The Vanishers explores what happens to Julia Severn, a student at a psychic institute who suffers from an attack brought on by her mentor that leaves her undeniably ill and seeking refuge from her life. She sets out to answer questions that revolve around her mother’s suicide after she’s recruited by those in need of her psychic abilities to find a missing person. She travels to Paris and other parts of Europe seeking answers to her troubled history, while finding fragments of shared realities with perfect strangers. Julavits’s narrative approaches mystery from a metaphysical and experimental place, where one’s emotional scars become another’s crown, and psychic damage is seen and felt through encounters with family and females alike.

I met up with Heidi while she was on her book tour in Los Angeles, where we promised each other we’d talk about The Vanishers. A mere five months later, we actually managed to make that happen. Being the co-editor and co-founder of the literary magazine The Believer might have taken up some of that “free time” she had. That, and being married to writer Ben Marcus, teaching at Columbia, and having kids.

***

The Rumpus: In your latest novel, The Vanishers, there is a strong narrative thread that addresses issues as they revolve around identity. Your last three novels—The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Uses of Enchantment—also explored variations on this theme. You like to explore memory and the manner in which it functions in our lives. In some cases, your characters are recreating their past in order to understand it or deal with it, often making up mythological tales or imagined realities; others summon amnesia or encounter memory lapses. This book addresses identity on different levels, moving between grief and memory, which both seem to deal with a “self” that no longer exists. Why do you think your narrators are preoccupied with memory?

Heidi Julavits: Maybe I’m obsessed with memory because I have such a terrible one. This is a new experience for me. I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective. I’ve subsequently become conscious of MAKING MEMORIES. Which makes me sound like a scrapbooker. But I go through life now reminding myself to remember something, and I do this while that something is happening. I’ll be experiencing a moment and I’ll say to myself, “Remember this!” Otherwise my whole life just blurs by. So I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person’s identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner. You’re the character and the creator. How can a partial fiction not result?

Rumpus: Dion Fortune was an author, an occultist, and woman who believed in magical and mystical occurrences. When I read that Fortune suffered a nervous breakdown and then began studying psychology and took interest in the occult, I could only think about our human need to make sense of experience. I wondered if her book, Psychic Self Defense, was the result of her thoughts about her nervous breakdown. Her work served as inspiration for some of your narrative in The Vanishers. In what ways do you think Dion’s work influenced your narrative or process with this novel?

Julavits: I owe so much to Fortune that I paid a psychic to contact her and get approval for using her life story. (I did this just before the book was published, so I don’t really know what I would have done if she hadn’t approved.) But the belief that one’s suffering has a greater cosmic purpose, and is thus more exciting and more noble, well, it made a lot of sense to me when I read about Fortune’s breakdown, and it made even more sense to me when I recently believed I’d contracted an untreatable, incurable chronic pain condition. A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a “teacher”—she didn’t mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense—I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.

Then it turned out I’d been misdiagnosed. But I really did for a few weeks think, I’m in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical I can’t believe I’m admitting this in print. But I needed to understand this random bad bit of luck as part of a bigger design. Otherwise I was suffering meaninglessly. This made the suffering a lot worse.

Rumpus: On a psychological level, I think it would be cathartic to label a breakdown a “psychic attack” or give my unexplained medical symptoms a specific diagnosis. To put the mirror on ourselves, to examine how or what has happened to our bodies or minds requires introspection and responsibility. There are explainable and contagious illnesses and there are the unexplained, the infectious, psychosomatic symptoms/illnesses that afflict people in equal numbers. To my mind, suffering from a psychic attack would be similar to the way an auto-immune disease attacks a person’s body on a regular basis. It can feel like an internal suicide taking place when your body betrays you, when it attacks itself. The unexplainable symptoms, even with a diagnosis create a certain kind of emotional madness that yearns to be alleviated on any plane possible. Perhaps Fortune’s book was an attempt to share a certain kind of permission to feel certain things as a result of our own psychological undoing?

Julavits: The twisty nature of psychic attack—are you being attacked, or did you bring this attack on yourself?—speaks to me of an American cultural paradox we all grapple with. There’s the rampant litigiousness of our society, and the desire to blame others for our misfortunes, on one side of the paradox, and then there’s the old Emersonian self-reliance ideology run through a self-reflexivity (or narcissism) machine. Is your misfortune someone else’s fault? Or is your misfortune, because you’re so self-reliant, self-inflicted? Fortune’s book makes it pretty clear that either or both of these forces are at work when you’re psychically attacked.

While conceiving The Vanishers, I had a couple of friends suffering from undiagnosable, and thus untreatable, afflictions. I thought of them when I first encountered Fortune’s book. Hers is a paradigm shift, a psychologically useful one. To believe you’re being psychically attacked gives you an understanding of your illness that no Western doctor can provide; this can be reassuring when you’ve exhausted the Western doctor tool kit, and the doctors are sending you to acupuncturists for pain relief. You know you’re screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.

But whether you’re being attacked by a malicious outside force, or whether you’ve somehow brought this attack on yourself, there is a cause. And if you’re the cause, doesn’t that come as a bit of a relief? Because now you have some control over a situation where you formerly had none. If I can just stop being so stressed out, maybe my cancer will get better! This is far less scary than treating a disease of unknown etiology.

Rumpus: Psychics often have the ability to see where we’re going or where we’ve been. They can see things we are either too afraid to see or in some cases have subconsciously blocked from our own sight. Do you think it’s easier to accept someone else’s interpretation of who we are (i.e. a psychic, a spiritual medium) rather than our own?

Julavits: I always think it’s useful to get an outside opinion. Why bother leaving the house if you don’t want feedback? If you agree with an outside person’s interpretation of you, that’s a happy bit of affirmation. It means you’re communicating externally what you believe to be true internally. If you disagree, it helps clarify how you understand yourself. And maybe makes you productively question how to improve your communication skills.

Rumpus: On some wavelength, psychics can feel or experience things that most of us do not. Your narrator, Julia Severn, begins showing unexplainable symptoms that serve as a sort of “default” diagnosis for her psychic attack. What I think is so curious and interesting about this is the way it parallels somatization. The medical industry calls “somatization patients” people who suffer from undiagnosable but very real medical symptoms. I think about somatization as a form of psychological trauma that emerges in physical form when we aren’t able to deal with our issues. The symptoms seen and felt are real, indeed; however, the cause of them seems to be of almost equal importance in terms of healing. Would you agree? Do you think having the ability to identify an illness or unexplained symptoms frees us from our past? Or that identifying what plagues us helps us acknowledge our real selves, both on the outside and inside?

Julavits: This question makes me want to talk about my Rolfing experience. Rolfing is widely understood to be a massage so painful it makes you scream. When I told people I was getting Rolfed, they all said, “But doesn’t that hurt?” Rolfing was invented by Ida Rolf, who believed bodies were thrown out of balance by past traumas, by which she primarily meant physical traumas. Her job was to locate the trauma area and undo the body’s protective mechanisms to restore balance. Her work was embraced at the Esalen Institute in California during the late ’60s and early ’70s, and yes, my understanding is that people often cried or grew hysterical when they got Rolfed there. At some point the focus became more psychological—Rolfers were releasing past emotional traumas from the body—and seemed too hippie-dippie, and that’s why Rolfers these days prefer to be called structural integration practitioners. The Rolfer/practitioner I saw was primarily concerned with my posture, but he still believed that “injury” could be interpreted physically or emotionally. He told me a story about a client of his, a former anorexic, who became totally hysterical when he Rolfed her stomach and intestines. Which makes perfect sense to me. You feel and express emotions with your body—you get butterflies in your stomach, you cry—why shouldn’t the body register, in a more entrenched way, an emotional injury?

Rumpus: I was also thinking about the way trauma manifests in the body. It could be said that inexplicable illness is the way the body archives trauma. Our physical symptoms are, in a way, their own narrative, with their own history. I kept thinking of your narrator in this way. At the onset of her symptoms, Julia was on a path towards discovering her own inexpressible pain felt in regard to her mother’s suicide and the impending connection to Dominique Varga. I think there’s a necessary crossover from the psychological to the physical when we experience our minds in direct conflict with our bodies. There’s a lot of truth in our physical exteriors, even when altered.

Julavits: I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive! This takes us back to memory, and memory-making. Maybe the body is taking responsibility where the mind is not. It’s scrapbooking for us. I think what can be most shameful or embarrassing is when our bodies broadcast a secret we’d prefer no one to know. This is why I hate rashes, in particular face rashes. A face rash says, “Hey people, I’m fucked up inside! And I probably don’t even know why, which is even more embarrassing!” I developed a crazy face rash after I got engaged to a guy I must have known somewhere I should not marry. I hadn’t articulated this to myself, so my face told the world instead.

Rumpus: Female relationships in your novels are always complex, if not the underlying focal point of your narratives. Mother/daughter relationships are functioning on a fractured but somewhat warped level where love and acceptance are at war with one another. A character says to your narrator, “a mother’s greatest heartbreak is when she begins to see her child as the embodiment of her own worst self.”  The underlying question in these pages seems to be, “how/why can women be so toxic to one another?” Why are we willing to endure such heartache as a result the complicated dynamic we share with the very women we simultaneously admire and envy?

Julavits: I have a daughter who, when younger, possessed no barrier between her emotional self and the outside world. Her emotional insides spilled out all over, and, especially when I was sleep-deprived and probably a little paranoid, this really threatened me. It was as if she were embodying and expressing the insecurities and freaked-outedness I never express, and which I’ve learned over the years to keep hidden. She was betraying this secret self of mine. She was my face rash. Then I caught up on my sleep and stopped believing crazy things.

But I don’t think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire. I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.

Rumpus: Identity and perception are two key themes in The Vanishers. How we are seen and perceived by others is an ongoing struggle for females in this book and, for some this struggle is present in our own lives. The women in this novel are either enamored by or attempting to be like one another (via plastic surgery or other emotional means). What are your thoughts about self-renovation? Why do you think we crave altered, exterior identities?

Julavits: I wouldn’t be myself if I weren’t always trying to be someone else. I only have so much time on this earth and I want to be as many people as possible.

Rumpus: Under what circumstances (if any) would you consider plastic surgery?

Julavits: THIS IS THE BEST QUESTION EVER. I’m at that age now where I notice friends checking out my face and wondering, Has she been Botoxed? There’s a new map there people that are trying to read. I think if I did get any kind of enhancement I would be very public about it. I don’t want people wondering—I want them to know. But right now I’m really happy with my face. My face is leaner and a little more angular and better communicates the person I believe myself to be. But if, at some future point, my face collapses around my eyes, I’d probably do something about it. My eyes are where I live, and if people couldn’t see them, no one would know me.

Rumpus: Your character, Dominique Varga, the much sought-after artist and pornographer, encourages women in to have plastic surgery to take on the faces of the dead. From Varga’s perspective, we’re made to believe it’s a selfless act, an homage to someone; a void that can be filled. This very idea requires the reader to reconsider identity and how we digest that in the name of art. The writer Dawn Lundy Martin said recently in a lecture I attended that she saw the body as “a suitcase for language.” If we’re reinventing the body, physically-speaking, what kinds of stories do we have to tell when we alter that canvas? If the body is an archive that houses our stories and memories, then what does that make Varga?

Julavits: I see Varga as a collector of other people’s faces, stories, and memories. This could be read as selfless—she’s sacrificed her own identity and, in effect, donated her body to a dead person, so that person can return to their loved ones, and alleviate their grief. But of course it’s a completely messed-up thing to do. Julia sees it as a mockery of her grief. Which is the rational response. But maybe this response is partially fear-based. We want to believe we couldn’t be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable. If I died, I’d selfishly want to believe my kids would never recover. But mostly they would. And my husband would probably remarry. And the grief they felt over my loss would dim. They would never have me again, but empty spaces fill over time. Substitutes arise. This happens. If it didn’t, whole families would be buried with their dead.

Rumpus: The Vanishers explores the psychology of female repression as seen between your characters Julia and Madame Ackermann, Varga and Irenke, and even those who appear in her films. The artist Do-Ho Suh has said that clothing is “the most intimate architecture.” When we think about identity and the significance of expression found in appearances and varied sexual acts, we can begin to view the many altered manifestations of the body as art. Clothing, or lack thereof, could be the ultimate signification of identity. And in some cases, even feminine identity. In a strange way, these varied acts (sexual, surgical, and suicidal) carry messages of love and desperation. Those who encounter them are, in a sense, seeing who those people are for the first time. It’s like witnessing a rebirth of selfhood.

Julavits: When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I still regret that we never did that. Maybe I still will some day.

When my husband first read a draft, he said, “You spend too much time describing the characters’ outfits.” He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained. After the novel was published, a female book critic mentioned how she noticed and appreciated the clothing cues for each character; I related to her my husband’s criticism, and she replied, “But clothing tells you so much about a person!” Maybe it only tells women about characters, who knows. My husband wasn’t getting a meaningful character read off of Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and that probably recommends him as a human. The risk when using clothing as an identity badge is that your characters are communicating in a language not everyone speaks. But isn’t that how life works? No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you’re saying.

Rumpus: How did you decide to structure The Vanishers in six parts? How much time do you spend contemplating the structure of your work? Or does it unfold as the work comes together? I think sometimes the work informs its author as to its needs. How different is The Vanishers in terms of form/style as a finished book as opposed to where you began?

Julavits: Does it have six parts? That’s so funny—if you’d asked me how many parts my book had, I’d have said, “Ummm…it has…hopefully exactly the right number?” Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels. The Vanishers is the least “structured” novel I’ve written in a while—it’s straight-up chronological, told from a single perspective. I think that’s why the psychic conceit interested me so much; it allowed me to tell a simply structured story but kept me from getting bored. The fact that Julia can regress into the pasts of others allows me to have a multi-perspective novel told from one perspective. She functions as the omniscient narrator to the other characters. Even though she doesn’t really want to—she’s a reluctant psychic—she can tell their stories.

Rumpus: When we read fiction, we all have to opt in on the author’s journey. Writing about psychics or psychic powers could be a topic, on a level, that some might easily dismiss. I think about this narrative as giving you, the author (and via extension me, the reader), a huge amount of freedom to deviate from the believable or the possible. What do you think?

Julavits: I don’t think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing’s inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it’s untrue. As such, anything is always possible, even if your protagonist is a plumber. But it’s the possibility, the limitless possibilities, of any fake life, that make writing about it so challenging. Whether I’m writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.

Rumpus: Did you go to any other psychics (either while writing/researching The Vanishers) or prior to your writing this book?

Julavits: Only that one psychic! I didn’t want to know too much about psychics. I like playing with a popular cliché and making it my own by half-embracing it, half-disemboweling it. If I’d found a non-clichéd psychic, which I did, it would have messed up my cliché-tweaking apparatus.

Rumpus: Near the end of The Vanishers, the narrator says “what you want a person to know is often the last thing you want a person to know.” Is there anything for you, as a writer, you wish people didn’t know about you? Or is there something you want us to know that we don’t?

Julavits: I wish somebody knew whether or not I’m Jewish.

Related Posts:

• The Vanishers
• Notable New York, This Week 6/14 – 6/20
• Notable New York, This Week 2/8 – 2/14
• Notable New York, This Week 11/30 – 12/6
• Thurston Moore’s Audience: A Subjective Account of the Brooklyn Book Festival

Having read the memoir, Two Kinds of Decay, both collections of poetry, (Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise) and her story collection, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, I knew one thing for certain: Sarah was a keen observer of the human condition. There is a brand of surety and ferocity in Sarah’s writing that is uniquely hers. The Guardians, an elegy written in memory of her close friend, Harris, who took his own life, is no exception. This book looks to answer the spoken and unspoken questions we have when someone close to us dies. Sarah bravely dissects the inadequate answers we are left with in the wake of anyone’s death, while employing imagination and memory as scaffolding for the painful grief that surrounds any mourning period.

In addition to Sarah’s numerous works, she has been a faculty member of the undergraduate writing program at the Pratt Institute and of the graduate writing programs at Columbia, Fairfield, and the New School universities. She also maintains a private writing studio. Born and raised near Boston, she was educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

*

RUMPUS: Tell me how you settled on The Guardians as your title. What does it mean? Did the meaning of the title change as you wrote the book, or does it hold the same definition for you now as when you began?

Sarah Manguso: The guardians are the ones who outlived Harris—all of us who are still alive, managing the consequence of our survival.

I’ve been waiting to use The Guardians as a title since 2003, when I gave it to a book-length poem I never showed anyone. Then in about 2006 I started a research project about my orphaned Sicilian great-grandfather, hoping to use the same title, but the project went nowhere. Then in 2007 I thought I’d give the title to a novel, but that didn’t work, either. Then Harris died. I wrote the book. The title got used.

RUMPUS: I read a piece on grieving at Tablet Magazine shortly after Whitney Houston’s death that addressed the need people have to skip over what Judaism calls “aninut,” the period between first receiving the bad news (of someone’s death) and completing the funeral rites. Liebovitz writes, “Judaism understands that it takes us time to process the most unnatural fact of another human being having forever disappeared and therefore suggests that we focus only on the practical arrangements of burial and leave the emotional stuff for later, when we’ve had a chance to absorb the blow.” Did your grieving process affect your decision to write The Guardians?

Manguso: Belonging to a faith is comforting when someone dies—ritual calls one back to the world, if just barely. For twenty years and counting I’ve kept a diary, and it’s there that I first wrote about Harris’s death. I didn’t write much, though. This is all I wrote the day after I learned he’d disappeared (carriage returns indicate time passing):

7.25.08

Worried sick, can’t sleep. Terrible dreams. Adam is in bed, hungover from a tequila slushy.

Fear Harris is dead.

Harris is dead. His family positively identified a John Doe found in Riverdale.

His sister writes: sarah harris is dead. i am so sorry to tell you over email but i do not have your phone number.

Change is to was on his Wikipedia page, as he would have for me.

RUMPUS: You mention how reluctant you were, a mere three months after Harris’s funeral, to participate in a memorial concert some friends had prepared, saying “Everyone else could mourn, obedient, but I would not participate.” The struggle you mention, “raising the tiny irrational child of Harris’s death” seemed overwhelming at the time, forcing you to tend to the complicated feelings that come from losing someone so important. Do you recall a defining moment where this process became easier for you? Do you believe it ever really gets easier? Or perhaps the dynamic just changes for those who survive the deceased?

Manguso: I wasn’t ready to sing and feel the sweetness of Harris’s memory. Maybe no one else was, either. Eventually I could do those things, but I don’t believe in recovery. I believe in relentless forward momentum. One is never the same, but one must continue. In the book I write about a lucid dream in which I knew I was dreaming of Harris for the last time. That dream marked the beginning of the end of my grief.

RUMPUS: You bring up an interesting point about recovery and its connection to trauma. People live with death and disease, and when they’re ready to address life again, some slowly re-enter the world while acknowledging a great change. Was your reintegration after losing Harris different from the reintegration after your own illness?

Manguso: Well, my disease happened to me, and Harris’s death happened to Harris. And Harris’s death happened in an instant, but my disease relapses and remits—the experience is ongoing. And of course there’s been no moment in my illness that’s felt as final as the fact of Harris’s death.

RUMPUS: You wrote “I want to know about my particular grief, which is unknowable, just like everyone else’s,” explaining that other rituals, customs, and other grief processes don’t serve much purpose where your own healing’s concerned. I find it so interesting to examine the coping mechanisms we develop after a death. As a writer, how has your writing helped you learn about your own grief? What do you know now that you didn’t know at the beginning of this process? Or is it still a process?

Manguso: I don’t quite say that rituals don’t serve a purpose; I state that they can’t teach me anything about my grief. They’re mindless, automatic, the opposite of analysis or rumination. Harris’s death taught me merely that I’m capable of outliving him—and that I might live a long time, now that he’s so violently reduced the statistical likelihood of my own self-dispatch. But these things came to me only via writing (and rewriting).

RUMPUS: What becomes clear in The Guardians is your understanding of what it’s like to suffer from something you have no control over. Your book The Two Kinds of Decay discusses your autoimmune disorder, another situation that suspended your control. Can the lessons of one problem apply to other problems?

Manguso: Difficulty becomes familiar, at least, if no less difficult.

RUMPUS: No one welcomes the addition of a physical or mental illness to their lives, yet you both had diseases to contend with at different points that dramatically affected your ability to live life. Do you feel like you understood Harris any better as a result of the common ground you shared?

Manguso: Sure, but I’m not the only person Harris told about his time in the hospital, and I’m not convinced we had a special understanding that trumped everyone else’s. No friend gets to claim the greatest intimacy. That’s one of the anxieties I write about.

RUMPUS: That’s a true and fair statement, to be sure. What’s one thing Harris knew about you that would have made him feel (even if temporarily) he truly did have the greatest intimacy with you?

Manguso: Ah, but if I told you, that intimacy would be gone…

RUMPUS: You mention various hypotheses in regard to Harris’s suicide. Because the reason remains unknown, you (and others) imagined a myriad reasons for the suicide. You discuss the agonizing side effects of antipsychotic drugs, mainly, akathisia, citing three disturbing examples of patients who reacted violently and/or committed suicide as a result. How helpful are drugs whose side effects create new monsters for patients to slay? How has your own medical treatment changed the way you think about prescription medication?

Manguso: It’s true that side effects create problems for patients, but side effects aren’t the root problem in the doctor-patient system—it’s capitalism. Companies obtain patents for drugs, and when the patents expire, they obtain new patents for revisions so minuscule, they’re essentially the same drugs. Meanwhile no one can manufacture a generic, so patients who can’t afford the name brand take shittier drugs with worse side effects, and they get sicker or die, and in the case of psychiatric drugs, the deaths are suicides. (NB: I don’t believe this is what happened to Harris.) While this is going on, the drug companies promote off-label uses in order to sell more pills without having to earn FDA approval. Then more patients get sick and die, and the companies buy gag orders and keep the remaining lawsuits tied up in court forever. This past week, AstraZeneca lost its U.S. patent for Seroquel, a drug I’ve taken for eight years. On the day the patent expired, the company appealed the judgment. They made more than five billion dollars last year just from this one drug. I’d take my business elsewhere, but I need the stuff. Without it I’m dead. It’s only a matter of time before the revolution comes, but that’s probably a subject for another interview.

RUMPUS: When things in life occur unexpectedly, it can take much longer to find peace in our hearts and minds. How do you feel about closure after an expected or timely death?

Manguso: My mother-in-law took years to die, but her death still undid me. A tiny box of her ashes sits behind my computer. The first time I looked in it I cried as if I’d discovered her body—which, of course, I had.

RUMPUS: The year you went to Italy, you and Harris stopped talking. You had your own struggles that year. Were you aware of Harris’ absence or did you feel his absence on a subconscious level?

Manguso: It was a year of great anxiety for me, as I detail in the book. I wasn’t myself, had disengaged from my actual life, and I felt his absence only after the fact—only after I realized I’d wasted his last year.

RUMPUS: In hindsight, is there anything about the year in Italy that you now recognize as having been positive, in spite of the distance from Harris, having missed his last year?

Manguso: Of course. For one thing, I ate better that year than I ever had, and I came to understand why some people care so much about eating well.

RUMPUS: After you marry, you tell your husband you want to see a psychic because you want to talk to Harris. You also mention that you feel his presence at times and entertain the idea of ghosts.  In the Kabbalah, there is a verb, davok, which means to cleave and, in 17th-century literature, it often refers to evil affecting the spirit and body. Dybbuk is shortened from the phrase dibbuk me ru’ah ra’ah, which roughly means to cleave or attach to outside spirits. Harris’s sister believes a dybbuk killed him. Do you believe in ghosts or possessed spirits? Do you think believing in them would make a difference in how you dealt with Harris’ death?

Manguso: I neither believe nor disbelieve that ghosts exist. I take it case by case. So far I’m still undecided. I’ve tried to believe in them, but I can’t.

RUMPUS: I’m interested in the idea of ghosts existing on a case-by-case basis. What keeps you from fully embracing the idea of them?

Manguso: Never seen one, and I’m an empiricist.

RUMPUS: How long did it take you to write this book?

Manguso: Well, I met Harris in 1994, then I wrote the title in 2003, and then the various iterations of the attached book appeared and disappeared. Harris died in 2008, and then I sold a draft of the book in 2010 but kept revising it until late 2011. I didn’t work on it every day, and the days I did work, I worked on it between one minute and ten hours. How long, indeed?

RUMPUS: I think writing about death or illness is always difficult. You’ve managed to do both (here and in your memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay). Did you worry about finding publishers for these books? What has that journey been like for you as a writer? 

Manguso: Writing about anything is difficult. Selling a book is also difficult, but in a different way. My so-called journey began years ago—my first book was published in 2002, and there were two more books before I found the agent who sold Decay, heaven bless him.

RUMPUS: Were you ever concerned about this book’s subject matter being an obstacle in regard to pitching or marketing the book? As a writer, you must think about what might excite your agent. Did the subject matter of the book give anyone pause?

Manguso: No, I know myself well enough that I don’t expect to produce a blockbuster. Despite this (and/or because of it), my agent’s belief in the inherent value of my work has lasted since the week we met, and my book editors have been just as supportive. I’m a lucky fool.

RUMPUS: Writers write the stories that need to be told. They aren’t always the ones that get bought, nor do writers control market trends. Earlier, you mentioned writing through problems as a means to understanding life and the struggles you’ve encountered. How do you feel that process is helping you evolve as a writer?

Manguso: Well, for one thing, my books keep getting longer.

RUMPUS: You recently moved back to New York from Los Angeles. You’re married now. You just published another book. These are all positive changes. If ghosts really do exist, what would want it to observe about your life?

Manguso: Enough that if the ghost ever spoke to me, I’d learn something.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Gina Frangello is capable of magic. She’s the kind of person you meet and you know seconds after meeting them, they’re capable of things you’d never be able to accomplish. In Gina’s case, not only do you get this feeling when you meet her, but also when you’re lucky enough to sit down with one of her books and digest the absurd, the grotesque, the sexual, the hilarious, and the magical stories that lurk there. Frangello wears many hats: author, editor (Other Voices Books and Fiction Editor at The Nervous Breakdown), professor, mother, and wife.

Having first interviewed Gina after the release of her first novel, My Sister’s Continent, Rumpus writer Angela Stubbs caught up with her to discuss her latest release, Slut Lullabies, a collection of stories recently published by Emergency Press. They discussed sex, aging, therapy—and what it means to be Gina Frangello.

**

THE RUMPUS: Your second book is a collection of stories, Slut Lullabies. How did you decide to publish a collection after having published a novel?

GINA FRANGELLO: Well, I didn’t so much decide as that I had a streak of really shitty luck that ended up resulting in something good. I’d had a novel called London Calling in the queue for publication by Impetus Press, and while my novel was in production Impetus went bankrupt. Because this was just at the beginning of the publishing Armageddon that hit a few months later, my losing my publisher got a bit of media attention, which for a while was really depressing, like being a D-list celebrity going through a messy divorce.

But it turned out to be a good thing, in that some other indie publishers took an interest in the story, and a friend of mine, Cris Mazza, who had a book coming out with the New York- and Seattle- based indie, Emergency Press, was talking with her editor, Bryan Tomasovich, about it, and Bryan ended up approaching me and asking to see London Calling. For a bunch of red tape reasons, I wasn’t at liberty to give that book to anyone at the time, so instead I asked if he’d like to read a collection… About a week later, he offered to publish Slut Lullabies.

RUMPUS: You have the unique and fantastic ability to write about sex and awkward situations with grace, humor, and ease. Is this a chore, or is it somewhat effortless?

FRANGELLO: Um… do I look like an asshole if I claim it’s effortless? Look, there are many things in my writing that are indeed a struggle or a chore. I think what those things are vary from writer to writer. For me, writing sex—whether erotic or brutal or awkward—is not one of those things. It’s very organic and integral to, I guess, the fibers of what I write about. That’s been true from the time I first began writing.

RUMPUS: At what point did you begin picking stories to be a part of Slut Lullabies? These stories had all been previously published—how difficult was that task of looking at your stories and trying to decide what you’d include?

FRANGELLO: By the time I sent Slut Lullabies to Bryan, there was already a rough form of the manuscript. My former literary agent, Bill Clegg, had helped me compile it when he was shopping my first novel, My Sister’s Continent. Bill had read pretty much all my published stories and suggested which ones I should include and in which order. Our basic logic at that time was that none of the stories that featured the same characters who appeared in My Sister’s Continent would be in my collection—we wanted the collection to have an entirely separate feel, not to be derivative… so that took a lot of pieces off the table right there and simplified things.

I did add a couple of newer pieces and I changed around the story order, because Bryan and I had our own opinions about that, given we’re both editors, and story placement is really important to both of us—that balance changes every time you add a new piece to a book.

RUMPUS: Speaking of My Sister’s Continent, which is a fantastic retelling of Freud’s “Dora” case study through the dysfunctional lives of two contemporary twin sisters: As a former therapist, do you ever find yourself thinking about using info from old sessions of former clients in your fiction?

FRANGELLO: I’m deeply inspired by my years as a therapist. I met girls and women during those four years who had been through things that were on the level of what you might live through in a war zone… I encountered a lot of abuse that was not just ugly and oppressive in a way that is sadly all too common, but things that were truly bizarre in their brutality.

The most extreme of those things are not the circumstances I write about. There are two basic reasons: one is that the insanity of those situations were so specific that it would be hard to write about most of it without literally stealing someone’s life and breaking confidentiality. The other is that some of these circumstances were so over-the-top that I’m not sure I could tackle them in literature without it seeming sensationalized and cheapening the truth rather than honoring or deepening it.

But in general, the women and girls I worked with in New Hampshire and Vermont in the early 1990s had come from extremely abusive—physical and sexual, usually both—backgrounds and most of the women currently lived in abusive situations, perpetuating the cycle either out of fear for their lives if they left, or out of simply not believing they truly had other choices or options. The foster girls had been taken from their homes, almost invariably because their mothers refused to believe their stories or to leave the men who were hurting [their daughters] even when they witnessed it with their own eyes. So in addition to the most horrific abuses at the hands of men they had also suffered a profound rejection from their mothers.

Those years and that work informed me a great deal about the powerful survival instinct many people possess, but also about the ways some demons are never fully overcome, and how the past lives with us every day in a very present way. The Rumpus’ amazing “Dear Sugar” column once featured a post about what it is to do this kind of work—how it impacts you and what you learn about both the world and the human spirit, and especially how it is essential to redefine what might constitute a “successful” outcome for someone who has, for all intents and purposes, lived through a war in which there were no limits or rules. Sugar expressed what I feel about all that more eloquently than I could say it here. But those girls are always with me when I write. Though most of them will no doubt never read any of my work, it would not be untrue to say that I write for them.

RUMPUS: Your subject matter and characters are extremely varied and diverse. Is there a place you feel you have yet to go or yet to write about in your fiction?

FRANGELLO: I have written very little from the perspective of characters who are parents. In Slut Lullabies only one of the stories’ protagonists—Victoria in “The Marie Antoinette School of Economics”—is a parent. Most of the main characters in my published work have been in their twenties—sometimes teens or early thirties—and not yet in that stage of life. I tend, for whatever reason, to focus on characters 5-10 years behind me, age- and lifestyle-wise. I definitely feel like the Next Big Frontier of my writing is to incorporate parenthood and middle age into my characters’ lives. I do not mean in a Mommy Lit kind of way—I mean in the way that people’s lives remain complicated, political, sexual, intense and story-worthy even if they are out of their early thirties and are parenting children. The big surprise of aging is that it does not actually make people less interesting if they were interesting to begin with, but rather makes them more so—or it certainly should if done right.

RUMPUS: You’re an editor for Other Voices Books and a fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. What’s the most challenging part about each of those jobs?

FRANGELLO: In the general sense, the most challenging part of having any job other than writing is that other work takes time away from writing. I have three kids, age ten and under, so I feel this very acutely because my demands on the home front are also considerable. I tend to take on far too much, to the point of it being something of a joke among people who know me. It’s a little absurd. I even take on things I have no particular skills at doing, such as uploading material to The Nervous Breakdown, which necessitates coding and such—I’m a tech idiot and I’m still worried on basically a daily basis that I’m going to somehow contribute to the utter crash of the entire Nervous Breakdown someday with a technical blunder.

RUMPUS: Your agent just called. You’re afraid she’s going to tell you… what?

FRANGELLO: Well, my agent, Ellen Levine, is pretty heroic and supportive. I’ve been working with her for five years and—since both of my books have come out from indie presses—have yet to really make her any money, but she’s remained incredibly loyal and invested in my work. That said, I suppose every time I talk to her I’m afraid she’s going to tell me that if I don’t revise my current novel in a way that makes it more “commercial” or able to be marketed more with that “popular women’s fiction” angle, then there’s nothing more she can do for me.

I’m not sure this is a realistic fear—I mean, she represents Michael Ondaatje and other highly literary, even experimental writers who have found success without making artistic compromises. But this market right now… it’s bad. New York publishing is in a scary place right now. I think your last advance has to have been pretty big for you not to be at least a little bit afraid that your agent could break up with you at any moment.

RUMPUS: What comes next for you? What are you writing now?

FRANGELLO: Right now Ellen is waiting on my newest novel, A Life in Men, about a woman traveler with cystic fibrosis. The novel is framed between the [1988] Lockerbie Disaster, and September 11. Every chapter takes place in a different country. I’m obsessed with this novel, so it makes me kind of sick to my stomach to take it out into the world. It’s like sending a child off to military school or something…

Meanwhile, I’m also writing some short fiction for the first time in years. I just wrote a short story that may be my favorite of any I’ve written, though probably I always feel that way at the time. There are writers who hate everything they write, even if it’s brilliant, but I tend to fall far too deeply in love with my characters to be that sensible and self-protective; when it comes to my characters… well, I guess I’m a slut.

RUMPUS: You recently said in a “self-interview” at TNB that you are “particularly interested in the way people are ‘othered’ by their sexuality in a variety of ways… and in the end I’m probably more fascinated by exploring the way my characters alienate themselves, and why, than with what other people may do to them externally.” You write so incredibly well when it comes to human issues regarding sexuality. My Sister’s Continent explored those issues in part from a lesbian perspective, and here in Slut Lullabies, one story features a gay Latino who’s dealing with marriage issues. How do you get inside characters so different from you or your own life?

FRANGELLO: My husband’s cousin recently asked me a variation of this same question. Basically, she said, “How do you experience so many different emotions? Do you have Multiple Personality Disorder?” She was kidding, of course. But maybe it’s true that identity is a little permeable to writers. I think most of us experience—at least in our own minds—a kind of empathy-telepathy where it’s always been extremely easy for us to think we know what the other person is thinking or feeling in any given situation. We feel a little like mind readers. I don’t mean this in any mystical way—I am not a mystical or spiritual person, for better or worse—I just mean in terms of insight.

Good therapists, bartenders, medical doctors, educators, and salespeople can often possess this same talent. And sex workers! It’s a talent that’s very inborn, and extremely unrelated to whether or not you will make a lot of money or anything, but I think most fiction writers with any modicum of talent possess this trait, often to degrees that it can be intrusive in our daily lives—that we take on other people’s emotions or put ourselves in the shoes of others so compulsively that the only way to satisfy that urge is to write.

But I think this question also gets to the heart of how we define “difference.” And certainly somebody being gay or having darker skin is not how I fundamentally quantify how different I feel from them. This isn’t to undermine cultural differences, or the fact that some people face discrimination that I don’t have to deal with as a white, married woman—I’m just saying those things aren’t what makes somebody seem foreign to me internally. I grew up in a largely Latino neighborhood in Chicago, and went to a high school with 6,000 people in it of all different races and from all over the city, and I’ve lived in a few different countries, so—like a lot of urban people of my generation or younger—multiculturalism is not “exotic” to me, it’s just a fact of life. I also grew up below the poverty line, but I’ve had close friends who are wealthy and I now lead a pretty solid middle-to-upper-middle-class existence, so class-hopping is of a lot of interest to me and something I feel a fair amount of facility with.

It’s funny: When I was a kid, the Italians in my neighborhood didn’t consider ourselves white—we referred to “white people” meaning the wealthy, the WASPs, just like our Latino neighbors did… I had to get quite a bit older before I realized how deeply white privilege actually did apply to me. But my daughters aren’t white: they’re Chinese. They were adopted from China, and a lot of their peers—the kids of my friends—don’t have “traditional” birth stories either. Our best friends are a gay couple with two babies by a surrogate, and one of our closest women friends is a single, Jewish mom who just adopted from Ethiopia. So my dad and my daughters and a lot of our friends are either first generation Americans or moved here as kids. In this way, the kinds of difference that I tackle in my fiction—that’s very much the stuff of my real life, even if it’s not always about a character who would identify with the same labels that would be applied to me personally. Difference is much more about who you feel you can empathize with, who you think you can believe, than it is about what somebody looks like or who they sleep with.

RUMPUS: You recently wrote a three-part essay about your father turning 88. Have you ever thought about turning those essays into something bigger?

FRANGELLO: I have an entire novel written about my old neighborhood. It’s fiction, but very autobiographical in a lot of ways, and covers some of the same kind of material from those essays. Right now the novel, which is called A Beautiful Violence, is on my desktop and not being revised or submitted or anything, because of that very reason. I’ve come to realize that I probably have a nonfiction book in me about all that, and the novel was just practice for it. I’m not sure when I’ll ever write a larger work of nonfiction, but I think it’s something that’s building. It’s interesting the way learning to recognize what material is simply mine—not about making up a story to surround it or turn it into something else—is something I’m only now really discovering, past the age of forty. I always believed fictionalizing things would make them more interesting, free them up to tell larger truths, and sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s just the opposite, and the real story—or my version of it, I mean—has everything it needs already, and is just waiting for its writer to find the courage to tell it.

RUMPUS: Tell me why it’s good to be Gina Frangello.

FRANGELLO: Oh, man, Ang. I mean, just look at this. Need I say more?

Related Posts:

• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Margaret Atwood
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kate Zambreno
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Junot Díaz
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jonathan Evison

On the surface, Christian Peet’s Big American Trip looks like a simple collection of postcards from a nondescript (“alien”) narrator on a journey across the United States. Here, the founder of Tarpaulin Sky Press and author of The Nines takes language and puts it under his microscope; whether it’s written on bathroom walls, the backs of postcards, or billboards, Peet examines how our knowledge of language affects each of us. Peet is no novice when it comes to communication, and his experience at deciphering what makes good fiction and publishing it Tarpaulin Sky’s journal and books leads into his interpretation of fictional narratives in this cross-country trip.

Inside this clever collection, postcards slowly reveal their true and unique messages. The gender, ethnicity and age of each sender is unknown, the postcards’ recipients range far and wide, and Peet casts an inclusive net with these poetic public addresses. Big American Trip addresses all of our insecurities as artists, as lovers, and as citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak. Peet allows us to look closely at our limits as humans and as Americans in a world filled seemingly with so many opportunities to connect.

Christian Peet

Peet’s writing is less about plot than about experimentation with text and style. That’s not to say Big American Trip is void of message or story—quite the contrary. The words that decorate the various postcards are provocative and alluring, the text playing with form and genre in unique ways. The “foreigner” narrator seeks common ground with all walks of life, in cities and towns across America. Peet places intricate stories and pieces of landscape next to one another, allowing the reader to perceive how these are magnetically drawn to one another.

Big American Trip speaks to the American dream and what holds it together, and Peet examines how difficult it can be to define what it means to be an American—there’s a certain Norman Rockwell quality to both the writing of postcards and the images on the cards themselves. Peet’s ambiguous “alien” addresses these descriptive, poetic mini-manifestoes to politicians, oil companies, and corporate officers, just to name a few. A kind of battle ensues between the hopefulness of the words (or lack thereof), and the negative associations their readers will have with the arrogance and misplaced power of recent current events.

Geographical borders are equal to language barriers, as we see while following our narrator from coast to coast in search of common denominators (shared passions, aspirations, security, adventure). We never quite figure out what this narrator is looking for, but aimlessness itself becomes the common thread that holds this story together. In the end, it’s not what is found on the journey but what remains missing that holds our interest: “It is not simply a matter of language…/it is possible to translate with fair accuracy from one language to another/without losing too much of the original/meaning. But there are not methods/by which we can translate a mentality/and its alien ideas.”

What’s most captivating about Big American Trip is Peet’s attention to the qualities we share, regardless of geographical and linguistic barriers. This unique book opens eyes and minds to both difference and sameness in an ever-evolving world.

Related Posts:

• The Little Tolls and Pitfalls of Modern American Racism
• Songs of Our Lives: Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”
• Cities and You
• Final Dispatch from the Great Mistakes Tour
• Gay Marriage for America