The time I left our slanted rooftop apartment in San Francisco’s Castro district with its stained yellow tiles and foggy view of the city to ride in an ambulance to a psyche ward, I kicked meth for good. Twenty years later and still clean, I devour stories about addiction and redemption as hungrily as I once craved speed. Fiction and nonfiction stories about overcoming addiction and escaping death made me want to live in a way that no relentlessly optimistic self-help slogan could.
Here are some books that will not only make you want to quit doing the thing that is killing you, but also offer an interesting narrative structure for writers because they flout the conventional hero journey template. Instead of a reluctant hero emerging from an ordinary world to delve into the tricky landscape of magic and tests, these heroes begin in chaos and emerge from the grungy ashes of last call and plunge into sober, or at least peaceful, life earned by one’s ability to overcome hurdles associated with addiction.
Black Out, a memoir by Sarah Hepola, is a funny, sad portrayal of an unstoppable, unattached, driven woman who early on mistakes recklessness with feminism and freedom. But her sassy wine-drenched sisterhood quickly cascades into a life of forgotten staircases and stranger’s air mattresses. Hepola’s appealing, smart slumber party voice and achingly honest observations of her own progressive alcoholism are at once heartbreaking and deliciously funny. Surrender and recovery have never felt so familiar.
Graceland, a novel by Chris Abani, is a colorful, cacophonous story of a father and son, addiction, and seductive American trappings in post-colonial Nigeria. Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator, hopes to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no real job opportunities in sight; Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his slippage into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by influential friends and accompanied by a restless symphony of voices. With little help and the desperate pull of crime life nipping at his heels, Elvis must find his way to a Graceland of his own. A poignant tale, which demonstrates beautifully the idea that no matter the reckless path where we stray, we must ultimately save ourselves.
Gun, Needle, Spoon, a memoir by Patrick O’Neil: If anyone knows the gritty consequences associated with the junkie life, Patrick O’Neil’s debut memoir is that secret within the secret. Our hero begins with a violent and terrible arrest after being busted for several armed robberies, the method by which he supported his heroin habit. His incarceration leads him inexorably toward recovery and rehabilitation from which he emerges a person who is not only able to forge a sober life, but whose primary aim is to never forget and never return to his stifling cell in 850 Bryant.
Delicious Foods, a novel by James Hannaham, begins in a swampy hell. Our hero, Eddie, who has no hands, struggles to drive a stolen car to a sweeter place off interstate 45, where his aunt lives, in order to escape a horrible series of events that are not revealed until the end of the story. Darlene, Eddie’s mother, is grief stricken by the sudden death of her black activist husband; her identity becomes entirely eclipsed by crack cocaine. Darlene is literally held captive and drugged by a sinister food chain, human trafficking operation. Although the book is primarily focused on desperate acts born out of grief, drug addiction and rough terrain, “Delicious Foods” is, on a larger scale, an ambitious story about systemic racism and self-destruction — traps that can lead us to our own demise.
How to Grow Up, a memoir by Michelle Tea, has a particular San Francisco squalor: maggots in the fridge with flies. Cigarette butts on the floor. Beer bottles in the sink. The young Michelle Tea — our forever adolescent, fashion junkie-turned-alcoholic — was the only Goth kid at her prissy school. Later, in her twenties, she believed with her whole glittering heart the world was conspiring against her. Throughout this warm and generous how-to book, Michelle Tea’s astute observations about classism, low self-esteem and struggling as an artist in San Francisco coincide with the harsh realities of being poor and her desperate reach for alcohol to soften the blow. After several broken relationships, shitty apartments and getting ripped off due to her fear of becoming responsible, the most surprising twist of fate was to grow up and chose a sober life. “How to Grow Up” was an actual manual for me. Proof that getting sober and becoming honest about the things we really want more than anything — a spouse, a child, a good job — is sometimes the most punk rock move yet.
Permanent Midnight, a memoir by Jerry Stahl, begins in a bloody diaper, thirteen stitches strong, oozing through gauze in a hospital rehab. If heroin addiction is its own kind of death, then PermanentMidnight is Stahl’s beautiful, green, sky-high view resurrection. In Stahl’s sober hands, addiction has never been more colorful and hilarious. His story begins with himself as a young man, a hopeful, fledgling writer driving cross-country to Los Angeles with his Jersey Penthouse editor to write the demented TV show “Alf.” His opiate habit gains voracious momentum along with the miseries it brings to himself and his daughter. For instance, midnight trips with her in a car seat while he cops dope. In his darkest moments, so many hells were fully realized and washed clean as he kicked dope in a garage while the LA Riots raged outside.
He writes:
“I suspected, for one strange moment, that I had died. And caught myself looking over my shoulder, back through the open door of the rank garage, into the shadows, just to see if my body was still in there. It would have not surprised me, either way. It didn’t matter now. Nothing did. The scum had boiled to the surface and burned off, and what remained was all that had to remain.”
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing depression.
Depression is that feeling you get when you wonder why God bothered to make you and you can’t come up with an answer.
Everyone gets that feeling once in awhile — some more than others. The two types of people who get it the most are writers and comedians, with comedy writers obviously being the worst of the bunch. If I meet someone who is introduced as a comedian or writer, I immediately take a step back because you never know what might happen.
I’ve been pretty fortunate in that I can count the number of times I’ve been depressed on one hand. The root cause has always been the same: desire. Like the time I was depressed because I wanted my wife Rosie to come back to life. Or the time I wanted a fresh-baked blueberry pie but the woman who always baked it for me was Rosie and she was too deceased to make one. I had to buy a frozen pie.
The happiest people are those who have the most. Like celebrities. I imagine Kenny West is very happy because of his successful rap career, his beautiful wife, and all the goods they own. I bet they have one of everything. If they ask their butler to buy something they see on QVC, he probably says, “there’s already one in the other room.” I wish I had a butler.
The only time I saw Kenny West feeling sad was the time he wanted Beyonce to win an award and she didn’t. It did seem a little unfair not to give Beyonce that award. After all, she’s Beyonce.
Some people are depressed non-stop. They were born that way. I always want to give those people a hug and remind them, “Don’t worry, life is shorter than you think and it will all be over really soon.” If they knew how short life was they could wait it out.
One of the best ways to battle depression is with humor. If I get sad reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I’ll turn on an episode of Hogan’s Heroes to cheer me up. If the TV reception isn’t clear enough to watch Hogan’s Heroes, I’ll pop in one of my Gallagher VHS tapes. There’s always laughter to be found somewhere.
BEST FEATURE: Not caring about anything can really free you up to live a life uninhibited. WORST FEATURE: The endless stream of tears means having to spend a lot on tissues.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a baboon.
Chelsea Manning, who was convicted in 2013 for spilling government secrets to WikiLeaks, is currently serving a 35-year sentence. Because Chelsea — previously known as Bradley — identifies as a woman, her imprisonment at the all-male, maximum security military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has sparked plenty of discussion and concern about the treatment of trans men and women in prison.
And now, nearly two years after her sentencing, Manning has been found guilty again — but no, not for spilling more classified government secrets. This time, prison officials discovered some other so-called “dangerous” items in her cell: books and magazines. CNN reports that Cosmopolitan was among one of the confiscated reading materials. Manning’s eagerness to read it makes complete sense, too, seeing as how that particular issue included her first press interview.
Abigail Pesta, who conducted the interview, also revealed the longer list of confiscated books and magazines. They included magazines such as The Advocate and Vanity Fair (featuring Caitlyn Jenner on the cover), and books such as Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala; Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs, Taking Rights Seriously, and Law’s Empire; Casey Plett’s A Safe Girl to Love; and Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations, as investigated by The Atlantic, state their right to prohibit any publications found “to be detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution or if it might facilitate criminal activity.” And yet, it’s nearly impossible to determine which books are safe and which are subversive. The Atlantic further explores previous instances of censorship in prison libraries around the United States, including in Texas, South Carolina, and Connecticut.
On her personal Twitter account, Manning tweeted about the result of her prison trial: “I was found guilty of all 4 charges @ today’s board; I am receiving 21 days of restriction on recreation — no gym, library, or outdoors.” (If you’re just as confused as I am about how prisoners are able to tweet from behind bars, TIME reports Manning dictates her tweets by phone and Fitzgibbon Media posts them on her behalf).
Prison libraries, too, feature widely in pop culture these days. Piper Kerman, author of the memoir-turned-Netflix show Orange is the New Black, told the LA Times that books were “complete lifelines” and the “only legitimate forms of escape” during her imprisonment. And in the New York Times,Dwight Garner reviews Avi Steinberg’s memoir, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, revealing how Steinberg “comes to realize what a humming and humane place his library is.”
Regardless of whether or not you approve of Manning’s reading-related punishment, the power of the written word simply cannot be denied.
Before all the tattoos, the stripping and the rock band was my life of San Francisco-specific political activism that involved marching in the streets, spraying a plastic green oozy water gun while yelling for gay rights and one newspaper article with a spread of my face because I volunteered for the first lesbian sex club in the Bay Area. When I die, someone could patch together a fairly accurate portrait of a queer woman with a big mouth and a shoe collection to match. But they would see other things too: An early struggle with drug addiction, a dead mother, decades of sex work, artsy boyfriends, and an MFA: layers of complexity make up fictional portraits of real people and who’s to say what will stick and what parts will fade away.
Jami Attenberg’s new novel Saint Mazie is not only a story that bamboozles any memoir enthusiast into reading historical fiction but it also forces the reader to wonder: What will they say about me when I die? Will my text messages be silly pet noises and bicycle emojis? Will they say I was a loyal friend: That I had a big heart?
According to legend, and a profile piece written by Joseph Mitchell in The New Yorker in the 1940’s, Mazie Phillips-Gordon was a saucy, unmarried dame who wore her makeup cakey and her dresses tight. She was more preoccupied with helping the needy than landing a husband. She worked at and eventually owned a ticket booth in a movie theatre called The Venice in Brooklyn, NY in the early 1900’s. In fact, the real Mazie Phillips-Gordon is still asked for by men and women in New York, fifty years after her death, not because she’s a silent picture film star or beauty queen, but because Mazie had a huge heart that left a lasting impression.
Mazie’s whale-sized heart captured the attention of Jami Attenberg. She used The Venice as a backdrop to springboard Mazie’s life, which was textured by prohibition, the depression, police brutality, small time crooks, big time alkies, a sister who ran away to become a burlesque dancer, and the decline of her other sister’s mental health, all issues that could easily be current topics highlighted on our Facebook newsfeeds.
Saint Mazie contains episodes of her diary, real and imagined, expanded upon in vivid scenes that stick with you like following a strung-out mother to a crack house in order to feed her starving kids or by chasing down a man beaten by a cop. These snapshots show a generous feminist with a unique brand of philanthropy that was as grassroots as it was downright gritty.
The way Attenberg skillfully straddles that springy tightrope between memoir and fiction is a magical trick that surpasses genre: a hypnotizing voice, so modern and bawdy, she made me fall in love with a woman we actually know very little about. Letters and diary entries are the fabric Attenberg sews together to form a whole woman so beguiling, you will want to warm her frosty fingertips as she hands out movie tickets through her glass window and light her cigarettes. Both of them.
Mazie spent most of her free time roaming the streets after work with a nun she befriended, giving away her money to homeless people. She named herself the “Queen of the Bowery” and, like the movies of the silent era, the view from her ticket booth would appear to be myopic at first glance, only to reveal that is was anything but.
Through Mazie’s lens, life is heartbreakingly clear. She chain smokes. Sips from a flask. Befriends the man who was the brutal cop’s target. Other voices of characters also broadcast throughout, allowing the reader to piece together sections of Mazie’s life that she may have not wanted aired, like the Captain’s son. Throughout Saint Mazie, our heroine receives postcards from a Captain in the military with whom she has a love affair that spans several years. The postcards and her responses echo a life that can be felt in the reader’s skin:
Postcard from the Captain. Niagra Falls. A place not so far away from New York City. A day trip, a train ride away. I can see it on a map in my head.
I can hear the crash of the waves when I look at it. I can feel the spit from the falls on my face. I bet it’s cold up there near the water. I bet the air stings your skin red. Like a man slapped you hard and meant to leave a mark.
Saint Mazie is never sentimental or bogged down by 1920’s lingo or reverie about days of yawn because Attenberg proves to be too astute to fall for those traps.
Instead, Attenberg gave a classy dame a proper funeral.
By doing that, Attenberg presented a beautiful woman’s life pieced together in a collection of shining fragments: A curvaceous figure of an early 20th century feminist during a time when the women’s movement gave rise to a young generation of female artists, photographers, performers and professionals entering the workforce for the first time. The change helped propel women such as Mazie Phillips-Gordon into formerly patriarchal social, political and professional roles. She was a trailblazer — a giant heart in a difficult, war-torn world.
Set in a world where the virtue of a snack food is its shelf-life — preservative free, because its biologically derived ingredients are destroyed and replaced with a sugar inspired by plastics, to repel vermin — Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, puts the white noise of everyday living, like junk food advertisements and female beauty rituals, under a microscope until they appear new and strange.
We talked about writing on the Internet, female beauty treatments, and what it means to take risks in writing.
(An excerpt from You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, with an introduction by Cal Morgan, is this week’s featured story on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading.)
Adalena Kavanagh: In a recent profile you talked about how you got your start writing in high school. You joked, “I was pretty big in the Asian-American web log community.” Increasingly, those who have grown up with the Internet being their first writing platform and community are publishing books. What was your experience within those forums? How did those spaces shape or inform your future writing?
Alexandra Kleeman: I started my blog when I was fourteen, and I did it without very much understanding of how public the internet would become, or what it meant to put your full (fairly unique) name out in a space that strangers could search. I had total strangers from all over the world writing to me to tell me something I said was funny or poignant or idiotic, it was a continual surprise — and when I look back now I see how exposed I was, how easily the world could get to me. But coming to it with that sort of openness and naiveté meant that I was able to write publicly, but not particularly self-consciously — I was too young to doubt whether I had anything of value to say, whether I was making a good impression, or cultivating the right audience. It let me write without expectation — something which is harder and harder to do as you get older and sacrifice more to make time for writing. When I’m stressed out or intimidated by the writing career I’m embedded in, I try to remember what I knew then: You write to others in order to write to others, not because anything specific will result from it.
Kavanagh: You were in a rock band in college. I’m always interested in writers who engage in other art forms. What do you get from music that you don’t from writing and vice versa?
And what music has on writing…is that it’s so easy to make an utterance, and less clear when you’re uttering that you’re uttering the wrong thing.
Kleeman: When I was in college, writing seemed less like a craft or career and more like one territory within thing-making that bled into all the others. I took a class taught by Thalia Field, “The Foreign Home,” that was for writers but prohibited making traditional text-on-paper pieces. First I was making these “black boxes,” painted cardboard structures lit from the inside with small lights and full of internal corners, found objects, drawings, and peepholes. It was incredibly stressful! Visual artists are more intuitively at home with the physical world, they make the practical work of material-gathering and assembly look easy, which it should be. I was always worrying about getting the exact right materials, joining them the exact way, making the object I had diagrammed, not wasting the material I had gathered — which is an impossible way to do creative work! What writing and music have in common is that their materiality is so plentiful, so renewable. And what music has on writing (at least for someone coming to it as a foreigner) is that it’s so easy to make an utterance, and less clear when you’re uttering that you’re uttering the wrong thing. I was making spoken-word pieces where I looped my voice over my voice in real time, added singing and some scripted speaking, and I played vocal-ish non-verbal counterpoints with a musical saw.
The band, which was a three-part synth-pop band called Triangle Forest, was a double escape, from the strain of working with words and the strain of working alone — it was wonderful to be able to hand over two-thirds of the song to people you trust and work at it together, listening and adjusting. It was fun, having co-responsibility for a thing, and fun playing shows together in all kinds of weird places. Our first was in a dive bar called the Safari Lounge that burned down a few years ago, known for its erotic-photo-hunt machine and the gigantic albino boa constrictor in the glass tank right next to it. Our best show was in a huge, warehouse filled with art and light installations where the proprietor, Zane, got so into the music that he took a lead pole to his own water pipes and flooded the place, ending the whole night around 3 a.m. Playing allowed me to be collaborative and spontaneous and fun, things which I hardly ever was when writing.
Writing begins from the particulate and the discrete, you build until vitality and fluidity emerge — but you have to begin with the individual units, each of which has too much meaning, not enough meaning, not the right meaning. I’m most suited to being a writer, but it lets me indulge my worst, most reflexive way of being in the world, which is driven by getting a sentence “right” rather than taking a risk with it.
Kavanagh: You said, “I’m most suited to being a writer, but it lets me indulge my worst, most reflexive way of being in the world, which is driven by getting a sentence ‘right’ rather than taking a risk with it.” In what ways are you hoping to take risks with your writing? How do you want to challenge and or play with literary conventions?
Kleeman: That’s a great question — I should clarify that when I say I’m disappointed that I don’t “risk” sentences more, what I mean is I’m reluctant to lose control of them. That I would automatically think of giving up a measure of control as a form of risk-taking says something about my personality.
The world around us is too much: when we try to represent it any other way I think we do it a disservice.
I’ve always felt that the books that affected me the most were the ones that changed my existing notions of what a novel can contain while still remaining vital and alive. In this one, I wanted to widen the scope of my text to include the noisy, ugly, hypercommercialized elements of daily life, things I usually exclude from my fiction. I wanted to let the noise in, to let it eke away at the foregrounding of the characters. I wanted to try to point to the animacy within the inanimate, even if that meant blurring the distinction between the human and the nonhuman. I wanted to work at the edge of including too much rather than too little, the latter generally being the option that makes me feel safer. The world around us is too much: when we try to represent it any other way I think we do it a disservice.
Kavanagh: Your novel engages modern beauty consumption in a way that is familiar, but taken to an extreme, with products like an edible face cream (though women inject botulinum to achieve a wrinkle-less forehead, so we’re not so far away from edible face cream). What in the culture inspired this theme?
What’s struck me most is the way beauty is linked to technological development…
Kleeman: The modern beauty industry fascinates me and I’ve seen it change so much, even since I was a teenager. What’s struck me most is the way beauty is linked to technological development, technologies of representation and technologies of modification, and how this modern way of viewing the material of our bodily selves compels us to maintain and scrutinize ourselves in new ways. The development of HD television exposed wrinkles and blemishes, but also the pancakey texture of traditional foundation — so new types of foundation had to be developed that were sheerer but offered the same coverage. They used light-scattering particles that made the skin look “airbrushed.” Our fantastically detailed televisions taught us to look at ourselves up close, so close that the face practically disappeared and all you saw was a landscape of pores. This went with a renewed interest in shrinking pores, hiding pores, speckling over pores. People were fanatically worried about nearly-invisible skin ducts that had always been there, but that they now believed they could do something about. The face was transformed into a series of small problems, and that makes it much more difficult to have a friendly relationship with your own visage.
I describe a lot of strange beauty products in the novel, but I don’t think they’re so far from the products and treatments we have nowadays — there’s Botox, Juvederm, flash-freezing treatments for eliminating body fat. There’s bee venom and snail mucus and in France I saw a serum that tans you by forcing your skin to produce melanin, as if it had been out in the sun. The familiar is an extreme. We live in interesting days.
Kavanagh: You’re working on a PhD in Rhetoric, and your novel has reoccurring descriptions of advertisements, the ultimate persuasive arguments. How does your work in Rhetoric inform your writing?
Kleeman: The Rhetoric program I went to was unusual, more of a critical theory program. It was rooted in the idea that all discourse is a form of persuasion, subtly reinforcing the structures that give it credibility and power. When you watch a slew of advertisements, something is being sold to you other than the specific products pictured — it’s the idea of wanting, the desire to want. In a sense you’re being convinced of something that is not literally pictured but which is present in every frame — and that’s a bigger deal than whether you end up buying the item that was pictured doing its amazing work on-screen.
Kavanagh: You said, “Our fantastically detailed televisions taught us to look at ourselves up close, so close that the face practically disappeared and all you saw was a landscape of pores.” Your novel examines the quotidian in the same way — what is familiar becomes strange, so strange that I was first convinced that your narrator, A, was a clone. What is it about the quotidian that merits closer, microscopic examination?
But I think there’s value in trying to disrupt how easily and cleanly we perceive our surroundings…
Kleeman: I think it’s natural that we develop something of a callus toward the things we see every day and do every day — as you spend more time with a thing, it’s possible to see it more, but more often you see less of it each time. But I think there’s value in trying to disrupt how easily and cleanly we perceive our surroundings, to slow down the process by which we make our lives fast, clean, and transparent and try to see the friction, effort, clumsiness that goes along with living. Eating is something we do almost without thinking about it, but within that act is the crushing-up of another thing’s life structures with your own teeth, the pre-digestion inside the mouth, the genuine digestion in the stomach, the continual death on a large scale of bacteria living within us that we need in order to get nutrients from food-material. It’s violent and amazing, and looking microscopically at this quotidian activity shows us something about how messy our lives are, whether we perceive it or not.
Justice has been served! Glenn Pladsen, a man whom the press dubbed the “literary litterbug,” admitted in court to tossing over 600 books from his vehicle. U.S. 287, a highway in Colorado, was littered with books for months until a state trooper finally witnessed the crime in April. I can only imagine that the sight of hundreds of abandoned novels on the road would have been slightly apocalyptic.
According to The Denver Post, Pladsen pleaded guilty to three counts of littering and has been sentenced to 30 hours of community service by a county judge. He was also ordered to pay $1,725 in clean-up and court costs. Employees of The Colorado Department of Transportation spent hours collecting and removing books (unused and often in perfect condition!) along the highway from February to April, and the mystery of their origin plagued the news. Many of the abandoned books were romance novels, which might have suggested a cynical, world-weary, heartbroken human trying to purge all reminders of a lost love. But I digress: the real reason is a lot less exciting.
In an attempt to explain why he so cruelly cast aside thousands of books, Pladsen revealed that he’d bought them all from a used bookstore when it went out of business, hoping to sell them on Amazon for a profit. After trying and failing to do so, he thought littering was the next best option.
As Jezebel reports, some of the orphaned books were titled Rogue Angel Sacrifice, Taken by the Viking and Rocky and Bullwinkle: The Movie Official Joke Book. (Amusingly diverse…)
It’s been a strange month in Colorado regarding the treatment of books. Just last week, a Little Free Library in Denver was torched by a mysterious arsonist. If only Pladsen had taken an extra moment or two to investigate nobler alternatives to dumping books, such as donating them to a Little Free Library, then perhaps the indignity of this crime could have been avoided.
There are millions of reasons why books are necessary in our world. Reading can ease loneliness, inspire action, teach us new things, make our hearts race, make us laugh and cry. And now, for the first time, books may also help people live healthier lives around the globe.
The chemist Teri Dankovich, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA, has invented something called the “Drinkable Book.” According to the BBC News, the book’s pages can be ripped out and used to purify contaminated water. In trials at 25 water sources in South Africa, Ghana, and Bangladesh, the paper — which contains tiny particles of copper and silver — successfully eradicated more than 99% of bacteria. The pages also include instructions for correct use.
The book was presented Monday at the American Chemical Society’s 250th National Meeting in Boston. (No matter whether we choose to carry a book, a pencil, or a test tube, long live all the nerds of the world aiming to enact change).
Discover Magazinereports that Dankovich has hand-produced about 50 books, and is working to raise production funds for global distribution.
A disturbing 663 million people around the world lack access to clean drinking water, and the Drinkable Book is hoping to significantly lower that number. According to results from field tests — which Dankovich conducted with the help of charities such as Water Is Life and iDE — the pages are capable of cleaning up to 100 liters of water. According to Water Is Life’s website, they claim to be “working on a variety of languages” and “ways to share the message through training, storytelling and discussions in communities…where there is a desperate need.”
One can only hope that, through storytelling and science, the Drinkable Book will promote literacy as well as save lives.
I had started dating C a couple years ago, during the fall when fathers began vanishing from out of their comfortable, middle-class homes. For the first few weeks, local newscasters read out the list of the newly vanished each night along with the location in which they were last seen, and it sounded like they were reading from a master catalogue of legitimate, reasonable names, names like “Peter” and “Steve.” Ted Hartwell, Matt Skofield, Dennis Galp. None of them knew each other, and there was nothing to link them except that they were all equally average. Telephone poles and store windows went white with fliers depicting men in interchangeable hairstyles, clad in polo shirts, all traces of fun leeched from their faces long ago. They wore confused expressions in the pictures selected by their family members, as if none of their kin had cared to warn them that photographs were going to be taken. Their confusion made it seem as though they had been lost for a long time, much longer than they had been gone.
The newsanchors called it “Disappearing Dad Disorder.” For months nobody knew where the dads had gone, whether they had been stolen or had stolen themselves, victims of self-napping. Then last January dads started turning up, one by one. Good Samaritans found them wandering dazed in shopping malls five towns over, malls that were not their own but resembled their own to an uncanny degree. They would return to familiar stores like the Gap and try to buy khakis with little scraps of paper that they had collected from obscure places. They sat on the mall benches and closed their eyes, waiting for someone to claim them. Often they wore clothes identical to the ones they had disappeared in, identical but fresh-smelling, like they had been laundered or even bought new in the same sizes and colors. They were confused and quiet, preferring to stare off into the distance or fiddle with a keychain instead of engaging with those around them, those who asked them gently: Are you lost? Is your family looking for you? Do you have a number we can call? When questioned about their disappearance, whether they left or had been taken, who had taken them, did they remember his face, height, manner of dress, was it someone they knew from work, from home, from the bowling league, from the auto repair shop, was it many people, an organization, a religious group, a band of criminals, a league of sexual predators, the missing dads reproduced, with slight variations in phrasing, a single sentence: Sometimes you’ve just got to be content with things the way they are.
The emptiness of C’s apartment reminded me of those missing fathers. The place was nice the way car dealerships are nice: clean, spacious, cold and full of light. He owned two of the same self-assembled couches and three identical self-assembled endtables, the cheapest model they made. They were all arranged in his living room, the couches side by side gaplessly and facing forward to the television set, the endtables pushed together in front of them to form a single, long, low table from which you could eat food if you hunched over and lowered your jaw almost to your knees. From the door, you could see the living room, kitchen, and a chunk of bedroom splayed before you like a blueprint of someplace an engineer had once thought might be all right to live in. I took a few steps forward and the bedroom came into view, a full-sized mattress on the floor with navy blue sheets and a wad of comforter. Next to it, a laptop blinked drowsily.
“Did you just move in?” I asked, hoping that he had.
C laughed. “People always ask that. I’ve been living here two years. Two and a half, really,” he added.
“Where do you keep your things?” I asked, and he gestured all around us.
C did graphic design for a small advertising agency, but this had almost nothing to do with his life. He left for work around eight thirty or nine in the morning and returned unchanged, with few memories of where he had been. If I asked about his work, he seemed surprised to be reminded of it, then annoyed. “If you want to talk about dead end jobs,” he’d say sometimes, “why don’t you talk about your own?” and I would respond to this by saying nothing at all. I pictured him as a hot air balloon, saggy and bright, tethered to the earth by three or four flimsy ropes. The person who lived in this bare, depressing, anonymously furnished apartment was about one taut rope from flying off the face of the earth, I decided.
“Are you one of those people who acts normal, but is secretly about to chuck their lives and disappear?” I asked. If that were the case, I wasn’t going to waste my time getting to know him. I knew that we’d be dating for a while at least when he laughed several times, loudly, and kissed me for what was then the third or fourth time ever.
“Yeah right. No way. Neither are you,” he said. “I’ve seen that on TV, those dads, and it is nuts. No way. Everything’s worked out great for me since whenever, I don’t have any plans to make it complicated. Besides, I’m attached to my material goods.”
What material goods? I wondered. Then I followed the arc of his arm pointing to a location across the room. He had been referring to his collection of DVDs, heaps of horror and comedy and porn, stacked together in a pile the size of a small love seat.
“Can we do something?” I asked.
C looked at me mildly.
“Like what?” he said.
I looked around us.
I went to C’s kitchen and stood staring at the open cupboards that held his library of canned goods. He had cooked beans flavored with pig fat, different soups and stews, vegetables — corn off the cob, chopped green beans, carrots sliced into bright orange circles. There were peaches and pears in syrup and, toward the back of the cupboard, canned meats with labels obscured by shadow. Blocky squares of skin-colored food on their printed labels were visible through gaps between the small towers of cans. I was impressed by how well the cans stacked together: they fit to each other the way I wished I fit to the things around me. And there were cans of fruit cocktail with peeled grapes, canned peas, Porkpot Chili, and an off-brand noodle-and-meat-sauce product that had a picture of tomatoes on its label, but no tomatoes listed in the ingredients. There were cans of tuna and cans of olives and pineapple and also mandarin oranges suspended in sugary water, the little naked pieces jostling up together in the perfect dark of the can, curled fetally against one another.
“Do you have anything fresh?” I called out to C, who was already sitting in front of the TV in the other room.
“All that stuff is fresh,” C said. “And it lasts for one to five years,” he added.
I didn’t think I could stand to eat any of it. I imagined opening a can and putting a forkful into my mouth, and I knew, whatever it was, it would be soft and yielding and would disintegrate as I pushed it around with my tongue. I wanted to eat something real and living, something tough with life. I wanted to destroy it with my teeth. I wanted it to be veal. I wished that I had eaten one of the gross hot dogs earlier, but it was too late for that. I heard a smattering of crunching sounds from the TV over in the other room.
“You’re missing Shark Week,” C shouted.
I went over and got under the blanket with him. I tucked my feet in under his thighs and looked where he was looking.
On TV, the sharks ate through a goose and a school of sardines. They ate a belly-up humpback whale that had died partway through its migration, and when it died it had rolled over and slid up to the surface of the sea, a glistening red exposure rising toward the sun and quick spoilage. Under the rows of sharp teeth, the whale came apart as if it were made of wet paper, sloughing off wads of sodden crimson that slid into the water with a liquid sound. The sharks ate seals, and other things by accident — driftwood, garbage, people. The lesson was that sharks were made to eat things. Nothing else had the immense hunger of a shark, and nothing else could back that hunger up with such efficient action. It was so beautiful that I felt like I wanted to be a part of it, though I knew it would be impossible for me to ever become a shark.
At the commercial break, there was an ad for Kandy Kakes. In this commercial, Kandy Kat faces off against his longtime nemesis Kandy Klown, a bulbous, Santa-shaped figure who consumes Kandy Kakes like it’s the simplest thing in the world, like it’s all he can do. He makes it look easy. The Klown is walking around, left leg, then right leg, slowly articulating full circles in the air, the two round hemispheres of his belly bobbing up and down alternatingly, bobbing in rhythm with the smooth fall of his feet. As he walks, the little Kandy Kakes on their tiny legs trot over to him and form a patient little queue scurrying alongside. Now the first one runs forward with a sudden burst of speed and hops straight into the Klown’s mouth. Its body is a cheery little lump visible in the Klown’s profile. Then the next one runs up and hops in, then another. Slack-jawed and dark, the Klown’s mouth is the exact shape and dimension of the Kandy Kakes that slide through it so smoothly.
All of a sudden we see Kandy Kat some distance away, watching this scene unfold through binoculars. His jaw hangs open, and out comes some drooly fluid. He turns away from the scene and grabs his head in anguish, then his stomach in anguish, the stomach distended and throbbing through the thin cover of skin. Suddenly he has an idea and rushes off-screen. We hear the sound of metal, rubber, cloth in motion, and when he runs back on-screen, he’s dressed like a Klown. He’s got the white face painted on, the ridiculous red nose, the floppy polka-dotted hat pulled over his ragged ears. With the sharp nozzle of a bicycle pump through his belly, he inflates himself until he rolls, lolling like a moored boat. He runs to the Kandy Kakes gathering and strikes a Klownish pose, arms out and swaying, listing slightly from side to side. The Kandy Kakes turn and for a moment they seem to be considering it. Kandy Kat’s big eyes grow wet and you can see he is full of hope, you can see it like you see the heart pounding inside the little cage of his body. A dry red tongue slowly rolls out of his mouth.
Then they decide. As if they are a single body, a single mind, they fall upon him. They fall upon him with their small, sharp mouths, swarming his bony frame, covering it completely, bending it beneath their weight as the Klown watches a few feet over. They tear at his costume, little bits of it are flying everywhere, and we hear a dozen wacky sproingy noises while the voice-over announces:
KANDY KAKES. WE KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.
I noticed that I had been sitting with my nails pressing into my knee, and as I pulled the hands away I saw ten little semicircular segments dug in, each one a purply blue. It was like discovering that I was filled with something totally different from everyone else, a dark and dislikable substance, and I had let a bit of it seep up for the first time.
That slogan was off somehow. We know who you really are. It failed to sell anything, it wasn’t friendly, it sounded more like a threat than a promise. But then again, maybe it was a promise made to the worthy, that they alone would have all the Kandy Kakes they desired. Or a promise to those eating Kandy Kakes, that they would become good people, worthy of eating the things they had eaten. Either way, I realized I felt hungry. Or to be precise, I wanted to take something into my mouth and destroy it there.
I thought about this dad that had disappeared from his Fairfield County home while watching a football game. His wife and two young sons came back to find pretzels, Cheez Forms, and mini microwavable cheeseburgers sitting pristine in their plastic serveware, the TV chattering to nobody. Police posted his photo as far as Tibico City in the south and Coxton to the north, but nobody matching his description exactly turned up, although there were many approximate matches. A few months later, they found him living in a town more than three hundred miles away, across state lines. A neighbor had called to report a stranger living in the house next door to them, someone who seemed friendly enough but who had “a weird bent towards underreportage.” When the local police investigated, they found their missing person living in an occupied single-family home with a blond woman who closely resembled his abandoned wife, down to the navy-blue pumps and feathery bangs. The blond woman, whose husband had vanished a year earlier, was the mother of two young children, both male. She preferred not to comment on how this stranger had come to take her husband’s place or where her husband might be now. The missing father was arrested by Pleasanton police and held on suspicion of having kidnapped the woman’s actual husband and assumed his identity. It turned out Pleasanton was also the name of the town from which he had originally disappeared, a town farther north but similar in all other ways, though authorities couldn’t comment on whether this was a coincidence, an accident, or a mistake.
“Look,” C said in a very soothing voice, putting his arms around me and pulling me back down to the couch. He slung himself around me so that I was like a wrapped package, unable to move my arms. He slid his hand up to my jaw and held it there as he kissed me on the cheek.
“You’re okay,” he said, “trust me.”
For C, it was possible to get along with me even if I, for my part, was not getting along with him. It was lonely being the only one who knew how I was feeling, to not be stored in the mind of someone else who could remind you who you were. The image of a skeleton key flashed in my mind, heavy and long, made of antique brass with a wide, flat end for the thumb to push against when turning the key in the lock. The key was normal except at the functional end, where it had no teeth, nothing with which to turn the small gears of an inner lock. This was a key that could fit into any lock, a key that could never unlock anything.
C slid his arm around my back. His body was warm. He pointed to the TV.
“Look, the sharks are back. Just look at the sharks,” he murmured, holding me close.
What was at the root of Disappearing Dad Disorder? Sociologists said it was social, psychologists said it was psychological, and some religious nut said they had heard a call from God to leave behind their wicked lives. Biologists compared it to migration and to songbirds that become confused in the presence of skyscrapers. They compared them to honeybees who abandon their hives: maybe the fathers had been misled by cell phone signals, by highways, by toxins in the water supply. An American Studies professor from Cornell argued that it had to do with the breakdown of the single-earner family model upon which our common baseline for masculine worth was founded, a comedian said that all husbands were on the verge of disappearing, only there was still such a thing as a football season, and then a basketball season, and then a baseball season. And a minority voice pointed out that this had been happening forever in minority communities, but it wasn’t called a disorder until it started happening to well-off white people.
Possible explanations for the self-napping impulse were offered up in interviews with abandoned wives. Their husband was a sneaky rat and had been since the earliest days, the days when they were courting and he often “forgot” his wallet, forcing her to pay for the entirety of their meal, which, though it was only diner food — fast food, really — nevertheless added up. Their husband was well-intentioned but also a doofus, he had trouble with navigation even in their own moderately sized gated community; his absence was surely an exaggerated case of the many instances in which his sense of direction failed completely even as he continued to insist upon its quote “pinpoint precision.” Their husband had loved them very much, particularly in the beginning, but in recent years she had noticed that he had noticed that the backs of her arms jiggled when she waved hello, that there were spots that were not freckles distributed among her freckles, that her joints made loud cracking sounds when they made love, which sometimes caused him to ask her if she was all right.
But maybe the fathers were just seeking a perfect life, which when you think about it is a completely reasonable thing to do. They wanted the good things: the popcorn, the corn dogs, the plush industrial mall carpeting with its friendly geometric patterns screaming themselves in green, pink, and brick red, stretching across the concourse like a little, comprehensible fragment of infinity. They didn’t want the bad things: the pressure, the stress, the weekly division of chores by chore wheel, the homework that they thought they had done away with when they graduated elementary school or middle school or high school or business school. They didn’t want the gift-curse of recognition by those they loved and who loved them back, one consequence of that love’s durability being that they would be recognized and loved aggressively even on days when they couldn’t stand to recognize themselves in the mirror, even on days when merely remembering themselves made them sad and want to sleep. Love which made every day a day that they had to live in a handcrafted, artisanal fashion, rather than being outsourced to someone who could do it happily and efficiently for a third of the price.
They might have thought, to use a stock phrase, that somewhere out there was a way to “have their cake and eat it too.” That many of them returned to their homes months later, malnourished, dehydrated, and amnesiac, could be interpreted as evidence that there is no cake anywhere in the world to be had or eaten.
In Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, Eileen, the titular character works at a boys’ prison, lives with her alcoholic father in a town she cannot bear to name, and obsesses over her body’s inelegant systems and secretions.
This character study, however, is also the story of a bizarre murder.
Moshfegh writes, she says, to explore why people do weird things. This interest in the strange — a few striations from the humiliating — shows. In her short-story Disgust, a lonely Chinese man debases himself in his love for a faintly-known woman. In her novella McGlue (excerpted in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading), a drunk sailor is unable to remember if he has murdered his friend.
The Paris Review has championed Moshfegh’s work, publishing several of her stories, and awarding her the Plimpton Prize in 2013. (Her story, “Bettering Myself,” was also featured in Recommended Reading, recommended by The Paris Review.) The following year, Moshfegh won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
When Moshfegh and I chatted on a rainy day in a Williamsburg coffee shop, she was in the final months of a Stegner Fellowship. We discussed, among other things, feminist writing, embarrassment as a literary subject, and why the uproar over Claire Messud’s “The Woman Upstairs” makes her angry.
Moshfegh was unafraid of disagreement, and our conversation rounded into argument and back. But the most memorable moment came when she spoke, lit up, of the joy of writing: “I can’t tell you how much I love writing, revising, editing,” she said. “It’s a complete fantasy.”
Megha Majumdar:What is really interesting about Eileen is that the book complicates female desire. I was struck by a part in which Eileen thinks that her first time having sex will be, in fact, a forced encounter. She believes she will be raped. That, of course, questions what desire can look like. Did you set out to write a feminist book?
If we go by the mores and values that we see around us, any woman living in this world should hate herself.
Ottessa Moshfegh: You’re the first person to ask me that. Thank you. Everything I write is feminist, because I don’t hate women, I hope. I find it impossible to ignore the fact that we live in a really violent culture. Eileen’s character in particular is a victim of that violence. Not only is she in a completely shitty situation at home, but the whole world is rigged to keep her small and powerless. So I wondered, what would it be like if I exposed what happens in a person’s mind when she is being conspired against, held hostage to society? The mind gets perverted when you live in a state of constant defensiveness. You think there’s something wrong with you. Self-loathing is natural. If we go by the mores and values that we see around us, any woman living in this world should hate herself.
MM: Eileen’s self-obsession can make her an unpleasant person to be with —
OM: I don’t agree. Of all the characters in the book, Eileen is the one I relate to.
People talk about her, like, is this a girl you want to spend time with? But she’s pretty typical. She’s delivered to the reader in an intimate, first-person narrative, so you know what her thoughts are. From the outside, she’s not offensive, though she thinks she is.
She has an inflated sense of her physicality. What I was hoping to capture through the perspective of having Eileen narrate this book at 75, talking about herself at 24, is that her self-perception was inaccurate. It was an effect of living in this world. I don’t think she’s that bad.
MM: All right. Let’s see if the question I was going for could still stand — there are a bunch of characters in the book who are unpleasant. People you wouldn’t want to hang out with. Unlikeable characters, basically. I wonder if you remember the debate over unlikeable characters — if women are always expected to write likeable characters, and so on. Do you have some hope for how your book might engage with that debate?
OM: I hope that people might see how ridiculously sexist that is. And it’s so boring. As an artist, I say fuck that debate. Let’s be done with it.
It’s not my job to please people who can’t tolerate anything but lukewarm baths.
The notion of likeability is a concern that the book industry has because there are people who read to feel nothing — people who read in order to check out. They don’t want to be disturbed by the words that they’re reading. They’re scared. The moment they feel challenged, they put down the book and review it on Amazon, “I just couldn’t get into this; it was too dark.” So when you’re selling a book and you say, this might have an effect on you, it turns off cowardly readers. I’m not concerned with those readers. It’s not my job to please people who can’t tolerate anything but lukewarm baths.
I read because I want to change, because I want to learn something and have an experience. If I’m having an experience where nothing is happening to me, I’m going to look at that book as… nothing. And I don’t want to write nothing.
MM: Eileen is obsessed with her body. Where did that interest in the body come from, and how did it evolve as you wrote this book?
OM: Eileen’s body is, in a way, her lover. It is the thing she knows the most intimately, and her relationship with her body is a way to engage with the world. Where it’s not safe to, let’s say, act out against her superiors at work, what she can do is objectify herself, and act out against her own body, as a way of processing her feelings.
I think that’s one way that eating disorders manifest. Or any kind of self-destructive tendency, like cutting. As a writer, it seemed implausible to me that Eileen could have a healthy relationship with her body given her circumstances.
Women are objectified so much that it was impossible for me to conceive of a book where that wasn’t an issue. And especially in this book, which is set in the early 60s.
MM: Is that interest in uninhibited and self-destructive behavior part of why you are interested in writing about drinking and drinkers? This shows up in McGlue as well as Eileen.
OM: I am interested in the ways that people cope with life. Alcoholism itself is not very interesting to me. If your identity as a character is that you are an alcoholic, it’s not going to be a very round character for me, in my writing.
That’s why the father in Eileen — that is who he is, he’s drunk and delusional, he makes messes — but he isn’t a whole person. He’s more like a ghost.
Drinking and doing drugs feed delusion. I’m interested in the stories we tell ourselves, and how they may conflict with other people’s stories about the world, and how, if we’re operating under a delusion, we might make really weird decisions. I like to explore that in fiction — why we do weird things.
MM: You chose to leave Eileen’s father as not a totally full character. Can you talk about that decision?
OM: On the one hand, Eileen as a grown woman has spent a lot of time coming to terms with the way that she feels about her dad, so I didn’t want the book to be, “Here’s me, Eileen, processing my feelings about my abusive alcoholic father.” I wanted the book to be more about Eileen extricating herself from that situation, and leaving behind this identity in search of a new one.
MM: One of your short stories in The Paris Review, “Disgust,” is a favorite of mine, and I wonder if we can trace a line from “Disgust” to Eileen. In “Disgust,” one of the major concerns was embarrassment and humiliation. And in Eileen, those are major ways in which the main character experiences the world. What makes embarrassment and humiliation literary subjects for you?
OM: They take the interior to the exterior. Humiliation is when people see a weakness in us, and we’re caught, exposed in that small moment. We’re vulnerable, and we’re received with judgment. That, to me, is a huge part of being alive — this negotiation between, who is it safe to expose myself to, and how does my fear of judgment limit me from being myself?
I also enjoy thinking about how funny it is that we care so much about the exterior: she has this haircut; he has that haircut; what does that mean — when really we all use the toilet? We all fart in our sleep. We all get pimples. We’re all mortal.
Yet we try to present ourselves in a way that is free from those bodily associations.
There is very good reason for that — people are afraid of death.
And for some people the exterior can become a complete obsession, the way that they create their outward identity. Either the inward disappears — and we call these people shallow — or it becomes so stifled that they become self-loathing or self-obsessed. That stuff is really interesting to me.
Spending time in New York, I’m overwhelmed by the obsessive image-making, and I mostly find it really fun to watch.
MM: This is a book about a bizarre murder. I was surprised by that, because in your short stories, the transgressions are much smaller. What drew you to write about murder, especially in the larger scope of the novel?
So maybe that’s part of my association with a novel: that it is a life and death situation.
OM: Maybe it was the conceit that because the novel is bigger, the transgression needs to be bigger. That happened with my first book, McGlue, too. It starts off with a murder, and in that case, I didn’t know that I was writing a whole book. I just knew that I needed to write that story. And it turned out that there was so much about that murder that it needed to be a book. So maybe that’s part of my association with a novel: that it is a life and death situation.
My attitude toward novel-writing is also very different from my attitude toward short story writing, and my interests in each form are different. Weirdly, a lot more subtlety can be explored in a short story, even though there is less room. Novels for me need broader strokes, so it seems natural that there would be bigger issues to deal with, in terms of storyline, plot, character behavior.
MM: The structure of Eileen is remarkable. There’s attentive observation of the mundane for a lot of the book, and then there’s an explosion of horrifying events. What made you want to structure it in that way, where you are beginning, very consciously, so far from the end?
OM: I wanted to create the feeling of Eileen being stifled and suffocated. I wanted the reader to feel suffocated like Eileen is, living in X-ville. So when Rebecca appears, it really is a lifeline, and things happen quickly thereafter. Eileen is so ready for those things to happen that there isn’t much more room to self-obsess. There isn’t a need for any more world-building, that work is already done. So we can just push forward.
MM: I was struck by lines like, “Nothing special happened that night…,” lines which draw our attention to the artifice of storytelling. What made you want to have that conscious presence in the book as a storyteller?
OM: Eileen, as the older narrator, is telling a story of these days in her past. There is no question that this is a construction. This novel has been written. It’s not like the Ten Commandments or something. We know a human being has put effort into the writing, and it was actually me! Hahaha.
But, I didn’t want the reader to forget that this was a character talking to them, and not an expert storyteller either. Eileen as a narrator cares that she’s understood, and there’s a lot of contradiction, and a lot of self-acceptance in that.
But I wanted her to feel alive as the narrator, so those interjections and little corrections are a way of keeping the reader aware of her.
MM: Let’s talk about the name of the town in the book — X-ville. What is interesting or necessary about that name to you?
OM: A name should be evocative. It is both the label of a place, and a word denoting the shared associations between people who know that place. When I say, Broadway, we both know what we’re talking about, and yet we must have different experiences of it. Names are proper nouns, not subjective. In that, they sit in the imagination with a lot of weight.
X-ville had to be X-ville because naming the actual town would’ve been too painful, and maybe too risky for Eileen. It was a way of distancing the entire story from her heart: I’m telling you this is a real place but I’m not going to tell you what it’s really called. In that way there is a gap between reality and story.
MM: Where is your own name from?
OM: My name is Persian. My dad is from Iran.
MM: What are your thoughts on other, recent feminist novels — Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. In those, there is a minute examination of domestic life. And in Eileen, domesticity is kind of a farce, but it’s also something Eileen wants. How do you think Eileen might be in conversation with those other books?
OM: I get angry thinking about Claire Messud’s book, and the hoopla around having this character who was a woman who was a little angry.
I didn’t think the opening rant in the book came across as being very hostile at all. Just because it was a woman writing it and speaking it, people were like: Oh my god, how uncouth! How experimental! Wake up, people.
In terms of domesticity, the world that Eileen knew was her house, this small town, and the prison where she worked. That was kind of it for her.
What does domesticity mean? It means, life athome. I don’t think of Eileen as a domestic character at all. The fact that she lives in a house makes her domestic, but no more than a cockroach.
MM: What does the practice of writing look like for you? Do you write by hand?
OM: I write straight on the computer. When I’m editing a novel, I’ll print out the draft and edit on paper, cutting things and taping them back together, stuff like that.
The process is really different depending on whether it’s a short story, novella, or novel. This novel I drafted very quickly, in 6 weeks, and then spent 10 months revising and re-writing. I don’t usually take a year to write a short story, but in some cases I do.
MM: Do you anticipate being edited? Has being edited changed how you write?
OM: What I like most about being edited is the perspective shift. I like looking at a piece as an object, rather than carrying the baggage of the process of writing, to my reading of it. Seeing it through an editor’s lens is refreshing and clarifying.
MM: Is there something you dislike, or that stays difficult, about writing and editing?
OM: No. It’s a joy. Writing is so much fun for me. What’s painful about writing is the fear that I can’t realize what I’m envisioning. But even that fear is a delight. I can’t tell you how much I love writing, revising, editing. It’s a complete fantasy. (laughs)
MM: Are there things you do that are not writing that you find are good for your writing?
OM: Yeah. Sleeping is really good for my writing. Dreaming. Walking. Seeing art. Listening to music. Seeing people I haven’t seen in a long time — it stimulates my memory. High risk situations are good. Travel is the big one.
Recently I wrote a story that was inspired by a really strange couple of days that I spent in this small coastal town in Kenya. The actual story doesn’t take place there, but it inspired the world that the story does take place in.
MM: Have you read anything good recently?
OM: I go through phases where I read a lot, and then I don’t read at all. I brought Volume 1 of My Struggle with me, and I just don’t know why I’m supposed to care about this self-obsessed, white European man. Why is he supposed to be interesting to me? I don’t find him interesting. Even when he’s being charming and funny, I don’t care. I don’t think I’m going to finish it.
MM: I read half of that book.
OM: Why did you stop?
MM: I felt that I knew what his writing was like, and that satisfied me.
OM: Same experience.
MM: What are you working on? What can we expect to read next?
OM: I have two novels that I’m working on, and I’m writing personal, narrative essays. Or, I wrote one. Now I’m writing another.
OM: Yeah. Now I’m writing about birds that I’ve known, personally.
MM: What draws you to non-fiction?
OM: I’m at a place in my life where I’m old enough to have perspective on my childhood. All of a sudden, I’m not a child. I don’t know how that happened.
I come from a fascinating family of very special people with endless good stories. There’s so much to explore there, and funneling it through fiction is less interesting for me right now. Why not just say what really happened?
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
