out loud.” She said, “Well, what kind of a friend are you?” So I said, “Oh, alright, but I’m leaving town.”

So you weren’t even there for it?

I wasn’t. Anyhow, so that was that, and I didn’t think about it, and about six months later Joe Papp called me up. And he said, “Kathleen did your story and I just came across it again in the drawer and I’d like you to write a play.” I said, “Joe, I can’t write a play.” And he said, “Well, I’d like you to write a play.” And I said, “Joe, I can’t write a play!” He said, “Well, I’ll give you a signing, a commission.” I said, “Money! That changes the picture!”

I said, “Listen, I’ve got this really good waitressing gig, they don’t fire me, no matter what I do, and I’m a really lousy waitress so I cannot give this job up.” So we worked out this scheme where I dropped by a few nights a week and he sort of put me on salary. He said, “Okay, you’ve got five months, and show me the play as you progress along.” And I said, “Oh, sure, Joe.” But I would never show anybody anything while working on it, and I didn’t show it to him and he kept calling and saying, “Well, how’s it going?” I kind of said, “Oh, fine.” Actually, I was lying on the floor drinking grappa. I was just panicked.

Not writing it?

No, I had no idea how to do it. I’m a very, very slow writer, but I wrote that very quickly, in like the last two months or so, and I was very pleased with it. I showed it to Wally, the most important person in my life, and he said, “I don’t get it, what is this?” And for some reason I was very confident about it.

Uncharacteristically, it seems.

I don’t know why, I was just certain it was good. I brought it to Joe and I said, “Here.” He read it. He called me. He said, “I hate this play.”

Oh no!

I said, “Okay.” It just didn’t bother me. He was very angry about it because he had paid me all this money. And also he liked being a person who did nice things for people. So it really made him angry to be saying something bad to me.

But you continued to feel like it had some value?

Yeah!

Well, the way you’ve been talking about your path up to know it seems very “I can’t do anything, I can’t do anything” and all of a sudden it’s this, “I have this thing, and I don’t care that my most trusted critics are not into it.”

I didn’t care at all. I was working at a bar at the time. Naturally I was a good decade older than anybody else who was working there, and I thought that they were the perfect cast.

That they would have been perfect in your play?

Yeah, perfect. So we invited them over and they did a reading of the play.

Where?

At our apartment. And Wally said, “I get it, I get it.”

It had to be read.

It had to be read.

And what about Joe Papp, did he ever see it?

No. He said, “I don’t care, I don’t care if it’s the biggest hit that ever happens, I’ll never like it.” So I didn’t care. But Kathy knew I was doing this of course because I told her. So she said, “Let me see it.” So I showed it to Kathy, she really liked it. And she showed it around. Nobody was interested in doing it.

I didn’t care, I had no particular interest in it being done, but there were two consequences. One was that I sort of had tasted the fun of writing twice. If Joe had not commissioned the play, I would not be writing now. But after you’ve had that taste, you just can’t give up, so I started then really to write. The other consequence was that that play sort of floated around. I wasn’t aware of its floating around, but it was floating around and somebody called me and said, “I really want to do this.” So then it was the first new play that was done at a theater called the Second Stage. They did a great production, and it was just wonderful!

What’s interesting is how you went from this place of, “I can’t do it,” to writing and having the first things you write be both satisfying to you and to be put in the public forum, and to be recognized in that way, that’s sort of…

It’s all uncanny, I mean it’s a story about incredible luck. Here’s the sort of final leg of that: I was working in this bar and there was a table of people that would come in frequently and one of them was this very nosy woman from the neighborhood. She kept saying, “Who are you, what are you?” And I kept saying, “I’m your waitress and I’m bringing you a hamburger.” And she kept saying, “No, you’re a writer I can tell!” And I kept saying, “I’m not a writer, I’m a waitress!” This went on and on, and during this time my play was produced and in the play, my writing was compared to hers. She was Laurie Colwin. So she came in waving the New York Times with this review. She said, “See, I told you, I told you, what are you working on now?”

If you’re in an MFA program people know you are writing, so you can’t really get the protection of lying, but I suggest lying to anybody who isn’t. Just don’t tell people, protect yourself.

People start prying and asking and making it uncomfortable.

It’s hard, you know? People know you’re writing, they say, what are you writing? She was sort of saying, “What are you writing?” She said, “I want to see something of yours.” And I knew she was working at a homeless shelter in a neighborhood so I said, “If you let me come with you to the shelter, I’ll show you a story I just finished.” So, we made the trade. A few days later, somebody called me up and she said, “Oh I’m a friend of Laurie Colwin and my name is so and so and Laurie showed me your story and I really liked it.” “Oh that’s very nice, thank you.” “Well, maybe you’ll come have lunch with me?” I thought, “I’m not doing anything for lunch.” And she said, “Okay, what day is good for you?” We made plans and I said, “Where do I come?” And she said, “Well, to Knopf!”

It was Alice Quinn who was at Knopf. She said, “Well, I’d really like to publish a book of yours.” So I said, “I haven’t written a book. And she said, “Well, do you want a contract?” And I said “No.” But when I had written a certain number of stories, I went back to her.

That’s amazing.

It’s amazing, I know.

So did you create a discipline for yourself at that point?

I was able to carve out a certain amount of time and space, more than I’m able to now. And…I think it’s a very good time for writers before they’re published because then people don’t put them in slots, there’s not a lot of pressure, you have a kind of freedom. I would say to people, don’t rush to publish.

That’s great. Several people have told me that. Then you’re not beholden to anybody either, or to a style that you supposedly have.

Absolutely. The longer you can retard it, the better off you are. There may be people for whom that is not true, but it’s certainly true for me, and I think it’s true for a lot of people.

So then you wrote enough for it to be a collection, then you brought it to Alice, and then?

And then it was a collection.

What did you parents think at this point?

Of course I lied to them as long as I could.

You didn’t want to tell them that you were a writer.

I definitely did not want to but at a certain point I had to.

But what was the resistance? Because, in a way, wouldn’t they have liked that?

Oh yes, oh definitely, they would have liked that but the pressure would have been unbearable. There came a point when I had to send my first story, the one that was done at the Public, to my parents. My parents were living in New Mexico then, and they were living not far from Henry Roth. So anyhow, I sent this thing to my mother, didn’t hear anything, just as well. And eventually, she called up and she said, “Well, Henry Roth didn’t think your story was very good.”

[GASP.]

So then, I had to send her my second one and my mother’s response was, “Well, it isn’t as good as your first one.” So.

Damn hard to please.

But I’ll tell you a story, if you want to know a story about prestige, publishing, all that. I used to keep this story a secret because I was so embarrassed about it, but now I think young writers deserve to know stories like this.

I’d be honored to hear it.

I grew up in an area where every girl looked like Tuesday Weld. I mean everybody was just a very blonde, beautiful, leggy girl. Then there was me. And it was like, “Uh oh, what are we going to do about this?” My father had three sisters and they all had three big gigantic noses, like me. Two of them had nose jobs in their sixties.

Prestige, a good review, equals smaller nose. Better nose.

That’s how they see it now because of the new way they see you.

That was the most incredible status index that I have ever, ever experienced. “Oh you look so much better.”

Tough crowd.

Yeah, they are a tough crowd. But everyone is a tough crowd, you know? And I think that’s one reason why people really do desire publication, desire recognition, because of the absolutely inarguable status shift. I think if you can tough it out, the longer you can tough it out, without that, the better off you are.

And why exactly?

Well, just for that reason that you’re more protected from people’s expectations and demands and characterizations of you.

I think it’s just criminal, it really is. Let somebody admire you because they admire you instead of thinking that maybe you’ll make money. I mean fine if that happens after a while, great, but by that time you own your writing.

I’m still so interested in this idea that you had of yourself as this person who couldn’t be a writer, but then you’re being reviewed in the Times, your book is published, you can hold it, it’s a tangible object— what was the feeling of seeing your first book in print?

Ugh, I left the country for three months when the book was coming out. There weren’t cell phones, there weren’t computers and I just went to Italy on my own, Wally stayed at home. I just said, “I can’t handle it, I don’t wanna know about it, I don’t wanna know what happens.” It was terrifying, I was really terrified.

But in the privacy of your own room, when you hold the object…

The object is great, I’m not going to pretend for a SECOND that it doesn’t feel fabulous to have a book in your hand the pages of which you have filled up.

And now your work has been collection in this beautiful anthology.

It is beautiful, isn’t it?

You’re on Olympus, among the untouchable gods of the pen.

I feel old, but not untouchable.

[Laughter.]

There is something to be said when people don’t want to beat you up so much. You know, after a certain age.

How does it all feel, looking back?

It’s surprising. It’s just very, very surprising.

So yeah, I mean, I was just very, very, very lucky.

And now you teach young writers. You’re at the other side of the table, you’re the one saying, “Go back and do it again.” Do you have any advice for young writers?

Yes, I do. One is, that it isn’t supposed to be good at first. You can’t just expect to sit down and write something good. There have always been a few people that can. I certainly can’t and when I started I couldn’t write a decent English sentence. It’s very thorny grammar, it’s difficult, it’s squishy weird grammar, it’s hard to get a handle on. It’s very, very hard to express the simplest idea or thought or activity and I think that often young writers are not prepared for that. On the one hand, they are frustrated too easily because they think, “This is harder than it should be.” No, it isn’t! It’s really, really, really hard. And they think, “Well I’m not suited to it, because its so hard.” I mean, that’s what I always thought. But the fact of its difficulty has nothing to do with whether you’re suitable for it or not. Nothing to do with it.

Then there’s the converse problem of people not being as ruthlessly honest with themselves about what they’ve made as they ought to be. Thinking, “This will do, this is okay.” So on the one hand, you have to have a lot of confidence that you’re going to be able to do it, but you also have to be really scrupulous in your honesty about whether or not you have done it. It’s a double thing. It’s very, very difficult. It’s very demanding.

And you have to have the perseverance and the hard-work ethic to go back and say, I have to do it again.

Yeah. I think a lot of young writers are very frightened by revision. I happen to like it, because I’m embarrassed about the first draft, my early drafts. After a certain point, you do develop a certain confidence that you may not be able to make it good, but you may be able to make it a little better each time, and that’s precious gold too, to know that that’s going to happen. You know that little by little by little by little you can make it something that you yourself can bear to look at. But that’s a learned thing.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Diana Michener

Writing of Gordon in the LA Times, Susan Salter Reynolds noted that, “In her novels, stories and poetry, Gordon has pushed the limits of style — explored the empty places in her articulate characters and works — so that language drags meaning behind it like a fur coat trailing blood. Her language is so textured that her pages seem three-dimensional.”

Are you ready to answer some questions about your yore?

Yes, I remember how awful it was to be twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four and feeling like a committed artist but needing to take regular jobs because I really didn’t have any money, and wondering if I would ever have a publication, wondering if anything would ever become of me.

I read in an interview that you felt that already at nineteen you were starting to write with what you considered your mature voice, which is very early indeed and seems to suggest quite a bit of confidence. I am wondering: At nineteen, how were you thinking about your writing?

I was writing a story that was later published, although saying it was like my adult oeuvre is going a little far. But I think what I had from the start was confidence that I could write an interesting sentence. And that was the first time I was working on a story where the basic project was one that I still think about. I was just in Philadelphia reading with Karen Russell and Jennifer Egan—

I love both of them, I just have to say.

Right now, to be reading with those two— that’s feeling like an arrived writer.

Yes. For sure.

But I was remembering that I had set my very first story in Camden, which is really greater Philadelphia. Why did I do that? It looks like Baltimore, it was always Philadelphia’s run-down outlying section, and it had these tall, skinny row houses like Baltimore. The melancholy of those buildings, the urge to describe them was one of the main incentives for writing that story.

The reason I know that I was nineteen when I wrote it was that it was during the Kennedy assassination. As I was sitting at the table— and this is characteristic of me to this day: I always fix a very nice desk, a very nice study, I’ll put months into getting my workspace exactly right, and then I’ll work at the kitchen table.

Oh, that sounds familiar…

[Laughs.] A fortune teller once said of me that I like to be near my source of food and drink and it couldn’t have been truer.

So anyway, I remember that I was sitting at the table when the news came on the radio that Kennedy had been shot. So I know exactly when that was: November, 1963.

When you’re nineteen years old at the kitchen table— did you have set writing habits already then?

I had inclinations more than a habit of industry. I only have a habit of industry when I am working on a particular piece. But I am not a writer, to this day, who works every single day. Because I still really have time management problems, and I am always behind in my obligations to other people, which include letters of recommendation, interviews that I’m actually writing rather than speaking— things that I procrastinate shamelessly on. I often find myself at the computer but doing other things besides working on my fiction.

So, in that sense, it sounds like your habits haven’t changed that much over time?

No! I hate to say it, but I think I’m much the same person. The only thing is that at nineteen, I wouldn’t have been sure that I’d ever be able to finish a novel. I mean, how do you know before you’ve done it? It seemed a monumental task.

I’ve always had a dog, ever since I was twenty-four. And I spend an awful lot of time on my feet, walking a dog. It is just part of my routine.

I bet you work through a lot of things while you walk.

I do. This habit I’ve actually had since childhood. I often carry a text with me when I walk. I know it sounds dangerous, but I feel where I’m going better when I’m actually reading something. I think because of a lifetime habit of reading and walking in a place where there was really quite a bit of traffic, in Baltimore. [Laughs.] I rarely walk my dog without something to read. I use one of those headlamps at night.

The writer David Grossman actually told me something similar. He walks all the time when he is working.

Well, he is certainly a writer I’d like to be doing something the same as. One way or another, I usually make notes too. I usually have a pen with me.

That is some high-level multi-tasking.

Yes! It is very much part of my routine.

You were talking about writing a story set in Camden because it was like Baltimore. Let’s backtrack a little: What was it like to grow up in Baltimore? Were there a lot of books in your home growing up?

Yes, I was really very lucky that way. Like a lot of people, I feel like my parents should have loved me more. If my parents had thought I could do no wrong I delude myself that I wouldn’t be so hypercritical and so slow in the process. I am so unnecessarily rigid about revising and far too self critical to really be a prolific writer. I kid myself, I even say it proverbially to students: “Well, I guess your parents thought you could do no wrong.”

What’s more, I didn’t drive until I was nineteen and I went to college when I was sixteen. So, I was in college for three years before I even had a car. And Baltimore has never had a particularly efficient pubic transportation system, but it had those buses. I spent my childhood riding on buses: Slow, flatulent, crowded, urban buses. And I loved that, actually. They made a huge impression on me. I learned an awful lot about the working class population of Baltimore by riding buses all the time. And you know, in Kalamazoo, which doesn’t have a very developed public transportation system, every now and then I ride the buses and I think, Wow, if you really want to know a town, you have to ride the public transportation that the poor use, to find out about places you never knew existed. Sometimes, honestly, it’s places that you wouldn’t ever see otherwise. So I spent an awful lot of time in Baltimore taking buses and that showed me neighborhood and industrial dumps, industrial waste places, and that kind of urban wilderness that cities like Baltimore are prone to.

And it made an impression on you.

I used to love to walk in factory districts where it occurred to me that the music of machinery— especially when I would hear the machinery of one factory and the machinery of another factory right next to it, superimposed on each other— it’s a kind of music that we know, because we know machines, and when you’re in a solitary state and you’re listening to these machines, they seem to be alive and feeling down-strandedness, feeling their own solitude in some way. That made a huge impression on me as a kid.

Even as a child and as a teenager, I chose to spend a lot of time alone. In my senior year of high school, when I was sixteen, I really didn’t have a best friend outside of the family.

But you have several siblings.

Yes, I have four siblings and one sister whom I’m extremely close with. Extremely close with. In fact, it is really her story…I think I can tell this now. I used to not really discuss any relation that Bogeywoman might have to me or my life. I didn’t think I dared. But it was the shape of my younger sister’s life that I borrowed for Bogeywoman.

So, if she is Ursie, alias the Bogeywoman, you are in fact Maggie, the telepathic older sister who swoops in…

Exactly. And that is really how it was with us. There was a period there when she was estranged from everybody in the family, panicked. When she was fifteen or sixteen years old she was so freaked out by realizing that she was gay, understanding what that was— and it had happened to her when she was at a beloved summer camp that we had gone to— that she willingly went into a hospital. But it was not a state hospital, it was a very expensive, private psychiatric hospital. I don’t think a public hospital would’ve kept her for even a week. But as long as my parents were willing to foot the bill, she lived in that hospital for years. Literally! She went to high school from the hospital.

Anyway, I just really wanted to tell that story.

Thank you for telling it to me. I love that character, Ursie. I wasn’t sure who she was, but it was clear to me that she had a very strong relationship to her creator. Back to you. You went to college at sixteen. That is quite early.

In Baltimore there was always an accelerated course for junior high school, anybody with an IQ over a certain level could do it. It wasn’t all that high because I would say that maybe 15% of students were given the opportunity to do this. My mother did it, my older sister did it, I did it. It was just available. So I did seventh, eighth and ninth grades in two years. And then I was a July baby. I went to Antioch College, which had a five-year program because you went to school half the year and worked half the year. And you could start in the summer, right after regular school let out. Basically, I couldn’t wait to get out of my family home— that is what it amounted to— so I graduated high school in June and started college in the end of June. So, just by a fluke, I was still sixteen instead of seventeen when I started college.

What was your college experience like? Did you write a lot in college?

I didn’t really do anything in an orderly way for two years— I was far too young to be in school, especially the kind of school that sets you on your own responsibility as much as Antioch does— that is their whole thing, to entrust you with the responsibility for your life and to show you what it is like work on the street, organize your business affairs, and have an existence in the real world all while you are in school.

That’s a lot for a sixteen year-old to deal with.

You ain’t kidding. I was a child! On the other hand, if you’d asked me at that age, I felt more adult than ever! I always had this front of a tough chick, a tough babe. That was really very much the picture that I tried to show the world at that age. So I don’t think it was easy to detect, but I was completely lost as far as really knowing how to look after myself, my property, and when my safety was concerned.

I still had that fascination with the other side and I think that, for better or for worse— and I can say this as long as I’ve survived it— that footloose habit that I had, that refusal to be cautious, say if it was two o’clock in the morning and I wanted to trot downtown to get something, I would just do it— I am still like that. But at least now I know I have to have a dog with me! That’s one of the main reasons why I have a dog. If you have a dog with you, your chances of not being molested in some way are a whole lot better than if you’re by yourself.

But your sixteen, seventeen year-old self made it, after all.

And now I can say that it paid off for me in a way. I often tell people that one of the reasons it took so long for me to finish Lord of Misrule was that I had written about that reckless young woman in The Bend, The Lip, The Kid, She Drove Without Stopping, and Bogeywoman. And when I sat down to write Lord of Misrule, I was going to write a social novel about the racetrack and about the typical people who work at the racetrack. I didn’t want that lost college girl in there this time, and she sneaked in anyway and became an important character.

Everything that I had written about her hadn’t caught on, really. Now people say Maggie is a terrific character, and it is very gratifying, I feel more forgiving [toward her]. But there was this interim where I thought, I’ve written about myself at that age and it’s just not that interesting to people. In fact, it’s embarrassing because she was so without regard for her own safety, without any practical sense, or reasonable wariness of men. If it doesn’t make good fiction, then it’s just embarrassing!

It may not be that it doesn’t make good fiction. I was speaking with the writer Binnie Kirshenbaum and she said she gets frustrated because she writes complicated female characters, just like you write complicated female characters, and there is an aversion in the publishing world, and to some extent to the public reader, at least the way books are marketed to readers— there is no tolerance for female characters who are complicated in the way that we have tolerance for, say, an Alexander Portnoy and his hysteria. There is an archetype for a hysterical male but there is no permission for female characters who have all these eccentricities.

It is very interesting that you say that, because at a certain point She Drove Without Stopping was under contract with Delacorte, and a very well-known editor at that time named Seymour Lawrence had bought it. It was exactly because he was hoping for a female Philip Roth that he was interested in my work. But when he got the manuscript, he ran like hell! Because I think you are exactly right, the market wasn’t ready for that. It looks different when it is a woman. A woman’s sexual indiscretions make people uncomfortable.

Exactly. I certainly hope you don’t stop writing those characters, they are my favorite type of characters. And hopefully there will be more room for them in the future.

Well, winning the National Book Award for a book that has a character like that in it goes a long way in correcting any lingering prejudices you might have.

Let’s hope so! I’d love to hear more of the practical reality of your life in your twenties. You graduated from college and then you went to get your master’s degree. But in-between there were some years. What was your first move after college?

The first thing I did was follow a boyfriend out to Los Angeles. Actually, I should say, I had gotten into Syracuse, one of the earliest writing programs out there, and I thought I was going to go— I even arrived at Syracuse with that in mind. But then I realized I just didn’t feel like being in an academic program yet, I felt like having an adventure.

My boyfriend, named James Aitchison, who is still a very good friend of mine and has done illustrations for a few of my books, had gone out to Los Angeles to try to start art school. He was another case in point of my being attracted to somebody who was an autodidact. He had never gone to college. He had lived a pretty rough life. He just showed up in Yellow Springs one day and I couldn’t get involved with him fast enough! We ended up living in Los Angeles, but it was a trajectory back and forth in and out of the desert all the time.

Where were you living in Los Angeles?

Most of the time I was living in the apartment that was described in She Drove Without Stopping, I might even have put the address into the book. It was kind of a beautiful old building with hardwood floors. It was in what might once have been a nice neighborhood but which was now, between Vermont and Hoover, in the neighborhood around USC that had become a very bad neighborhood. Just like Jane in that book, my landlord was this great, big Native American guy who ran a fly-by-night construction company. My then-boyfriend, the painter, and I lived in this building that was very easily penetrated. A would-be rapist once entered the building, just like in She Drove Without Stopping. All those things that are described in the book actually happened to me.

I lived that life for two years, definitely narrated to some extent in She Drove Without Stopping. “Now Jane was really lost,” that is a line at some point [in the book].

What kinds of jobs did you have?

I always worked places as a waitress and as a bartender but the first job that I had that I really count was that I taught English as a second language to foreign students, mostly Persian students actually, in a private school in Hollywood. I had great fun doing that, although I had no idea what I was doing— it was very irresponsible of them to hire me!

Then I worked at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health as an intake worker at a psychiatric clinic. And that job, which lasted about a year and half, taught me so much, I mean, I am still using what I learned. Basically, every person who came into care in that clinic, whether it was for marital dysfunction or schizophrenia, passed through my office. So I got to talk to an awful lot of people in extreme or disturbed mental states of one kind of another. And there are a lot of people like that in my books! Boy, if you get to choose your jobs, you couldn’t have a better job for a young writer.

You must have gotten a lot of great character studies.

I mean, the first time you talk to someone who is hearing voices right in front of you…there’s nothing like it.

Any good stories from that job?

I remember talking to a woman who had been busted for prostitution. And therefore she had just been released from a hospital for the criminally insane in Los Angeles. You just roll your eyes at the injustice of it. She was a gentle person who was just psychotic, you know? She was the first person who I knew was seeing and hearing other things than what I was seeing and hearing. But at the same time, she was enough in the world to be having a conversation with you.

She said she was hearing voices and I said, “What are they saying to you?” She said, “They’re saying ‘I love you.’” So I said— believe me, I wasn’t following the rulebook for what questions to ask as an intake worker!— “That’s not so terribly bad, is it?” And she said, “No, but it gets on your nerves, you know?” It was such a touching conversation.

What happened after your California years?

When I first left California I went back to Baltimore where I was from. I didn’t want to live there, but I didn’t have any money. Not having any money was such an important condition of my twenties that almost all my books could be studied from the point of view of the miniscule economy of them. Like, for instance, if you took every single dollar that comes into the reckless female character in the book, it would always be under one thousand dollars. [Laughs.] And usually closer to 250, tops.

Of course she is preoccupied with money, because she doesn’t have any, but this doesn’t prevail on her enough to make practical decisions.

And was this true of you too?

It is very much a portrait. Just to give you an idea of the difference between real life and invention, there is a scene in She Drove Witout Stopping when a rapist is in Jane’s house and Jane has managed to hide herself in the wall, but one step more and the guy is going to come across all the money that she has made so that she would be able to survive the summer. So she makes a noise inside the wall and the reader will have to draw his or her own conclusions about whether she would rather be raped by this guy or at least risk her life, than lose her 286 dollar bank roll, or whatever the sum was, that allows her to live this reckless life out in this country. So, she does in fact get raped by this guy.

Then I moved out to the country, just like Maggie in Lord of Misrule. Just like Maggie, I was working for a small town paper, as a food editor. I was also the education, society and reaction editor, and it was a dinky small town paper so someone who really didn’t know anything about journalism could come in and do that job overnight. But I loved writing about food! Just like Maggie, I met a racetracker and was purloined away from my proper employment.

You started to work on a horse racetrack.

I became a small-time racetracker, that’s right, and lived in a trailer, just like Maggie.

And how do you look back on those young reckless years now?

As I said, as recently as the past five years, when I thought of that reckless young girl, I would smile riley, shake my head in despair and compare myself to some of my friends who made good enough marriages in their twenties to have good enough children to look after them in their old age, and also to be the family of their middle age and aging years— I don’t have any of that. And some of those decisions were beginning to scare me.

As I said, she [the reckless young woman] hadn’t paid off for me. Now she has paid off for me, but I still don’t have kids to look after me. By the time I wrote Lord of Misrule, I was identifying more with Medicine Ed and Two-Tie than I did with Maggie anymore. They are two characters who are looking at friendless old ages, maybe without even a secure place to live. And definitely I was beginning to worry about that, about the final price that you pay for having made those footloose decisions in your youth. But now it is okay with me again.

Is that because of the success of Lord of Misrule and the recognition that came with winning the National Book Award?

That’s right. Now that Jane, now that Maggie has paid off, I feel much more forgiving towards her, much less embarrassed by her.

That’s interesting. Lord of Misrule had a very long journey to reach the National Book Award. It took years for you to write it, you put it aside many times, then it was published by a very small press before it was acknowledged and now it is out in paperback with a big house…So it seems that, though you always had this core confidence in your own ability, reception and recognition is very important to you; that the reckless woman has paid off because now she is recognized.

I really felt that my obscurity— I mean, it’s not like I’d never had any recognition, I’d had three National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and I had been a fellow of the Radcliffe Institue— I mean, my resume looked pretty good for someone who had only had three novels by the time she was sixty. But at the same time, the average reader on the street would not have heard of me. Very few book clubs would have read Bogeywoman in its old avatar. And I do think that, I didn’t really see it coming, but all of a sudden I started to feel like, Wow, I missed it; I missed the boat. I thought I was going to be a writer whom people would remember. That at least was the promise I made to myself. Because I did feel— even when I was nineteen and first started writing that story I told you about— that I had something special on the sentence level. That I had a gift and that it was my obligation and privilege to use it. And then I was getting into my late fifties, getting close to sixty, and I thought, Wow, I have to face it: Maybe it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s more likely that it’s not going to happen than that it does if it hasn’t happened yet.

My first book had one central obsession, and that is: The idea of getting famous. The central character feels that if he doesn’t become famous, he will get swallowed up in oblivion and it will be as though he has never lived. I was preoccupied, if you can believe it, from when I was eight, nine, ten years old, from when I first realized that I was going to die one day. Already, I had this romantic obsession with making some kind of impression on the world with creative work. Otherwise I would disappear and it would be as though I had never lived.

Do you think that desire for longevity, for making an impression, that you had at an early age is what drove you to be a writer?

Yes! Absolutely. The main thing that made me want to be a writer was that I loved narrative, I loved books, I loved reading, I loved hearing stories. It was so much the main thing that I did that I never really considered doing anything else.

Then the gods of mischief decided to turn everything upside down for me with the National Book Award.

What you do and have done for a long time now— teaching at a writing program— is what a lot of writers do to support themselves and still be in a literary context.

In the fall of 1980 I went to teach at Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri and that was my first academic job. And it is very interesting when you think about it…Every book I’ve worked on up till now— I am working on a book right now that departs from this model— but every book until now draws from my twenties, from my wild life before I had an academic job. As I was saying to you before, you live the kind of life that I lived and a lot of things happen to you. When you have an academic life and security, in some sense nothing happens to you! You might have your family and you make a contribution to your field in a certain way and I’ve taught some very wonderful writers who I feel very invested in…But I really stopped having material that I would consider my kind of material once I started to have an academic job.

As a teacher, you are a mentor to a lot of young writers. Do you have any advice for young writers who are reading this?

It is a very different world now from the one I went to school in. I feel so sorry for my students who graduate deeply in debt and who really had no choice, because it is part of the economic structure of the university now; it is expected that students will graduate in debt. The premise is that a college education is worth so much money that it is fair to put students into that much debt because they can pay it off after a lifetime of working, quite easily. But if they’re young artists, to have that obligation— it’s terrible!

I don’t know what I would have done. What I did do was work as a waitress all the time. That put enough money in my pocket to pay rent and buy cigarettes. And that was all I needed.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Peter Blickle