Hazlitt Magazine
Many of the answers to the question of how to fix food media come from within.
Olivia Robinson was and is much worse than I am. She’s also, in the sense that matters to her and to our world, much greater.
The author of How the Word is Passed on writing through the lens of fatherhood, reckoning with the past and confronting difficult histories, and the beauty that can rise from pain.
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22.03.22
Many of the answers to the question of how to fix food media come from within.
In June 2020, writer and historian Soon-Tzu Speechley tweeted a criticism of the typical food writing published in The New York Times. “Writing about US food the way the NYT covers Asian fruit,” Speechley wrote: “In a nation torn by racial conflict, one unlikely food unites. To those accustomed to chopsticks, the greasy parcel known as a ‘burger,’ a sort of split bao, is crude and messy. Yet it encapsulates a nation’s violent past.” Social media users, especially those in the Global South, were delighted with Speechley’s exposure of the condescension often adopted by Western publications towards foods and cultures with origins outside North America and Western Europe. That same month, The New York Times published a piece titled “Eating Thai Fruit Demands Serious Effort but Delivers Sublime Reward.” The piece is a dispatch from the markets of Bangkok, in which the writer, Hannah Beech, describes fruits—jackfruits, durians, rambutans—as unwelcoming and even diabolic. She calls mangosteens “an exercise in disappointment,” and durian “an infamous fruit, which stinks of death.” The piece itself reeks of confident, nonchalant bias. Often, Beech sounds like she is under attack. It was a year when food media companies faced heightened scrutiny online. Discussions about systemic racism and the discrimination and disadvantages that non-white media professionals face in the field came to the fore. Food media giant Bon Appétit’s former editor Adam Rappaport resigned after a photo from 2004, where he posed with his wife in brownface, surfaced. The photograph set off a wave of call-outs about Bon Appétit’s toxic workplace, ill-treatment of employees of colour and overall callousness when it came to racial sensitivity. Following the upheavals at Bon Appétit, there was a promise to build better structures, especially for Black, brown, Asian and Indigenous writers, editors, and chefs in the United States. In the middle of the reckoning, Nigerian chef and writer Tunde Wey, who lives in New Orleans, noted the alliance of the white food media in the United States with Black and brown folks at its own convenience. In a piece titled “White food media and the commodification of resistance” for Scalawag magazine, he wrote, “In a system where goodwill is eventually monetized, charity and virtue has become currency for white food media… Because what use was a politicized identity when it couldn’t be sicc’ed on something?” *** Even when the language employed for non-Western food in Western media is favourable, it’s often paternalistic: dishes are translated as “comfort foods,” “heritage dishes” or established as the “real authentic.” As foods from different origins enter the pantries and media landscapes of the West, they are rendered in eulogizing stereotypes, meet-cutes are staged, “discoveries” are made; everyday ingredients are captured in high-definition, and these foods are often Westernized to the point of disintegration. A boost in mainstream integration of Indian food in the American imagination synced with the established and rising power of the wealthy, dominant-caste Hindu Indian diaspora in the United States. A 2013 editorial in n+1 called South Asians the most powerful and successful immigrant minority in America. “No immigrant group in the US is so uniformly rich, so well placed in professional and executive ranks, so widely dispersed and integrated into wealthy white society.” As elite Indian immigrants succeeded to white-adjacency, Indian cuisine became a covetable culture, an assimilated brand into the American capitalist ideal. An aesthetic was created for Indian-ness that edged on rose-tinted mysticism and nostalgia, full of buzzwords: tradition, healthy, colourful, family. A small group spoke about Indian cuisine with tones of romantic zeal and ardour, and were welcomed as proprietors of representation for South Asians, both in Western diasporas and in the subcontinent itself. Through them, carefully curated Indianisms were filtered through American sentimentalism. Suddenly, samosas were racked on fancy ceramic plates; words like Dishoom, the name for a popular Indian restaurant in London and the sound associated with a gunshot, were enveloped in bourgeois glory. Indian foods and by consequence, Indians, became cloaked in metrics of wholesomeness, there was a homogenous paradigm of sameness for Indians (and South Asians) that watered down our representation to the rest of the world. But the production of the aesthetic has remained dissonant from its place of origin. The plain fact that every experience of food in India is embroiled in the violent and segregated system of caste is never touched upon. The elevated language employed for Indian foods and cultures glosses over the physical, economic, and social realities of the subcontinent, where under the authoritarian right-wing rule of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government, farmers rights remain curtailed; and large-scale unemployment and the COVID-19 pandemic has created more food insecurity and hunger than the years before. This model aesthetic also spoke over the foods of India’s neighbours in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tibet, and glossed over regional foods outside the North Indian mainland. It was a bizarrely simplistic mode in which to perceive a country infinitely creviced by topography, land culture, social location, language, caste and class. The cuisines of working-class South Asians, Muslims, and Indigenous people, as well as audacious, inventive modern foods that had no connection to tradition whatsoever, never made the cut. Most grating was the celebration of Indian vegetarianism: a tool of surveillance and discrimination by dominant-caste Hindus in India on Muslims and marginalized-caste communities. In the West, the lifestyle was elevated to a cultural boon. To observe the same things that signified supremacy in India be celebrated as milestones elsewhere felt eerie. As for myself, I did not grow up in a kitchen where meals were conducted like delicious operas. I was raised in a family of Tamils, who had for three generations lived far away from our immediate roots, first in Rawalpindi, then in Karachi, then Delhi. We ate with the agency afforded by caste, with the functionality of middle class city-dwellers. My diet and palate were bound to the market and what was considered frugal and utilitarian, I did not find much that was glorious about my family’s dining rituals. I do not possess heirloom tricks passed down from my grandmother; I spent a life, like my father and grandfather, eating whatever came my way. We were a family of middling cultures, far from what was considered traditionally accurate and celebratory. The energy that I grew up around and embodied did not find a place in glossy geometries of representation and culture as commodity. Even as Indian food made inroads in the United States, the complexities and even cruelties within it were often obscured, the various regional and sub-regional ways in which people ate and lived were discarded for more cliché, colourful claims. *** Intimacy between food and language can light up the intricacies of a certain individual or community; there are great things possible in the way food spurs specific language to take shape. In White Trash Cooking, a spiral bound cookbook by Ernest Mickler, an American chef from the South, he writes about onions: “Cook ‘em, slice ‘em, till you can see through ‘em,” introducing a world so vivid and distinct from the otherwise shiny cultures of North America that many of us living elsewhere have imbibed since we were children. Longthroat Memoirs, a book of essays by Nigerian writer Yemisi Aribisala, succeeds in taking back language, neglecting stereotypes of “stodge,” and “soup” that Aribisala notes were often reserved for foods like hers. She writes of “puff-puffs” eaten at crowded road corners, a ram riding on a scooter that would soon be dinner, and akara, the black-eyed bean she heard stories about as a child in her native Nigeria. “The word akara is soft, seductively broken on the back of the letter k, so you can conjure up a squish and hushed chew, the compression flowing through the respiring pores of hot, freshly fried pillows of seasoned, milled beans,” Aribisala writes. “No one ever talks about the oil insidiously escaping out of the kitchen towel, oozing from the akara, direction to every self-righteous resolution of fried foods you ever made.” Aribisala’s language is laid with idioms and tonalities of the specific English of her upbringing. She mediates English with insertions of Igbo, and the foods she writes about do not pander, or make themselves small to appeal to anyone else. In 2020, a London-based newsletter was pioneered by writer and editor Jonathan Nunn, publishing pieces with dialect-driven representation of food and language. Nunn introduced Vittles by saying: “I’ve always thought it strange that food writing—something that literally everyone in the world, no matter what class or race or religion, has an opinion on—is actually one of the least democratic forms of writing that gets regularly published.” From the get-go, Vittles has decentred the British capital, questioned American dominion, favoured regionalism, and complicated the banal reservations so often kept about the British North and working classes. Perhaps what is most notable about Vittles is its devotion to a diversity of perspectives about foods and not just food itself; and its keenness to tilt an axis of relativity in which Western foods and cultures are considered the centre, from where others branch out. Vittles does not consider one perspective, region or country primary, instead treating every perspective with the same universality afforded to the cultural centres in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. In one of my favourite pieces in the newsletter, Nina Mingya Powles discloses that she cannot translate dòufu huā into English, as “it loses some of its taste, its shape…The direct translation is ‘tofu flower’ and Beijingers call it dòufunǎo, ‘tofu brains.’” Mingya Powles writes. “In English you could call it ‘soft beancurd,’ or even ‘jellied tofu’ as my dictionary app suggests. ‘Tofu pudding’ is the one translation that makes sense to me, owing to its custard-like texture.” Mingya Powles does not concentrate on strip mining the item for those like me who may not know it, but with illustrations in Chinese characters, dòufu huā remains fairly unknowable yet completely visible, a full form. Perhaps what is most liberating about this kind of work is that these writers write in affirmation. They do not write in combat, but there is a victorious aloofness to fighting the Eurocentric and American-capitalist perception of non-Western foods. They write, somehow, for themselves. *** In India, food journalism is a relatively nascent genre. It sits in the lifestyle industry, and its reins are held by elite critics and influences, who decide what a nation of a billion, splintered by social hierarchies, should eat. For me, the idea of working, instead, for the global food media was exciting. Writing for publications abroad, I thought, would allow me space to use food to think about the political and socio-economic climates of the country and continent where I lived. I aspired not to introduce what we ate to the West, but to think about the things—trade, migration, gender, and economic fluctuation—that surround the foods we consumed, the ways in which we cooked. As the food media in the United States confronted these imbalances with varying degrees of successful accountability, I wondered what these developments would mean for writers in the global South. Would non-Western foods still be positioned as a sign of gastronomic daring or multiculturalism? In this new, reformed food media, would Indian food still be limited to an array of vegetarian mothers, Ayurveda, over-the-top giddiness at eating raw turmeric? Would writers from Karachi and Cairo still be interchangeable? When stories from countries outside North America and Western Europe were included, would they be plastic wrapped in friendly semantics for easy absorption? But when I began to pitch to American food publications, big and small, I found myself shifting my perspective to match the one expressed in dominant publications like Bon Appétit and The New York Times food section. These Americanized perspectives influenced the way I thought and felt about food. I read the publications with feigned interest driven by misplaced aspiration, in the same way that, as teenagers with sudden access to American television, my friends and I would laugh mechanically in sync with Friends reruns even though the references and humour were out of any real reach. Very soon, I found myself approaching things familiar to me with a fairy tale-like mysticism. When I spoke about foods I grew up with around Delhi, I began to glorify and dissect. I racked my brain for praises of dal-chawal. To write neatly digestible text, I tried to code familiar foods into adaptable Western packages for an American readership. I translated everyday things as a “kind of crepe,” or a “sort of sauce.” I believed that I had to explain, instruct, and pander to a comfortable fantasy staged in the West about the cultures of South Asia. Even though I knew it was untrue, I found myself responding to assumptions about the dispositions of Indians–docility and good-behaviour, the stereotype that governed Indian women and families—domesticity, generosity, and an affinity for nourishment and care. In early 2021, I was coaxed into the dreary task of cultural spoon-feeding by an editor for a piece I was writing about the emergence of home kitchens during the pandemic in India. I did my job, writing lazy Wikipedia-style suffixes for each region in the subcontinent. “Make it clickable,” prodded my editor, also Indian, also jaded. “Make it simple. So they understand.” The focus of food media and writing about food remains to drive consumption. Many of the answers to the question of how to fix food media come from within it. Wey’s critique is important, as are suggestions from writer Alicia Kennedy, who proposes that food media, like literature, should work in translation. In her newsletter, Kennedy asks, “How much more accurately would the culinary world be depicted if we let people speak in the language that allows them to say what they want, not just what they can?” In a piece written in 2020 about Alison Roman, Navneet Alang illuminates how food media’s whiteness lies in its geometry. “It is more accurate to say that the way we define what is contemporary and fashionable in food is tied to whiteness as a cultural norm—and to its ability to incorporate other cultures without actually becoming them.” Alang writes, noting how it is the spectrum that must be dismantled, instead of certain non-white cultures being brought about at whim. In his book, Taste Makers, writer Mayukh Sen questions what he calls the “food-establishment” when he profiles seven immigrant women who changed how America ate. “Capitalism can encourage artists, including chefs and cookbook authors, to suppress parts of themselves to cater to market’s desires.” As I continue to write about food, I don’t want to buy into predisposed, inaccurate notions of British food as tasteless; Chinese food deviant, West African food heavy, and other stereotypes of soup, stodge, and spice. But I also do not want to write another shining, friendly sentence about a food like the samosa, one I know only from the street, eaten while shouting at uncles and glaring at my friends as they try to reach for my crusts in scorching Delhi heat. I cannot read another listicle glorifying dominant-caste Hindu food practices without context, when my country remains in the grip of a Hindu nationalist government, my friends arrested, and our lives torn apart. When food writing is not done in exclusion, it lives outside the genres of glistening recipes written with over-compensating zeal. It is a solemn, celebratory narrative, a web of scene and place. If the food media can let go of their penchant for either disdain or exoticism, we may be able to create an industry that gets at the heart of what matters about cuisine and culture.
14.03.22
Olivia Robinson was and is much worse than I am. She’s also, in the sense that matters to her and to our world, much greater.
Certain stories are for wielding, not telling. I used to have one before it was taken away. It was more of a joke, a few lines of generic airport experience and television borrowings honed into a minor weapon for use in business situations. But I counted on it. The final time I used it was at the AAP Conference in October 2018. Seven listeners and I were on a sickle-shaped couch in the lobby of a generic hotel implanted into the superstructure of a retired castle in Montreal. The couch was upholstered in washable light gold fabric that rasped against pants and skirts and felt like Kevlar against my palm as I pushed myself deeper into the cushion, hoping to discover a secret angle or groove free of the rigid springs that were pressing into my tailbone. “I don’t blame them, I’d pat me down too. I am always, no exception, late to the airport, sweated up when I get there. The air conditioning freezes it on my face and gives me that hospital or strapped-with-plastique sheen. Then there’s the whole ‘this’ thing.” I added, as I did every time, to the invitation of my smile with an up-down displaying wave of hand over face. The downstroke acknowledged the skin that caused the airport situation and the unease of my listeners. The upstroke, a toss like I was flinging salt or a spell, dismissed any tragic significance, sent race into the ether, let my listeners join in a laugh if they were brave enough to start it. Anyone who takes pleasure in rendering even brief power from goodwill and fear is shit. When I used this story, I was no exception. I want to make it clear that I understand this, and that it doesn’t prevent me from discerning that Olivia Robinson was and is much worse than I am. She’s also, in the sense that matters to her and to our world, much greater. The six listeners who weren’t Olivia reacted exactly as I wanted them to. Mouths balanced between self-evaluating smile and moue of concern, quickly hidden by a mug or glass held up like a quivering masquerade visor, eyes shy to meet mine and saturated with a compassion begging for transmutation into accepting, accepted laughter. The features of these people have vanished now, from AAP’s offices and from my memory. Eye colour, ruddiness, dental details—all gone. Enough of them were white for me to have deployed the story, remarkable considering the company’s diverse employee pool, which Nena Zadeh-Brot called a “rainbow whirlpool of mediocrity blending into a calming diarrhea tone when stirred with the correct human resources stick.” I only remember that they were watching me correctly, that they were doing what I wanted them to do. But Olivia Robinson just looked like me. Her expression. She looked like the person telling, not the person listening. Her appearance, classed by Nena as “tolerable Aryan prettiness,” has nothing in common with my aging Indian softness, other than the strip of upper gum we now both reveal when we speak. I say “now” because this first meeting took place during Olivia’s closed-mouth speaking period, when her lips only allowed the occasionally flickering sight of tongue against darkness, never a gap or archwire or elastic or point of enamel. And now that she’s speaking with her new mouth, with its perfect teeth, I’m in recession. If I still spoke to people and cared about how I presented, I’d have to reprogram myself to talk through the same flat pucker she mastered. As my gums retreat and blacken, the teeth look like they’re growing into my head, as though they mean to bite my brain, also shrinking and darkening in its nervy membrane pouch. “What about the power of it, though?” “Of what?” I scratched my thumbnail against the cushion just in front of my crotch, then turned the motion into a brush at the immovable pills on the knees of my suit pants, in case anyone thought I’d been subtly gesturing toward my dick. Olivia saw the gesture, and beyond it. I am myself when I’m inside a doubt. “In the airport. Instead of feeling abject, targeted—which, totally, I understand you are—what about feeling how scared of you people are? Isn’t it powerful that there are spaces in this world where you’re not you, but a menace? No one’s ever scared of me.” None of the others saw how much smarter she was than me, and I hadn’t yet understood, either. But I did feel it. Olivia played it perfectly to look like she had no sense of humour, which people are always ready to believe about a person like her. Perhaps it is true in her case, but she at least has a sense of senses of humour, or she wouldn’t know when people hope she will laugh, and that would be too great a tactical weakness. I couldn’t see how this exchange benefitted Olivia until the next day, when she allowed me to know. But I did understand that it had been fair to rob me of my pathetic charge of control. The drinks in our group’s hands were appropriate to an early afternoon with two conference sessions left before dinner—coffees, sodas. Olivia had a lemonade. She was younger than me, perhaps twenty-seven to my thirty-eight. I chewed ice. My story died, not because Olivia had exposed it, but because she had begun to consume it, at the outset of a long game that began when she indicated a pretend path to power on that acrylic couch. I’m going to try to avoid making these pronouncements with the false sense of distance and ironic knowingness I want to slip into. The truth is that my airport story’s morsel of leverage was meaningful to me, and I was sad to lose it. I’m still sad about it. Sad that I am a person who wants a tool like this, sad that I no longer have it. As I mentioned, no one else in my audience for this impromptu conference-adjacent seminar on race and terror still works for AAP. In pursuit of the ideal of efficiency that our leadership requires, and with any of the many who have attempted to form a union paid off or terminated long before their organizing can come to term, there is a lot of churn. It’s painful, because AAPers are hired for their devotion, their programmability, their willingness to pronounce their liberal arts degrees both useless and crucial, their servitude to the ideal of technology making knowledge masterable and advancing education beyond the cave. When AAP leaves these employees behind, they are so completely indoctrinated that they are cut off from their pasts. They can only move on to one of AAP’s lesser competitors, begin doomed start-ups, or fling themselves into the pensioned, shutting maw of university administration. After Olivia routed me, I left the lobby and skipped the afternoon session. This was still possible before the enforced scans that were instituted at the January 2019 AAP Edu-Jam. A point of AAP structure that we present to clients as proof-of-efficiency is that there are only ever 100 upper-level employees. Thus, there should be exactly 100 people in the room at every central AAPC presentation. When we talk up this streamlined aspect of our business to schools, we’re very careful not to let them think we’re critical of their own inflating administrative position numbers. The more people clustered at the broadening top over there, the better chance that one of them will subscribe to AAP. The suggestion is that we stay lean so they don’t have to. I went to four used bookstores and one bar. There, I laid out the books I’d bought on the artificially distressed but genuinely beer-stained table in front of me and took a photo to post in the near future, when none of HR’s freelance social media hawks could make the connection between my browsing time and absence from Dr. Bobby Merchant’s “Your New Paperless Memorybank: A Digital Communications Action Intensive” seminar. My co-workers would be repeating to Dr. Bobby, who had been an early champion of AAP at our crucial first two Ivy League scores, that his product wasn’t a shockingly obsolete rehash of the Palm Pilot and that the stylus was indeed an essential and neglected connectivity tool. Dr. Bobby had retained enough money and influence for his irrelevance to be denied in every zone of his life except the market. He constantly mistook me for an AAP programmer named Amandeep who’d been deported months earlier, two days after the FBI came to our offices for his hard drive. Amandeep wasn’t deported, really: he flew home with a cousin’s passport to avoid prison or ICE detention. The cousin was then deported. My superiors didn’t tell me to accept Dr. Bobby’s ongoing error, but it was made clear that I should prevent him from feeling embarrassed, or worse, asking what had become of Amandeep. Dr. Bobby presented with that tech mogul eyebrowless squint and isosceles lip-purse that suggested an unattackably itchy anal contusion caused by excessive scratching. I wanted to spend my afternoon looking for modern firsts, for J.G. Farrell and V.S. Naipaul, and so I did. I would post the photo and the prices I’d paid two weeks after the conference and a fellow collector in Devon would call me a lucky cunt in genuine rage, and I would feel happy. I drank three beers, ate two dinners, and waited until midnight to come back to the hotel with my books and bottles. Nena was only a couple of floors away, but hadn’t messaged me all day, which wasn’t unusual when we were about to see each other. * The next morning, Olivia apologized for being insensitive. She was ponytailed and her clear eyes spoke of at least a decade of sobriety, disciplined sleep and exercise. I was sure she’d spent the morning in the hotel’s gym or pool, while I roiled the sheets and coughed into consciousness. Perhaps forty other AAPC attendees could hear me forgiving her repeatedly, in a voice I had to drag from hungover glottals into the precise, gracious speech that Olivia knew I was capable of if only I tried. Nena Zadeh-Brot was across the lobby, speaking to two AAP board members and pointing at an iPad, but also watching me. We wouldn’t speak until after the sessions were over, but her glance pulled me out of the final lingerings of sleep, forcing me entirely into conversation with Olivia Robinson, to witness the creation of repentance as product, to contain the apology that was being forced into me. “It’s totally okay. I feel embarrassed you’ve even been thinking about this, truly.” The lobby smelled of fresh tile adhesive, except when a guest disobeyed the signs to use the revolving doors and let in a gust of October wind cool enough to have an immediate freshening effect, even if it was polluted. But I stayed lodged in the smell of my own head, its plaque and necrotic mucous and trapped air. From Olivia came an insistent scent of pennies and mint. “No. Osman, I know nothing of your past, of you, except what I can see and imagine. And that I—that I just interrogated you like that, told you how to process your own experience like I had any conception of what it is to live even a moment in your skin—it would be like, oh, Jesus, it would be like you telling me how I should fucking deal with PMS.” “It would not—I didn’t see it that way at all. We were two grown-ups talking about ideas, which is always okay.” It is not okay, especially at AAPC, but I was too disoriented to figure out how to claw this remark back. Olivia didn’t lean in, but her right forefinger, a questing E.T. digit with a bumblebee-yellow manicure, landed at the apex of my shoulder, the place where the hollow between muscles would be if I had a proper body. “I’m sorry. Please feel that,” Olivia said. Her expression hadn’t changed, but the eyes were clearer, wider, the pupils refracting with dark sincerity. The crowd of forty was quiet. Even the people who were speaking left pauses long enough to take in what Olivia was saying. And while I understood exactly what she was doing, finally, while I knew that she was speaking past me to an audience, that she always would be, she still made me want to try to live up to her earnestness in that moment. How the fuck does that work? That exchange is only remembered by Olivia and me, except in the subconscious of every man and woman who’d seen me dominated with such ease. It is generally forgotten because Olivia made herself unforgettable moments later by hijacking AAPC’s keynote presentation, dominating a stage she wasn’t even standing on, and reducing the speaker and anointed next leader of our organization, Elodie Chan, to just another audience member. Planted questions are part of the house style of an AAPC presentation. Every session has to come in at under twenty-five minutes, including Q & A. This time-efficiency is also part of AAP’s public face. Part of what we offer to colleges and universities is a guarantee to increase potential enrolment by packaging their existing lecture and seminar offerings as compressed online-delivered courses with an optional in-class supplement, an offering that we assured the schools was “just as beneficial to end-users,” leaving out the statistic that somewhere under 17 per cent of enrolled students actually viewed and completed the entire online package. But the profit stats and test cases were undeniable. Tuition income rose by the millions at each of our four pilot schools, and AAP’s earnings swelled on our 5 per cent ask in return for upfront-costless implementation and administration of the program. The inescapable five-year contract for sign up had been conceived of and written by Nena Zadeh-Brot in conjunction with two long-vanished members of the legal department; Nena had taken an enormous bonus instead of a promotion after its successful implementation. That’s when the board knew she planned to leave AAP, someday, and she was never offered a promotion again. 2019 was Nena’s planned final year, in fact, but only our end-to-end encrypted chat knew that. I wasn’t ready to escape so soon, but was naturally unremarkable enough to avoid offers of promotion. That same quality kept me safe from being asked to be a question-plant at AAPC. Olivia Robinson was assigned to raise her hand in minute seven of Elodie Chan’s keynote, which would end up being her last as VP, two months before her total release from the company. A particular trick of Elodie’s was to avoid cramming in prepared questions at the end. She had them peppered throughout, so she could hit minute twenty-five with a judicious wrap-up that included everything that the audience had brought to the idea. It was a reusable innovation: simulated dialectic fit the AAP tradition. It was an organized display that we could replicate and use in sales pitches out in the field. During Elodie’s wireless-mic-and-chin-thrusting speech, her arms ran through a sequence of four postures—summoning, inquiring, pensive, embracing—that she had memorized because her instinct was to leave them hanging apelike at her sides. Her set-up to the fatal question was: “What can we tell these institutions of higher learning that they’re all, from Sunnydale Polytechnic to fucking Cambridge,”—Elodie paused for the laugh here, as the top reaches of AAP were expected to display frankness and practicality by swearing in their presentations—“what can we tell them that they’re, without exception, doing wrong?” She pointed at the person who was about to depose her. Olivia rose from her middle seat in the second row and stumbled over the first set of knees she encountered, laughing at herself for the rest of her trip to the mic in the aisle. “I can’t believe I’m about to make a serious statement to y’all when I can barely walk.” The “y’all” sounded so wrong in her mouth I wondered if it was a bit of Swedish until I figured it out. “Please, go ahead,” Elodie said. Olivia had eaten perhaps forty unplanned seconds, and Elodie’s arms assumed their natural slaughterhouse dangle as she mentally cut sentences from her remaining time. “Elodie’s asking us what the schools are doing wrong, and I totally see the value in that. Absolutely. But—and I’m sorry—I just don’t think it’s the question we need to be asking right now. In this company, in this world. We need to be asking what we’re doing wrong.” The tremor of a hijack in progress passed through the room, as tangibly as if the aisle Olivia was standing in was airborne and she’d stepped into it with a clever wood-and-rubber gun. Elodie could edit, but she couldn’t improvise. Her jaw hung open a half inch, matching her slack arms perfectly. We all saw it. She fixed the mouth but the arms stayed. “And I think that how we choose the questions we ask is exactly the issue,” Olivia continued. “Who we think of as our customers, as our clients—that’s the issue. How limited our idea of inclusion is. That’s the issue.” The mic was cordless, and Olivia had silently unholstered it from its stand and turned, started to back up with perfect smoothness. She moved slowly. If you were sitting, and not exactly in line with her at the back of the room, as I was, the glide to being flush with the stage would have looked like a wedding or funeral procession: dramatic, inevitable, ending in the right place. The movement made the stage, and certainly Elodie, invisible. Even the camera tracked down to record Olivia, leaving Elodie as a pair of calves ending in grey heels, the gradual zoom briefly revealing a scuff that looked like a wad of white gum on the tip of the left toe. “End-user is such an impersonal term, but that’s what we have to think about. It’s what our clients, the schools, think about. The students. That’s ultimately who we work for, am I right? And what we’re leaving out is their humanity. That’s what we are doing wrong. I am so guilty of this myself, and I know it resonates for a lot of people in this room. “Connection is what we sell. Accelerated connection, yes, but in order to be accelerated it has to be deep, profound, immediate, true connection. Do we really understand how valuable what we’re doing is? We are the only company in the world that is both mining and enriching the same resource: students. Young humanity.” I cannot express to you how well this went over, and how well it still does—a combination of disingenuous self-criticism and laudatory descriptions of our mission. Now that Olivia was up there, everyone in the room collectively realized that this was one thing, one essential thing, that Elodie Chan sucked at. She didn’t know how to take the right shallow dips into shame and corporate self-interrogation to illuminate the glory of AAP’s path forward. This was a crucial sales and motivation tool that no president could be without. Elodie’s career ended right then, but Olivia continued with another few strophes on students, and then a transition that included my name. “Osman—is it Shah? Could you please stand? God, I didn’t even have the—I really hope I got your last name right.” She blinked self-consciously, the eyes closed for an extra moment of penance. There was a gathering of flesh around the mouth in her otherwise sharply cut face, a poised cluster of skin that suggested the protrusions her braces were correcting. Olivia summoned me to stand, looked for me in the crowd instead of behind it. I walked a few steps forward and waved, then receded back to the wall. Elodie watched me as though I were advancing with a rifle and her blindfold had slipped slightly. “Osman was telling me—telling us—a story yesterday, about his mistreatment at the airport. He couched it in humour to make us all comfortable, but it was just so clear—this was, this is, a person who deals with daily humiliations on a scale that I can’t even contemplate, and comes to his colleagues with the expectation that for us to be open to his emotional state, he has to entertain us with his despair. “This is a man who carries the certainty that even AAP, with our perfect diversity statistics, can’t be a home for his pain, unless he smuggles it in under his labour and good-hearted humour. We need to ask what we are doing wrong. We need to ask: are we really valuing diversity? Are we channelling the fullness of the experience of our Osmans—I see your faces now in this crowd as I admit I never have before—if all we’re asking is for you to help us with specific sales strategies, and not to come to us with all of your experiences, freely and with openness and the expectation of understanding? Are we working with you or just using your work?” I watched her subsume my story, annex it to her ongoing enlightenment narrative, a grander tale that she was offering AAP the chance to be part of. I’ve since read my first name twice in interviews with her, an altered telling of my tangle with security now embedded in her pruned and arranged answers about diversity, power, grace. This is the real reason I don’t tell that story anymore: it’s not that I saw the truth of what a manipulative turd I was when I told it, but because Olivia liked what I said and decided to take it away and make it useful. Now I can’t take it back without being correctly accused of theft, because she did more with that airport scenario than I ever did. While AAPC applauded, and Elodie waved redundantly behind her, Olivia Robinson unfurled a hand toward me, as though she had manifested the brown lump of tragic heroism who was leaning against the wall to take pressure off his shitty spine with its slight curve and two herniated discs. The audience turned to applaud the person who had been conjured for them. Randall Dunn, the biometrics chief analyst who worked in the chair next to mine, mouthed an apology to me as he shook his head. Our obviously curry lunchtime bit died forever that day. Olivia’s move to topple Elodie would have been laughably obvious if she hadn’t made laughter impossible by hiding the coup in an apology. The audience accepted her bid at concealment. They saw the attempt but also the quality of its packaging, and they allowed that exterior to become the reality. It’s the reaction they would hope for if they ever strategized assassination plans of their own. They would want their goodness to be believed, their ambition ignored. No matter what came to pass in the year after that summit, Olivia will always be fond of me, because her gambit worked. And Elodie, long absent from AAP, is rumoured to have died of the big flu or to be running a non-profit. It’s generally agreed that she moved to Denmark. Excerpted from A Hero of Our Time by Naben Ruthnum (McClelland & Stewart).
02.03.22
The author of How the Word is Passed on writing through the lens of fatherhood, reckoning with the past and confronting difficult histories, and the beauty that can rise from pain.
Clint Smith was born and raised in New Orleans, a former epicenter of America’s slave trade. Despite the city’s close connection to chattel slavery, there is now little within it to commemorate this history. However, there are many streets and schools named after slave owners. In the New Orleans of Smith’s childhood, a 16-foot-tall, 8,000-pound brass statue of Robert E. Lee—a commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War—stood atop a 60-foot pedestal close to the city’s centre. Dressed in his Confederate uniform, Lee was depicted in a crossed-arm stance, defiantly facing north. In 2017, the statue came down along with several other racist monuments in the city. It was a historic moment in a struggle dating back decades, and it propelled Smith to reconsider his city of birth along with the pervasive legacy of slavery throughout the country. How the Word Is Passed (Little, Brown and Company) is the result—a remarkably perspicuous book that dispels the myths and half-truths surrounding the history of slavery in America. A staff writer at The Atlantic, an award-winning poet and educator, and now a New York Times bestselling author, Smith debuts with a narrative nonfiction account that revolves around visits to sites that help him better understand the central role that slavery played in the development of the country. It’s a narrative that includes a plantation-turned-museum/maximum-security prison, a Confederate cemetery, and Wall Street. Through recounting his travels, Smith illustrates how white supremacy and exploitation were foundational to the American project. While often painful, How the Word Is Passed also pays tribute to Black life in America and the people committed to preserving its history. Smith suggests that if we learn to reckon with the past rather than rewrite it, we just might be able to find a better way forward. The author currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and I caught up with him over the phone to discuss his new book. Andru Okun: I want to start by talking about your hometown of New Orleans. When did you begin living outside of the city, and how did your perspective of it change as a result? Clint Smith: I lived in New Orleans my entire life up until Hurricane Katrina. I was three days into my senior year of high school, and my family and I ended up evacuating to Houston, Texas, where we lived with my aunt and uncle for a while. My parents then came back for their jobs, and my younger brother who was in sixth grade at the time came back as well. My sister and I stayed in Houston, where I finished high school. I think part of what happens when you’re from New Orleans and you leave is that you don’t realize all the ways that New Orleans has shaped your sensibilities and your disposition. Even simple things like holidays, I took for granted that people have jambalaya and gumbo and crawfish etouffee. The idea of not having those things that were staples during the celebratory moments of my life was strange. I realized I came from a place that had such a singular history and that the unique history and make up of New Orleans is something that everyone from there carries. I think I’m still learning every day about the ways that New Orleans shaped me. As I became a father, I learned about how growing up in New Orleans has shaped the way I think about childhood and what a meaningful childhood looks like and how much of that was animated by the sense of community and love, the sort of village I felt I was raised in within the city. How has fatherhood changed your work? I started the book in May of 2017, the same month that my son was born. So on a practical level, parenthood very much shaped the writing experience. My kids are all over this book in the sense that their emergence into my life and their presence inevitably shaped the work that I was doing and the logistics of how I wrote. I didn’t have long, extended opportunities to write; I wasn’t going away to residencies. I was writing during naptime and episodes of Sesame Street. I would take my laptop with me everywhere I went and if they fell asleep in the car, then I would pull over in a parking lot and try to get fifteen minutes in before they woke up. I was disabused of the idea that this book would be written in any sort of long, luxurious stretches of time, and I recognized it would be written during whatever moments I had, whether it was when my child was sleeping on my chest or however long I could stay awake after we put them down for bed. I remember a few years back I had lunch with Imani Perry, a professor at Princeton, and she had two young kids in the early stages of her career. When I asked how she did it, she told me that no amount of writing is too short. If you can only write for ten minutes, you might be able to write a paragraph. That sort of thing builds up, so you have to forget this idea that it’s only possible to write if you have an hour or two hours or an afternoon. You just have to take what you can get. In terms of how I thought about and approached the book, I think fatherhood further amplified the emotional texture of the places I visited: the Whitney Plantation and seeing these small statues of children sprinkled throughout different exhibits across the plantation; the Field of Angels, the main exhibit at Whitney Plantation, and seeing the names of thousands of enslaved children who died during infancy or childhood in Louisiana prior to emancipation; a slave cabin and seeing the crib or small bed that an enslaved child would sleep in—it felt so much more intimate. It wasn’t as much of an abstraction as I think it would have been previously. Throughout my experience of writing this book, I thought much more deeply about the implications of family separation than I ever had before. So much of the way that many of us are inundated with the spectacle of chattel slavery is through the brutal whippings and beatings, these violent moments of cruelty manifesting themselves. And to be sure, that was an enormous and horrific part of the institution, and I understand why that is so much of what we see in the depictions of slavery. But for some reason, I hadn’t fully accounted for the role that family separation played in the institution. And when I took a step back and thought about what it might mean if I were sleeping in my home and I woke up and my two small children had been disappeared in the middle of the night, and I had no idea where they’d been taken or if I’d ever see them again, it became almost overwhelming to think about. And that is the reality that millions of enslaved people lived through over the course of generations. The possibility of being separated from your wife, your parents, your loved ones, and your community hung over enslaved people for generations as an omnipresent threat, a mechanism of psychological terror. I experienced that emotionally in a much more visceral way and felt the tremors and the shaking in my own body when I considered what it might mean to live with that threat hanging over you every day. Kids can change so much about your life in all sorts of ways, but their presence certainly made me more conscious of the implications that this institution had on family units. How the Word Is Passed was at the top of The New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. What were your expectations for this book’s release in terms of its reception? I did not expect that it would be a number one New York Times bestseller. It’s hard to explain to people how much that was not at all in my conception of what was possible. I never considered, even with all the pre-publication buzz and the great reviews, that it would become what it became. When I got the call when the list came out, I fell out of my chair. I just kept yelling expletives, basically. I couldn’t believe it was real. And it still feels very surreal. But let me say, I am incredibly wary of attaching any sense of a book’s success to external factors that are beyond my control. Going into this book, I didn’t want its success to be defined by whether it was a bestseller or if it was nominated for prizes or awards or reviewed well. There’s so much that’s not in your control as a writer. In some ways the book doesn’t belong to you once you put it out into the world; that’s what it means to create art and literature. I was very much moving through this process with a recognition of that, and I had to be clear about who this book was for and whose opinions mattered to me. I wanted to write a book that I would have wanted to read when I was in high school. So much of this book was animated by attempting to fill in the gaps of my own education, the gaps of my childhood. I also wanted to write a book that I would have wanted to teach when I was a high school teacher. Those were the driving forces that shaped how I wrote. To the extent that I had an audience in mind, that fifteen-year-old version of me was that audience, to write a book that would provide the history, language, framework, and toolkit with which to more effectively make sense of the landscape of inequality that I was seeing around me growing up in New Orleans that I didn’t know how to explain. So much of the iconography I didn’t really understand. So much of the history was embedded in the infrastructure of the city in ways that I had never known or been presented with. The book itself is this four-year journey of me trying to bring the reader along to learn about the things which I wished I had learned about when I was younger. So now you have this large audience engaging with your book and lots of white readers who may be confronted with ideas that make them uncomfortable. I don’t see it as your responsibility to make these readers feel more at ease; I am curious, though, if you ever felt the need to factor in white readers' innate defensiveness while writing this. I don’t consider what will or won’t make a white person uncomfortable. That doesn’t really factor into my writing at all. The thing about this book is that I wanted to lift up and honour the work of public historians, tour guides, descendants, and the people who are engaging with all sorts of folks from the public on these issues every day. I think the tenor of the book was inspired by the approach so many of these public historians and guides took with a recognition that our country has systematically and structurally failed to teach the history of slavery to millions of people in any way that is commensurate with the actual impact that it had. You have generations of people of all ages who have little to no understanding of some of the basic history of slavery. You carry a recognition of that, and you extend a level of grace and generosity and understanding to people who might not know information because they’ve never been presented with it. Many of these guides very much believe in meeting people where they are. They know that you have to recognize where people are coming from when you’re engaging if you want to have that engagement be meaningful. At the same time, none of that means that you soften the blow, so to speak. None of that means that you reduce or limit how transparent you are about what this institution was, or that you pull back on any of the details that are central to understanding. It’s about finding a balance between generosity and accountability, a balance between empathy and responsibility. So many of the people that I met who have dedicated their lives to telling the history of slavery do this in such a remarkable and important way. These are people who have a deep intellectual understanding of this history and who also are in conversation every day with people who have no idea. They model for me what it means to find a balance and to tell people the truth in a way that will allow them to hear it. The scene where you sit in on a Sons of Confederate Veterans gathering seems like it must have been so trying. Yet, you seemed to have been exceedingly patient with everyone you engaged with. Did you ever feel frustrated during these conversations? I think for me, those are moments where I’m just moving with curiosity. I’m really a genuinely curious person, and I knew that even though I would fundamentally reject everything that group of people stands for, I also wanted to understand why they believe what they believe. I really did want to understand how one could come to think, despite the overwhelming evidence and primary source documents, that slavery wasn’t the central cause of the Civil War or that the Confederacy didn’t secede because of slavery even though their government specifically said otherwise. What animated somebody’s understanding of history and themselves to believe things that run counter to all of the evidence that we have? I knew that if I approached them from an antagonist perspective that they wouldn't open up. If I tried to make it this gotcha moment or if I got super angry, they wouldn’t talk to me in any way that would be illuminating or valuable. What I wanted from that experience was clarity, and I think I got a lot of it. I think they were pretty honest with me about why they do what they do and why they believe what they believe. In those moments, I’m less interested in engaging in what feels like a performative antagonism at the expense of getting honest responses and then letting the history itself serve as a rebuttal. That’s what I wanted to do in that chapter—I wanted these people to open up to me and tell me about how they’d come to believe these different things, and then I went to the primary source documents to make it clear to the reader what is true and what is not in ways that I think are far more interesting and effective than me attempting to do any of that in real time. I also wanted to make clear to the people that I was talking to that I’m not a quote-unquote objective or neutral party; I had very direct conversations with these people about how they feel a sense of pride when they visit a cemetery for tens of thousands of people who fought on behalf of the Confederacy, because all I see is people who fought a war to keep my ancestors enslaved. I am honest with them, and I think there’s a difference between being honest and antagonistic. I think it’s important to paint these folks in three-dimensional ways. It can be very easy for them to become caricatures of themselves, and I think they’re often depicted as caricatures, but the truth is that these are people who hold their grandchildren on their lap the same way my grandparents did. These are people who sit down for family dinners with people they love. They are human beings with their own interior lives that I think need to be taken seriously because it reminds us that they’re not cartoon characters, they’re people. And that makes the implications of what they believe all the more urgent and frightening and dangerous. It is because they are real people that what they believe is so concerning, not because they’re cartoonish notions of people we can toss to the side and discount. In fact, they represent people who are all around us. Your book digs into the misconceptions and myths of American slavery. One of the more bewildering narratives is that of the benevolent slave owner. How did this particular falsehood become so common? Earlier on in slavery, during the Jeffersonian age, the people who engaged in slavery largely knew it was wrong. Jefferson wrote about this, and he knew it was a pretty terrible thing, but he also said it was necessary for social and economic foundations. It was this thing that many people seemingly did begrudgingly, and they hoped that, ultimately, they could move toward a time that it would not be necessary. That shifted when slavery became much more entangled in the American economy. It became much more central to it and then the narrative turned into slavery being a civilizing institution. In the words of the late senator John Calhoun of South Carolina (who was also once our vice president), slavery was a “positive good” for both Black and white people alike. You could look at the historian Ulrich B. Phillips, who perpetuated the idea that plantations were civilizing institutions, that enslaved people were treated well and slavery had rescued Black people from the savagery and anarchy of Africa—that it had given them Christianity and civilization, a specific and important role to play in the American project. I think once people realized that they didn’t want to give slavery up because of all these sorts of social and economic conveniences and the power that it afforded them, then they did what humans do, which is make up a different story to justify their actions. So then they thought of themselves as doing the enslaved a favour, giving meaning and structure to people who would otherwise have no idea what to do in the world. As Yvonne Holden at the Whitney Plantation said, when white people come to the Whitney one of the questions she gets the most is, “Were there good slave owners?” And these questions come specifically from white visitors, and I’m paraphrasing, but she basically says if someone kidnapped your child, no amount of niceness would take away from the fact that they were a kidnapper who stole children. I think that’s a helpful framework because within the context of chattel slavery there is no such thing as a good slave owner. If you own another human being, you are engaging in behaviour that is morally abhorrent and unacceptable. The formulation of the benevolent slave owner is in and of itself a contradiction. This sort of reminds me of how people talk about Angola Prison after Burl Cain [the former warden] arrived. Angola is said to have been this really horrific place before Cain, and he is widely credited with shaping it up and improving the lives of the people imprisoned there. But we’re still talking about the country’s largest maximum-security prison sitting on a former plantation, a prison named after the origin country of the enslaved people forced to work there. It’s one of those things where it’s a both/and. Obviously, I write about Angola in the book, and I wrote my dissertation about education and incarceration, and I think a lot about mass incarceration, the history of chattel slavery, and our current carceral landscape. I think we can recognize that it is a good thing that Angola Prison is not as violent as it once was. It is a good thing that it is safer for the incarcerated people there than it once was. That is a different thing than saying that a place is good. Recognizing that there is less harm being enacted on the minds and bodies of incarcerated people than there were two or three decades ago is not the same thing as saying that Angola is now a good place to be, because it’s not. For me, I’ve been teaching in prisons and jails for the last seven years. I take seriously what it means to mitigate the harm that people currently incarcerated are experiencing. I think people who are currently incarcerated should have better health care and access to education and better food. I also believe that we should build a society in which it’s not necessary for prisons to exist because we have provided communities with the necessary social infrastructure that would prevent people from becoming entangled in the criminal legal system in the first place. So it’s that both/and. From what I understand, Burl Cain came in and made reforms that have mitigated the harm that people in Angola experience, and that is good. It also doesn’t mean that he made Angola Prison a good place. Another misconception you write about is that slavery wasn’t simply a result of southern white supremacy. As your book notes, northern financial institutions bankrolled and profited from slavery, and the demand for slave labour was directly related to international demand for cotton and sugar. Why do you think popular narratives of slavery often limit its horrors and impacts to the American South? I think a lot of people like to think of themselves as not as culpable. As you alluded to, the concept of the North as “the good guys” doesn’t account for the ways that so much of the economic, social, and political infrastructure of northern cities were deeply entangled and invested in perpetuating slavery in the South. New York City was once the second-largest slave market in the country. The banks and financial institutions provided the capital that allowed slavery to subsist, and so much of what slavery excavated from the soil was sent off to Europe. New York was so invested in slavery that on the eve of the Civil War, the mayor of New York City, Fernando Wood, proposed that New York City secede from the Union alongside the southern states because the city’s existence was so deeply tied to their fate. I think it’s important to recognize the reality of these northern cities, and I wrote about New York, but I could have written about Providence, Boston, or a host of northern cities whose histories are inextricably linked to slavery. It’s a history that’s not often told because Americans genuinely like to create clean demarcations between good and evil. So we say the South did this terrible thing and the North did this good thing, when the history is much more complex than that, in the same way that we now know what we call “red states” and “blue states” are not just red and blue. In Louisiana, it’s a quote-unquote red state, but there are millions of people who vote for democratic causes or politicians in cities throughout the state. Louisiana in the mid-19th century was a slave state, but there were also many people who were sympathetic to the Union; in New York City, which was in a quote-unquote free state, there were a lot of people sympathetic to the Confederacy. No city or region is monolithically anything, certainly not monolithically good or bad. But when we retroactively look back, we often attempt to create narratives that overly simplify the nature of what was happening. It’s often done to provide a level of cover or to stave off culpability for harm that has been done. You write, “Our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.” As a writer and a historian, how do you determine which stories are worth telling? I’m really interested in the people who are not anthologized in our textbooks, the people who did not necessarily write their own autobiographies or end up on our posters on the wall. That’s part of why I appreciate the Federal Writers Project slave narratives so much—even with all of the limitations and problems embedded within them due to how they were transcribed and how white interviewers engaged them—I think they can tell us so much about what the ordinary, quotidian nature of slavery was like for people who were not Douglas, Tubman, Jacobs, or Equiano. Those narratives tell us what it meant to be a human, to make a sense of meaning and purpose for yourself in the midst of these unimaginable circumstances, and they’re more reflective of how the majority of people experienced slavery. They were trying to build community and find love and meaning and respite in these small moments where they could, to remind them that they were people who had agency despite being oppressed by an institution predicated on taking that agency away. I thought one of your book’s most affecting chapters was the one in which you speak with your grandparents. Their stories felt so personal and unfiltered. How did you come to include them in this project? I was writing this book, travelling across the country and having conversations with all these different people, and I was asking strangers these really deep questions about their lives. I realized that I’d never brought the same level of formal attention to conversations with my own family, gaining a sense of all of their life stories and talking to them with a level of intentionality and specificity that I hadn’t before. As I write in the book, I realized that some of the best primary sources aren’t in archives. Rather, they’re right next to you. My grandmother and my grandfather are their own sort of monuments to a history that wasn’t that long ago. I think I had a moment when I realized my grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved, and I saw my son sitting on my grandfather’s lap and was reminded of how recent this was and what not only our physical proximity to slavery is, but also our temporal proximity to this history is. It’s this story we’re told that happened a long time ago, when in fact it wasn’t that long ago at all; there are people who are alive who loved and were raised by and in community with people who were born into intergenerational chattel slavery. I was just doing a local NPR show and an older woman called in and talked about how in her earliest years she was raised by her great grandfather, who was born a slave. The idea that slavery was a long time ago is just so profoundly untrue, and at worst it is morally and intellectually disingenuous to suggest that it was. It was important for me to have conversations with my grandparents about their own proximity to that history and what their lives were like in the more direct aftermath of slavery. My grandfather was born in 1930 in Mississippi, which is only 65 years after the end of slavery—there were millions of people alive when he was born that were once enslaved. Much of this book was interested in questions of proximity and intimacy, and I wanted to better understand my grandparents’ stories to make sense of my own, to more effectively situate myself in this history, but also to get a sense of what it felt like for them to be so close to it. While on a slavery tour in New York, your guide, Damaras Obi, noted that race is a social construct that isn’t supported by any scientific or genetic evidence. When, if ever, do you think America will be ready to grapple with this concept? That’s one of the million-dollar questions, I think. I mean, it’s another both/and. You have to carry recognition that race is completely made up with the specific intention of creating and demarcating lines of power—that it’s grounded in the history of capitalism and exploitation. Another physical mechanism could have been used to decide who was and was not a citizen, but they used race. And race is what has come to shape not only our contemporary social, political, and economic infrastructure, but our global infrastructure as well. So you have to hold the recognition that it’s made up, but it also has profound implications that are with us now and will likely be with us forever. Part of what Black people have done is taken this thing that was used as a mechanism of oppressing, subjugating, and violating us and turning it into this remarkable culture that has emerged out of such pain. Whether it be the music, the art, the literature, the sensibilities, or the language, these things came out of the history of chattel slavery. I often think about how remarkable it is that things so beautiful could have emerged from something so ugly, but that is the incredible story of Black life in this country.
25.02.22
The author of Damn Shame on finding the universal, empathy and the X-Files.
David Pevsner’s new book, Damn Shame: A Memoir of Desire, Defiance, and Show Tunes (Random House Canada), is a road map for those journeying toward full sexual expression who find themselves stuck in the ditch of sexual stigma. Pevsner has a lot to teach the reader: he’s a writer, actor, former escort, and at 63-years-old, a current OnlyFans content creator. His story is of a man split by shame—the actor who plays straight doctors and lawyers on mainstream television, and the horny gay sex worker who makes porn for fun. With panache, Pevsner shows us that fearless, honest storytelling, despite the myriad of risks, leads the way to the shameless integration of the self. Narcissism is a main character in Pevsner’s sex work memoir. In college, mustering up the courage to exit the closet and tell his shrink about a crush, the doctor disturbingly responds: “He probably looks just like you. All homosexuals are narcissists.” Beyond homophobic stereotypes, Pevsner becomes a self-described narcissist as he grows out of his awkward musical theatre teen years into the hot daddy of his own dreams. His superficiality increases in tandem with his insecurity, with a mixed bag of results: Ten hours/week in the gym (good!), lots of hot sex (great!), and standards so high he inevitably hurts the suitors who care about him most (bad!). Narcissism, based on the much-maligned Narcissus of Greek mythology, is a dirty word. Narcissus was a man taken by his own beauty, who could not stop looking at his own reflection until that staring led to his untimely death. As artists, as sexual beings, and as integrated humans capable of both, what’s wrong with beauty looking itself in the eye? Self-reflection is the root of art, especially when that art is explicitly autobiographical. As a writer, performer, and sex work memoirist myself, I, too, have been called a “promiscuous narcissist.” Promiscuous for being a whore, narcissistic for making art about it. It’s one thing to be a slut, we are told by those clutching their pearls; it’s another to tell everyone. Reading Damn Shame, I felt an intimate kinship with an artist who, I can only presume, feels his sexuality and creativity are inextricably intertwined. That hiding one part of ourselves impedes the expression of all others. For the promiscuous narcissist, the performative nature of sex work feels like home. When Pevsner ventures into sex work as a mature escort at thirty-six, his superficiality is challenged in a transformative way. The man with high standards must learn to love the less attractive stranger. The narcissist comes to realize that men are more than their looks, and that, for an agreed upon sum, he is capable of compassionately loving anybody. What a gift! Grounded with a more empathetic view of humanity, Pevsner’s heart is newly open to true love. But when Reid, Pevsner’s shitty, whorephobic boyfriend, is informed of his partner’s sex work, he writes a breakup note that calls the artist untrustworthy, undatable, and disease-ridden. He signs it, “With love, without respect, Reid.” Besides money, at least Pevsner always received respect from his clients. Is there such a thing as love without respect? For Pevsner, the memoir is a mirror, but its reflection is a moving target. “I know what you’re thinking,” he writes at various points in Damn Shame, as he prepares to divulge even more shameless truth about escorting, pornography, and homosexuality. He engages the reader and calls them out on their perceived assumptions. In Pevsner’s reflection, the image is wearing boxing gloves, and rightly so: he’s a man on a crusade against ageism, sexual stigma, and homophobia. He is, of course, still David “I would have fucked me in a second” Pevsner. He’s hot—the nude photos in the book prove it!—he knows it, and lucky for us, he’s not even close to being done. Thank goodness. Those of us promiscuous narcissists on the same path, creatively exploring our whoredom both in private and in public, are deeply grateful. Andrea Werhun: In the midst of your acting career, sick of taking on restaurant jobs to subsidize your life in New York City, you ventured into “mature” escorting in your mid-thirties. On the elevator ride up to your first appointment, you calm your nerves by repeating, “You’re an actor, you can do this!” What are the connections you see between acting and sex work? And what are the similarities between the way you’ve approached both professions? David Pevsner: When I started, I thought I’d have to use my acting talents to be able to engage with guys that I maybe didn’t find attractive, to be able to be sexual with them. But the more I did it, the less “acting” I had to depend on. I found things about every man that helped me connect to them, both personally and sexually. Going beyond the looks or the bodies. Plus, my caretaking and sense of humor also helped make these sessions go by sweetly. I got special requests to indulge certain fantasies they had: the repairman who shows up to fix the TV but needs a shower first and then, oops, his towel falls off; the superhero bottoming for the man-in-distress; the lothario who romances the guy and sweeps him off his feet, sure. There was a lot of acting/role play involved, and that was always really fun. And sometimes they just wanted me to be a nasty daddy top or submissive boy bottom, and I treated everything as if I was about to play the role off-Broadway. Very fun. I found, just as in my legit acting work, that the more I feel organic about what I’m doing, the more pleasurable it is and the better the connection. I can’t stop thinking about Reid’s breakup note sign-off after he discovers your sex work: “With love, without respect, Reid.” Do you think it’s possible to love someone without respecting them? And is sex work a form of respect, without love? Can you really have one without the other? As I found in the aftermath of that shit-show of a relationship, you cannot have real love without respect. Or, let me put it this way: I don’t think I can have real love without respect. It made me realize how much respect I had for so many people in my life, even if they were going through difficulties that made them do some disrespectful things. I make an analogy to Mulder and Scully (I love The X-Files!) and their relationship. They didn’t always agree, but they had each other’s back and respected and trusted the crap out of each other. To me, that’s a perfect basis for love. As for sex work, I can’t say I respected everyone I fucked, but that has nothing to do with the work. If they were a crappy person (and very few were), the respect went out the window, but I still had to perform. Almost always, I had utter respect for the men who hired me because I could sense their need and it was real and I was there to make them feel better. I also respect everyone who photographs my nudes and videos if they are artists, even if we’re just shooting something porn-y. The sex work I’ve done has always been better when there was mutual respect and manners, even if it was down and dirty. You transitioned from in-person sex work to posing for erotic photography and today, you are a prolific content creator on OnlyFans. All along the way, you’ve had to grapple with your nudity and sexuality posing a threat to your mainstream acting career. What have been the showbiz implications of being open and honest about your sex work and sexuality—and what does Vanessa Williams have to do with it? That last line made me do a spit-take with my coffee. I talk about the “Vanessa Williams Rule” in my book. When her Penthouse Forum nude photos were discovered, she lost her Miss America crown, and though she said that it was a mistake (mainly because they were published without her okay), she didn’t apologize and didn’t call them morally wrong. She owned up, handled it well, and that’s why I believe she’s had the career she’s had. They will come for you if you apologize and cower to conventional wisdom. “Take control of your own story” was some advice I got from a publicist friend, and that’s what I’ve tried to do. It’s all out there, but I do not believe it should hamper my ability to work as a mainstream actor. And though I lost a couple of agents over my photos, I’m still getting auditions, and really, the folks I want to work with, the Duplass Brothers, Ryan Murphy, even Martin Scorsese...do you think any of them really care if my dick is on the Internet? You are an autobiographical wonder. You’ve written two one-man shows, To Bitter and Back and Musical Comedy Whore, and now this memoir, Damn Shame. How do you transform a personal story into a tale with universal relevance? When does art go from a narcissistic pursuit to something that’s relatable to everyone? That’s a fabulous question. I’ve gone to shows and read books written by people who have had awesome experiences, but I was left feeling cold because I didn’t really identify with their journeys. They didn’t find what was relatable in their stories, to go beyond “hey, look what I did!” I became aware of finding the universal in my work when I wrote my song about getting hard-ons in the showers in gym class. So many guys told me that the feelings I wrote about in that song hit home with so many of them, and that it was both fun and healing to know they were not alone. I found by really gleaning my experiences, getting deep into what I felt while things were happening, really exploring the humanity in every situation, the more folks responded to the stories I was telling. As I like to say, you can write a book about penguins in Guam, but if you don’t give me a reason to read it beyond the plight of the penguins; to bring out the animal lover in all of us, the caring about our planet, the relationships between the penguins and how it mirrors our own, the funny shit they do and how they walk—that will get me involved. And then if something good or bad happens to them, I feel their joy or pain or whatever in my soul. A cute penguin ain’t enough. That’s all a pretty long analogy, but hopefully it makes my point. As you age, does the insecure narcissist of your youth ever rear his beautiful head or has getting older rendered him insignificant—or rather, unrecognizable? Has your anti-shame, anti-ageism, and pro-sexuality crusade put the narcissist in his place? How do you get comfortable with getting older? Oh, he’s still there. I don’t think he’s ever going away. But he has other things to balance him out that have come more to the fore as I’ve gotten older. When I feel him going over the line, I focus my attentions outside of myself and usually that will pull him back. I’ve always been a very empathetic person, but also a very judgmental one, which sometimes overran the empathy. But as I’m getting older, having been through all I’ve experienced, I’ve become much more forgiving and in tune with folks, because none of us is perfect, and really, what the hell do I have to be judgmental about? And I’m hoping that my “crusade” as you put it (a great word, actually) helps others. I guess you could say I’m still a narcissist, but much more tempered and for a very good cause. For me, if I can just maintain my health, physically, mentally, and emotionally, I am more than okay with aging. But I want us all to be okay with it, that there is no age limit on feeling sexy, passionate, accomplished, whatever. You’re only done if you decide you are. I’m not done!
21.01.22
For centuries, queerness and horror have been intertwined, horror relying on queerness for shock and pungency, and queerness relying on horror for visibility and validation.
Ever since my mother first read me to sleep with nursery rhymes and fairy tales, I have sought to find my place in them. Was I the farmer’s wife being chased by three blind mice? Was I Little Miss Muffet, running screaming from spiders? Or was I the wicked witch, the dark fairy, the evil stepmother? Even at that age, I knew that I wasn’t the bland, courageous prince who would chop through a forest of thorns to rouse his love with a kiss. From the earliest days of childhood through to my teenage years, the books I read, the movies I was taken to, the TV shows I watched—everything told me I was destined to be a villain or a victim, or possibly both. For most of its history, horror has been an inherently conservative genre, as fear is an innately conservative emotion, and horror has traditionally been employed to uphold conservative values: the triumph of the virtuous, the punishment of the wicked, the rejection of the different, the dissident, the unknown, the preservation of family, country, and God. As I write in the genre, I continually have to question whether I am demonizing sides of myself that I should be embracing and celebrating: my values, my relationships, my sexuality, my otherness. * For centuries, queerness and horror have been intertwined, horror relying on queerness for shock and pungency, and queerness relying on horror for visibility and validation. The genre we describe as horror today has its roots in the romance and Gothic genres of the eighteenth century, which in turn were influenced by the pre-Romantic movement known as the Graveyard Poets, the more gruesome works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton, as well as the works of Milton and Dante, which described in graphic detail the torments of Hell that await those who had sinned. While the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras were more liberal in their depictions of queer historical figures, relationships, sexuality, and romance (though often with tragic ends), such positive portrayals declined as the Church and the State both worked to criminalize and demonize such behaviour. With the arrival of Gothic novels, the early Victorian thrillers known as “sensation novels,” pulp novels, and penny dreadfuls, we stepped into the spotlight in one of the few great leading roles we were allowed to fully inhabit: the villain. In such works as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (who warns his “brides” as they approach Jonathan Harker, “He belongs to me!”), queer attractions and subtexts could suddenly be explored, and queer characters could take a role at the heart of the story, albeit as predatory unnaturals with perverse desires, seeking out innocents—including children and animals—to corrupt and consume. From Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, chances are that if you read a story from this period that depicts “a secret side,” a “hideous transformation,” a “debilitating disease,” a “tainted bloodline,” “wanton decadence,” “unbridled hedonism,” “a duplicitous nature,” or a “twilight underworld,” you are likely confronting a carefully coded example of queer horror. Queer writers found we could work within the confines of this most conservative genre, using metaphor and allusion to describe meeting places, encounters, relationships, occupations, and networks through which queer people could find each other, gather, and form community. At least for a while, it was better to be seen as a monster than to remain unseen. However, in our zeal to use the genre to portray some aspect of ourselves, what we most often revealed—or were required to reveal—was our self-hatred. For queer readers, hatred, and self-hatred, were the stinging medicines we were forced to consume if we were to satisfy our need to see ourselves. * So-called sexual deviance and perversity continued to play a starring role in horror past the turn of the century and into the early 1900s, through two world wars and the deeply conformist 1950s and early ’60s. As stage plays, fiction, cinema, and television became more permissive, explicit portrayals of lusty lesbian vampires, pansexual covens, mother-obsessed maniacs, and cross-dressing cannibals shocked and titillated mainstream audiences and enraged censors and queer activists alike. The lines between good and evil began to blur, the anti-hero became a dominant protagonist, and the prim, prudish, unfailingly heterosexual heroes were subtly mocked for their dullness while the outlandish monsters and murderers were quietly cheered for their rejection of social norms. Up until this point, family as a microcosm of society had been held up as a sanctity, as the source of strength and safety, and heroes would do anything, including sacrifice themselves, to destroy the monster and restore order. Then we began to see a transition from the common theme of “destroying the abnormal to preserve family and society” to the implication that family and society were themselves the abnormal and would destroy you. This new wave of horror was the one I grew up with, precociously reading novels such as Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, Stephen King’s Carrie, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, and V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic. In these stories, family and society were where the monsters were made—through divorce, abuse, neglect, through isolation and exclusion, and especially through a disregard for and degradation of the rules of gender and sexual identity that “good families” obeyed. This was the new order, and while “good people” and “good families” could try to combat it, they risked sacrificing themselves for no reason or, worse, becoming monsters themselves in the process. These narratives unfolded in stark contrast to those I’d seen in old creature features on television, where the monster, even if created by our greed or misadventure, was still an external force we could fight and destroy. Now we were in the era of Bob Clark’s influential proto-slasher Black Christmas, where the obscenity-spewing woman-hating killer—whose perverse and monstrous tirades alluded to abuse within his family—was calling from inside the house. As LGBTQ communities became more vocal and visible in our demands for civil rights, portrayals of queer monsters and villains and grotesques were decried as homophobic and transphobic. As a queer young man who loved horror, who, like many, was drawn to darkness, I struggled as I confronted images of myself and my friends that openly maligned us, and recoiled with a different kind of fear as I imagined my parents, my employers and co-workers, my straight friends and their families, seeing these films as legitimate depictions of my life, my experience, and my desires. In recent years, the queer villain/anti-hero has made an interesting and largely welcome return within horror, as we have seen an increase in the psychological complexity of its monsters and the conflicted nature of its heroes and victims. Michel Faber’s cerebral sci-fi horror novel Under the Skin (and its more oblique 2013 film adaptation with Scarlett Johansson) presents an alien who performs gender, taking on the image of a vulnerable, feminine woman to attract, ensnare, and harvest her human male prey; her journey both illuminates and subverts the trope of “trans woman as male deceiver.” In John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In, the genitally mutilated child vampire Eli befriends and imperceptibly grooms the bullied boy Oskar to replace the aging “father” in Eli’s thrall. Oskar and Eli ultimately escape the town where Eli has been feeding; we understand that Oskar too will grow older, will become protector and facilitator and “father,” as Eli remains ageless. And then there is the titular creature of the 2014 film The Babadook, who was embraced by film-savvy queers as a darkly dapper symbol of queer resistance—“I’ll wager with you, I’ll make you a bet: the more you deny, the stronger I get.” Once it bursts out of the closet, it refuses to be repressed or restrained. In the end, despite all attempts to exorcise it, it cannot be defeated, nor can it be driven away; it can only be integrated into the family, fed and nurtured, accepted and embraced. * I’ve had to reckon with my own personal history with queer horror, how it has shaped my view of my community and of myself. So much of it is about the aspects in queer culture that straight people fear, that straight society fears: strength and independence in women; vulnerability and intimacy in men; the upending of gender and family roles; the repudiation of the primacy of reproduction; the hollowness and bankruptcy of the dominant social structures; challenges to the pronouncements of the Church. And our intrinsic invisibility, our insidiousness—that we could be anyone, anywhere, hiding in plain sight. I have to admit, there is something delicious in that—that we would provoke so much unease, so much discomfort, so much irrational, unfounded terror just by existing. But what are queer people afraid of, apart from the obvious? I asked myself this as I was writing my first novel, The Bone Mother, which included an array of queer and trans people among its many monstrous and human characters. We are afraid of death, of course, of violence and torture and sickness and suffering, of being exposed and humiliated and shunned and persecuted. We are afraid of being erased, or unseen, or forgotten. We are afraid of being alone. Sometimes being queer is about all those things; they are at the heart of our history and the root of our oppression. Sometimes being queer is about being cast out; sometimes it’s about casting ourselves out, walking or running away while we still can. Sometimes being queer is about being the monster, the one who corrupts, the one who devours. Sometimes—after everything and everyone has been stripped from us—sometimes being queer is about being the last one standing. Excerpted from Red X by David Demchuk (Strange Light Books).
20.01.22
The author of All’s Well on dark academia, Shakespearean witches, and the tragicomedy of chronic pain
“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven,” says All’s Well That Ends Well’s Helen early in the play. It’s a sentiment not at all helpful to Miranda Fitch, the erstwhile actress and current beleaguered drama professor of Mona Awad’s off-kilter novel All’s Well (Hamish Hamilton). Miranda might well know that the pain she feels constantly radiating from her back and leg shouldn’t still be affecting her, and yet the pain persists. Struggling through a failed marriage, entitled students, and a roster of doctors no longer receptive to her suffering, there seems to be no hope for Miranda until three men, ominously gathered in a local bar as if in Twin Peaks’s Black Lodge, offer her respite. Suddenly, there is no more agony; every part of Miranda’s once-stalled life now teems with possibility. In All’s Well, fantasy blurs with nightmare as pain is suffered and then shed, with dramatic, Shakespeare-worthy turns of fate transforming what was once a curse into a terrible, powerful gift. Alyssa Favreau: A good place to start is this novel’s treatment of chronic illness. Why was it important for that to be the central theme? Mona Awad: I started there. I started with an interest in exploring chronic pain because it’s something that I suffered from for a number of years and had been living with daily, not really [being] able to find relief, trying all these different doctors, and going to different surgeons. I’d had surgery on my hip and just couldn’t find a solution for it and had to live with it. And so I really wanted to explore what it’s like to live with that every day and the ways in which it impacts so many aspects of your everyday life. And it made me really dreamy, made me dream about what it would be like if one day this pain were taken away. I started fantasizing, sometimes quite darkly, about what that might look like, how that might feel. I was reading Shakespeare at the time, and Shakespeare has all these incredible reversal of fortune-type stories, and that was very inspiring. The two just came together like a perfect confluence. It seems so important, too, that in this story the pain be a woman’s pain, that it be minimized and ignored and disbelieved in such a gendered way. Was that also the story you wanted to tell? Absolutely. One of the most challenging things about being in pain is just having your experience understood and validated by the world around you. And I think, when you’re a woman, that’s so difficult. Certainly that was my experience with doctors and physical therapists and even in the workplace. And it’s not only harder for people to believe you, but it’s harder for you to believe in yourself when you’re speaking on your [own] behalf. When you’re advocating for yourself, it’s almost like the internalized misogyny just cripples you from the start. We’re just so trained not to believe women, and women are so trained not to believe themselves and not to believe their own experiences. I really wanted to explore that, and with Miranda, of course, it’s even more fraught because she’s an actress. When you are in pain, the act of communicating it, especially something as nebulous as chronic pain … you kind of end up performing it, just to communicate it to someone else. And that act of performance also amplifies the ambiguity and makes you second-guess yourself, even though you have to do it in order to communicate your pain. That was something that really struck me, the discussion of the performance of pain. The line from All’s Well That Ends Well says it best: “I do affect a sorrow, but I have it too.” Having the pain but also needing to perform it in a way that is legible to others. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful line from that play. I love it so much because Helen is in pain, but when she says that, we don’t trust her anymore. She says, “I do affect a sorrow, but I have it too,” and the affectation creates the doubt, even though there’s a part of you that knows it’s sincere. That’s what makes it troubling. That’s what makes Miranda troubling. The pain is real, but she is performing it. That line was enormously inspiring to me; it’s really what gave birth to the whole thing. I was interested in how Miranda is embodied, as well, and her changing relationship to her body. There’s sex. There’s her gourmandise and her trajectory towards having this more balanced relationship with her body. Was that at the front of your mind while you were writing? Yeah, because you’d think that pain would make you more in touch with your body. And it does in a lot of ways because you’re so hyper aware. You’re just waiting. “Oh, God, is this going to get worse? Is it going to get better? I just don’t know.” So it makes you hyper aware of your body, but it also cuts you off from your body in these really strange ways. That’s the experience Miranda has. Initially she’s extremely cut off from her body, and then her relationship to it changes as her relationship to her pain changes. That was very intentional for her to go through a journey with her body. And she’s an actress, so she already has a very particular relationship to her body. That was very important, that arc. From a writing perspective, how did you approach creating the claustrophobia of Miranda’s pain? It was pretty easy. It’s something that I experienced, so I could really tap into my experiences of being in that place. I don’t usually say that writing is cathartic, but it was cathartic to give expression to that because pain is so difficult to communicate. There’s a scene where she’s trying to tell her physical therapist about her pain, and she’s like, “It’s red and it’s throbbing and it feels like there’s a chair on my foot.” And he’s like “Red… Throbbing… A chair.” What do you make of that? There’s this absence in language for communicating something as visceral as pain. I wanted to make the language as visceral as possible. I really leaned into that experience of feeling and not being able to give expression. You have to make do with these phrases and these metaphors that don’t quite do it justice. I’ve never thought about it that way, of writing as creating the language of pain. That’s fascinating. It was actually fun. The novel takes place in a college drama department, and the dynamics and quirks of the Shakespearean production are so perfect. What’s your history with the theatre? I was really into theatre in high school, and then I kind of dropped away from it and fell in love with English literature, [though] I still was really interested in the plays and would go see productions whenever they were in town. Shakespeare really, really became important to me when I was in pain. I was a graduate student [when] chronic pain first came into my life. I was taking a Shakespeare class with these reversals of fortune, these story arcs where your whole life could really change. The story of All’s Well That Ends Well is wonderful because a king is actually healed in the play. This young nobody orphan, this clever wench, actually gets what she desires, even though the play begins and she’s completely powerless. She manages to overturn the whole world of the play and get what she wants, and I found that really troubling when I first read it. But there is something about her agency in this world—where she starts off being so powerless—that was exciting to me. I really wanted to capture that. And it felt really kindred to Macbeth as well, so I started thinking about the two plays together. I’d like to ask you about that—how, with the ways in which the two plays interact with each other, it almost seems like one is haunting the other. Why these two plays in particular? One is on stage—All’s Well That Ends Well—and that’s of course the life that Miranda wants. It’s the comedy with the bizarrely happy ending, the improbable love. That’s the life that she wants for herself, and she’s trying desperately to stage it. The life that she is living off stage is, of course, the life that she doesn’t want, the play she doesn’t want, the tragedy: Macbeth. But there is a through line between those two plays, even though one’s a comedy and one’s a tragedy. Both are about these outlier characters who at the start of the play don’t seem to have any power within the world of the play, or they have less power than they want. And then they have to take this wildly transgressive action in order to make their desire come true, to make it manifest. That’s kind of how I see the two of them speaking to one another. One goes down the road of comedy, and it’s light and nobody dies. The other, of course, goes down the road of tragedy, and there’s murder and madness and beheadings. I wanted to explore both, one on stage and one off, because I think it’s the same story ultimately. I was really struck by the fact that witches are such a prominent figure in both plays. You’ve got Macbeth’s three witches in the form of the three mysterious gentlemen, and how their destructiveness begins to overwhelm a more healing and generative magic that All’s Well That Ends Well’s Helen has. I love that crossover. Helen does have a witchiness in All’s Well That Ends Well, which is part of the reason why I love her. She’s got this strange trickster energy. She can heal a king and get what she desires. It’s all very strange. And then the three witches in Macbeth are so fascinating. To what degree do they orchestrate the whole thing? To what degree does Macbeth really have free will? It’s one of the great ambiguities of that play. I wanted to play with that in this book. There are two different kinds of magic, and both kinds of witchery are in the novel: that kind of good, healing energy and then the more malevolent energy of the Macbeth witches. All’s Well That Ends Well is famously one of Shakespeare’s problem plays. Do you see this novel as a sort of problem play? Definitely. I see it as tragicomic, which probably is what makes it a problem play or problem novel. But I also see it as the most honest expression of what I could have done as a writer engaging with these two plays, because I love the way that tragedy informs comedy and comedy informs tragedy in storytelling. I love when that happens in storytelling. That’s when you get the most potent comedy and that’s when tragedy is the most moving, when they’re walking hand in hand. And so, in this book, I really tried to do that. I tried to create both experiences simultaneously for the reader. I was surprised by how inspiring I found Miranda’s bitterness. It seems like a kind of resistance to have her be so angry and so ungracious and disillusioned with everyone around her. Was that always part of her DNA or did it manifest in the writing of her? She surprised me. She’s both the hero and the villain of her own story because she is both a kind of Helen and a kind of Macbeth/Lady Macbeth figure. I could have fun with her villainy as the book progressed. She’s been suffering for so long, and suffering corrupts you. It does things to your heart. It does things to your brain. And Miranda’s not immune. And then the sudden absence of suffering, the euphoria that comes after the suffering has ended, that’s another kind of strange filter through which to experience the world. That changes you too, changes your ability to empathize and see clearly and respond to people. I had fun with that, and I think it’s part of her humanity. To not go completely there with her would have been doing a disservice to her humanity. When she does manage to pass her pain on to others, it reads almost as a revenge fantasy, as if giving the pain to others is a way of being believed and taken seriously. Yeah, yeah. “Feel it. Feel what I’ve been feeling. And then you’ll know that it’s not a lie.” That’s the dream of people who are in pain, or at least it was my dream, sometimes, with doctors who didn’t understand or who would just blink at me. “I wish you could feel this, because then you’d know, you’d understand my desperation.” It’s a way of creating empathy, where maybe there is no empathy, even though it is a revenge fantasy at the same time. This novel has some overlap with your previous book, Bunny. I’d be interested in hearing you talk a bit more about that and whether you were interested in creating a through line for your readers from one novel to the other. There are definitely parallels. Obviously there’s still interest in the supernatural. There’s interest in the fantastic, in witchery and the occult. Bunny has all of that. Interest, too, in New England, that Gothic setting, and in the college campus. I love the fact that All’s Well also has that school year arc. There’s something about it that feels very comforting to me. It was fun to revisit a college campus again. And I love the tensions and the power dynamics that you find in a school. School is like a microcosm of the world. In Bunny, we experience the story from the student’s perspective, and in All’s Well we’re seeing things through the eyes of a teacher. I was surprised at the degree of powerlessness that Miranda feels as a teacher; it’s not really something that I fully understood until I became a teacher myself. I always thought as a student that teachers had a lot of power. They were kind of intimidating. But now as a teacher I realize I have no power; it’s all a performance. Students have a lot more power than they realize. Young people have a lot of power. It was kind of fun to explore the other side of the desk that way Both novels have this way of manifesting a new reality through artistic expression, too. Absolutely. It’s true. Miranda’s vision for All’s Well That Ends Well gives so much expression to her interior anguish and also her longings. And that’s also the case for Bunny, for the Bunnies and for Samantha. Their creations are the expressions of their fears and desires. You’ve got this amazing ability to create these kinds of manic funhouse-mirror worlds where reality and delusion is so blurred. What appeal do these worlds hold for you? That anything is possible. It’s the realm of the imagination. Anything becomes possible. In Bunny, the fact that I was looking at the world through the eyes of a writer in an MFA program allowed me to open up the borders of reality. In All’s Well, the fact that it’s theatre fiction [meant] I was able to do the same thing. Even though the stage is a physical thing in the book, it extends far past the school’s stage into the world of the novel. And that allows for anything to become possible, allows for theatrics to take place in any realm, in any part of the world of the novel. That was so exciting to me. The phrase “all’s well” gets repeated a lot throughout the text and takes on such power as both this kind of invocation that darkly manifests, but also as a reassurance that sometimes all does end well. When I first read the play, I thought that that was such a dark phrase: “All’s well that ends well.” Well, what came before? There could have been all of these terrible things, but one can still say, “all’s well that ends well,” and it sounds good. I remember when I first started reading the play, I kept picturing this woman straightening towels in a bathroom [while] her house was on fire. And that ends up in the book as a memory Miranda has with her mother. I pictured this woman saying it as a mantra to herself, even as her life is falling apart. It has a lot of darkness, even though it’s a reassuring phrase. I like that it’s reassuring, [even though] it has the potential to hold a lot of darkness and mystery in it. Do you see this as a hopeful novel? Yes, absolutely. And I wrote it as such. There’s actually an original ending that’s not so hopeful, but I didn’t stick with it because I didn’t want darkness to win in the end. I wanted hope, and I wanted the redemptive power of the feminine to be there. I do think it’s hopeful. It’s more All’s Well That Ends Well than it is Macbeth in the end.
11.01.22
The author of Jam Bake on flavour libraries, candied fruit and making things with your hands that taste good.
Through the most locked-down periods of the pandemic, I have felt cinched by my own routines, with only brief hours of darkness to peel apart the mille-feuille of same-o. Like many of us, I took some comfort in the calming measures of the domestic: cooking, sewing, and frenzied bouts of cleaning. Now facing an Omicron-haunted winter, I return to my kitchen cupboards for escape, pawing through the hardened bags of brown sugar and exhausted cartons of baking soda. On the top shelf of the pantry where I keep coffee and tea—dusted with the fragrant debris of both—are two unopened mason jars, one cherry jelly and another of pink grapefruit marmalade. Both of these are gifts from Camilla Wynne, whom I met in the brief intersection of summer and freshly vaccinated, to discuss her (then) just-released book, Jam Bake (Appetite). I can’t bring myself to break the seal on these precious jars, which preserve fruit, and something else. Some years ago I became transfixed by the elaborate cakes baked and decorated by Wynne, formerly of the Montreal-based jam company Preservation Society; a musician, pastry chef, teacher, and gentle hedonist whose mastery of what she calls “back-to-the-land” skills elevates the domestic to levels of fantasy like Graeme Base’s The Eleventh Hour and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. One such cake posted to her Instagram account features three extravagant tiers, laden with candied fruit—another of Wynne’s specialties. In Jam Bake, Wynne brings her rare creativity to the masses, sharing endlessly adaptable preserve-oriented recipes and gorgeous photographs of the results. Not only about jams, jellies, and marmalades, the book also features splendid baked good recipes (kamut and poppy seed muffins with pink grapefruit and almond marmalade filling; gateau basque with coffee, date, and pear jam) in which you can inject your freshly made preserves if you don’t want to limit them to toast. Last summer, Wynne invited me to her home to chat about Jam Bake, and to make sour cherry jelly in her charming Toronto kitchen—the jelly that now lives in my pantry. My first in-person interview in nearly two years, I felt utterly drunk on the pleasures of Wynne’s vibrant workspace and immense charm (which comes through in her recipes, too). Dressed in a periwinkle zebra-print dress and coordinating Jacquemus socks, Wynne walked me through the steps of jelly-making before taking me out to her flower and plant-filled balcony, where we discussed her incredibly varied career, safe canning techniques, dresses that look like cakes, and cakes that look like dresses. Naomi Skwarna: What was your gateway to jam, jelly, and marmalade? And more generally, preserving? Camilla Wynne: I’ve always loved sugar and fruit and was pretty obsessed with it as a kid—plus the confluence of my granny and my aunt’s homemade jelly and jam. It had an air of mystery because we never made it at my house. I was the city slicker and then there were all my country cousins. When I started working in pastry, there was something so compelling about preserving because of its shelf life. [In pastry], we made so many things that were only good for that day, and so I was intrigued by the idea of being able to prolong the lifespan of all of these fruits that I loved. Then, when I left working in kitchens to go on tour with my band, I would get so upset every time we’d tour during sour cherry season! So when I was home, I started squirreling away all those flavours to enjoy later on. A flavour collection. Yeah! A flavour library. Preserving does seem like an effective way of extending the life of something that is otherwise sort of ephemeral. Since you were self-instructing, did you ever make any big mistakes, or was it pretty smooth sailing from the start? I think any of my errors have been eclipsed by stories from my students about their seriously crazy mistakes. For instance: I have never given my friends botulism. A student of mine once announced, “I’m here at this pickling class because last year I gave all my friends botulism.” You’re extremely clear about canning safely in the book—I mean, you do put a lot of time and clarity into ensuring that people don’t make those mistakes—but the pickling section definitely struck a bit of fear in my heart. Thank you! I was self-taught at the beginning and I was so frustrated about this hard line North American National Center for Home Food Preservation thing that basically says anything that’s not this is danger! But then I’d read a book from France or England and they’d say, “close the jars and turn them upside down.” I was like, are they dying in droves over there? There are lots of ways to can safely. When I teach, I show you how to work safely in what I think is the easiest and the fastest way, because I always want more time to read novels. Yes, there are a lot of bad, scary ways to can, but I teach how to discern the difference. If you understand the principles, you can objectively look at a method and tell that’s not safe. If you’re just following a set of instructions, you’ll either be a hard liner, or else you’ll just follow whatever instructions come your way, be they safe or not. It’s extremely important to my teaching philosophy for people to understand why, because I found it so hard to get anyone to tell me how it really works. Well, props to your student for giving all their friends botulism and still wanting to learn how to do it. He was a very enthusiastic 23-year-old man. Good for you, sir, but also: wow. Will his friends ever eat something he preserves again? I wouldn’t, personally! Coming back to your training—you’re one of Canada’s only Master Preservers. What does that process entail? It’s a lot less fancy than it sounds—it’s just not a program offered in Canada. I wish it were, because I think it’s extremely valuable. The idea is that universities, Cornell in my case, have extension co-ops in agricultural communities for the university to be able to disseminate their research to the farmers. So they have these programs to become a Master Preserver or a Master Gardener, where people learn to be experts at, well, “expert,” you know, through a five-day course. But we learn enough that we can then teach other people how to safely preserve. It covers freezing, pressure canning, hot water bath canning, and drying. Then basically, there’s a test, plus completing a certain number of hours of teaching or writing about preserving methods to show that you thoroughly understand the methods. It was so nice and great, but they also literally made us chant “canning is not creative cooking,” and my whole thing is that that’s not true if you understand [the science]. Reading your book, creativity feels like such a defining feature of your recipes and aesthetic. What does creativity mean in what you make and how you teach? Sometimes I’ll ask my students, “Who else here feels if they can’t be creative, they’ll die?" And everyone will be like: (stares blankly). Maybe one person will say, “okay.” I consider myself a cook as well. There’s such a dichotomy between cooking and pastry, but I cook a lot and I write a lot of savory recipes, too. I hope I don’t spend my whole career pigeonholed as only making sweets. In the end, it’s all making something with your hands that tastes good. When did you start teaching? I began in 2011 because of my friend Natasha Pickowicz, who’s a famous New York pastry chef now. She was working at the Depanneur in Montreal and was always organizing events; she’s a real organizer. And now you teach so many classes! Your candied fruit is really breathtaking, and such a unique skill to offer a class for. How do people respond to it? That class was so popular in the winter, I think partly because everything was locked down and no one I know has ever seen a class like that offered before. I couldn’t believe it! I thought no one was going to come, but it was my best-selling class for sure. Those fruits are so gorgeous. Right. I know. They’re so beautiful. You mention that dichotomy in Jam Bake, too. It reminds me of what you said earlier about being a pastry chef and preserver—that the pastries you made were meant to be eaten straight away— Yes, I don’t want to see a croissant more than two hours after it came out of the oven. They’re like those insects that only live for one day. It’s like your work is split between making delicacies with brief lives and ones that can live for very long time. And then the bridge there is fruitcake! You’ve found so many outlets for your skills—as a pastry chef, writer, teacher, and through running a business. But it seems now that you’re very much your own boss. What are some of the challenges faced by someone who wants to work the way you do in the food industry? Restaurants, which is where I worked, are their own whole thing, and we all started to see how highly problematic they are over the past couple of years. Pastry chefs, particularly, are paid less, appreciated less, and are the first to go when layoffs need to be made. Dessert is always considered optional and pastry chefs dispensable. But, arguably, fine dining is about celebration, you know? And that’s exactly what desserts are for. Sometimes I get insecure about internalizing the idea that desserts are superfluous and I’m not doing it to help anyone. But pleasure is important, you know? It makes life nice. I have to remind myself of that frequently, especially being in a relationship with someone who literally keeps people alive [Wynne’s partner is an anesthesiology resident]. You’re like, sure, and I give you cake! There’s pleasure in the making and in the receiving of cake! And a lot of your cakes in particular are some of the most stunning, sculptural things I’ve ever seen. Thank you. I obviously don’t post the ones that aren’t...[laughter] That’s every artist’s prerogative. What inspires your creativity, outside of the cooking world? Definitely clothes! I spend a lot of time looking at clothes I’ll never afford. Lately a lot of them look like fancy cakes. That is very true. Molly Goddard— Yeah. And Cecilie Bahnsen. All the ruffles? Ok, so I wanted to ask you—we’re still in the pandemic, but moving into a different phase of it. You mention in Jam Bake that making preserves has brought a lot of joy into your life. Can you talk about that joy, or the mental state this type of tactile, sweetie treat creativity cultivates in you, and what you think others can get out of it? Even though I was highly inconvenienced by jars being out of stock everywhere last year when I was starting my online classes, I also couldn’t deny how awesome it was. I love that people are taking this up, because I do think it’s so full! There’s the kind of meditative pleasure of the act itself and then the wellbeing of a stocked pantry. It really makes you think, like, maybe it makes sense during these apocalyptic times to have weird, back-to-the-land skills. Being able to eat well throughout all this must have been a real source of comfort. The act itself brings the same sense of relaxation as yoga, I find. And I think it’s unfortunate that a lot of people are nervous about canning or cooking if they haven’t done it before. If they could instead just take a breath and think: I’m just observing this thing and I know what to look for. I’m not asking anything of it. I’m entering into a dialogue with this pot. We don’t speak the same language, but maybe it can tell me when it’s ready. It’s like trying to see if a baby’s hungry. When you bake a cake, you can’t really watch it rise. It’s quite a quick process—maximum twenty minutes—but you have to be there. You can be checked out and maybe it’ll work, but also you might burn it. If you’re really there and just appreciating the serenity of observing transformation, then you’re probably going to do a better job. It just, I don’t know, unclenches something. I think it’s so nice. Yeah, I can see that. Wasn’t it thrilling when we saw those cherries transform from liquid to a solid? That’s why I call it alchemical. I know that’s just science, actually. It’s called transformation of states. We don’t really experience a lot of obvious transformation in our everyday lives. There’s the maillard effect—cooking, browning. But that’s more routine, as things we see every day. But making jam, it’s really special to see. It feels magic and if you’re not willing to experience the magic of things, well, that’s not fun for life. Beyond the actual making of beautiful jams, jellies, marmalades, and cakes, what’s the most fulfilling type of project for you? The satisfaction of writing a well-written recipe, and also making something taste good. I really have realized over the past couple of years that writing and making recipes is my absolute favorite thing. I also love teaching and I never want to stop doing that, but if I could manage to make a living by writing and making recipes? That would be certainly the dream for this guy. I have a pretty fleshed-out idea for my next book, so hopefully I can start concentrating more on that, getting it sold. What will it be about? It’s a candied fruit book! There are just so many different techniques to explore and then there are so many things to bake that are traditionally made with candied fruit, plus cool ideas for the syrup. I just think it’s a very rich topic—and I guess I will have to see who I can convince to agree with me. [At this point in the interview, Wynne proceeds to lead me through a jelly tasting. Having told her earlier that I didn’t like jelly, she is now intent on turning me around]. That was so good. Tasting those flavours [damson, redcurrant, cherry,]—I am now a jelly convert. My work here? It’s done. I didn’t hate jelly, I just didn’t know jelly. She was a mystery.
07.01.22
The author of Seek You on recognizing obsessions, Sandra Bullock, and separating solitude and loneliness.
Being lonely can be painful. As a species, we’re born with an innate need to be with others, and the physical and mental distress caused by too much isolation is proof of this fact. To frame this another way, for nearly all of our time on Earth, to be alone was to be in danger. Thus, the feeling of safety and well-being derived from human connection is both an evolutionary quirk and one of the more meaningful experiences we can have. With incisive prose and distinctive photo-based illustrations, Kristen Radtke hones in on this complex subject in her book, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (Pantheon). A sweeping essay in graphic form, Radtke’s sophomore release reflects on laugh tracks, cowboy archetypes, Princess Diana, romantic comedies, mass shooters, and the early days of the internet. She describes a call service for solitary senior citizens, the infamous isolation studies of an anguished psychologist, and the industry of professional cuddling geared toward people starved for touch. She also discloses her own loneliness and conveys how fear and vulnerability are widely shared, writing, “I want us to use loneliness—yours, and mine—to find our way to one another.” Whether felt in our brains or our bodies, Radtke tells us, the ache of solitude is our signal to seek company. While tinged with melancholy, her book provides a compassionate perspective on the meaning of loneliness and the importance of human connection. The Brooklyn-based author and I recently talked about her latest book and how better understanding loneliness helped her to feel less alone. Andru Okun: Seek You is your second book. What themes or motifs do you think you’ve carried over from your first, Imagine Wanting Only This? Kristen Radtke: When my first book came out, I remember there was a review that said something about how I was grappling with isolation and loneliness, and I was like What do you mean? I’m not doing that. I didn’t recognize that was a theme I was working with, and I think sometimes it takes me a really long time to recognize an obsession I have in my work, or the fact that I may be working through something in my writing before I’m conscious of it. First books are complicated, difficult things, and I didn’t know when I started writing that I was writing a book. I just thought I was writing essays, so it came together in a very different way than this book, which felt like I had an intentional purpose when I began. There’s less memoir in this book and more reportage and research. Was that intentional? I never wanted to write a memoir. My first book sort of became one over time; I thought it’d be much more like Seek You in that it’d be more outward-facing, but early readers were asking for more personal information, like a personal guide to help them through the research. I think that’s the case for this book too—an early draft didn’t have any memoir or personal elements in it. I had a friend who pointed out that I’d done all this research, but they didn’t understand why I’d assigned myself this work. They wanted to see my personal stake in it. There’s also a discernible difference in your drawings between your first and second book. You’re now using colour, and the visual storytelling is more complex. As an author of graphic non-fiction, do you feel like the drawn components of your work grow in tandem with your writing? When I draw, it changes what I need to say and how I say it. I’m also communicating by using language in the images, and, of course, images are a kind of language in themselves. I can’t quite remember how the form started for this book—it isn’t sequential or in panels; it’s not a comic in the same way. I tried to remember how I came to that, and I really can’t. It just became the form that made sense to me as I was working. You note that you started this book in 2016. This was also the year scientists first identified the part of the brain that responds to isolation. Was this discovery part of what prompted you to pursue this project or was this coincidental? It was coincidental. I didn’t know anything about the science of loneliness before I began writing about loneliness. All of my research was done in service of this particular interest. So, what exactly was the catalyst? I think 2016 was a lonely time for a lot of people. It was a challenging year. I’ve looked for research on whether loneliness spikes during election years in America. That research has not been done, or at least it has not been published publicly. But it seems likely to me that that would be correct because it does isolate us from each other in a pretty stark way. Loneliness traditionally spikes at three ages—your late twenties, your mid-fifties, and your eighties. This makes sense because it’s when a lot of people go through a lot of life changes. I was in my late twenties, and I was just trying to figure out this transition into proper adulthood and what my life would look like, which can be a kind of isolating experience. I recently read Elisa Gabbert’s essay on loneliness that references some of the graphic essays you published before the release of Seek You. She makes what I think is an excellent point regarding writers: while we’ve come to think of solitude as a necessity, we really thrive off of interactions with strangers and crowds, that being around others engenders “a complicating energy that produces ideas.” I was wondering how you felt about this concept. It’s hard for me to say if that’s unequivocally true for everyone, but for me that’s definitely true. I find myself surprised where ideas come from, because I can never track what’s going to trigger something for me. It might be a conversation with a friend, a ride in the subway, or a thought I have as I’m falling asleep that I have to write down or it will be completely gone the next day. I think that we do like solitude, but I think it is really important that we separate solitude and loneliness because they sometimes overlap but they’re not the same. Someone can be very solitary and not be lonely, and another person can be extremely socially active and be cripplingly lonely. What does it mean for loneliness to rest, as you write, “in the space between the relationships you have and the relationships you want?” So, there’s no formula to fix loneliness, no way to easily determine how much social interaction one person needs. You can have a very outwardly fulfilling personal life and still feel unfulfilled if your relationships are not providing you with the meaningful stimulation that you need. That’s one of the reasons I think that political divides make us more lonely. I hear a lot of people say that when Trump emerged, they just stopped talking to their uncle or their dad about politics. But as we know, the personal is political, and to not talk about politics means resisting talking about a big part of who we are, our belief system. And if we can’t talk about our belief system, it’s difficult to have deeply meaningful, authentic interactions. Even with a really active social life, someone can feel a kind of longing for connection or for a witness so they feel seen, and that can lead to a sense of loneliness. Did you personally have these types of experiences where you stopped talking to a family member or a friend over political disagreements? Yeah, I come from a very conservative place. I think that it’s very painful for people who have different political ideologies from their family, for sure. Why do you think separation is such a large part of American culture? I wrote about loneliness in America specifically because I’m American and American culture is what I understand best; but I’m also very interested in how loneliness is kind of coded into our ideology and our value system and how that’s a by-product of our insistence on individualism. If we look at the American dream, it’s this idea of the white picket fence, a big yard, and the ability to literally block yourself off from other people. You can define your space and claim it. Where I come from, your measure of success is how much land you can afford to have—how many acres—and there’s this pride in not being able to see your neighbours. You’ve made it if you can be isolated in that way. And I’m not saying there’s something wrong with wanting to live in the woods (there’s not), but I think that when we start to prioritize the self over the community—which I think we consistently do in America, and I think we saw this in the divides that arose during COVID—it starts to get very dangerous. That prioritization of the self has been a big part of our thinking probably since America’s conception. It’s as if loneliness and separation are built into the architecture and the layout of our communities. Absolutely. There are not that many community gathering spaces that aren’t based around commerce. When I was in high school, we would go to the mall. It was of course a place centred around consumerism and capitalism, but now what are the gathering places that people have? Some cities are better about green spaces and public parks, but we don’t have town squares or places where we can get a town-square feeling in a way that is quite common in other cities across the world. Wealth is a factor of loneliness as well, right? Generally, the more chronically lonely countries are wealthier. This is clear for a lot of reasons: wealthier countries have a skewed relationship towards work and a lot of the work is more isolating than it is in less wealthy countries. Office jobs, for example, can be quite isolating. People in wealthier countries are more likely to be able to afford to live alone or to delay marriage; also, wealthier countries have longer life expectancies, so you’re more likely to see people that you love die and you’re less likely to live with your family during that time. There’s a lot of caveats to this, though. A country that is at war is generally an extremely lonely place. Hannah Arendt writes about this in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism; she consistently found that loneliness was out of control in countries where people lived under dictators and couldn’t trust their neighbours. Your book suggests that our perceptions of loneliness differ depending on our personal experiences of gender socialization. What drew you to examine this construct? Honestly, I think it was Sandra Bullock. In the before-times, I used to fly a lot for work and it was sort of my favourite moment to watch terrible movies. It’s just one of the greatest pleasures in the world, to detach from any responsibility and just watch a stupid rom-com from the ’90s. And so, I’d watch a ton of Sandra Bullock movies, and I started to notice she was lonely in every single one, sometimes in the same tropey way and sometimes in very different ways. In Gravity she’s literally shot into space, and in other movies she’s a sort of hapless twenty-something in her tiny studio apartment trying to make it as an assistant in a cutthroat industry. But she’s always on the outside, and I was interested in that because the formula for how they solve that is relatively consistent, and it often involves making a romantic connection or occasionally a friendship. It’s very different from how men are portrayed. The rise of the anti-hero reinvigorated the cowboy trope. If you look at someone like Don Draper, Tony Soprano, or Walter White, they’re all cowboys and basically renditions of the same characters. This isn’t to say that it’s not entertaining, but they get to be sexy and coveted and alluring in a way that a rom-com heroine doesn’t get to be. Can you explain the idea of contagious loneliness? That was one of the most shocking things I researched, although once I understood it the concept made complete sense to me. I think it was something I was already recognizing in my personal life and my relationships with my friends. The scientist Dr. John Cacioppo discovered through his research that loneliness can become contagious and be transmitted to up to three people removed from one lonely person. Basically, once we enter a state of loneliness, we’re likely to start self-isolating. It’s kind of like depression or any kind of insecurity or self-consciousness—we start to assume other people don’t like us and that they don’t want to hear from us. We imagine that rejection will happen before that rejection takes place, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once someone is lonely—particularly when someone is chronically lonely—they kind of cocoon into themselves. So, if I’m isolating, and I have a best friend, she may feel rejected by me and stop reaching out, so then that relationship will become strained and severed and she could feel wounded, which creates a type of loneliness in her that she could then pass along to another person. How do you think our culture’s idealization of the past ties into present-day experiences of loneliness? I think it’s very easy to say that everything has gone to hell and things used to be so much better. Every generation has felt like This is the end. If you go back to ancient cultures, there was a sense that the apocalypse was coming. We often prescribe that to technological advances—as we make progress, we’re lamenting the things that we lost. And I think that’s really natural, but it’s also slightly misguided because things get sepia-toned and hazy, and we forget the difficulties and complications of the past. I think about this a lot when I hear complaints about social media, and I’m not saying social media isn’t a huge problem that has done enormous damage to our understanding of truth, news, our electoral system, and our relationships to each other. All of those things have been very damaging and, in a lot of ways, catastrophic. But I think that we assign a little too much blame to new technological advances like social media. I read that the New York Times wrote this scathing editorial about the invention of the telephone and how we would soon become nothing more than transparent bits of goop, or something like that. Every technological advance is assigned as the end of everything. You write about Yayoi Kusama, a fascinating and idiosyncratic Japanese artist best known for her room-sized installations lined with mirrored glass. Why did you want to include her in this book? When I went and saw her show, Infinity Mirrors, I didn’t know she would end up in the book, which is one of the great pleasures to me of non-fiction, that research can meld with personal experience, and you start to recognize connections. This maybe goes back to what we were talking about earlier about how it can be energizing to be around strangers, because you come across things you wouldn’t in your own apartment. I think Yayoi Kusama is a very lonely figure who has lived quite an isolated life, but her work, especially at the beginning of her career, was about narcissism. One of her first pieces was these mirrored balls that people could purchase and look at themselves. Now her artwork is some of the most photographed artwork in the world, and people will wait in line for hours to go and take a selfie. They’ll get dressed up in coordinated outfits that match her show and take photos to post on Instagram. I think it’s funny that so many years before social media was invented, she predicted this phenomenon. But there’s something compelling about her work and it’s so beautiful, so it’s like Yeah, I want a picture of myself in this. At the same time, it’s easy to critique or make fun of, that people are coming to see a show about narcissism and going exclusively to take a photo of themselves. I’ve read Seek You twice now, and both times I found the chapter on Harry Harlow and his experiments on infant monkeys just so, so sad and upsetting. It’s actually a bit difficult to get through. Tell me about Harlow’s work and your interest in it. I became completely obsessed with Harlow. I had known about his famous surrogate mother studies, where he separated baby monkeys at birth and put them in a cage with a fake wire mother and a fake cloth mother. The wire mother dispensed milk; it was meant to either prove or dispel the idea that babies only loved their mothers if they fed them. I kept reading about him and came to know more about the studies he carried out after, which literally just became darker and darker. He started isolating monkeys in dark places without any visual stimuli for really long periods of time. He struggled a lot with his own mental health and he was hospitalized a few times and had electroshock therapy. He also had a really difficult personal life, including estranged marriages and distant relationships with his children. I just became very interested in how he came down this path of inducing isolation in animals as he was experiencing isolation himself. I tried to write about him with empathy and compassion, because I think that on the surface, it’s easy to say that he was doing these horrific things—which he was; there’s no way to deny that he was abusing those animals and that he was a sexist person and seemingly not a great, supportive partner—but I’m also interested in how we remember complicated figures in history. He really did change the way in which children were cared for, because prior to his study people thought you shouldn’t cuddle or coddle your children, and we now know that children need a lot of emotional support at a young age. How did writing this book change how you interacted with people out in the world? It’s hard for me to say, because just as I was finishing, the pandemic started. I think that making this book did make me feel less lonely because I understand loneliness more and I think I make more of a conscious effort to connect with other people than I used to, but I also think the pandemic has changed the way I interact with people in a similar way. It’s shown us that we actually do all owe each other a great deal, that it’s all of our collective responsibility to care for our neighbours and each other. That was the same conclusion I made in writing this book.
03.01.22
Julia Child’s collaborator Simone Beck has lingered as an object of pity in public memory. But maybe Beck didn’t want stardom at all.
The sky was still dark that morning in October, 1961, when a Frenchwoman named Simone “Simca” Beck and her American friend Julia Child headed over to the NBC studio sets in Midtown Manhattan, ready to make their television debut. They were to conduct a cooking demonstration for the Today show to promote Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), the 732-page tome both women had co-authored with the writer Louisette Bertholle. It had been released a few days before in America by the publishing house Knopf to rapturous reviews. Sales, though, could’ve been better. Appearing on Today, which pulled in around four million viewers a day back then, certainly couldn’t hurt. Though the book had three authors, Bertholle’s involvement became minimal as the book neared publication, which is to say it was really a two-hander between Beck and Child. And it was Beck, in particular, who contributed the majority of the recipes to early versions of the book, many of them family heirlooms from her upbringing in Normandy. Child, meanwhile, gave the text its American soul, making the recipes legible to readers in the United States. On this day, they had five minutes to make an omelette on a hot plate. They were terribly nervous. Neither woman even owned a television. “When the camera and the sweltering lights were at last upon me in the studio, I nearly froze with fear,” Beck wrote in her 1991 memoir, Food and Friends. She just barely pulled through. Today, this clip of Beck and Child on Today has become somewhat hard to find, in spite of the fact that it’s so significant an historical artifact. It was, after all, the nation’s introduction to Child, who would seize the country’s imagination unlike any cooking personality had prior. Child called the experience “simply terrifying,” yet she was a natural compared to Beck. As the writer Bob Spitz observed in his Child biography Dearie, Beck’s “usual exemplary English sounded like French-accented Ukrainian,” and she ultimately “looked lost, diminished” on screen. In the years that followed, the two women remained friends and worked together on a second Mastering the Art volume, yet their paths eventually forked. Child found television stardom with The French Chef, her cooking show that premiered on public television in 1963. Beck, then in her late 50s (and roughly eight years Child’s senior), gained the respect of America’s food establishment through cookbooks of her own, but never achieved the same public adoration Child generated. The press was always happy to point this out. “Julia Child is a household name,” the food writer Colman Andrews wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “Simone Beck isn't—except perhaps in those rare households where the stove is more important than the television set.” It doesn’t take a genius to understand how this imbalance came to be. Child, after all, was American, with a jolly persona that could lift the saddest of spirits. Beck, bound to tradition in both culinary and cultural terms, was resolutely French. Yet Beck’s imprint on the way Americans think and talk about food is unmistakable. Both Beck and Child, as cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum wrote months after Beck’s 1991 death, bore responsibility for “changing forever the way we think about eating.” Contemporary chronicles of Child’s ascent—numerous biographies of her, for example—have tended to paint Beck as a bitter shrew resentful of Child’s high profile. If comparing the trajectories of Beck and Child seems tasteless—setting two women against one another is a sport of the patriarchy—consider that Child herself even found Beck’s lack of fame unjust. “I felt that she was such a colourful personality, and so knowledgeable about cooking, that had she been American rather than French she would be immensely well known,” Child wrote in her posthumously published autobiography My Life in France (2006). Even in death, Beck has lingered as an object of pity in public memory, cast as the poor woman whom celebrity eluded. But maybe Beck didn’t want stardom at all. *** She was born in 1904, baptized with a long name typical of French families in the era: Simone Suzanne Renée Madeleine. Growing up in Normandy in an upper-middle class Catholic family, she knew English before French. Though Beck’s mother kept black notebooks full of recipes, her family could afford to hire a fully-staffed kitchen. Beck came of age at the side of her family’s cook, Zulma. She hung around the stove so often that its steam made her hair curl, made her cheeks turn ruddy. Cooking was a profession considered beneath a girl of Beck’s breeding, so that was out of the question—at least at first. Her parents told her to settle down with a man, so she followed the rules, reluctantly wedding a family friend named Jacques Jarlaud in June 1923. She was just eighteen. A short man, Jarlaud was the “unprepossessing equivalent of a frog,” Beck wrote in her memoir, she “some wide-eyed fairy-tale princess.” On her wedding night, Beck realized they had no physical chemistry. Years later, they would learn he was sterile, turning their marriage platonic. Beck led a superficial life for that decade with Jarlaud, spending her days playing bridge and grabbing lunch with friends. It took catastrophe for her to snap out of this stupor. She survived a brutal car crash in 1928, after which she “wanted something more regarding than the life of a young housewife, which was beginning to pall,” as she wrote in her memoir. So she threw herself into an unlikely profession: bookbinding. This wasn’t thrilling work, but she ended up doing it for four years, steeping herself in the art of perfectionism. What she really wanted to do, though, was cook. Her father’s death from leukemia in the early 1930s made Beck ditch her husband and chase her culinary dreams. In late 1933, she enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu. She only stayed there for six months, deciding that taking private lessons from one of the school’s founders, Henri-Paul Pellaprat, would be a better use of her time. Under his tutelage for two years, she learned how to make salmon-stuffed rolled sole fillets, soufflé with Bénédictine, young duck with turnips and gumdrop-shaped green olives. In the autumn of 1936, just around the time the ink dried on Beck’s divorce from Jarlaud, a man named Jean Fischbacher came into her life. Two years her junior, he worked at a perfume and cleaning product company, and Beck found him utterly charming. He christened her with the nickname “Simca,” after the small Renault car she drove. Their courtship was the first time that Beck felt something close to euphoria, an emotion her life had previously denied her. She’d only seen this happen in movies, just read about it in books. The two wed in April 1937, and food became a vital part of the life they built together. They socialized by having friends over for dinner, where Beck would make guests fish pâté in a pastry crust, serving it with Hollandaise sauce. Fischbacher taught her to have confidence in her abilities. With his encouragement, she began to shed the traumas of her previous loveless marriage, finding liberation in the kitchen. The chaos of World War II would intensify her ardour for food, which became a rare commodity. Fischbacher served in the army as a second lieutenant, stationed at the Eastern Front before the Germans took him captive. Back in Normandy, Beck would “carry on my own war,” she would later write, “dreaming up ways to send food to Jean.” She would pilfer Bénédictine from her family’s factory and trade it for butter, ham, and pâté that she would dispatch to Fischbacher. After Fischbacher’s release and the war’s end in 1945, Beck turned cooking into her identity. On her husband’s recommendation, she joined a high-class women’s gastronomic club called Le Cercle des Gourmettes in Paris. She found her footing in this exclusive circle quite quickly, hitting it off with one member in particular: Louisette Bertholle. Beck learned that Bertholle had been thinking about writing a cookbook for Americans all about French cooking. Beck’s husband convinced her to assist on that project. She didn’t hesitate. Beck taught herself how to type, and, over the next few years, worked tirelessly to breathe life into the book. She scoured her mother’s black recipe notebooks; she scanned her mind for recollections of Zulma’s cooking. Along the way, she and Bertholle produced a tiny recipe book called What’s Cooking in France, published by Putnam in America in 1952 to little fanfare; on her own, Beck also produced a small pamphlet devoted to prunes and prune liqueurs. These endeavors were just distractions, however, from the mammoth opus that consumed Beck’s energy. In 1950, when she was in her mid-forties, Beck submitted a book of a hundred-plus recipes to a family friend of hers, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Fisher was a famed author herself and a member of the editorial board of the Book of the Month club, a prominent subscription service in the United States. After months, Beck received a terse reply. “This is just a dry bunch of recipes, with not much background on French food attitudes and ways of doing things,” Fisher wrote. Fisher advised that the book would be better served with stories alongside those recipes. Beck’s husband told her not to be dismayed. Maybe she could find a collaborator other than Bertholle, a companion who knew French idiosyncrasies and the American way of viewing the world. It was a sharp suggestion, Beck realized. And she knew someone who fit the bill. *** Beck had met Julia Child at a party in early 1949. Born and raised in California, Child had worked at the Office of Strategic Services during the war, but she grew to love cooking after moving to Paris with her husband, Paul. When she and Beck met, Child was a student at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, yet she was upset with the lack of zeal among her classmates, most of whom were American World War II veterans. She yearned for a friend who cherished food like she did. “It was an immediate take,” Child would later write of her introduction to Beck. Child saw Beck as “good-looking and dashing in a most attractive and debonair way, full of vigor, humor, and warmth.” Beck, in turn, was struck by “this handsome, curly-headed woman” who stood over six feet tall. The two started plotting their partnership. Along with Bertholle, they began teaching cooking classes out of Child’s apartment, finding groups of Americans who were eager to grasp the fundamentals of French cuisine. The trio began calling their organization L’école des Trois Gourmandes, or “the school of three hearty eaters.” Teaching came easily to Child, yet Beck found the job unusually strenuous. Language was a particular obstacle. Though she knew English well, her manner of speech was decidedly British, her French accent foreign to American ears. In spite of such differences in ability, Beck and Child remained close, and Beck soon involved Child in the book project. When Beck showed Child her budding manuscript, Child found the directions lacking in clarity. So she gave it a makeover. By 1957, when the Childs found themselves back in America due to work, the book had swelled to nearly 900 pages. Child suggested they present the book to Houghton Mifflin, located in Boston. This required Beck to visit America for the first time in her life. Then 54, Beck went to New York that following January, finding Americans “casual, generous, and outgoing,” so far unlike herself. When she and Child traveled to Boston for their meeting, however, they were disappointed to hear that the publisher’s editors wouldn't even make time to see them, so they left the manuscript with a clerk. Six weeks later, Houghton Mifflin wrote Child to tell her that the book was unpublishable, too academic to resonate with readers. Beck, having faced such rejection before, wasn’t deterred. After three months in America, she returned to France and got to work, trading letters with Child until they completed another draft at the end of 1959. After countless queries, it landed on the desk of Judith Jones, an editor at the publishing house Knopf. Jones promised to publish the book in 1961. Jones titled it Mastering the Art of French Cooking, its three authors credited in alphabetical order, with Beck’s name first. The book was a slow burn with the American public, though the press recognized it as a groundbreaking work quite quickly. Craig Claiborne, the renowned food editor of the New York Times, thought its thousand-plus recipes, whether for quiche Lorraine or cassoulet, were “written as if each were a masterpiece, and most of them are.” The book emerged in an era when Americans were becoming hip to French cooking; over in the White House, the Kennedys had the French-born René Verdon as their chef. Promoting the book required Beck to return to America to tour the country with Child, back when the very concept of a tour for a cookbook struck many as outlandish. They rubbed elbows with luminaries of the era—the British cooking teacher Dione Lucas, the pre-eminent food personality James Beard—while giving department store demonstrations in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco. It was during this time, too, that both women made their Today show appearance. Their labour paid off. Sales skyrocketed. Knopf ordered a second printing of 10,000. Though Beck didn’t know it yet, Child’s brief taste of small screen glory would grow into a full-fledged hunger. By the time she and her husband had relocated to Cambridge , Child told Beck that she wanted to do a television show, thinking it would be a prudent way of getting word out about the book. In 1962, Child would make an omelette with mushrooms on a segment of an educational show broadcast on the public television station WGBH. Audiences responded to Child so emphatically that WGBH decided to give her a cooking show of her own. The cooking show was not exactly a new genre—both Lucas and Beard, for example, had their own in the 1940s—but it had yet to soar, lacking a figure who could fuse education with entertainment. With The French Chef, which began airing on WGBH in February 1963, Child offered just that. Viewers fell for the disarming lady who cleaned a pig’s ears and teeth with a toothbrush. Beck would later laud Child as “a natural film star”; she took to the camera like a moth to a porchlight. But Child began to wonder if her friend was suppressing some deeper sadness. On a late 1963 visit to Beck in France, Child vigorously dodged any mention of her show around Beck, writing that she “didn't want her to feel overshadowed.” According to her memoir, Beck didn’t seem to mind that great acclaim followed for Child. Child landing on the cover of Time magazine in 1965 boosted sales so much that the two women started toiling away together on a follow-up to Mastering the Art (sans Bertholle, who was busy with a book of her own). To make the writing easier, Beck and her husband even built the Childs a house not far from them in Provence where the American couple could live part-time. If the first cookbook had more of Beck’s stamp, Child took charge this go-around. Beck, then in her mid-sixties, found herself battling arthrosis. Plus, Child “gained confidence and authority, especially as she was the one living in America,” as Beck observed in her memoir. Once the cookbook appeared in 1970, Beck returned to America to publicize it. Child was the star of the proceedings, with Beck lucky to get any promotion. Any solo publicity Beck did grab framed her in terms relative to Child, with a Times headline declaring her “Simone Beck: The Cookbook Author Without a Show on TV.” People in Child and Beck’s orbit took note of friction between the two. “It became clear to me, in working so closely with Julia, that her relationship with Simca was growing more and more strained,” their editor Jones wrote in her 2009 memoir, The Tenth Muse. The two women “were like sisters who had long nourished each other but were ready now to go their separate ways.” Jones seemed more than happy to assist Beck in finding a new direction, telling her to write a book of her own based on a few recipes that had ended up on the cutting room floor. Beck heard similar clamours from fans she’d met on her book tour. So she began to write Simca’s Cuisine, a book co-authored with the American journalist Patricia Simon. The process was challenging. Jones, in her memoir, chides Beck’s supposed arrogance, saying she seemed allergic to constructive criticism. But she couldn’t deny Beck’s great instincts as a cook. Her recipes—for rolled soufflé filled with crab, eggplant quiche, and frozen caramel mousse—were from Normandy, from Alsace, from Provence. She included ingenious tips like how to cut onions without crying, telling cooks to “take a wooden kitchen match, light it, blow it out, and hold it between your teeth while slicing the onions.” Upon the book’s publication in 1972, Beck was quite proud. Vogue called it “simply and brilliantly done,” while the New York Times surmised it “is likely to be the last of the great personal cookbooks to come out of France.” In the Los Angeles Times, Jeanne Voltz noted that Child had “overshadowed” Beck while hinting at rumours of a “rift” between the two women, but that it didn’t matter, concluding that “this is a Frenchwoman’s gift of good home cooking to America’s venturesome cooks and eaters.” In spite of what registered to the public as obvious tension with Child, Beck came to terms with the fact that Mastering had served its purpose, allowing both her and Child to pursue their own passions. She could finally write—and live—as she wanted to. *** Beck spent the 1970s, a time when she was nearing her seventies, teaching and travelling. In 1976, she began a cooking school in Provence. But she also made time to jet around the world, conducting cooking demonstrations in Napa Valley and Venice. Though Beck had intended her 1972 cookbook to be her last, these journeys inspired her to write New Menus from Simca’s Cuisine, published in 1979. Co-authored with her American assistant Michael James, the book relied on ingredients common to America. Beck folded macadamia nuts into cakes, ice creams, and blue cheese balls; she trapped avocados in aspic with tarragon and port. In spite of its American orientation, the book didn’t garner the same stateside reception as Simca’s Cuisine. The Chicago Tribune frowned that the “book falls short of Beck's previous works” due to recipes that became bungled in translation. She juggled her career commitments against twin tragedies in her personal life: the death of a brother, her husband’s stroke. Her husband would later die of cirrhosis in 1986, the same year that America’s International Association of Cooking Professionals honored Beck with a gala reception. Though Beck welcomed such recognition from America’s food establishment, her partner’s death devastated her, and she struggled to find reasons to live in his absence. Her life’s final great project routed her away from her grief: Food and Friends, a memoir and cookbook co-written with the American journalist Suzy Patterson. Per Patterson’s recollection, it wasn’t an easy working relationship. “The fun/torture of it for me was writing it,” Patterson wrote in the Montreal Gazette. The trouble may have been worth it. The engaging book was split into two halves, the first weaving between memoir and recipes, the second dedicated to a mix of French and international recipes like Italian-style green gnocchi, nasi goreng, and Brazilian mocha ice cream. The press reacted well to Beck’s swan song, with the Times saying that reading it was “like listening to your mother tell those entrancing stories of when she was a little girl.” It was Beck’s old friend Child who had persuaded Patterson to write the book with her. Though the two women saw each other less often as Beck approached old age, their bond remained. “You've got to do this,” Child reportedly told Patterson. “Simca's life story is fascinating and should be told. *** Beck died mere months after the book’s publication, succumbing to heart problems in December 1991, when she was eighty-seven. “The doctor said that because she wouldn't eat, she died,” a cousin of hers explained to the Times. It was a cruel and poetic stroke of fate: Beck died because she lost her appetite. Her demise provoked widespread sorrow within the food establishment, with famed cooking teacher Peter Kump calling her “one of the most talented architects of the new gastronomic movement” in a Chicago Tribune piece. Child seemed especially crestfallen. “She was the first person who was interested in food the way I was—as a profession, a life-consuming passion,” Child told a journalist. “She felt as I did.” But in the years that followed, the historical record became unkind to Beck, all while Child’s prestige only grew. There were reports of the nicknames: Child’s husband Paul reportedly groaned of “Sigh-Moan,” commenting that she had a voice that could “be heard in Montevideo.” Judith Jones didn’t mince words when she referred to Beck as “condescending and difficult” in her memoir. Even the reappraisals have a tinge of viciousness: “No matter how refined her palate, her haughty, untelegenic French demeanor never won over the American public,” the writer Christine Muhlke observed in a 2006 T magazine piece. That’s not to say that saintly overcorrection is necessary in Beck’s case. In his 2017 book The Gourmands’ Way, the writer Justin Spring revealed how Beck’s hauteur could morph into ugly intolerance. “You’ll never find a communist in my house,” she told one reporter. She then continued: “The barbecue, where everyone joins together and has a good time, that has nothing to do with France. The melting pot works in the United States but not in this country.” Herein lies a reminder that Beck’s very way of perceiving the world was uncompromisingly, distinctly French. To be fair, many reputable figures have similar skeletons in their closet—in her 2007 biography Julia Child: A Life, the scholar Laura Shapiro unearthed evidence of Child’s homophobic attitudes, ugly sentiments that reportedly mellowed during the AIDS crisis. But Child’s well-documented prejudices have not prevented history from revering her. In the years following Child’s death, Nora Ephron would direct Julie & Julia, cementing her legend. The cultural fascination with Child is ongoing: A book of Child’s quotes appeared last year and documentary filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West directed Julia, released this past fall. An eight-episode dramatic scripted series, Julia, is currently in production from HBO Max, with Isabella Rossellini cast in the role of Beck. Beck hasn’t inspired such a cottage industry, but perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted it. Near the end of her life, Beck made peace with the fact that stardom wasn’t for her, a reality that does not negate her contributions to American food culture. “I have always felt that my professional success was largely due to America and its cooks,” she wrote in her memoir. “My friends over there wonder why I’ve never been known as a cooking star in France.” She had some guesses as to why. In France, cooking television wasn’t the expansive genre that it was in America. Cooking there was a serious art, not a form of entertainment. “We have rock stars and movie stars, sports stars and even chef stars,” Beck wrote. “But cookbook writers and teachers?” Beck found gratification in the work itself. She had recipes to write, students to teach, and she saw little use in becoming a household name. To cook in pursuit of fame? Why, there was nothing more American.
16.12.21
Talking to the author of Virtue about writing as shedding self-consciousness, the impossibility of living an uncompromised life in a compromised world, and Toni Morrison’s bathroom.
“I wanted badly to be good; I wanted desperately to be liked. It was easy to confuse the two.” The narrator of Hermione Hoby’s new novel Virtue (Riverhead), a half-formed young man called Luca, takes up an internship at a much-acknowledged literary magazine amid mass revolt. Above the battles in the streets, piety and complicity mingle uneasily. He grows enamoured with an older artist couple from that orbit, Paula and Jason, becoming their own object of fascination. Installed at the pair’s summer home, Luca comes across a newspaper piece about Paula’s latest show: dolls mimicking family life inside domestic miniatures. Hoby’s debut Neon in Daylight had that dizzy gait of somebody trailing behind a crush; the romantic flights of its characters always risked stumbling into the gutter. Virtue manages a more sceptical eye even while inhabiting a single narrator, as Hoby reveals her gift for describing excruciating social situations: The gallerist visibly straining to recall your importance, the patrician editor proclaiming let us see what can be done, “an invitation that now impressed me for being simultaneously inclusive and egotistic.” Whatever distance Luca finally does find from that world arrives as desolation. Chris Randle: You're calling from Boulder, right? Hermione Hoby: I am, yeah. Are you in Brooklyn? Yeah. It was apocalyptic a couple of nights ago and now it's a beautiful fall day. I really hope you're not in a basement apartment. How was it? It was fine for me personally, I'm a few floors up, but there was so much—the last I heard a dozen people had died, transit shut down. On the night of the storm itself somebody I know was at Newark Airport, and they got trapped there for hours, because there were no flights, and the complex was slowly filling up with water. During the last big storm a couple weeks ago, I was heading to a friend's going-away party, and when I passed through Metropolitan, the G train stop, it smelled like raw sewage. All this infrastructure is rotting out. Yeah, it seems like a lot of people even in New York had no idea this was about to happen. My friend texted me and said, "My basement's flooded," and I was like, oh no, her pipe's burst, and then looked at Twitter and was assaulted by these apocalyptic images. I don't know if you feel this too, but I find one of the difficult things (among many) about being alive right now is this sense that nowhere is exempt from climate disaster. That if there were a place that was somehow environmentally safe, everyone would move there and it would no longer be safe, you know? It just rained here and the skies are clear but there's been wildfire smoke for days. My partner just ran out to get another air purifier—there was that sense of, better get one before they run out, and I hate finding myself in that mentality, that scrabble to protect oneself. I think that's what's behind the whole Peter Thiel thing—this right-wing fantasy of moving to New Zealand. Yeah, exactly. Just hunker down. It's applying that capitalist logic to life itself. Absolutely. It's so depressing. I was having this conversation with some friends recently: what do we do and how do we survive? There were four of us, two men, two women, and the guys were like, you prep, you get cans of food or whatever. And me and my female friend were like, "Why would you want to survive in such a world?" [laughs] What would be the incentive to stay alive in Peter Thiel's world, a world of squillionaires hunkered down in their cabins and the rest of us fighting each other to live? That kind of dovetails with the first thing I wanted to ask, which—I don't know where you're from originally in England, but Boulder is a very different landscape, different from New York as well, so I'm wondering if that's affected the way that you write at all. I'm from the southeast London suburbs, and I was just there recently, finally seeing my family again. It felt very—I hope this doesn't sound snotty—it felt small to me: I fear I've been spoiled on these extraordinary mountain vistas. I think it felt, small, too, in a miserably post-Brexit way: inward-looking, cramped. I don't know how it's changed me as a writer; I know it's changed the way I feel and think. I feel slower, I feel much more relaxed. When I go back and visit New York, I wonder how I ever got work done, because it's so noisy. It’s a place of intense stimulation and excitement, and Boulder is of course a great deal sleepier, but it's been wonderful to be in a place that's quiet, and full of natural beauty. This is the first time in my life that I've had a room of my own to write in, and it makes such a difference to go into a space, close the door, and know that space is yours, a designated space for work. It makes me feel incredibly fortunate. I guess the way that being here has changed my writing is just having an office, which seems like an unromantic answer [laughs]. I'm writing something now which is not set in Colorado, so maybe my Colorado novel is to come. One of my friends keeps insisting I write a Western. Both of your novels are almost infatuated with New York City. They really are [laughs]. I guess you were still living here when you wrote the first one, but with Virtue, how did you summon that back up again? You mean summon the sense of New York while I was here? Yeah, I feel like I sort of became myself in New York—it's a foundational place for me. I had lived in London-proper for a couple of years after graduating, but I never felt the sense of... it's not ownership, it's more like, oh, this place gets me, and I get this place, the way that I felt as soon as I arrived in New York. I was just like: here it is. I think I moved to New York when I was 25, which is an impressionable age, and I felt like the city made me who I was. So it's still very fresh and accessible. Neon in Daylight is very much a New York novel, but with this one I didn't think I was writing a New York novel at all. To me the setting was sort of incidental, but the dynamics of the city certainly feature, and the beginning and the end are set in New York. I suppose with this one I felt like what was driving me wasn't place so much, as it was in the first book, but character. As soon as they'd become real to me, the engine was there. I didn't have to conjure the city consciously, the thing that was driving it was these people. It's kind of like, in Neon in Daylight the setting is its own aesthetic, and in this one it feels more sociological. It's really gratifying to be read like that, because I felt like I wanted to write a more grown-up novel than the first one, in which New York was not just, as you say, an aesthetic experience, but a place that was politically fraught as well. I was also curious about the shift in perspective, because your first book has a third-person narrator and the characters get introduced in this almost symphonic way, one by one, circling around each other. Whereas Virtue is first-person, more of a monologue, and I'm wondering why you chose to switch it up. I will answer the question properly [laughs], but the preface to the proper answer is that, whenever someone asks about choice, I always feel like, ah, it's not exactly choice. With this one I just had his voice in my head, unbidden. It was like this voice in the aether had chosen me for a moment, just jumped into my brain as its host. And then of course there was the choice to stick with it, and the choice not to shift into any other perspective, but Luca just seemed this compelling... presence to me. I also think there was something liberating about knowing that there would be no possible autobiographical confusion. I am absolutely not a young dude from Broomfield, Colorado. I think so much of writing is about shedding self-consciousness, following intuition, and allowing yourself to be strange and odd. To dodge the expected thing. By that I don't mean that people were expecting something of me, I just mean, in the work itself. I want it to be unpredictable, surprising, which is to say honest, and perhaps the vehicle of a young man as narrator made it easier to do all those things, because it was already removed from me. I was already inhabiting something strange and different. I had a lot of fun being a dude for four years, my shadow life as a young man. It's an act of madness to inhabit another person, but a fun one. I think there's also narrative contrivances that are kind of inherent to fiction, and first-person can lay them bare in a way that's sometimes obvious and annoying, like, oh yes, I just happened to find this cache of letters or whatever. But sometimes it also makes the whole design clear in a striking way. Yeah. I think one of the reasons I deployed this frame narrative, in which he's 34 and recollecting being 23, is that it seemed a way of doing first-person with some of the benefits of third-person, in that there was a sort of authorial voice working through the immediate voice of the young man—in other words, a double consciousness to the narration. It seemed to offer a malleability, whereby I could keep shifting, even within the space of a sentence, between the more reflective, older Luca and the young Luca who’s gauche and ardent and overwhelmed by the world. I was thrown by that near-future vantage point. Was it always framed that way? You know, originally it was much further in the future, like, a moment of facing mortality. I couldn't make it work, it just seemed cheesy and overblown, and I was like, "Well, if this moment in his youth was so important, why would he only be telling the story now, when he's 85 or whatever?" I kept trying, but I couldn’t convince myself. And then I thought about The End of the Affair, where the distance between what has happened and the point of narration is narrower, and that seemed emotionally truthful. As in, enough has changed in Luca’s life that it feels like a different time, but there's still this intense emotional residue. It seemed more plausible that he would be revisiting this time and thinking about it. I guess I had this sense that he's narrativizing this moment almost in an exculpatory way, it's self-mythologizing while knowing, as this older man, that self-mythology is a feature of youth, and that way no wisdom lies. And there's the little echo of that original framework, one of your most extraordinary passages, in Luca's reverie of his own deathbed. Oh, yeah! I feel like I'm admitting all my secrets now, but that originally was just his deathbed, straight up. And of course it was so corny, I couldn’t make it honest. My best friend read this very bad passage and generously, helpfully said, "This is almost like his fantasy of himself," and I was like, "Wait a minute, that's what it is!" This is him writing a fantasy deathbed scene, badly. It's a kind of false ending, I guess, one to do with wishfulness and self-fashioning. Yeah, it definitely fits with the... gnarled masturbation that he does, literally and figuratively. That's an intense phrase. I don't think you're wrong, but wow, yeah [laughs]. I really treasure good writing about clubbing—I didn't fully appreciate all the uses of dance music until my early twenties, which I think is true of Kate in Neon in Daylight as well. And I loved that passage where she's idling against the edge of the club: “It was a wall she found, a sallow wall, damp with moisture, but as she set her back to it the floor started to tilt, gently, some sick tease. When she blinked, she wished she hadn’t: everything refracted and blurred, trailing echoes of itself, woozily haloed in gold.” Is that a similar experience that you had? Well not that precise experience, no, but also I hear you say that and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so old, once I did drugs and went to clubs [laughs]. Although I guess none of us have been doing that over the past year and a half—for very good reason. My experience was probably pretty standard for people of my demographic; I had ecstatic, revelatory-seeming nights, a few in London, many more in New York. New York always just felt way more fun to me than London, still does. Like, a greater sense of possibility: a spirit of optimism and permissibility, rather than the defeatism and inhibition I perhaps unfairly associate with the UK. That novel feels like ancient history to me now—it was very much a novel of my twenties—but I do remember that one of the things I was thinking about was intoxication, in all its forms. You know, what was real and what was cheap and illusory. If you have what feels like a transcendent experience and it's been induced by taking ecstasy, is that any less meaningful than something I'm more likely to do now, which is hike to the top of a mountain at dawn? Or not at dawn, I need my sleep. Anyway. I think the answer is no, they're both valid—but I'm sure you've seen this too, we probably know a lot of people, we probably love a lot of people, who have become trapped in intoxication. So I don't want to be sounding blithe about what can be life-limiting or even life-ruining, but I had fun [laughs]. I hope that fun may return to us at some point. I do miss dancing. With any kind of intoxication there's this delicate balance or tension between feeling embodied and feeling weightless. I was at this friend's going-away party a couple of weeks ago, you know, molly-fied, and I didn't realize how much I had missed standing with people outside, feeling the individual beads of sweat on your skin against your shirt, hearing the muffled pulse of music coming from inside. Yes! That's beautiful. And when all of that is aligned it's just the best feeling. I think that's when I feel most at home in a body. But when those are misaligned, you don't realize how awful you're being or stumbling around blackout drunk, rampaging, unaware of what you're doing— You're right, it's a delicate thing, and I have a horror of being insensitive to other people, which is probably why I haven't gone totally crazy on intoxication, because that's just the worst. But it's exciting to see how much is being written about in terms of psychedelics, it seems like so many people are coming round to the therapeutic effects, whether you're taking them recreationally or in a more controlled way. A friend of mine right now is doing this ketamine therapy in a totally legit, controlled way, and it seems transformative. I'm like, I need to do more psychedelics before I die. Mushrooms are legal in Colorado, so I should get on it [laughs]. Weren't they one of the first states to legalize weed as well? There's dispensaries, right? Yeah. Ben, my partner, sometimes jokes, "If my 16-year-old self could see me now, living in a place where weed is legal, he'd be so disappointed in me for not being totally baked every day." I think weed isn't cool here now because it's legal. The last time I went home to Canada, where's it's legal nationwide, there's signs at the airport like, "Please declare your weed paraphernalia." I think Canadian travel regulations are the most uncool you can possibly get, so. It would be great if all drugs are legalized in our lifetimes. I'm sounding like some kind of crazy drug advocate, but maybe I am [laughs]. I feel like the great ambivalence at the heart of Virtue is complicity—have you read The Line of Beauty, the Alan Hollinghurst novel? There's a line towards the end of it, where a member of the Tory MP's family the protagonist has been living with says, "We always supposed that you understood your responsibilities to us." Embracing somebody and throttling them at the same time. And the characters in your book, they don't have that sort of political power, or even all of the wealth, but they are very comfortable, very much ascendant in the culture industry. Absolutely. I guess I'm wondering, how do you think complicity operates in that particular world, as opposed to, like, "Yeah, I'm just hanging out with these grotesque plutocrats and Margaret Thatcher." It's really interesting that you say complicity. A novelist friend of mine read this book just before it was published, at the same time as Sally Rooney's novel [Beautiful World, Where Are You], and she's like, "You and me and Sally were all writing about the same thing! It's complicity!" I don’t mean to arrogantly align myself with Sally, who’s such a fucking genius! But what I mean is, I don't think you or my novelist friend are wrong. I guess one of the questions that was really driving me from the start with this (outside of the novel, too; it'll be troubling me for my whole life) is how to live an uncompromised life in such a deeply compromised world. And of course it's not possible. Like, here's my iPhone, people in China maybe died to make this. If we investigate almost any part of our lives, and follow the trail, it so often leads to subjugation and unconscionable crimes against humanity [laughs]. I don't mean my laughter to be glib, it's just the absurdity of—how do you try to be a good person when the world is set up in this way? Should Paula and Jason, if they actually care, just give away all their money? And I suppose this ties to the question of—I think Luca makes it explicit quite early on in the book—the small world and the big world. This is actually how you and I kind of started this conversation. If you're Peter Thiel, you make your small world, you retreat to your bunker and just look after yourself and adopt a fuck-everyone-else mentality. And that, of course, is pure hell on earth. I probably sound pathetically idealistic saying this, but I want us to live in a world of mutuality and care and community, one in which we all acknowledge and honor our interdependence. When the pandemic began I had such a naïve thought along these lines: that this global disaster would wake us up to our commonality. So the big question for me was, how much attention does one pay to the small world, the world you can manage, your immediates and your home and your small community, and how much do you look outward to the civic and the political and the national, the international. I think Zara has chosen the latter, she's on a mission and she can't really form close bonds because of that. Whereas Paula is like, "Well, I've got my kids, and it's up to me to bring up these kids and make my art and that's what I'm doing." Luca is torn between these choices. All of us could be doing more, but we also I think have a duty to our own happiness. Particularly in those first years of the last administration, there was just this constant feeling of, am I doing enough? I've set up my donation to the ACLU and RAICES, but could I afford more? Should I be volunteering more? If I miss a march to go see a movie, does that make me a bad person? So we're all complicit. I mean, maybe there are a few people living off the grid, that's not exactly complicity, but it is a refusal of the world. The challenge is to find a way to be in the world that doesn't feel so desperately morally compromising, and I don't know how to do that. I'm trying [laughs]. And a lot of these galleries and little magazines and other institutions love to say the right things even as they also love union-busting, or not paying their workers enough to live on. Totally, I know. Last summer all these huge companies were loudly proclaiming "we stand with Black Lives Matter" while quietly paying the women who clean their offices, predominantly women of color, below minimum wage. We live in such an age of presentationalism when it comes to politics, as in, “let’s make it look good”—never mind what's actually going on beneath the surface. Do you remember when one of the Whitney Museum's trustees got forced to resign, for being an evil—his police-equipment company was actually called Safariland, as if he were some pith-helmeted colonist. Several writers published a collective statement against him, with a line I just returned to: "The rapacious rich are amused by our piety, and demand that we be pious about their amusements." Mmm, that's a very good line. And I love how you describe that whole world in the first half of the novel, the countess who funds the little magazine and the elderly WASP editor. When you're writing things like that, obviously they're not precise analogues of anyone, but there's also a lot of... grist for that particular mill. Do you ever find yourself consciously filing details away...? Oh yeah, I'm just a glinty-eyed little magpie all the time. The crazy thing about fiction is that, by the time you've written it, you actually forget what was stolen from reality and what was purely invented, such lines become blurred. One friend sent me a beautiful email about the book, it's an email I will treasure, but I had forgotten that there is a scene—you know when they go to the square dance in Maine? I had totally forgotten that I'd sort of taken that from a real experience which I’d shared with her, not in Maine, the details changed. She said something like, "You were just hovering above it all the whole time," which is a nice thing to say, but it's slightly sinister too [laughs]. In transmuting reality into fiction, the fiction necessarily becomes more real to you than its originating material. My first years in New York, I was lucky in that my visa status was such that I couldn't work for American publications. So in a way this lent my social interactions a kind of... innocence, I guess? If I was talking to someone at a party, it wasn't like trying to get published in whatever magazine. I was just experiencing it in a slightly anthropological way, which I think all fiction writers do. It's fascinating to observe human beings. One part of Virtue I became slightly obsessed with was Luca's... sexual indeterminacy? Very well put, yeah. I had been describing him as a straight white guy, and then I was like, well, mostly straight. Straight-ish. There's that wonderfully oblique line about his later encounter inside the infinity room with the Japanese artist. It seems pretty clear that he's not straight, but maybe too much of his identity is bound up in that. Yet at the same time he's very clearly sexually obsessed with both halves of this artist couple. And they're kind of encouraging it, pushing and pulling. I guess I don't really have a question...? [laughs] Yeah, let's just talk about that [laughs]. Is that something that emerged while you were writing the book? I had a sense from the very beginning that he would be obsessed with these two. And then as it went on I wanted him to be more obsessed with Paula, or at least the sexual attraction was more pronounced with Paula, but that didn't preclude some sexual current between him and Jason. So often the choices, because these were choices, were about it not being precise. I didn't want anything to be simple. So I didn't want it to be that he's equally sexually attracted to these two people, I wanted his sexuality to be a little mysterious. I want it always to be complicated, uncertain, because that to me seems more truthful. That's the kind of fiction I want to read, mostly. I wanted to apply that principle to pretty much every character in every situation. For example, with Zara, she is this young woman of extraordinary principle who at one point rails against the heternormative beauty industrial complex, but I also wanted her to paint her toenails, you know? It's like, there are these minor, petty, inconsequential hypocrisies within her way of living, because she's a human being. Similarly, I wanted her to maybe be a little bit mean as well as smart. I wanted everyone to feel as real as they possibly could. And that, to me, felt like trying to dodge the received or the even vaguely stereotypical at every turn. But of course the problem with that is that you have to be believable, too, and I think it's a fine line to walk between cliché and the received on one hand, and the improbable or outlandish or completely unrelatable on the other. That was one of the many challenges [laughs]. I can't speak for straight people, but there's definitely couples that I know where—they're not inviting me to their beach house and I'm not becoming obsessed with them or anything, but I've definitely found myself going, am I attracted to both of you, or am I attracted to an idea of your life? Totally, exactly! I've had that too—it's like, I find you both sexy, but is what I'm finding sexy your couplehood, your life, or is it you as individuals? And very often I think it's the couplehood, two people who are really into each other and have extraordinary chemistry, they can often become attractive to you, because you kind of want to be them, I guess. Or at least be in on that energy in some way. I remember reading that Diane Arbus had this fantasy project where she would go into people's houses and photograph them while they slept. Or even when I'm catsitting, it's not like a fetishy thing, but I love seeing how other people live, you know? Oh my god, me too. When I was doing interviews, it would thrill me when the interview was at their house, because I'm just so curious. I interviewed Toni Morrison and I got there and I really needed to pee, and she was the warmest and realest, just a force of all that’s good. She was like, there's the bathroom or whatever, and I was like, oh my God, I'm in Toni Morrison's bathroom. But it didn't need to be Toni Morrison, it's not that she was Toni Morrison, it's just that thrill of being in someone else's space, seeing how other people live. I think that's what drives me as a novelist, the fascination with other people. I'm just ravenously nosy all the time. Do you think if Luca ran into either half of that couple individually, would he still have become obsessed in the same way? I think not to the same degree. It is about the heat of them as a couple, as well as who they are individually. It's almost like, the whole domesticity of it feels very conventional on one hand, but then there's the third party making everything faintly perverse. Absolutely. I think you kind of alluded to this earlier: he dynamizes their relationship. They're getting off on knowing that he's awed by or attracted to the two of them. The erotics are triangular. There's that passage where he feeds a handheld ice cream to Paula... Oh yeah, I wrote "Magnums," and my wonderful editor Cal was like, with a little blushing face in the margins, "Do we need to specify ice cream, not condoms?" He's simultaneously wrapped up in the physical response and watching it happen. Exactly. That's narration, right? To traduce Wordsworth, it's horniness recollected in tranquility. This goes back to what we were saying about the dual voice, the simultaneity of the self and the narrated self. Virtue uses Cy Twombly's paintings as semaphore for the flush of infatuation. What elicited that association for you? Is there any other art hanging over the novel in a similar way? So, this will sound like a bafflingly oblique answer, but I often think of John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about Whitney Houston. It was just a brief thing after she died, and at some point in this highly thoughtful, intelligent piece of critical appreciation, he says something like, “her voice was so good.” The sentence is that simple, unadorned and, in a way, gorgeously thoughtless. It seemed to be a humble recognition of the way in which some things—certain paintings, infatuation itself, the miracle of Whitney’s voice—are beyond intellection. A person can cerebrate over abstract art, for example—a worthy enterprise!—but when they get in a room with a Twombly canvas they might discover thinking goes out the window. The novels I love most are dynamized by this tension, between the felt and the thought. What are you working on right now? I'm working on... well, I hope it becomes a novel. Right now it’s just a messy Word doc, so I feel a bit superstitious about declaring it to be a third novel, but I hope that's what it becomes. It involves a British man who becomes a Hollywood actor…
09.12.21
Talking to the author of Imperial Nostalgia about the complex British relationship to class, culture war diversions, and toppling statues.
Shortly after local activists sent a statue of slaver-merchant Edward Colston tumbling into Bristol Harbour on June 7, 2020, The Daily Telegraph interviewed Nigel Biggar, a monkish conservative and theology professor at Oxford’s Christ Church College, who complained: “It’s not fashionable to stand up for the British Empire.” Biggar has spent the past few years doing precisely that, with a speciality in apologetics for the diamond magnate and Napoleonic megalomaniac Cecil Rhodes; his statue still looms above Oxford’s High Street, a tribute to the machinations that warped southern Africa. Peter Mitchell’s new book, Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves (Manchester University Press), critiques this reactionary vogue, moving from right-wing fury against seditious university students to the literary-political construction of the “imperial wonder boy,” always naively worldly, born to rule over some distant undetermined land. Mitchell excavates the battlefield beneath today’s culture warriors, showing how Oxford itself became a storehouse of colonial knowledge, and how imperial historiography was created by obscure Victorians like George Birdwood, an expert on Indian handicrafts who nonetheless declared the subcontinent was incapable of high art. (“[A] boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul,” he dismissed one Buddha statue at the time.) How to unravel these faerie glamours, to disenchant their dream-castles? “Nostalgism’s political trajectory is apocalyptic,” Mitchell writes. “It tends towards mythical return, purgative violence and fantasies of a transcendently renewed state: Odysseus’s massacre of the suitors on a grand scale.” Chris Randle: Can you talk about the whole project that inspired this book? Peter Mitchell: What interested me was, as I think I say at the beginning of the book, I was working on a project about the British Empire, kind of on the way to becoming a historian of the British Empire, in 2016 when the Brexit referendum happened. And I think the Brexit referendum is a symptom rather a cause of anything, but I was feeling that it's only really new to comfortable white people that certain violences are continual, are terrifying—I was well aware by 2016 that there was a new reactionary wave in what I guess we have to call the West, and the role of imperial history and the imperial imaginary within that, especially in Britain and in England, really concerned me. I never really became an academic, but in my PhD I had worked on the empire's own creation of a mythical past, the way empire itself rehearsed certain historical scripts. I'm fascinated by the twin tracks of research in the book, where you're simultaneously looking at the historiography of imperialism alongside these present-day reactionary bleatings. What was your whole process like with that? I'm not sure that it actually worked that well, but one intervention I wanted to make, and the one intervention that I think should be made more forcefully, is that the past also has a past. Reactionary movements tend to produce pasts as stable entities, without violent and odd and conflicted relationships with themselves or with the past that they themselves have to deal with and negotiate. The tropes that come up in public discourse about the Empire include stuff like, "No one would've had these kinds of opinions back then." And you're like, well, which back then is this? You assume a historical time outside time, in which certain things just weren't in contention, when people knew where they fit in. And of course that's the whole structure of nostalgia, that the past is a place in which you would have known who you were, and you would've known who everyone else was, and in reality no one ever has. I thought that was important, a really basic point that people other than me probably made more interestingly once, but an important thing for people to reckon with in approaching how the culture war relates to history, so they're not seduced by reaction. To understand that the past has always been contingent, that there's no actual, empirically verifiable past to which one adds politics as a kind of overlay. Approaching this stuff now, you could say, "That's nostalgia," the connotation being that nostalgia never existed until now, as if there wasn't this way of relating to the past until now. So during the pandemic here when we had our absolutely demented mass nostalgization of VE Day, it was like, why are we so weird about this, people weren't so weird back then. People were weird about the past in 1945. People were really weird about the past in 1945 [laughs]. And in 1875. And when Cecil Rhodes was alive. Cecil Rhodes was a fucking lunatic about the past! The imperial nostalgists and apologists of today would be knocked into a cocked hat by how insane Cecil Rhodes was about the past. I was familiar with the whole idea of the invention of tradition, partly from that Tom Nairn book [The Enchanted Glass] about the monarchy, where he mentions how many supposedly ancient royal traditions were invented by the Windsors to seal their legitimacy. But you delve into figures I'd never heard of, like George Birdwood, or the absurdly named Francis Younghusband, who anticipated Boris Johnson: "Oh dear, I seem to have blundered into invading Tibet and ransacking all of their treasures." And interestingly, because of this particular cultural moment, [Younghusband] later becomes a racially charged kind of syncretist "Eastern mystic." He gets really into symbologies and how Man will attain the Godhead. There's actually a mistake in the book, where I'm writing later about Sandy Arbuthnot, the hero of various John Buchan thrillers, saying he's always meeting his adversary in a high mountain pass and gazing into his eyes and finding the measure of the man. That's not fiction—I had that mixed up with Younghusband in real life. He met his Russian counterpart in a tent and they drank loads of vodka and sized each other up. I was wondering, as somebody who's gone through a ton of this stuff now, how much of the historiography of empire is still informed by these people? Obviously there's been a big counter-movement over decades, but... I'm not totally confident answering that because I’m not a professional imperial historian; there's far better people to ask. But, as it should be, this is a really fertile time for imperial history as it's practiced here and in the U.S. and elsewhere. The scale of the work being done is really impressive. Obviously the historical profession has its own problems of entry qualifications and social makeup, which aren't being helped by certain structural issues in higher education, but history seems to be doing pretty well. There's all this stuff generating noise and energy—I think it's an exciting time to be an imperial historian in a university at the minute. And I think we have to remember that out of the loudest voices in the profession who're doing imperial apologetics, very few of them are really professional historians anymore. They're just not in the game. Niall Ferguson long ago gave up being a historian to become a kind of jester in the court of the powerful. [laughing as a cat named George saunters over to the laptop] That cat's massive. One of the points you make is that the British Empire never really had mass popularity behind it—I thought of Joseph Chamberlain's "Imperial Preference" scheme, which is so fantastically obscure now. It was sort of Chamberlain's attempt to resolve the inherent tensions between cosmopolitan capitalism and jingoistic nationalism. And it just didn't work. It flew apart. In one of Stuart Hall's essays about Thatcherism he talks about how she translated this arcane, freakishly niche ideology into a popular idiom that spoke to people. How do you see the ideas and images of empire being used in that way today? Well, that's the whole book really, isn't it [laughs]. Maybe to be more specific, do you see any cases of that breaking down? In the book you mention British working-class support for the Morant Bay rebellion, and something like the toppling of Edward Colston's statue feels reminiscent of that. It's hard to say because what I'm writing about, or writing against, is a very few writers for certain newspapers and a very few members of the Conservative Party. I'm writing against an attempt by an elite to create a structure of feeling out of a variety of—obviously they'd like to hope it's already there for them to conjure up, but it's not, people's natural relationship with the past is far more mysterious and inchoate than we think. And the only way to point out what it is, especially in a country where access to the means of representation and argumentation is as unequally distributed as this one, is to float a proposition and see whether people rise to it. I've just been reading a cover article from The Spectator a couple weeks ago about how the National Trust has lost the nation's trust. And it's just absolutely fucking bonkers. But the idea is, can I make your property-owning granddad angry enough by telling him that the National Trust has been taken over by Black Marxist revolutionaries who want to murder him for being white? The only way to find out if you can do that is to do it. And to some extent it works and to some extent it doesn't. The question is, is it enough to keep him voting Conservative until he dies? Is there some way you can convey the operations of British media to outsiders? In the U.S. there's Fox News, but only a small fraction of the country actually watches that. I guess it's a similar audience of older, white, propertied classes giving themselves black tar heroin. We have a really, really complex relationship to class here. The map of class stratification between who reads The Times and The Daily Telegraph and who reads the Daily Mail and who below that reads The Sun and the Express is really complicated and really tiring to navigate—but all of these papers work together in advancing a reactionary agenda that takes a lot from the States. We’ve learnt a lot from the States, especially in terms of how to prosecute a culture war, since the Nixon revolution. But the other half of it we get from Central Europe, from the French Front National, from the AfD in Germany, from Orbán in Hungary and [Andrzej] Duda in Poland. I think we're increasingly seeing the influence of a European tradition of blood-and-soil nationalism. We're not settler colonists, we're the real thing, and I think the new New Right here, whatever you want to call it, is getting better at understanding that and consolidating those narratives. How it works in terms of elections is that a lot of this media exists to keep the proportion of the country that votes and owns property voting for, if not for the Conservative Party, then voting against any redistributive politics. As is the case in the States as well, the demographic that's held the balance of electoral power since the Second World War is about to leave the stage ... There's no one central idea, a lot of this stuff is more chaotic than its creators would like to imagine, but the central thrust of it is to manufacture a politics of resentment, and to drive progressive and left-wing and class-based race and gender politics out of the acceptable mainstream. And that worked, we saw it work with Jeremy Corbyn. I campaigned a lot in the 2019 general election, and the biggest divide wasn't between white and black or rich and poor, it was between people who owned property and people who didn't. People who owned property were like, "Oh, I've always voted Labour, but I just don't know, it's just, mm." It's like, something's clearly stuck here—there's a sense taken hold that something is just not quite right about these fairly unambitious social-democratic redistributionist politics. And actually so much of the libeling of Corbyn preyed on his anti-colonial politics. I feel like he didn't even talk about Palestine that much after becoming leader, but there was also his IRA sympathies, or like, "look at the Old Fool publicly caring about the Chagos Islanders again." Venezuela came up every day of the election cycle. Up here in Newcastle, local Conservative candidates were saying, “The Labour candidate will turn Newcastle East into Venezuela-on-Tyne” [laughs]. Corbyn’s association with Diane Abbott, the fact that they used to go out with each other... that stuff about how he went to Jamaica and came back as an anti-colonialist. He went native in the wrong way, which I think has power especially because he's from a privileged class of English boy, and he went to a private school. That kind of acculturation is supposed to be a prophylactic against the seductions of the colony. Half of the drama of the colonial mission arises from when those boundaries fail to be policed. With the British media I also think of that combination of prurience and moralism, like, simultaneously nursing this Epstein-like obsession with teenage girls and raving about "gender ideology." This is something I've noticed a bit about universities. Someone on Twitter the other day was like, "The press has a hell of a weird interest in what happens in student common rooms." They like to put the gendered and often not-white bodies of the students on the front pages of their papers, scour people’s social media for pictures of them looking particularly nubile, make you hate students but want to shag them too. I mean, the trans thing is obviously incredibly prurient—these people are completely obsessed with people’s undercarriages. Really odd. Maybe that is more of an English thing, what with our humour that's constantly in the toilet. On the cliffs at the end of my street someone has carved an enormous pictograph of a cock—you know, with a big bulbous end et cetera—out of the living rock. We’re not necessarily any more insane than other cultures, but the precise lineaments of our insanity are, uh, interesting. That dovetails with your chapter about the essential boyishness of the imperial adventurer—to me the phrase "the Great Game" is so revealing of that, an endless series of intrigues and skirmishes and mini-invasions that killed many thousands of actual people, but to the occupiers it was all a jape. I forget who said this, it was some leftist academic type, but they had a tweet about how the main theme of 21st-century politics is impunity. Obviously there's Boris Johnson, where he can do almost anything and then skate away, because of his class affect— There was that amazing moment during the election campaign where the other party leaders got interviewed, they'd all agreed to it, and then they were like, "So, now it's Boris Johnson's turn." And he just went, no, fuck you, I don't care, I'm Boris Johnson, I’m not doing it. I think that's right about impunity. And so much of that imperial-wonder-boy stuff is bound up with a kind of fetishized fragility. I've just been reading Time's Monster by Priya Satia, about the different stages and cultures of British imperialism and their own histories, and it's fantastic. She writes about Lawrence of Arabia, where he's such a fragile little boy even when he's doing a massacre. He's so sad after he murders a guy that they have to lift him up into his camel's saddle, he's just too weak to do it himself. He's having an attack of the vapours because of all the people he’s killed. But the fragility is a function of the impunity, in a way: he gets to dispense violence, be feted for how daring it was, how sensitive, how beautifully described in the most delicate prose, and then he goes home and gets killed much later in a mysterious accident, because someone that magical can only die by intrigue or suicide. "If you'd been any prettier, they would've called it Florence of Arabia," Noel Coward said to Peter O'Toole after the film came out. One of the other themes of that chapter in your book is the winnowing of that whole class or sub-class, like, Rory Stewart is out of a job now. Jacob Rees-Mogg is obviously an important figure in the Conservative Party, but even now I can't imagine him ever becoming leader. He's useful for his role, which is to model a certain affect, a certain kind of political theatre that he provides. And I think the Tories are getting better at using him for that. Whether he's conscious of it is another question. And I'm sure Rory Stewart will be around for the rest of our natural lives. One of the things I always want to say about culture-war stuff is that single interventions, single figures, are diversions in a way from the main thing being communicated. Take that Nigel Biggar guy that I spend a chapter on. He's not interesting, nothing he says is interesting, none of the debates he engages in are really worth engaging in. It's what he channels, the larger structure of feeling that he enables you to access, that's important. So, you know, there'll be plenty more Rory Stewarts; there are thousands in waiting. Rees-Mogg is useful because he's such an oddity, but you could make a version of him out of pipe cleaners and plonk it in the House of Commons and have it occasionally squawk a few words of Latin and it would have the same effect. And Boris Johnson, he's very happy to draw on these tropes, these structures of feeling. What I find amazing about him is the way his appetites continue to grow. That Billy Bunter thing where he's always snaffling the pie from the window ledge. It just gets bigger and bigger with him, it doesn't seem to stop. The more you put in front of him the more he eats, and he'll eat until he bursts. He just can't have enough, and he doesn't know why he wants it. It's a Homer Simpson thing, and it's impossible not to kind of love, like having a stupid dog. Unfortunately your stupid dog is also an authoritarian who would happily see you dead if you can’t supply his needs. I think that's why there's these perpetual intrigues to get rid of him. Maybe not right now, since the Labour Party is being fully Pasokified, but there's this sense that he's just too slippery, a little bit too much of a libertine, not really the ideal figure to usher in managed democracy. Yeah, he doesn't work hard enough. I'm not really a political commentator, but I don't think we should ever underestimate the extent to which the Conservative Party is a riven organization, and what this country has been living through for the past five or ten years isn't so much a crisis of political democracy as a crisis of the Conservative Party. We're all living through their civil war. But it's a fascinating organization, because we have a hereditary ruling class and that ruling class has a party that's spent the balance of the past century in power. And that makes for a very odd kind of democracy, and an absolutely bonkers culture given that the ruling class also pretty much oversees that culture. Yeah, like, I believe the UK is still the most regionally unequal nation in western Europe. Yep. And you can see that in Rory Stewart, when he talks about his travels, and the way that for him the field of the regional isn't really that far away from the field of the colonial. Is he in a working men’s club in Easington or is he at a wedding in Kandahar? Who knows? What’s the difference? It's all territory to be mapped and conquered. There's that Victorian ethnography you dig up, which was written like a Quillette article or something. It's talking about the "negresence" of northerners and the Irish. Yeah, exactly. I worry that I’m stretching a thesis a bit, and being a bit too deterministic about how the colonial gaze gets turned on Britain's fringes, which are also its "heartlands," when that’s convenient. But it does, you know? Beyond anything else, it’s easily mapped out in the sense that some people exist to act and some people exist to be acted upon. And people especially in the North exist to be acted upon, in much the same way that people on the colonial periphery did. It's different, of course, because we have the privilege of whiteness, but as I say in that chapter, some whitenesses are more provisional than others, and sometimes our whiteness is extremely useful for underwriting the white supremacy of people who'd rather not say it with their whole chest. That's one of the things that's annoyed me more than anything else in politics over the past few years: whenever someone in London wants to say something racist or transphobic, they'll invent an imaginary working-class friend from where I'm from. What was that one reactionary-safari piece in The Guardian? With the artisanal pizzeria owner who was also a landlord? Oh, the pizza guy! He was a landlord business owner, but his opinions were properly working class because they were reactionary! I adored him. I think there's limits to how useful these anecdotes are, but I spent election day 2019 in Stockton South, which we lost, under the Labour MP who got parachuted into Hartlepool a few weeks ago and had his arse handed to him [laughs]. And in Stockton South there's loads of people who've been driven mad by the Daily Mail and they're nuts and they're racist, but also loads of people who Labour traditionally didn't really think about—they’d count on having their votes but keep it on the down-low, or assume they wouldn’t vote at all—who were absolutely red-hot for Corbyn. It was when I went round the estates, kind of out-of-town, not a lot of amenities, but they're for people who own property, and they want to own a nice house that has some Doric pillars on the porch and enough space for two cars and a garage. And everyone who answered the door there wanted me to know that they've always voted Labour until now. This is obviously part of the reactionary script in this country, everyone's always voted Labour until this one point where they've gone too far, which is now. They've probably been saying that for 30 years. But these guys were serious about their working-class identity, and I'm not going to question that. And they weren’t wrong to look at me in the certain way that you look at some dickhead who grew up with books in the house and went to university down south, because I am that dickhead and I did go down south. They were basically telling me that they couldn't possibly, as working-class people, as people who knew what's what, they couldn't possibly support this kind of stuff, it might be all right for the likes of me. I kind of wanted to say, "I made 12 grand last year and I live in a room where I can't stand up straight in London. You live in a house with Doric pillars on the front porch." One of your favourite phrases in this book is "the imaginary," which I like a lot as well. Do you see a counter-imaginary happening at all, against these zombies of empire? This is one particular historical imaginary that's been activated, and to some extent conjured and created, by reactionary politics. But there's absolutely shitloads of counter-imaginaries, it's one of a whole galaxy of them in this country. All historical imaginaries are nostalgic to an extent, but there's other nostalgias, like the welfare-state nostalgia we have, if you've seen Ken Loach's film The Spirit of '45. I find it dismaying, but a lot of Corbynism was based on, like: "Remember 1945 to '48, when we created the welfare state? That was great!" And the post-war utility aesthetic. Remember the war, but in a socialist way. We have our mythologies about the International Brigades—it's not a hugely widespread mythology here, but if you know about the International Brigades in this country, it's likely that you think they were a good thing. I remember going to university and talking with someone who said, "Well, some people went to fight for Franco, and they were good chaps too," and just being absolutely horrified, because I'd never come across that before, because it was so unusual to hear someone speak about the Spanish Civil War in a way that didn’t come from the left. We have the whole British-leftist political imaginary going back to the Peasants’ Revolt, the Civil War, the Levellers and the Diggers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. So there's a leftist historical pantheon and heroic narrative, we have those traditions as well. I imagine there are emergent traditions from immigrant communities that I'm mostly not aware of. And a lot of our best art and writing over the past century has been about presenting counter-imaginaries like that. I was helping a mate the other day with an article about northern literature, and we ended up talking about Alasdair Gray, the Scottish writer. His whole project was to stake out another imaginary that would counter the imperial British one. I've just watched a bunch of short films by Ayo Akingbade, which are all micro-histories of Black British people, both formally and politically radical. With cinema, like the Colston statue, I feel like there's a reason so many people were simultaneously horrified or galvanized by that, because it was such a dreamlike—this fact of the landscape just toppling into the water. It was a really emotional moment over here. How much coverage did it get in the States? It's hard to say, because so much of it happened via social media, and I never watch, like, cable news, but it was all over. People were joyously losing their minds here as well. I think there's an expectation, certainly on the part of people who pay for statues and have them commissioned, that they're not to be questioned. Even in Toronto where I'm from, there's this university called Ryerson, which is named after a Macaulay-like figure, Egerton Ryerson. They just pulled him down, didn't they? Yeah! He was one of the main architects of the residential school system, which is back in the news in Canada now after the discovery of these mass graves. Hundreds of children. So the university is gesturing towards changing its name, and meanwhile a bunch of people surreptitiously took his own statue and dumped it into Lake Ontario. The university was like, "Yeah, we're not going to replace it." What sort of recent historiography or books or other interventions would you suggest for people to read if they wanted to delve further into this, the question of empire? There's loads coming out right now—my book is in the middle of a huge splurge of stuff. It depends what it's for? The journalist Sathnam Sanghera, who's a really cool guy, he's written a book called Empireland for the general reader. It's kind of like, if your dad has been going on about mad students taking down statues, this is the book to give him. So it'll probably do more good than anyone else's book in the entire field, in terms of working against the ways reaction captures people, and meeting them where they are. Alex von Tunzelmann is publishing a really good book called Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History. Priya Satia’s book that I mentioned before, Time’s Monster, basically does what my book just about barely attempts, but on a grand scale, and about a million times better than I ever could. Obviously anyone wanting to understand race and history in contemporary Britain has to read Paul Gilroy, and I’ve always loved Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolphe Trouillot. The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks is really good, really emotional and challenging, and sort of visionary in how it approaches the museums issue. I was genuinely troubled by it, in good ways. I really want to read that one, partly because it seems like the culture industry is such a redoubt of people who are—not unapologetic Nigel-Biggar-style imperialists, more like, "It's very bad that all these things happened, and we're going to sponsor a workshop or something, but please don't make us give back our looted treasures." There's a book called White Innocence by Gloria Wekker, from the Netherlands, which is just about a perfect explication, albeit in a different national context, of what's at stake in all this. I think what's really important for people to read isn't so much about the empire—I mean, obviously we need to know more about it—but as I try to make clear in this book, most of the time it's not even about that, that's just the thing it's being hung on. What we need, and this is something that comes down to the level of school curricula, is historiographical literacy, for people to understand how the past is used and what it's for. It's not just there being true, it's a political object that's always in contention. And for that there's classics like Raphael Samuel, like, everyone could do with reading Raphael Samuel. Patrick Wright is a writer who's still around, his book On Living in an Old Country is a selection of essays from the '80s, from the last moment like this under Thatcherism, the beginning of the heritage industry. He talks about how British history, Queen Elizabeth I and the Mary Rose, get mashed together into a lovely reactionary stew, with which to underwrite, in that case, a Hayekian neoliberal revolution that completely reconfigured society. Owen Hatherley’s book The Ministry of Nostalgia is really good, about the particular nostalgic fetish of austerity that took hold in the early 2010s. I wish all these books were more dated than they are, but there you go, they’re not, and whatever’s good in my own book I stole from them. I think it's important to have examples of how to read things, because I'm not a proper historian, I'm not really a historiographer, I'm definitely not a theorist, but all my degrees are in English literature and the only thing I'm really useful for is being able to read a thing try to describe it. So this is a book not necessarily about empire, but about how to read things, how to think about the past.
09.12.21
Talking to the author of The Rock Eaters about organizing a short story collection, lingering in the complexity of a question, and the inevitably of sorrow (and, hopefully, beauty).
In the opening story of The Rock Eaters (Penguin Books), Brenda Peynado’s debut collection, a child and her family perform oblations to the angels that live on their suburban rooftops. These benevolent beings don’t pay much attention: “They chewed their cud from the grasses and bugs they scavenged during the night and then shat runny white on our roofs, the shingles looking iced with snow despite the Florida heat.” They sound more like pigeons than god-adjacent figures, don’t they? The story, incidentally, is titled “Thoughts and Prayers,” and concerns a school shooting. Peynado’s stories are full of such clever twists on the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, the familiar and the alien. While a lesser writer might let the conceit of a story dominate it, Peynado never does; there is a deep emotional core to all the stories, and often a political one as well. In “The Stones of Sorrow Lake,” a young woman travels with her beloved to his hometown, a place that doesn’t let people go once they’ve experienced some kind of trauma there; in another story, “The Whitest Girl,” a group of adolescent Latinas experiment with the power of othering and exoticizing, tools learned at the hands of their own oppressors; a third, “The Touches,” an eerily prescient story, deals with touch hunger and isolation in a future ravaged with disease, where the outside world is so deadly that people live alone in small, secluded rooms, their material needs taken care of by robots. The Rock Eaters asks big, complicated questions about the nature of love, alienation, marginalization, and power, but it doesn’t attempt to give concrete answers. After all, these are questions human beings have been asking for as long as we’ve existed and written things down. I spoke to Brenda Peynado over Zoom just after the book’s publication. This interview has been edited and condensed. Ilana Masad: People in the contemporary literary sphere like to say that it's difficult or impossible to publish a short story collection before a novel. But you did just that! Would you tell me a little bit about your road to publication? Brenda Peynado: Yeah! So each of these stories was published previously, before being collected in a book, except for the first one, “Thoughts and Prayers,” which I wrote after the book had been sold. So the road to publication started with just publishing those first short stories. A lot of them have been years in the making. I had published maybe 40 or 50 short stories before selling the collection. I think one of the things that's so hard about publishing short story collections is just that every MFA has one; if you've written 15 stories, suddenly you have something that you can consider a collection. I think my road came from not publishing [in book form] the first 16 stories [I had]. They didn't all fit together, and my writing changed a lot over the course of a decade, from very realist stories into more fabulist, going back to the genre that I loved writing. I kept getting better as a writer with every year. So a lot of my early stories ended up not making it to this collection. I did think that I was going to have to sell [the collection] with a novel, but I have an amazing editor who believed so much in the short stories that she didn't want to buy the short story collection as a freebie for the novel. She believed in it as its own book and really loved the stories. I’m so glad; you’re such a good short story writer. How did you decide, from those 40 or 50 stories that you've published, which ones would come into this collection and how you would organize them? The organization was [in service of] making it feel like you were prepared for what was coming next. So even if one of the stories was realist and the next one was science fiction, [I was] trying to get it so that one would pick up a thread that a previous story left off. One example of this might be “The Touches,” along with a story like “The Dreamers,” and a story like “The Drownings,” and how they’re about human connection and trying to understand each other, and about romantic love, but they're also wildly different. And seeing them spread out over the collection—as opposed to clumping them all together—has the effect of creating a good thread. The only ones that I felt strongly about, in terms of order, were [the first and last stories.] I knew that “Thoughts and Prayers” had to be first, and I knew that “The Radioactives” had to be last. I really want to make people cry, and I want to show the brutalness of humanity, but I also wanted to show tenderness and I wanted to end the book on a feeling of hope: that these superheroes [in “The Radioactives”] were coming to save us, in a way. That despite all of the ill, despite everything that had happened to them, they were still coming and they were going to save everyone. I wanted “Thoughts and Prayers” to be first because it picks up all of the themes of the other stories. You know, it's got the angels, so it sort of prepares you for the genre bending that happens; it has this Latina girl [narrator] and it deals with girlhood; and [the narrator] is sort of considering what forms love can take and what is worth protecting: Is love worth protecting? How do you protect it? How do you love someone, even if they're the unlucky family across the street or your mother wielding gun? I think that story sort of encapsulated everything that I was trying to do in the collection in a fun way. Something that appears in quite a few of the stories is how many different viewpoints on how to deal with a problem can exist side by side in one family, or in one community, and how people can love each other despite those incredibly different ways of approaching a problem. What does fiction allow you to explore about the complexity of how people love each other? I was probably never going to be a good essayist because I don't have answers. I only have lots and lots of questions about the world. One of the things that fiction can do so well is not give you any answers and just pile on the complexity of a question, which is where I love to linger. I think this probably says a lot about me—I'm so bewildered at how there can be such brutality and harm and sorrow in a world where there's also such love and joy. And it's not that they exist in different pockets, they're sort of mutual and flitting back and forth between each other. There's so much harm that can come from love. I just think about people with guns and how they're not shooting someone necessarily because they think, I'm going to get this gun and I'm going to go out and harm people. I mean, there are some people that do that, but there's a lot of people who are like, I'm going to get this gun, ’cause I'm going to protect the people that I love. It comes from love, even if it's flawed love. Or, you know, how much harm we can do in relationships, trying to love each other and how flawed and desperate that love is at the same time as it can be beautiful and joyful. I feel like fiction—even in political stories—always has to remember the individual and remember that all of these brutal things are coming from such complicated desires. And a lot of those desires are the same ones that we have even when we don't agree with where someone is coming from. So in my fiction, I really don't want to give people easy answers; I just want to show people how complicated all of this is. I think that's what can really make people cry at stories: how inevitable the sorrow is, as well as the beauty that comes along the way. The stories in The Rock Eaters span various genres, from straight up realism, to fabulism, to sci-fi, to magical realism. Do you know, from the start, if a story is going to go toward one genre or another? Do you discover as you write? How does genre play into your process? I sort of think genreless in that I don't necessarily have them in separate boxes. I usually start a story based on an image and that image can end up in any genre. Each writes its way into the story. I began “The Kite Maker” just with an image of these aliens flying a kite. Then I thought, Why would this be meaningful to them, and how would that be heartbreaking? Oh, they've lost their planet and this kite is representative of that lost planet. And then I was like, Okay, who's watching them? Who would that [act of] watching them break? Oh, somebody who feels incredibly guilty at the harm that she's caused these people, and the weight of that. So I went from the image to like, Okay, whose heart is this going to break? And whose heart is that going to break? The story came from there. Sometimes the stories come in layers. With “Thoughts and Prayers,” I knew I wanted angels on the roofs and that school shooting. Part of that was because I think about school shootings a lot as a teacher. Every year we get thethis-is-how-you-avoid-dying-from-a-student-who’s-become-violent seminars, where they were giving us tips and tricks to stay alive, like take off your belt and you can tie the doorknobs together! That’s so bleak. Right? So I had school shootings on the brain. I was raised very Catholic and my mother prays for a lot of people and it just kept feeling so insufficient to me. Like, Mom, I appreciate that you're praying, but also, is it that you think that not enough people have prayed for the people that died? Do you think that anyone who’s saved, it's because enough people prayed for them or prayed hard enough? What is it that you think that prayer is doing in the world? So I wanted to have these angels as an embodiment of this prayer, and people [pray to them] because they feel like they have to or because they believe it, but also, they can't quite figure out what it's enacting in the world. From there I was like, Okay, I know there's a school shooting. I know there are these angels. I know there are these two girls that are best friends. Another story, “The Stones of Sorrow Lake,” was a really realist story when I wrote it the first eight times, from scratch. It wasn't until the stones [became] the embodiment of what I wanted to talk about—a legacy of sorrows in this town's history—that the story ended up working, and finally I was able to write about what I wanted to write about. Girlhood is a feature of many of the stories here; many of the protagonists are tweens or teens. What is it about that time that feels so rich to you as a writer? I have been mourning my age lately, and part of that is how much I feel is lost. There's our aging bodies, but also how many possibilities are lost to us. When I was a kid, I thought I could be a super-secret spy, learn eight languages, have five different jobs, be an artist and a writer and an activist—all at the same time. I think there are some people who are able to do that, but I think for most of us, as we get older, the things that we can imagine ourselves doing start to narrow. What I love about that time period [in girlhood] is just how many possibilities are open to us and yet how bewildering we find the ways to get there. I think what I love to write lingers in that stage of bewilderment and possibility and wonder, and that's the attitude that I like to bring to everything. I also love how complicated girl relationships are, with frenemy-ships where you both understand each other and love each other to death, but you're also competing at the same time in this very fraught way. Another thing that I noticed come up in multiple stories is the use of a plural first-person narrator, this collective “we.” What about this narration style calls to you, and how is it useful to you as a writer? I really like writing in first person plural. Part of that is because when I have something that is too complicated for me to stare at head on with just one character, the “we” narration allows me to sort of layer on all of these complexities, whereas if I had had one character, I would have had to sort of stick with what they thought about the situation. So in “The Whitest Girl,” there’s the intersectionality of race and the way that [the Latina girl narrators are] thinking about getting back at what has gotten them, but also the ways that they could band together or not. It's hard to think about something that works on groups without speaking as a group, but I was also really interested in the ways that the group frays at the edges. In a story like “The Drownings,” [which deals with] death and risk, and [asks] what risks do we take, I wanted the story to feel like a dream, and I think the “we” narration gave it that sort of singsong, incantatory [feeling], almost like a group chanting. I have to ask about “The Touches,” which was first published on Tor.com in 2019, well before the terribly, eerily, awfully relevant year we've just gone through. Did you think about it at all when the pandemic started and social distancing became a thing and touch hunger became something that people were suddenly talking about? Was it a weird life-imitating-art thing for you? Yeah, it was really uncanny. I had written that at a time when I was interested in investigating loneliness and trying to connect with people. I had just moved to a new city and was bemoaning a loss of connection that I had before when I was in graduate school. That story came from a place of feeling isolated and wanting desperately to connect with people and not knowing how to do it. [I was just] imagining this world where we were all forced into that [isolation], and [touch] was forbidden to us. So of course, when the pandemic started, it became super relevant. I think at the time, [when I wrote the story] there weren’t all of these political ramifications of will you mask or won’t you mask? Will you quarantine or won’t you quarantine? So I was able to look at it in a very isolated way, just assuming everyone is on the same page and somehow the governments of the world all got us to the place where we were quarantining. Then what would the world look like? And what would you do to transgress those boundaries? Whereas I think had I written it in the [COVID-19] pandemic, there would have been so many politics around those choices that I would not have been able to write the same story. The weirdest part too, is—so I had virtual reality [in the story] and I had my main character electing for a baby. And the two things that happened during the pandemic were, first, last summer I got an Oculus Quest and spent a lot of time in VR. I went to a Metallica concert in VR, and you could actually see people headbanging. You didn't need to see their facial expressions; you were at a Metallica concert. And I also went to a jellyfish viewing at an aquarium in VR and there were a lot of people talking politics, and you could jump seats to talk to different people. So it was really interesting to be in VR, in quarantine, at a time when so much was happening and people were protesting. And second, out of all that and my feeling of isolation, [I turned] to my partner, like, you know what, let's start a family. Who does that? That's a bewildering choice to make considering all of that. But for whatever reason it felt right. I noticed a lot of casual bisexuality in the book, by which I mean that it's not the topic of any story, it’s just allowed and there. How did you allow that in and let it stand without comment? I think it is a privilege of bisexuality that you don't have to be out. People know you as someone who's dated men—if you're a woman—and you can casually mention that you have dated women before or relationships you've had, but strangely it's not a thing that necessarily needs to be announced until the moment at which you need it to be known. My characters are also living in worlds where no one calls them on it. In the first story, “Thoughts and Prayers,” the mother does sort of comment on what she considers to be an inappropriate relationship between the two girls but she does it silently because it's something that she doesn't want to speak about, that she doesn't want to say out loud. I think that probably goes a lot more into the mentality of the “don't ask, don't tell” aspect of that privilege. But later stories are relying on leaps of imagination—I mean, in a world where people don't sleep, can’t we also have polyamory and bisexuality as something that is a matter of course and that nobody has to question? I think part of it is a hopefulness.