Stephanie LaCava

RM

It’s a bit funny to start the conversation off this way, but, as I mentioned to you over email, I’ve never sent my interview questions to the person I’m interviewing ahead of time before—prior to today, of course. This may or may not be interesting to talk about, but knowing that you would be reading my prompts ahead of time augmented my approach to writing the questions in the first place—

SLC

—Oh, totally. I hope I didn’t make things too difficult; I was just interested in getting a sense of where your head was at going into the conversation.

RM

No, no—it wasn’t difficult! If anything, I’ve been thinking about it as a sort of thought experiment. Writing with that knowledge in mind triggered this sort of self-reflexive impulse that I haven’t felt before—I had to bird’s eye view out and really consider not only the mechanics of how I instinctively construct a set of questions, or a conversational flow, but also the mechanics of someone else witnessing those mechanics, you know? Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been sitting with your writing in preparation for this conversation, but I found myself applying the meta-cognitive feeling that I was experiencing while writing these questions to your work, and to the way you approach narrative structures. Your books are so tangled up in these questions of not only what it means to “game” human interactions, but also how to untangle the blurred lines that separate genuine intentions from gamified ones. There are all of these knotted webs of complicity and calculation in your novels—it’s often unclear to what extent your characters are even able to distinguish between their own competing motivations. I had a hard time figuring out if I was writing these questions out of pure curiosity, or if I was trying to gamify the flow of conversation ahead of time—or, to take it further, if my strategic approach to that conversational game became more apparent because you were able to see my hand ahead of time, you know?

SLC

I’m always trying to figure out how much I should explain. Or, to put it another way, I’m always trying to figure out how much I shouldn’t explain. But, since you’re raising the question, I guess that means I need to explain. [Laughs.]

The title of The Superrationals is a direct reference to game theory. It signifies the opposite of its intended meaning as the title to a novel of this kind: you can never predict human behavior—the position of the other “players.” It’s not so much about rationality, in terms of logical thinking versus emotion-driven decision-making. It is about how people make moves in order to get something that they want—this is something that I’ve become hyper-aware of, just from watching and feeling and being present in different situations at different times. A lot of my work has to do with the webbing of culture workers, or the idea of networking. It’s not just an art world thing—this happens in dance, in literature, in performance. In the case of I Fear My Pain Interests You, it’s music and film. But, to your question, were you interested in talking about the idea of gaming the novel, or were you referring more to the gaming of relationships between people?

RM

Both threads interest me. Let’s start by talking about gaming the novel though. There was a recent conversation between you, Chris Kraus, and Gracie Hadland published in Texte zur Kunst in which you pose the question, what would it mean to game the publishing industry? Can you say a bit more about how that question structures your own writing practice?

SLC

Part of what I was thinking about when I posed that question was this idea that more experimental work is not always “rewarded.” In the context of the current publishing landscape at least, it feels impossible to separate the writer from the work itself. A lot of people have talked about this, but there’s this sort of obsession with the creator and how that augments the way the work is presented and received. It’s not really anyone’s fault—or actually no, it is probably the fault of the publishing system and the ways it chooses to value the work it produces.

There’s this dance that goes on at legacy publishing houses and in legacy media where people are constantly forced to ask themselves, “How much are we catering towards, or trying to capture, a certain audience? Where do we need to make compromises?” I’m always interested in the line of compromise, and also the people who don’t compromise, or the people who think they don’t compromise even though they are compromising. Because I’m a novelist, I don’t try to make judgements. I’m more interested in laying open that space, you know what I mean? I’m interested in looking at these situations on their own terms—and how that informs the choices that we make.

I’m deeply interested in the larger mechanics of the system: the packaging, the act of putting a book out into the world, all of the little choices at the beginning that lead to a finished product. But at the same time—and maybe I’m naïve or romantic for thinking this way—I also think that the endurance of certain books and works of art has something to do with an ineffable quality that you can’t nail down. You can only game the work up to a certain point. You can game it to get people to see it, which then might lead people to discovering this special quality within the work, but that quality itself can’t be gamed.

As a writer, you just hope that at a certain point that hidden thing breaks out. Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about the cult book, or the writer’s writer—I don’t know if we even have a suitable word for it in English. I don’t even know exactly what that intangible thing is, either. I’m still learning about it; I don’t have the answer. I would like to disappear and not be a part of this one day, but, as things stand right now, I am a part of it. There are some people who are really skilled at disappearing and not participating in these systemic games, which is a whole different story.

RM

I want to push a little bit deeper into your point about networks of culture workers. Your novels perform these surgical examinations of different miniature slices of the culture industry—the art world, criticism, and literature in The Superrationals, music, film, and dance in I Fear My Pain Interests You. While these examinations are, in a sense, quite field specific in terms of the details you pick up upon, there’s a sense in which the general relationships and structuring principles that you’re exploring are highly interchangeable—you choose one industry over another for each narrative, but these choices end up feeling somewhat arbitrary in relation to the larger psychic structures you’re playing with.

SLC

I’m describing human dynamics, you know? I’m not interested in saying like, “Oh, the art world is so much worse than the literary world.” That’s not the wager here. I’m much more interested in looking at how general human dynamics operate within the systems that structure our cultural life.

RM

That sense of humanity feels key. That perception comes from being in and of the system itself, as you’ve pointed towards. In my experience, operating from the vantage of being a culture worker, regardless of what subset or industry we’re talking about, you become deeply intimate with the background mechanics behind, say, putting together a press release, or branding and packaging an artist’s persona within the work as a type of product. It’s not just that you’re exposing the sort of skeletal structures through which a work travels from scattered sensation to a packaged whole, but also that, by virtue of operating from an insider vantage point, you’re able to uncover this inescapably—and perhaps crushingly so—human undercurrent. It’s not just about the realization that there is something sad in witnessing a work become packaged and gamified within a larger network of consumption, but also the secondary realization that there is a person, or group of people, behind that packaging process who are probably also not totally happy to be participating in the packaging process either.

SLC

Exactly. Again, I’m not making any judgements in my work. I always think it’s interesting when people use the word “agenda,” right? Let’s say someone working at a corporate magazine has an agenda to become an artist—in that sense, their lack of attention to the daily work at the magazine can be considered self-serving, a means towards some other ultimate end that they believe they are meant to be doing. In such a case, doing “good work” means setting up for selling things, being happy to be part of a hierarchical chain of command, maybe even to eat shit.

Not everyone has the ability to say no to everything, just like not everyone has the ability to say yes to everything. Being able to decide between what you will and won’t do on the basis of an aesthetic or political principle is a kind of privilege, right? We’re all forced to make compromises in this sort of unending, cyclical pattern—it keeps on going around and around and around. I suppose all I’m saying is that these decisions and assessments are deeply nuanced, which is why I write novels—with novels, you’re allowed to show two things at the same time.

RM

The question of need driven by social position comes to the fore in I Fear My Pain Interests You. There’s this sort of push and pull between competing aspirations that you attempt to untangle throughout the novel. Certain characters come from these deeply entrenched, “generational talent” type families with deep roots in the culture industry, for instance, and, as a result, busy themselves with trying to accrue a type of “punk cred” that might help to counteract their respectably bourgeois origins. Others are born with a type of de-facto punk cred that is rooted in their lower-class upbringings—for them, the idea of pursuing punk cred is laughable. They view participating in culture as a way out from an otherwise doomed future, or as a means to a better end than the one they were stamped with at birth.

SLC

There’s no reconciling that contradiction, it’s an endlessly twisting system.

RM

To maybe connect this to your own biography a little bit more directly, you worked in publishing for a number of years before you pivoted to writing novels of your own, most prominently at Vogue. What did your desires for cultural participation look like in those early years? What was your “agenda,” to borrow a word you just used, when it came to publishing and editorial work?

SLC

I don’t think I really had a clear end goal at the time. A lot of things in biography are part choice and part chance. I studied foreign policy and international economics when I was in school. I wasn’t studying journalism or English literature. I knew that I wanted to write, and that I could write, but I always thought that it was something that I would do in addition to something else. I didn’t feel as if I was entitled to immediately jump into writing as “my thing,” you know? I could get up at 5 AM and write for an hour, but then there would be something else that I would have to do. I think that’s something that my parents also drilled into me, for better or worse—I don’t know, maybe they should have been like, “That’s great, go be a writer!” I don’t know what the answer is, I’m not vilifying either side. But that’s my story. And then I got offered the job at Vogue before I even graduated, and I took it. I was so eager to get out of school and to be free. Or, to be what I thought it meant to be free at the time, let’s put it that way. [Laughs.] I think that’s an important distinction to make. I was quick to take the job and to try and figure out how to make it work. I had no peers or friends my age at that time, everyone else was still in school. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t really know anything, but I was learning as I went. It took a while for me to realize that what I was good at, or what was important to me, involved a certain skillset that didn’t really overlap with the work I had found myself doing.

RM

How would you describe that skillset?

SLC

I’m an incredibly emotional person. It’s funny that I often end up writing characters that are the exact opposite of that. In a way, those characters are a throwback to that earlier moment in my life. I wanted desperately to be able to control my emotions, but I can’t. I mean I am skilled at hiding them, maybe, but my antennas are always beeping, my emotions always going. I so wanted to evince that type of stony exterior, but it’s just not how I was made. I think it’s important to note that I don’t think I write autofiction. The characters I write are largely the opposite of who I am. I mean, there are certain ways in which details of their lives are similar to details of mine, but they’re really meant to be the exact opposite of who I am as a person.

RM

I’ve been thinking about the question of autofiction in regard to your work quite a bit, actually. It seems to really connect with the idea of gaming publishing, or the cognitive structures through which literary works are so often presented to contemporary audiences. It feels like—especially concerning novels that have come out in the last five to ten years—the default is to assume that everything is autofiction unless it is blatantly positioned as something else, like genre-fiction or sci-fi. As you’re saying, there are just enough connections between your characters and your own biography—the books largely take place in New York, where you’ve lived most of your life, and Paris, where you grew up, for instance—that an uncritical reader could come to a conclusion like, “Oh, X character must actually be a stand in for Stephanie.”

SLC

I think the thing about my work is that it’s often an inversion, or a negation of a negation. Like, if you really examine the overlap in these certain details, they kind of double-back into a sort of absence, or a hole. The double negation alters the stakes of what it means to draw parallels between my life and my work. At the same time, of course, parts of the books are drawn from my life, because I’m the one who wrote them. Every writer ends up writing from the vantage point of their life.

RM

I might be misattributing this quote, but I think it was Chris Kraus who said something to the effect of, “Referring to auto-fiction as a sub-genre of literature is stupid, because every book is kind of autofiction, in the most basic sense.” I’m sure she had a more eloquent way of phrasing it though. [Laughs.]

SLC

Chris is such a hero of mine. I admire her so much. I love that you referenced that interview with her earlier—she’s really the person you should be asking these kinds of questions, not me. [Laughs.]

RM

November loves Chris too. What was it like working with her as an editor on The Superrationals?

SLC

It was wonderful. I was so grateful for that experience. It was a shock, and still is to be honest, that that was the experience I had with that novel. I couldn’t be more grateful for the fact that she took a chance on it, because up until that point nobody had any interest in the type of experimental writing I was doing.

RM

Did you cold-submit the manuscript, or did she solicit it?

SLC

I was connected to her through a couple of different friends. Other people facilitated our introduction, and then I eventually ended up just submitting the manuscript to her from there. I don’t work with an agent, so I do everything myself now. It’s clear to me what I will do—or, more likely actually, what I will not do, so it makes it easier for me to handle all sides of things. I have very strong ideas about the presentation of my work, as well. I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to my friends and confidants. I find it hard to stomach when people come around or show up once there’s whatever new form of recognition that cements your talent to them. I feel the same way when people demonstrate inconsistency or small betrayals. I’d prefer to hold onto people who weather shit, who loved me when it was inconvenient, murky or dark. This doesn’t mean not changing or working with new people, but certain loyalties are important.

RM

I want to return to what you were saying about this interplay between emotionality and writing. What did the emotional landscape around writing look like for you in those early days at Vogue? Does the psychic or emotional space of writing shift for you depending upon the type of writing—as in, fiction versus interview versus editorial versus criticism—that you’re doing?

SLC

Well, my early days at Vogue had nothing to do with writing, actually. I was hired in the fashion department. It’s not really clear to a lot of people what that means, but it was essentially market work. I did a lot of calling and sending emails, trying to get samples of clothes and shoes and stuff like that. Again, I was very junior there. For a time, my job was to go with the security guards to all of the jewelry shoots and log all of the jewelry and pieces and make sure everything was there on set, things like that. I wasn’t writing. It’s a frequent misconception that I wrote for Vogue—I never wrote fashion pieces. I eventually moved over to features, probably because I was incapable of doing what they wanted me to do in fashion. [Laughs.] I think they were like, “Oh, she’s really weird, let’s try putting her here instead.” They gave me another chance. I learned a lot about researching because of that. I was Hamish Bowles’ assistant for many years and helped produce a lot of his shoots. But again, it wasn’t writing, it was logistical production on photoshoots. I was so dead. I just wanted so badly to write. I was so distracted by that desire, but it was never my job while I was on staff.

RM

What were you writing about in your free time?

SLC

I was writing my own stories. I was doing a lot of experimenting with different ideas and structures. It wasn’t very good. Even though the stories were probably quite bad, I was starting to put things down as a form of exorcism. I was rushing a lot of my writing, because I knew that I needed to be on my own and to get to the point where I would be able to write for myself, but I wasn’t there yet. I was living in this studio apartment in Yorkville, and I remember I was like, “Nobody can ever come over here”—there was an inch thick pile of paper covering the entirety of my studio floor. It was all of the writing that I would try to squeeze in during the hours that I wasn’t in the office—or that I would try to squeeze in while I was in the office, which I got in trouble for. I wasn’t that good at doing my actual job.

RM

[Laughs.] Definitely. Perhaps as a bit of an addendum, I was hoping to talk a bit about your time growing up in France, since we’re on the topic of your early life. There’s a particular subset of French writers that seem to be clear interlocutors with your work—you’ve mentioned Duras and Robbe-Grillet and the rest of the nouveau roman writers in previous interviews, for instance. That said, the writer who I’ve always most closely associated with your approach to tone and structure is Samuel Beckett, which is a bit of a funny coincidence, seeing as he’s not a French writer in the proper sense but rather, much like you, a native English speaker who spent a significant chunk of life immersed in Parisian life. I’m always reminded of him when I read the way you work with the English language—it has a similar sort of alien quality to Beckett’s writing. I always come back to the fact that he wrote in French and then translated his work back into English himself, in order to produce this sort of estrangement or distance via working through a language that he had a weaker grasp upon. Do you feel as if the time you spent living in France as a child has shaped your relationship to writing in English?

SLC

First off, I’m so flattered by the comparison. Beckett is really the ultimate model for me—I can’t claim that I live up to it, but I’m flattered, nonetheless. What does feel accurate in the comparison is that, in some ways, my work does read like a bad translation, you know? That’s the voice I tend to employ. It’s close to my real voice, in fact. When I talk, my brain is going and I’m not really editing. I talk really loudly, I don’t have much of a volume control—I think this maybe comes out in the fact that I often don’t pronounce words quite right. I like to think that that comes out on the page, in a way. It’s an intuitive process—it’s a dance between me and a voice that exists outside of my own body. I don’t want to draw too grand of a comparison between myself and Duras, but she has also had a large influence on how I approach writing—there’s that same sort of dance in her prose, something that is intuitive and rhythmic. I don’t really understand punctuation or care to, to be honest.

RM

Do you feel as if the years you spent in France lead you to this specific group of writers, or perhaps helped shape your approach to structuring prose?

SLC

Oh my god, one hundred percent. Not directly though. I mean, it’s funny to think about biography, because when you read and learn about the lives of these different artists, you realize how much of it is a type of pure fantasy. So, like, I could sit here and tell you that I was reading Duras when I was 11 under a tree in the backyard, but that’s not true. But what is true is that I was reading everything I could get my hands on, in any language. I had a difficult childhood, and I was very interested in distracting myself—I ended up reading constantly as a result. I would be dragged to a dinner party with my parents, and I’d invariably end up hiding in a closet with whatever book I found on the host’s bookshelf. I had no social skills, and I sometimes think I still don’t. My literary voice was directly cultivated through all of that reading and the intuition that I developed through it. It’s like music—I’m terrible with music, but I know when I feel like it’s right. Sorry, that was probably a really bad way of phrasing that idea. [Laughs.]

I had this incredible English teacher, who I’m still in touch with. When I was in eighth grade, we did this Shakespeare intensive—it was me and five other students. I actually think I can still recite most of the material we covered by heart. It changed everything for me. I think that might have had a hand in cultivating my taste for dialogue. It wasn’t so much French writers as it was Shakespeare, and this whole history of English theater. Those two threads were both hugely informative for me.

RM

That makes perfect sense. Besides France, the other space that looms large in your work is obviously New York City. It often seems to exert this intense, psyche-structuring force upon your characters—it is in turns constrictive and liberating, often to impressive extremes.

SLC

As you probably know, I’m intensely interested in how biography expands or changes through our lives, or how “biography” interacts with the actual details of a life.

RM

It’s a type of self-mythologizing, yeah?

SLC

Exactly!

RM

I think I’m drawn to talking about New York in particular because it is so easy to self-mythologize here. It’s been done so many times already, so there are all of these preexisting tangents and tropes at hand. The city is a producer of mythologies, or a template through which we are able to produce mythologies anew. What is your relationship to New York? Is it fair to call it home for you? Is “home” even an interesting concept for you?

SLC

No, I think the idea of home is important. I don’t think I pay enough attention to it. New York is, and has been for a long time now, my home. It probably still will be for a long time to come. This is probably the most biographical detail I’ve ever gone into in an interview—I try to avoid it for exactly the sort of self-mythologizing reasons that we’re talking about. I don’t want to play into that system of thinking. But in this case, I feel good about it, I want to do it. For years, I tried to refuse to mention the whole Vogue thing, because no matter how you frame it you end up trading on it—it ends up “meaning something” about you in the eyes of others. These things have currency, and they invariably become a self-fulfilling ouroboros of image creation unless you’re really good at shutting it all down and disappearing—which, like I said, sounds great and I hope happens to me one day. Unless that’s your life though, you inevitably end up contributing to this system of image creation and consumption, right? The whole idea that social media has completely monopolized image creation is simply not true. That’s why New York, as a space, is fascinating to me. So much of image creation still happened by going outside and seeing and hearing things in the ether that exists in between people. I’m so interested in that kind of connectivity, as opposed to the networked connectivity of online life. I mean, sure, I’m interested in the ways that they manage to smash into one another too, but I don’t think you can just focus on digital culture exclusively.

RM

Definitely. I want to get back on track with your writing process though. [Laughs.] Isolation and distance are recurrent tropes in your work—critics tend to hone in on the way you depict the women in your novels, often in this way that seems to really shoe-horn your work into the cannon of “sad-girl” or “dissociated feminist” literature. I’ve always found that characterization to be a little strange, or frankly just done in bad faith—while you often write about young women navigating various morally bankrupt culture industries, and your prose makes strong use of coldness and distance as affective devices, you don’t really lean into these themes of dissociation and lack of agency, or at least when it comes to your characterizations of the women in your novels. If anything, the young women in your books feel like the only people with real agency, or the only people who experience real feelings of love.

SLC

Yeah, it’s funny, those two terms have become kind of definitive for how people talk about my writing. People love to focus on my interest in these really unmoored female characters. I love that you use the word agency though, because that is so important to how I’m thinking about them. I just read this great essay by Melanie Marino on Rosemarie Trockel titled "The Parody Aesthetic." It kind of synthesized some of what I think about when it comes to this idea of “feminist” stories or art. In short, it is really important for me that these characters have some sort of control over their own lives—at the very least, they are trying to figure out how to get control over their own narratives. They’re trying to figure out how to control these forces that seem so wildly, intensely out of control. At the same time, they want to let you know they know what you’re coming to the book with and that you may have existing ideas that they don’t need to shoulder.

RM

There’s this very careful play between calculation and complicity. Your work seems to reject easy, top-down narratives of domination and victimhood, in which there are the “bad guys” with all the power and clout and then the poor souls who get caught in their web. Instead, your work seems to be, at least in part, an attempt to carefully parse apart the ways in which having agency, or chasing agency, leads one into different forms of partial collusion and complicity with larger systems of power.

SLC

I’m always quick to question the victim mentality. That really comes to the fore in I Fear My Pain Interests You—just because “bad” things happen to certain characters, or just because certain people do take advantage of them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are victims of circumstance, or that they lacked an active hand in the decision-making processes that led them up to that point.

RM

What is the emotional space of writing these characters like for you? Writing is obviously an inherently isolating experience—this is a fact which is thrown into aggressive focus when placed against the backdrop of living somewhere like New York. Your writing is also intensely researched, which I can only imagine further compounds the need for isolation and solitude while working, yeah? Are you ever thinking about your own isolation as a writer when you’re fleshing out the inner lives of these unmoored characters?

SLC

One thing that I don’t have trouble with, unfortunately, is discipline. I say unfortunately in the sense that I often approach my work in an extreme way, to a degree that can border on being unhealthy. It’s hard to find a sense of balance. I’m pretty happy being alone all of the time, and I would honestly like to be alone all the time, with a few exceptions. But then again, if you’re alone all the time you aren’t getting out into the world and seeing all of the things that enable you to write in the first place. In a sense, I feel lucky that I was forced through all of these different intense work and life experiences when I was younger, because that’s now the material through which I’m able to write—I’ll eventually have to generate new experiences like that as time goes on. The most generative thing you can do as a writer is to go out and see other people’s work—you need to talk to other people about their work. Being in the world is such a huge part of the process, which is funny, because it’s so antithetical to my image of myself and my process, which is very solitary. I wish I could take out my phone right now and show you the endless list of drafted notes I have going—it’s all the things that I clock when I’m running around that I jot down, which eventually becomes the fodder for the writing itself. In terms of my exact process, I’m very good at getting myself to sit down and work anywhere, for any amount of time. At the same time, my life has taken upon a shape where I have very limited time to myself. The early hours of the day are when I do my best writing, and I don’t really have access to that time of the day anymore. As a result, I’ve taught myself to be able to write regardless of the noise going on around me. The writing itself doesn’t take that long. My books come together very quickly. It’s all of the other work leading up to the writing that takes a long time.

RM

By “all of the other work,” are you referring to research, or something else?

SLC

Yeah, exactly. I read everything. For instance, I was just on this trip, and I embarrassingly may or may not have ordered five different biographies on the same person to my hotel, because I got it in my head that I needed to read all five of them. That’s probably a good distillation of who I am as a person—I’m supposed to be on vacation in this beautiful place, and I end up ordering five different biographies because I decide that I have to figure out which one is the best one, right then and there. It’s a bit psychotic, but it’s who I am. [Laughs.]

RM

How do you go about distilling all of that information? Your books are longer than novellas, but they’re still quite slim, all things considered. It feels like you’re taking all of this information and stripping it down to this sort of sheer skeletal structure—the research is all there, but it’s been paired down into the sharpest presentation possible.

SLC

Skeletal is exactly the right word. I keep so many notebooks—there are actually some lying around here that I have yet to unpack, which I need to do later. When I write, I’ll make a draft in my notebook and then I’ll literally rip out pages and write them again, over and over, until they become more and more condensed versions of the original thought. Eventually I hit my computer and it all comes out incredibly fast. It’s a bit of a bizarre process. I never stop. I spend so much time and energy condensing prior to actually writing anything on the computer—by the time it comes to put things down on the page, the prose almost seems to write itself. I’m always collecting everything. I’m always clocking things—that’s what it takes to be a writer. I hear things or see things and think they’re so incredibly special that they have to be a part of my work. In a sense, the work is happening all the time, everywhere.

RM

I want to stick with this idea of skeletal structures for a moment, because it feels so central to the experience of reading your work. You take an almost surgical approach to form—the structure of your novels, in many ways, seems to supersede the narrative content itself in terms of hierarchical importance. That’s not to say that your characters are completely flat or devoid of persona—

SL

—I mean, a lot of them are one-dimensional. But yes, to what you’re saying, they’re one-dimensional in part because that’s what the form requires.

RM

Right. It’s not like they’re without complex emotions or motivations, but those dimensions seem to take a back seat. The focus seems to be placed on how they function within these certain structures that impose a predetermined set of rules for how you can and can’t interact with other people. I started rereading I Fear My Pain Interests You in preparation for this conversation while I was on a plane back home from LA, which is perhaps a little ironic, since the opening sequence of that novel takes place on a commercial flight.

SLC

It’s funny, a lot of people I’ve talked to have had that experience. For some reason or another, people always seem to start reading that book while flying, which obviously leads to them commenting on the opening scene.

RM

[Laughs.] What a bizarre coincidence. When I was reading during that flight, I couldn’t help but think about planes and airports as a type of structuring system that alters human interaction, or that imposes a predetermined set of moves and objectives upon your mind and body, and how that intersects with your approach to form. When you’re in an airport, it’s not like you’re completely desubjectivized or anything, but the particularities of your persona have a way of receding or shrinking in order to fit a prelimited structure of possible social interactions. I like to think of myself as being a comparatively relaxed person—or, I have plenty of my own neuroses, but being a hall-monitor isn’t usually one of them. At the same time, the second I step into an airport I become such a tightly-wound nerd for authority—I get a little nutty about other people’s lack of spatial awareness, or their general obliviousness to the intended flow of bodies through each check point. Do you start out with a clear structure in mind for each novel and then plug in narrative data, or do the two develop hand in hand?

SLC

The Superrationals absolutely began with a clear formal map. The plot was supposed to fold in on itself and could be folded backwards—“A,A,B,B,/B,B,A,A,” that sort of thing. That was my original plan for the novel, even if it didn’t end up coming out that way. I think you can still maybe feel that initial impulse while reading it, though. I didn’t really do that with I Fear My Pain Interests You, although I did use other structuring devices. Originally, I wanted to use the list of movies that were supposed to be screened at the canceled ’68 Cannes as the headings for each chapter, so that the story had to somehow reference back to the title of each movie as a chapter head. It’s like creating these structures that then allow you to continue the story, you know? As I continue to write, those original structural limitations disappear. I tend to give myself formal constructs that eventually end up falling away. It’s like when you put papier-mâché around a balloon and then pop the balloon—you’re left with this shape that vaguely hints at what it was originally supposed to be.

RM

I’ve read in a couple interviews that you’re a fan of the Oulipo writers, right?

SLC

Yes, exactly, they use those same types of constraints. Wordplay is so important to me and my practice. I love the trickster-slash-troublemaker aspect of wordplay as an act.

RM

I actually wanted to address wordplay specifically. There are all these moments throughout your work in which you seem to be toying with the reader through these subtle inversions and turns of phrase—almost like easter eggs, if that makes sense? I’m thinking, for instance, of how in The Superrationals one boyfriend repeatedly uses the phrase, “c’mere,” and then fifty pages or so later another boyfriend, who is dating the same protagonist seven or eight years in the future, repeatedly says, “com’ere”—I had to flip back and make sure that I wasn’t misremembering the subtle discrepancy between their respective shortenings of “come here.” Facts and timelines get skewed just enough that you become aware that something is off, but not enough for it to be some sort of obvious nod towards unreliable narration.

SLC

It’s funny that you mention that. I’ve never said this in an interview before—you’ll like this I think, going off of the shared interests we seem to have in literature—but in The Superrationals, I did this kind of Robbe-Grillet inspired thing where you would see the shopping bag with the protagonist’s stuff in one scene, and then it would be open in her room in another, or a bow would be tied around something in one scene and then untied in another. I left it up to the reader to clock these subtle returns of objects, I didn’t choose to draw direct attention to them.

RM

Totally. There was a funny moment that happened when I was rereading The Superrationals, where you introduce the character of Olympia and then start the next sentence with the word “ribbon”—I immediately went down this whole wormhole of thinking about Michel Leiris’ book The Ribbon Around Olympia’s Throat, which frames the ribbon in Manet’s Olympia as a type of fetish object for accessing all of these different concepts and plot points. Without even really zooming out or thinking too much about it, I got caught up in this sort of conspiratorial like, “Aha, I cracked the case on this hidden reference” headspace, as if it were some sort of coded moment or key to unpacking a hidden meaning within the book. Of course, when I started researching interviews you did around the publication of The Superrationals, I quickly realized that I had totally fabricated that connection—Olympia’s name is actually derived from a character in ETA Hoffman’s “The Sandman.” I found it interesting to think about how the book’s extremely skeletal structure created this space for me, as a reader, to unload all of this meaning onto a detail that wasn’t, in reality, really there at all.

SLC

That’s so interesting to me. So much of my work is about how we process references, both in visual art and otherwise, and then how we choose to share them with others. Even if we arrived at different references, I think it’s important all the same that that passage triggered some sort of associative connection to another set of imagery for you.

RM

Could you say a bit more about how you approach referentiality in your writing?

SLC

I’m starting to realize that a lot of my existing work, as well as the work that I’m in the middle of right now, has to do with how we metabolize and share cultural references, and then also how we reconfigure them in other works of art. This shows up in the concept of the stack in I Fear My Pain Interests You, for instance, which is essentially this document of references the protagonist’s lover gives her that’s full of things for her to think about. That sort of thing happens all the time in daily life, with the person you’re living with, or with the people you’re intimate with. I’m interested in how those exchanges of references become transmuted and show up in other people’s work—or, even worse, when they show up in the work of the person’s next lover, because you know where that reference originally came from. Like, what does it mean to suggest a book to someone that someone else suggested to you? The first person thought that exchange was a sacred interaction, but it’s clearly not. On the other hand, does that repeated exchange mean that you love and respect the first person enough to want to share their references with the next person? Where do we stop those flows? What kind of reverence is due to which references?

RM

It's kind of destabilizing, yeah? You’re mixing multiple registers of exchange, ranging from sacred expressions of devotion to meaningless, clout-motivated social signaling—where one register drifts into the next is often unclear, as are the motivations behind each drift.

SLC

Right, but then you also see how it all doubles back again into the idea of cultural networking. You have this network of culture workers who are sharing all of these different references because they have to for their careers, but also because they’re humans and that’s a foundational aspect of human interaction. Of course there’s sexuality, and there’s friendship, and there’s needs for touch and care that all come into play, but this exchange is also simultaneously rooted in something much more basic in its humanity.

RM

I want to try to connect this back to your writing a bit more explicitly. You have these characters that are often, as you mentioned, kind of grey, NPC-like figures—they’re largely, with a few notable exceptions, these blank formal devices without much in the way of a defining persona. On the opposite hand, you often describe objects, whether it’s a piece of clothing or jewelry or even a hotel room, in such ornate, almost baroque detail—the objects in your books are often accorded significantly more in the way of a “persona” than the characters. You make a point to not reference specific brand names when describing objects though, yeah?

SLC

Exactly—I never reference identifiable brands, that’s a hard rule for me. I think there’s something really corrupting, both literally and stylistically, about name dropping like that. It’s an intuition thing. I’m hyper-aware that making those sorts of direct connections to the real world turns the reference into a secondary reference of itself. I’m interested in showing these objects as I feel they should be seen, as opposed to showing them in relation to some preexisting culture of referentiality.

RM

A lot of your objects function as narrative devices within themselves—they shoulder a lot of the weight of communicating plot development and emotionality.

SLC

Yes! I try to describe things like I’m seeing them for the first time. I’m trying to approach them in the same way that I would approach describing an actual person. It’s really important that they don’t become simply another reference in a chain of meaningless referential flows, you know what I mean?

RM

Right, that degree of referentiality can almost bog the objects down and turn them into these meaningless placeholders for a moment in time—it strips away this sort of emotionally propulsive quality to one’s personal effects.

SLC

Referencing brand names also brings in this commercial register to the narrative. If you’re referencing a brand name, you’re also obviously invoking whatever sort of value it occupies within the given moment. While I find that interesting to a degree, I’m much more interested in the ways that individual people attach particular personal value to certain objects—I’m interested in how people value objects outside of a commercial register.

RM

I feel like this idea of a lack of resolve—or maybe a breakdown in the communication of value—is key. One place in which that really comes to the fore for me when reading your work is in the way that you approach writing through critical theory. There are all these scattered references to theory throughout your work, though I would strongly hesitate to call your books “theory novels”—names like Bataille and Lacan are tossed about by different characters somewhat flippantly, one girl cracks jokes about her boyfriend that revolve around these less than glowing comparisons to Deleuze and Kierkegaard, and so on. Specifically, I keep on returning to The Superrationals, which is intercut by these sequences that are comprised of passages lifted from the protagonist’s art school thesis. Importantly, it reads as a like… well, it reads like a straight up bad and kind of embarrassing thesis. [Laughs.] It’s one of those classic undergrad papers where someone throws out the entire kitchen sink of big-name theorists and buzzy terminology in order to perform some sort of cosplay of intellectual rigor—it’s the work of someone who’s desperate to let people know that she’s done the reading, without her having like, really done the reading, you know?

SLC

She’s showing off her references, you might say. [Laughs.]

RM

Right, exactly. I found that device to be particularly interesting, because it almost reads as a sort of parody or play on another well-trodden genre of novel. I mean, we’ve all come across plenty of novels—not to mention works of contemporary art writ large—that are very clearly shallow masks for some sort of critical theoretical argument, just dolled up under the Trojan Horse of “fiction.” I usually think those books are so annoying—maybe this is conservative of me to say, but I tend to think that if you have a critical theoretical argument to make you should just write a critical theoretical argument. I was so compelled by how you toyed with that notion, because it almost felt as if you were dangling this carrot of like, “Hey, here’s the key for parsing the secret argument I’m making with this book”—except that when you actually try to glean some sort of insight from those theory chunks, you pretty quickly realize that they aren’t really saying anything all that coherent.

SLC

It's even funnier too once placed against the context of the title: The Superrationals.

RM

Absolutely. Could you talk a bit about this lack of resolution, or the work’s intentional failure to coalesce into a coherent theoretical stance?

SLC

I’m working on another project with my friend, who is a writer and an academic—we’ve been having this extended sort of exchange. We recently discussed different ways of exchanging love, and how that shows up in our writing. And I realized—to exactly the point you were just making—that she always arrives at a final thesis or point, whereas I never do. There are no “right” angles in my writing, at least not in the same way that there are in hers, which I think is probably a deficit on my part—I don’t necessarily think it’s a good thing. But maybe it’s just a matter of style, or something unavoidable about who I am. It’s like dancing in a certain way because you have a broken foot. I’m not usually able to find a definitive conclusion, so I warp my style so as to avoid having to reach one.

RM

What draws you to write about these different theorists and critics? As you’ve said, you’re not engaging with them as stepping-stones for progressing a theoretical argument, but they do still show up in your work all the same—or, they show up to such a frequent degree that it would be difficult not address their presence in the room.

SLC

It goes back to how I approach references and research in my process. None of us come into this work with a blank slate, right? We’re already inundated with the work and the minds of these different cultural creators by the time we decide to make work of our own. I’m interested in the way that academic culture tends to dictate these ideas of what you should have read, or what you need to read in order to enter the conversation. I don’t necessarily agree with that outlook—I don’t think that’s what makes someone smart. But I want to investigate that impulse. It’s easy to read all of the “right” books and ape something—but who’s coming up with something original? I think those people are rarer today than ever before. I’m interested in finding the real voices within the thicket. They’re super inspiring to me. You can ape a successful work of art, you can ape a successful book—in a sense, we’ve come full circle to your original question about gaming publishing, yeah? But, can you make something that reflects your own voice? Do you have a voice? Do you have a point of view? People often tell me my books are “feel bad” books, or that they fuck you up. And I’m like, “You know what? Good!” Maybe that’s what reading is supposed to do. If you want to be entertained then go somewhere else, I’m not for you.

RM

What would you like your books to do to the reader, ideally?

SLC

I don’t really set out with a mission like that. I want them to unsettle people, I want to avoid tidy conclusions. They don’t moralize and they don’t give you any answers. To return to where we started with gaming publishing, self-help books and cookbooks sell more copies than anything else. My books are the opposite of self-help books and cookbooks.

RM

Right—you have to sit with these knotted family structures and torturous love affairs, but without the promise of catharsis.

SLC

It’s like the body horror stuff in I Fear My Pain Interests You. Here’s the piss, here’s the cum, here’s the blood. Do you want me to clean it up? I’m not going to clean it up—you clean it up.