Lynne Tillman

SP

When you were growing up, what were you reading?

LT

There was a book about a little girl who had a blanket, and the blanket got a hole in it, and then she was very upset. I read this sitting on the bed in the bedroom. And she got very upset and chose to cut out the hole. Of course, the hole got bigger. So she thought she would cut that out, too, until the blanket disappeared. I remember sitting on the bed, I must have been five, very perplexed about why you couldn’t cut out a hole. So it was the first kind of philosophical, existential...

SP

And yet it’s this tangible object as well.

LT

And to this day, you think, Why can’t you cut out a hole? [Laughs.] Then I had two older sisters. Six and nine years older. I read books from their book cases, but I also read Nancy Drew. And I read a short story by Sartre.

SP

Oh, so they were serious readers?

LT

Yeah, they were serious readers. I read a D.H. Lawrence short book.

SP

I just read The Fox by Lawrence.

LT

His novels are really incredible. He’s been put aside for a long time, but when I was in graduate school in the ’80s, I read all of the novels.

SP

I’ve read Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and I was totally...

LT

They’re knockouts. The first is very different from Women. He sort of let those sentences fly. Sons and Lovers, it’s more traditional. I read a lot of, you know, the books that were around: Norman Mailer, I think I read Saul Bellow when I was twelve, thirteen. They were post-war novels that were really about war. My theory is that the so-called Great American Novel was basically a war novel. And it merged into the ’60s and became a much more paranoid novel.

SP

Who is a paranoid author then?

LT

I’m thinking of Pynchon and the metafictionalists. Coover. So it’s all about deception. A lot about deception.

So I don’t think there is a Great American Novel now. That’s why I fooled around with it in American Genius, A Comedy. Then when I was in high school, in my sophomore year, I became completely entranced with history, with American history especially, because I had a fantastic teacher. He was a young guy who was getting his doctorate at Columbia University and he gave us paperbacks to read, Robert Heilbroner and people who were contemporary theorists. Oh, Gertrude Stein. I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I must have been fourteen or fifteen, and that had an enormous impact on me.

SP

I read this Gertrude Stein essay you mentioned you liked called “Composition as Explanation.”

LT

Isn’t it brilliant?

SP

I liked this quote. “Automatically with the acceptance of the time-sense comes the recognition of the beauty and once the beauty is accepted the beauty never fails anyone.”

LT

I thought that essay was probably the best art criticism, literary criticism I’d ever read. Her theory around why something comes to prominence for some people and doesn’t for others, she was rejecting the idea of an avant-garde, and so did Warhol. So we are not ahead of our time. We’re just interested in things that are different. Stein was seriously important to me. The first kind of story I wrote in high school, just for myself, was very influenced by her.

SP

Was it something about the concept or the form? Or the language she was using? What would you say was latching it onto your brain?

LT

It was the cadence. It was the use of repetition and how that flow did something. And I think it was really, I wouldn’t have said that then, about consciousness, which of course is the thing that interests me in writing novels.

SP

Like in Cast in Doubt, there’s this real rhythm I felt while reading it. You’re propelled into someone else’s consciousness, which is what you want with novels, to be in someone else’s mind. I never want to read about a twenty-four-year-old girl living in New York.

LT

Oh, you can though. There are many of those.

SP

Oh, I know. [Laughs.] I try to read them and like them.

LT

You don’t need to read them. You’re a young woman in New York. [Laughs.] And I guess you’ve noticed that it’s a different kind of consciousness I work with in each of the novels I write. So Cast in Doubt is very different from Haunted Houses and Motion Sickness from No Lease on Life. For myself, what is interesting is playing with these different kinds of minds and educations and predilections and all of that.

SP

Is it the character that’s interesting first or is it the concepts that these characters would be interested in?

LT

I think it’s both. I think what they’re interested in. But that’s why language is so important because they’re going to use different language, also, and that reflects on their education, the way they perceive things, what’s important to them.

SP

Do you remember what your short story inspired by Stein was about?

LT

Yes. When I was eight, my oldest sister was seventeen, I remember her walking down the stairs. I wrote a story from that point of view. It wasn’t that I defined a character who was looking at the sister walking, but something about her walking down the stairs.

SP

As she’s ready to go out for the night?

LT

Yes.

SP

It’s quite a dramatic scene.

LT

There was a lot of repetition. I don’t think I ever finished it, but I probably wrote about 600 words.

SP

There’s certain images, like a woman walking down the stairs to get ready to go out for a date.

LT

I used to watch my sisters, the oldest one because she went on more dates, while the middle one, the one six years older, she was much more of a scholar.

SP

Was she the one who had the Sartre on her shelf?

LT

It was a shared bookstore...Bookshelf. [Laughs.] I guess it was my first bookstore. But in the bathroom we sisters shared, I would put the toilet down, sit, and watch them put on makeup or get ready, fascinated. I think my mother put on powder, no eye makeup, but she always wore red lipstick.

SP

That’s great.

LT

It looked good on her. As much as I disliked her. [Laughs.] We had a cat who was so smart and she loved my mother. One time she came out of the bathroom, my parents’ bathroom, with red all over her lips. My mother had left her lipstick opened with no cap. And the cat, just imitating my mother.

SP

My grandmother will never leave the house without her lipstick on. She’s always reapplying.

LT

My mother would often say to me, because for years I didn’t wear lipstick, and now sometimes I do, but usually I don’t, she’d say, “You look like death,” or something like that. [Laughs.] She wasn’t given to compliments.

SP

That’s very clear from Mothercare. What did you study at Hunter College?

LT

So I was an English major. American History minor. And I took all my electives in studio art.

SP

So you were painting?

LT

Painting and drawing. And I was the only non-art major. I had two really great teachers. One of whom recently died, who was a well-known and important abstract painter, Ron Gorchov, who worked with shaped canvases. He lived until he was ninety-four years old, I think. He was so gorgeous.

SP

Was he?

LT

I had a huge crush on him, of course.

SP

You were like, “I’ll keep taking studio art classes. I believe in art.” [Laughs.]

LT

No, I loved him. I think part of why artists like to have me write for them or talk with them is because of that little bit of background. Painting and drawing myself made me understand a little bit about what that work is. And it’s so different. It’s space. You’re thinking about space in a way that writers don’t. You just don’t think of it like that. This is material. This is a physical object. Conceptual artists work differently, but painters usually have this thing in front of them, so you’re concerned with the corners. I also got involved in making film. That really taught me a lot about editing books.

SP

You’re winnowing something down and finding the kernel of it. It is a similar process across media.

LT

Understanding that what you take out is more important than what you put in. Too much can destroy a book. When there is this overload of words or clauses. You have written something, it says it, and then you think, Oh, I can do this simile or here’s another metaphor.

SP

How do you feel about similes and metaphors?

LT

They can be used. I think you can use anything. If it’s necessary. If it helps to create an image that you want. In Haunted Houses, I use a lot of similes, ‘as if,’ and so on. I don’t use as many now.

SP

Do you think that’s a function of having written a lot more?

LT

Change. And liking to do different things. Also feeling that I’m using the words I’ve already used more fully.

SP

Like Gertrude Stein, with her repetition. She’s using these same words over and over again, but somehow they take on new resonances and meanings.

LT

Lydia Davis is, of course, a wonderful writer, and we were talking one time, and she used the word plain. “Wanting things plain.” And more and more I see the beauty of that. Of course, that’s coming from Beckett also, the idea that it’s plain. Once you read Waiting for Godot, things change in your mind. But when people read it, if they don’t understand rhythm, they don’t understand how things might sound. They think, Well, what’s here? Or they’re just not able to see that it means even if it’s very stripped. I mean, Beckett is very stripped. You don’t have to see the play, although I’ve seen it many times.

SP

That’s almost the problem with these plays, is that they’re impossible to stage.

LT

Well, he, as you know, put the description: “A country road. A tree. Evening.”

SP

I always loved Krapp’s Last Tape, one of Beckett’s radio plays.

LT

Radio was such an important medium. Orson Welles brought radio into film.

SP

All of my friends know I’ve been advocating for a return to the radio. I’ve been listening to the radio because I don’t want to choose anymore.

LT

When I was a kid I put the radio by my bed. Although we had television very early, I was watching television from the age of three. I grew up with it. I really did. But I had pneumonia when I was ten, and the radio was placed there. I was in bed for six weeks. I had bad pneumonia. But at midnight, there was this crazy guy called Long John Nebel who would talk about UFOs and all of that. It was like you were in outer space. The podcasts, if you listen about crime or something like that, they’re like television without visuals. But this was really about voice. Which is what Orson Welles dealt with. Voice. The voice in the movie Mr. Arkadin. The voice in Citizen Kane.

SP

I know you lived in Europe after you graduated.

LT

For six-and-a-half years.

SP

I’ve read you were in London and Amsterdam. But were you traveling around?

LT

Especially in the beginning. And I lived in different places. It was the basis for Motion Sickness. I mean, I updated it to suit the time I was interested in writing about. But I wish every American who had any kind of mind could live abroad. Now, abroad doesn’t mean anything because this is all global. It’s just global.

SP

Madrid’s interesting, I think, because of how recent the Franco dictatorship feels.

LT

They had wars. They had a war on their country. When I was first in Europe in the ’70s, it was not so long after, twenty-five years after, World War II ended. There were traces of that. People had living memories. People had lived through that. People had starved in Holland. There was no food. And it’s a very different thing from our experience.

SP

I read that you never felt more American than when you were in Europe.

LT

You don’t even know how infused it is in you because your attitudes about things are so different. I was involved in running a cinema when I lived in Amsterdam, showing experimental or indie films. And I had gotten a one-hundred dollar check from my father to buy a winter coat. I was living with a Dutch guy then, who later became a friend. I should never have been in a relationship with him, but anyway, I was, and he was the first man I ever lived with. So I had this one-hundred dollars, put it as a down payment to this rundown movie theater that we rented four nights a week. We called it the Electric Cinema after the one in London. And Dutch people said, “What grant did you get?” Because you didn’t do anything without the government.

SP

Oh, art is so publicly funded there.

LT

Which is great, except in Holland what they did was they put all this art into government storage, so nobody could see it.

SP

Well, that’s a real problem now in Germany with the censorship of Palestinian art and artists.

LT

Isn’t it crazy they can’t use the word Palestine? It’s so disturbing. Anyone who supports Palestine is treated like a criminal.

SP

Art being funded by the government, which is obviously in some ways positive, is in this case incredibly distressing. While you were living in Europe, how did your involvement in film relate to writing?

LT

Film felt like a secondary occupation. I was trying to write, but I was terrified. I couldn’t show anything to anybody. And I was around people, particularly men, who wanted me to help their writing. So I was editing other people. They did not show any interest, these particular men, in my writing.

SP

Did you offer to show them your writing?

LT

I mailed the editor of SUCK what could have been the first Weird Fucks. But I wasn't thinking of Weird Fucks then. SUCK was a porn magazine in English published in Amsterdam. It wasn’t sexy enough, he said. Then they lost the handwritten manuscript. The time was the sexual revolution. It’s not that the Dutch were more open-minded than other countries. They have a long-running mercantile society. They want the taxes paid, then they're cool.

But I became involved in film because I was always interested in film. I mean, if I had my druthers, I would have done everything. I loved painting. My teachers wanted me to go on for an MFA, not that I was so good. I thought seriously about painting, but I wasn’t dedicated to it. I thought, Do I want to deal with these kinds of problems? And no, I didn’t. It was writing, it was that space I needed to fill. I loved the physicality of painting. I loved thinking about color and shape, composition. Painting is hard. I loved drawing, also.

SP

You were working mostly with abstraction?

LT

Yeah. I took a drawing class where we were to draw nude model. I could never get the full body onto the paper. Either the head was chopped off or the legs or the arms. Some students made drawings of tiny people, with all their limbs. I just couldn't.

SP

You couldn’t finish the body?

LT

No, no. There was no head. There were no arms. There were no legs. Psychologically, it was very interesting. It was like a human being was so big to me.

SP

So you needed to get inside it through writing?

LT

I couldn’t.

SP

You couldn’t be on the outside of it?

LT

I just couldn’t. Again, I was somebody completely untrained. All of these people had probably been art majors in college or in high school, and I had none of it.

SP

You thought that to be a writer you had to go abroad.

LT

I had to get out of the city. I didn’t know how to be a writer there. It was so terrifying to me. There were people already giving readings. I was not ready.

SP

Were you going to readings in college?

LT

I would go to readings. I saw Denise Levertov read, I saw Stephen Spender read. Going to readings allowed me to think about giving a reading, although I didn’t put it in my mind. Most fiction writers are terrible readers. I made a film, a narrative film, feature-length, called Committed about Frances Farmer. I was the co-director. When you do auditions and when you audition people, it’s fascinating. You see different ways of saying the same words, of projecting. Some people would just cry. They could just make themselves cry at a certain moment. Sometimes it wasn’t necessary, I thought. There was something about projecting. When you’re giving a reading, you’re not reading into your chest, you’re reading to people. I learned that reading aloud is about understanding through the ear as well as the eye.

SP

When you’re writing, do you read things back to yourself out loud to hear how it sounds?

LT

Yeah, to hear how it sounds, because that also carries the meaning.

SP

I’ve heard when you read something out loud, if you find yourself stuttering over a sentence you’ve written, it’s because your body knows there's a problem.

LT

Sometimes when I’m teaching, which I never expected to do, but I had to do to support myself, when a student is reading aloud from her or his work and they stumble over, later I’ll say, “You notice how you...,”

SP

What was the relationship writing for a sex magazine and also writing Weird Fucks, a book about sex? Did it feel related to you?

LT

I didn’t write Weird Fucks because of SUCK. SUCK must have been an influence, considering how to write sex and about it. SUCK was not a contemporary woman’s point of view, though they included writing by women. The men thought they were quite liberated and the mag was too. Everyone thought liberating was going on, we were throwing off the chains of inhibition. [Laughs.] When I returned to New York, I began to think of writing it. The title Weird Fucks came from a friendship with a woman whom I trusted, one of those terrible female friendships. After an encounter, she would say, or I, “That was really a weird fuck.” So that became my title. I finished it in 1978, it was the first longish work I’d ever written. A friend of mine pretended to be an agent. She called herself the “Secret Agent.” This was Martha Wilson. It was rejected by every publisher because, one, the title; two, the length of it; three, the material. I think the editors were horrified. They’d never seen anything like this. Not from a female, anyway.

SP

It feels shocking a little bit even now.

LT

I think, unfortunately, things change and certain things don’t change. The greatest changes seem to me to be in technology, not in the human consciousness. [Laughs.]

SP

You’re talking about the sexual revolution?

LT

What Freud did, by emphasizing the importance of sexuality in our lives from childhood, is still anathema. I’ve written about, I forget in what, that feminism probably helped men more than women ultimately, practically speaking. They got to be with their children and they got to be in relationships where they didn’t have to support the whole family. I remember feeling very touched and moved by my father’s anxiety to support all of us. He did very well. He and his brother had their own company and so on. But what a burden! I think a lot of people want to be supported, a lot of women. And of course, who wouldn’t want to be? Who wouldn’t want to be cooked for, also?

SP

I feel like a lot of people still desire that stability that a partner offers.

LT

What stability is there?

SP

It goes away.

LT

People lose their jobs. I think there are ways in which things have gotten better for women, or at least certainly different. I think many of us don’t grow up thinking that we will be taken care of. I think that’s an advance. I think it puts a different sense also of what being a woman is. I mean, obviously, it’s a cultural remanufacture. I’ve never felt quite like a woman because I disobeyed.

To me, I felt Weird Fucks was representative, also. It was cultural, social, psychological. Those are the things that I was writing for and about. Also, rhythm. I wasn’t seeing writing that I wanted to see, particularly around sex and a girl’s or woman’s experiences in that way.

SP

What made you want to go back to New York?

LT

I got to a certain point where I wasn’t hearing English. Even in London it was not American English. Words are different. In Amsterdam, I knew a lot of people who spoke English, but I knew I had to get out of there. If I wanted to be a writer, the writer I wanted to be, Europe was not the place to be at. Psychologically I was getting involved in some very weird stuff, which was not so different from issues in my family. I knew, psychologically, I had to get out of there.

SP

Time to go home. Then once you're home, that’s when you started publishing?

LT

Slowly. It was a good moment. Late ’70s, early ’80s.

SP

Tell me about New York at that time.

LT

The most important aspect: so cheap. That really was foundational. You didn’t have to have a lot of jobs.

SP

What did you do for work for the first couple of years?

LT

I was an elevator operator for one day. When Richard Foreman’s theater was downtown, you had to go into an elevator to go to the fourth floor. He had me stand at the elevator and, at a certain point, tell people, “You can’t go up anymore. The play started.” That was my job. I was doing anything. I remember typing for the Byrd Hoffman Foundation. I was asked to type up Robert Wilson’s address book, princes and princesses. I was a terrible typist. I don’t remember how it ended. I was probably fired.

SP

When was graduate school?

LT

That was in the same period. I just wanted to read people I hadn’t read.

SP

Who were you reading at this time? I remember you mentioned Jean Rhys.

LT

The greatest, right? She’s right up there with Woolf. I mean, I adore Woolf, but Rhys, for whatever reason, maybe because she was alcoholic and because she disappeared for the last eleven years, she isn't seen that way. Not in the main Modernist canon, which is one of the reasons I resist canon building. Luckily, it can change. But, for me, too slowly.

SP

She feels almost punk. In an interview, she said, “I’ve never written when I was happy.”

LT

I can imagine thinking that.

SP

But what were you reading at this time?

LT

In graduate school, I was reading Marx and Foucault and Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir.

SP

How do you think reading critical theory impacted your own language?

LT

It was incredibly important to me, because ideas are embedded in what I write. Studying sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, sociology was really philosophy. And I could do anything. Foucault was really important to me, so was Max Weber. Oh, and the ethnomethodologist, Erving Goffman. Marx is considered by some a sociologist.

SP

What does sociology really mean to you?

LT

Study of society. Isn’t it everything? Isn’t it a novel? How do you think my writing fits in with contemporary writing, other contemporary writers? I’m curious.

SP

Honestly, I felt a deep identification with a lot of the early works, especially in the writing about young women, that I don't often feel.

LT

Helen in Cast in Doubt?

SP

Of course, in the way that this older gay man was obsessed with her. But I think there was something I felt you were specifically telling about being a young woman or a woman that was true. With Haunted Houses, tell me about the decision to keep the girls separate.

LT

That was a huge funny thing because I’d read millions of novels, and so when I was writing it, I had the idea that I would do case studies of each of these girls.

SP

Sure, which I’m understanding is part of this sociology background.

LT

And coming out of Freud. So I wrote those first three chapters. That was the end of part one. Grace, Emily, and Jane. Then I thought, Well, now they’re supposed to meet. And I thought, Why? I couldn’t figure out a reason why they had to meet. I thought I was doing three contiguous lives in the same period from different economic classes: lower-middle class, middle-middle class, upper-middle class. I remember this other writer...

SP

Who’ll remain unnamed?

LT

Unnameable. [Laughs.] He said to me, “You didn’t make any concessions, did you?” I thought to myself, What concessions should I make? I’m writing because that’s the only freedom I might have. That’s how naive, in a way, I was. I wasn’t writing, and this is neither a virtue nor a vice, I wasn’t writing in order to be published. I was naive enough to think people will see what this is.

SP

That's partly what interested me with your work. So much of the contemporary stuff I read feels like it’s written to be published.

LT

Well, that’s what happens from MFAs. It has had a big impact. When I was judging things, you got a lot of very competent writing. Nothing wrong with this. Except it’s uninteresting. [Laughs.]

There were nineteen rejections for Haunted Houses. There were many more presses in the late ’80s and by the end of the ’90s, many of them disappeared. I think it’s far harder to get started with a big publisher. I don’t publish with big publishers anymore. Indies. But one of the rejections for Haunted Houses was from an editor at a very well-established press. A woman who was a kind of glory editor. A friend of mine had recommended that she read this manuscript. She wrote a long letter because it had been recommended to her by this man, a friend of mine, and she wanted to do right by him. You get rejection letters that are trying to be nice. Rather than saying, “I’m sorry, I have to pass on this, this doesn’t suit my program," she knew to write the first three paragraphs with praise for Haunted Houses. Then the paragraph, the beginning of the rejection, came. And she said, “But I don’t know what Lynne Tillman is trying to teach me.” And there you have it, there is a prejudice that women don’t have the right, or shouldn’t be expected to, or shouldn’t be allowed to have knowledge. You write about family, you write about relationships of any kind, you write about your despair, you write about how you were abused or whatever, that’s cool.

SP

Right. That’s a woman’s experience.

LT

But American Genius was not that. So at that point, my agent sent it to very few publishers. One editor said, it was a young woman, I believe, she said, “I really like this book, but I wouldn’t know how to edit it.” Which was so curious. But what does she mean? Why couldn’t she edit it? And I mean, we can suppose many things. So it was Richard Nash, who then had his own press, Red Lemonade. He saved my career, basically.

SP

What do you think he understood about the book that others didn’t?

LT

He’s very smart. [Laughs.] He didn’t have that prejudice. He got it. Working with him was one of the greatest things. He was more of a line editor, not one of these macro editors. He’s Irish, and I think he was attuned to language and really got cadence. So, of course, I was very worried waiting for how he was going to edit this manuscript. When I received it, the edits were basically line edits. Richard is a judicious, respectful editor. All of his comments – I thanked him for. A good editor is a good friend. A bad editor is your enemy for life. That’s all I have to say about that. [Laughs.]

SP

It’s very intimate. Who did you first trust to read your work?

LT

Oh, David Rattray, who’s dead now, was great. He was a polymath, brilliant. Once a junkie, once an alcoholic. But had a job at Reader’s Digest writing their dictionaries. I mean, the guy was so brilliant and fun. Unfortunately he died of brain cancer way too early. So he was the first person. Maybe it was the beginning of Weird Fucks. And anyway, there were other people, but slowly I gained confidence. One of the ways in which I gained confidence was with this ex-friend of mine, we did a newspaper-format literary journal, Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter (PAN). It was all anonymous. My writing, some of her writing, and then Harry Mathews.

I could not put my name to anything. I was terrified. But then Harry Mathews, an excellent American writer living in Paris mostly, part of OuLiPo, was published in PAN. I had written the PAN meeting notes, a club that didn’t exist. It was an imaginary club. When Harry did a reading at St. Mark’s Church, I went along. He announced from the podium, “I want to read the notes from this Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter.” He read my meeting notes. There was a great response from the audience. People were laughing.

SP

Well, you’re very funny. [Laughs.] Which is rare. Most writers are not funny.

LT

They take themselves too fucking seriously. I mean, I take writing seriously, but I don’t take myself seriously. Writing is different. I will protect my writing like a lioness protects her cubs. You don’t fuck with my writing. You have to show me that you can. But me, I’m different from my writing. I’m not my writing. And people confuse themselves. And Harry read it aloud. It was a gift, a gift from a serious, much older writer, well-published, not a very well-known writer, not a Stephen King. But he was important to me. He read Weird Fucks in manuscript and he just went wild for it.

SP

People keep going wild for it.

LT

As the writer of it, I’m a little distant from that. You can learn if you listen to your audience, if there is an audience. At first, I think I knew everyone personally who read anything I wrote. [Laughs.]

SP

How has it been with Peninsula Press republishing your early work? New readers have been finding you.

LT

Well, that’s been amazing. Thirty years later. It’s so bizarre.

SP

Is that how you describe the experience, “bizarre,” of reconnecting with books you wrote a long time ago?

LT

Well, that people connect with it. It’s not that I have been disconnected from this work. I don’t know if I could say this, but I wasn’t writing to speak to the present, not necessarily. I wanted it to be literature, that's how I thought then, which meant to me it would address something that wouldn't disappear, like sexual and psychological issues. It would have legs, might be read later on. And there are many things I did in Weird Fucks without even knowing specifically I was avoiding them – trade names, slogans, certain pop words.

SP

It could almost be any time.

LT

At any time. Probably not the eighteenth or nineteenth century. [Laughs.] But, well, it’s very little to do with time period. I wrote the experiences that this young woman was having and the complication of relationships of a heterosexual woman with a heterosexual man.

SP

Your books are concerned with American national identity, too.

LT

I wrote a response to a friend of mine writing something very interesting on Instagram. It had to do with nationalism in art. I said something about, you know, in the Olympics you have to cheer for your country rather than for the great skill or athleticism of any athlete. I understand the need for a kind of group cheerleading. I’m a Mets fan, right? I’ll be happy when the Mets win. This is the most benign form, unless you’re in England and they battle after soccer games.

SP

They fight in the streets.

LT

That’s right. [Laughs.] But, to me, there’s something that allows you to be happy for your tribe, whatever it is, the Mets or the Yankees, God forbid. I understand that. That’s very minor league. But to cherish the fact of your being this or that and my nation or your nation.

SP

To hold it so closely that it becomes totally identified with who you are.

LT

It’s really interesting that the nation developed alongside modernism. So modernity and the nation state grew up together. We’re out of that now in some other period that may be much worse. I don’t know. I didn’t expect the 21st century to be as horrible as it is.

SP

You were optimistic for it?

LT

I wasn’t optimistic. I just wasn’t pessimistic.

SP

What has been the role of organizing or politics or activism in your life?

LT

Well, I do vote. And a lot of people I know didn’t vote. And I was regularly horrified by that. I remember when I tried to get some people I knew who weren’t going to vote once Clinton was going to run and not Sanders, I wrote on my little platform, “Imagine you’re a new immigrant. Imagine you’re something else. Vote for them. Don’t vote for yourself.” This whole fucking thing about conscience. Don’t get me started because I become apoplectic. But I’m not good at physical activism. One time I was in a crowd, some march or other, and I’m very short, and I was nearly crushed. The crowd swayed. There was a policeman on a horse and everybody moved like this, and I was terrified. So I don’t do that, but I send money. What about you?

SP

Speaking of 2016, Hillary Clinton losing that election, for a lot of people my age, was probably a big political awakening. And then it’s just continued. An onslaught of absolute awfulness. Me Too, Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020, and now Gaza.

LT

A very desperate time, isn’t it?

SP

I mean, yes, but I don’t know if it’s because it’s the only time I’ve lived in that it seems very desperate.

LT

You only live in the time you live in. You can’t live in another time. The comparisons, I think, are foolish. But when I hear people say this is the worst time there has ever been, that’s going too far. It’s not the worst time. Imagine all other times, you know. Imagine how many people were killed in the Great War, the first war. Millions. Europe was decimated.

SP

That’s what The Fox, the D.H. Lawrence novella, is about. A soldier comes home from the Great War, and wreaks havoc on these two young women.

LT

Dorothy Parker wrote a wonderful story called “The Lovely Leave,” which is about a woman who’s waiting for her husband to come back on his leave from World War II. And he’s called back, he has to leave in twenty-four hours rather than the week. And she’s very angry. Now, this is not a patriotic story, right?

SP

She wants him to stay home, she doesn’t want him to fight in the war, for their country.

LT

“I’m important, too.” It’s an amazing story.

SP

You're working on a novel in which which you deal with Las Meninas again, like in Motion Sickness. Mothercare was published in 2023. What has it been like since then?

LT

During that time, I was very fortunate to be asked to write a lot of essays. I’ve written on many, many different artists. I did a piece on Nan Goldin. I did a piece on Diane Arbus's photographs, An-My Lê's photographs. I wrote an essay on a work by Bob Gober. I wrote on the work of Steve Locke. I wrote about work by Luc Tuymans. I’m not an art historian, I do them in the way I respond to the world. So I’m very fortunate that way.

SP

You’re very busy with writing, but not novels.

LT

Not novels all the time. Thank goodness. I don’t know how people do one a year. I don’t know where they get the ideas from. I’m very impressed. American Genius took me about eight years to write. Men and Apparitions, ten, because I had to read all this stuff.

SP

Especially in your later work, you’re more explicitly thinking about theoretical concepts. You yourself have to live with these ideas if the character’s going to live in them.

LT

Just writing about Clover Hooper Adams in Men and Apparitions. And then reading Henry Adams’ novels and some of his other writing. And I sat in a course on the history of photography from Geoffrey Batchen, who was then teaching at CUNY Grad School. I did a lot of work in order to write that. It was not easy to write. I think that was the hardest book I’ve ever written.

SP

Do they just get harder?

LT

That was very ambitious, bringing together all of this ethnography, photography, the question of theory and family and what you believe, and the protagonist Zeke’s marriage.

SP

What about the novel you’re working on now?

LT

I wrote a few stories for Katherine Hubbard, a wonderful photographer, for her catalog. One of the stories had a character named Stella. And later on, after it was published, she said, “You know, I really like that character Stella.” And I liked her, too. I like her. So I decided to write a novel about her.

SP

A novel about Stella.

LT

So, Sophie, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, really. I’m doing something. I’m one hundred pages in. But it’s unlike the last two novels. I don’t have a central idea. In American Genius, I was thinking about sensitivity and how Americans are so sensitive now. Their skin, their vitamins, their this, their that, everything. I mean, if they can afford it, so the middle class. Skin, which is the largest organ of the body, seemed to me to be the dividing line between exterior and interior. I mean, it is in a sense, although it’s permeable. On skin you can see a person blush, get pimples. You can see a lot from skin. And then the idea of America in this community, whatever it was, whatever that community was, in a spa, in a mental health place. With Men and Apparitions, the guiding theme was, what does it mean to live in a glut of images? As everybody’s been saying for years, “We live in a glut of images.”

SP

And now we’re on Instagram, you’re on Instagram.

LT

And before then, there’s so many advertisements, celebrities, blah, blah, blah. So I thought, how would you tell that story of a person, Zeke, who came out of that?

SP

This began conceptually and led into this character that articulated these conceptual quandaries. But then Stella appeared.

LT

But now with Stella, now with this, I’m not sure. I’m not sure.

SP

In the initial story you wrote for the artist, did she appear out of necessity?

LT

Maybe it had to do with some of Katie Hubbard’s images, but it’s not magic. It’s something else. But then when Katie said that, for which I thank her, I thought, Oh yeah, I like Stella. I don’t know who she is, but I like her. People think you know your characters, but you can be as unknowing of them as a reader. I mean, it’s just you, in some sense. You’re creating something with words. That’s what you’re doing.

SP

Does Stella have a specific language or a specific way of using words?

LT

I don’t think I can answer that yet.