Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeed Books editor, has been enamored with tattoos since he was 14. Back then, Fitzgerald was a boarding school student on the brink of being kicked out or dropping out — whichever came first. It wasn’t until his tattooed school advisor, Nate McBride, made him and his friends a promise that Fitzgerald found the incentive to stay in school. The promise? If Fitzgerald and his friends graduated from the boarding school, McBride would pay for their first tattoo. Fast forward several years later, and McBride kept his promise, paying for a Celtic Tree of Life inside a tribal sun, the first of Fitzgerald’s several tattoos. Fast forward several more years to 2012, when Fitzgerald teamed up with illustrator Wendy McNaughton to start the blog Pen & Ink, a submission-based Tumblr where people reveal their tattoo stories. The idea took off and Bloomsbury published Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them this fall.
Pen & Ink grants us access to the private meanings behind the public markings of strangers. It provides a sensation similar to meeting someone in a bar, hearing their secrets, and then never seeing them again. From tributes to late fiancés all the way down to tributes to pizza, Pen & Ink showcases jude how wide the range of tattoo stories can be. There are tattoo stories from familiar names, like Tao Lin and the rapper French Montana, but many of the book’s best moments come from less well-known people — warehouse managers, union organizers, bartenders — sharing their stories.
I met Fitzgerald on the first day of November at a bar in Brooklyn. We spoke over beers and the course of an afternoon about all things tattoos.
Michelle King: The blog started in 2012, but when was the first time you had the idea of people telling their tattoo stories?
Isaac Fitzgerald: I really think it was at Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist was this bar I worked at, and it open from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day of the year, save for one day of the year in January where we would shut it down to clean. It was a big staff, so we weren’t all there from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m., but I was there more than I’d like to admit. While we were passing those hours before the place really got cooking, I would ask people about their stories. It was a way of communicating, and that’s where the first thought came from. That was years and years before I even met Wendy. Another big proponent, and the book is dedicated to her, is Rachel Fershleiser, who works at Tumblr. She was another one. Rachel was smart enough to be like, “That idea should be on Tumblr.” Rachel was the one to be like, “Tumblr will be its home.”
MK:I have four tattoos, one of which is visible, but I still find the question of “Why did you get that tattoo?” to be really intimate and, at times, invasive. It’s a question about a public thing — a thing you choose to make public — but it can still be very private. Do you agree?
IF: I do, and I think you’re getting right to the point of [the book]. One of my favorite things I saw when the book came out is this woman — I wish I could remember her name — but she tweeted about the book and was like, “I love this book, I like these stories, but if you ever ask me about me tattoos in public, I’ll punch you in the fucking throat.” I thought that was great. For me, tattoos are about holding a story and carrying it with you, and at the same time, it can be this idea of “this is my body and I can do with it what I want and you don’t get to ask me about that.” There’s a lot of power in that.
MK: There is. That’s really the backbone of Roxane Gay’s piece, where she speaks about tattoos being a way to take ownership of her body, and her being able to choose something about this body that she didn’t get to choose. That’s one of the more emotional stories in the book.
IF: Absolutely. Roxane is one of my favorites in the book, and I don’t just say that because she’s my friend and I don’t just that because she’s an incredibly talented writer. I’m not going to lie. I feel very fortuitous to have Roxane Gay and Cheryl Strayed involved in this book.
MK:And Lena Dunham submitted to the project, right?
IF: Lena got a galley of the book and wanted to support it. She sent her photos, she sent her story. Of course, it needed almost no editing, because she’s great. She really captured the spirit of the project. To have Lena, to have Cheryl, to have Roxane Gay involved with the project — it has just been mind-blowing.
MK: All of those pieces are so incredible, but one of the things I find really special about the book is that it’s anchored by pieces from “normal people.” How important was it to you that the book include names that people wouldn’t be familiar with or that the book include people who didn’t identify as artists or writers?
IF: Huge. Huge importance. I was asked once why I put their employment and I never actually asked myself that question. I was just like, “Well, it shouldn’t just be their name. Let’s make it their name and what they do.” Looking back on it, what that allowed is to show that people from all different backgrounds get tattoos. CEOs, politicians, business owners — people from all walks of life now have tattoos, which was one of the things I was setting out to prove. It’s not just those of us who work at the biker bar or creative types. All sorts of different people, from all sorts of different backgrounds have tattoos in modern day America.
MK:It’s true. Tattoos used to be this underground thing and now they’re more mainstream —
IF:Very mainstream. 23% of the people in this country.
MK:That’s insane. Why do you think that is?
IF: I think our parents’ generation saw it as this thing that people on the sidelines did. It was not a mainstream thing. It was not a thing you’d go do on a Saturday afternoon. I think they thought that as we got further away from World War II, we’d get deeper into this idea of “honor your body.” And I’ve met those people. I’ve met people who are like, “how could you do that to your body? Your body is a temple. That’s going to be there forever.” But what’s happened in the next generation is that it’s gotten incredibly mainstream. But still, for somebody who is against tattoos, it’s almost inconceivable. They just come to it with so many assumptions. That’s what I love about this book, though. In my perfect world, this book is for somebody who not only has tattoos, but also for somebody without tattoos to try and understand some of the reasons why people decide to mark themselves in this way.
MK: So many books about tattoos are photography books, which is great and it serves its own purpose, but the illustrations really allow this to be a book that focuses on the stories. Is that what you and Wendy wanted? Did you envision it being a “tattoo image book” or more of a collection of anecdotes about why people choose to get tattoos?
IF: We wanted to focus on the storytelling. I grew up with tattoo magazines, and I do hope people understand that I think art photography is incredible and beautiful. I do love it as an art form, but what Wendy brought to the table is something new. That’s why I think Pen & Ink isn’t just another tattoo book, it’s a different kind of tattoo book.
MK:Whose idea was it to take away any of the other tattoos a person might have and only focus in on the tattoo being written about?
IF: Man, that is fucking all Wendy. Literally any question you have for me today, any good idea aside from maybe the initial idea, that is Wendy McNaughton. She’s talented, she’s smart, she’s incredible. She normally draws live, but early on she said to me, “Isaac, you get the stories, you edit the stories. And you take photographs and send them to me.” This is actually a point of much contention for us, because I’ll usually be at a bar getting a story from someone, snap a photo of the tattoo, send it to Wendy, and she’ll be like, “That’s great, Isaac. But, um, I would like to have their hand in the photograph.” But the reason why she decided not to draw live is that she wanted to focus on the tattoo. She wanted the body of the person to be the least thought about thing in the image. The link to the tattoo is the story behind it, not whether the person is smoking hot or not so smoking hot, or their ethnicity, or anything other than the tattoo. It’s just about the tattoo.
MK: We’ve spoken about some of the more heartfelt pieces in the book, but the book isn’t just composed of these more emotional stories. There are also tons of really silly, funny tattoos, like the woman who got pizza party on her toe knuckles, because —
IF: Because she fucking loves pizza.
MK: Because she fucking loves pizza. How do you consider those lighter stories to be an integral part of the book?
IF: The whole point [of the project] was that I wanted to show the spectrum. The spectrum of the jobs that people with tattoos have, the spectrum of backgrounds that people with tattoos have, and the spectrum of the reasons why people get tattoos. Speaking personally, I have tattoos on my body that are for dead friends. I have tattoos on my body that I can’t talk about without crying. But I also have tattoos that are dumb and silly and hilarious. And that’s just me. That’s just one person. So, the entire scale of why people get tattoos? It’s huge.
MK:All of Wendy’s drawings are beautiful, but the book isn’t about beautiful tattoos. When you talk about your Celtic tree tattoo, you acknowledge that you think it’s ugly but that you still love it.
IF: That Celtic tattoo? One of the stories that’s not in the book is I was working maintence and my manager looked at it and said, “Oh. That looks like Spider-Man getting his Spidey-sense.” And he was right. So, just like that, it went from being this tattoo that meant so much to me and represented so many of my beliefs to being Spider-Man getting his Spidey-sense on my right shoulder.
MK: Some tattoos do force you to have a sense of humor. Either you could hate that one part of your body, or work to get it removed, or work to hide it or you can be like, “I’m going to own this.”
IF: Yes, exactly. And when it comes to cover-ups, I think they’re great and I applaud people who choose to do them and there are so many reasons to cover-up a tattoo that you’ve gotten. If people do choose to get their tattoos removed or cover them up, that’s part of their tattoo story. But I don’t cover any up. I had a very dramatic tattoo artist say something to me once but I don’t think he was wrong. He said, “If that tattoo could live and breathe, it’d scream out for it’s life. It’d say, ‘Don’t you remember our good times? Don’t you remember why we were friends’ and it’d be like you were drowning it.” I agree with his philosophy.
MK:There’s going to be called a Pen & Ink sequel, right?
IF: Yes! It’s going to be called Knives & Ink. It’s about the tattoos of chefs. I feel really excited about it.
MK:Why chefs?
IF: It’s a few different reasons. One, I’ve worked in kitchens before. It’s such a tattooed culture. Two, it runs the gamut. You have gritty line cooks that are covered in tattoos, all the way up to the stars. I love that democracy of tattoos. And then, three, I just think there will be a lot of great stories. There will be stories of debauchery, but I also think there will be a lot of heartfelt stories, just as there are in Pen & Ink. Coming from an editing background, I really do think that that the more specific you get, sometimes the more surprised you’ll be by the story.
You wouldn’t think we’d find the apocalypse so compelling. If it comes — when it comes — the end won’t be pretty. In fact, it will almost certainly be grizzly. Still, we love to think about it, to watch films about it, and read novels about it. Some people might call this humanity’s death wish. To me, it seems like the opposite, ironic as that is.
Our obsession with the end runs hand-in-hand with our desire to understand ourselves and our origins, a belief that if we know what’s coming we’ll be able to stop it. In this way apocalyptic literature has the ring of prophecy or fleshed-out fortune-telling — part of its seductiveness the idea that there are secrets hidden within. But there’s another level to apocalyptic literature, the best of it at least. Here, I’d include Emily St. John Mandel’s latest, Station Eleven, along with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Ultimately, these books fulfill Milan Kundera’s lofty goal for the novel (from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting):
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything… In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
Station Eleven is a rare piece of work, one that succeeds dramatically and linguistically, philosophically and thematically. In this, it shares something with one of its great and obvious obsessions, the life and work of William Shakespeare. That’s not to raise Mandel’s art to the level of Shakespeare’s — a comparison the author herself would no doubt shy from — but to say that Station Eleven is a book of its time in much the way Shakespeare’s work was of his, one well deserving of its status as a National Book Award finalist.
The world of Station Eleven is stark and blighted, most of the novel set in the aftermath of the Georgia Flu, a pandemic that has killed almost 100% of the world’s population. Humanity’s remnant clings to the basics of existence, the skeleton of a civilization at once deluded and grand, foolish and hopeful, arrogant and doomed. That civilization is, of course, our own.
With antibiotics, electricity, the Internet, and countless other, modern conveniences stripped away humanity’s survivors don’t so much try to rebuild society as subsist in the shadow of what once was. They live as hunter-gatherers and scavengers, marauders and zealots, such technology as remains both blessing and curse, fodder for children’s stories but also for feelings of despair, a pall of grief fallen across a stricken world. Station Eleven becomes a poetic lament for the scientific magic that has been lost, “These taken for granted miracles that had persisted all around them.”
From the opening chapter, in which famed actor, Arthur Leander, dies during a performance of King Lear, to its dramatic focus on the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of gun-toting, knife-wielding players that roam the pandemic-ravaged, post-apocalyptic world performing classical music and Shakespeare (their motto, Because Survival is Insufficient), to the story of Station Eleven itself (a fictional space station that serves as locus for the novel’s meta-fictional book within a book) Mandel’s novel centers on the struggle between existence and transcendence, a conflict that rests at the heart of the human experience.
This struggle takes multiple forms, the differences between existence and transcendence not always so easy to see. Just as in our world, many are led astray by religion even after “the apocalypse,” none more than the prophet and his followers, their holy books the New Testament (and, of course, the Book of Revelation), but also the graphic novel, “Station Eleven.”
Yes, somehow “Station Eleven” has found its way into the prophet’s hands but also into the hands of Kirsten Raymonde, a member of the Traveling Symphony. A child actress who was performing with Arthur Leander the night he died, Kirsten received her copy from him, as ultimately did the prophet. Over the course of the novel these two characters and their two radically different interpretations of Station Eleven draw ever closer, building towards a final life and death confrontation that comes to feel epic in scope.
Station Eleven is one of the finest novels I’ve read in some time, a book that succeeds sentence to sentence, scene to scene, and as a piece of philosophical art. In spite of its obsession with Shakespeare’s life and work, this book doesn’t set out to court greatness. But with the restrained brilliance of its prose, the humility of its attention to story and dramatic construction, and its unwillingness to give us easy answers it may have achieved that greatness all the same.
Choose Your Own Adventure books have grown up. If there was any question, Nicholas Bourbaki’s novel If(Livingston Press, 2014) proves that the narrative medium driven by the reader’s choices — whether you call it choicefic, interactive fiction, or branching path narrative — is a viable form of literary fiction.
If gives the reader a hand in the fate of an unnamed protagonist, a teenage boy (and later, young man) from an obscure California town, reaching adulthood around the turn of the millennium. If uses the second person that is familiar to readers of the Choose Your Own Adventure series (in which “you” are the main character). Cleverly, Bourbaki introduces a first person narrator with a small but important role — a childhood bully who occasionally reappears in the protagonist’s life. This bully’s intimate cruelty as a character makes a striking contrast with his emotional detachment as a narrator. Bourbaki deftly morphs his narrative voice to reflect the various identities the protagonist takes on, sometimes with a strain of mockery that might be attributed to the bully-narrator.
Most of If’s plotlines are bluntly realistic, though a few are fantastical — including one that gives a nod to the mystical labyrinth described in Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Despite its tongue-in-cheek cover blurb, If evinces little of the kitsch and whimsy that have dominated choicefic: the endings are nearly all dark — and only occasionally funny. One ending is so disturbing I almost regretted reading it.
The pseudonymous Bourbaki, who keeps his real identity secret, answered my questions by email.
JJR: Your book is about the decisions a person makes early in life — about ages 13 through 23, it seems. Did you start off wanting to write about this time of life and decide choicefic/interactive fiction was the best way to do it? Or did you want to write choicefic and decide that this time of life was a good fit for the medium?
NB: A little of both, and I can’t remember which came first. I’ve heard that the period between when someone leaves her parents’ home and when she settles down to start her own family, or settles into a career, is a unique period in life. Beliefs and values are in flux in a way they usually aren’t before or after. A person might move away from the religion or politics she inherited from her parents. Then the window closes, we stop seeking out the unfamiliar as much — you know, most people quit listening to new music and things like that — and whatever tribal identity we had when the window closed, we apparently tend to keep for the rest of our lives. It’s like a game of musical chairs. You dance around for a while, no one knows where she’s going to end up, and then at some point the music stops and you stick with whatever seat happened to be nearby.
So I wrote the book partly because I wanted to explore this period in life when choice is especially central. But I also wanted to start a little earlier to show the background — the first choices we make where we can really be held responsible. And because all of this is a time when your choices really matter — the rest of your life ends up being path-dependent on your choices in the window of transition — I thought it would be interesting to present these themes in a novel where the reader gets to participate in making the choices.
JJR: Your book deals very directly with the question of free will — which choicefic seems particularly suited to do. One of the questions you have to answer in writing choicefic is “when does the reader get a choice?” Did you have to settle on a particular philosophy of free will in order to write the book?
NB: I’d say I’m basically a skeptic when it comes to dogmatic issues in philosophy like the nature of free will. The title of my blog (“Against the Logicians”) comes from the work of a Pyrrhonian skeptic who had a lot of influence on Montaigne, another one of my heroes. Basically, I don’t believe that philosophical problems are set up in a way that allows them to be solved. I agree with the later Wittgenstein that once you see the problems clearly, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that there is a problem, much less a solution.
Actually, I tried to mock a puzzle-solving, analytic philosophical approach to the nature of free will here and there in the novel. And the way that you end up with so many different philosophical attitudes, based on unrelated choices you make in the novel, offers another kind of commentary on philosophy.
JJR: I’d like to address the word choicefic. I don’t know how you feel about the term, and I realize it’s probably confusing to a lot of readers because, well, I made it up. But I think all of the other terms for this type of literature are problematic. Choose Your Own Adventure is a trademark, and it evokes something at least whimsical if not intended for kids. Interactive fiction (IF) originally referred to a genre of video games — and if you Google it, that’s what you find. The other terms — like branching path narrative — are sort of clunky. What are your thoughts on this?
NB: I think “choicefic” would be a great term, and I agree that there’s a need for some term that’s not covered by a trademark. I wish it had been possible for me to say on the back cover that If is a “literary Choose Your Own Adventure novel,” so that someone researching that term on the Internet would come across the book. But because of Chooseco’s trademark, that’s not possible.
It’s unfortunate for anyone trying to write a book like this. While I was working on If, I searched now and then to see if someone had tried to do a literary Choose Your Own Adventure before, and I never came up with anything. Then, just last month, someone emailed me about Life’s Lottery, a literary choicefic book from 1999 by Kim Newman. It never came up in my research because it wasn’t associated with the phrase “Choose Your Own Adventure” in Internet searches.
JJR: Your book is out in hard cover and paperback. There are things you can do in electronic choicefic that you simply can’t do in a physical book. Did you feel these limitations in writing your novel? Have you experimented with electronic choicefic?
NB: The publisher, Livingston Press, is working on a Kindle version, so I’m definitely not opposed to electronic choicefic in principle. But I also think that the printed form has advantages, for me at least. You get a better sense of the total number of possibilities in the book, and how what you’ve read relates to those possibilities. With electronic choicefic, I imagine there could be a vertiginous sense that the novel might extend indefinitely in all directions. Some people might find that thrilling, but I think I’d find it demoralizing.
Also, one thing that the Kindle does not do nearly as well as a physical book is allow the reader to flip back and forth rapidly between various sections and pages, something that I often want to do while trying to make sense of a book with a complex structure or complex themes.
JJR: You’re writing under a pseudonym — Nicholas Bourbaki — which is also the collective pseudonym of a group of important mathematicians. Why did you choose this name?
NB: I first read about Bourbaki in a biography of Kurt Gödel and thought that the whole idea of mathematicians using a collective pseudonym was hilarious. So I wanted to join in. I also liked the implication that the novel might be written by a collective, in light of all the different styles. Who knows what’s on the other side of a pseudonym?
I should add, though, that I learned later that the Bourbaki collective aimed for a kind of encyclopedic, perfectionist foundationalism that may conflict with a lot of my own thoughts about the abuse of mathematical thinking in philosophy and economics. So I added the “h” to “Nicholas,” and now the name has an echo of Jolly St. Nicholas. The slip from Nicolas to Nicholas probably captures my attitude about the original Bourbaki project well enough.
JJR:I found it interesting that you mentioned your skepticism about philosophical dogma and your opposition to foundationalism. There’s a funny moment in your book where one of the characters identifies as a “Burkean” but then makes it clear through her comments that she doesn’t have a clue who Burke is — a delicious irony given Burke’s concern for historical context. I got the sense that the book itself is rather Burkean in that it portrays a world where life is a muddle, rationalism is often a trap, and the worst mistake is to arrogantly defy the wisdom embodied in tradition and convention. Not that the reader can avoid a dire ending by making conformist choices — the protagonist’s deviant behavior is often outside the reader’s control.
NB: Exactly. It was unexpected that the book ended up reflecting what is in some ways a conservative outlook. Most people would probably view the politics on my blog, for example, as pretty far left. The economics there certainly are. But in the novel, I found myself adopting a critical attitude toward the cultural legacies of the 1960s, the New Left, things like that. The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s obviously did a lot of good — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the environmental movement — but at the same time, I think Michel Houellebecq is on to something when he criticizes the 68ers in France or the hippies here for leading toward a dead end in terms of how to live one’s own life.
In retrospect, a lot of If could probably be seen as an illustration of the idea that pursuing moment-by-moment self-gratification is an unlikely formula for a well-lived life. And I think, in practice, this is where the cultural revolution of the last several decades often ends up, despite everyone’s best intentions. It strips away constraints on individual freedom until you risk ending up with consumerism as the default meaning of a person’s life. It strips away community until you end up with the kinds of things Robert Putnam talks about in Bowling Alone. It strips away traditional sources of meaning, like Charles Taylor (the philosopher, not the Liberian dictator) has argued throughout his career. One of the last sections I wrote, which ended up being almost like a critical essay on the book, was the section that describes the protagonist as “the eternal civilian,” the small nightmare corresponding to today’s moment in the development of freedom. When I think back on the book today, that’s what stands out most in my mind.
JJR: Do you expect that choicefic will gain wide respect as a literary medium? If so, how would you respond to a critic who says “your book is good, but that’s a trick that will only work once”?
NB: I’ll be very curious to see where things go. It seems like the people who read Choose Your Own Adventure books as children are around the age where they’re producing their own work, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more in the near future. The fact that Neil Patrick Harris recently wrote his memoir as a Choose Your Own Autobiography suggests there might be more to come.
JJR: Are you willing to share any hints about your next project?
NB: There are a few projects I’m thinking about, including a book of poems about catastrophe in nature, but the project closest to If is what I think of as my “dystopian travel guide” project. It would pretend to be a travel guide written after several decades or maybe more of global catastrophe — flooding and drought, epidemic diseases, mass migrations to lawless coastal megaslums, endless resource conflicts and terrorism, probably the use of nuclear weapons. The continental United States would be a kind of wasteland. This would be a travel guide to the wasteland, all written in the jaunty, reassuring tone of the Lonely Planet series, with advice on where to get the best street food, etc.
This week Taylor Swift did something seemingly unremarkable. She couldn’t come to a contract agreement with a company, Spotify, so she decided to stop doing business with them. Swift’s music is still available on a half-dozen other online streaming services, to purchase digitally or physically, or to listen to free on YouTube. Yet somehow a decision to exercise a modicum of control over the art she creates caused a backlash with writers scolding Swift for insulting her fans, calling her greedy, and urging fans to refuse to buy her music.
Sure, Swift is ridiculously rich, but she is correct that Spotify is a complete rip-off for artists. This infographic shows how stark the picture is. Spotify pays as little as $00.006 a stream, meaning you’d have to play a song 167 times — or about 8 hours of music — before an artist earned a single dollar. But the point is not Spotify’s rate, the point is that Swift has every right to decide who to do business with.
I don’t think I’ve even heard more than three Taylor Swift songs, but the idea that artists are “insulting” or “greedy” for asking people to pay a relatively modest amount of money for their art is pervasive in today’s culture. People make these same claims about indie authors, bands that can’t afford a tour, and struggling illustrators. I’ve seen people proclaim that midlist novelists who can’t even make a living off their books are “greedy” and “evil” for asking more than 99 cents for an ebook. I’ve seen readers who admitted to pirating every single A Song of Ice and Fire book say that George R. R. Martin “owes them” a quicker publication date and that he should essentially give up all his hobbies and other projects until he finishes his next book. (Neil Gaiman had a nice rebuttal to this mindset on his blog.)
It is bizarre enough to think that an artist “owes” you something when you’ve paid them nothing, but the entire idea of “mean” artists who are taking advantage of their fans is especially bizarre in a time when artists give more of themselves to fans than ever before. Look at Taylor Swift. She is famous for constantly interacting with her fans on social media — and, I feel the need to stress again, much of her music is free or dirt cheap on YouTube and non-Spotify streaming services. Artists today already provide tons of content for free — mixtape downloads, short stories on websites, illustrations on Tumblr — that it is only the most extreme fan entitlement that could resent them for taking a small portion of that and asking a few bucks for it.
I understand why people steal music, books, and TV. Who doesn’t want everything for free? But it is getting hard to take the bizarre rationalizations and outright contempt for artists that so many self-proclaimed “fans” have. I’m positive I could go walk into a café right now and find someone with a trust fund sipping a five dollar latte and dicking around on a $500 tablet who would tell me he pirates because “books are overpriced” and authors are “greedy.” Plus, he isn’t just stealing music and books, he’s really fighting for freedom, bringing down the capitalist machine, pushing art forward, and encouraging innovation through disruption!
The bottom line is that artists’ rights are workers’ rights. You are not being progressive or radical by denying artists the right to control their own work. You are not helping the underprivileged by making it impossible for anyone who isn’t already rich and privileged to take up artistic careers. Your pirated Taylor Swift song isn’t feeding the poor. If you want to fight the power, maybe try hacking JP Morgan instead of pirating a vampire romance for your Kindle.
In fact, the constant devaluation of art has been a huge boon for large corporations. There is no one happier that it is increasingly acceptable to pay nothing to photographers, artists, writers, and musicians. Doritos would love for you to crowd source their next TV ad and Apple is thrilled you’ll pay more for an iPod because you know you can steal the music you’ll listen to on it.
None of this is to say that artists shouldn’t give their work away for free. Free stuff is great! Streaming is great! Self-publishing, ebooks, and the rest are all great. The point is that it should be up to the artist. If one author wants to put up all their work for free online and another wants to charge ten dollars, those should be their decisions. If you don’t think that a book is worth ten dollars, then don’t buy it. The artist is not “mean” or “greedy” or “evil” for wanting money, and you have near infinite other options to spend your time on. The current climate is one where artists need to experiment with different ways of making and selling work, but that means letting them try different things — not demanding that they do exactly what you want them to do.
In short, treat artists like you would treat any other type of worker. If you wouldn’t demand your accountant do your taxes “for exposure,” steal medicine from your doctor to show him his rates are overpriced, or call your baker “a greedy asshole” for charging a dollar a dinner roll, then maybe go easy on an artist asking the cost of a few cups of coffee for something they put countless hours of work into.
Luke Goebel: Alright! Hi, Lindsay Hunter. You wrote the book Ugly Girls (great title, by the way) and it’s a jaw rattler. I keep saying it used my heart as a rag. To clean what is the next question…the heart of the world? The heart of all of us? The holy secular heart? I mean there’s a lot to say on this one, and it’s BIG. FSG release. Kind of book everyone will want to read. Mass appeal, all that, killer speed book, craft out of the top of the head, with all the best prose anyone could want, plus the big story, mindblower, like at times I’m reading something written so good I think it’s As I Lay Dying only it’s 2014 or ’15 or ’16 and it’s Ugly Girls and it’s set in this trailer park — other times I’m clearly reading Lindsay Hunter and it’s still set in that trailer park — but it’s like one of those great books you read in school as a kid (though this one isn’t going to be taught in any kids’ schools anytime soon I doubt, not with some of these scenes!) and thought, HOW THE HELL DID THIS WRITER DO THIS? They must just be one of them [sic] magic writer people, one of them [sic] AUTHORS, who sit away in some lonely place of beauty to write this GOLD that just comes out of them, like, erupts, because they live the Earth into its being, and are geniuses, and all that… I’m trying to give you a compliment… say your book is killer… and with a difference from those old greats, because you do things they would have been shot if they wrote. Really. Killed.
SO… here’s the question, and it’s the ONE I think everyone wants to know when they read a book that rattles their jaws and makes the world seem at once familiar and strange, so the reader thinks “Maybe I don’t know myself, or life at all, maybe I can try again and do better this life.” Question being: HOW DID YOU DO IT?
Where did this novel come from? Who are these characters you found? Did you have help? Was there an editor? How did you write this? At what times of day? From what hilltop or plantation or moor or whatever wetlands? On what machine or by hand? Where did you figure out to have that quarry that is in the book? How did you find this novel inside you? Well… Hunter, will you tell us?
Lindsay Hunter: Luke, thank you so much for saying all of that. It is an enormous compliment coming from you!
I think I trusted that I had a novel-sized story to tell inside me, and then I just kept trusting that every single day. It was very hard at times and it haunts me to this day! Eventually, after years of doubts and self-hatred and all of it, a writer must come to a place where she can trust herself. Or give herself permission, at the very least, to write. So this novel is kind of the culmination of years and years of self-flagellating and wheels-spinning. Eventually I just decided to forge on into the abyss, or whatever that saying is. Is there a saying? I decided to trust the abyss.
You know, this is something I’m learning as a mother, now, too. I resist the daily change that comes from being a parent. Every once in a while I have to remind myself that the way through is through. Can’t go around, can’t avoid. Just ahhhhh, lay back, get all up in that change, serve it a plate of sausages and some tea. Trust the abyss.
Anyway. Even trusting the abyss I needed some goals to work toward. And not just the goal of “write a novel!” I needed bite-sized, achievable goals. I decided I’d attempt it the way I attempt flash fiction stories: with a word count (or plot-based) goal, and I’d sit at the desk until I met that goal. My daily word count goal for the novel was 2,000–2,500 words. Sometimes I’d get that done in two hours! Other times it’d take me all day. It felt wonderful at times, completely blissful, and then the next day I’d decide I was a horrible hack with no real story to tell. Would people care about anything in this book? Would they be bored, feel cheated, see right through me? I fear all of that to this day. I can never trust a compliment. I’m always searching in and around it for the TRUTH. It’s a sickness! I think writers are like that, though. We don’t take anything at face value; we keep probing for that dark secret, that hidden room. It is so annoying.
I wrote this mostly in my basement office, with forays into my SunPorch sofa or my dining table. I like to write in the morning. I am a true morning person. I took a month off of work and treated writing this novel like a 9–5 job. I’d shower, get dressed, get ready, eat breakfast, and then descend into the basement to write. I did not allow myself to relax until my goal was achieved. I was pregnant at the time, and I just felt like I didn’t have any time to slack. I had to go hard in the paint. Also, in general, in life, my process is to write until it’s done. I am not one to write a bit, ruminate, come back, write a little more… I need to get it DONE. Maybe that speaks to the novel’s pace? I wanted the novel to MOVE. I didn’t want any dawdling. I wanted stuff to matter. I’m not saying I was a hundred percent successful in any of it! I’m just saying what I wanted.
The quarry. I almost named the novel “The Quarry”! I felt like it was a physical representation of the deeply carved quarry in each of the characters. It sounds lame typing it out that way! But I wanted a place for things to culminate, and I wanted it to be a kind of metaphor. Again, not sure if I was successful. I can’t say too much more without spoilers!
It all started with me wanting to write a fairy tale about a girl who couldn’t feel fear. It started there and became what it is now. I think my grand plan for the novel changed on a daily basis, and I just kind of went with it. It was the only thing I could do!
And now I turn this back to you. Luke. Holy frijoles. Speaking of a book moving. Your words positively freak right off the page. My eyes can barely keep up. I am with you, I am with you, I am with you, oh my God now I am crying. So many moments like that in your work. Hysterical, is the word I think of now. Because it’s funny and it’s emotional and it’s unhinged and it’s so, so, so unique. I want to know how YOU wrote THIS BOOK. And what kind of effect did it have on your psyche, if you don’t mind me asking? It seems like a laying bare kind of a book. A true soul-scouring. Did you feel better or worse? Are those adjectives even worthy of what you felt?
Another question: Padgett Powell said he wasn’t sure if this was fiction or non-fiction. It seemed like an odd thing to say. Why would I care what he wasn’t sure of? BUT it made me think. Do YOU care? Do you think there’s a distinction? Do you label it as fiction or non-fiction, yourself?
LG: Lindsay, Thank you. What an awesome answer. Extremely generous and now I know about the quarry and your process and I’m left with the same sense: you are the book you wrote. It’s your drive that gave it its speed. Then it’s also a miracle.
As to the question, Am I the book I wrote? Well, surely I am. It’s my then music coming from myself. Although, also it’s a performance. You’ve nailed your answers. I feel like saying, I don’t know the book. It showed up one day and could talk.
For me, it was all a very different kind of process. I didn’t have a regimented approach. I wrote because I was living and writing. I wrote stories of myself and stories from me that were coming hard for me, at me, from the world and my being then me. What Padgett Powell said, wrote, when he wrote it, it knocked me out, his saying it wasn’t so much fiction as something that had been done to me, like a beating, and I wasn’t unhappy at how I had taken the beating. I then realized, reading his words, how much of a beating I had taken and that I had been too dumb or too in flight to sit and just be beaten. The calamities. The tragic loss. I had to make something out of it.
Also, I had something to prove at first because of a teacher and a love, both of whom are in the book. I lost her and then my only and big brother died. He was the greatest most fun and loving and terrific person I ever knew, with the greatest heart. Then I wrote the stories I had and assembled as a book half blood eyed crying and it was signed and awarded a prize. I figured: now what? So I wrote them into a novel, the stories I had written. Getting away with something. Changing it up after selling it. I felt like what the hell! I’ll get a motor coach and use it to travel and have a 3600 watt generator and power on the side of any road any place I set down to run computers and printers and typewriters and make edits and drink coffee and cry and smoke cigarettes and take my road home with my dog.
I just started using more and more interruptions and stories that were happening as I kept driving into the world, looking for the next round of trouble. It was a lot of excitement driving that giant death trap. I had another adventure and another and it just HAPPENED. I wanted to keep talking and getting it more… correct. So I took my keys in a big long motor estate and hit the world of roads… But… ARE THESE OR IS OR WAS THAT ME?
I feel like saying was Elvis Presley really Elvis?
Of course when you watch footage of him playing his heart into the piano, when no one was supposed to be looking, it’s like watching a boy take himself into art in holy brilliance of pure study and love for song. I don’t know much about Elvis, but what I listen to of him. If it all doesn’t sound too ludicrous. I just love the old music. I’m NO Elvis here, NOT SAYING I’m ELVIS material, but I was just working with the keys trying to get true and truer. But was Elvis really performing as ELVIS? Do I have to account for myself after accounting for myself? In one way or another? His heart shows through and everyone who knew him says the same thing. He was all honest goodness. Course I don’t know. Maybe I have overlooked a backstory. But ELVIS? I’m not all goodness, still we all have those art forms in us, us devoting ourselves to something we love that’s in us. Well, the book is about lots of things real at the core but many fictionalized too, and I really bought a 31-foot van and learned to drive it on the fly just bellow tornados with huge winds torquing me like a sail with 31 feet of exposed wind catching side eleven feet high. I fixed parts going out and breaking off on the old wingless plane, and smashed into an Acura on Manhattan Beach, tore it open like a tuna fish can, and had a pistol and snuck into paradise and felt myself alone and asked what can you offer over and over and had a time of it all, trying and pushing my song onward, and I could feel it was happening right, and I kept trying to find something for us all, sky and sea, for you and myself and all the readers, something to believe in — in this time we live in of cowardliness and Ferguson, MO. War on good-hearted-human-alive people and true families of our streets, in this time of world chaos and Fukushima, and militarized police at home keeping down protests after teenagers get murdered one after another, gruesomely killed by police thugs in our streets, and out there Taliban and ISIS and earth hatred and poison corporations kidnapping food and water and kidnapped girls and tortured soldiers coming home all kinds of destroyed and meanness, greed and hatred from the corporate rich, with the politicians’ clear hatred of women and poor masses, and every downtrodden sufferer has a family and its song, and also all the beautiful people with so much love being harmed by so much violent fear, and I needed to get a rebirth of song, and at the same time I was putting on a show. Even for myself. You know, the rock ’n’ roll stuff Elvis did, and his Gospels, are all work in the genre and its performance and traditions. I was doing that in my van. And the jumpsuits are part of it. He’s drawn to what he’s drawn to. I like real wood. Yarn and wood curtains. A giant commercial engine. An old coach.
People are saying really loving and excited things about the book and contacting me after they read and that makes me humble. I feel like, you know, all the same doubts and all the same fears and I’m looking for all the same hidden rooms you mentioned. What is the hidden criticism being stated in the compliments, and what will I do next, etc.? I can barely hold a compliment but then while I was writing I was fulfilled. Yeah I showed a lot of myself, maybe too much, and that’s true. It scares me to see it come out. But that’s the only risk I wanted to take. With so many books in the world. But then you say it’s so different from everything else and that makes me feel a moment of relief.
Did I feel better or worse after I wrote it? Soul scouring? Better. I felt better. Is there a word for how I feel or felt? I feel like I dare you. I feel like I didn’t succumb to numb death in a time when that’s what’s mostly happening. I feel I testified to love. I feel I need to do more, much more, before the end, which is death then who knows?
So, thank you for what you said about Fourteen Stories. Is it fiction or nonfiction? Yes, it’s fiction. Why?
Because I wanted it to be. As to when I wrote it, that was my choice all throughout and so I let myself take on roles in traditions of the voices of the rebellious calling out HEY, CUT THE SHIT and in so doing I did not limit myself from taking on aspects and opportunities of singing and making music of all kinds, both holy and perverse, that I may have limited myself from doing in a form of nonfiction. Because there’s stuff too to make you cringe in my book. Because it’s not being self-preservatory. But in the truest parts of the work, in the moments when the hysteria stops and it drops into truth, that’s the sound that’s my then blood. But when it’s riding high mania and being funny and being raw and being provocative and rebellious, well those are my jumpsuits.
Tell me about gender and your book, if you feel there is territory to explore talking about gender. I thought about Virginia Woolf and her writings about gender and women and literature a lot while reading Ugly Girls, because I felt let into a perspective and view that was not male-centric, and I thought about what she says about books and the sparsity of them written with women who are the real important characters and the lack of books back then from non-male-dominated brains and hearts and eyes. Were you concerned with gender when writing Ugly Girls? Was there a need you felt needed to be filled in the world, in terms of gender and literature, while writing this book?
LH: I definitely felt a strong urge to write the novel from the perspective of a teenaged girl. In my experience, they are often tougher than they look. Tough as nails in fact. And they are doing and wanting and hoping for the same raw, gross, power-and-sex-based shit teenaged (and adult) boys are. I really wanted to write the full spectrum of these girls. Teenagers are still children; their brains aren’t fully developed, yet they have these intense emotions, so the urges they experience are in a way hyper-real. They act on urges in ways we can’t fathom. Perry and Baby Girl are struggling for purchase in two worlds: the world they’ve created and the actual world. They are mean to each other even as their loyalty to each other trumps the meanness. They use and discard each other at will. I just really wanted to write characters that were unlikable often, because what human isn’t, but still interesting to read. I think unlikable female characters are the least liked, most difficult to root for, and that appealed to me. And I know there’s a lot of talk about whether or not a writer should care if readers care about characters, but I definitely want readers to care. I think that has to come in the authenticity of the characters, in their thoughts and emotions and the things they do, in the compassion the author has in writing the characters. I think when all is said and done my main goal in life is to create and nurture empathy for shitheads.
So, gender. It’s so funny to me because does a male author ever get asked “Hey, let’s talk about gender. Your main character is this dude. Did you think about gender when writing?” But I get it. Books written by women are often in the minority on those lists people post on Facebook of the top ten books that had an impact. They just don’t! Who knows why that is. Based on the questions I get constantly about women writing and female main characters and the like, it seems like men (and I say “men” meaning this chunk of humanity that people often stick into this one peghole, even as I know plenty of men who read women) are frightened by a book with female main characters. Ugh, what if they emote? Get their period? Moon over something? Get into a catfight? There’s another peghole: all stuff written by women, over here. To those turned off by books written by women (I doubt you’re reading this interview, but if you are): get over it. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Dive in. I have a friend who’s only reading books written by women this year. As far as I can tell he is still a man. No breasts or obnoxious hormones yet! And as far as I can tell, he is enjoying what he’s reading. Women have been on this earth as long as men, or if you’re a Bible sort, we were only created like a day after man was, and all that ancient stuff inside you? All that raw caveman fear and desire and hope and thirst and hunger? We have it too.
What about you? Are you ever asked to talk about your choices when it comes to gender of your characters? Is there anything you feel like you want to soapbox about when it comes to “men’s fiction”? Or “women’s fiction”?
And another question: how do you keep yourself working? Are you a dedicated every-dayer, or do you write when the mood strikes?
LG: Yes, I definitely have been asked, recently, about gender, about having a “dude” talking, yes, yes, and I ask and have asked myself about it and asked myself about it while writing the book quite a lot. All the time. I was just critiqued in one review for having a male narrator who performs some of his persona of “maleness,” whatever that means, though I think he’s subverting gender types, but maybe it was subtle? I feel most people I have talked to get what I’m doing. Strangers. Blurbers. But the reviewer claimed I didn’t have enough fully developed female characters and it hurt the book a teensy bit, even though he sort of danced out of that charge and said, not really, not really. What does that mean, fully developed female characters? I wanted to say, “There are women in the book and they aren’t characters and they are importantly real”; then who will believe a guy saying that? I mean, my narrator is a man (though I say, even in the book he says, “a man… if you want to call me that,” as if, what does that even mean!) and he’s on the road, or in a hospital bed, or in the middle of nowhere mourning, or in his head trying to account for himself, to tell his story, mostly to himself, or to anyone who will listen. I think there are fully real people who are female in the book. I believe Catherine, the love interest and true love of the narrator is real, the mother, the sister, but then, that’s up to the readers. It’s hard because Catherine isn’t in the present part of the book because she’s left him. He’s super vulnerable, he’s super manic, he’s aware of the elements of gender, and of his performance of gender, of the forces in our society and times, yet he’s provoking and pushing, and he’s trying to explore and slip the binds of his persona and himself, and subvert subvert subvert. I guess I think writers now have to decide to make our characters aware of their performance of gender, or our narrators, or as authors we need to show the falseness and complexity to the performance, which I believe I do. Which you do.
But you know, I couldn’t respond. You can’t get clean of a charge like that, and now I’ve perpetuated the charge into another feature, the fully developed woman characters charge… what does this fully developed idea even mean? In postmodern new writing? In non-realism? It bothers me. I feel in a lot of ways, and always have, that I do not fit in the traditional roles of “maleness,” and feel the pressure to perform one way and feel another, and want to perform the truth and so be an outsider which I have done most of my life, coming from a small farm town in the Midwest, now living in Texas, being big, being loud, and I have my personal physical attributes, six five, hairy chest, over two hundred pounds, etc., but I have always felt very androgynous. I went to a facility when I was young to quit drinking, which I did, and I took the MMPI, which Timothy Leary wrote, and I got a score of 49% female and 51% male. I know, how can they qualify that? It’s an old test. Anyhow, I think a lot about gender, and about the obnoxiousness of so much of “male” writing, and that’s why I ask. I think about all this when I write.
I felt like it was a major relief to read your book, not because there are female characters (Oh GOD! IMAGINE!) or female POVs, because of course yours isn’t THAT rare in that aspect, is it?… but I felt like your book did a rare thing by centering the whole world on these two teenage friends, these young women, where the world was primarily oriented into and around their perspective, even with the moving lens that inhabits men and women, the perspective never unhinged entirely off of these female characters. Even when in male lenses, we never left the view from the two girls and the violence of their world, the hardness of their world, the heartbreak of their world — you never bent the lens to be in the objective world of “realism” which isn’t real at all of course, which is handed out like vaccines — your book’s feel isn’t the world of the TV or the radio, it isn’t the cliché world of realism being shown with the addition of their perspectives, but a world ontologically centered within them so entirely. You never let the pressure off.
Gender is very tricky to ask about and talk about, and I am aware of this, as a writer who is a dude, yes, I’m very aware also of how we are in a time when gender may be the foremost construct that is being looked at in terms of what can be rewritten as a culture — it feels the most possible of all the forces to finally subvert, patriarchy and hegemony do, at least partly, no? At least in personal and discourse relations. At this moment. I mean, economic systems can’t seem to be changed, systemic injustice against race seems to be not changing, dammit, world wreckage of the environment won’t seem to stop, and of course how can gender and power be fully changed if those things seemingly won’t budge? But there’s a sea change around gender in some aspects of society. In how we talk and how we write and what is dominant in constructs, right? To me that’s how this time feels. So, yes, I have these notions all the time in mind, the attention to gender, and no I’m not soapboxing, but I do have a disgust for writing that is overtly male still, male-dominated, that reeks of maleness and needs a shower from male-centricity, although that usually for me isn’t the stuff that people often point to as being overly male. Kerouac doesn’t always feel that way to me, in fact he seems to defy gender in a Whitman-like sense. Kesey doesn’t. Lish or Denis Johnson not even so much in such a deplorable sense. It’s more this certain type of plentiful writing from well-educated white men who are clever. Ironic. Insincere. Smug. Bright. That don’t question it! To me, it’s usually people who never get hell for it, who drive me the most crazy, for resting on their male characters and being so male-centric without ever questioning it. It’s like, if I never crack from the dudeness, no one can mess with me about it. I feel male narrators and narratives at this point in time need to finally be questioned and be accounting for their presupposed gender performances. These things are so hard to fully explain. It’s a spirit thing. You just feel it.
Nope, I do not write every day. I wish I did. I should. I work, I’m exhausted from other things and I waste time!!!! And it gets pushed back. I write when it’s coming. Sometimes I write every day most of the day for weeks, or a month or two. Sometimes I spend all day writing in my head and then all the rest of the day writing at the machine, and other times I write nothing and nothing for gaps of weeks. Then I’m scanning myself for the next story. I do not do it every day. I do it when I am running to get to the page. Although, a part of me is always doing it. A part of me is always asking questions that need answers. Living the next book.
So, what drives you nuts? What are you thinking too much about lately? What’s it like to bring a baby into this world, today? Have any good news for us? Any jokes? How do you write so sharply, with so little waste? And tell us about having a real editor. Tell us about being with FSG and working with Emily Bell?
LH: Well, damn, you know what? Maybe there is so much hullabaloo about gender because we assume these male-centric maleness writers aren’t thinking about gender at all. Kind of skipping like stones over their own male virility, mindless and plainspoken. But you, being a male, whose own book is “male-centric” in that it is from the point of view of a male, damn, you think about gender a lot. But see I had to make some generalizations of my own to get to that conclusion. Your book, to me, isn’t male-centric. It’s human-centric and pardon me for such a douchey phrase. But your main character seems to visit every aspect of what it is to be human — the love, the ache, the hate, the self-hate, the silence, the loud, death, life, seeing, not wanting to see, doubt, denial, truth, search for truth, eating quietly, being hungry, petting a dog, wanting to be pet, driving, DRIVING! is such a human endeavor and urge, but I digress, you’re wearing off on me — your character is so human that he is almost pure animal. And for that we have to recognize that it kind of transcends gender altogether and becomes about the soul. And we all have that, whether you call it consciousness or soul or spirit or universal oneness. But why am I trying to hard to find similarities? It’s my own head-shyness about my own work. Like HEY WORLD, MY CHARACTERS ARE HUMAN, TOO! SEE THEY EAT, CRY, SHIT, HATE, ET CETERA, JUST LIKE HUMANS. Last night someone told me “I’m really excited, because the adjectives I use to describe this book (written by a woman) are the adjectives I usually used to describe books written by men!” And I acted excited too, but inside I felt insulted, kind of patronized. It’s that same old “Hey, she writes pretty good, for a woman!” or “Hey, she’s a good writer because she writes like a man!” No. What you are responding to is good writing, period. Writing that makes you feel something or other that is important to you. That should be above and beyond the gender of the author. Fuck the gender of the author. Let’s stop acting surprised when a woman can write, and let’s stop acting surprised when a man has a female character in his book.
Your Leary test made me remember this one day in class, in grad school. I was kind of spacing out, pondering nothing, and I looked around the class and thought, “Hey, there’s only one other man in here besides me.” My subconscious just kind of going along like I’m a man! I’ve always felt more masculine. In acting class once we did an exercise where this other woman and I had to walk toward each other saying the same word, until we were very close, and my acting teacher finally said, “Wow, Lindsay, you’re like a man! Look at yourself!” I was towering over the other woman, shouting the word into her face. Like a man? Aggression = man. But I’m a woman, so.
Writing that is overtly male does seem to tell the same story over and over, doesn’t it? I suppose I am guilty of that myself. But maybe let’s all promise that in the next thing we write, we’ll scare ourselves a little. Write that thing we don’t feel allowed to write. See what happens.
I don’t write every day, either. I feel it would kill the fun for me if I did. But finding time to write is a luxury these days, anyway! Thank you for saying I write sharply, and with little waste! That is a dream compliment for me. It’s been an obsession almost as long as I can remember to try to describe something as specifically and with as much payoff as I can muster. I find it fun and incredibly rewarding. And when I feel myself drifting in a sentence, I delete. I edit as I go. That does not mean I don’t need editing; I do! I think I used the word “tapioca” in Don’t Kiss Me like, I don’t know… eighty-five million times? “butterscotch,” too. And the word “smear” is smeared all over Ugly Girls, badump-bump. That’s why I’m relieved and thrilled to have Emily Bell as my editor. She ferrets that stuff out, that little stuff, and she’s so keen on the big stuff, too. Knows when something needs work or just isn’t there yet. Makes me dress my skeletons. Working with her wasn’t all that different from working with Zach, et al, at featherproof. She loves “indie” authors and works hard to advocate for and preserve and strengthen our voices. I trust her completely. And thank goodness!
What drives me nuts? I obsess over gratitude. If you’re a grateful person (and I know that you are, Luke!), you see the world so differently. It’s a shame not to walk around saying “thank you” to whatever. The universe, the trees, your family, a great meal, your bed, whatever. These are the kinds of people I want in my life, the people who walk around awed. The other day my husband made us stop to admire a particularly beautiful cloud. It was beautiful. Strange and looming. And I felt grateful for him for being grateful for the cloud. But the people I see who aren’t grateful, who aren’t awed that they are alive to see the clouds, I get so riled up about that!
That goes hand in hand with bringing a baby into this world today. I read this poem that I cannot find right now, but the gist was about teaching your child not to be an amazing, special, famous whatever, but teaching him to recognize the wonder in everyday things, so that he always walks around awed. I hope I’m doing that for Parker. The world can be viewed as a dark, doomed, scary place, or as a gift we’re allowed to experience for its brief stay in the history of time. I find myself worrying more and more about climate change; about terror; about technology; all of that stuff a parent begins to go mental over, because you realize that you can’t protect your child from any of it. You can only teach your child that the world meant for him is inside his heart. I hope Parker is an empathetic, awed boy and man. That is who he is now, and I am bowled over daily.
I have no jokes. Okay, I have one, but it’s awful. Did you hear about that pirate movie? It’s rated Arrrrrggghh! Please tell me some of your jokes. And how was the editing process for you? Do you like being edited? Juliet Escoria (have you read her wonderful book?) asked me this question so I’m stealing it for this: Have you jumped into the future in your brain and imagined criticism that reviewers/readers will say about the book? If so, what is it? Exorcise it here. And what are you working on now? Can we be friends in real life?
LG: Lindsay Hunter, shit, I love your last answer, all of it, A LOT — the many answers and questions in that answer. And… I feel like a bit of a jerk for even bringing up the question about gender now, because yes that must SUCK to have so much said, and often poorly said, poorly phrased, poorly questioned, poorly complimented, poorly… well, harassed — regarding gender.
I’m so happy that you are writing. So much out there is warm ups, and then there’s someone like you. You’re not warming up. You’re live white hot DOING. SO… I guess I was interested in mostly how you bent the lens to always keenly train on the two friends in Ugly Girls, Baby Girl and Perry, and I guess I just needed to cook the question out a little longer, of the impurities, but did that through conversing.
Yes, we need to get to the soul. It’s so simple! Hey, writers, we need… uh huh… yep… here’s what it’s all about… you gotta get to the soul! Gotta get beyond self. Gotta hit the complex soul and have a spirit bigger than self. Makes me think of that Neil Young song, “Campaigner,” with the refrain “Even Richard Nixon Has Got… Soul.”
Like I was telling you, in our private chats, aside from the forum of this public conversation, I teach your story “Nixon In Retirement” every semester to my students. It’s from Don’t Kiss Me, and it’s so gorgeously green and lush and sexually teenaged and adult and vivid, that story. You give Nixon such a soul, such a dreamworld, such imagination, such creepiness, but also you do this magic with him and make him re-human, soul-full, and I want to kiss him on the face. Maybe even on the mouth. Every time I read the story! Every time I start with that overly-salted hardboiled egg you give us that leads us to the beach, that leads us back to Pat, that leads us to the White House and the gold trashcan and the mooning dream with Jackie Kennedy and wishing to have not made all the mistakes we have made. In about four pages? Three?
Yes, we can be friends. Yes, we better be friends in real life. And what you say about being grateful, about being in awe of the world, yes, yes, yes, that’s it… I mean, it’s kind of funny to write, because to write a book, for years and years, there have to be these problems in the book, these losses, these pains, these agonies, to give the beauty and the soul to the work, and then I step out into the stream of the physical world, which writing kind of takes away, and there’s so much beauty I have to cover my eyes with sunglasses, get busy, get to work, hole up. And so, why bother? When there’s already so much to be amazed about? I just had to type in WHITE HOUSE into the internet to see if it is still two words. It is. Don’t worry. It’s still two. And they are a business with a web page and links about ISIS. So… there’s all that. Jokes? How about… Q: What do you call a tall pile of kittens? A: A meowtain.
I was edited first in journals by editors I love and respect, such as David McLendon of Unsaid and Giancarlo DiTrapano of The New York Tyrant and Roxane Gay at PANK and Jacob White of Green Mountains Review and a bunch of other great editors like Brandon Hobson and Ben Marcus (who selected a story recently for this issue of The American Reader but he probably didn’t edit it, Marcus, in fact, I am sure that he did not). Then I had Katherine Sullivan of Yes Yes Books out of Portland, Oregon take the book under contract first, under a different style and different form, after three days of having sent the book out to presses, and she edited and helped especially with individual stories, most memorably “Apache.” Then FC2 gave me the Sukenick Prize, which I had honestly forgotten I submitted to and was the only prize I did submit to, and won, and Katherine Sullivan, who is a great fiction editor though she is known for poetry, said GO with FC2.
Once with FC2, I got really lucky and the managing editor of the parent house took the book on for copy editing herself, personally, because she loved the title and picked it out of a stack of maybe hundreds and read it and loved the book. Her name is Vanessa Lynn Rusch at the University of Alabama Press (which handles FC2). But if you really wanna hammer the silver flat, the truth is I did my own editing. I did it fairly blind. I brought folks in for eyes, mostly private citizenry outside of the industry, mostly in hostage like settings, grilling them, though I did get the author Ryan Ridge to help a good deal and he even fixed up a few great lines. I had some editors and eyes from Bloomsbury and other houses give me some great encouraging praise, and then Padgett Powell with that blurb he gave me knocked me back and I had more of a sense that I wasn’t totally blind. But, by and large, the editing, like the writing, was solo — founded on myself and my firing, such as even when alerted to the fact that the book was thirteen not fourteen stories long, I just decided to stay the course with the title, with its wrongness, because I liked it. Who the fuck can tell me what I can and can’t do? It’s my soul. I’ll write it out how I want it.
What should our last questions be? I feel like we’ve had a pretty good run. I feel we covered some tough ground and found some gold. I don’t have fears about criticism anymore. Not really. Well, maybe the old teacher, I fear him calling me up and sullying my remaining faiths, but if he does, fuck him. I’ll love him and go on anyhow. I guess, the question I want to know, is how are we going to make sure everyone gets your book Ugly Girls? How can we convince the general reader that our books would make a fine pairing, and what are you working on NOW?
LH: I really don’t know how to make people read something! I truly do not. What makes ME read something is hearing about it from people I know have great taste. So I would hope people think I have great taste and will listen to me when I say READ LUKE GOEBEL’S BOOK. But “read” seems like such an inferior verb. Sure, you can read it. But the physiological and emotional effects of reading it make the verb something more like…”open.” That’s what your book does — it creates an opening. Depending on who you are, that opening will have different shit in it. Like it might have laughter, screams, your dad wielding the TV remote, an endless loop of an empty raft on a river, dogs barking… but someone else might just see like a thousand candle flames, but they will be candles that have never been lit before, and it will mean everything to that person. I just really appreciate the laying bare it seems you’ve done with this book. I watched a short clip of you reading from it recently, and the crowd listening kind of erupted after you were done, and it was truly wonderful to see. Hey, maybe your opening could be a crowd erupting, person reading this! Don’t you want that experience inside you? Okay, then read Luke’s book.
Pairing our books! A fine idea. I think in each there is the noble attempt to create something whole — the ugly, beautiful, baffling, all of it. In that sense I think our books go together like chaos and the void.
What I am working on now is pining. As a writer, part of my process is this phase where I’m desperately pining for time, a keyboard, for something nameless that’s been in me since I was a child. It’s like a me-shaped ache inside the me. I welcome the ache and I let it stay for as long as I can stand it. I have two distinct ideas right now. Another novel and a screenplay. The ache is busy with those ideas right now. One day soon I know I’ll get to attack them the way I need to. But right now…
LG: I love those candle flames. A thousand candles lit up in red and green and blue and clear, meaning everything, burning just for you and for the heavenly realm, you hit something of mine in your last answer. Something is slipping between us and back and forth. And for your book, WHOLE is right, it’s one of those books you finish, rare rare rarest of rare, and I feel like all my organs were taken out of my body painlessly and cleaned, soaked in like bubbling water, cleaned perfectly, painlessly, while reading, and put back in exactly the right places as new, and for some time, maybe ten strong minutes, and then over a day, over a few days, you have hit a restart, and there’s this chance to change and be a better person again. Like after a trip. Lose ego. You’ve written an ego-losing book. It’s the future! I mean, you have been changed, but of course then you don’t change all the way. I mean I didn’t all the way. But something has changed. I mean it!
LH! I’m not the same since I read your book. It gave me this weird, transcendent, hope, faith, I don’t know how to sing it. Because while reading, I was, like, my heart is being used to clean the world shit, or at least to clean all the world the book was giving me, and then… it was over, and I was newly clean. I looked around like, SHIT, I can do better on planet love. I also know I won’t forget it. It’s one of those rare books, usually we call them classics, but yours, I don’t know if I would say classic, because it’s so wildly provoking. I have never read a classic that… WOW… maybe that’s what a classic is like when it is just born. I don’t know, maybe SO! I just know I won’t forget it. I was in NYC last weekend and at this great old bar THE LONG ISLAND BAR and talking to someone incredible about books, she was asking me about novels, and I was like, yeah, I love some novels I’ve read lately, but then all I could think of was Ugly Girls. I was thinking of it while doing my laundry a moment ago. Gotta do the whites. Actually colors. No soap. Shampoo and dishwashing detergent. You just said it: the me-shaped ache. I got that. Sometimes I think about the question, like what makes a writer, and I think it’s that hole. It’s that self that can get all the way out of the self, and stretch out and be other people, because the self has got such a hole in it, and that hole is what knocks me around out of my head and body and heart and pushes my whole limb and heart and lung and self crazy into the world to find something to give myself as a gift and give others. Maybe I don’t get what you mean, and maybe I do, but the nice thing about writing is the books, we get the books, to talk for us. It’s a different language. It’s not so DO YOU GET ME? YES I GET YOU. It’s I have Ugly Girls inside me now. I have this place where you and I are together inside me in the form of that book. We took a trip. A big, wild life-shaped trip together. Screenplay! Ugly Girls should be a screenplay! And I want to read your next book, see your next project written and produced, I want more Lindsay Hunter, but I also will give you time, time, time, to be in that place of pining. As I am in that place of pining. That glorious doubt too, I am in, of… can I do it all again? A whole book? Something I can swear by and call my name and give to the world? And Lindsay, your book satiates, and I can wait and I’ll read UGLY GIRLS again at some point, and wait, because I am fulfilled by what you gave me. But I am also already wanting the miracle again. Rooting for your next miracle. We got time ahead. If the planes and the bombs and AIR death doesn’t come, if we get a glorious tomorrow, and another showcase in the sun, another mountain top, another road and animal, and we get to go on, as I pray we will, especially with your baby, and then we get to go charge at it again, all in.
“Some people like being ugly I guess,” says the narrator of “Dishes,” from Lindsay Hunter’s 2013 collection, Don’t Kiss Me. In the opening paragraph of that story, the word “barf” appears three times, a woman watches her husband as “his shorts bunch in his ass,” and when the same woman’s son confuses Texas for Oklahoma, she thinks, “it’s no skin off my tit.”
Ugliness in Hunter’s work isn’t an isolated theme. Don’t Kiss Me, like Hunter’s prior collection, Daddy’s, overflows with vomit, junk food, boogers, belches, gross sex, farts, smelly sweat, cigarette butts, tapioca pudding fat, hangovers, beer shits, and lower-class dialect, along with its inevitable double negatives. Now, having read her novel, Ugly Girls — what else could it be called? — the assertion that some people just like being ugly reads less like a passing observation and more like the key to Hunter’s oeuvre.
Her authorial preoccupation with the ugliest parts of poverty brings to mind a similar fixation in the parallel career of film director Harmony Korine, whose work I’ve seen described as “ugly people doing ugly things.” His trademark, per IMDB, that he “often depicts teenagers doing violent and disturbing things” could just as easily be applied to Linsday Hunter.
But it’s not merely their chosen subject matter that links the two. The evolution of Hunter’s writing over the course of her three books mirrors in many ways Korine’s arc from his earliest film, Gummo, to his latest, Spring Breakers.
Similar to Harmony Korine’s leap from independent maverick to mainstream director, Lindsay Hunter has, of late, made her own leap from the inarguably terrific indie press, Featherproof Books, to the apex of mainstream Big Five literary publishing, Farrar, Straus and Giroux — first with the paperback original Don’t Kiss Me, and now with the full-fledged hardcover release of Ugly Girls — a trajectory that might be summarized as The Great American Publishing Dream of the Modern Era.
Like the centerless, vignette-based Gummo, Hunter’s early work in flash fiction functioned as a collage built of glimpses into a certain type of white American existence, staged in dirty suburban houses, dinged-up cars, and depressing all-night diners. As with most flash fiction, plotlessness is all but taken for granted. The mood is what’s matters, or the image. Capturing an instance or a feeling of grotesqueness appears to be primary among Hunter’s aims.
Similar claims have certainly been made about Gummo, though I’d argue there’s another element at play in Korine’s work that remains unexplored in Hunter’s. The humanizing details he dwells upon between depressing freak show episodes suggests a greater meaning behind the ugliness — if not beauty exactly, then at least complexity and depth. Reading Hunter’s stories, one sometimes feels that ugliness itself is the statement. Full stop. While the writing is reliably strong, and the author demonstrates a genuine talent for creating clear and memorable images, the work frequently leaves me longing for a deeper level.
In Korine’s Spring Breakers, he parts ways with more abstract techniques in favor of a more traditional (for him, anyway) narrative. In Ugly Girls, Hunter does the same. Both works tell the story of bored girls seeking fun and escape through theft, sex, and the attention of a man who could probably teach them a thing or two about being bad. However, it’s worth noting that in both cases the girls are already criminals by the time their respective men enter the story.
While Korine populates his film with broke college party girls, Hunter’s cast of characters — trailer-park dweller Perry and her best friend and fat wannabe-gangster, Baby Girl — are high school outcasts with little hope of pursuing a higher education. Other characters include Perry’s parents Myra, a sex-and-attention-starved alcoholic who can barely hold down a job at the local truck stop’s donut shop, and Jim, a prison guard — easily the least pathetic and awful character in the book. There’s also the hare-lipped parolee pedophile and his freakishly obese mother. And of course Baby Girl’s older brother, a one-time stud and neighborhood idol left with the mind of a child after an accident.
Hunter brings the full weight of her considerable strengths and nagging weaknesses to Ugly Girls. While she makes the transition from flash fiction to full-length novel look easy — not something most authors carry off so gracefully — she persists in her fixation on her usual bleak subject matter with no apparent deeper meaning to justify such extreme cynicism and darkness.
Hunter doesn’t merely turn her eye to life at its most bitterly unromantic; the fervor with which she seeks it out rises almost to the level of compulsion. Nothing is ever ghastly enough. Baby Girl’s brother can’t merely polish off an entire box of sugar-covered breakfast cereal or wail like a disturbed autistic first grader. His penis must wag from his open fly. He must forget to flush the toilet after defecating. It isn’t sufficient that the hare-lipped pedophile endures the incestuous semi-overtures of his whale-like mother. He must rub her disgusting feet with lotion.
“She moved her toes, their sour smell familiar to Jamey, the definitive smell of his momma. He dumped on more Jergens.”
It’s a complicated mix. There is a definite development on display in Hunter’s work. With each book, the writing grows more certain and more overtly well-constructed. And she’s unquestionably skilled at sketching her bummed-out characters and their milieu. By the end of the first page she’s already displayed her unique power thorough such grim descriptions as a “sad rag of a paycheck” and “the rising sun the color of a pineapple candy, no more than a fingernail on the horizon.”
There’s something undeniably intriguing about the ugliness of Ugly Girls. The writing compels with the strength of a funnel. The guarantee of life’s inevitable worsening brings with it a peculiar pleasure, a morbid fascination in seeing just how bad it can get and where it all might end. But there’s also the threat of going too far, of becoming so extreme it’s comical; like the Debbie Downer skits on Saturday Night Live, in which the slightest shred of optimism is immediately destroyed by a litany of reminders of just how awful the world truly is. At times, Hunter’s relentless darkness risks turning whatever she’s trying to reveal into a joke. Korine avoids that fate by establishing a comic element in his work to contrast the awfulness, injecting instances of humor, giving you something amusing to look at, a point of fascination or even joy. Hunter offers no such relief from her characters’ spiraling world.
“Slaughterhouse-Five is a pretty intense book for a teenager,” Alex Karpovsky says, “But it stayed with me for a long, long time.” Known most famously for his role as the cantankerous coffee-shop manager Ray on HBO’s GIRLS, the comedic actor (and filmmaker) Karpovsky is readying for a live reading of a Kurt Vonnegut short story; the featured reading in a Selected Shorts event at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan. The long-running program is celebrating its 30th Anniversary of pairing dynamic fiction with equally dynamic actors. In this case, the curation luckily pairs Karpovsky with the work one of his favorite all-time authors.
“We were both anthropology drop-outs,” he says, “So I always felt a connection with Vonnegut there… But the biggest influence was the sense of fun. I don’t want to say he’s [Vonnegut] a minimalist, but his writing is so exciting.”
While Ray on GIRLS might be quick to shut-you-down with rapid-fire encyclopedic knowledge on a given topic, Karpovsky’s literary knowledge is more organic and friendly. He doesn’t have all the Vonnegut novels memorized necessarily, and he mentions Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, and Etgar Keret in the same breath as Vonnegut. When asked if any of this kind of genre-bending writing influences the characters he plays, Karpovsky is quick to point out the similarities between Kurt Vonnegut and Vonnegut’s fictional sci-fi author, Kilgore Trout. “There’s a lot of things about Vonnegut that remind you of Kilgore Trout, or the other way around!”
“Who Am I This Time?” — Karpovsky’s selection for Selected Shorts — tells the story of a theatre director in a small town who always uses a shy hardware store clerk as the lead in every play. When his strange leading man meets a certain woman, a bizarre relationship dynamic is created: this new couple can only communicate through the words in a given script, meaning their relationship literally transforms according to drama. When asked if Vonnegut had any influence on his acting, Karpovsky has a very Vonnegut-esque answer:
“I feel like a lot of the guys I play are more interesting than me,” he says. “My characters I think are more complicated and dimensional than I am. There’s more bubbling up inside of them and I feel less real then them.” And as he reads “Who Am I This Time” to a giggling audience, the layering of characters and dimensions are both funny and jarring. While Vonnegut’s story plays with the notion of small-time actors exploring feelings for each other through theatre, Alex Karpovosky is a big time actor exploring his feelings for Vonnegut by reading in front of people. Multiple alternate dimensions seem to overlap as this happens; Karpovosky is Ray reading Vonnegut, but he’s also Vonnegut embodying the body of Alex Karpovsky.
And even though Karpovsky admits that “Ray is probably way more well-read on Vonnegut than I am,” in this universe, in this dimension, Alex Karpovsky as the Vonnegut fan is a strikingly honest, unpretentious reader who is, it seems, here to have some fun. Though, that all depends on who is he really is, this time.
Alex Karpovsky reading the Kurt Vonnegut story “Who Am I This Time?” will appear on a forthcoming installment of the Selected Shorts podcast. He’s joined by Heather Burns reading Aimee Bender and Dave Hill reading Dolan Morgan. For more info check out www.selectedshorts.org.
The beloved children’s book series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of Daniel Handler) will be joining House of Cards and Orange is the New Black on Netflix. Deadline announced the deal for a live-action adaptation:
“I can’t believe it,” Snicket said, from an undisclosed location. “After years of providing top-quality entertainment on demand, Netflix is risking its reputation and its success by associating itself with my dismaying and upsetting books.”
How much input will you have? Will you be working closely with the team at Netflix that will be developing the show?
DH: Right now we’re all working closely to find the right director so that it might be developed accordingly. Hey, interesting directors, stop reading Buzzfeed and call us!
The adaptation is being made with Paramount, the studio behind the Jim Carrey film adaptation. The best-selling series have sold over 65 million books around the world.
I came to New Moon during one of the worst phases of my life. I was only just thirteen, but already my future seemed to hold a string of repeat offenses, shitty decisions of my own foolish choosing — or, worse, choices made for me by people even more inept at living than I was. Late in the afternoon of my thirteenth birthday, I was picked up for grand larceny and breaking and entering. I’d stolen from a small shop that made guitars. I was of course too young for the charges in any big world sense, but the math of the damages suited the terms. Up until then my sins were petty misdemeanors — lifting cassettes from record shops, fistfights in convenient store parking lots, dealing caffeine pills passed off as Black Beauties. I’d been a fish far too small to keep, tossed back into the pond of some greater, future undoing. And here it was. Now, those I’d stolen from were in a position to change me. They wouldn’t press charges, for the right compensation. It would keep me from a long stay in juvie. The owners took the cost of each guitar we’d stolen as a complete loss. My father, who didn’t have the money, found it — though he never revealed from where or how. I could use my imagination, that’s what he wanted. Now I was in debt to him, I would take this as a life lesson. By then, my parents’ arguments had grown familiar and terrible, a ritualized menace in the kitchen, or their rage passing muted through their bedroom walls. Even then, I saw their exchanges clamoring to pull the future away from us as a family.
I’d been to New Moon once, maybe twice. It was the only Chinese restaurant in our town. Steve Lu, the manager, was the husband of my mother’s friend, Chris, who worked at New Moon as a waitress. She came by our place sometimes just before her shift to visit with my mother. She hid it well enough, but most of these visits you could tell that she’d been drinking. She was about my mother’s age — her early thirties — and at some point in her brief life had probably been attractive. But she looked awash now, already, with tired eyes and an alcoholic bloat to her face. Though she was very thin, a small belly pushed out from her white shirt. The paunch looked strange, and manlike. I don’t recall why my mother and she were close. I don’t know, really, what they would have had in common. Or, maybe they weren’t all that close and memory has shifted them closer together in my mind. And when I suddenly needed to earn money, Chris was the one who suggested the restaurant.
When you first walked into New Moon you smelled chicken, soy sauce, the faint hint of cigarette smoke at the bar, and faced a long glass aquarium with tiny exotic fish, darting and worrying the water around several enormous, sluggish gold carp. The carp floated docile and monstrous and common, and if they’d been capable of rage, they might have pushed the tank over by force, tumbling out in a riot of murk and day-glo baubles — the deep sea divers and livid corals, the sunken ships and treasure chests, all the smaller fish twitching their lurid rainbow over the dirty burgundy carpet. But every time I looked into the aquarium, these carp only floated there, silenced, appalled at all the things they would never do. They seemed alive only in how they were not dead.
They said I owed a phenomenal amount, several thousands of dollars, but I wasn’t in a position to challenge them. We never saw more than three men working in the guitar shop, a little cinderblock building we passed each day on our walk home from school. They kept short hours, and by the time we passed in the afternoons the doors would already be closed, the lights out.
One afternoon, I shattered the window and shoved my friend Carmen through the opening. He grabbed a couple of guitars and handed them to me, grabbed a couple more, then climbed back out. We ran, carrying them over the Rock Island Line tracks that divided us from everyone else in the world, down through a deserted brownfield whose toxic, muddy grasses after a rainstorm bubbled up the cleaned bones of small animals. And for the month before my thirteenth birthday, I’d push up a trap door in my bedroom closet ceiling and climb up into the hot, fiberglass insulated crawlspace of our attic. I’d open a hardshell case and stare at that guitar, while the overheated, over-insulated space creeped over my skin. I’d lift the instrument out of the red satin lining, feel the smooth lacquered neck in my hand and knew it would never be a part of my life anywhere but up here. It was forever sealed off inside the hot, irritating space, this compact hell above my bedroom, just as everything else was trapped on earth below.
We passed that guitar shop the following day just as we always did. They had closed, as usual, by that time of the afternoon. Around the building the air started to stink of burning oil and in the cold snap of the October air it smelled like guilt drawing all around me. They had only nailed a piece of plywood over the broken window. Nothing more, and it made the value of anything we’d done seem cheap and small. Now, a day after we’d broken in, I was finished with the place.
Monday, I walked home from school alone. I saw they’d put up shatterproof glass, and a red alarm sticker shaped like a police badge on a bottom corner of the window.
And then, in school, on my birthday, some cops took Carmen out of his wood shop class and drove him away. I knew I wasn’t far behind. When I came home that day, two detectives were sitting in the living room with my mother. It was all polite. They didn’t need to make a show of it. I wasn’t going anywhere.
The three Chinese cooks in the back came from Nanjing on some kind of special visa. They were mean and violent, but by the economics of a Chinese restaurant (where, at this rate, I would have to work for years to pay off my debt), it was far too expensive to hold them accountable for their meanness. And so they did what they wanted with a sort of wild, unchecked lawlessness. I never learned any of their names; they remained to me locked inside a nameless and malicious space, half hidden in the steam like some three-headed infernal creature chained to the floor. They spat at you and tossed boiling water as you passed, sneered and made a strange clicking sound with their teeth, significant only to themselves.
Steve Lu pretended they didn’t exist and they left him alone. But Steve’s wife existed in some other place. The Chinese cooks only smiled at her when she entered the kitchen. They laughed warmly when she staggered around the back, drunk and lewd, when she insulted them in words they didn’t understand. In her presence even the sound of their language seemed to soften around her. The clicking stopped. Occasionally I’d be out on the floor and I would hear the cooks applauding from behind the swing doors.
Chris drank every night freely, clumsily. I found her often out back by the trash, the tip of her cigarette glowing. I’d watch the dark around her move, the tulip glass of vodka catching a slip of light as it rose to her mouth. Then she’d come back inside and whisper terrible things in front of her husband, in front of me, sexual things, compromising things, and her tongue would slip a splinter in me, a sampling of the pain I supposed her husband might feel. But Steve Lu only walked away, moved to some other part of the room to deal with a detail on the floor, circling the room greeting regulars, occasionally dropping a check, or clearing a table one of us had neglected.
On New Year’s Eve the girls at the take-out counter in the back fed me plum wine all night long. The last hour or so I was nearly useless, though I couldn’t tell if this was apparent to anyone else. Now it was past midnight and I was bringing trash out to the back. The air in the kitchen was swollen with heat and the smells of boiled cabbage and pork and fried rice from the woks, the jets of steam from the dishwashing station, the push and pull of the evening. I passed through the back door as if some icy drape separated that kitchen from the outside world. I saw someone in the dark beyond the dumpster.
“Hey,” Chris said. Her voice sounded small. There was a champagne bottle in her hand. “Come here.” She held out the bottle.
I could taste her cigarette on the lip as I drank. I handed the bottle back. She leaned over to set it on the ground. Then, instead of rising, she lowered herself, kneeling in front of me. The sodium-vapor light fell on us where we stood, fell on her face and I felt all the more exposed, and saw that she didn’t notice, or didn’t mind. Her eyes looked up, checking me. Her face in the spread of light looked younger, closer to my age. My hand reached out, touched her hair. I didn’t know how to pull her away. Her face was shining, and then it was moving slowly in and out of its own shadow. I saw her in my house. Saw my mother laughing. I heard the voices of my parents arguing in our kitchen, saw my father staring at me. I began to tremble and the trembling grew as I tried to keep my body still. And then my teeth began to chatter.
She stopped and looked up. Her eyes had startled. She was holding me still with one hand, her other hand on my leg. I clenched my jaw but couldn’t stop my teeth or my trembling. Then her eyes softened, as if she’d settled into this interpretation of ardor, a recognition. She continued, her face moving in and out of its shadow more urgently. I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eyes and waited.
Maybe, when it was over, I felt something like love for her. I heard shouting from the cooks and clanking metal in the kitchen. She rose and brushed off her knees and took out a cigarette. She lit the cigarette, then went over to the back door of the kitchen. She took a couple of drags, tossed it, and went inside. The shouting stopped and I thought maybe it had been only in my imagination, a product of my agitated mind. I lifted the champagne bottle she’d left by the trash and drank all that was left. My teeth had stopped chattering. I noticed a faint steam in the air around me, then saw it was rising from my bare arms and face. I didn’t want to go back inside. Whatever I felt in the moment — love, or just a new kind of guilt, some cheap castoff of love whose intensity I would find repeated over and over again, the rest of my life — the feeling changed the moment I went back inside. The love or guilt, or whatever it was, turned from Chris to her husband, Steve Lu. I passed back through the kitchen door and the heat and steam felt like I’d pushed into a dream.
All of the last of the customers had gone and Steve Lu was over by the buffet table. That he knew, or that someone had seen, crossed my mind, and I began to shake again, felt something drop in me. He saw me, smiled, and called me over. He’d stripped the red polyester tablecloth off the table. The chafing dishes were stacked on the counter behind it, with a dozen little dented, cooling tins of canned heat. There was a teapot on the bare linoleum and a smudge of something beside it.
“I want you to see this,” he said. He dabbed a napkin in some of the weak tea and said: “Hot tea. Good for removing stains, you see?” He wiped the stain with a tea soaked rag, and the swipe began to dissolve. He looked up and said, “Oh. Happy New Year!” And then he chuckled.
That night I walked home from work like every night. My legs were thick and rudderless and I knew the walk would take longer than I wanted. The night air, cold and raw, smelled of burning chocolate. My ears pinched in the cold, and my head was sugary and defiant and brave. Occasionally a car would race by, someone yelling out the window or the radio thumping so loud it felt as if they were wishing me good fortune. The adrenaline from the exhaustion of the finished shift conspired with the plum wine and I wanted to break windows and thieve with impunity. I wanted my grand larceny back. I wanted to wander inside stranger’s lives and rob them of their past. I wanted the new year to celebrate me.
I’d find a damaged piece — the mahogany blank of a body or an unfinished neck — in the dumpster behind the guitar factory. Some flaw made it unacceptable, an unintended gouge in the wood or a small knot or pit in the grain that hadn’t been obvious until it was cut into rough shape. I’d bring that piece home and think about what it meant to me. Why it meant anything at all. Even if I couldn’t name what it was, it always meant something.
At work, Chris and I didn’t talk about it. I was just a busboy and she was a waitress — a friend of my mother’s, Steve Lu’s wife — and I was too young, anyway. She ignored me when she was near, stepped around me when she could. But occasionally I caught her across the room watching, as if staring through me, and I knew I was a space she had to pass into to get to somewhere beyond. I persuaded myself that she had needed me, that she would always need something like me. That wherever she ended up she would remember that she’d passed through me. She began to come in less often, and then stopped showing up at all. Steve Lu spent more time at the front on the phone, or pretending to write things in the reservations ledger, even on slow nights where it was clear he wasn’t taking reservations. From the busboy station I would see him through the fish tank between us, a bluish haze to his face, like some giant, gently animated figurine dwarfing all the other fish.
Then, one night, after Chris still hadn’t returned to New Moon, and Steve Lu hadn’t said anything about why, it felt as if her string of absences just disappeared her; as if this night she’d finally stopped existing anywhere. Steve Lu no longer smiled and moved around the room. He cleaned things a little too much, greeted the customers at the front a little too politely, as if quietly distracted by an approaching dream.
It had been a slow Friday night shift and now I was walking home. I had made less money than I’d hoped and was tallying the losses, the debt in my head. A car passed and slowed. Then it pulled to the side of the road and I saw Steve Lu lean his head out of the driver’s side.
“Hey,” he said. He waved me over: “Hey!”
I came up to the window.
“Get in!” he said, and I ran around the car to the passenger side, opened the door, and climbed in.
“Do you walk each night? How do I not know this? Ohhhh,” he said.
He left the window cracked halfway and took a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. I recalled he’d once said, about the cigarettes: “Soft pack. They’re fresher.” He put the pack back in his pocket slowly, carefully — I don’t know why, but it seemed to me in a way suggesting a kind of conscience in the act. Of returning something to its rightful place. I thought maybe he was a little drunk.
At night all the strip malls looked different. The dark gave them the texture of variety. Or, on this night they did. I was noticing this as we drove and I saw too how driving in a car turned my walk into an endless series of strip malls, each broken by a little space, an old disused lot of trash, or a car mechanic’s shop, a solitary house or two that hadn’t been torn down yet.
Steve Lu said nothing, and so I did what I always did on my walks home, just listened to the voices in my head talking. Sometimes they sounded like me, they were me. Often I thought about how much I still owed my parents. The amount seemed so unreal. So impossible that it was as if I were floating in some kind of free fall where debt was just the air you breathe. The only thing my father had said when my mother called about the detectives was, “Why would you do that?” As if desire were accountable to logic. He really wanted to know, and my inability to answer him would stand between us the rest of our lives.
Steve Lu inhaled deeply from his cigarette, then tossed it out the window. In the passenger side mirror I watched it tumble and spark in the road behind us before flaring out in the distance.
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“Mmnh,” he said. He fished another out, handed it over, took one out for himself again, then plunged the button in the dash.
I thought about how my life seemed to end each night when I went to bed. Mornings had begun to surprise me with their loud light. I thought about schoolwork and my parents’ unfathomable ages. How one made it to such an age. The drive was quiet through it all. It was the quiet between two people who know each other so well it doesn’t sound like silence. I don’t know what Steve Lu was thinking. Maybe about his wife. Or about the taste of his cigarette. Then I stopped thinking, and as if prompted, the roofs and dimmed windows and the desolate strip mall parking lots more or less vanished. We were just driving in the dark now, past a forest preserve. I wanted to say something in the car. I wanted to tell Steve Lu what a good guy I thought he was. That I admired him. I like you, Steve Lu, I wanted to say.
“Are you from Nanjing?” I said: “Like the cooks?”
“Ha!” he said. He took a deep drag from his cigarette, exhaled: “No,” he said, and he smiled, as if the very idea that he could be from the same place as the cooks surprised him. “I’m from a small village,” he said. “There is a polytechnic there. I went to school, just after it was built. After that, I left. I came here. It was a long time ago. It has grown since. It’s big now.”
“You don’t go back?”
“No. It’s gone. It was a good place to leave.”
That was when it occurred to me that you could leave somewhere and not ever look back. That you could leave a place and someday say you’d forgotten it. The forest preserve ended, and the road opened out to the newly constructed cloverleaf of the interstate. Beyond, the lights of a giant shopping mall appeared, parked like a spaceship.
“Chris,” Steve Lu said. He let out the slightest breath.
“Is she okay?”
“Well,” he said. “It’s okay. She’s spending some time in St. Luke. Female problems. You know.”
I don’t know that I could have known, then. I was just a kid. Why someone with whatever it was, this condition he’d left so vague, would stay at a clinic. Maybe it was convenient, having me there to misunderstand, to not comprehend his life.
We pulled into my subdivision, wove around the unbuilt areas where the road passed through the large mountains of dug up earth, where the construction of new units had yet to be completed. Then the street evened out, flat and straight, flanked by Ranches and Cape Cods, the little front lawns, an occasional odd miniature Colonial rising up between them.
Steve Lu slowed the car, then paused at the one stop sign. A dog was moving along the gutter down the block. It looked ragged and strong. It moved slightly sideways, as if it had been hit by a car, and its healing bones had been permanently bent. Maybe it was just a coyote with mange. The car idled, waiting for the dog. I wondered if Steve Lu was afraid of it, or superstitious about something. The dog crossed the street, then hesitated at the end of a driveway. It just stood there, its muzzle raised, sniffing at the night air as Steve Lu and I watched. Or maybe Steve Lu was looking through the dog in the distance to somewhere else. Maybe everywhere he looked now he saw his wife.
Steve Lu took out the pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, the car still idling, but the pack fell from his hand as he tried to pinch a cigarette out. As if he’d forgotten I was there, that anyone was there in the car, he whispered, You so clumsy. For the first time since I’d known him he seemed to have a slight Chinese accent. He picked up the pack, took out a cigarette. He pushed the dash’s cigarette lighter in. Then the car moved forward through the small, desolate intersection. The dog was gone. A moment later we pulled up to my house.
“Well,” he said.
I thanked him for the ride, said goodnight. I opened the door and stepped out onto the grass strip in front of my house. The night air felt wet and warm inside the cold, like an unexpected spring day in the middle of winter. I shut the car door. Steve Lu was taking the cigarette lighter out of the dash, touching it to his cigarette. He was already dreaming, it seemed, he’d already forgotten about me. I walked up my lawn and at the front door looked back. The car was still there, and I saw then that Steve Lu hadn’t been dreaming. He was just waiting for me to get safely inside my house.
There he is, a shadow inside the car of my memory, raising his hand goodbye, the tip of that cigarette glowing and dimming, marking time, betraying his living pulse. Now the car is pulling forward, driving slowly away down the street.
A few weeks later I quit New Moon. My father had found a job for me at the radio station where he worked. Where he was an engineer — sometimes a substitute disk jockey, late at night. When I came into New Moon to quit, Steve Lu said he was sorry to see me go. Chris hadn’t come back. My mother hadn’t seen her either.
The new job wasn’t any more money than the tips at the restaurant. My debt would forever retreat, slippery, faster than me, outrunning its possible satisfaction. But my father thought the new job might put a different nature in my mind. Might put a sense of a future. A common sense I could share with him.
My dad was doing what he’d wanted to do, what he’d wanted ever since he was my age. I’d surely feel the same way: I believe that’s what he told himself. And, of course, he could keep an eye on me. He wanted to teach me his childhood hopes and a practical nature. He gave me an old electrical engineering book to study. Inside the worn red cover were pages of schematic diagrams, little lines and circles and indicators of flow, capacitance, resistance. The ways a current ran out its life through a planned route and brought something — light, sound, a voice, some impulse — to a natural conclusion. Each time I opened the book, his childhood devotion to electricity felt like the loneliest thing a kid could ever want to know. And the longer I worked there the more powerful the sense came to me that I didn’t have an aptitude for any of it.
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