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1. Setting Up The Interview, The Part About Us

The Rumpus: So… um… like what I’ll do is I’ll try to type your answers, but then I’ll also have them recorded.

Michelle Orange: Interesting.

Rumpus: Is it going to be too disruptive if I’m sitting next to you and you can see the screen?

Orange: Kind of. No. I don’t know. 

Rumpus: Because I can get a chair and sit over there or something.

Orange: That would be more distracting.

Rumpus: Normally I sit across from the person and they can’t see the screen. 

Orange: But they can still hear you typing. Like a stenographer. 

Rumpus: It hasn’t been a problem before.

Orange: Why do you like to do that?

Rumpus: It saves time.

Orange: Oh, it’s a time saving mechanism. But if I’m saying something that’s not interesting will you not bother to type it and then I’ll see you not typing it? This is suddenly very stressful. I’ll see you judging me in real time. Not that I don’t, generally.

Rumpus: If anything I’m the one that’s always nervous about being judged.

Orange: I’ve accepted everything about you.

Rumpus: That’s the thing. You’ve accepted.

Orange: I’ve completely settled.

Rumpus: This was actually something I was going to bring up when talking about your book, This Is Running For Your Life. I’ve always felt like you’re so smart and it makes me nervous because I feel like you see all this bad stuff and decide whether or not to put up with it.

Orange: I don’t think that’s a result of being smart. I think probably a lot of people have that relationship to you. Is that something you feel about other people?

Rumpus: I mean women, as a genre. 

Orange: We’re a genre.

Rumpus: Particularly you. Because you notice these tiny details. I think most people don’t. 

Orange: And that makes you nervous. 

Rumpus: It’s always been a thing.

Orange: Would the alternative be better, if I just didn’t notice anything about you?

Rumpus: Then you wouldn’t be you and I don’t know if it would be better. We’re talking about a different person. I like you the way you are. 

Orange: Well that’s nice. I guess.

2. The Part About The Book That’s Still Really The Part About Us

Rumpus: Is this your first time being interviewed for your essay collection?

Orange: No, I was interviewed by Publisher’s Weekly a couple months ago. It was pretty quick. 

Rumpus: What’s the genesis of This Is Running For Your Life?

Orange: I wrote the book basically so I could bring about this exact moment.

Rumpus: What do you mean?

Orange: So I could force you into a captive format and you would have to ask me questions about myself. 

Rumpus: That makes sense.

Orange: Yeah. It’s been about ten years and this was my only option really. This is what I was left with; I better write a book. 

Rumpus: That’s not true. I ask you about yourself all the time. 

Orange: No, you don’t. 

Rumpus: I mean percentage-wise it might be less, maybe 40/60.

Orange: OK.

3. Finally Talking About The Book

Rumpus: I feel like this essay collection, This Is Running For Your Life, is about several things that are summed up in the blurbs on the back in very simple terms, i.e. social media, the modern world. But you’re actually writing about much bigger ideas than that. 

Orange: I’ve tried to think about ways to sum up the book when people ask what it’s about and I still have a hard time. Though it’s better now than while I was writing it. You don’t really know what you’re writing about until it’s done. But I knew I wanted to write about time, and limits. I wanted to try and identify a predicament, consider its ambivalences and contradictions, and find my own experience within it. But mostly it had to do with time.

Rumpus: You feel like you’re writing about time? 

Orange: Yeah. Death, time. 

Rumpus: Because I was thinking you were writing about loneliness a lot. 

Orange: I’m always writing about loneliness. 

Rumpus: In the last essay, “Ways Of Escape,” you mention that in college you only knew one or two people. You’re supposed to meet a guy at one point and you blow him off, though you like him a lot. This is a period of your life where you’re running twenty miles every day. And it reads as a kind of self-avoidance through ritual.

Orange: Writing that essay was trying to figure out what happened during those years and what that period of my life was about. What I came up with was that my relationship to time had gotten completely out of whack. It seemed like there was way too much of it. It was closing in on me and I needed to try to find a way to get around it until I could figure out a way to be.

Rumpus: I’d like to understand what you’re saying as to how it’s about time. 

Orange: You texted me yesterday asking what people do on Saturdays, like you didn’t know how to pass the day. That’s how I felt all the time. Running gave me something to do. I was twenty, twenty-one years old. And it turned out to be this thing where through running I could escape the sense that I should be doing something, that I should have a better idea of what my life was about. 

Rumpus: You didn’t want to misuse your time. 

Orange: I wanted to feel like I was accomplishing something. And for whatever reason what I came up with was running twenty miles. I was in school, but that took up a handful of hours a week and the rest of the time I didn’t seem to be able to sustain social or romantic relationships. It’s complicated. Don’t you look back on periods of your life and think, So what was that about? 

Rumpus: I feel like I’m still in that exact period of my life.

Orange: There are all these things that are so obvious in retrospect. I was driving my mother’s car back to my father’s house every weekend and literally running, circling my entire town, where all my friends had scattered. At the time I was completely baffled as to why I was doing anything I was doing.

4. The Part About The Rumpus

Rumpus: Is the book mostly pieces you had already written?

Orange: No. I wrote first drafts of six of the essays in six months and the other four were heavily reworked and expanded. 

Rumpus: Didn’t this come out of writing for The Rumpus? 

Orange: Yeah. In a way. Because when The Rumpus started you were looking for people to write and I had been on this grind of trying to survive as a freelancer. I had my head down for several years, trying to get myself stable and writing a lot of reviews and film and book stuff. I’d been striving to get published in the places I thought you were supposed to get published because I thought that would carry me to this wonderful place I was supposedly trying to go. Then the recession hit and my schedule opened up. And I found it was the things on The Rumpus that got the response I had been hoping for. I thought, I should keep going in this direction. These are the things people are more interested in reading about and I’m having more fun writing about them. 

Rumpus: These were the things that were important to you so they had energy.

Orange: Yeah. That must be it. But there’s both having to make a living and feeling like you need to hit these certain milestones. And I probably did lose a bit of that thing that I liked back when I was working in an office and I could spend my spare time writing about whatever I wanted and exploring who I could be as a writer.

5. The Part About Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace 

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the San Diego essay, “The San Diego Of My Mind.” What was that supposed to be about and what did it end up being about? 

Orange: It was supposed to be about this new trend in focus groups of using fMRI machines to look inside people’s brains in order to gauge their response to a product. In the case of the firm that I visited that product was often a movie. It was supposed to be about what it might mean if this kind of market research catches on. And it ended up being about those things but also about my exhaustion with certain kinds of movies and the possibility that this kind of research poses a profound threat to the way we think about art and subjectivity. 

Rumpus: This is a stupid thing to say but you’re clearly operating in the lineage of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Do you feel that element in the work or do you feel apart from that?

Orange: Um… 

Rumpus: Like the way Joan Didion is trying to make sense of her experience through story, and Sontag’s obsession with images.

Orange: That’s what I meant about the book being an expression of my influences and preoccupations up to this point. Though I came to Joan Didion relatively late. I have this sense that her presence is not as definitive in Canada as it is here, but maybe that’s just my excuse for not having her on my radar early on. I did know, once I had this opportunity and was sitting down to figure out what the book could be, that it was time to revisit her work. With the Hawaii essay, “War And Well Being,” in particular I felt that Didion was someone you have to reckon with. If you’re going to write on that subject, in this format and in that place, you have to write through her first. 

Rumpus: What’s that essay about? 

Orange: It details a trip that I took to Honolulu in 2011 to attend the annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association and try to get some perspective on the writing of the new DSM-V manual.

Rumpus: I think about you and I think of The White Album. When Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” that could be you writing that.

Orange: That could be a lot of writers. I think about you. We’re all Joan Didion, especially in the eyes of copywriters.

Rumpus: You could easily have written that essay. 

Orange: Oh my god. 

Rumpus: It just feels like within your wheelhouse. 

Orange: You’re not necessarily aware of all the ways you’ve been influenced. Reading David Foster Wallace, I always have that sense of having been influenced indirectly. Somehow he seeped into the atmosphere and I didn’t necessarily have to read everything that he had written to completely absorb and be affected by it. 

Rumpus: But you were really into him. 

Orange: Yeah. 

Rumpus: Not just the writing but also the way of being a little bit. Like I remember we were talking about his interview with Charlie Rose. I don’t remember what you said. 

Orange: I don’t remember what I said, either. 

Rumpus: But you weren’t just thinking about his writing, you were thinking about how he was wrestling with himself and you related to that. 

Orange: He had some exchange with Charlie Rose where Wallace says, “I don’t want to look like a blah blah blah,” and Charlie Rose gets exasperated and says, “Just don’t worry about what you look like!” And Wallace says, “Well there’s nothing that stimulates your What Do I Look Like gland like being on television.” It was such a crazy thing for Charlie Rose to say: “Oh David, you child, don’t worry about what people are going to think of you while they’re watching you on television.” As though we’re all supposed to be born to be on television and have interviews with Charlie Rose. Which I guess we are. But for someone like Wallace, it must have been torture.

6. The Part About Closure

Rumpus: Do you worry at all with this book you’re going to be more out there than you’ve been before?

Orange: Yeah. Don’t you worry about that? With books? You like that, though. I have a conflicting thing of where I like it and I don’t like it. Speaking of David Foster Wallace, those are the things that I related to the most in his biography. This idea that there was a part of him, like a reading he did at a Harper’s event, where he absolutely dreads it up until the moment he does it, but then he loves the reception that he gets, and then he goes back to hating it. I feel like I’m very much like that. It’s like you want attention but you don’t want attention. You want it on your own terms but you sort of forge ahead anyway. It makes me nervous, but I can’t stop doing it. 

Rumpus: But the essays are so personal, and you write a lot of stuff that’s not that personal. So I just imagine that would be a different feeling. 

Orange: You mean I write reviews and stuff and those are less personal? The first thing I ever published was very personal in the way I think you mean. The last essay is kind of about that, this impulse. And the idea that I want to control it or make it useful somehow. It doesn’t feel like a bad impulse necessarily. 

Rumpus: In my experience I’m just using the tools I have to tell the story. But the whole desire to write and be a writer is such a strange thing. Really hard to explain. 

Orange: I know. I think my parents would like an answer. I don’t have one.

Rumpus: I wanted to talk more about the individual essays but now I feel like we have an interesting interview. What did I miss? 

Orange: I don’t know. I don’t feel like I said anything very good.

***

art by Michelle Orange

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And I loved Stoker. But my friend didn’t love it and she asked me why I loved it and I couldn’t say really. The cinematography of course. This is a movie where the camera is truly one of the performers. The music, by Clint Mansell, a composer I’m obsessed with. But the story is what carries. The tension. You’re locked in your seat. And the movie is smart. It’s not like a Hollywood thriller, continually talking down to you, telling you how to feel.

And I thought of another friend asking a similar question about Django Unchained. She was asking about the purpose of the movie and wondering about the purpose of the artist, as well.  The purpose of the artist is not important to me. I don’t believe an artist needs to know why she is driven to create what she creates. And I don’t judge art against the character of that artist. The artist rarely enters the experience for me. I believe art happens between the viewer and canvas. If I was deconstructing I could have said Django asked interesting questions about narrative’s relation to the darkest part of American history. It was similar, really, to Martin Amis’s Koba The Dread, subtitled Laughter And The Twenty Million, an amazing book that poses the question of why it’s OK to make jokes about Stalin, but no Hitler. But I don’t think I loved Django for that reason. And yet these movies are not just entertainments. Tarantino is commenting on the history of cinema and Park Chan-wook is making movies unlike anything we’ve seen before. Though Django stayed with me and already Stoker is fading.

I’ve seen five movies in my three days here and only really enjoyed two of them. I was most disappointed by Before Midnight, because Before Sunset is one of my favorite movies. Ethan Hawke is still amazing. It’s almost impossible not to look at his face, even when his shirt is half-tucked in for more than a third of the movie as if it were a fashion statement. But Julie Delpy is terrible. Or her character is. But the actors wrote the movie with Richard Linklater, most of it coming from improvisations. To me Delpy was everything I never want in a relationship. She was an argument against relationships. In Before Sunset she was neurotic, and nagging, but also an artist, full of life. Now she is only neurotic. If you tell her you miss your son who lives with his mom in Chicago she will tell you she’s not moving to Chicago. If you try to talk she will scream. She will criticize your writing and assure you you’re no Henry Miller, on the page or in the bed. She will work traps, asking what you don’t like about her.

Halfway through the movie I whispered to my friend, I would have broken up with her twenty minutes ago. And by broken up I meant, walked out the door. I would have taken a small bag and walked to the road and gotten in someone’s car. It would matter that we had twins together, but not enough. I know, from a family friend, that you regret later not fighting for your children. But Hawke was in the fortunate spot of having a son in Chicago and two daughters in Paris; he was going to abandon either the son or the twins no matter what.

I didn’t like Don Jon’s Addiction, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s directorial debut, but it got me thinking about compulsion. All my life I’ve tried to live the way I’m supposed to live but never known what that is. I can read an article, like The Futile Pursuit Of Happiness (which I read in 2003 and successfully nominated for Best American Non-Required) and attach myself to it like a cult. I was talking to a friend who plays Farmville two hours every night. She had eight farms, she said. She said they were perfect. She wasn’t conflicted. She didn’t feel like she was wasting time.

I brought it up with C., who was in Park City only for the weekend. I said, porn, sex (of a type), internet, chocolate, smart conversation, indoor climbing sometimes. Snowboarding. Board games, card games. It’s a long list. She said, Does it make you happy. And I said, Is that really the question? Drugs make me happy. I haven’t done ecstasy in five years, or acid since high school. Does happiness really justify anything? I get how we define addiction. It interrupts our work, hurts our relationships. I was talking on the other side of that. Like Josh Gordon Levitt’s character masturbating 11 times a day. Or that movie Shame. Or anorexia. Or the video game industry.

I was talking about meaning. Elusive. Always shifting as what matters to us changes. That’s why Sheila Heti‘s book is called How Should A Person Be. That’s what On The Road is about. That’s the question Joan Didion raises, and answers, in The White Album. That’s the question I raised, and answered, in The Score. It turns out the answers are temporary. That’s the beauty of the quintessential line from Hard Rain Falling:

He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey.

That’s why I moved to the mountain in 1997 and I moved to the Mission in 1999. Because I thought it was important to be free and I thought it was important to be close to friends.

Don Jon’s Addiction, at its best, and it’s rarely at its best, is a movie about change. But change into what? And for how long?

What I’m most excited about at Sundance is the premier of Afternoon Delight directed by Jill Soloway. It seemed like one day she was talking about wanting to make a movie, taking director workshops, and the next day her first movie was opening at Sundance. I’m fond of Jill, she’s always trying to help people. And she’s funny and a good writer.

And I’m excited for Josh Bearman and Antonia Crane who are supposed to arrive today.

And at some point I’m getting on that mountain and hurtling downward. Maybe today in fact, though it’ll mean missing movies I want to see. Can you believe they gave me a press pass for The Rumpus? And I guess here I am, writing about Sundance, so maybe it’s not without merit.

Kink opened here the other day. A documentary about Kink.com (very NSFW). James Franco got the idea for it when we were shooting About Cherry in the San Francisco armory. He didn’t direct the movie, which I’ve heard good things about. He’s the producer.

There are parties here. Lots of them. Drinks are free. The food is good. People are going all out. The directors are relatively hidden but the producers are everywhere. Some people say it’s like Hollywood, if Los Angeles was smaller and you could walk to things. But it’s also New York. It’s got all the good and bad sides of making movies. What I love is that there is so much to do. It’s beautiful, no matter where you stay. It’s almost impossible to look out a window and not see a mountain. The busses are free. There are people here who live in San Francisco but we hang out more in Park City. We’re all away from our routines, like it’s the first day of college.

*

Postscript: The excessive stimulation can make it hard to connect, as well. Hard to have a meaningful talk while rushing to the next thing. It’s exhilarating. You might say, It’s good to be alive! and forget why you said it moments later. The challenge of getting into a movie you want to see might be more fun than the movie itself. I happen to be good at getting into places when I want to. For instance, if I want to see a movie I’ll ask three or four people for tickets. One of them will always come across an extra ticket. Either they changed their mind about going, or the met someone with an extra ticket. But most people don’t do that. They don’t have a ticket so they either sit in the wait-list line or go somewhere else. Maybe I lack pride. And maybe there’s a link between lacking pride and being resourceful. And can you lack pride but still have integrity? Like most contradictions it helps to have a short memory.

*

Originally published as a Daily Rumpus email.

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I’m not sure why this one stuck with me, maybe because I hadn’t read one of these screeds in a while. It reminded me of Taylor Antrim’s cheap essay on the Daily Beast about why some memoirs are better as novels.

Hamilton talks about writers struggling to be read and editors using personal essays as link bait. At last count his essay had 40,737 hits and 182 comments. Blog posts attacking memoir also make for good link bait.

In his piece Hamilton says that most people’s lives are not that interesting. In other words, your life is not interesting enough for a memoir. I would dispute that. Most people’s lives are very interesting but most people don’t look at their lives in an interesting way. The unexamined life is never interesting. If a good memoir was merely predicated on having an interesting life then some of the best books would be celebrity memoirs. These people live a life most of us know nothing about. But celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.

It’s easy to point to bad memoirs and use them to attack the entire form but the form is never the problem. When you attack personal writing you attack Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath. In truth most books are bad and most publishers are risk averse. Many bookstores are going out of business. The changing media landscape has made it harder for journalists to make a living. But that’s not a problem with memoir.

Hamilton says that we are raising a generation of robotic insta-memoirists. He calls this journalism as narcissism. He says when you write about yourself you will soon be all used up and then you’ll start writing bad books. But that happens to everyone, not just memoirists. We get older, we lose some of the heat we had for certain stories. If we’re unable to move on to other fires it’s true that our writing will become cold. So many writers never live up to the promise of their first couple of books. Someone said when we’re younger all we care about is fame and access and when we’re older all we care about is money. What that person meant was that our values change and it impacts our ability to write. David Foster Wallace talked about this, the difficulty of accepting praise for something you’ve already written, knowing you might never write something that good again.

But what about Joan Didion, or Tobias Wolff? There are certainly authors who write many memoirs or novels where the protagonist is a stand-in for the author. Only truly great writers can pull it off, but how many people even write one great book?

As for the larger argument, the argument that isn’t actually argued, but rather stated as if we all accepted it as fact, memoir does not actually equal narcissism. If you know journalists then you know there are many among them you would consider narcissists. And if you know memoirists, especially the really good ones, you know they are more curious than most about the world around them. I’m thinking of the few who I know well, Dave Eggers, Tobias Wolff, Cheryl Strayed, Nick Flynn. These are all amazing listeners. They inhale their surroundings.

Of course, that’s a pretty high standard, but isn’t that the standard we’re aspiring to? I’m sure there are many memoirs written by narcissists, but I doubt they’re very good. Even looking over my own work, my own daily emails, the worst ones are generally written when I’m too far down a hole to connect my life to the larger world.

**

originally published in The Daily Rumpus.

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So today we’re announcing our third Letters To Each Other. The way it works is you send us a letter, no more than one page (front and back OK), and a self addressed stamped envelope. We send you five letters back and photocopy your letter and send it out to five other people. We encourage you to put your mailing address on your letter, you might end up with a pen pal. Also, make sure you send a large enough envelope as your SASE (a #9 or #10). If your envelope is smaller than that you won’t get back as many letters.

You have to be a subscriber to Letters In The Mail to participate. Obviously, we’re not making any money on this, it’s just a cool thing to connect people. We found the response was better the first time when it was only open to subscribers, than the second time when we allowed anyone to participate. If you’re a subscriber and you need the address to mail your letter, send an email to  karen@therumpus.net.

Letters must be post-dated by January 18.

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