A large reason why the book resonated so profoundly for me was that I connected it to the time I spent in Vietnam in 1993, when the country was just cracking open again to the West. I’d gone there hugely self-conscious about being an American in a place where U.S. involvement had devastating consequences, and I’d steeled myself for awkward encounters, especially as an odd-looking woman traveling alone. Instead, I was met in most quarters with an enthusiasm, curiosity, and generosity that nothing in my life had prepared me for. I was invited into people’s homes, singled out among tourists of other nationalities for special treatment, and followed on the streets, where more than once the crowd that formed in my presence erupted in cheers when I bought a baguette or tried to ask a question in Vietnamese. I also encountered a handful of people who very obviously did not have positive associations with Americans, and I confronted poverty and a depth of need that I had never before seen. Meanwhile, I was addled by the beauty of the country and confused by the ways in which its tragic history and decades of economic isolation contributed to the exotic aesthetic I found so alluring. What I saw in Vietnam didn’t quite come into focus when looked at it through a lens of postcolonial criticism, but it couldn’t be understood without it, either. I left the region reluctantly, and with a question that has burned for me since: how—to borrow from Sheila Heti—should a white girl be? Cambodian Grrrl, published almost twenty years after I went to Vietnam, presents the best answer I’ve yet to read.

It’s easier to find examples of how a white person should not be. Moore herself—a journalist and cultural critic who is the author of books including Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing (The New Press, 2007) and Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004), as well as the former co-editor of the now-defunct Punk Planet and the founder of the feminist comics collective, The Ladydrawers—often documents the missteps of business and aid communities abroad. Recently, for example, she’s helped organize a critical response to Nicholas Kristof and Half the Sky, the controversial documentary about women’s oppression across the globe that he and Sheryl WuDunn produced.

A critical stance can sometimes make it difficult to move through the world unencumbered by self-consciousness, or can come with its own set of blinders. So I’ve particularly admired how gracefully Moore’s writing on Cambodia presents the complications and contradictions involved with teaching in a country where U.S. involvement contributed to the conditions of a genocidal regime and where U.S. dollars now have an outsize influence on the economy and development. When Cambodian Grrrl came out, Moore announced that it was to be the first in a series of work about the country. She’s been back repeatedly since 2007, and she’s planning subsequent installments that will cover the garment industry and the sex industry, on which she’s been reporting. I‘d been awaiting these books, but what she published next was quite different. This fall, she released Hip Hop Apasara (Green Lantern Press), a collection of lyrical essays and photographs that’s impressionistic rather than journalistic, and that documents, among other things, the emerging public nightlife in Phnom Pehn and the struggle for social justice. The book captures the poignancy a single moment can have when so much is changing, and it highlights the contrasts and constants contained within human nature.

Once again, I was moved. Hip Hop Apsara and Cambodian Grrrl have left me with so many overlapping thoughts and feelings that I had difficulty formulating specific questions to pose for this interview. Moore and I talked for about 90 minutes in her apartment in Chicago.

***

Rumpus: Last night I was telling my dad about this interview, and we were talking about the issues raised around Kristof, the way he puts himself and other Westerners front and center in the stories of these women, and ignores the larger contexts. My dad’s been teaching on the Navajo reservation for about twenty years, which he started doing as a way to sort of give back after doing a lot of scholarship there. But what he said last night was that more and more, he realizes that he can only say with confidence that the work has had many positive impacts for him. That it’s less clear what the overall impact has been on his students or the community. Anyway, I was going to ask you about the first time you perceived yourself as an outsider in another country, and then I noticed that in Cambodian Grrrl you talk about having spent some time on a reservation, and I was interested in that, since you don’t have to leave the country to experience another culture.

Moore: I was born on the Rosebud Reservation, in this unique situation where my parents, white people both, were working there at the time. I lived there for my first two years, and I grew up with this weird status of being the white person who has the “in” to Indian Culture. Which I even knew when I was little was this incredibly fucked up, complicated thing. So then in 1998, I went back and did some pretty serious work on a different reservation, on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Rumpus: What were your parents doing there?

Moore: My dad was in the domestic service. He didn’t want to go to Vietnam. (So I did, later.) So he was working in the U.S. He was a neuroradiologist. He was also involved in setting up all these alcohol treatment centers. But he was also a super raging alcoholic. So he would work during the day to set up these alcohol treatment centers, and then he would get wasted at night. So that gets back to your dad looking honestly at his experience, and looking at the Kristof thing: how much impact can we really have that’s positive, when our own needs and desires and problems travel with us wherever we go?

Rumpus: I was also interested in your experience in Nicaragua in 1994. I have the impression that you were there meaning to investigate Sandinistas or…

Moore: Yeah, that trip was really interesting. I was just barely at the beginning of trying to answer: “What can I do with the skills that I have?” I was writing for The Onion at the time, and working at The Progressive. I went to Nicaragua for a month to see what could happen. I got really sick right away, so I didn’t end up being able to do anything, and instead I almost died of cholera.

Rumpus: A lot of my fascination with your work in Cambodia comes from my own experiences in Vietnam. All the preparation I thought I had done to be an American in a newly opening Vietnam was just totally misdirected. My nationality was so foregrounded, which I guess I expected, but I hadn’t expected it to mostly make me into a complete rock star. I had braced myself for the opposite. I was coming with all this guilt, and I was unprepared for the level of kindness I was met with. And I was unprepared for the poverty, too. I had seen poverty before, but not to this extent, and I just didn’t know what to do in the face of it. There was this list of tips for conscientious backpackers traveling in the developing world that got passed around at the time. Ideas about how not to, in your well-meaning blundering, inadvertently contribute to making a situation worse. You’re not supposed to give cash to beggars, you’re not supposed to give medicine to people, you’re not supposed to give stuff just in general—but these tips didn’t seem to apply very well in Vietnam, where I felt like an asshole or a jerk in complying to them.

But I just fell in love with it there. And after I left, I was sort of desperate to go back, but I only wanted to go back if felt like I had a purpose. And I was still just confused about being an American there, or in the world. When I came upon Cambodian Grrrl, I was struck by your ability to go to Phnom Penh and share your skills with confidence. To know that they might be useful, and that they won’t be harmful. And by your ability to sit in the complexity of a place with so much history and where America has had so much involvement without becoming paralyzed by it. How did you arrive at that place? Was there a difference between when you went as a much younger person to Nicaragua, and then fifteen or so years later when you went to Cambodia?

Moore: You know Betsy Crane? She has this really great line in one of her stories. The character has finally gotten her shit together, and is describing the past when her shit wasn’t together, and she says, “There were some ineffective years.” I always intended to return to Nicaragua and do something, but I didn’t. Partially out of a realization that work was already going on, that there was nothing I could contribute to it. But there’s a little bit of failure on my part to really make that set of experiences and my skills useful. I think that failure definitely set me up for how I wanted to be in the world.

The phrase “global citizen” always gets tossed around with my work, and part of it is that, clearly, talking about being a global citizen is the only way we can talk about participating in globalization without feeling like assholes. And so it’s a little bit about being a global citizen, with all the United Nations positive umph that there is with that phrase—it’s about being a positive do-gooder. But it’s also: how can I participate in globalization in a really clear way? Like: don’t leave the house unless you can bring something worthy into the world. And so Nicaragua changed the way that I want to do things.

But the Cambodia stuff was such a conglomeration of need and loss, and interest, and time, and luck, that there’s also this different sense of it. It’s different than anything else that I have done, like the work that I’ve done in Georgia [the former Soviet Block country, not the state], in Germany, and have been thinking about through various communities here.

Rumpus: I’m interested in your focus on print publishing in Cambodia. Is it anything to do with the fact that print publishing might be playing a different role someplace like that, whereas here and now print publishing might have a bigger question mark over it in terms of need or impact?

Moore: Yeah, for sure. So, I was invited to Cambodia to spend time in this dormitory. Let me explain more about that. It’s a single dormitory that was built by an NGO for young women to live in so that they could go to school elsewhere in Phnom Penh, at one of the colleges that were already being rebuilt in the country. But there were also some classes offered there. I was invited to spend some time as a resident in the dormitory, which is called Euglossa, right around when Punk Planet was shutting down.

For me, it was very much about my sense of loss that this form of communication—small-scale publishing—wasn’t having the kind of impact that it needed to be having. It was also at a moment when I was like, I worked my whole fucking life at this fucking career and it’s over. It’s over, you know? There were—I’ve done this part of the interview a lot of times—you can run the data on the thousand-some people that were left without a reliable place to have their voice heard when Punk Planet shut down. I felt responsibility to them. I felt responsibility for not having been able to make a small, scrappy, already-underfunded institution continue here despite the democratic principals the U.S. was supposedly built on. So it was really like: what good am I? What good are these skills that I’ve worked my whole life to ensure? I always wanted to be that person who can be dropped into the wilderness from a plane and they could survive for three years, and I can’t do that. But you know, I can put a publication together really fast, and it’s going to be interesting, and it’s going to be diverse, and it’s not going to have too many spelling mistakes, and it’s going to have good art. So in 2007, when I was first invited to Cambodia, it’s like: I can do this one thing. I happened to be invited to a place where that one thing might prove useful. So. Let’s try it. And it was great.

Rumpus: Can you give examples of things those young women you initially met are doing now?

Moore: So many go on to work for NGOs, because it’s one of the only ways for a professional in Cambodia to make a living. Some just went into banking, straight up. And a wide swath of them did just get married. And many have come and studied in the U.S.

Rumpus: Might they go back?

Moore: Most of them have, and that is a testament to their staunch desire to make it happen there. They’re just getting to the age where they’re starting to have larger questions about how international aid works and maybe questioning their presumptions that the best answer is always the American answer. That part of where things are at is really exciting, but that’s not a conversation I want to have a hand in. I don’t want to be like, yes, I think the American answer is always stupid, or I think it’s always the right answer. So I’m in this weird place there. I’m feeling it out. Cambodia is going through an enormous amount of change right now. Daily.

Rumpus: I want to compliment you on the writing and construction of Hip Hop Apsara. It’s so elegantly written and put together. I thought the ghost theme was really effective, very appropriate on lots of levels. There’s the scene where you’ve having dinner—I don’t know what kind of dinner it was—a lavish dinner…

Moore: …with fancy people.

Rumpus: You’re with the former Secretary of Education, at this lavish fancy dinner. And you’re conscious of all the contradictions, of the people outside who haven’t eaten all day, etcetera. I love how you were at once appreciative of the dinner being offered, aware of the contradictions, and admiring of this man, whom you describe in glowing terms. But I read a friction there as well. This man is warning you about ghosts, and I went back to reread to see if this was a veiled threat, or if it was a flirtation, or if it was to be taken at face value as a friendly warning, a sharing of information.

Moore: It was deep concern that I might get haunted.

Rumpus: Was there a reason he though you in particular might get haunted?

Moore: It wasn’t about my adventurous spirit/problematic political stance. It was entirely, “You probably don’t know about ghosts because you’re American, so we have to talk.” That was an amazing, amazing moment. I think a lot of people I know could have had that experience, and been like, “What a back-asswards country, and what a ridiculous thing to be concerned with.”

Rumpus: Here’s this guy with all this power…

Moore: …and he’s going on about ghosts. But I don’t want it to be read as: and that’s what he cared about? What he cared about was that I might not have the knowledge to avoid this dangerous situation. And that’s why I talk about ghosts as politically important, because they’re like little teeny fears and belief systems that don’t get newspaper coverage, they don’t enter into the debate, they’re always kept elsewhere. But in my experience both in South Dakota and in Southeast Asia, agreeing to the possibility that here’s stuff that we don’t understand is a) a great political moment as an American; and b) something that just lets you talk easier with people. If someone is talking to me very seriously about not going in the banana trees because they’re haunted, and I accept what they’re saying, it’s so much easier to move on to talking about the state of education in Cambodia, because you’re not stuck on “you’re crazy.” So, ghosts as political metaphor.

Rumpus: So in part I was reading a potentially romantic subtext in this banquet scene. Did you date while you were in Cambodia?

Moore: No. And I was just thinking about that. I was watching this Thai horror film, and I was really attracted to one of the characters, and I thought, I wasted my time while I was in that part of the world. I should have gone on a dating spree! I should have slept with everyone! But no. If I’m entering a situation where the political economy needs to be foregrounded, there’s no way that I’m even going to see people in the could-potentially-date category. Which means I spent a lot of time not getting laid. Which is totally unacceptable!

Rumpus: I was interested in the way you talk about the young women at Euglossa. You describe the girls in the dorm so vividly—their prettiness, their adorableness, their sweetness, how much they giggle. They’re very feminine. I think it can be hard to talk about groups of young Asian woman without talking about…without focusing on the beauty of them. The absolute charm and fetching-ness of them. I’ve wrestled with that. How easy it is to be infatuated by a group. Sometimes in Southeast Asia I would find myself feeling like a fifty-year-old man on a sex holiday. I’d be surrounded by these lovely women, and I’m thinking: “You’re so solicitous, and you’re so lovely, and it’s so wonderful to be around you, and…”

Moore: And all we do is hold hands…

Rumpus: It was very confusing for me. So there you are: you’re an American woman, and a Caucasian woman, in this place with these strong gender roles. How did it affect your sense of yourself as a feminine or masculine person, as a sexual or asexual person?

Moore: Right. And I’m queer. So I’m like: young, hot women slaving over me? Don’t even think for a second that… Sure, the elementary schools that adopt Cambodian Grrrl into the curriculum aren’t going to want to hear this, but making a decision to maintain a sexual distance does not mean that it’s not this constantly running thread in my head. I’m actually physically turned on by some of this stuff. And again, the political economy in that particular environment means that, if my attraction ever coheres as a thought at all, it’s never going to be verbalized, because that will mess up the education environment, it will mess up everything. You cannot claim to be doing good if you’re moving in that direction.

I think immediately of the white American businessmen that I see every night on the riverside there, soliciting the services of young Cambodian women. They think that what they’re participating in is an even-keeled emotional exchange, but the young woman involved believes that it is an economic exchange. You’re never going to be able to comprehend what the other person is thinking. Even if we ignore the sexual assault, the rape, the abuse, all of the other fucked up things about the sex industry, just in terms of a relationship, you are never going to be able to communicate. But I am still the person that I am.

Hip Hop Apsara was about giving myself space and time to let these ideas play out a little bit more, especially in the writing, and the images, and the way they intersect. It’s not journalism, but there’s a way it allowed me to be more emotionally accurate than I was allowed to be in Cambodian Grrrl.

Rumpus: Is there any visible queer culture is Phnom Penh?

Moore: Very little.

Rumpus: In Hip Hop Apsara you talk about the Messenger Band show you attend, and there was a transgender fashion show as part of that.

Moore: Yes, but that’s a relatively new thing. Again, here’s an upside of globalization: transwomen have become more visible. But that does not in any way, shape, or form mean that queer women’s rights have been even put on the agenda.

It wasn’t even until this last trip that I was able to have any sort of frank discussion of lesbianism at all. It was very much off the record. It was with a woman who wasn’t claiming to be a lesbian herself but said she knew someone. And there are a couple figures in Cambodia who are, it’s widely know, in long-term relationships with other women, but it basically comes down to rumor.

The ways sexuality plays out in political economies is central. And Cambodia’s political economy is organized around this notion of family. So lesbianism is actually perceived as being threatening to a degree that it would have not been, for example, under socialist East Germany. But it’s one of the essential issues of women’s freedom: Do you get to do want you want to do with your body? Not if you don’t know what your body is for. Not if you believe that your purpose is to be married to a man who will annoy you with his sexual advances until he finally impregnates you, which is how a lot of young Cambodian women talk about sex. It is not my job to go and be the sexually liberating force in that culture, but it’s a conversation I’ve been excited to watch, a little bit.

Rumpus: I was thinking back to Thailand, when I was traveling by myself. So many young women are super-friendly and affectionate, and a couple different times, there were cases where I was totally being hit on by woman, and I didn’t realize until far into the process what the intention was.

Moore: And how that interaction cannot be divorced from the presumption of economic reward means that I get uncomfortable around that pretty quickly.

Rumpus: That’s not to mention the times being out late in Bangkok clubs or whatever, and the hour strikes when the women who aren’t going home with any men will go for the lesser payoff of trying to get a woman to pay to go home with them. My friend had to point it out to me. I thought we were all just tearing up the dance floor and bonding and having fun. But no, this was their job.

Moore: Yeah, and you are playing a role in their working environment.

Rumpus: It was fascinating to me, to go somewhere and be seen as a potential sex consumer, when I had spent so much time on my guard, thinking everyone was trying to get in my pants. Which was often enough the case. So I was attracting one kind of sexual attention while also being on the other side of it.

Moore: But that also means power, in this very deliberate way. It’s really interesting and instructive for women to spend times in political economies where they do have power. It’s such an enormous reflection of how little we’re seen to have economic power in the United States. Those are the questions I’ve been interested in more recently. How much does globalization mean that women don’t have access to power, economic power, political power, market power, voice, etcetera.

Rumpus: In Cambodian Grrrl, several times you mention your own cynicism, and you talk about how previously you would have responded to the kind of excessive sweetness the girls showed by thinking, Oh barf. But you felt your cynicism of dissolved in the face of …

Moore: …Unrelenting cuteness.

Rumpus: How has your relationship to your own cynicism shifted because of your work in Cambodia?

Moore: It is not inaccurate to say that I learned more and got more out of that work than the young women I worked with there did. It’s super important to foreground that. It wasn’t even about losing or questioning my own cynicism, it was about this…trial by fire of learning how to love. It sounds so dippy and romantic, but it’s…I’m this punk rock outsider wearing dirty ripped whatever, this scruffy haired loser, being dropped into the most adoring and caring environment that I believe could possibly exist on the face of the earth. Thirty-two young women that were just about: “Are you happy? Are you happy? I’m happy just to be alive!”

It only took about twenty-four hours before I was like, Whoa. This is not the way I grew up. This is not the way I see the world. I’ve got to get my shit together if I’m going to survive this love, because it’s going to kill me. And I had to learn to appreciate the effusiveness and the genuine care for people that underscores it. In terms of my personal relationships, it’s definitely where I learned how to love people. All my failed relationships before that, we can trace it back to not having lived in a dorm with thirty-two Cambodian women. It wasn’t even that I dropped my cynicism. It was—over the five years that I’ve been spending time there, and thinking about these experiences, and getting into meditation, following up on some of the threads that came from that—it was really about accepting what is offered, and trying to meet it. So cynicism aside, it was very deeply spiritual, and very important emotionally, yeah. My life changed. Fundamentally.

Rumpus: That’s so interesting to me, because on the one hand, there’s this desire on the part of Westerners, a certain kind of Westerner, to go out and see the world, to find ourselves in other places. I’ve totally bought into that, but I also see it as problematic, as using the world—and developing economies in particular—as a set for our own self-discovery. Yet at the same time, it’s easy to come back to it. I don’t mean to disparage the positive work you’ve done, but it seems the element that keeps you going back to Cambodia is this very meaningful personal experience.

Moore: This is the danger with pretending that I’ve dropped my cynicism, because I really haven’t at all, so I’m going to problematize that. The very truth of the matter is that American exceptionalism is such a clear defining character trait of everyone who lives in the U.S. that has any sort of means whatsoever, that you do have to be placed in a pretty different environment to recognize it. If you’re not in a place that is making you question the political economy that drives every decision you’ve ever made about how you consume media, how you participate in the world, who you are as a person, then you’re never going to have those breakthroughs of: I’m an idiot, and…how can I explain this? Here’s an example of how it plays out in personal relationships. When you’re young, you think that a relationship is good because you’re dating someone who is hot—not to disparage my previous partners. If you are never placed in a situation where you question where that message came from, which is from Hollywood movies, from TV every single night, from every ad you have ever seen in a newspaper…

Rumpus: What about chemical responses?

Moore: Fine, but are chemical responses exclusively available to you from the way that someone looks?

Rumpus: No, but—this is a sideline—I can think someone’s so hot, but you don’t think they’re so hot, and we’ve been looking at the same ads, right?

Moore: Totally, totally, but I’m just talking about those ways that we think relationships work when we’re really young. What we think that we want out of being in the world. We blame chemical responses, we blame the romantic notions we’re raised with, but until we’re in a situation that we have to question our assumptions in these really personal ways, we’re never going to figure out that there are different ways of being in the world than that set of presumptions has allowed for.

Rumpus: Maybe it’s especially hard to do that if you’re coming out of a punk subculture, or any other kind of subculture that takes a critical stance toward the world around you. I mean, it’s easy to feel like you’re not part of the problem if you’re disavowing the forces that are the problem.

Moore: I would definitely agree with that. I get e-mails weekly from people trying to emulate the Cambodian Grrrl experience. I’m getting a distressing number of, “I’ve never made zines before, but I just agreed to do them in whatever part of Southeast Asia.” And I’m like, “Don’t. Do. That.” This is not an experience that is available to everyone. It was an experience I was lucky to have, given a specific set of circumstances. It’s an experience that has fed the way I participate in the world elsewhere. These are really complicated issues. So, yeah, you do have to have that thing where your head is split open. You do have to have that thing where the very basic ways that you think you work in the world are questioned fundamentally in order to start seeing where you’ve been getting the lessons you’ve learned as a part of a system that not everyone has access to.

Recently I’ve been thinking that I need to not be concentrating on these problems elsewhere, when there are some deeply-seeded local problems that are just as pressing. Like, Kristof, guess what, dude? There’s poverty in the U.S. So my Ladydrawers stuff has been one big way of organizing around that. I’ve begun to think that what’s problematic about my work is that in opening up the media environment to people from other cultures, it opens them up to a market that I fundamentally disagree with.

Rumpus: So here we are at election season. I wondered if you were doing anything around this election.

Moore: A bunch of cartoonists I work with through Ladydrawers are making a Congressional pop quiz, based around Representative Todd Akin’s hilarious comments about how women’s bodies work. We’re submitting questions to Congress intended as a test of what they think happens in the female bodies. So it’s super jokey, super whatever, but at the end of the day, Representative Todd Akin believing that women are having abortions for fun when they’re not even pregnant, that’s a really serious problem. And it becomes even more serious under globalization, where that shit gets broadcast to places like Cambodia where women themselves don’t know how their own bodies operate sometimes, because there’s no educational structure around it. So that. That is the thing.

Congress doesn’t have a basic understanding about women’s bodies, and that’s a disaster when the U.S. is guiding public health policy around the world.

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• Women are Bitches

I grew up on a rural route outside a small town and went to college in a smaller town yet, and I pined all my young life for a big city. But it did not happen at a glance with Chicago. The buildings and streets were wider and more windswept than those of the East Coast cities with which I was familiar, the distance between the few significant points I could identify vast, and the city remained unknowable to me–still unknown despite repeated trips when I came for my last time as a visitor in 1989.

In my senior year of college and on winter break, I was staying with my friend in her out-of-town parents’ house in Hyde Park. Although affection lingered, our active friendship was on the wane, and the real reason I was there was that my new boyfriend was coming in to play with his band at a club called Exit on New Year’s Eve. They were opening for Naked Raygun. Then they were heading out on tour. We’d been apart for a couple weeks already and were at a stage in the relationship where the thought of going a few weeks more without an alleviating consummation caused a physical pain. I would have been excited to meet him in a truck stop parking lot, let alone in punk rock majesty, and I counted the hours while whiling time with my low-key friend, an introvert who’d grown up in the city and didn’t have the impulse I did to stalk the streets like an alley cat, sniffing at cans.

On the evening of the show, her brother was supposed to drive us up north, but he was late, then later, and then we called a cab, and another one and another one until we finally got through somewhere. But the cab never came, and neither did her brother, and I was assured a dozen times that public transportation from where we were on the south side to the north side was impossible at that time of night.

I had hitchhiked and Greyhounded and hightailed it all over the country and Europe during the previous few years, but there I was that New Year’s Eve, trapped in a turreted home, imprisoned, infantilized, while the world raved on without me. I’d come to Chicago with open arms, but the Midwestern behemoth had shrugged and turned its back. I felt I would be kept outside the urban gates forever. I believed I had failed some test set by a cruel king and would never see my new boyfriend again.

Luckily he didn’t get that memo, and he showed up at my friend’s house the next evening. She had been so quietly kind the previous day, in the face of my misery, and she was tactful and kind again, allowing him and me to disappear into my little guest room in the attic. We didn’t come out for the next sixteen hours or so, except once in the middle of the night when hunger drove us down the three flights of stairs and into the kitchen. The next afternoon, my face sore from kissing and grinning, we set out together to make our way in the metropolis.

We took a train into the Loop and stepped off it into lit, slushy dark. I had no idea where we were, other than The City, deep in a thrilling canyon of skyscrapers, and I still don’t know. But he had a vague sense. Ukrainian Village. Wicker Park. I heard those words for the first time from him. We were going to the house where he was crashing with his band mates. West, he thought it was. Barring the site of an actual sunset, I couldn’t have pointed in a cardinal direction to save my life. “West,” I parroted. “Sure!”

It was warm for a winter night, the sidewalks wet, perfect walking weather—or maybe the balminess was all in my mind. I felt half afloat. We walked out of the Loop and into an industrial district, foreboding and dark but aesthetically compatible with the Einsturzende Neubauten and Psychic TV that spun on our turntables. We saw no one. Nothing was open or looked like it ever had been. The blocks were long.

“I think this is the right way,” he said. There was the frisson of unease, the tingle of walking into it, the sense of being the only two people alive in the world. We passed a warehouse that had a gray metal door flanked by three mailboxes, each bearing a label with one or more names. The label on the top box was made from red plastic tape with letters pressed into it and accompanied by signifying stickers, artfully placed, and a twist of silk flowers. We looked at each other. Smiled. We were the only people on Earth projected into the future, looking at the threshold to our someday home.

Milwaukee Avenue. He thought he recognized the name. Chicago Avenue. Now he was sure we were on the right path. A few blocks more and there was the pulse of life again. People. Shops. Signage in Spanish. A horse outside a Western-wear store. There was no visible Mexican population in East Coast cities at that time, and I had spent some summers in New Mexico. I liked the combination of desert culture and urban ‘hood. We stopped for a bean burrito at a storefront restaurant, a place blasting mariachi music and bathed in bright light. We were the only young white Americans in a country not our own. Then he called on a pay phone to get exact directions to the house, and as soon as we arrived at the neat bungalow—just steps from the Hispanic commerce but part of a row manifesting Ukrainian tidiness with clipped hedges and edged walks —we were taken back out again under the wing of a pack.

We went in and out of one bar and down another dark street. Then we were upon a one-story brick structure with painted-over windows, a hash of metal grate over one of the entryways and the other hardly more inviting, a burgundy door set back in a little alcove. Above it was a neon sign, mostly in pink: a vertical R-a-i-n-b-o and then the script Club. Its seedy glow made the sidewalk brighter than the interior, where a doorman sat looking serious.

My heart started to bump. It wasn’t clear to me what kind of culture we were walking into, and my boyfriend was not yet 21. But we slipped by—how did we do that? They were so strict; it still seems a miracle—and slid into a circular booth. Red vinyl. Round red table. A big horseshoe bar arching around an almost rococo stage. Art hung above the dark paneling on the walls, expressively lit with inadequate spots. It was my perfect dream pairing of bohemian boudoir and wild-west saloon. James Brown blared, sounding as new and old and fantastic as anything I’d ever heard.

The bar filled up. T-shirts and leather and boots and hair. We didn’t move from our booth, knowing no one and afraid of being caught as underage or just agog. But one of the women in the group kept depositing flared glasses of beer at our table. “How much?” I asked after the second or third one. I counted my few dollars carefully, was aware when someone spent any on me.

“Free when you’re visiting Chicago,” she smiled. And I had to accept. Chicago. Yes. It had taken me awhile, but now I was here, retrieved from banishment and inexorably bound to my boyfriend. We were in the middle of everything, right in the center of a secret world. I don’t know how this fits into my theory of at least a year, but there’s often an immediate clarity: You need only an evening to recognize that there will be love. At least in retrospect.

Six months later, a new graduate, I took a room in an apartment three blocks from the Raindo Club. I would spend countless hours in a Rainbo booth over the next eight years. I would traipse up and down Chicago Avenue countless times. I would bike and walk and bus Milwaukee Avenue from the Bloomer chocolate factory to the Village Thrift until I knew every E-Z terms furniture store and half-caved-in, boarded-up architectural gem. These were the parameters of my world, and it gave me joy to lay claim to them.

I admit that in the couple weeks between graduating and moving to Chicago I sat on the living room floor of my soon-to-be-sold childhood home and poured over a street map, my heart falling as I counted out the blocks between where I’d be living and the closest patch of green. The triangle called Wicker Park looked about the size of a single backyard where I grew up, unfenced glades that sloped down to a creek. Yes, I had always pined for the city, but I hadn’t exactly thought through how it’d feel to live on a permanent diet of all cement, no woods. It didn’t end up mattering as much as I thought, though. I found other things to connect me to home.

Wicker Park in 1990 was in the earliest stages of gentrification, and it had features familiar to anyone who’d grown up in a crumbling Rust Belt town: Decay, limitation, the creativity demanded by making do.

There were, for example, no ATMs. To get cash, you needed a check-cashing card from the Jewel. Bedrooms might have only half of one working outlet. A single space heater often did the work of warming four or five rooms. My favorite music venue, Czar Bar, looked very much like the Volunteer Fireman’s hall back on Cussewago Road: The same stackable vinyl-baked chairs, tin ashtrays, starkly utilitarian lighting, and cigar smell. But this version had the addition of fantabulous scenesters collecting to see Beat Happening play a seven-dollar show. It wasn’t long before I would recognize by sight most of the people in the room.

Soon enough, Earwax would move in, and a little later, Quimbys, on Damen and Evergreen before moving to North. But in 1990 you still had to make forays out of the neighborhood to buy books and records and trendy thick-soled shoes. Forays out to eat food that was not Mexican or Ukrainian or Polish. There was Leo’s Lunchroom and Urbis Orbis catering to the brunch and coffee needs of arty types, but no Thai. No Indian. No Ethiopian. No bagels. Certainly no sushi. There was a feeling of expedition to get any of those things. From the base camp in Wicker Park out into the great bounty of Chicago, any adventure was possible. It was the combination of village and city made for someone like me.

That first summer I had no job yet, which meant I had no money, either, to speak of, but time to explore. When my boyfriend returned from a European tour to stay with me in my 8 x 10 room, we took train rides and walks that felt like extensions of the first one. The temperature was 60 degrees warmer, heat and stink rising from the sidewalks in waves, but there was a similar wonder and dreamlike accord. The Picasso sculpture at night. Humboldt Park on Puerto Rican Independence Day. Reckless Records on Broadway. Powell’s Books near Printer’s Row.

Then he went back to school and I took a job in River North and beat a path in that direction. I walked north over the Chicago River on every bridge from the Loop and decided LaSalle had the most spectacular view, the best proportion of buildings to water to lights. That first year as an office drone often left me shaky and lonely—This is what it feels like to work for a living? What happens next?—but I’d stop and look out from that red steel bridge in the winter, and the city kept me in its thrall.

My boyfriend and I eventually moved into a loft that resembled the one we’d noticed in 1990, but the relationship faltered. My job went to seed. I met a new friend who riveted me, took to running around the neighborhood at all hours with her. We’d both ride on my bike, inebriated, helmetless, in elaborate outfits we’d scored at the thrift store the day before, the wind warm on our faces as I pedaled us from show to party to bar. Most nights we’d pass through the Rainbo, and she’d make it her project to collect quarters for the photo booth and herd us there. We’d mash on each other once the curtain was drawn, strip down or ham it up, kiss. This display for posterity felt uncontainable. We were conscious of our luck and happiness.

Then for a year I traveled, touching down once in the neighborhood for a stint to couch surf and pick up waitressing shifts and a boy while I arranged visas and vaccinations. It’d have been easy to settle somewhere else after my trip, to take up in Seattle or abroad somewhere warm—I owned virtually nothing, and I fancied myself an adventurer. But at heart what I wanted was Chicago. I returned and moved in with my friend, picked up where I’d left off with the boy.

Over the years, between moving and crashing and boyfriends here and there, I laid my head in a lot of corners of the larger neighborhood, the area between Noble and California and Hubbard and Armitage that was maybe two miles square. You could have plopped me down anywhere, drunk, at three in the morning, and I could have pointed correctly in each cardinal direction, told you what each quadrant’s best bars and corner markets were. At my final apartment in Wicker Park, on Augusta and Western, a single sapling was the only tree I could see when I stood on my fire escape. By this point, when I left the city, the itch of the foliage and the scream of bugs and the depth of the dark were something that I had to get used to.

The Rainbo Club played its part in taking me out of the neighborhood. My friend went one night without me, met a man who lived up north, at Irving and Clark. He’d come in for an art opening. Once they fell in love, I was set up with his best friend, and it worked. We four participated in a red-light green-light swap of primary affection. “Where’d you find him?” a couple friends asked me, maybe wistfully.  There were many more hip people and places to go in Wicker Park by this time, but in some ways it felt smaller, too, to those of us who’d been fishing there for years.

When Mark and I decided to move in together, we said we’d look both in his neighborhood and mine, and we’d move wherever we found the best place. I tried really hard. But Wicker Park was on fire. We’d show up to a viewing and there’d be a dozen other people there, pushing past each other to look at the closets in bedrooms the size of them, waving checks in the air.

So we moved to Uptown, in between New Chinatown and Andersonville, and I found other things about Chicago to love. I had Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, and Thai markets to explore. There were fewer bars I liked and fewer friends within walking distance, but that was made up for by lakefront. And oh, the lake, the lake, the lake. Crashing and green. Frozen and regal. Mirror-like. Caribbean blue. I rode my bike along it to my job in the Loop. I walked and ran along it and thought my thoughts. I wrote a novel. I settled into interior life, and domestic life, and really became part of a pair.

Eventually we had saved enough to buy a place, but now the crowds were descending on Edgewater and Uptown, bidding over the asking price of anything we could afford, and so we migrated further north into Rogers Park. I was pregnant by the time we moved in. My son was born in the spring, and he and I explored the lay of the land together as I fell in mother love. Everything looked different to me with him strapped to my chest, dewy and outsized and new. Instead of bars, my mental map was marked off by playlots. And, more than ever, it was defined by the lake.

In Rogers Park, the beach is not cut off from the mainland by Lake Shore Drive. The sidewalk just deposits you into it. We were there in all seasons, scooching on the sculpture at Pratt Beach, finding the most interesting panels on the winding mural wall, climbing between the hills of sand banked up each fall.

Our favorite spot was what we called the “playground by the lake,” a one-block park and beach at Albion, separated from the continuous stretch of the Rogers Park beaches by buildings and rocks. Albion ends in a cul de sac, and while we lived nearby the city installed a few black benches just off the curb, facing the sand and water. Sitting there, I get the feeling I’m in Brighton Beach, or in Russia – two places that I’ve never been. One day someone staked Tibetan prayer flags into the sand, and their flutter reminds me of the Himalayas, the fartherest-away place I’ve ever reached and a symbol of what I’ve resisted in order to take root. Looking south, I see the outline of Chicago’s shore, the skyline of the city. The view instills me with the sense of fullness and possibility just barely tipped with melancholy. Time is passing. Time has passed. Choices have been made.

I never returned to my hometown for more than a couple of weeks once I left at 18, and my parents split up and moved out of state soon thereafter. Chicago is my home. I don’t even fantasize anymore about leaving it for somewhere sunnier or more spectacular. A sojourn, a sabbatical, sure. That’d be great. That’d be fun. An affair. But Chicago is my home. There’s so much here. The Russian shore, the Caribbean coast, that place at Devon and Maplewood where the traffic chokes and the sari shops beckon. The smell of burnt duck on Argyle. The way the bike path widens when you come up on the volleyball players around Fullerton Beach. The way Michigan Avenue slices a straight, clean edge of skyscrapers apart from the infinite lake. And the cacophony of Wicker Park.

I go to visit. Sometimes I take the Metra and get off at the Clybourn stop, where – when I lived near Wabansia – I used to get on. I walk past the site of the old Artful Dodger, where my friend and I used to go for a nightcap in our pajamas and sometimes end up dancing, past the house where we lived so happily until it caught fire, past stoops and sidewalks where I’d kissed and caroused, the sign post where my bike was locked when someone ripped off its tires. Beneath windows of rooms where I had sex and cried and read and danced and talked all night. And there’s another one. Another one there. Up Milwaukee Avenue to Damen. From Damen to Division, and the glowing Rainbo sign. There are more restaurants on one block than there were in the whole neighborhood when I moved here. Dinner for two at many of them costs as much as a month of my former rent. It’s been like this for years, and I come around plenty. But there’s a moment where I stand like a rube every time.

There were no ATMs! I say sometimes out loud. There were no ATMs!

I’m at the age and in a situation where it seems possible that I won’t fall in love again, not in that way. Except to the extent that I do whenever I walk down Milwaukee Avenue, a greenhorn once more, amazed, exhilarated, and an out-dated old-timer, too, in a trance of nostalgia. Everything’s existing all at once for me. The scope of a big city. The small village made good. And I love it.

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I first heard of Lisa Carver in the late 1980s, when we were both about 19 or 20. Performing under the name Lisa Suckdog in shows that involved screeching, screaming, pissing, and violence, she was often spoken of in the same breath with notorious scum-rocker G.G. Allin, and I was impressed that a girl my age was making herself a legend in the punk underground. But I didn’t become a bonafide fan until I stumbled upon her zine Rollerderby a few years later. At first I was disbelieving: Who would have guessed that the hurricane Lisa Suckdog could write so well? Her voice was perky and zinging, irreverent but commonsensical, unabashedly feminine as well as manifestly horn-doggish. I wasn’t the only one who was charmed; she had fans galore. In 1995 the Utne Reader listed her as one of “100 Visionaries Who Will Change Your Life,” and 1996 saw the publication of Rollerderby: (the Book) and a collection of essays called Dancing Queen. By the early 2000s, I would occasionally stumble upon her hosting an episode of HBO’s Real Sex or on MTV. Her byline appeared in glossy magazines. She also published another book, The Lisa Diaries, that drew from her weekly sex column at Nerve.com. When I learned she had a memoir, Drugs Are Nice, published by Soft Skull Press in 2005, I gobbled it up.

Drugs Are Nice fills in some of the blanks left in her earlier relentlessly upbeat (if also gory and obscene) work. She sketches a chaotic upbringing split between a sickly, pill-addicted mother and drug-dealer father who went to prison when she was six. She talks about escaping an abusive relationship with the father of her first child and the reality of raising alone a son born with a chromosomal deletion. But as it turns out, Drugs Are Nice, for all its stripped-back honesty, presents only a fraction of Lisa’s life story. In January, she self-published _________, an untitled book that collects around 80 paintings she created intuitively in late 2010 and early 2011 as part of the effort to recover memories from an early childhood so horrific it’s hard to look at squarely. Through painting and through therapy, Lisa came to recall being abused, molested, and prostituted by her father as a very young girl, and she began to understand the process of disassociating by which she had coped and functioned. In the text accompanying the images, Lisa writes about her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and gives interpretations of the paintings.

Lisa and I spoke for nearly two hours on the phone about the book, childhood sexual assault, memory, truth, and disassociation, among other things. At the end of the conversation, Lisa said, “I think when you write about things that are really deep and personal and important to people and when they give you feedback from a deep important place inside themselves, that’s so similar to sex. I feel like we just had sex.” And I did too. Really good sex.

________ is available on Ebay and suckdog.net.

 ***

Rumpus: When I saw you have a new book coming out, it sent me back into your catalogue. I noticed that in Rollerderby your parents are quite present—you interview them, talk about them, they’re totally part of your life. Dancing Queen is dedicated to them. In Drugs Are Nice, you’re more critical. By the end of the book, you had cut your dad out of your life, because you recognized he wasn’t being responsible in the way he was dealing with Wolf, your son, and he was sort of stalking you. I always had a picture of your dad as a strange, off-the-wall, dangerous character, but there’s no mention in Drugs are Nice of any molestation or child prostitution or anything like that, and I wonder when you started suspecting you had these memories that you weren’t able to find.

Carver: Certainly not when I was writing Drugs are Nice, because as I was telling that I was telling the most truth that I could. I was not trying to hide anything. So, it was hidden from me. I had no idea at all.

Rumpus: You were starting to see these fucked up dynamics and analyzing them more closely, but you hadn’t gotten to the bottom of them.

Carver: Well, I knew that I presented as somebody who had been molested, that was obvious. But I thought it was just coincidence. Or maybe I thought that cool people are like this. I didn’t know. You can’t know what you don’t know.

Rumpus: What let you or compelled you or forced you—I don’t know how you look at it—to try to locate those memories.

Carver: I didn’t try. I certainly didn’t go looking. There was actually something involving one of my children, that I won’t talk about, that was an impetus. I had to protect one of them from something, and that brought up these feelings that…  I felt very scared, and the fear was far out of proportion to what was actually happening to my child. I’ve always been very proud of my normal parenting, my healthy parenting. I felt like it was OK that I was so destructive in my personal life and my sex life and my career because I kept it together with my kids. So when I reacted that irrationally, I realized that my unhealthiness was affecting my life with my kids.

Rumpus: What role did painting play in discovering you were dissociative? Were you already starting to explore some of this stuff in therapy when you started the painting, and was the painting part of the therapy? Or did what you were painting send you to therapy?

Click Image to Enlarge

Carver: I think the painting was first. I mean, I was already in therapy. My therapist had been, for probably about five years, trying to get me to recover memories, because my childhood was a blank. But I always refused, saying there was no reason for it. I didn’t want to. Then when this happened with my child and I was painting these scenes that looked like something had really happened that I didn’t know about, that’s when I agreed to the treatment. And so the two were playing off each other. I was going in and having this treatment to recover memories, and I was painting them at the same time.

Rumpus: In the book you mention that you had given up writing for a livelihood around this time, in response to what you were discovering about yourself, and you were selling the paintings as soon as you made them. Was that for financial necessity?

Carver: Well, of course I needed a job, but I also just wanted the paintings out of my house. I didn’t want my children to see them, and I didn’t want to see them. And every single one of them except for “Wrists Attack Razor” were gone the minute I put them up. They would sell. All these horrible, ugly, nasty things. There’s a market for that, I guess.

Rumpus: Were the buyers fans of yours? I’m wondering about the relationship between being a public person and going through this super scary and personal and deep thing. People are kind of watching you, and hopefully you’re feeling like they’re caring about you, but…

Carver: It was really great. I was on Facebook all the time, and I would put up the paintings as I was working on them, and I would talk about the things that had happened to me.  I was very excited to not have these things be secret, and it made me feel very comfortable and safe that there were all these people watching me. I had felt at-risk from my father, but now he couldn’t get me anymore, because now everybody would know it was him. That’s the feeling that I had. That’s not the reality really, but it was the reality for parts of myself.

Previously I had been mind-fucked to the point where I was telling people who might have helped, “Yes, this is my father, this is OK,” and I wasn’t trying to escape anymore. And now I was telling everybody what had really happened, and everybody knew, and everybody was around and encouraging, and I felt like, even if I forget—and I’m always worried that I’m going to forget; I still doubt myself—I know that everybody else could hold that reality for me. And I could go pick it up sometime if I lost it again. It’s really strange to… I even feel strange talking about it. It feels very strange to not have your memories or your own sense of reality. The best you can hope for sometimes is to pick good people to hold it for you, instead of somebody who wants to use it against you.

Rumpus: That gets at the claim you make throughout the book that the cruelest thing that was done to you as a child was not the rape or the trafficking of you, it was the fucking with your mind.

Carver: The thing that my father did was to make me say and believe that I wanted this. That I wanted to be sent off with strangers as a tiny child. He would torture me emotionally to the point where I would say that I wanted anything. Until I asked for it. He made me ask for it. And then I became convinced that it was all me. I think. I don’t know.

Rumpus: You present some factual information about dissociative identity disorder in the book. At what point did research started to inform your understanding of what was going on with you?

Carver: Like most people with multiple personalities, I had long been drawn to other people, especially lovers, who had multiple personalities. So I was researching the symptoms—to try to cope, to understand why these guys were behaving like they were. (That started back when dissociative identity order was called multiple personality disorder.) But I had no idea that it related me, at all.

Rumpus: So you had all this background information to draw on when you when you were piecing this together for yourself?

Carver: Oh, I was so familiar with it. And then also I have always been really morbidly obsessed with children who get murdered and kidnapped and raped. Who get pornography made out of them. So I already knew a lot about that because I was just so drawn to it all the time, again not knowing it related to me personally.

I want to ask you a question. Do you relate personally at all to disassociating?

Rumpus: I don’t know that I relate to disassociating exactly, but I do have… I was molested as a child at a young age, starting around four. It has nothing to do with your situation. It has nothing to do with my parents, and they were loving parents. But definitely I’m interested in the fact that we’re the same age and this is coming to you in your forties, because I’ve become sort of obsessed with these childhood experiences in my own life lately. And it’s hard to precisely remember things from when we’re little—some things are really blurry, isolated moments are crystal clear, some memories come forward in a way that actually hurts my brain— and I’ve definitely spent a lot of my lifetime telling myself that I don’t need to think about this, and who cares, and it wasn’t a big deal. Even—and I still think some of these things—even thinking in some ways that it was not that negative, that it developed some positive traits in myself, and the discomfort of that feeling…

Carver: I think it probably did. And in other eras and other countries it’s the norm. You think all these things. And it is so incredibly prevalent…

Rumpus: It is. What, like one out of three or one out of four people experience…

Carver: That’s what they say. And that’s just one out of three people who know it and admit it and are believed. The reason I asked you that was because the book is so inside the experience of disassociating, and I was wondering if anyone could relate to it who didn’t know what that was like.

Rumpus: Reading the book was a very powerful experience for me. One reaction I had is to feel almost guilty about how much I connected to it. How can I compare my experience to your experience, which was so much more extreme? And yet some of your images and descriptions are so vivid to me, they strike a painful and electric chord. I think the book could speak to anyone who was sexualized really early. It’s a confusing thing to have happen. You can want it to go away, but it doesn’t go away—or it doesn’t stay away. And then questioning that: Why am I thinking about this? Am I misremembering? Am I reading too much into this? Am I creating memories?

Carver: Am I being a crybaby? Am I trying to get people in trouble?

I look at other people’s history and think about how much worse they had it than me. That makes me discount my own experiences. Everybody does that. Everybody compares. But the thing is, when you’re a child, your reality is total. So it doesn’t matter if you get punched in the face once, or if, you know, you’re prostituted every single day. For you, it’s a total experience.

Rumpus: It’s such an unusual book. It’s so deep and raw. It has messages to us now as a society, it has messages to people who’ve survived stuff in their childhood, and then sometimes it’s just very vivid description of the disassociation and… just the perspective of a helpless child. It’s doing a lot. Nothing about the book is typical. Even the trim size, the way the images are placed, the use of two different fonts… The format and structure and language of the book seem to be representing the splintering of memory and identity, the disassociation, but it doesn’t feel self-conscious in that way. I didn’t get the feeling that you’re formally experimenting with how text can represent consciousness, for example. So I wondered about the process of creating this book, about how intentional it was, or whether you were working from a more purposefully unconscious process like the one you describe you used for creating the paintings themselves.

Carver: The stuff that’s in Times font, that was me as a writer making sure I was getting things correct, making sure I was getting the chronology OK, making sure I was saying what I believe was true. The stuff in the sans serif font, I did not exert an editor or a narrator or a writer onto that, I just let the experience tell itself; I let the memory tell itself. I didn’t question it. I didn’t try to make it good. I didn’t try to make it right, because that was how I kept lying to myself and everybody else all my life. And that was the bad thing about writing. I was able to lie convincingly and look very naïve, because I was trained in that, so when I told the stories from within themselves about what was happening, I didn’t question it. I didn’t ask my approval.

Rumpus: What about the fact that the titles of the paintings are listed in the beginning and organized carefully into groups, but on the pages themselves, the paintings are not titled, and the commentary about them does not always appear on the same spread, which can be disorienting. Was that disorientation intentional, or was that part of the giving-permission strand in the book?

Carver: You can go look for the title of a painting if you want, but you won’t be compelled to attach my title to the image. Because I was hoping that people would tell their own story through reading this, that it would wake up something in them. I didn’t want it to be only about my experience. I wanted people to feel what they had hidden inside themselves.

Rumpus: It was very successful for me on that level. It was disorienting at first—not in an off-putting way; I devoured the book in one sitting—but then I kept going back to it. There’s a certain kind of work that has to be done by the reader. I was very involved with the book, and personally involved, and the one other person I know who’s read it has felt similarly.

Carver: I’m happy to hear that. I’ve always tried for that, even as a teenager performing on stage. Or even in my personal life. I always try to get people off balance. It’s kind of Buddhist and it’s kind of performance arty, but it’s a way to wake people up. Every time I’ve learned a lot, it’s when what I saw as walls were knocked down and I could go in any direction. But the movement is preceded by a period of uncertainty, of feeling lost or confused. That’s part of it.

Rumpus: In some ways, I can compare this book to Rollerderby and the anarchic format of a zine, where you’re fitting things on the page in odd ways, putting in weird ephemera or hand-written notes, where the whole project feels more impromptu. Then there are your books, and you’re a great writer—technically good, pitch perfect in your voice, adept at structure—but the books feel very contained.

Carver: It’s true, when I started being published by big magazines and big publishing houses, I lost some thrill. And I gained some money, and some social position. But it really wasn’t worth it, and I was really happy to go back to self-publishing. I did not want anyone to tell me one word. I didn’t care if I did a really bad job, it was going to be my job, and I didn’t want anyone else to look at it.

Rumpus: I want to talk about something you write in the book. When you explain why you felt like you had to give up writing for a living, you say: “My success in writing came out of the same formula I learned as a child prostitute: find out people’s dreams and make them believe not only that dreams can come true, but their dream already is true… I take their hand and show them. I make them laugh. I appear to be dirtily innocent and happy – utterly without fear or disgust, and I make them feel there’s no reason for them to feel any fear or disgust either.” That’s a great description of your voice, and when I read it I had a strong response, because I loved your voice. I loved your energy, your optimism, your combination of craziness and sensibleness, and it is a harsh toke to have to look at all that in the context of traits demanded by a child prostitute. We do all want to feel OK about our lust and our desires and our messy parts, but of course some lusts are not OK to act on, and it’s hard to walk that line. It can be confusing for people who have spent a lot of energy and a lot of their lives convincing themselves otherwise.

Carver: An editor who was really important to me, Ada Calhoun, said basically what you just said. She apologized because she felt that she had somehow taken advantage of me as an editor, taken advantage of that child-like voice, by encouraging me to be like I was. She said she was crying when she read this book, and she felt like she had taken part in something wrong. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I love writing. I love being happy about my life and accepting it. I loved helping other people accept themselves. And I loved being a prostitute as an adult. I loved having open relationships. I loved experimenting and living with gusto. And writing with gusto. And saying fuck you to anyone who tried to control what I was doing or call me names. I loved it. And so I don’t want to take away any of the glitter or happiness. It was all real.

I went through a period where I realized that I was also, at the same time, reenacting my past, telling people, “It’s fine. You’re fine. That’s the way human beings are. Accept yourself.” On the one hand that’s totally true, and I really believe that. On the other hand, now I know when to stop. When it’s not right. When it’s gross. I didn’t know before.

Rumpus: In the book you talk about having a backlash against your interest in BDSM, and then you talk about coming to a place where you’re able to reclaim it as your own. There’s a really beautiful passage where you talk about becoming bigger than your father’s influence over you.

Carver: I think my father was compelled to do everything that he did. He had no control. At this point in my life, if I do something, if I have sex or if I hit someone, it’s because I want to. I know what I’m doing. I’m not compelled; I’m not reenacting anything. Up until I painted these paintings and wrote this book, I, too, was just compelled. Needing to do something to someone. Needing to run away from something. Needing and not knowing. Just doing what I knew how to do.

Rumpus: You were 26 when you had your son Wolf, and leading a super alternative life.  You found it in you to be a good parent in a really difficult situation, with a baby with serious special needs and a partner who was…

Carver: Who had special needs himself! Alcoholic, depressed…

Rumpus: I was moved by your explanation of where your parenting instincts came from, which was from having parented yourself in your imagination when you were a child and no one else was taking good care of you. But what else did you draw on? Because parenting can be hard even in optimal conditions.

Carver: I do think my ability to deal with all that came out of having dissociative identity disorder, because I had separated out a part that was a mother, and that part had been alive almost as long as I had, and that part could take over at any time. That’s the great thing about being dissociative: you can rise to any occasion without internal conflict, because you shut down the other parts. A really hard thing about being a parent is not being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it. But I didn’t have to experience that, because if it was time for me to parent, I just shut off that other part, and the mother part took over. There was no conflict. There was no resentment. There was no confusion. I’ve always been that way, no matter what the circumstances were.

Rumpus: So there’s a case where dissociation has been a strength.

Carver: Oh, It’s been a strength in everything in my life. I was good at it. In fact, I feel the loss of it very much now that I’m mostly integrated. I feel so much more conflict and resentment and so many more negative emotions, like anger and like feeling trapped. I never ever felt that, until I was, you know, “cured.”

Rumpus: What’s a benefit of being cured?

Carver: I haven’t been this way long enough to really be able to say much about it. But I am alive, and I really don’t think I was ever truly alive. I was playing roles, and half of me or three quarters of me or nine tenths of me was dead all the time, and there was this stunted part that was playing a role and she knew, or he knew, that the role would be over and they would be dead.

There was a lot of desperation and feeling disrespected by myself. And now I don’t have that. I’m all alive all the time. But it’s just not always good. Sometimes it’s really inconvenient. I don’t want to have to be sad. I don’t want to have to be patient. I want things to be really easy and magical, and they’re not all the time.

Rumpus: I was struck by the end of the book, where you’re describing going into the desert with the man that you love. The voice there seemed very recognizable to me—the syntax, the gleeful energy—it was the “Lisa Carver voice” that you refer to earlier in the book as being sort of an act. But it seems like that must be an innate part of you, too, that it’s not just an act or a lie. Or were you going for the trope of the happy ending there?

Carver: It was never a lie. That voice was always a part of me, but yes, that was the trope of the happy ending. I hadn’t been integrated long enough to be able to speak with authority about what my life looks like now, so I think I did call on my old voice. Sort of like, hey, can you say something here that’s happy and true? Because I can’t yet.

But that all definitely happened. I went to Nevada. I was with someone I loved. I didn’t think about my father all day. Definitely one of the best days of my life. But I wasn’t able…  I’m not able even now to describe what it’s like to be a real person.

Rumpus: You say at the very end of the book that you still, after all this time, feel like you’re lying. There’s an obsession with the real in memoir. Writers talk a lot and write a lot about the slipperiness of memory. You, of course, are talking about something far beyond that everyday slipperiness that most of us experience. There was someone who was purposefully trying to fuck with your memory…

Caarver: More than someone. It was a whole system. My father and my mother and the girlfriends and other family members all played their part…

Rumpus: So you had nowhere to look for an accurate reflection, or no one to reflect back to you your own experience…

Carver: I have my cousin. She saw a lot, and we’re still close, and we are able to say to each other yes, that really happened. And then I have police records, and all the letters I’ve kept from my childhood. And I have some photos. I still have these actual things, and I can turn to these things to help me…

Rumpus: It sounds like these physical artifacts have been important to you. You say, “A believed child is the safest child.” And it’s so easy to tell a very young child they’re wrong, or to dismiss a very young child’s account of something. It’s difficult for anyone looking back into his or her own childhood and trying to locate the truth, or the honest perception. I’m wondering how you see the relationship between factual truth and honesty, an honest accounting. How do we trust children or our selves as children, our very early memories?

Carver: I don’t really care if it happened exactly as I remember it or not. It doesn’t matter. Obviously I was really fucked with. The details, some of them, I’m sure I invented at the time to cover up other stuff, and now what I remember is the invention, and that’s OK. I know the dynamics now, and that’s all that matters.

I know—well, I believe—I have a memory of—pornographic films being made of me when I was a little child. My father was eventually reported to the police for being a child pornographer, so that sort of corroborated my memory of it being done to me. And I met one of the people who’s now grown but who had as a child been filmed by my father. While I was writing the book I was pretty obsessed with tracking down one of these films with me in it, because I still doubted myself. But now, if somebody handed me that film, I would absolutely not watch it. There’s no reason I need to see myself or any other child being raped. How it plays out in my relationships now matters, but the details of what exactly happened, and my veracity, my exactness, that doesn’t matter. What do I care? It’s over.

Rumpus: It must feel good to be at that point.

Carver: I think that I really cared so much before because parts of me knew that they had to hold on to that information for me. They had to keep it safe for future me, for me now, or they would be dead like my father wanted them dead, like all perpetrators want that memory dead. So those memories were like people, like little girls, and they had to be believed; they had to be seen.

This is going to sound like weird therapy talk, but once I said to the little girls, the memories, “I believe you all. I believe all of you. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says. It doesn’t matter if there’s any proof otherwise, I believe you all,” it was like they all said, “Oh, thank God. I did my job, and I can rest.” Like they all grew up at once and became part of me. So now I don’t have to hang onto it anymore.

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