A few days after an article about cookbook ghostwriters ran in the New York Times Dining section, Gwyneth Paltrow took to Twitter to deny that she’d had a ghostwriter for hers, My Father’s Daughter: Delicious Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness. The article’s author, Julia Moskin, identified Julia Turshen as Paltrow’s ghost not only for that book, but for a second forthcoming title that will bear only Paltrow’s name on the cover, and she quotes Turshen in the article about her work on the actress’s books.

A week later, Paltrow appeared on the Rachael Ray show via Skype, still insisting she had no help. Ray has similarly refuted Moskin’s Times article. She told Eater.com: “In well over a decade of writing recipes for many cookbooks, television shows, and magazines, I have not now nor have I ever employed a ghostwriter. I simply don’t use them.”

I wasn’t there when Paltrow and Ray did or didn’t write their cookbooks, but as a ghostwriter myself, who has dealt with a client denial, I have a hunch about what happened at least in the case of Paltrow, for which there is more information to sift through.

The way Turshen is quoted in the article, the detail with which she is introduced, the fact that on her website Turshen lists the book as something she’s worked on, and that she wrote an essay about working with Paltrow on her cookbook for Food & Wine magazine all give me the impression that Julia Moskin got it right, or pretty close to right, and that  Paltrow’s denial is rooted in problems of semantics and misundersanding. I sense  Paltrow believes that because the stories and recipes in the book were hers, even if  Turshen did the editorial heavy lifting, she didn’t serve exactly as a ghost, and therefore Paltrow should be credited alone.

“Ghostwriter” is a problematic word. It gives people the idea that we have some kind of other worldly power; that we’re able to hover over clients somewhere in the ether and read their minds, then write their books using only our own words. But it’s nothing like that, at least not for me. That’s where misunderstandings arise.

In her denial, Paltrow tweeted, “I wrote every word myself.” The thing is, even if she did write every single word that made it into the book, it doesn’t mean she didn’t have the help of a ghostwriter or co-author whatever you want to call us.

In my work I never simply interview a person and then write their book using a whole different collection of words than they did. Typically, I use many of the same words that came out of their mouths, although likely in a different order, and surrounded by other words. I also move whole pieces of their narratives around for purposes of better storytelling. I remove boring expository chunks, and try to draw more interesting anecdotes from my clients to replace those – anecdotes they wouldn’t have thought to include until I prompted them; anecdotes I still have to seriously rework and bring to life.

Another way I work is to get clients to “free-write” bits for me, without concerning themselves with spelling, grammar, sentence structure, or “sounding good.” I have them do this because sometimes people are inclined to reveal more when they are in a room by themselves, writing privately, than when they are sitting and talking with some ghostwriter their agent or editor hired, whom they’ve just met. I find some clients also tend to remember and capture more details when they write things down and email them to me.

After I receive and rework the pieces they’ve written for me, I incorporate them with what came out of the transcriptions of our interviews. That synthesis is really hard work. Even if I were to use only words clients spoke and emailed to me, which is never the case, it would still take a lot of work to put those together in a way that yielded a book that’s readable and interesting. It’s a skill most ghostwriting clients – even the ones who can write beautiful letters and witty blog posts – don’t have and rely on us for. Maybe don’t realize falls under the heading of “ghostwriting.” Which is to say, even though the stories are not our own, and many of the words come from our clients, we still do a great deal of work transforming those stories and words into books.

This is where a client might get confused. In her mind, if she’s providing the stories, and I’m asking her to write, I’m somehow cheating or shirking my responsibilities, and she is no longer officially using me as a ghostwriter. Never mind that I’m neck deep in her manuscript, and I will be the one to piece it together, rearranging everything many times, creating transitions, finessing the order and wording again and again before turning it in. Even with chunks penned by the client, it’s still the same job for me. Actually, it can be an even harder job, especially when the client gets attached to problematic sentences she’s crafted and resists having them reworked, or insists on retaining sections that don’t move the story along.

So maybe Paltrow uttered or typed every one of the words in her cookbook. But I strongly doubt she strung them all together as they stand in the book without a great deal of Turshen’s hard work. Maybe “ghostwriting” is the wrong name for Turshen’s role. Maybe it’s the wrong label for this work, altogether, although I’m at a loss for a replacement that accurately describes taking raw verbal matter and transforming it first into rough jigsaw pieces, then smoothing and arranging those into a patchwork, and finally weaving it all into a seamless tapestry.

At the very least, it seems to me the book was a collaboration between Turshen and Paltrow. But it’s probably stipulated in Turshen’s contract that she can’t claim to have worked on it. That’s pretty standard – what ghostwriting is about – even though many people know that most celebrity books are not written by the celebrities themselves. That’s probably what Turshen assumed when she agreed to give Moskin an interview.

I hope Turshen is not penalized financially or otherwise for this potential breech of contract. It’s lousy enough having Gwyneth publicly deny her work on the book. I know that feeling. It’s happened to me.

No one goes into ghostwriting for the acclaim. You do it because it’s a flexible job, it pays at least decently (sometimes well), and because it can actually be gratifying to help someone who’s not really a writer tell his moving story. For the most part, I am happy to stay behind the scenes. While some writers accept a “with” credit on the cover, I never put my name on anyone else’s book.

I tend to think of myself more as a “memoir midwife,” as one client called me. Sometimes it feels akin to what I imagine being a surrogate mother is like.

The point is, in the end, I am ultimately delivering someone else’s story, not my own creation. And so I don’t think it makes sense to put my name on it.

Instead, it’s often written in my contract that I must receive the first acknowledgement, and that it must be worded in such a way that people in publishing will easily decipher what my role was. The acknowledgement usually reads something like, “I’d like to thank Sari Botton for helping me find the words.”

(Turshen’s acknowledgement in Paltrow’s book is more oblique about her editorial contributions: “I literally could not have written this book without the tireless, artful assistance of Julia Turshen. She quantified, tested, and retested every recipe, oversaw the production of the photos, helped brainstorm in a crisis, and, above all, was my intellectual and emotional support through the whole process.”)

Going otherwise unnamed is fine with me. It’s inherently not my ghostwriting clients’ job to publicize the work I did for them. By the same token, it’s not okay for an author to go to such lengths to vehemently deny having had help that she disparages her ghostwriter in the process.

One client of mine falsely insisted in interviews that she’d fired her ghostwriter after she’d found the first chapter to be unsatisfactory. She claimed she then wrote the book all by herself in five weeks.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I labored hard on that one, especially since we were “crashing it out” in just ten weeks, including the interviewing time.

I was advised to send that author a legal cease-and-desist letter to get her to stop “publicly retracting the acknowledgement stipulated in my contract.” Later, when I got some distance from the incident, I realized her denial was consistent with others she’d made about having help in her life, from the first time I interviewed her.

We talked in her living room that day about, among other things, why she couldn’t imagine putting her son on a special diet. “Tonight, I’m making spaghetti for the whole family,” she said. “I can’t imagine what he’d do if he couldn’t have any of it.”

When we wrapped up interviewing at about 6 pm, we walked into her kitchen. There, in front of the stove, was a woman in an apron, already making spaghetti. “Oh my god,” I thought, “my client thinks she’s making spaghetti even though her hired help is clearly doing it.”

I get it now. She doesn’t like to admit to accepting help with things. No one does. Celebrities – especially those who went to fancy prep schools in Manhattan, as Paltrow did – perceive a stigma associated with needing a ghostwriter, even though they might not have experience writing books. Besides, what’s the point of having a secret ghostwriter if you have to talk about it publicly?

When I read my client’s false claim that I’d been fired, I cried. And then I thought about all the babysitters and nannies that in the book she denied having, as well. I figured they were all having a good cry, too.

***

Photos by Brian Macaluso

Related Posts:

• Thoughts on Letters In The Mail
• Letter from Sari
• Love for “Ghosts Are Real, At Least in Publishing”
• “Before He Opened His Mouth”
• More on Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #12: Emily Carter

Note to self: Duh. Those are probably the biggest things I wrestle with. Plus I worry I’ll make things worse by writing about it all, whether as memoir or autobiographical fiction.

But I’m a mere featherweight in this category when compared with Emily Carter, author of Glory Goes and Gets Some, an incisive collection of autobiographical fiction originally published in 2000, which manages to be simultaneously bleak and sardonically funny. Carter ­– the HIV-positive, recovering-heroin-addict daughter of feminist author Anne Roiphe, and sister of often contrarian cultural critic and author Katie Roiphe – earned her black sheep bona fides going where few Jewish girls, let alone Jewish girls from Park Avenue, dare to go.

The collection features Gloria Bronsky, Carter’s alter ego, from her desperate days of using, and sometimes trading sex for drug money, on the Lower East Side, to her years struggling to stay clean one soul-suckingly mundane day at a time in Minnesota, land of the Twelve Step rehab facilities and half-way houses ad nauseam. Stops along the way, on Park Avenue and at a fancy prep school, provide stark perspective; this is not your run of the mill junkie with HIV. This is “a rather charming statistical anomaly,” as Glory says in one of the book’s earlier stories, a daughter of the moneyed New York Jewish intellectual elite, who derailed.

While Carter acknowledges that Glory is very much based on her, it’s an amped-up depiction, “a shocking and almost grotesque version of myself,” she told me when we met at a diner on the Upper West Side. There we talked about many things, including the perils of writing about your parents – even when your mother herself was disowned by the wealthy side of her family for writing about them, in fiction and memoir. “It gets very meta, very quickly,” Carter said.

By the way, I first learned about Glory Goes and Gets Some from a post on Emily Gould’s blog. It’s the December selection for the awesome indie e-book store/club, Emily Books, which Gould launched a few months ago with her friend and business partner, Ruth Curry. Carter will have a discussion with her cousin, n+1 editor Marco Roth, at the January 10^th Emily Books event at Word, Brooklyn.

***

The Rumpus: You dedicate your book to your mother and your step-father. There are some stories in there that seem very autobiographical and I wonder whether they hit a nerve with them. Like “Train Line.”

Emily Carter: Well, this part here, (pointing to a page in the story describing Glory’s mother sizing up Glory’s new boyfriend) that could describe a lot of parents – “Status: Judeo-negative… Do NOT interact.” That’s not entirely untypical in a certain segment of society. That was not the one that upset.

Rumpus: There was one that did?

Carter: Yes!

Rumpus: Tell me about that.

Carter: Well, it blew over.

Rumpus: How?

Carter: Well, first of all, my mother made her living writing memoirs and extremely autobiographical novels about her family, and there were major ramifications from that. But she always told me to write whatever I had to, and not to worry. Now, when she saw the piece that hurt and offended her, she was very hurt and offended. I didn’t write it to do that. My love for them and my gratitude, I felt, showed through in my work. I felt that I never attacked them in my work that way. I had to write about growing up with the family I grew up with or I would have been somehow dishonest. But it was not my agenda to expose and destroy, or to hurt or offend. But there was some hurt and some offense taken.

Rumpus: Which story was it?

Carter: “The Bride.” It was supposed to be published as fiction. But it was rejected as fiction and sold as memoir. At the time I was really, really, really strapped for money, and I had to say, I don’t care what you call it, just publish it and pay me for my piece so I can pay my rent. I really was in no position to argue about the niceties of autobiographical fiction at that point in my life.

Rumpus: Did that one run in the New Yorker?

Carter: No, it ran in a magazine online called Word Magazine. But somehow somebody at the New York Times dug it up and said this piece was originally written as memoir when they reviewed the book. They mentioned my relationship with my mother and my family and said it wasn’t “cozy” because I’d done some gimlet-eyed descriptions of her here and there. I wrote them a letter in response saying basically, thank you for the review, but I love my mother. And she was upset. Especially because it was the New York Times, which for her and my family is the big book or the bible or the Higher Power. And it wasn’t to me, so I was a little bit shocked by the depth of her hurt. But it blew over. It was a number of weeks, and then she was over it. I mean, believe me, I’ve done worse things, and it wasn’t meant to hurt her. And it blew over because she knows that I’m a writer, she’s a writer, and we have to write what we see. And she also knew I didn’t do it to attack her. My agenda wasn’t to hurt.

Rumpus: My biggest dilemma is that in writing about my life, I’ve hurt people in my family, most notably my father.

Carter: I read one piece you wrote. It didn’t seem terribly hurtful to me. I mean, it described an unpleasant situation, but he didn’t come off as a monster by any stretch of the imagination.

Rumpus: I can’t write a memoir or a book of stories that are autobiographical without that piece of who I am. And so I just wrestle with this.

Carter: I guess you’re in a sticky wicket. I don’t know what to say except that it’s been my experience that no matter what you say, or how you couch it, the truth from your perspective may be painful to someone else. At the same time, I’ve found that people who are writing about flawed but loved people in their lives, if they’re not writing to expose those people, or to alienate them, as long as that’s not their agenda, that’s not mixed into the story, those things blow over. It depends on why you’ve written it. Now, Augusten Burroughs wanted to destroy his mother, maybe for good reason. It was also such an important story, it couldn’t not be told. But he wanted to destroy her, and they will never talk again. That was part of his agenda. He also wanted to expose this man who had drawn so many people into his orbit and hurt them, and he wanted to strike a blow against charismatic, damaging people. He wanted to hurt them the way he felt he’d been hurt. It was a brilliant book and it was wonderful, and it was his agenda.

If your agenda is to tell a good story, and you think someone’s flaws would make a good dramatic twist, it is a forgivable sin, and I think you’ll be forgiven. That’s truly what I believe. You can’t expect not to hurt. It will hurt. However, if your agenda is not just to hurt, I do think those things blow themselves over. If you’re deliberately trying to hurt a relative and destroy them, well, then yes.

Rumpus: That’s not at all my agenda. It’s just that a lot of my observations and a lot of my stories come from being this daughter.

Carter: And you love him. That came through in the piece I read, anyway.

Rumpus: Did you let your mother read the book before it went to press?

Carter: Much adored, my mother is often my first reader. I lay my work at her feet like a cat would a bird. Also, I value her feedback. I do try to keep from her things that might upset her, but I’m afraid I’ve made her judge aesthetically content that might have affected her emotionally.

Rumpus: Did you leave your last name, Roiphe, off the book to protect her?

Carter: I used Carter to avoid any taint of nepotism should I get published, which I didn’t for years, and was silly anyway since the underground ‘zine type mags I was writing for had never heard of anything as mainstream as my Upper West Side, Times Book Review-reading mother. The first thing I was published in was a cute little pamphlet calling itself “Dumb Fucker Review.” It paid in copies.

Rumpus: It was so interesting reading one of your mom’s memoirs, 1185 Park Avenue, after you and I talked on the phone. Here she’s writing this memoir about some intense family stuff, and in it she talks about writing autobiographical fiction years before that made her father distance himself from her. And then here you are writing this, and it’s very meta.

Carter: Yes, it gets very meta very quickly – a big meta mess! What my mother did was she got us disowned from the wealthy side of the family, which she could have thought of when she was 27, writing her books! But she had to tell the truth.

Rumpus: Was the choice to write autobiographical fiction instead of memoir a creative impulse? Or was it an attempt to protect people?

Carter: It was a creative impulse. It was also easier for me. Instead of writing five stories about five different people, I could composite them and make a person up that I believed exemplified this, that or the other point that I was trying to get across. Did I steal from life? Like a ruthless little gonif I stole from life. But I put it together in my own way.

Rumpus: When we spoke on the phone, you said that the book is only partly autobiographical. Is it that there are some stories that are, and some that aren’t, or that each is a mix?

Carter: There are stories there that are about other people besides the main character, and they are 100 percent fictional. But the stories that are autobiographical, the character is a shocking and almost grotesque version of myself. It’s not really me. It certainly deals with feelings I’ve had myself, but ratcheted up to ten. If you could create a character made of all your worst insecurities and worst feelings and have someone say them out loud for you through a megaphone, that’s what Glory is. It’s not an accurate reflection of my character or how you’d find me in a conversation. And certainly, I always kept in mind that if something made me uncomfortable in myself or in a situation, that’s where I would go. I would make that more of my focus; I would make it bigger.

Rumpus: I’ve thought a lot about doing that kind of thing. Years ago, I did some MFA work, and my natural inclination then was to fictionalize real situations. And then somewhere along the line, I switched gears to nonfiction. I still consider writing fiction. I think it would be kind of fun to have a character who does all the shit I’m afraid to do. But I also have this feeling like I can’t get there until I get the true stuff out first.

Carter: I understand that feeling. The only thing I can say is, it’s a ruthless business. And there isn’t much you can do to make that easier for people, especially if it’s somebody who really has a resistance against it. But I’d say you can stick to your guns about your intention, and say it’s not to expose or hurt or offend, but to tell and to explain. Because, if you believe your story will connect with other people, that it’s a story worth telling, you have to tell it.

Rumpus: I’ve got all these stories I’m so afraid to tell. Like about how I grew up adjacent to affluence, but not from an affluent family myself. I had these step-sisters who had trust funds, and they had this grandmother who would give them thousands of dollars every year, and then she’d give me and my sister each a card at Chanukah with one crisp dollar bill in it.

Carter: That’s a great story. How can you not write that story? With the card and the crisp dollar bill. It’s a story that needs telling, not to attack, but because it’s the story of a young person having that kind of experience. There’s always that story in families of someone getting the short end of the stick, and what is that like?

Rumpus: If I ever get my shit together and complete my book, maybe I’ll open it with an explanation of where I’m coming from, and hope it will help people be less upset.

Of all the composite characters in your book, did any of the people they were based on ever come to you and say, “I can tell that’s me, and I’m pissed.”

Carter: No, and it’s a good thing, too. But one of the people I based one very small part of a character on, to our great sorrow, wound up shooting his girlfriend in the head – not killing her – and is in jail for the rest of his life. A very sweet person when sober. A very different person. He did this heinous thing. That’s someone I’d like to not have mad at me. But I had to steal his story. It was too good. I suppose if he confronted me I’d admit it and say, it was that particular thing, it was a good story, give him some money if he asked for it. You know, I didn’t make a lot of money from this book. But I don’t feel bad about what I did. I certainly don’t. I used more bits and pieces of incidents than whole stories. And I only did that with people I cared about. Because, you know, we only kill the ones we love.

Rumpus: Did you sit down and write most of this at once?

Carter: No. It was like five years until I had enough to have a collection. And then I had to add parts to make it more read-through, more cohesive. I was hearing that short stories didn’t sell, short stories didn’t sell, short stories didn’t sell. So I wrote some interstices and some pieces that would make it seem more novelistic, more like a book about a certain place and time. I wrote some more interstices and more characters to make it more overarching and give it a narrative.

Rumpus: Did you sell it when it was complete?

Carter: No, it was rejected by everybody – everyone my agent sent it to. And I sent it myself to a small local press and they accepted it.

Rumpus: How long did it take you to sell it?

Carter: About two years.

Rumpus: And then it got resold?

Carter: It got resold for paperback.

Rumpus: Have you considered doing another book?

Carter: You know, for the past 10 years, I’ve been really involved in other things. I am starting to come back to it, and we’ll see what happens. After you’ve not been writing for a while, you’re very rusty. My gears are grinding back up. The machine is coming back to creaky life.

Rumpus: What have you been doing?

Carter: I’ve been studying ethology. Which is animal cognition. And taking some dog training courses. And I was taking care of a lot of animals. And I was helping my husband study for nursing school. He went back at 45 to get his RN. So now I have a private nurse. And I’ve been basically following my bliss. I’ve been making money here and there doing book reviews. I still do book reviews for the Star Tribune, to try and make some money. Doing a long piece again is very scary. I can actually hear these rusty gears turning and creaking, clicking into place and screaming out for WD 40.

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“I bet it’s because of what happened with me,” suggested former Times Critical Shopper columnist Mike Albo, who very publicly lost that plum gig in the fall of 2009 after word that he’d taken a free trip to Jamaica as part of a press junket made its way around the snarkosphere.

He’s probably right. There is language in that Times email that just had to have arisen from the paper’s clumsy 2009 firing of Albo (who is probably best known as the co-author of the brilliant satirical novel The Underminer: Or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life, and as a performance artist who stars in Underminer-themed videos, among other things).

It didn’t matter that Albo was a starving freelancer and not on the New York Times staff. It didn’t matter that the trip was completely unrelated to his column – for which he received a measly $900 every other week. The incident raised thorny questions about the relationships between journalists and the people they write about – particularly in the more merch-y arenas, like fashion. And it raised other questions about the kinds of restrictions a publication can place on writers to whom it doesn’t offer a salary and benefits.

Albo addresses those questions and chronicles the whole ordeal in The Junket, a bitingly funny, thinly-veiled “novella-festo” he’s just released as a Kindle Single for $1.99.

In it, he achieves the perfect balance between veracity and satire, twisting certain details in the most deliciously wicked ways, but never making you doubt for a second that the story is so real it still haunts Albo at night. The fictional “Mike Albo” in The Junket explains it this way:

“This story needs to be told without much fictionalization or allegory, from my point of view. It’s not like I want to do it this way. I wish I could transmute my middle-aged gay pain into some teen vampire drama. But I do need to bend the truth a bit or I will get into even more trouble. Think of this as a memoir with a fictional $3,000 sheer Thai silk veil lightly draped over it.”

Albo chatted with me by phone about how he became “the Silkwood of swag,” the reasons he chose to fictionalize, and the virtues of publishing an e-book (ironically partially about the death of print) through Kindle Singles.

The Rumpus: I know you’re calling The Junket fiction, but I have to tell you that it is very real to me. I lived in that world, when I worked for women’s magazines. It’s unbelievable how much stuff gets sent to you. At a certain point you don’t even realize you’re accepting gifts. It’s just stuff on your desk that would take too much effort to mail back. You’ve got this little passage that really says it all: “I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion – gift bags and plus ones and banquets and galas – that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work. Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag.”

Mike Albo: Yeah, I’m not saying that what I did was right – I’m just saying everyone does it. It’s part of the interesting wheel that no one is admitting. Our consumerism involves a lot of hype. I just think we’re all part of it. The line is more blurry than people admit.

And the only people who can afford to abide by the publications’ policies against accepting freebies are people with a lot of money or rich parents – people who are like, “The $150 I’m going to get for this article will pay for fresh cut flowers for my Tribeca loft!”

Rumpus: It’s crazy, what is happening with rates for freelance articles. Just about every day, I get a “job alert” from MediaBistro offering me an opportunity to write for content farms like Suite 101 and Demand Studios, for like $35 an article, and I want to shoot myself. This used to be a way to make a living. I don’t know how anyone does it now, especially living in the city.

Albo: It’s the same story about New York. I try not to be curmudgeonly about it, but it’s so hard to scrape by in these creative professions.

Rumpus: I really can’t see how going on that trip to Jamaica would compromise your reporting for the Times, for the Critical Shopper column. I mean, if anything, I could see you writing about what went on there, sort of sending it up.

Albo: The reason I wanted to go was it was such a bizarre trip. The people who were going were really interesting. And Thrillist – the hosts of the trip I went on, not the trip “Mike Albo” in the story went on – was pretty interesting. I was really interested in how all these brands were circling around this trip. I’m so obsessed with how consumerism consumes us. This was like a wet dream/nightmare come true. The whole experience was so bizarre by so clarifying. It really sharpened my eyes and my head.

Rumpus: You were basically doing research about what it’s like to be conflicted about swag.

Albo: And also about relationships with people you write about. When I was writing for the Times, there were plenty of times when they asked me to write about someone I knew and I said, “You know, I’m kind of friends with them,” and I didn’t write it.

But at the same time, some of the people I wrote about became my friends. There are some designers who are just lovely people, and sometimes just by going to the stores to meet with them, I became friends with them, and just love them.

We’re pushing product. We’re all always pushing product. It’s our whole culture. Everyone is doing it all the time. I’m starting to feel like I want to go to law school or something. The whole journalism ethics thing is such a blurry world, and I can’t see out of it. I wish I were all Arianna Huffington-ish about it and could argue my point, but I don’t have much of a point besides, this happened to me, and it was hard.

Rumpus: Part of what keeps me from writing is that I’m afraid to burn bridges and upset people. You’ve fictionalized, but it’s still pretty clear who’s who. Are you concerned or worried about burning bridges?

Albo: Funny, I said to a friend today, “I hope my bridge-burning novella-festo does well because I’ve completely destroyed all my professional contacts, yay!” There are a few reasons why I wanted to fictionalize. The first is that I thought that if I did it as a memoir, it would be polemical and dry. And I’d have to be more argumentative. Also, I wouldn’t be able to make up fake newspaper headlines, which was the most fun to do! Secondly, I feel that when you write a memoir, unless you’ve had an incredibly interesting life like Jon-Jon Goulian or Ingrid Betancourt, it would be really boring. Like, if I were going to write this as a memoir, I’d have to explain to readers, “Now this Paul is a different Paul than the other Paul that I know…”

Rumpus: So you feel as if it would require too much boring exposition?

Albo: Clearly. And to tell the story well as a memoir, you have to streamline it, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it fiction. I did the same thing – my first book, Hornito: My Lie Life, is also a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel and I used my real name. Some of the stories in it aren’t true, but mostly it’s true. But I had to streamline. I almost feel like it’s reality-show literature.

Rumpus: Oh, wow – you’ve just invented a whole new category.

Albo: Thirdly, the little people, I really didn’t want to go after them. Including my ex-boyfriend, who is different than in the story. The woman who is Laynee, in the book, there’s some talk on the internet about who she is. But the truth is, I sat next to a guy on the plane, and there was a woman on the trip I fell in love with, who was just as funny as that character, but it was not her.

Rumpus: So that was a composite character.

Albo: Yes. Totally. It would be a bummer if I hurt anyone’s feelings.

Rumpus: And the boyfriend, too, was highly fictionalized?

Albo: He did not look that way. He was different. But I don’t even know if that kind of fictionalizing works that way. Call me in four months and I’ll tell you if anyone called me and said their feelings were hurt. I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. This was a watershed realization for me: One of the first things I got published was back in the 90s – the golden age of the 90s – and it was for this website being put together by Prodigy. Some of my friends, who I still love, were editors there and they would ask me to write funny essays. One thing I wrote was a piece about all the people who died in my high school. My high school was like the movie “Final Destination.” There were all these weird accidents and stories. So I did a version with people’s real names. This was back when you thought the internet was like paper – I didn’t think it would be in there in perpetuity. Years later I went to my high school reunion, and this guy there was like, “You know, you wrote this thing…” And I felt so terrible. I begged my friend to take it off the site. That to me was a moment when I realized I had to step on the other side of the line, of satire. You can do it, and it’s a very thin veil. Keep it real, but keep it satirical, and heighten things.

Rumpus: You’re saying you can fictionalize as a way to not hurt people?

Albo: Oh–“hurt” – that’s such a harsh word. What I’m saying is that you can avoid revealing people.

Rumpus: One of the things that has stymied me is that I am afraid of hurting people in my life. I have all this rich material, but I’m afraid to use it. I could fictionalize, and that could be good for many reasons, but I don’t know that people wouldn’t see themselves in my extrapolated versions of them and still be hurt.

Albo: Let’s just pretend we have no souls for a second and not address the hurting people issue. I’ll tell you that when I started writing this piece, I thought about making it really absurd. Like all these people go to this island, and half of them die, and the rest have to swim back. Like I was going to totally go over the top. And I had a bunch of scenes – like one in SoHo House, making fun of it, and it just seemed a little too farcical. There are some memoirists who are so lying. I just want to look around and ask, “Does anyone believe this shit?” And then there are these novels that are total reality-show literature, where I’m like, “Oh my god, I can feel their pain in these pages.” I feel like Hemmingway is like that in a way. There’s this book I’m reading now called I Love Dick.

Rumpus: I’ve read it.

Albo: That’s total reality-show literature.

Rumpus: She refers to it as fiction, but apparently it almost perfectly mirrors her life.

Albo: It might be fiction. Maybe she embellished the letters. It’s totally reality-show literature.

Rumpus: I feel like it would be fun to write fiction about a character like me, who does all the shit I’m afraid to do – including writing a memoir. Anyway, I loved the way you used fiction to heighten things. Having lived in that world, I feel like I knew which parts were real, and which you made bigger.

Albo: The magazines I worked for, they’re pretty fictionalized.

Rumpus: I’m really glad you wrote this as fiction. It gave you a lot of latitude. And it allowed you to be really funny. It is so funny! How many words is it?

Albo: I want to say it’s about 16,000 words – like 41 pages. The Kindle Single program editor said, “We’re finding these work when they’re between 8,000 and 30,000 words.” People feel like they’ve learned something or taken something away with those lengths. When I was trying to bloat this out into a book form, I had all these chapters that were more memoir-y than fiction, and who knows, one slight dream is that someone at some stodgy publishing house will ask for a full-length book version. But I was really getting bogged down with telling the story, and then Virginia Heffernan, who is like this weird angel in my life who just comes along and gives me an idea and saves my ass, was like, “You should get in touch with this guy at Kindle Singles.” So I called the guy and we talked. I was really tentative at first. But he was like, “I really think it will be great for this.”

Rumpus: So, is publishing a Kindle Single a good thing? Is it a viable way for a writer to publish?

Albo: It’s too early to say, and maybe in October I’ll say, oh, I should have done it another way. But right now, I like it. Part of the relief of this is the format. It’s sort of this slightly independent way of publishing your work, and also I’m not embarrassed asking my friends to spend two bucks. I feel bad making friends spend twelve bucks, but not two bucks.

Rumpus: And you don’t have to ask them to go to your Kickstarter and give you ten or fifteen or twenty-five bucks, and offer them a present in return, and not get the money if you don’t make your goal.

Albo: My book kind of feels like the right length for it, too. Once again, who knows? We’ve been in this sort of bi-polar time in publishing where something has had to be either a magazine article or a book, with nothing in between, unlike the old days when there were pamphlets and little weird books all the time. Like, Blake was doing his stuff like that. A friend actually said to me the other day, “I’m so glad you did a short version, because I feel like there are so many things out there trying to be books that aren’t.”

Rumpus: Do you also realize the irony that you’ve written a piece partly about the death of print as a Kindle-only piece. Did that occur to you?

Albo: It did, yes. But right now I am feeling more optimistic about the continuation of print than I ever have. Even just from people asking me this week, “Can I get The Junket in print?” What I’m hoping is that there can be print-on-demand on it. I don’t think print is going away. McNally Jackson book store has a this Fotomat-type print-on-demand booth.

Rumpus: How does it work? Do you get an advance like you would from a book publisher?

Albo: No, there’s no advance. The cut is 70/30 – 70 for me, 30 for Amazon. Which is pretty good. So I make about $1.40 per book. It’s pure sales. I could end up getting the amount of an advance anyway, without having to pay it back. Who knows? This is the splashiest, gossipiest piece I’ll write for a while. It seems right for this.

Rumpus: Does your agent get a cut?

Albo: Yes, my agent is taking a cut. I did broker the deal, but being a new form of content, there are all sorts of weird little details and twists to the content and distribution and I am grateful to have her working with me on it. To me this is an interesting time for both this new form and for the relationship of an agent and writer. For instance, I am hoping this to evolves into an actual solid book in the near future, and I still don’t know if that would happen through Amazon, or with a publisher, or, maybe, I will do it on my own and put it in bookstores myself – and I sort of still see the value in having an agent help you figure these things out. So far this has been a positive experience. But hey, I’ve been living in NYC for years so I am cautiously optimistic about everything. Catch me in a month or so and I will let you know how it all panned out. I will either be totally psyched or totally bitter and living in a shed with the phrase “fuck the world” tattooed to my forehead.

Rumpus: How have you been surviving, financially, since you got fired from your column?

Albo: Well, The Underminer was optioned for a film in I think 2007. And I got a chunk of money for that. I have been trickling off of that for years. There are some months when I can’t pay the rent and I’ve been really broke. I’ve been writing for GQ and W, and thank god for those assignments. I just wrote something for Men’s Journal. Then there are those places that forget to pay me, and I have to waste all this time following and tracking people down. My self-esteem has been run over by a tank several times, but think I still have a good gauge of when it’s just too humiliating.

Rumpus: This is a really hard time to be a freelancer. It’s amazing that you’re still doing it, especially after what happened to you at the Times.

Albo: Of course it had to happen to me when I was turning 40. I mean, could this have been any more of a Jennifer Aniston movie for a gay guy? The fact that it coincides with a mid-life crisis I didn’t even know I was having. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Am I supposed to completely change careers? Or what?

Rumpus: I think you should get money for just having coined the term “underminer.” Like the world at large should give you an ongoing, tax-free stipend for that. You hit on something so accurate – I make references to that all the time. Just the other day I tweeted, “First, we kill all the Underminers,” after someone said something allegedly supportive to me that was actually completely unsupportive and back-handedly hurtful.

Albo: Thank you. I like that–when the riots hit New York, we have to kill all the Underminers first.

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Honestly, I didn’t even want to read it.  There was just so much of the kind of pre-publication hype that I find off-putting: a highly publicized, literary-A-list-studded galley-release party three months before the book even came out; numerous articles about what a social butterfly and literary it-boy Goulian was, and how he was famous, essentially, for being about-to-be-famous.

And then there was the whole matter of the reported $750,000 advance Random House paid him. When I hear about books earning crazy sums like that, I get a horrible stomachache, and not for the reasons you might think, such as jealousy. No. Having been party once (as a ghostwriter) to a million-dollar deal that placed unprecedented, mind-fucking pressure on me and everyone else involved, and then went wrong in every possible way a project can go wrong, I find myself anxiously worrying for writers who land those kinds of contracts. I’m afraid to go anywhere near their books; I want to avert my eyes from what seem to me train wrecks waiting to happen. What is the chance of one of those books living up to its pre-release hype? Of earning back its advance? How soon before an accounting is taken, and the author starts getting shit from snotty gossip columns for not moving books?

I’m not sure what persuaded me to give the book a chance. (My curiosity may have been piqued by something as trivial as a tweet comparing Goulian to Stephen Elliott – both are self-proclaimed submissives who tend to eschew long-term relationships, real jobs and standard adult living arrangements, and who generally prefer cuddling over sex.) But somehow or other, I eventually opened it, and that was it. I fell in love with the book, with Jon-Jon as a writer, and then with Jon-Jon the living, breathing, warm-hearted human being when I interviewed him.

Goulian is so eloquently, hilariously candid about everything – his insecurities, his vanity (he is currently between nose jobs number two and three), his wide-ranging ambivalence, his entrenched aversion to conventional notions of “growing up” – that it’s hard not to be engaged, and to empathize, especially if you’ve ever felt out-of-step with societal norms or your age group, or if you’ve ever let your parents down. You can’t help but feel for him as he tries again and again to do what he, the brother of two high-achieving scholar-athletes, thinks he’s supposed to do. He goes to law school. He clerks for a prominent judge – although he can’t bring himself to take the bar exam. He moves on to a job as a revered assistant to New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, but he can stick with it only so long before he’s on to other less demanding commitments, such as babysitting.

I especially admired the great humor and sensitivity with which Goulian writes about his parents and his grandparents. They all labor – clumsily, hurtfully – to understand and guide their peculiar progeny, a bright kid who in his teens takes a sharp turn from his passions for soccer and academics, and dons a skirt and eyeliner. I was so moved by this remarkable balance between hard truth-telling and compassion right from the introduction. There, he tells the story of his famous political philosopher grandfather, Sidney Hook, referring to Goulian – his body-image-obsessed, effeminate college-age grandson – as a faygeleh (Yiddish for homosexual), and a few pages later apologizing for that in a sweet, incredibly humble letter. (For the record, Goulian is straight.)

Goulian brilliantly frames the book as a response to a postcard he received when he was 36 from his six-year-old self, thanks to an arrangement he’d made thirty years before with a small-town postal carrier. Six-year-old, soccer-playing, ocean-surfing Jon-Jon wants to know what thirty-six-year-old Jon-Jon is up to. Forty-two-year-old, skirt-wearing, couch-surfing Jon-Jon has a lot to fill him in on.

Goulian and I talked–and talked, and talked–at the Upper West Side apartment of a family friend, who lets him stay in the tiny former maid’s quarters off the kitchen.

***

The Rumpus: So, you’d never written anything before. After all the various things you’ve done in your life, and years of indecision, how did you decide to write a book–and this particular book?

Jon-Jon Goulian: It came out of nowhere for me. I’d never published a single article or anything in my life. Well, there was an essay I published when I was 17 in the San Diego Reader, which is like the Village Voice of San Diego. I won third place in a contest. I think the question was, “What’s the worst job you’ve ever had.” Between then and now, this was it. And it was torturous. I don’t sit still easily. So I actually stood when I wrote the proposal, with my laptop on this bureau back there [points in direction of maid’s quarters], in four weeks. And then in Vermont [at his late grandfather’s house] I found this other bureau and did the same thing. Because when you’re standing, you can bounce around on the tips of your toes a little. It keeps you moving, and it’s better for your posture. It’s more exercise.

Rumpus: But how did you know this was the particular book you wanted to write? I ask because I’m 45 years old, I’ve been sitting on writing a book of my own for years out of fear, but also out of indecision, because I can’t settle on which story, which angle, is it fiction or memoir, what’s the voice. I cannot zero in on which thing I want to say first. So, after all the things you’ve tried in your life, how do you come to, okay, I’m going to write a book and it’s going to be this exact book, and I’m going to write the proposal in four weeks?

Goulian: The beginning of this book was this: In January 2007, I am living in this maid’s room, doing odd jobs, freelance editing, babysitting for $12 an hour. I’m having lunch with a friend, Kate Taylor, who is now a culture reporter for the New York Times. At the Time she was writing for the New York Sun, but on the side, she was editing an anthology of essays about Anorexia called “Going Hungry,” for Vintage. She had a lot of writers – Jennifer Egan, Joyce Maynard, herself – and she had one guy maybe? She wanted to diversify the voices. So at lunch, she sees me playing with my food, and ordering in the most high-maintenance way possible, and I looked really skinny. She said, “Do you maybe have an eating disorder?” And I said, “Maybe by the loosest definition.” I definitely sometimes starve myself to be deliberately skinny and bony. But hardly is it cause for intervention or hospitalization, or even worry. She said, “Would you write an essay for my book?” So I went home, and standing at the bureau, I whipped out an 8,000-word essay in three days. Then she started to edit it and wanted to put it in her book, but then I thought, The theme of anorexia has over-determined the focus of this essay. I told her, “I don’t feel comfortable being in your book, because all these other stories are about people who were seriously anorexic,” and it felt like my approach was even a little frivolous. So I pulled the essay.

In the mean time, I had sent it to all my friends. And most of my friends happen to be writers. I fell in with this group of writers after I graduated college. I’d had no literary aspirations really then, or even now. Law was going to be my thing. I thought I had to grow up, so I gave all my skirts away and started working as a paralegal. But I fell in with this crew, and I’ve never been able to shake them.  And I showed them the essay, and they were like, “You know, there could be a book here.” These people were very encouraging along the way. Because even though I didn’t have any literary aspirations, I used to write these very long emails and tell fun stories. They always said, “You should write something, share these stories with a bigger audience. We get a real kick out of you; other people should enjoy you, too. “ So I sent that essay to Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie agency, and she said, “Yes, you might have a book proposal somewhere in here.” So she took me on as a client in May, 2007, and then I spent the next nine or 10 months just really thinking about my life and taking notes.

At that time, the memoir was going to be more about my eating, and my relationship to food was going to be more of the organizing theme of the book. But then I didn’t have that much to say about it, other than what I have to say about it now, which is that my father raised me on such a rigid diet that I became so self-conscious about what I put in my mouth that consumption in every respect became fraught for me – even sexual consumption. So I spent 10 months, but really just thinking and taking notes.

Rumpus: That sounds like a great exercise–but also like the kind of thing I’d just keep doing and doing without ever completing the thing.

Goulian: Well, it came to a point where I really didn’t know if I was going to do it. I didn’t know if I had enough to say. Then March, 2008 has rolled around and I haven’t really done anything on this proposal. I meet people all the time who say they just can’t sit down and do the writing they want to do. I was talking to this woman the other day, and she has a full-time job, and she’s married, and she has kids, so she’s lucky if she can find a three-hour chunk of time to write each day. And here I was with at least three of those chunks every day! I’d sit down in the morning, and I’d get nothing done, and then I’d get up and run around for a while, and then sit down and try again. And if I didn’t get anything done in the second chunk of time that day, I’d have to start over again later. Sometimes it would be 9 o’clock at night before I had anything on the page. Sometimes you need to have some serious external prod to force you to write something. I remember Mary McCarthy said that when she started going out with Edmund Wilson, he would lock her in a room and say, literally, “You’re literally not coming out until you’ve written a short story.” So, for me, I sent a note to my agent saying, “If I haven’t given you a proposal in three or four weeks, drop me.” My friends knew I had this agent, and they were really supportive of me and the shame of potentially being dropped–for me, that was the external prod. Then I just stood at the bureau, and what came to me was, Hey, instead of food, how about androgyny as the organizing theme? So, I whipped that proposal out.

Rumpus: A full-on proposal with sample chapters and everything?

Goulian: Initially the proposal was about 20,000 words–an introduction, two sample chapters, an outline of the three remaining chapters, then a prologue, which was about the postcard. Which was a great springboard. It organically gave rise to the story, because it’s my younger self writing to me and asking, “Hey, what’s up with you, man?”

Rumpus: That is so perfect.

Goulian: That’s something every memoirist has to answer: Why are you telling this story? And everyone calls you self-indulgent, and narcissistic, and asks, “Why do we care.” And the conceit here is that I had to answer my younger self. He’s reaching out to me and asking me what I’m doing with my life, and I’m saying mom and dad still give me a hard time. So it was just perfect. So, I sold the book, in April, 2008. When I finally woke up from that, it’s around June 1, and I have a book to write.

Rumpus: What kind of a deadline did you have?

Goulian: A very short one.

Rumpus: Like, how short? I’ll tell you that as I ghostwriter, on occasion, I’ve been given, like, seven weeks to write a book – including interviewing time.

Goulian: I had a September 1 deadline. From June. So I went off to the woods, and started going at it. Remember, besides the proposal itself, this is the first thing I’ve ever written.

Rumpus: And you’ve got this huge advance.

Goulian: Which I don’t want to say much about–actually, which I don’t want to say anything about!

Rumpus: But, that’s some pressure! So, did you write it in the ten weeks?

Goulian: Yes, I wrote it in the ten weeks, and it was chronological as I’d proposed. And then I sat down with my editors at Random House, and we all agreed that the chronological approach wasn’t really working, primarily because my life, chronologically, doesn’t lead up to any crisis of action or revelation. I’ve hung out here, I’ve hung out there, I’ve stared at the ceiling here, I’ve started at the ceiling there. The book was losing momentum. So they suggested and I agreed that I structure the book more thematically. They said, “Maybe if you gathered the material on various themes and you put them in baskets.  Put the bits about your adorable Granny Shammy here, and the bits about your grandfather Sidney here, and the bits about food here.” And then I went off for six months just thinking about structure, and trying to come up with an outline for the book that would work for me. I sat in that maid’s room back there, and I had every scene of the book on a sticky note.

Rumpus: So you were storyboarding.

Goulian: Yes, like people who write screenplays. And I would start with a number of baskets, and then I started wondering which basket should go first, and it drove me a little batty. The word that finally made everything gel for me was–and I don’t know where I even heard it–“imbricated.” It refers to the overlapping of tiles on a roof–the way they overlap like that, that’s called imbricated. For some reason that word meant a lot to me. I thought, why don’t you think of these chapters as “imbricated”? So that each chapter will overlap both over the one preceding it and over the one that’s yet to come.

Rumpus: I’m really fascinated with this “imbricated” concept, and the storyboarding idea. I’ve thought about doing that. What I do to myself is, I get an idea about what I think my book should be, but then I start obsessing, thinking, Okay, which details belong in here at all, and which ones should go first, and which part should I write first? And what if I outline? But what if I outline wrong? And then I just can’t do anything. I’ve got lists and lists and lists all over the place, on paper, in my computer, of stories and ideas. They’re just all over the place. Maybe I need to sit down and storyboard them, and give myself time to just outline. Was that really helpful to you?

Goulian: Yes, but remember, I had that gun to my head. I had people expecting to see things, and I had these tight deadlines. Without those, I’d probably still be outlining in that back room. I finally came up with an outline for the second draft that I was happy with. Each chapter starts a little later in time than the one preceding it, but also roams around. Because when you think of your life, you don’t think about it in strictly chronological terms. You’re swimming in it, and I was trying to bring to life that aspect of life – that one swims constantly. And you’re hanging out in the mind of a neurotic, someone seriously neurotic. And that’s where the narrative takes place. A lot doesn’t happen, in the conventional story sense, in this book.

Rumpus: It’s all character-driven–all emotional.

Goulian: And perception-driven. It’s about self-perception. Then Random House said, great, let’s move ahead with it. So then I went back to Vermont, and stood at the bureau writing. And in two months, executed it, with this outline reigning me in. And the second draft was also about 120,000 words. Including stuff that didn’t make it into either draft, it would have been about 400,000 words.

Rumpus: That’s like four-and-a-half books.

Goulian: I have enough outtakes for a few more books.

Rumpus: Do you think you’ll do that?

Goulian: No. Actually, a lot of the outtakes and a lot of the stuff from the first draft that didn’t make it was about my sex life from my 20s and early 30s. In the book now, the chapter on sex and food, called “the Vegetable Monster,” that’s a joint chapter because my anxieties about food, from the rigid diet I was raised on, tainted my relationship to sex.

Rumpus: I can see that. I mean, I was raised with a weird relationship to food, and one parent who was a compulsive over-eater, who was always alternating between that and crazy diets and health food. It made me very self-conscious about weight and my body and body fat, and uncomfortable about showing my body to people.

Goulian: Well, that, too. But also, sex literally involves consumption of fluids – kissing and whatev. It made me think of the health implications. This was also the age of AIDS. And my dad’s a hematologist, and he was seeing the earliest cases of AIDS. So sex in this chapter ends when I’m 21 and I’ve been broken in by “Stevie,” who, by the way, came to my reading in the Castro, and who agreed to that name.

Rumpus: So you changed people’s names?

Goulian: Yes and I say as much in the author’s note. If someone was involved in sex stuff, and if I thought there was a risk of embarrassing them.

Rumpus: But then there are people who are obviously your family. Did they know you were writing this book, and how did they feel about it?

Goulian: I didn’t tell my parents until I sold the book. I didn’t even tell them I had an agent before then because of the classic Jewish mother thing. When you’re working on something and you’re a kid who’s been floating as long as I had, to even talk about having an agent would have made my parents say, “Yeah, we’ve heard about these things you work on…” And in the past I’d worked on screenplays and other things. The day I sold the memoir, the first call I made was to them. They were obviously very excited that I’d finally done something. Also, they were a little wary of what this kid’s gonna say. I remember saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fair.” I was incredibly anxious about how deeply I could go into my family’s characters and their lives, because I kept asking myself, Why do I have the right to violate their privacy? And I don’t. So my response to that was largely to stay away from them in this book. I mean, what I say about them is accurate. But if my family were dead, this would be a very different book.

Rumpus: I feel you treat them much more kindly and sensitively than they treated you when you were growing up. I feel like you were very fair. But fair or not, you’re still revealing things about people. That’s a huge risk.

Goulian: Although, not that much. In fact, in the review in the New York Observer, he gently criticized me for turning them into superheroes, and he referred to the book as a love letter to the folks. Again, if they were dead, I would have psychoanalyzed them maybe more. I might have gone into factors in their lives that might have affected the way they brought me up. My mother’s relationship to food as a girl, for instance, was fraught, as was her mother’s. I stayed away from that because I didn’t think it was my business. The richer characters in the book are the ones who are dead. My grandfather, my granny Shammy, my high school teacher Mr. Carey, sort of a mentor to me in high school, those are the ones that are richer. A fair criticism of the book is that the parents and the brothers are stock characters. In fact, my brothers are referred to simply as the oldest and the middle brothers, so all you take from that is that they’re archetypes, and I’m the youngest in the birth order and how that might have affected me. Even though they are thinly drawn, arguably, I don’t really know them that well. Boys – we are not emotive with our folks.  You come home from school, and you’re like, “Hey, what’s up? School’s fine…” It’s largely small talk, the substance of conversations. I don’t go deeply into my feelings, they don’t go into their feelings.

Rumpus: Although, your father tries to engage you with this question of what’s going on with you, and what are you doing with your life.

Goulian: Yes, he does, and I don’t really engage with him on it.

Rumpus: And you’re not even revealing anything shocking about that by telling about it. That’s his role. That’s what a father will do. I mean, I get the call all the time – “What are you doing? Are you writing something finally?” In my case, there’s a subtext there of, “Are you writing about me?” So did you give them a chance to read it first before it was published, and to make changes?

Goulian: I waited until the last possible second to show them the book. It was last December, two weeks before it was going into galley. One approach was just never show it to them and wait until it came out in stores. But I showed it to them, for two reasons. First of all, I needed my dad’s legal permission to publish those letters he sent me. And, two, so they could correct biographical details about their lives, because this is now going to be published, and in a bookstore. So if I say my dad got his tonsils out when he was six, but he got them out when he was four, he could correct that. I was terrified. It was still a manuscript. I doled out each chapter, first to my mom. I did not show them the sex chapter, though – the one on sex and food.

Rumpus: Yeah, you sort of apologize to them for that chapter in the opening of the book.

Goulian: It’s more about my body than they need to know. Although, when I think about it, there’s a lot about my dad in there – about the diet he raised us on – but I didn’t show it to him. And my mom read it really quickly. And this was true of both my parents: they were too busy preparing themselves for the next awful revelation that never came to really enjoy the book. It had been two-and-a-half years since I’d sold the proposal, and they just had no idea what to expect. Does he turn us into monsters? Does he blame us for things? There are so many memoirs out there turning parents into monsters.

Rumpus: I know – my mom asks me all the time, “Are you writing a book about a bad mother?”

Goulian: My mother told me something about Erica Jong’s parents, as a way of reassuring me. Basically, they were so happy that their daughter published a book, that they didn’t care what was in it.

Rumpus: I wish that were the case with mine. I published a Modern Love essay a few years ago in which I revealed things about my parents’ relationship and their divorce, and the editor made me tell my parents what it was about, and get their permission to go ahead with it. I didn’t have to show it to them, just tell them about it. And so I tell my father, “I got a Modern Love accepted, and I have to tell you that in it, I have you sitting at the piano, singing ‘Let Me Try Again,’ with tears streaming down your cheeks as mommy is making dinner and ignoring you and we’re playing in the living room…” and the only thing he heard was that I’d had a Modern Love accepted. He was so excited. And then it came out, and he was really upset and hurt, and it still bothers him. And I’m completely traumatized by having upset him in that way. So were your parents okay with what you wrote?

Goulian: They were relieved. Not only wasn’t it as bad as they imagined, they come off really well.

Rumpus: It comes across that you have a really good relationship with them.

Goulian: They’re just really gentle, relaxed people. Part of that is also that they were workaholics, wrapped up in their own working lives.

Rumpus: You reveal your dad to be an orthorexic – someone who is hyper concerned about healthy diet.

Goulian: Yes, but remember that I didn’t show him that chapter. He did say to me, “Why don’t you show me the other chapter?” And I said, “No, not doing it.” And he said, “Well come on, I’m going to read it when it comes out. This is your hang-up, not mine.” And I said, “Fair enough. You can read it when it comes out. But I’m not showing it to you.”

Rumpus: Has he read it?

Goulian: I don’t know. I just saw my mom, and she said she has not read that chapter. My book was there, and she said, “Oh, by the way, I haven’t read that chapter.” In the New York Times Styles profile of me, they mention boy-on-boy experimentation, and it referred to me taking ecstasy to explore my sexuality. They read that piece, and they’ve never said anything to me about it. I mean, my parents are very fair-minded, accepting people.

Rumpus: I wish I could just ask my parents not to read certain things. I published an essay once that was partially a funny look at my sex life, and I asked my father not to read it. He later totally lied and told me he didn’t read it, but said he’d heard about it, and he told me he wrote me this ten-page letter about what a disappointment I am, but his therapist wouldn’t let him send it to me, because his therapist knows how defensive I am.

Goulian: Oh, my god.

Rumpus: All this to say, I understand your fear of your parents reading about your experiences with sex!

Goulian: You need to see that letter!

Rumpus: Some day. I don’t think I could handle it right now. So, your parents didn’t give you any kind of a hard time after they read the book?

Goulian: Oh, no. Not at all!

Rumpus: And, your fears and anxieties that you had about what your parents were going to think – are they now gone?

Goulian: One-hundred percent. The other fear was about my Uncle Ben’s reaction. He’s my grandfather’s son, and the literary executor of his estate. I had to get his permission, legally, for the letters from my grandfather to me. I was a little worried, even though he has a very laissez-faire approach toward giving rights. He’ll give rights to people he knows are writing very negative books about my grandfather. My grandfather was a controversial figure. I was worried that Uncle Ben was going to demand to see the book first before giving permission to use the letters, which was not going to happen. But, boom, he signed off immediately. I actually would like to see his reaction to that chapter, because my grandfather comes off as a little rough.

Rumpus: The chapter where he flat-out asks you, “Are you gay?”

Goulian: Yes. He apologizes in there, too.

Rumpus: I thought that was a beautiful, very self-aware apology. I was touched by that.

Goulian: Me not responding–you can understand that. You’re embarrassed by it. You just want it to go away. So when my uncle signed off about the letters, I was relieved. And also my dad – he could have said, “Those were very personal private letters I sent you, and I don’t want them out there,” and they are so crucial to the book, and here I am two weeks before the book goes to galley.

Rumpus: That was so supportive of him to let you use those. It seems like you are really close with him, and the rest of your family.

Goulian: We’re very close. My refusal to grow up in a sense and do all the conventional things that people expect of me causes such concern and worry and anxiety in the people in my family, that it really brings us together in a sense. I love them, and they give me a reason to love them, so I don’t bolt from them. We’re in constant contact because of it – them worrying, me trying to deal with their worrying. It had the opposite effect from what you might expect.

Rumpus: I so relate to that part of your story about people wondering when you were going to “grow up,” and pick a lane and stick in it. In many ways, I feel like I’ve never launched. I don’t know – haven’t written a book of my own, I’ve only written other people’s books. I’m so afraid to commit to one idea. I also live a fairly unconventional life. I mean, I’m married, and somehow I am a homeowner, but I don’t have kids, mostly by choice. I live in this bohemian little town where there are a lot people sort of floating too, and where I’m friends with people who are in their twenties, and people who are in their sixties. I’ve just always had to do things my own weird way – maybe I was fucked up by Free To Be You And Me – and so I found it kind of comforting to read about you. Even though it seems you are still struggling, emotionally, with your lack of direction.

Goulian: Well, that’s part of the tension of the book. It’s not that I’m this rebel saying, “Fuck you” to his community. This is someone who clearly is tortured by it. It’s not a book about a rebel. A rebel as I define it is someone who asserts his individuality when faced with the pressure to conform. This is a book about someone who wants his family and friends to love and accept him, and wants to fit in, but can’t do it because he just doesn’t really want to. There’s nothing he wants to do, work is problematic for all the reasons I mention in the book, everything is fraught, he never seems to be able to stick with anything, his grandfather is giving him a hard time for not sticking with anything, law is problematic for him. So I can’t seem to “get my act together” in that conventional sense.

The underlying irony of the book is that through writing this book about how I can’t get legitimized, I get legitimized. Although you do get a sense that outside of that, nothing changes. Notwithstanding the book deal, I’m still here, and living out of bags. I’m still going to be eating my nuts and berries, still worrying when I go to restaurants what they’re doing to my food, still crashing here and there. My mother often asks me, “Have you thought of getting your own apartment, and a lease, and putting something on a wall…” I mean, I’ve never bought a piece of furniture in my life, and I’m 42. But the book changed my life in the sense that in the eyes of my parents and most of my friends – and I hang out in a pretty bourgeois crowd – although they were tolerant and accepting, I have been legitimized in their eyes. And I have to admit, it feels good.

Rumpus: Do you feel like, with this book, you’ve explained yourself to your parents? And do you feel like that’s your job?

Goulian: I don’t think we’re supposed to explain ourselves to anyone. That’s where my memoir is a little different. There isn’t this definitive self-appraisal. I mean, I explain why I did a few things along the way, but it doesn’t end with, “Now I know who I am and why I do what I do.” I’m still and oddball to me, and to most people around me, I’m still confused. There’s no dramatic breakthrough at the end where I’m a new person who understands these things.

Rumpus: I’m really glad about that. So…what’s next?

Goulian: My dad finally asked me that a few months ago. I got a three-year reprieve from the folks. I sold the proposal for the book in April, 2008, and from then until a few weeks ago, it was all good. Like, Yes, he finally did something. We don’t have to worry.

Rumpus: And now?

Goulian: I don’t consider myself a spiritual person or a new agey person, but I put on this new agey vibe and I said, “Dad, it’s not about what’s next, it’s about what’s now. What’s now is wrapping up this.” September it’s a fair question, I suppose.

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While I realize this is not quite the simple solution to the problem that some people think it is, the thought has certainly occurred to me.  In fact, whether to write fiction or memoir is a debate I have been having with myself for a good twenty years, since the early 90s, when I dabbled in graduate school, first at Sarah Lawrence, and later at City College. I’ve done some of each, and while I enjoyed certain aspects of working on fiction, I’ve come back again and again to first-person non-fiction. It’s just always seemed more natural for me.

For reasons I can’t seem to name, after a period of feeling more emboldened, I’m now back to feeling fearful about writing memoir again, and am seriously considering shelving a lot of material until my parents pass on. There’s plenty of other stuff I want to write that has nothing to do with them, so I could still write memoir. But somehow, thinking about all that brings me back to my old debate.

I thought it would be helpful – and interesting – to take the conversation outside my head and have it with Elisa Albert, a friend whose writing I admire tremendously. Albert is the author of the darkly funny, irreverent novel, The Book of Dahlia – in which inoperable brain tumor patient Dahlia Finger essentially gives an annoying self-help author and the rest of the world the finger – and the hilarious, often politically incorrect short story collection, How This Night Is Different, which skewers an assortment of Jewish stereotypes while also shedding sympathetic light on a variety of human frailties and dynamics.

Albert, who is at work on her second novel, describes both books as “personal” as opposed to autobiographical, although they are rooted in her own experiences. I met with her to talk about this at her home in Albany, New York.

***

The Rumpus: Part of me has come to feel as if there’s some stuff I just can’t write until my parents are gone. After all this back and forth with different authors, and different conversations that you and I have had, I don’t know if I can write about them until they’re gone. Although, don’t hold me to this – I’ll probably go back and forth a few more times.

Elisa Albert: So you’re assuming they’re going to die before you?

Rumpus: Hmm. Well, you have a good point. Yeah, if it’s the other way, it’s not going to work out so well.

Albert: You’re deciding you’re not going to write it at all, or you’re going to wait a long time?

Rumpus: I think I’m going to wait a long time for the stuff that’s about them. I’m thinking that I can write some of the other stuff first – the stuff that’s not about them. I’ve got so much that I’ve meant to write for so long, and haven’t, that there’s a very deep well. I think I’m making peace with writing things about myself that might upset my parents. But that’s just stuff about me. Who knows? Maybe, after I’ve gotten over that hump, then I’ll be able to write the things about them while they’re still alive. But maybe not.

Albert: Why can’t you write it and not publish it? Why can’t you write it all, and then afterward decide what you want out in the world, and what you don’t?

Rumpus: I don’t trust myself. As soon as I’ve written something, if I’m pleased with it, I get really itchy about getting it out there. That’s already happened a few times. I get it out of me and I start to like it and start obsessively tweaking it, and then I just want everybody to see it. I also feel guilty just writing some of it. I’m still very conflicted about writing about parents, family members and other people close to me. One of the suggestions people always have for me, is “Why don’t you just make it fiction?”

For various reasons, whether to write fiction or memoir is a conversation I’ve been having with myself for literally twenty years. I thought I’d have it with you, now. You and I have discussed this before – you describe your fiction very specifically as “personal.”

Albert: Yeah. Not autobiographical, but personal.

Rumpus: But in talking, you’ve said that a lot is drawn from your own life. You’ve talked about some of the characters in The Book of Dahlia being really close to people in your family. And so in a way, you’re taking almost the same risk as someone who’s writing a memoir.

Albert: Well, not really. That’s a misunderstanding of what fiction is. Fiction is not reality with the names changed. It’s a completely bizarre, singular stew in which things that are real get mixed up with things that are invented. It’s a weird hybrid – a donkey head on a zebra body in a fourth dimension kind of thing, even when it’s realistic and even when it’s pseudo-recognizable, or people assume that it’s about you, or ‘I recognize your father’, or ‘I recognize your brother’. It’s just this new beast that emerges when you put everything in the hopper. It’s not a solution to writer’s block, I don’t think. A lot of it feels involuntary. I don’t sit and make conscious decisions about what I’m going to “use” and what I’m not. Stuff that needs to be used is there and there’s no way around it. And the craft part comes in trying to appropriate it and use it well, use it in a way that’s interesting and opens new questions and pathways and can lead to bigger issues. It’s not as simple as plucking things that really happened from your life or your experience and just changing names or making it set on Mars. It’s a weird thing.

Rumpus: It’s not a conscious decision you make?

Albert: I can’t really articulate to you where it all comes from or how it happens. The Lorrie Moore story, “How To Become A Writer,” is the be-all and end-all, as far as I’m concerned. Everyone could dispense with a lot of talk about fiction and craft, and a lot of what goes on in MFA programs, if they just read that story, like, 15 times. Because it says everything. She has a teacher of writing describe it as recombinant DNA. You start it in a realistic context, and then you alter it, and then you alter it again, so those imaginings ripple out and it can no longer be traced back to reality, really.

Rumpus: And yet there is some connection to reality that you acknowledge.

Albert: A friend whose novel is about to come out – she’s freaked out about ‘what are people going to say?’, what projections are going to be put on her, what people are going to assume about her life – and she said, “Maybe one day we can go through The Book of Dahlia and you can tell me what’s real and what’s not? Did this happen? Did that happen? Like, line-by-line, let’s go through it.” And I’m like, “No!” And this is someone who’s a friend, who knows me.

Rumpus: I guess that’s a burden whether you write fiction or nonfiction. People are going to read it and think, “Oh, is this you? Is this what you think about things?”

Albert: And that’s okay. That’s fine. It was harder at the very beginning. It hasn’t taken that many years for it to just become something funny and odd that happens and I don’t care. It’s not me, it’s not my problem. It has nothing to do with me. It doesn’t affect me. I mean, people who know me, know me. People who don’t know me are going to think or project whatever they want. And it’s not my problem.

Rumpus: My friend Emily Mandel just sort of scoffs at the notion of “write what you know.” She just essentially makes everything up. There’s no clear Emily character in her writing. While I admire that ability and her talent, it doesn’t feel like something I particularly want to do. By the way I have notions that for me the simple solution is to just fictionalize what happened in my life – change names and circumstances. I mean, sometimes I imagine these stories – and I’ve written a few short ones – where there’s a character who is similar to me, but she is better and worse than me, more exaggerated, and she does the things I only think of doing. Sometimes I just think that would be fun. But, doing that, I still run into the same problem of, well, it is rooted in me, and so I am still revealing myself if I write it, and revealing the people around me whose actions made me think and feel things I wanted to write about in the first place.

Albert: Yeah, I think that’s unavoidable. Even if you’re a crime novelist or a science fiction writer or whatever. By definition anything that you can make up is confined by the limits of your perspective. Unless you drop acid before you write, you’re going to have a really hard time having a perspective that’s not yours. You can only imagine as much as you can imagine. You can only empathize as much as you can empathize. That’s the limit of who you are and who you’ve been and where you come from and what you know. That’s not to say that fiction is all autobiographical, because it’s not. I have to be able to relate to the people I’m inventing or writing about – even the ones who don’t get along. It’s what I imagine acting to be. When you see an actor do her thing, you don’t get to know her any better by watching her on stage or watching her in a movie. But you think you do because you’re seeing her interpretation of a hopefully very specific human being. And that does come from somewhere inside her. It’s based on something she knows or feels, and some empathy she’s able to have for the character. So everything comes from the self that way. I don’t really think about it so much when I’m writing, though. I get into a groove and the self dissolves. There is no more me. I am left behind, and I’m in the world of what I’m working on. Ideally, on a good day, I lose myself. That’s what’s fun about it. That’s where the joy and the fun of it is.

Rumpus: It seems like fun. I mean – I’ve sort of gone there at times. I’m tempted to go there again. But I am pretty sure that for me, it would involve mostly material that is really close to my life. I’ve toyed with making things up completely now and then, but it just never had the same appeal resonance for me as working with what really happened, because I think about that so much. But I suppose there are outcomes and attitudes that could be different.

Albert: If we sat down and went line-by-line through Dahlia, I could say, Oh, that did happen to me, oh that happened to a friend of mine, that’s something I heard about, or I always imagined this. I could trace out where it comes from, draw you a convoluted diagram or something. My dad is this really this incredibly nice, tall, Jewish lawyer, like Bruce Finger. But he’s not Bruce Finger. Their biographies are different, the way their roles are played out is different. It’s not the story of my family.

Rumpus: And you are not Dahlia Finger, seeing as you don’t have brain cancer, and you haven’t died.

Albert: But my brother did. He had a brain tumor and died at 29. And that’s totally where this book comes from. But, as I’ve said over and over again, my brother was Dahlia’s opposite. He was a proactive, positive, wonderful guy. He didn’t complain for a minute. He didn’t say fuck life and fuck this and fuck all y’all for a minute. But something sparked in my head when I was a teenager, watching him die. I imagined this alternate universe person in the same situation who was going to handle things really differently. So is it autobiographical? No. But it comes from this completely intense experience. And clearly I thought it was worth telling, because I told it. But the goal was never to illuminate my experience. The goal was not to make myself understood. The goal was to explore what all this shit means, and how people deal, and how they don’t, and what happens in families. My family has something in common with that family.

Rumpus: Did you ever worry as you were going through later drafts, oh, shit, my mother or father are going to see this and not be flattered – or, my brother. I mean, your living brother, you’ve told me that he’s really close to the brother character in the book. So were there any anxieties about that, the same way that someone writing a memoir might…

Albert: There honestly were none. I somehow escaped that particular thing. I think it has something to do with the fact that my parents, being the unique people they are, both feel incredibly guilty for a lot of the things that happened and the way our family played out. They are incredibly loving and supportive. And so the combination of that loving, supportive, “You want to be a writer? God speed,” and the, “Oh my god we fucked up so badly and we know it and we’re so sorry” – combination works out sort of perfectly in that I can say whatever I want. Nobody is going to try to silence me, even passively.

Rumpus: Really? No digs, even?

Albert: My mother will sometimes make a joke. A friend of hers said, after Dahlia came out, “I’m glad she’s not my daughter.”  And I think it hurt her. I think it made her realize other people were reading it with a perspective other than “Isn’t it great that my daughter is doing what she wants to be doing and is having some success at it?” She didn’t speak to that friend for a while, she told me. And I think it’s taken her a while to feel secure and okay. But she doesn’t put that shit on me. She just doesn’t. I’m really blessed that way – both of them are supportive. They’re like, “Congratulations on getting your books published, and how amazing that you’ve emerged as a writer, and way to go, and say whatever you want, however you want to.”

Rumpus: What about your brother?

Albert: Well, my brother is a different story. For a long time, I wasn’t concerned with what he would think or feel because I felt like that relationship had reached its end, and I had sort of given up on him.

Rumpus: Yeah, I noticed in Freud’s Blind Spot, the anthology of essays about siblings you edited, in the intro, you talk about how disappointed you have been with him, and how he’s not been the brother you wanted, and I thought, my sister would kick my ass if I wrote anything even approaching that.

Albert: The blessing and curse with my brother, though, is that it’s so far gone – our estrangement and the travesty of our relationship – that it doesn’t really matter anymore what I say or don’t say. Actually, when I was working on Freud’s Blind Spot, I was in a really different place than when I was writing Dahlia. When I was writing Dahlia, I was like, I don’t fucking care, I will portray this character as extremely as I want. I had reached a point where I was like, I give up, there is no relationship here, I can’t make it different, I have no responsibility to this person. It’s been pretty powerful and upsetting over the years. And I will be loyal to myself. I’m not going to protect someone who’s really hurt me. And now some years have gone by, and I’ve come to an understanding that as much as I still want to be on my own side and validate the little girl I was growing up in a really bad situation, I don’t need to be carrying around a lot of enmity toward him. I have increased empathy toward him as I get older, and I see how he suffers, and how his life has been hard for him. I don’t feel as strongly about him as I used to.

Rumpus: You’re able to have a relationship with him now?

Albert: I’m at the point where I hope I can some day soon be in a room with him and not take a Xanax.

Rumpus: Did your brother read Dahlia?

Albert: I have no idea.

Rumpus: What about your parents – did they see what you wrote about the brother character and feel protective of your brother?

Albert: Not that I know of.

Rumpus: Do you think your parents would consider adopting me? I run such a high risk with my parents. Not just of losing them, but of hurting them. I so envy that support you have.

Albert: You know, I don’t think it’s your job. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a sociopath, but if you’re not doing what you want to be doing, not saying what you want to be saying, at some point you’re harming yourself to avoid harming them. That looming threat of what they would do or how they would react is not right.

And in some alternate parallel universe where you write whatever the fuck you want to write and publish it and fulfill whatever goals for whatever it is you want to say, I bet they’d initially be upset, but then they’d get over it.

Rumpus: Well, I often think about creating this character who writes whatever the fuck she wants to write – an alternate parallel universe me. You know, I wrote and have been be performing this monologue about how I used to cut class in high school to go home and sing by myself, and then I got caught by my annoying step brother when I was belting at the top of my lungs. Some of the people who have seen it, have said, “I love the way you go and become your teenage self again in the piece,” and I’ve since realized that I’m actually not being my teenage self – I’m being who I wished I’d had the guts to be then. The me in the monologue is sassy and outspoken. The me in real life was so timid, I was whispering my feelings into a tape recorder hidden in my closet. I whispered my upset and angry feelings over the bat mitzvah tape my dad made for me to study with, and I had the humiliating experience of having to ask him to do it again for me. But anyway, this brings me back to the acting analogy you made. As a kid, I was really shy, but if I was acting on stage, in a role, I could not be shy, because I was expressing emotions I was familiar with, but through somebody else.

Albert: Right. It gives you a veil. You don’t have to stand naked in front of an audience. You can inhabit somebody else and channel yourself through that.

Rumpus: I’m sort of doing that in the monologue. Even though the events in the monologue are real, it’s a fictional version of me. It’s been a fun departure for me. I think that’s part of why I wanted to switch gears and interview someone who writes fiction that is personal, who has at the root a character based on who you are, but goes a million other places with it.

Albert: Well, that’s exactly it. I don’t think I ever write about who I am. I don’t think I’m capable of that. I think I write about someone I wish I was, or someone I fear being, or some other tweak. Somebody who can actually see who they are and communicate that in a clear-eyed way? That’s a very rare and special skill, and I don’t have it. When I try to write personal essays, they usually are, I think, total failures. And even if I don’t think they’re failures immediately, six months or a year later I look back and think, “That’s a total load of shit.”  That’s why I’m a fiction writer. I can’t write unless I’m inhabiting a role, and I am bringing myself to bear in how I interpret that role. I mean, if you have a magnifying glass, you can suss out things about me. If you’re a Jungian psychologist, you can probably make statements about who I might be, if you read everything I’ve ever written, tease me out. But that’s not my goal. I’m not trying to write about myself or illuminate myself. I’m trying to understand things that confuse me, I’m trying to answer questions for myself. A book is like a conversation I’m having with myself. And when that conversation is over, the book is done. The assumption is that if these are big questions for me, if they’re things that I’m trying to work out, then they are important because my perspective matters, and my humanity matters. I don’t, for some reason, often fall prey to the idea of “Oh, what I have to say doesn’t really matter. What do I know? Who cares about what I think?”

Rumpus: Well, yeah. The personal is universal. Like, if it matters to you, somebody else is going to relate to it.

Albert: People misunderstand that sometimes. They think it means that your experience is going to be meaningful to everybody, but that’s not what it means. It means that the things that vex you and challenge you and disappoint you about life itself are probably meaningful to others.

Rumpus: You know, I hate to say this, but I haven’t read a memoir I’ve loved in a little while. I’m feeling a little burnt on the genre. Maybe it’s because that’s what I mostly read. I want to be mistaken for getting on the anti-memoir bandwagon. I still generally love them. And maybe that is what I’m writing. Again, don’t hold me to any of this. I will continue to dither – trust me. I mean, I’m writing. I just am not sure what it is.

Albert: Well, that actually has its place. It’s part of the work.

Rumpus: Switching gears, does anybody ever come to you and say, “I see myself in your book, and I don’t like the way you’ve portrayed me”?

Albert: No, never. People assume they know me, though. That happens all the time.

Rumpus: That has to be very annoying.

Albert: It used to be scary and kind of sinister and threatening and creepy. It used to really creep me out, and confuse me. Because then I felt like, “Am I that person?” I’m 32 and I can’t tell you exactly who I am. I hope I’m still evolving and changing, and I don’t have very set ideas about who I am. As I get older they feel less set.

But when people assume I’m one of my characters, and react strongly against my fiction, it feels like they’re reacting against me.  People have really strong feelings about Dahlia, like, “I don’t want to read about some horrible, lazy, no-good, complainer who doesn’t deserve to live.” It’s like, whoa, who are you talking about? I’ve definitely had my moments of confronting that stuff and being like, maybe I am a lazy, no-good, fucked up complainer. It’s a weird mind fuck. And I’ve had it happen many times that someone comes up to me and says, “You’re much nicer than I thought you would be.” It’s interesting. At this point, I just say,  “Oh, cool, I’m glad.” I think I’m somewhat okay.

But, you know, I’m really not interested in reading or writing about noble people. I think that’s such a load of bullshit.

Rumpus: Yeah, me either. When I did some graduate school, I was in this short story workshop with Deborah Eisenberg, and there was this stupid guy in the class who responded to one of my stories by saying something like, “I don’t like these characters; I’d never be friends with people like this,” and I thought, how sad for you! That is so not the point of writing fiction or anything. I’m not at all interested in reading about noble characters. I want to read about people with flaws.

Albert: The things that are good in life, the things that work as they should, and the relationships that fulfill what they’re meant to, hallelujah. Thank god for that in life. That’s precious. But now let’s talk about the shit that needs talking about! I don’t see the point of looking at things that are great and noble and perfect and as they should be. Maybe in the acknowledgments. But I’m not going to spending three years of my life sort of masturbating to everything that’s as it should be.

Rumpus: I think that’s one of the things that’s so risky for me, whether I write fiction or non-fiction. It’s revealing my fascination with those sorts of flaws, which might indicate that I have some of those flaws.

Albert: No! Really?

Rumpus: I really do. Yes, I do in fact have flaws. But in my family, I’m the good daughter. I’m also a clergyman’s daughter, so people often assume impose upon me this beatific aura, and assume that I LOVE synagogue, too.

Albert: Because clergy are such exemplary people.

Rumpus: So it’s a coming out for me, no matter what I write. I’m admitting I cast a jaundiced eye on a thing or two. I need to find my balls about that, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction.

Albert: I don’t think it really matters. Right now I’m writing a first-person novel that I hope will read like a memoir. I want it to feel like you are inside this person’s head, and in this person’s life, experiencing everything that she is experiencing. I think a really high-quality first-person novel can read like an incredible memoir. Not because it’s autobiographical, or because anything in it really happened, but because of a completely un-self-conscious, raw disclosure.

But in any genre, if you’re true to your own vision there are going to be people you alienate. You can’t please everybody. Pleasing somebody can’t be the goal, either. The only person you can guarantee satisfying is yourself, in creating whatever it is you want to create. That’s why I really do see it as a conversation with myself – not in a navel gazing kind of way, I hope. If I’m entertaining myself, if I’m having fun, if I’m in it, I’ve lost myself in it, then I can feel good about that day’s work. If I’m trying to please god knows who, then I’m wasting my time and there’s no point to any of it. If I’m writing to please an editor or my mother, or some woman I met at a reading, it’s a waste.

Rumpus: So you divorce yourself from all commercial concerns?

Albert: I do. That was how I was educated. That’s how I came up through this stuff and started as a reader. My coming of age as a writer has nothing to do with, like, bestseller-dom. It’s about fidelity to some truth or vision that I want to give voice to. It all sounds very idealistic, but that’s it. I’d rather not write anymore than have to write something so that somebody can like it. There are so many things I want to do with my life before I turn writing into that kind of thing. It’s a freedom. It’s the fulfillment of a kind of personal freedom. It’s why I’m a happier person when I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m not as happy, and I’m not as pleasant to be around.

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In his essay, Genzlinger reviewed four memoirs, and only one of them – An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan – favorably. He was brutal in his criticism of the others, making arguments against them that frankly made no sense to me. They were too much about the authors and not enough about the others in their stories; they were too painful and sad; the authors hadn’t earned “the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience.”

He started off by asserting that former Salon television critic Heather Havrilesky’s memoir in essays, Disaster Preparedness, treaded on subjects too mundane: “cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity.”

But his description of Havrilesky’s book – in addition to my familiarity with her clever, witty writing – actually piqued my interest in it. Not only do I sit squarely in Havrilesky’s demographic, I also happen to enjoy collections of essays with an arc, the kind where the author hasn’t necessarily survived some remarkably terrible or even wonderful experience, but is instead just really adept at interpreting common experiences in a way that gives you new perspective on your own.

I wasn’t surprised to find that I enjoyed Havrilesky’s book and really related to it. There is so much overlap in our stories, I should probably hate her for beating me to the finish line by miles – thousands of them. But instead, I’ve decided to believe that, contrary to Genzlinger’s argument, there’s room for yet another perspective on your parents’ clumsy divorce in the 70s, your consuming control drama with a boyfriend in your twenties, and other fairly common misadventures. Besides, Havrilesky was super cool – funny, genuine, encouraging – when I reached her at home in LA by phone, so hating was out of the question.

***

The Rumpus: I’ve read other interviews in which you’ve sort of said that karmically speaking, you had Genzlinger’s take-down coming, because you are “an asshole by profession.” Meaning, you work as a critic. I know you focus mostly on television and film, but do you also review books?

Heather Havrilesky: I have, for Book Forum, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and I just recently reviewed Freedom for Salon.  I love to review books, although it’s hard to weave that in when you have to watch forty hours of television a week and see movies and all that stuff.

Rumpus: I have been wondering whether Neil Genzlinger’s review has had any impact on how you feel about criticism, or if it might change the way you review books?

Havrilesky: The piece that he wrote is a very recognizable piece to me because I’ve written a lot of stuff like it for different places. Salon was always interested strong statements, finding some way to weave together this and that, or asking “Is this a new trend? And if so, does it deserve to be blown out of the water?” Memoirs certainly aren’t a new trend, but if you read a few bad ones, the category becomes a pretty easy sitting duck, easy to blow out of the water.

Rumpus: I think memoirs – and the typically sensitive memoirists who write them – are easy targets, especially for people who are uncomfortable with the kind of raw emotional material and personal revelations they often contain.

Havrilesky: Yeah, maybe. I read people’s comments about that piece, and I’m reminded of the comments about a lot of pieces that I’ve written. People tend to think that you’re crossing a line if you seem like you’re not being fair. The thing you always want to avoid is giving the impression that you went into an experience of some genre, whether it’s movies, television, books or anything, with a preconceived notion of what you were going to find there.  But it’s really hard to avoid, too. I have a lot of sympathy for that. When you’re reading something through the lens of “most memoirs are worthless,” it’s pretty hard to enjoy a memoir. There are memoirs that he could have read that may have overcome that for him. But mostly I’m sympathetic to that assignment. I mean, I’ve written it a million times, so I don’t really have a big beef with him or the style he used to trash the stuff he trashed. It would totally be hypocritical of me to criticize that, because I absolutely write the same kind of thing, and people have often called me harsh on a lot of different fronts. I’m the last person in the world to call someone harsh, because that’s a reviewer.

That said, I really try hard to challenge myself to keep an open mind to the things that I’m reviewing and appreciate them for what they are. I just reviewed “Just Go With It.”  It’s a Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler vehicle and it wasn’t the greatest movie in the world, but it wasn’t a huge disappointment either. Jennifer Aniston plays Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler plays Adam Sandler ­– there are no surprises as far as that goes. But if I didn’t mention that someone gives a sheep the Heimlich maneuver and it’s kind of funny, I would feel a little guilty. If you appreciate something, you have to find a way to weave that in. And if you’re writing a piece that doesn’t have any room for that, but still calls itself a review, then that’s really messed up.  But I don’t think that that piece was necessarily a review of those books. It was sort of packaged like that, but I think it was more of an essay.

Rumpus: One of my problems with it is a fear that it will fuel an anti-memoir backlash, and at a time when I just might be ready to finally write my own. Actually, a couple of weeks ago, I met with an agent about a potential ghostwriting project, and she said something to the effect of, “Well, you can’t make it too memoir-y. You did see that piece in the New York Times Book Review, didn’t you?” And I wanted to pull all of my hair out, right there in front of her. Although, at least one person has told me that agents and editors aren’t taking the piece too seriously.

Havrilesky: I don’t know. I would be surprised if people are really taking that essay incredibly seriously and they’re going to guide their ships by it. That would seem a little ludicrous to me. But I think it’s a perfectly good piece of criticism, or not a piece of criticism, but a perfectly good essay.

Rumpus: Really?? I mean, I saw you put this really gracious comment on the piece online, but…really?

Havrilesky: Yes. And the thing is, if I’m telling you it’s not that big of a deal to me – and he was like fucking cutting my throat out on the page – then that should be really encouraging, right?

Rumpus: Well, I want it to be… By the way, it occurred to me that Genzlinger was not the audience for your book, or that type of book, whereas I am. I feel like he would have given a similar review to Traveling Mercies, or The Boys of My Youth, or My Misspent Youth, or Beg, Borrow, Steal, which are all books of essays that I’ve loved.

Havrilesky: I feel like The Boys of My Youth is such a gender-neutral book. It’s strange because you sort of aspire to achieve that. Like, I’m gonna write the most literary gender-neutral thing in the universe and it’s gonna be really respected. But then you read things that are really feminine. Like Anne Lamott is such a feminine writer. She has almost a liberated Adrienne Rich view of what she’s creating.  She’s creating in her most authentic voice exactly what she would enjoy reading.  I’ve thought a lot about that and decided that just because cheerleading is a gendered subject doesn’t mean that it’s not the most hilarious fucking topic in the universe.  I read a lot of Anne Lamott while I was writing my book and it really inspired me to just find my very specific voice and just fuck the critics, fuck the anticipated scoffing that would come from that, because if you can’t get into your connection to your story, you’re gonna tell a shitty story. You have to connect to it.  The way that she connects the reader to her experience is just fantastic.

Rumpus: You know, I really wrestle with that. First of all, I’ll say that any time I write an essay about something I deeply connect to, I have no problem selling it, and once I do, I hear from lots of people about it, mostly women. If I try to write an essay based on what I think is a relevant topic, it’s almost always a fail. But I’ve gotten some really nice, encouraging responses over the years, and they make me feel like, Yeah, I can and should do this. But I alternately chide myself, in a very Genzlinger-esque voice, saying, Really, don’t trouble yourself to do this, because no one is dying to know what it’s like to be a perpetually ambivalent, spiritually confused, childless, 45-year-old daughter of a clergyman who left New York City for the boondocks. The world will go on just fine without your perspective.

Havrilesky: But you know that’s bullshit. Because, yeah, sure it’ll go on. But it sounds like, based on your past experience, you will find a way to write your thing in a unique way that people can connect to you, and that makes it worth doing.

Rumpus: Well, first I have to get over the fear of upsetting other people, like my parents, my father in particular.

Havrilesky: Can you kill him?

Rumpus: Believe me, you are not the first person to ask that. I recently heard Terry Gross interview singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell on Fresh Air, and he said part of what made writing his memoir, Chinaberry Sidewalks, easy, was that his parents are dead. Your father is deceased, but your mother – how has she handled the book?

Havrilesky: I had my mom read the book over and over again because a lot of the stuff is about her and her crappy marriage. I have obviously had some complaints about her – the mistakes that she made.  I realize this is every mother’s worst nightmare, so I totally have compassion for her.  I have said to her, “You know people are going to come out and say to you, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you moved out on your kids when you got divorced.’” She’s gotten these random phone calls about it, and she’s now got to answer to this kind of thing. She’s been really kind to me about it even though it’s not the easiest thing for her.  It’s not that she’s so private or that she doesn’t tell people all kinds of stories openly. She’s a very good storyteller and has been completely open about the things that she’s been through. But there are times when I felt really guilty for having put her through that.

Rumpus: Did you give her the opportunity to nix it?

Havrilesky: Not to nix the whole thing. I mean I don’t think that she ever even would have dreamt of nixing the whole thing.  She really liked it. I sent her the first chapter about her and my dad fighting, and she was comfortable with it. And then I sent her the next chapter and the next. I asked her – especially in writing the chapter about her and her friends – a lot of questions about, “Can I say this? Can I say that?”  And the lawyer has you change details about people so that no one can trace who they are.

Rumpus: So, she’s largely on board with how it came out?

Havrilesky: Oh, yeah. But you know, in hindsight, if I wrote the whole book again, I think I just would have written about some of that stuff a little differently.  Like when I was writing about her moving out of the house when my parents got divorced – although that chapter actually is from the perspective of me then mostly, so that really wouldn’t change. I mean the thing is I was crawling into how I felt about it then, and how I felt about it was the world was ending. So I didn’t want to back away from that.  It’s not an exercise of self-pity. The point of that chapter is to explore what that felt like to a kid. The lesson of that chapter is not that my mom did the wrong thing, or that parents should never get divorced. My parents needed to get divorced. And she really did a smart and courageous thing in divorcing him. She didn’t have any kind of career. It was hard for everyone and it was really fucking hard for her, too. She got some advice from a priest who told her she should move out for the summer. She thought that that would be the best transition, even though for me it was terrible.  But it was the 70s and she was young and confused and dealing. She was staring down the barrel of having a minimum wage job and supporting three kids on minimal child support. She was under severe fucking duress!

Rumpus: I related to so much of what you wrote about your parents. Your portrayal of them as they were divorcing brought me right back to my dorky parents suddenly morphing into these disco ducks with permed hair in Sassoons and satin jackets.

Havrilesky: My dad did that.

Rumpus: Speaking of your dad, how do you think he’d feel about the way you portrayed him – this sort of irresponsible, womanizing charmer?

Havrilesky: You know, I left out details about my dad. There were details that if I put them in, they would have been too prejudicial, and people couldn’t experience him as a rational human being. I mean, he doesn’t seem that rational anyway.

Rumpus: I had compassion for him. I saw him as just this flawed human being. Do you think you’d write about him the same way if he were alive?

Havrilesky: That would have been challenging. I’m not sure how I would write about my dad if he were alive. It would be interesting to know how he’d handle it. I kind of think he’d sort of enjoy it.  He would probably make corrections to certain things or say, “You can’t say this or that.” But he never really shied away from the spotlight, so I don’t think he would find that much he didn’t like. With my mom, for sure it was a struggle. You just have to be really up front about the fact that you’re not trying to write to hurt someone. I was writing about them from a child’s perspective. I think the more you access that, the more you realize how unrealistic we are about parents. My father was a fucking human being in my life.  He did a lot of great things for me as a parent, but he also did a lot of disappointing things because he was a fucking human being, and that’s what human beings do. In hindsight, I was really fortunate to have the dad I did, because he made such a great character. He was such a rich source of material. I am very thankful to him for that.

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Despite that daunting experience, Flynn went on to courageously explore his relationship with his alcoholic, bank-robbing, homeless father in his 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (about to be made into a movie with Robert De Niro and Paul Dano), and to then plumb the depths of his own dark instincts in the age of Abu Ghraib on the eve of his daughter’s birth, in last year’s The Ticking Is The Bomb.

In the first book, Flynn manages to portray his seriously damaged father lovingly, despite sharing details of the elder Flynn’s gross negligence as a parent, his glaring audacity, and his apparent inability to care about anyone but himself. Flynn is able to reveal his late mother, too, as both deeply flawed and sympathetic.

In the second memoir, Flynn ups the ante, questioning his own nature while also considering the human inclination toward torture. In his quest to understand both, he travels to Istanbul to interview former Abu Ghraib detainees, all the while weighing his fear of bringing a child into a world where governments sanction waterboarding and other horrors. That and his personal struggles with sobriety and commitment as he juggles two girlfriends.

Flynn and I discussed his approach to writing the memoirs—as well as the advantages of having Protestant parents—over coffee in the West Village.

***

The Rumpus: Is your dad still around, living in a nursing home?

Nick Flynn: Yeah. I drove to Boston and saw him last week, just before the last day of the year. I give him a copy of Another Bullshit Night every time I see him, and every time it’s like he’s never seen it before.

Rumpus: He really doesn’t remember? Or it’s too hard for him to acknowledge?

Flynn: I don’t know if it’s Alzheimer’s. It’s probably more like alcohol-induced dementia of some sort—wet brain. But his short-term memory is shot. Yet he still remembers all the stories from his life that he likes to tell, which is kind of consistent with Alzheimer’s, although the progression is not.

Rumpus: Did you have any sense that you were betraying your father in any way in writing about him? I mean, especially because he seems so mentally feeble.

Flynn: He wasn’t so feeble when I started the book, and he certainly wasn’t when he showed up at the shelter. He was just drunk, which I guess may be a contradiction. But, yeah, to end up as a homeless street alcoholic is a position you certainly don’t want to have exploited. But I was really careful about it. I felt I was very careful in the writing of it. That’s probably why I have a relationship with him now. Because I did take a long time to write the book, and part of that was to get to know him and to understand him and find out how he ended up where he did. Not to say I succeeded, because I have no idea how he did where he did, beyond to say he’s an alcoholic and that happens to alcoholics. Would he have ended up in the street if he wasn’t an alcoholic? I doubt it.

Rumpus: Yeah, it’s delicate material, and he’s a fragile subject.

Flynn: That’s one thing about writing a memoir about someone who is more damaged. You have to be careful with everyone, but especially someone like that. I mean, it’s not like he’s going to attack me. It’s just, karmically, it’s not a good thing to do to attack someone who’s vulnerable like that. In general I think to write toward compassion is more interesting than to grind an axe. What you’re writing should be more about yourself anyway. It’s more about revealing something about yourself. At a certain point, you’re just projecting onto your parents, anyway.

Rumpus: You know, in some of the stories you tell earlier on in the book, it sounds as if it’s more than alcoholism.

Flynn: Yeah, some kind of narcissistic disorder or something. Although, that’s also consistent with alcoholism. But that’s the thing: he never unplugged from the alcohol his whole life, so it’s hard to diagnose him.

Rumpus: I feel as if I’ve been compassionate toward my father in whatever writing about him I’ve published. People who know us both have mostly agreed. But it’s still not flattering to read certain things about yourself, even if the writer has been compassionate. Were you concerned about your father being hurt by your portrayal of him in any way?

Flynn: Well, I think I was presenting myself in that book, and especially in the next book, in not the most flattering way either. I think you have to be at least as hard on yourself as you are on whoever the bad guy is. That’s one of the rules. There’s a reason why whatever that bad guy is doing can affect you so deeply. I mean, if you were some sort of flawless individual, no one could touch you. There’s nothing that anyone could do to disturb your equilibrium. All they do is reveal some weakness in yourself that you need to work on. At least that’s true as far as I can tell. I just know that the times that I’ve been centered in my life, people could come at me with anything, and I’ve been just like, “oh, interesting.” The like two times in my life that I’ve been really centered. Someone might have said, “You’re not a trustworthy person,” and I would have responded, “Oh, I’m sorry. It must be hard for you to feel that. Because I know I’m trustworthy.” I have felt that before. It’s really so much about projection and what you’re carrying.

Rumpus: So in the moments when your father has been aware of Another Bullshit Night, what has he thought about it? What has he said?

Flynn: When I went and saw him this last time, I brought him the new book, The Ticking Is the Bomb, and a new book of poems that’s coming out. It took a while for him to sort of just land again after I gave them to him. He was just wildly impressed at the act of having written a book. He was looking at them as objects. He used to be more guarded about it. It was if he felt competitive and didn’t want me to know he was impressed. But now he’s more childlike, and he’ll say things like, “Wow, how did you do this?”

Rumpus: In the book, when you show him your first published book of poems, he seems sort of threatened and incredulous that his son did what he hadn’t been able to do, but also, like he genuinely wants to know how you did it.

Flynn: Yeah, but these days it’s all that child-like wonder of “How did you do it.” The ratio has changed. Where before it was mostly like, “Well, of course you write—you get it all from me,” now it’s more like, just really wanting to know.

Rumpus: You write about your father going on about these writings that he has, and wondering whether they really exist. And then you find his manuscript. Is it something you think you could do something with?

Flynn: Well, I put the first thirty pages of it up on my website. It’s there if anyone is interested. Go ahead and publish it!

Rumpus: That part of the story reminded me of Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell, the story of a homeless man with all these brilliant stories he supposedly wrote, but no one could find.

Flynn: Yeah, I can see why it would remind you of that. By the way, supposedly that’s a total pastiche of several characters. There is no one Joe Gould. I just heard someone on the radio criticize him for that. But who cares? It was written at a different time.

Rumpus: Yeah, then there was not the furor over journalistic accuracy in memoir. Related to that, in Another Bullshit Night you say that your mother found your notebook, and in it there was a “story” about a woman very much like her. So, were you writing fiction at that time, or fictionalizing as a way to protect people close to you, like your mother?

Flynn: Yeah, I was writing fiction. I started out writing that way. I am a fan of fiction.

Rumpus: Do you still write fiction?

Flynn: No, not really. Although, that said, I have written a play, and there are fictional characters in it. There’s a fictional story I wrote that Stephen Elliott published in Sex For America. So I’ve written some fiction, although I generally don’t write much of it. I don’t think of myself as a fiction writer. That actually terrifies me.

Rumpus: I’ve often considered fictionalizing my story to protect people, instead of writing it as memoir, but something about it just doesn’t feel right for me. It would just feel too false. Is that something you were trying to do back when you wrote the “story” about a “woman” like your mom?

Flynn: Oh, back then? That was when I was like twenty. I don’t think I had any idea of what I was doing. It was clearly based on my mother. I don’t think I had a sense of any kind of genre. I was reading fiction, and that was what you did. Naturalistic fiction loosely based on fact.

Rumpus: So there was no sense of protecting your mother as you were writing it?

Flynn: I can’t really remember my intentions. I think I knew as I wrote it that it wasn’t something I wanted her to read. I don’t want anyone to read any of my notebooks. It’s just that they haven’t been integrated or processed enough. It needs to go through a whole integration system. I think it was clear to me it just wasn’t something for her to read. You want to be able to control when people read what you write in some way.

Rumpus: Oh, definitely. It would be nice to be able to control people’s reactions to it, too.

Flynn: But a book also has to have a kind of energy that is out of your control. It’s funny, people will say to me, “It must be strange for you that I know so much about you,” but, you know, I wrote the book. (Laughs.) It is crafted in a sense, and there are levels you get to where you’re over your head, and then it comes back again. It gives a tension to the book, which you need, especially in nonfiction. I mean, you can’t know everything about yourself. So you get to the edge of that and go back and forth, and that is sort of what makes it shimmer. But then you release the book, and there’s sometimes a level of discomfort about that, and you think it’s going to kill you.

Rumpus: So, is any of that discomfort still there for you? About revealing so much about yourself, including some not-so-flattering aspects?

Flynn: No, not really. My wife, she’s very helpful. We got together when this book was coming out. She said, people project onto her all the time what they want to see, because she’s an actress. And she said, “It’s all projection.” Everybody has a father, everybody had a complicated relationship with their father, and they want to tell you about their father. It’s totally fine. At first it was uncomfortable but then after about a month or so, I realized, people’s reactions have nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me. It’s a great thing, actually. There’s this experience that people either need or want to have, and they project it onto you. And they can see themselves in you. You sort of dissolve.

Rumpus: For me, that’s part of the value of memoir. The memoirist provides something that allows people to make sense of their own experiences.

Flynn: Yeah, I think so. Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it’s purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it’s going to fail. Although that would work for like a rock-and-roll memoir, where you just want to know all the juicy details. Not to say all rock-and-roll memoirs are like that. There are some great ones. Have you read Kristin Hersh’s?

Rumpus: Oh, yeah. I loved it.

Flynn: Yeah, it’s great. How’d she know how to write like that?

Rumpus: Patti Smith’s memoir is great, too. I loved it.

Flynn: Yeah, I loved it, too. The Ticking is the Bomb came out the same week as Just Kids, and everywhere I went, she was following me. I went to LA, and she was in LA giving a free concert. When I went to San Francisco, she was there, too. And I’d go to a store to do a book signing, and there’d be five of my books on the counter, and there’d just be like a U-Haul out front filled with her books, and they’d be wheeling them in. I didn’t know whether she’d already signed all of them, or she was coming in to sign them, but I just couldn’t keep up with her. But she’s great.

Rumpus: Back to the perils of writing memoir—so, what happened with your mother didn’t put you off writing memoir forever?

Flynn: Oh, no, it did. I didn’t write after that episode, after she died, I didn’t write for years. I didn’t start my first memoir until almost twenty years after she died. It stopped me from writing for a long time.

Rumpus: For how long?

Flynn: Definitely through most of my twenties. But I was also drinking then. I don’t really know what to blame it on. You can’t really say it was one thing or another. I mean, if she hadn’t read it, would I have written sooner? If she hadn’t read it, would I have been drinking then? I probably would have been drinking anyway. I had some drinking to do! We were all “alkies” in Scituate, Massachusetts. Everyone I knew. We called ourselves that. Every time you would see someone, they’d say, “You’re an alkie.”

Rumpus: When you sat down to write it, did you know it was going to be a memoir?

Flynn: Nah. It came out in these sort of episodic moments, like the moments in the shelter that I remembered. Those were the first pieces that came, just sort of going back to that time in the shelter when my father appeared.

Rumpus: Where were you in your life when you started it?

Flynn: Well, I had just finished two years of videotaping my mother’s boyfriends, and then started to focus on my father. I made this one twenty-minute documentary with interviews of ten of my mother’s boyfriends. I just asked them two questions: how they met my mother, and how they found out how she had died. And then they would talk. So, my father was one of them. And he wouldn’t answer the questions. He would just sort of ramble on about all these other things. The first time I asked him, he went on for like half and hour about how to rob banks—like giving me his advice on how to rob banks.

Rumpus: That’s actually kind of great.

Flynn: At the time, though, I was just so annoyed with him. I just thought, This is such bullshit. But that actually became a second movie, called “How To Rob A Bank.” I came around to realizing it was actually great. I screened the first movie at The Kitchen, and people who saw it were like, “Who is that guy?” He’s like the star of it. The camera loves him. He’s a real performer. All the other boyfriends would just be sitting there answering these questions, but my father would like lean into the camera and whisper and look around.

Rumpus: What a great character he is. No wonder you wanted to write a book about him.

Flynn: When you make a movie, you’re with someone a long time, and then you’re with them more as you’re cutting the film and trying to line things up with the soundtrack. So he was really in me, and then I just started writing. First there were some of the stories he gave on the video, and then other stuff just came. At a certain point it became clear that I wanted to write this, and that I wanted it to be nonfiction. I find a great tension in non-fiction. It naturally has a great tension to it. It’s this thing that happened that you try to represent accurately in the writing, but then there’s your perception of what happened. And that creates a whole tension between the two. You’re always navigating between them.

It seemed important, too, to write about my father as being homeless. I had written about him in poetry. In the first book of poems, I wrote about having a homeless father, and people kind of read it as an archetype or a metaphor for “the homeless father.” And they’d ask me, “How did you come up with that archetype of the homeless father?” I was really annoyed by it. I wanted to do a book where people couldn’t say that, or would have a harder time saying that.

Rumpus: What generally is your philosophy about writing about other people? And how do you handle it? Do you tell people in advance? Do you give them pieces to read before publication?

Flynn: I don’t really tell people in advance, at least not before the final draft. I don’t do it unless I need to, and I don’t usually feel I do. I haven’t gotten in much trouble with the books. Another Bullshit Night is mostly about me and my father. I got a release from him. He knew I was writing the book.

Rumpus: Really? You had to do that?

Flynn: Yeah. I had to have him sign legal papers. He had to agree that it was okay.

Rumpus: Wait – you have to do that when writing a memoir? I haven’t ever heard about that. I mean, if I write about things that have happened with people in my family, am I going to have to get releases from them?

Flynn: You know, I might be mixing it up with the films. I know I had to have him sign things for the films. Maybe he didn’t have to sign anything for the books.

Rumpus: Whew.

Flynn: But the New Yorker excerpted the book, and they called everybody, even the minor characters, and checked with them.

Rumpus: Yeah, that’s different. That’s a journalistic publication. Do you change people’s names?

Flynn: I say that I change people’s names, but I really don’t. (Laughs.)

Rumpus: Throws the lawyers off?

Flynn: Yeah, it throws Norton’s lawyers off. Unpleasant people. So you just tell them what you think they want to hear. I mean, I changed the names of most of the homeless people because I didn’t know them. And friends of mine—Norton got me to change names for some of them. Like in once scene I’m smoking a joint with someone and the lawyers were like, “You’ve got to change that name,” and I was like, “Seriously? That person doesn’t give a fuck.”

Rumpus: But you changed your wife’s name.

Flynn: Yeah, my wife and my child’s name. I did that for myself.

Rumpus: Even though everyone knows who you’re married to?

Flynn: But I couldn’t write it with her real name. When I’d put her real name in, I’d just stop writing. It was just a trick for myself. It just went faster that way. And at the end, it just somehow made sense to keep those names.

Rumpus: I thought that was funny, because it’s not as if you hide who you are married to. So how was Lili with what you wrote in The Ticking Is the Bomb? And how were Anna and Emily with all you revealed about your relationships with them in both books? Did you get any flack?

Flynn: The Emily character, who is in the first book—we are still dear, dear friends. I actually showed her the chapters with things about her family before the book came out, which was unusual. I mean, I didn’t even show it to my brother before it came out. When it did come out, he read it and then was like, “There are four things you got wrong: this, this, this and this.” Then we talked about it all for a half hour, and he was fine. I explained to him why I made the choices I did, but said I respected his version of how things happened. And he hasn’t brought it up since, so he seems cool with it.

Rumpus: Well that’s good.

Flynn: But the Emily character—it’s funny, you just don’t know what people are going to get upset about. I mean, I have her dropping acid, and she didn’t care about that, but she was concerned that her father needed to be represented as a French Canadian Catholic. She said, “That’s a really important part of who he is.” I was amazed. It has nothing to do with the book! Nothing. But it was really important to her, so I made that change for her. It was pretty funny. That’s what she cared about. I have no idea why.

Rumpus: What about Anna and Lili—was it hard for them to read about you trying to choose between the two of them, and being in relationships with them both at the same time?

Flynn: Well, I’m not in touch with Anna.

Rumpus: Right, you say in The Ticking Is The Bomb that you never heard from her again.

Flynn: And I have no idea if she’s read the book or not. And, Lili was there the whole time. It wasn’t like it was a big secret.

Rumpus: I mean, you revealed things that another person might think and not share. Like that you were in love with her and someone else at the same time.

Flynn: Well, we got married a year ago. She agreed to get married, so nothing bad came from it. I just think, a lot of that stuff is not really about her. It’s about my inner turmoil, and I think I have a right to that, as a writer. I don’t think that it’s a big secret to her. Maybe the particulars are, but the idea that people close to us struggle—hopefully you know that, or you shouldn’t be with that person. Besides, the particulars of it don’t matter really. It’s just all madness. I tried to represent my own madness as accurately as possible. So, that was my job to do that. Was there a risk in that with her? I think I knew that she’s a very centered person. I think of her as one of the sanest people I know. In that I mean, she has her own madness and she’s aware of that, but she doesn’t project it wildly onto the world. Which is usually the main problem with people. They don’t own it, their own madness. So, I think we have a real adult relationship in that way. We both sort of recognize our own struggles and try to work through them as best we can. But if you read The Ticking Is The Bomb, what do you learn about Lili, or “Inez” as I call her? Nothing really. I don’t really reveal anything about her.

Rumpus: Yeah, but there is some difficult stuff about how you were feeling. Like, at one point you thought, “Well, whoever gets pregnant first is who I’ll have a child and settle down with.”

Flynn: That was the bottom of my madness. That was supposed to represent how bad it can get.

Rumpus: I mean, I know if I was one of those women, I would have had a hard time reading that, and still like you.

Flynn: Oh, yeah, no—I don’t come off well at all in that book. And that was my intention in writing the book, as much as one can control something like that. In the first book, it’s easy to have a great deal of sympathy for me. I am a blameless victim. What did I do wrong? I have a bad father. But in the second book, I’m an adult making choices, and the choices are messy. The whole book is about darker impulses, and about the country making unbelievably dark choices. I mean, my dark choices are nothing in comparison to what was going on in the world. But if you just sort of sit there and say, “I don’t have any dark impulses. What are these bad soldiers doing to people?” it’s bullshit. The book is about all of us having these impulses. Every other book I’d read about war and torture was like, us and them. Like, “Bad soldiers. How could they do this?” But it’s more like, “How could you not do it?” We’re doing this kind of thing all the time.

Rumpus: So you were exploring your own darkness.

Flynn: Yes. I’m just part of the whole mix. It felt much more egoless to do that. We’re all part of this, we’re all in this.

Rumpus: To me, that’s a more challenging aspect of memoir writing than revealing other people—being honest about your human flaws. When I have revealed even little bits of those kinds of things about myself in pieces I publish, I get all kinds of concern and anger.

Flynn: From other people?

Rumpus: Mostly from my parents. And it just totally shuts me down. I suffer from a crippling combination of Nice Jewish Girl Syndrome, and Clergyman’s Daughter Syndrome. And I’m 45. It’s ridiculous.

Flynn: You know what you need?

Rumpus: No! Please tell me!

Flynn: You need to get yourself some Protestant parents.

Rumpus: That’s what I need?

Flynn: Seriously, if you don’t have a lot of WASPs in your family, you shouldn’t write memoir. Because everyone else—Jews, Catholics—they’ll be all over you. But WASPs don’t say fucking anything! You can pretty much write whatever you want, and they won’t say a word. All they’ll do is go and have a drink. I’m sorry—it’s unfortunate. But if you don’t want to be affected by it, you shouldn’t be Jewish.

Rumpus: I’ll have to try that. But, you know, my hope is that I can write about things that have happened in my family, and still have them in my life. A lot of people I’ve interviewed have lost their relationships with their families over what they’ve written, and I don’t want that to happen. You haven’t had to deal with that.

Flynn: Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about that from other writers, but I haven’t had that problem. I’m really serious about it: you should be Protestant. Because parents of other religions—like Catholics—they will not forgive you! They will not talk to you. No, but seriously. You should be allowed to tell the truth. And if you talk more about yourself, and are harsher on yourself than on anyone else, that helps. But parents are tricky. I got lucky—one was dead, and the other is crazy. I don’t have the same struggle that other people have doing this. I have dear friends for whom this hasn’t worked out so neatly. But what’s trickier than that—that’s only the outer ring of hell. You haven’t even entered the foyer yet if that’s what you’re struggling with. Because the real hell is revealing the dark stuff of the self. Once you get to that stuff, all your other worries are going to seem insignificant. That’s the real job of this: to go into all these dark places that people are afraid to go into and come back out tell about it. They all know about it anyway, but you get to sort of name it and come back still alive, and tell them, “You can do this.” If you just stay at the level where you’re worrying about hurting your parents, that’s like a revolving door. You’ll never get out of there.

Rumpus: No, I’ve got to get out of there. I’m ready to get out.

Flynn: That’s good. If you find you still have a hard time with it down the road, though, you might try suggesting to your parents that they convert to Episcopalian.

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But I couldn’t do it. No, not me, Nice Jewish Girl From the Suburbs. What would my parents think – my clergyman father, especially – if they found out? (Besides, could there be a more tired clergyman’s daughter cliché?)

So, how does a Nice Jewish Girl From the Suburbs go from belting show tunes in the living room while her father accompanies her on piano, to becoming first a stripper, then a call girl, and finally one of many kept women in Prince Jefri of Brunei’s harem? This is certainly something I wanted to know. Jillian Lauren writes about it in her fascinating memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem.

For me, as interesting as how she made those transitions was how she had the courage to write about it all – her challenging relationships with her adoptive parents, some abuse she suffered at her father’s hands, her complicated sexual and emotional entanglement with Prince Jefri. She spoke with me about this by phone from her home in L.A., where she was putting the final touches on her first novel, due out next fall.

***

The Rumpus: I’ve never stripped, been a prostitute, or been anywhere near Brunei, but I still related so much to your book – especially your disillusionment with Judaism while still missing some of the aspects of it, and your challenging relationship with your father. You reveal a lot about your difficulties with him and your mother, and I just found myself wondering how you did it: How did you get over your fears of hurting them, or losing their love because of things you reveal about them and/or yourself?

Jillian Lauren: I wrote the book with a tremendous suspension of disbelief; I wrote it as if no one was ever going to read it. I know that sounds like a cliché. They always tell writers, “Write as if no one is ever going to see it,” but that wasn’t hard for me, because no one had ever read anything I’d written before. I had been writing for a long time and had been unsuccessful at getting things published. I mean, I’d had small things published, but had written books before that no one had read. So it was very easy for me to believe no one would ever read this book.

Rumpus: That would be hard for me, because I’ve already had some essays and articles published that have upset people in my family. So I have this heightened awareness of what that’s like, and that it could happen again.

Lauren: Well, what I’m talking about is easier to do with a book than with an essay or article that’s going to be coming out in a week or a month. When you’re writing a book, the process is so long that it’s easy to kind of trick yourself that way. The time between the moment you sit down at the keyboard and write the first word to the point where somebody’s reading it – I mean, it’s going to be the end of the Mayan calendar before my next book, or, you know, the apocalypse. That helps!

Rumpus: I can see that. Although, I feel guilty as I’m writing this stuff. In the moment, in the act, I’m really conflicted.

Lauren: For me, it got really hard in the final passes, where I still wasn’t sure whether I was going to put in certain things about my family. The stuff about being a sex worker, well, whatever. I didn’t think that would embarrass my family. It was what I did, not what I do. I don’t think I lost anyone over that.

Rumpus: Did you lose people otherwise?

Lauren: I lost people over publishing the material about my father and my family. I caused a lot of pain. The stuff about my being a prostitute didn’t cause anyone a lot of pain, other than maybe me. I think my parents could have lived with that embarrassment or found a way to frame it that would have been acceptable to them. It’s very much about what their neighbors think. I think they could find a way to frame their daughter acting in a way that was unacceptable, but not a way to frame themselves behaving in a way that was unacceptable.

Rumpus: So you lost your parents over this?

Lauren: Yeah, my parents have stopped talking to me. And my brother, sort of. I mean, if I want to reach him I can. He’s very religious and living in Israel now, so he doesn’t approve of me anyway.

Rumpus: After you finished writing – and stopped telling yourself no one would ever read your memoir – did it occur to you that your family would turn their backs on you because of it?

Lauren: What I’d hoped would happen was they’d be able to say: look how much we’ve learned, look how much we’ve changed, all of us. Let us be an example, maybe for other families who are going through the same thing, or parents who have behaved in ways toward their children that they’re not proud of. I mean, I’m a parent now, and it’s only Monday, and already I can list twenty things I’ve done this week that I’m ashamed of.

Rumpus: Yeah, I have that same fantasy. I remember telling Shalom Auslander something like that and he just laughed at me and said, “Yeah, that’s never going to happen.”

Lauren: But I think it’s important that we talk about that stuff, particularly in like, upper middle class Jewish communities where there’s this pretense that things like physical abuse don’t happen in our world.

Rumpus: I’m with you there. I keep hearing stories about physical abuse in Jewish families, and it’s always so surprising, even though I dealt with some of that in my own family. My mother’s second husband would sometimes become violent, and at one point we had a social worker from the county coming to our house because a neighbor or somebody had called. But we had to be very hush-hush about it because, like, that doesn’t happen in Jewish families. I’ve rarely told people.

Lauren: When you come from any minority community there’s that concern, like, should I cast doubt or blame, or tell some unflattering story about my parents?  There’s this feeling that I’m betraying the whole community. We keep our secrets, take care of our own. There is this insular feeling about it.

Rumpus: So how is it not having your parents in your life now?

Lauren: It’s very hard. As complicated as my relationship with them was, they were a good part of my son’s life, and my husband’s life. And now they’re not there. My husband said something recently, like, “Oh, wow, I can’t believe we’re not going to hear from your parents at all this holiday,” and I was like, “Nope.” And it is weird. But I made the decision to publish the book with the willingness to let that happen if it had to. I had dinner with my friend Rachel Resnick, who wrote Love Junkie. She lost her relationship with her father over publishing that memoir. She said to me, “If you’re not going to run the manuscript by people, expect to lose them.” But I was unwilling to run the manuscript by people. I felt it was important enough for me to publish this. I stood behind it and I still stand behind it. I don’t regret it.

Rumpus: That is so brave. I have so much respect for you for choosing that.

Lauren: I think there’s only one way to write memoir like this, and that is full out. If you’re going to start manipulating what you are and aren’t going to tell, what you are and aren’t going to reveal, and who you are and aren’t going to hurt, I think the result of that is a coy book. I’ve read them before, and to me it’s the cardinal sin. I think that as artists, we can’t worry about writing work that is going to be acceptable to our children or our parents. Or we’re going to write some bullshit, or like, Harry Potter. Great! I hope to some day write a children’s book. But right now that’s not what I write. I write intensely personal material, often with some sexual content. I don’t want my dad reading that, and I don’t want my son reading that, but it’s not going to stop me from writing it.

Rumpus: I keep wrestling with all of that.

Lauren: Listen, there’s no law saying you have to write a book like this! You can write something else.

Rumpus: I keep wishing I could. But I’m fixated. I have these stories to tell about how I got to be how I am, and there’s no way to do that without having some stuff about my parents and other people in there. I don’t feel like I can write anything else until I write this. And yet I can’t write this! I’m stuck. I am so afraid of my parents’ reactions, so afraid of hurting them.

Lauren: Well, I can tell you something that I have distilled from conversations with other memoirists, which is: Your parents’ reaction to your memoir isn’t going to be any different from your parents’ reaction to anything else you’ve done in your life. Their world perspective is how they are going to react to your book, no matter what is in it. If your parents are the kind of narcissistic parents who expect you to be this perfect representation of them in the world, then they are going to be disappointed. Those things you’ve published in the past, I believe that you couldn’t have written them so that your parents would have liked them, or not have been hurt or offended by them.

Rumpus: That makes so much sense. It sounds like something my former therapist would say. Yet it’s still so hard to accept.

Lauren: You want them to say, “You have your own path. I don’t own you. You are a really awesome loan to me from God. I took care of that loan as best I could, and now, I leave you to your path. And I just think you’re super. And congratulations on your memoir.”

Rumpus: Oh, that sounds awesome. But, yeah, not gonna happen.

Lauren: Yeah, definitely not. Yet, still, that’s the parent that I strive to be. Actually, my mother said to me, “What are you going to do in thirty years when your son writes his memoir?!” My mother, who forever ruined for me the under-water room of the Museum of Natural History the last time I talked to her. As my kid’s running back and forth. And the guards are like, “No running!”

Rumpus: You told your mother about the book at the Museum of Natural History?

Lauren: No, no. We were visiting my parents in New Jersey when I told them what was in the book.

Rumpus: How did you tell them?

Lauren: Well, they knew I was writing a book. Before it was done, I wouldn’t talk to them about it further than that. I said, “I’m not talking to anyone about it while I’m writing it,” because nothing will kill that kind of a project like talking about it, although I did tell them it had some adoption-related themes. Perhaps I could have been a little more forthcoming.

When I was ready to tell them, I hired a therapist to act as a mediator. I sat down with my parents six months before book came out, but after it was totally done and in and no changes could be made. I said, this is when the book is coming out, and these are all the things that are in it. I had a list and I went through it one by one. And I said, “I hope this is enough for you and you won’t feel the need to read it. I’d like for you not to read it.” I’ve had friends whose parents agreed not to read their memoir. And I thought, what awesome boundaries on their part! Maybe I’ll at least ask for it.

Rumpus: Oh, that is ideal! I remember reading in the acknowledgements to Julie Klausner’s memoir, like, a promise to her parents that some day she’ll write a book they can actually read, and I thought: Wow. Imagine if you could persuade your parents not to read what you write!

Lauren: Well, sure enough, my mother looks me right in the eye and says, “I am going to read the memoir. Everyone I know is going to be reading your memoir. You can’t tell me not to read your book.” So, so much for that fantasy. It was a very difficult conversation. At the end of it, they insisted that they were okay with the book coming out. But in the wake of that conversation, we were having a very difficult time with our relationship. And then a few months later the first press started. There was an article in the New York Post, and my mother came home from being away for New Year’s to fifteen messages on her answering machine from friends who’d seen the article. She told me she just couldn’t handle it, and so she couldn’t have any more contact with me. And that’s the last I’ve heard from them.

Rumpus: What did you say when your mother told you that?

Lauren: I told her I was really sorry I had hurt her, and I told her that she should brace herself, because I knew that the Post article wouldn’t be the last of it, or the worst of it. I have sort of an unusual situation in that my story involved newsworthy people, such as foreign royalty. Because of that I got an unusual amount of national media attention for my memoir.

Rumpus: It sounds like you were being very practical, and also talking to her in a very compassionate way.

Lauren: Well, I realized the book must have been a really tough pill for my parents to swallow. I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for their position. But I also think that when you are going to be an artist who works with this sort of material, you have to just hand it over to the world. I trust that it’s bigger than me or my relationship with my parents. They have their right to have their reaction to it, but I’m still going to publish it. This has been incredibly hard for a lot of reasons. But I’m going to keep doing it.

Rumpus: How does your husband feel about it? You said that he seemed sad that your parents weren’t going to be in your life these holidays.

Lauren: My husband is incredibly supportive. He has been the whole time. There are certain relationships that I’m unwilling to lose in the world, that would trump me publishing something, and have. I have written a few things that he’s been very uncomfortable with, and so they haven’t made it out of the house. But generally, he is very comfortable being written about. He knows that aspects of our life are going to be all over things I release, and he’s perfectly fine with that. He’s believes in me, and he accepts it. He knew this about me when he married me. I didn’t marry somebody who wasn’t okay with it. So yeah, there are a couple of relationships I’m not willing to lose. And one is my husband, and the other is my son. He’s only two-and-a-half now, so it’s not an issue, but when he gets older, if he’s uncomfortable with something I write, I’ll respect his wishes.

Rumpus: I imagine it would kill your parents to know that you’d make those choices for other people, but not for them.

Lauren: Well, I think it’s sort of the normal order of things. This is my immediate family, this is the world I worked so hard for. I think the ethics around writing about children versus writing about grownups are different. You know, we’re all grownups, we’ve all made choices. I do make concessions for my husband. But that’s because he asks for them so rarely, and because he believes in my work and is so respectful of it. He is really the one who made it possible for me to follow through with writing this book because it was so hard. It did shake me to my core. I really was sitting there the day before the last day that I was allowed to make changes to the manuscript and I was debating, do I leave these paragraphs about my family in or take them out? Back and forth. And he said, “You are protecting a person who did these things. It’s the truth. Your father wasn’t an evil monster, but he was abusive to you and your brother, and it’s an important part of the story. You can spend your life protecting him. But the other option is you can write about it, tell the truth, let it be in the world, and see who it speaks to – who it helps.” You know, abused children protect their abusers. We get enmeshed in these contracts that are unwritten and unspoken, that we will protect our parents. It’s like the opposite of how things should go. As a writer your job is to pull the covers back on the stuff that we are inclined to keep quiet, to present the truth without shame.

Rumpus: You know, I hear you talking about this, and I’ve had a bunch of these conversations, and yet I keep coming back to this strong desire to get my parents’ permission and approval.

Lauren: You’re not going to get their permission and you’re not going to get their approval. It sucks. I’ve finally done something that I know that I would like to my parents to be proud of me for. And they would like to be proud of me, but they can’t. It’s a tragedy.

But I think there has to be a part of you that is capable of a lack of sentimentality. There has to be a part of you that’s willing to just be kind of brutal. This needs to be said, it’s an itch I’ve got to scratch. And it’s going to hurt some people. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m dealing with it in the most compassionate way, in order to tell the most authentic story and make the best book. I sort of think that mindset is required for this type of work.

Rumpus: That’s hard.

Lauren: But it’s what you have to do. It’s what I’ve had to do. I also have these cuckoo bananas stories. I tried to only write fiction for a long time to avoid revealing this stuff. But it wasn’t until I started writing non-fiction that the door in my mind opened for me. It said to me, “You are on the right track.”

Rumpus: You write in the book that Lauren is actually your middle name. So I am assuming your parents have a different last name than you. Did you do that as a way to protect them?

Lauren: I did it deliberately a long time ago. I did it so that nothing I did professionally would be associated with my parents. But then once you’re on “Good Morning America,” and people who know your family recognize you, that doesn’t work any more.

Rumpus: Yeah, your cover is blown. I’ve thought about using a pseudonym, but I think that would be strange and unsatisfying for me. Do you think your parents will ever come around?

Lauren: I don’t know. The wounds are fairly fresh. But I have bait – their grandson. My friend Shawna Kenney, who wrote I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, was initially shunned by her parents. They didn’t talk to her for two years. But now they’re talking again. So you never know.

Rumpus: It’s not just your parents that you reveal in your book, but also Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei, whose harem you were in for 18 months. Did you have any qualms about shining that kind of a light on him – or any fear of reprisals, legal or otherwise?

Lauren: From a legal standpoint, I figured I was pretty okay. I never signed a confidentiality agreement. The legal department at the publishing house took the vetting of this manuscript very seriously, so I felt well taken care of in that regard.

I didn’t write this with the intention of hurting Jefri at all. I have compassion for him. I don’t hate him; I never hated him. I have a sort of fondness toward him that you get for people who have turned into characters, whether in your book or your life. He doesn’t have any power over me anymore. I feel kind of sorry for him. He just can’t seem to keep himself out of trouble lately. And he cracks me up with those sex statues.

Rumpus: You weren’t concerned he might lash out at you in some way?

Lauren: I’ve been asked before whether retribution was in the realm of possibility. I mean, portraying a Muslim political figure in unflattering ways – I suppose any number of things could happen. But I’m not going to shut my mouth because I’m afraid of a host of possibilities, and I have no idea what they could be. And I’ve found that people have been incredibly supportive – Muslim women in Brunei, for example. I get emails from women in different countries. They write and tell me how much they liked the book.

You know, I felt strongly enough that my story was as important as Prince Jefri’s story. Just because he is wealthy and part of foreign government doesn’t mean he’s more important. I was able to get behind that from a feminist perspective, and that helped to embolden me to not be afraid.

Rumpus: I’m guessing you haven’t heard from him since the book came out?

Lauren: No. I haven’t spoken to him since I left Brunei, years and years ago. But I did hear from one of his wives. She wrote me and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

**

Check out the Rumpus Radio interview with Jillian Lauren.

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In the book, Strauss recalls the accident and its aftermath in stark, vivid detail, turning it inside-out, upside-down and sideways in order to try and understand it. He fixates on the girl’s motivations – especially after it is revealed to him that her diary entry from that morning appeared to foretell her death. With great compassion he tries to understand her parents’ motivations when, after verbally absolving him, they change tacks and launch a million-dollar lawsuit against him.

More than anyone else, though, Strauss holds himself up to intense examination and scrutiny, revealing very human, and in some cases unflattering, reactions and defenses over the years.

Blown away by his bravery, and by the haunting beauty of his prose – and having been hit by a car myself – I was eager to talk to him about the processes of writing and healing. I interviewed Strauss at the home in Brooklyn that he shares with his wife and twin boys.

***

The Rumpus: So, after writing three novels (Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than it Hurts You) you’ve published this memoir. I’ve read that prior to this, you had always been resistant, generally, to memoir.

Darin Strauss: I think that’s been a little overstated. In some articles it’s been written that I’m anti-memoir, but that’s not true. I didn’t have any biases; I just didn’t see myself writing that kind of thing because I sort of put this experience in a box and forgot that it was part of my life. I always thought, my life is boring. I grew up on Long Island with a pretty happy family and there’s nothing really there. I must have subconsciously thought, Well I’m never going to write about the accident so the rest of my life is not interesting. Then I found out that I’d been writing about the accident all along without knowing it.

Rumpus: When did you realize you were doing that – writing unconsciously about the accident?

Strauss: Only at the end of writing this memoir, when I was coming up against the ending and trying to figure out how to wrap it up. That sounds weird to say, like navel gazing. It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about after having written fiction. Like, “I looked back at my life to try to finish my book,” but I guess that’s what you do when you write a memoir.  The story is about about a car accident I had in high school where a girl on a bicycle swerved in front of my car and I hit her and she died, and at the funeral that girl’s parents told me, “You have to live your life for two people now, so live your life really well.” And my first book was about conjoined twins and the first sentence of the book is, “This is the end I have feared since we were a child.” They’re two people in one person.  The whole book is kind of about that.  We were a child. So obviously I was thinking about that idea of living for two people without realizing it.

Rumpus: You wrote that whole book without any awareness of being influenced by what that girl’s mother said to you?

Strauss: Yeah, none at all, (laughs) which definitely seems kind of stupid now but I guess I really wasn’t ready to touch this thing. It was still too hot to pick up and look at.  Then my second book is about a guy who changes his identity and moves to New York City and lives a life as a fraud. That’s kind of I guess how I felt, because the accident happened a month or two before the end of high school, and after I graduated I moved away and didn’t tell anyone. I mean I told a few people – women I was dating or people like that. But none of my new friends knew about it. No one in grad school knew about it. And then I moved to the city and became a writer and didn’t ever tell anyone. I was lucky the accident happened before Google, so no one who wrote about the first book or wrote about me knew that this had happened. I guess I felt partly like a fraud or like an imposter, so I wrote this second novel about this guy who moves to New York City and is a fraud and an imposter.  Again, not realizing that that’s why I was interested.

Rumpus: Our minds protect us in interesting ways.

Strauss: Yes. Definitely. And then my third book is about this family on Long Island with this terrible secret, so you know, it seems so obvious now. But then, I wasn’t aware of that. I think partially I thought, I dealt with it really well, because everyone said, “You’re not to blame.”  The court, the police, five cars with eyewitnesses all said you’re not to blame, as did all my  friends and anyone I was close to. They said, you know, you walked away. You didn’t get hurt.  Actually, the police said had I swerved the car differently, I might have died. Everyone told me I was doing great about it, and so I thought, okay, I must be doing well about this. So I think I just was in denial for a long time and didn’t think that I was thinking about it. I mean, I was thinking about it consciously in some ways, and unconsciously in others. I thought about the girl who died all the time.

Rumpus: Yeah, in the book you refer many times to how, at different milestones in your life you thought, “Celine isn’t going to have this experience.”

Strauss: Although, I wasn’t talking about it to other people. Still, I was letting it influence my writing, and in ways I didn’t realize. So obviously I was dealing with it in deeper ways than I thought and struggling with it in deeper ways than I thought.

Rumpus: What made you realize that you wanted to write this book? Or was it that you needed to?

Strauss: Well, I thought I would never write about it. I just assumed I never would touch this because it was difficult for me to even talk to friends about, so why would I write a book about it? And I think a lot of the memoirs I had come across I didn’t like.  I think memoirs are great when someone’s really honest and candid and hard on him or herself, and that wasn’t a thing I wanted to do either. I thought, well, I certainly don’t want to put the kind of mental effort forth that it’s going to take to write a good book about this because it would be really painful. But then I was finishing up my third novel and didn’t know what I was going to write about next, and my wife was pregnant with our twins and I was thirty-six and started thinking about what it would be like to have kids, and started to remember what [Celine’s] parents had gone through, and I think I had a new appreciation for how hard it must have been for them. Then I realized, oh wow, I’m thirty-six; I was eighteen when the accident happened. That’s half my life.

Rumpus: Wow. Thirty-six – three-sixty, full circle.

Strauss: When I realized that, I decided I would examine it a little bit and try to start to creep up toward facing it. I hadn’t had many good experiences with therapy so I just thought, I’ll write about it and see what I think about it, because that’s how I deal with things. That’s how I learn what I think about something – by writing it down. I started writing it and I saw that the story was taking shape and I thought, I’m still not going to do this as a book, but I’ll see where it goes. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s done some stuff for This American Life and he suggested I send it to them. It was just four or five pages, and I sent what I had to them, and they said they liked it. So I thought, why not?  I’ll go on the radio, and then I’ll get it off my chest, and then I’ll be done with it. Then I did that, and there was a really good response to it. I got tons and tons of emails from people.

Rumpus: What were those people saying?

Strauss: Some of them surprised me.  I guess I assumed that if I got emails they probably would be from people who have been in car accidents like mine, and I did get some from people who’d been in these accidents – they’re called “dart-outs,” where someone darts in front of the car and that person dies and the driver is not at fault. There are about two thousand of those in the United States a year.

Rumpus: Wow. Fascinating that it’s kind of a relatively common phenomenon.

Strauss: Yeah, I know. People who survive those dart-out accidents, like me, even though they’re determined not to be at fault, they’re more likely to suffer Post Traumatic Stress than drunk drivers are. I think it’s because drunk drivers can look back and say, “Well if I only hadn’t been drinking.” But it’s hard to deal with something when you go over it a million times and you can’t figure out how you can make it turn out differently. So, I did hear from some people like that, but I also heard from a lot of people who had been just going through any kind of grief or feeling guilty about something that they were told they weren’t at fault for, but still felt guilty. I think we all have things that we feel guilty about even though we might not know why, or feel grief that is unresolved. So it was much a more universal story than I realized. A few people emailed me saying, “I know a kid who has been in an accident. Can you send me the text of thing?” I sent it to people. Then I heard from someone at GQ saying would you want to do this as an article – just basically the text of the thing, which at that point was about twelve pages. And I thought, okay, people are responding to this in a good way.

Rumpus: That’s one of the reasons I love memoir – that sense of identification, that the writer has shared and knows and understands your experience. The feeling that you’re not alone in the things that are most painful or uncomfortable or embarrassing to you, because the writer was brave enough to share about those. It feels sort of ridiculous and shameful to compare my experience to yours, because you’re writing about something much more grave and difficult. But, any time I publish a personal essay, the first feeling I have is, oh, I’m a horrible, navel-gazing narcissist who reveals too much about herself and other people, and who is going to care anyway? But then sometimes I hear from readers. I have gotten some emails and letters that for me have justified doing it. I had this great, random experience last year when I ordered some stationery from a company in Boise, Idaho. When they sent me the stationery, it came with this note Scotch taped on from one of the owners saying, like, I’ve read your work, and I relate to it, and it is so appropriate to my life. It made me feel better about putting myself out there the way I sometimes do.

Strauss: That’s great. I know what you mean. The responses I got to This American Life and the GQ article were the reason I decided to write the book. And as many emails as I got from those, I’ve gotten many more from the book. Like hundreds. I know that when I was eighteen, I would have loved to have read something like this. I would have liked to have learned all that I have in the past twenty or so years, but not the hard way.

Rumpus: It must feel really good to know the book has helped people.

Strauss: Definitely. One of the things I wanted to do with the story is talk about how inappropriately we all act in sad or stressful situations. In the book I talked about how right as the accident happened these cute girls came over and I started flirting with them, because I was in shock. Looking back I always felt so terrible about that, but I realize now it’s kind of a universal thing. People are in shock. People have inappropriate thoughts all the time.  I had heard from many people who have said they laughed at funerals, and things like that.

Rumpus: Oh, yeah. That kind of thing has happened to me. In my mid-twenties, I was in this severe depression. But every therapy session, I would go in and the first thing I’d do was start laughing uncontrollably. I would crack up – like side-splitting laughter – and I had no idea why. I mean, I was in so much pain. It made no sense that I was laughing, but I guess it actually did.

Strauss: Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of stuff like that. I recently heard a story about a thirteen-year-old girl who couldn’t stop laughing at her father’s funeral. So I thought, well if I’d had a book about this when I was going through it, it would have really helped me to know it was okay to have these inappropriate reactions, and to see that you do move on in your life. It becomes part of who you are, but it doesn’t have to ruin you.

Rumpus: So, here you were thinking that you’d just get your story out and that would be the end of it, but now it’s really taken on a life of its own, with all these reader reactions. Is that more than you bargained for? Is it hard?

Strauss: It’s okay. I’ve kept a file of all the letters and emails I’ve gotten. I’ve thought about doing a book of them, if I could get permission from the people who sent them. There are so many interesting stories. Although some are very difficult. Because I have put myself out there in that way, people feel they can tell me these very intimate things about themselves, and sometimes it’s hard. But sometimes it’s okay.

There’s this one woman who is coming to my office soon to play me the tape she made about her son dying. In the book I quote a New York Times article about Complicated Grief Disorder. One of the therapies recommended is making a tape and then playing it every day for six weeks. This woman who is quoted in the article, whose son committed suicide, read my book and saw herself in it. She said, “It would really mean a lot to me if I could share the tape with you,” so I’m going to hear it. It might be a little overwhelming.

Rumpus: Clearly the book has been well received by readers. Were you worried about how the people you mention in the book would receive it?

Strauss: Sure, I was worried, although not so much people in my life because I felt like my parents come off pretty well and my wife comes off pretty well.

Rumpus: What about the women you dated who were mentioned in there? Were you at all concerned about them?

Strauss: No, because I didn’t name them, and one woman I dated emailed me to say, “Was that me in the book?” But it wasn’t. The only people I was really worried about were the girl’s parents.

Rumpus: That makes perfect sense. Did you change their names?

Strauss: Yes. I changed their names. But I was still anxious. What happened years ago was they told me I had to live for two people and that they never would blame me. They knew it wasn’t my fault, which was a huge comfort for me because I thought, okay, at least they know that. And then they turned around and sued me for millions of dollars. That was really painful in so many ways. I thought, I could be broke. I had my dad’s crappy insurance, and if the case had gone really badly I could have owed money on top of what the insurance covered. I thought they could garnish my salary forever.  But even more than that, it was that these people who said they didn’t blame me then were trying to ruin my life. I mean, I guess they would say they weren’t trying to ruin my life, they were just trying to get money out of the insurance company. Eventually the case went away, because there was really no case.

Rumpus: But you had to suffer through five years of that, right?

Strauss: Yeah that was over my head for five years. So I didn’t talk to them at all.  But then when the book was coming out, I knew that Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, was going to do something on it, and they live in Long Island, so I decided I should write them and warn them. It’s interesting because I thought, okay, I’m in a really good place about this accident. It’s been twenty years now. I wrote the book. I felt like I learned a lot about myself writing the book, and about how I feel. But the act of Google-ing them was difficult. Finding their address, writing them a letter and sticking it in the mailbox were harder than writing the book.

Rumpus: Have they responded?

Strauss: No, I haven’t heard from them. I did that like a month before the book came out, and so it’s been now probably two or three months. I don’t expect to hear from them, but I just wanted to warn them. I felt like whatever happened between us, I didn’t blame them because they were really vulnerable.  I think some scumbag lawyer took advantage of a vulnerable set of parents, and so I didn’t blame them. And I think whatever happened, they’re not the ones deciding to tell the story, I am, so I should warn them. I felt like since it happened to me I had a right to tell my story. I wasn’t at fault. This thing happened to me so I felt like I have the right to tell my own story, but I should warn those people.

Rumpus: Yeah, I know some writers think that you should generally warn the people in your memoir before it comes out. A writer I know gave some of the people he wrote about in his memoir a chance to read it before it came out, although he was not inviting them to make any changes, or give or withhold their approval. He was just giving them fair warning.

Strauss: That’s a good thing to do. I actually considered sending them the book but then I thought it would be really painful for them to read. I didn’t want to rub their noses in it. I told them it was coming out, and if they choose to go read it, they can. But I actually told them so they can avoid it, so that they won’t come across it in a book store and be surprised. In the book, I was careful to be respectful to the girl who died, so I didn’t think I wrote anything that would make them angry. I just thought it’s a painful part of their lives they probably don’t want to relive, so sending them the book would be sort of an aggressive gesture.

Rumpus: Were you at all concerned that they might not like the portrayal of them? I mean, I think it’s a very honest and compassionate portrayal, but it’s also very stark and real. There’s this once scene where you stop by their house, and you italicize the word “apologize” – the girl’s father tells his house guests that you’re there to apologize and there’s something about that characterization and certain other descriptions that I could see not finding flattering if you were the person being written about.

Strauss: Well I was concerned that I’d be honest and respectful, and so I thought I had to really try and understand what they were going through and why they would have sued me when they said it wasn’t my fault. I think I did that, but I also thought my main responsibility was not to them but to the story – to be honest about what happened.

Rumpus: That’s brave – and a huge challenge for me, and I think many writers. I think you come to writing if you are naturally an observer, but your observations are not always going to be kind.

Strauss: They’d better not be, or it’s not going to be an interesting story.

Rumpus: Some people think that writing fiction instead is a way around that, but I think most people will recognize themselves, and in fiction you can extrapolate and make people worse. I don’t know – do you think fiction is a kinder medium?

Strauss: I don’t think a fiction writer is ever going to think of doing it out of kindness. I think they think I’ll make the story better – I’ll change a couple of names, change some facts, smudge the factual truth a little bit to get at the real truth, and sometimes make the person worse to make the story better. I think it’s rare that a writer says, this is too mean so I’ll just tell it as a novel. Because if you go with that mindset it’s not going to be a good novel. You have to plum just as deeply in fiction as you do in nonfiction or else it’s just not going to be good.  That’s the thing about writing – you have to be completely honest. People have to recognize something universally true or else they’re going to think they’re reading something that’s, like, a daydream.

Rumpus: I find that to be one of the scariest aspects of writing. I want to be true to the story but I’m also so concerned about being liked and loved. I fall into this dilemma, and then I get blocked. Either I don’t write, or I feel inclined to ameliorate.

Strauss: See I couldn’t do that. Also, honestly, I’m not so hard on the other people as I am on myself. I thought the only justification for me for writing the story was if I was harder on myself than I was on anyone else in the story.  Because I thought there is no reason for this to be out there if I’m not showing the times when I felt inappropriate things or acted inappropriately and calling myself on it and not worrying so much if I’m loved. I could have written this book as sort of an advertisement for myself as a piece of propaganda, like, Wasn’t it sad that this happened to me? But look how well I acted. That’s not for me. It would have been inappropriate – another inappropriate thing on top of all the other ones. I think that’s where my fiction training came in, because I looked at my eighteen year old self as a character I’d write about with flaws, and being compassionate to that character but also completely honest about that character’s flaws and about that characters ignorance about himself and about what was happening. I think people ended up liking me more because no one can believe the scrubbed clean version of someone who only acts perfectly all the time. That’s a way to lose the reader. The weird byproduct of being mean to yourself is that I think people want to be nice to that character. So if I’m saying, look how inappropriately I was acting, a lot people have written to me saying, you’re too hard on yourself. The first editor of the book wanted me to cut out that stuff. Like, he said, you’re being too hard on yourself, you should cut out that moment where you flirt with the girls right after the accident because people are going to come after you and say you were insensitive.  I thought, well if I cut that, then there is no reason to have a book, because I have to be hard on myself,  or it’s just then therapy for myself. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be…

Rumpus: Self-indulgent?

Strauss: Yeah.

Rumpus: You also write that you are concerned about providing a flattering image of “Celine,” at least at her funeral.

Strauss: Well, not exactly. I wanted the book to be flattering, but I wanted it to be honest. I wanted to be as kind to her as I could be while still remaining honest. What got me was that articles in the newspaper about her when she died seemed to flatten her out into some type, and it was offensive to me because it seemed like they were saying it’s sadder that she died at sixteen if she was popular and beautiful – the most popular and beautiful girl in the school.  That was the narrative they wrote describing her: She’s the perfect student, the perfect person. And I thought, that’s really offensive, because she wasn’t the most popular person in school. She probably was more interesting than that, and even if she was the least liked person in the school, it’s still a tragedy for a sixteen-year-old to die. I wanted to avoid that kind of valorization of the dead, where suddenly they were the greatest person that ever lived.

Rumpus: This beatific image.

Strauss: Yeah, exactly, beatific. She was well liked and pretty, but she wasn’t the prom queen, and it was disrespectful, I think, to pretend she was because that, because that’s mourning someone who didn’t exist.

I feel good about the way I portrayed her. I’ve actually heard from a lot of her friends, and they liked it.  I heard from her biking companion that day – the guy who was with her when she swerved in front of my car. He said he never knew why she did it.  He knew it wasn’t my fault. I wouldn’t have expected him to like the book, and he said he read it in one sitting and it really moved him, because it put to words certain things he had been thinking but didn’t articulate. Other people who went to school with her contacted me and said they thought I was really respectful, so that was nice, because it was a worry of mine too. I had people who were friends with her saying that this is a great way to remember her. It was very rewarding.

Rumpus: Wow. That must be so incredibly validating.

Strauss: Yeah. So I felt like if I did it right. Maybe I’ve done a good turn for her.

Rumpus: Yeah, I would say. I think you’ve done as much right for her as you could possibly do. You’ve taken so much responsibility. You know, I was hit by a car a couple of years ago, and the guy drove off.

Strauss: Wow. Where?

Rumpus: In Soho, at the intersection of Thompson and Spring. I had the light and he had the light. He was making a left turn, which is apparently the most common situation in which a pedestrian gets hit.

Strauss: I know the corner. I used to live on Spring Street.

Rumpus: Yeah, so he was in this big Chevy Suburban and he came out of nowhere and barreled me down.

Strauss: And then he drove off?

Rumpus: Yeah. After he yelled at me.

Strauss: What an asshole! Did the police ever get him?

Rumpus: No. They totally dropped the ball.

Strauss: God –  who would yell at someone they hit with their car? Who could yell at someone at that moment?

Rumpus: You know, I’ve had a lot of different feelings about it in the two years since it happened. I had to have surgery on my shoulder and pain in my hip, and I still have nightmares about being under his car. And people always ask me why I didn’t keep on the cops about going after him, since bystanders got his license plate number and everything. But I think what I came to is one of the things we’ve been talking about, which is that, maybe he was in shock.

Strauss: Yeah, I’m sure he was.

Rumpus: I don’t know that he’s a horrible person. I think that in that moment he was a horrible person, and he behaved really badly. Maybe some people, when they go into shock, become assholes. I mean, I behaved strangely, too, that day. One minute I absolutely couldn’t talk,  couldn’t say a word, the next I was crying hysterically, the next I was fine. Then I was crying hysterically again, and around and around. I walked out of the ambulance as if nothing happened, after they examined me, even though I was badly bruised and the medic was like, you’re in shock lady – you could have a concussion, and you should probably go to the emergency room.

Strauss: You could have had a head injury.

Rumpus: Fortunately, I didn’t. I am very lucky.

Strauss: Maybe because of what happened with me I’m overly sensitive about a lot of this. Because I didn’t drive away, when I hear someone doing that, it makes me angry. I stopped. I went to her parents house. When people say, oh what happened to you is like what happened to Laura Bush, I kind of take offense. Which, you know, people don’t mean anything offensive by it. But I’m like, well she was a hit-and-run driver and I wasn’t. I would never do that.

Rumpus: Right, you took responsibility. You more than took more than responsibility, in life, and in the book. So, was it healing to have written it?

Strauss: You know, that’s the weird thing about this. People often ask, was it healing, or do you feel better now? In a way that makes memoir so much different from fiction. Now, an interview is like a therapy session. No one gives a shit how a novelist is doing. Now I have to talk about how I’m feeling.

Rumpus: Oh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that. Sorry.

Strauss: No, I’m not saying it’s bad.  It’s just a really strange transition. It’s weird having sort of public therapy sessions. But yeah, it’s been healing. It definitely has made it easier to deal with. I stumbled upon two great therapies in the process of writing this. For Complicated Grief Disorder, there’s taping your story and playing it for yourself every night for six weeks.

Rumpus: It’s funny – I used to kind of do that as a little girl.

Strauss: Really? You did?

Rumpus: Yeah, my parents had gotten divorced, and I was having a really hard time and didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to, and so I used to whisper my gripes and my sadness into this blue plastic Panasonic tape recorder I had, and then I’d listen to it. Unfortunately, it was at the same time that I was practicing for my bat mitzvah, and I taped over the recording of my torah portion and stuff that my father had recorded for me. He had to re-record it. And my secret was out.

Strauss: Did he ever listen to what you said on it?

Rumpus: I have no idea. But it was interesting reading what you wrote about the treatment for Complicated Grief Disorder, because I was instinctually doing something like that.

Strauss: Wow. I also learned that in AA, people tell their stories aloud, and it helps them and the people around them. Talking in public about something that you’re embarrassed about makes you less embarrassed about it and makes you realize that other people are feeling it too. So, I happen to get up and talk and do readings and then have people come up to me afterward, crying, saying my telling my story has made it easier for them. And talking about it again and again has actually made it easier for me. But I’ve had really weird experiences with this book.  Two interviewers have started crying to me while they’ve interviewed me.

Rumpus: Really?

Strauss: Yeah. One I don’t know why – I felt uncomfortable asking. The other, a reporter for a newspaper, told me that when he was seven, he got into a fight with his best friend and the friend stormed out of the house and ran into the street and died, and he’s never talked about it with anybody.

Rumpus: Oh my god.

Strauss: He was like forty five and starting to deal with it, and found the book really moving and helpful. So, that’s another interesting difference between novels and memoirs: If someone interviews you and they say they like your novel, they usually don’t start crying.

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I found myself admiring so many aspects of Elliott’s writing. But what touched me most as a nervous wreck struggling with my own memoir was the simultaneously bold and compassionate way he handled writing about his father – kind of a brute, in both physical and emotional terms, who may or may not have once murdered a man.

There’s a scene toward the end of the book in which Elliott attempts to make peace with his father. Despite negligence and violence at his father’s hands during his teen years; despite his father letting him languish in group homes; despite decades of harsh verbal sparring between them; despite his father’s leaving negative reviews of his son’s books on Amazon and elsewhere, Elliott writes, “I realize that I love him and that my relationship with him is the most important one in my life.” Elliott meets with his father in Chicago and offers an olive branch, or more specifically, “a way for us to see that our memories are equally valid.”

“We all think we’re retaliating,” Elliott writes. “We all think our actions are justified by someone else’s actions. But actually we’re responsible for what we do.” While the conversation is less charged than many of their previous ones, his father is mostly unreceptive. “I’m always going to retaliate,” he promises his son before they part.

As a writer, I can only aspire to achieve, in equal measure, the kind of bravery with which Elliott writes about such painful relationships, and the even-handedness with which he treats the folks who get revealed in the process.

Elliott and I talked about all this one September day when he visited Albany, NY, where he was guest lecturing and giving a reading. As we sat down over coffee he said, “I guess I should talk at some point about how weird it is for me to be interviewed on the Rumpus.” But we never got to that.

***

The Rumpus: I want to start off talking about that passage in your book toward the end, where you go and you meet your father and you tell him that you realized that your relationship with him is the most important one in your life and that you love him. That scene makes me cry because I identify so much with it.

Stephen Elliott: In the process of writing my book I realized that I cared about my father, and I had to just take a stab at the happy ending. I just wanted to see him, and I was like, I am going to take some poison out of this relationship.

Rumpus: Unlike you, I am on regular speaking terms with my father, but it’s a difficult and kind of artificial relationship, and it keeps me from writing because if I write the truth – even if I’m not writing about him and it’s just about me – then I am revealing myself to not being who he thinks I am. I am realizing how much impact this relationship has on me. So I wanted to talk to you about how you realized that even though your relationship with your father is so difficult, you actually love him and that this is the most important relationship in your life.

Elliott: When I started writing the book, I did not feel that way. At that point, my father and I were not on speaking terms. We had not spoken in years and I was very angry at him and I was very upset with the things that he kept doing, like leaving bad reviews for my books on Amazon, and I just felt so constrained by this conflict that we had.  So it’s not like I started the book forgiving my father. It was probably through writing all those things and exploring them over that time period that I came to a better understanding of my relationship with him. And so to say it is the most important relationship of my life, well, it is fairly obvious, when you add it all up, what person have I spent the most time thinking about in my life? My father. What person in my life as impacted my decisions the most? Often not for the best, but the most, nonetheless.  My mother got sick when I was like eight years old and died when I was thirteen and she was so sick, she wasn’t really as impactful as she might have been. And my father is this abusive lover who gives and takes away affection and is completely unpredictable. So yes, of course, it is the most important relationship in my life. But also, how could I not love him? How could I not love someone who has been such a huge part of my life and had so much to do with who I am? And so I was engaged in twenty-five years of arguing with my father. Who else would I engage in twenty-five years of arguing with? And why would I engage with him, and respond, and listen – why would it matter…

Rumpus: If he didn’t matter to you?

Elliott: Right. I did not know when I started writing The Adderall Diaries that so much of it would be about my father and our intense dynamic, and I did not know the things I was going to find out and come to understand about our relationship. And that is a lot of what gives a narrative tension to the book – that I am exploring.  I am trying to figure things out, you know, so that is one of the things I figured out.  I did not start off knowing that, and so when you talk about writing about your father it’s like, you don’t know where you’re going. I talk about this all the time: you are not supposed to know where you are going when you start writing.

Rumpus: I totally don’t, because some of the better essays that I have published have wound up touching on him, but when I sat down to write them I didn’t think that he had anything to do with him.  Like this one where I thought I was just writing a story just about the book, The Rules, and how that way of treating people just doesn’t work. I had no idea when I sat down to write that at the heart of my feelings about that book was something about my relationship with my dad. Although, he gave me that book, so…

Elliott: You are so deeply conflicted over your relationship with your father. And I wonder sometimes, why is she so concerned about what her father thinks? You write and you try to be a good person and you make the effort, but there are still people who will not ever be pleased.  It is not like you can satisfy everybody, I mean if your father is a person who will not be happy no matter what you write. You just have to accept that at some point, you know?

Rumpus: On some level I think I do. It’s my intention to write about him compassionately. I feel like I have, but he’s been upset by things I’ve written about him, and so I feel like I owe it to him to be more careful. But I still do not think he will be flattered by anything I write about him.

Elliott: I think what you’re talking about is something really false, though.  Like there is a difference between trying to be compassionate to someone and actually feeling compassion for them.  Like you have to reconcile your feelings, you have get at a truth. If you are being artificially nice when you have conflict with your father, then you are not fully exploring it.  So if you go into that, if you really head into that storm, then you might figure out how you really feel, and then you might find real compassion in there – the kind of compassion that does not depend on approval.

Rumpus: Wow. That makes so much sense.

Elliott: You know, what you are looking for now is approval. You are like, “I’m going to write something that my father will not disapprove of,” but that does not have anything to do with how you feel. If you really explore how you feel, you might find real compassion, and it will not matter what he thinks of your writing.

Rumpus: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I have had an inkling of that in the back of my mind. It’s this sense that if I were write more honestly and maybe risk disapproval – disownership, even – then I might come to a realer place with him. Maybe I would feel more like I had an honest relationship with him. And also, if I took those risks, it would make the writing more accessible and relatable.

Elliott: More vivid, more powerful. The reader can feel when you are lying, even if they are not really sure of what the lie is.  You might think you are telling the truth, but if you are being dishonest with yourself, you will pass on that dishonesty to the reader, and the reader will feel it. You know, you talk about owing your father compassion, but you do not believe that and neither do I.  It is not a ledger book with a balance.

Rumpus: I feel like there is some natural compassion for him.  I feel sorry for him. But also I think that there are things he does that I want to write about that come from a place of good intention but are just terribly misguided. There is something about the good intention that I want to come through. For example, my father handing me a copy of The Rules when I am thirty-five – this totally fucked up book about getting guys to like you by treating them like shit. But the intention was good. It was him saying, “I want you stop going out with fucked up guys; I want you to, be happy.” But as sweet as that intention seems to me as a writer, he is not going to be flattered by my portrayal of him as a sweet, misguided guy.

Elliott: There is no version of this that will make him happy. I think you just have to do the work of figuring out your own feelings. Right now it’s like you’re writing with one hand tied behind your back. And that’s the hand you write with.

Rumpus: You are so right. That’s a great analogy.

Elliott: Because you are writing and you are concerned with what your father is going to think about your writing, while you are writing it, and so you can’t.  You have got to go into the storm. The writing won’t get good unless it leads to, like, serious realizations about who you are and how you guys feels and about what the real genesis of your conflict is.

Rumpus: I probably can’t get there unless I –

Elliott: You have got to go toward it, but you cannot go toward it because you are writing and you are worried about what your father is going to think while you are writing it so you cannot make any progress and you can’t make those realizations that you need to make.

Rumpus: So many times I have thought, why can’t I just write something else? Like why can’t I just make some shit up?  I mean, there is other stuff in the word that interests me. I have observed relationships and I think that is interesting and I can make up a story about people who did this or that. But I feel as if I cannot change the channel. In The Adderall Diaries you write about feeling as if your sorrows and your experiences are just sitting there like a can of red paint and that you just have to use it. Do you still feel that way?

Elliott: I think there is like an urgency you are talking about. But what I am saying in The Adderall Diaries is like, you know, this is what I do. I write and I create art from my life.  It is not about right or wrong, it is just what I do. I think that is different from saying I have to do this. It’s almost like you are already making excuses – you’re saying, “You don’t understand. I have to do this.” Where with me, it’s more like, this is just what I do. If somebody gets hurt, it’s not like I want to hurt anybody, but this what I do, and if you are in my life, I will probably end up writing about you in some way. And you have every right to be offended by that, and I could apologize, later, but I know I am going to write about it. Why bother lying about that?

This is a little dangerous, but here goes. I had a relationship with someone that wasn’t moral. It was wrong. It involved a lot of lying and the first couple of times I felt guilty and then after a while I thought, If I really felt guilty, I would not be doing this. So it’s like, I was feeling bad about it to give myself the excuse I needed to do what I wanted.

Rumpus: So if you felt bad about it, that made it okay. Like, if you were suffering in some way, it justified doing it.

Elliott: Yeah, exactly. It’s okay because I feel bad about it. But I keep doing it. So it’s not like, “Okay I have to write it.” It’s, “This is what I do, and I have made peace with that.”  It’s morally ambiguous as far as I am concerned. There’s nothing noble about being a writer.  This is just what I do.  This how I have learned to get by in the world.  This is how I cope. This is how I process. This is how I understand things. This is how my memory functions. I do not know any other way, and it is too late now, and I do not really want to change it.

Rumpus: Yeah, one of the things I’ve heard you say a few times is that you acknowledge that you are in some ways betraying whomever you’re writing about. But you don’t not do it. I have been fascinated by that – that, on the one hand, you say, “I am going to do this,” and on the other, you say, “but I am going to acknowledge that what I am doing is kind of shitty.”

Elliott: Yeah. I try not to be shitty, though, you know? I mean, I try. I always hide identities unless I can’t.

Rumpus: Yeah, but sometimes you can’t hide people. Like you couldn’t hide who you dad was.

Elliott: Right. Those are the situations where you make the difficult decisions.  But either way, if I am going to write about someone, I try to write about them with kindness, and by that I mean I try to make very serious effort to understand their point of view.  To understand that if we are in a conflict, and I feel wronged by them, they probably feel wrong by me. You know, that you are not the victim. Realizing that nobody ever feels like they started it. Everybody thinks that they are reacting to something. I feel like I am reacting something, my father feels like he is reacting to something.  We all feel that way, and so try to understand those things and just get into the writing, where you just can’t fake it. Sometimes you just have to really go into it.  Here is this burning heat.  Here is this place where I just really dislike this person to the point where I can’t even write about them because the hatred is so strong, and just go into that.  Like, what is that about? And you have to be very skeptical of yourself.  You have to understand that the other person doesn’t think of himself as the monster. Nobody thinks of themselves as the monster.  So you try not think of them as monsters either. We are complicated. So you try and understand why another person might feel justified in what they are doing.

Also, understand that the quickest way to be wrong about somebody is to think you know their motives. If you think, “My dad did this for this reason or for that reason,” you are almost certainly wrong.  We don’t even know why we do things. Motives are impossible to really know.

Rumpus: Yeah, I get that, especially the idea that no one thinks they started it. I keep coming to that stalemate. My dad and I also come to the stalemate about whether it’s the past or the present we’re talking about. I remember you reading something about how your dad thinks that you are angry with him about the past, but you are really angry at him for –

Elliott: The present.

Rumpus: Yeah, the present. And I keep going around that one a million times with my father.  He’ll say, “You’re still not forgiving me for the divorce in 1976,” and I’ll say, “No, it’s about what you did last week, which happens to be same thing you did back then.” He doesn’t ever get it, and he thinks I do not understand him at all, either.

Elliott: But your problem is not him assigning motive to you – it’s you assigning motive to him.  It’s not him not understanding why you did something – it’s you not understand why he did something.  If you want to have a better grasp on the situation and write about this complicated thing, then like you have to put your effort toward understanding where where he is coming from.  Understanding that his truth is true to him. Like, he is not lying when he accuses you of being unforgiving.  Like that is how he feels, you know.  He is not making that up. So if you want to understand things, then it is not important that he understands why you are upset. It is actually much more important that you understand why he is upset, because that is where the information lies.  That is the information you do not currently have.  You’ve got the other information. The information you do not have – which is very hard to obtain in full – is: where is he coming from?  How could what he is saying be true and what I am saying also be true, and of course it is, because “true” is such a liquid thing.

Rumpus: There is a central story that I want to explore in my memoir.  My father and his sister do not speak. He disowned her in 1976, and my whole life, there have been two looming threats. One was that I was going to be disowned like his sister, and the other was that I would turn out like his sister, who is like 69 years old and impoverished and ill. She lives in alone a room in someone’s decrepit house.

Elliott: This is his sister?

Rumpus: Yeah.  She has been on and off welfare for many years. She was married once to an alcoholic who took all her money. She had a daughter with him who is a year younger than me – she’s 44 – and who ran away from home when she was fourteen to Alabama. From what I understand, she became a stripper and a sex worker, and had three kids with three different dads. And now she’s a grandmother. I’m pretty sure my aunt hasn’t met any of her grandkids because neither she nor her daughter can afford to travel. So, I have this idea that I want to go and bring my aunt to Alabama, reconnect with her and my cousin, find out what happened, why she’s always been sort of a mess – and if she even sees herself that way.

Elliott: So do that.

Rumpus: But I have always felt as if I am not allowed.  Because he disowned her, and disapproves of everything about her, I feel I am not allowed to know her.  And I am dying to go and spend time with her. I feel for her. It’s so sad to me – and scary – that she was cut off like that. And I want to see my cousin, who I haven’t seen since I was ten. And I want to help bring them together. And I know I will want to write about it. Ideally I would also love to talk to my father about it. But I know he will not want to, and I know that I run the risk in doing this of getting cut off and upsetting him. So I am terrified.

Elliott: I mean, why? It is like all of this is so obvious, you know what I mean? Like you have incredible fear of your father disowning you.  He is like forbidding you all this information. He wants to keep you in the dark and not let you find out some other truths, and you feel you are being kept from finding out who these people are, for fear of being cutoff and you do not even have any idea what you are going to find there.  You are forty-five years old and, like, you don’t get to talk to these people and find out about them? There’s like a movie here. Obviously you are going to find out everything from these people, but you are so terrified of your father. You just have to find out why you are so deeply terrified of your father disowning you. Because nothing of what you are saying makes that add up.  Nothing you have said explains the fear of him disowning you.  What happens when he disowns you? Does the earth come off its axis? If a person cannot have a relationship with you because of who you are, then you have to accept that.

Rumpus: Yeah, that’s my whole problem.

Elliott: Just like you cannot write a book that everybody likes, you cannot be a person that everybody likes. You cannot be an interesting person if you try to please everybody all the time.  This is something that Margaret Cho told me once, and she is all famous and it’s crass – it’s a crass way of thinking about life. She said, “If nobody is saying anything bad about you, you are not doing anything.”  And I know what she meant. You are forty-five and you are just this sweet person who does not want to make any waves, you know, and it is getting late. You do not get to go half-way.  No reader is interested in a book where the writer is trying to spare somebody’s feelings.

Rumpus: Right. Ouch.

Elliott: I mean, all those relationships you will be having with your aunt and your cousin and everybody else, you know, and things you could explore by yourself, you are too afraid to explore because you don’t want to make your father angry. Look at all these things that you are giving up. Even though you so clearly love him, you have to let go of trying to keep him from being angry. You have to do those things. And you have to let your father just be your father, and if he cannot deal, do not be the person making excuses. You do not have to respond to anything. You do not have to respond to everything, do not have to try talking your way out of it.  Just allow the person to be upset.

Rumpus: Let him have his feelings.

Elliott: Let them have their feelings, and go their own way, and let them come back around, or not. It’s like you’re being kept in this weird cage.  It’s just bizarre.

Rumpus: I feel like so much of my energy in life from childhood has been, you know, do I not embarrass my father.  Do not disgrace my father. For much of my life it kept me from being who I am.

Elliott: You have to find a way onto the high road.  Like, let him feel how he feels and live with it. You know, my father leaves bad reviews of my books on Amazon and I say, okay.  If that makes him happy, then that is fine.

Rumpus: But it doesn’t cripple you? It doesn’t give you writer’s block?  It doesn’t make you feel like –

Elliott: Not anymore.

Rumpus: But it did?

Elliott: It did.

Rumpus: What was it like before you got past it?

Elliott: When I was like twenty seven maybe, twenty eight, I just felt my father owed me a lot, you know.  He was a long way away from having paid his debt for the things he had done. I was actually wrong about that. I mean, how do you collect that debt? What does a son owe a father? What does a father owe a son? But I had all this resentment toward him. I remember one time he said to me, “You know a relationship can survive anything except contempt,” and I knew he was right, but I had a lot of contempt.

Rumpus: And did it come out in the writing?

Elliott: Yeah, I think you can see it in the writing, in this book I wrote about life in the group homes, A Life Without Consequences. The father always dies in my novels. And nobody shows up at the funeral. But I don’t actually think that was a problem.  I think what he really took offense to were the things I would say in interviews.  I would talk about group homes I grew up in, saying these are hard places and there is a lot of violence. I remember one time he said, “My neighbors think I am an abusive father because of the things they read about you,” and I thought, “Well, you were an abusive father.”  Like, the neighbors are right. So what do you want me to do about that?  But now I can see it from his side.

Rumpus: How did you get over that hump?

Elliott: Well, I went into the storm.  I wrote about it directly. What I had to write about was this crippling relationship, and this battle for my identity.  I had to really address what was happening. I had to write about that conflict specifically, write my way through it, try to understand it, and finally come to terms with the idea that my father and I can have different truths. It’s fine. I do not need his approval. I love him and I want him to be happy. But that does not mean I have to talk to him or respond to his messages.  It does not mean that I cannot write something that I want to write. He is seventy-three or seventy-four, seventy-five years old now. He is not going to change.  I do not need to change him, don’t need to convince him of anything. I just have to love him.  I just have to accept him and let him have his truth. And what you are focusing on– it sounds like you want to change your father. He is not going to change. And you have to love him and allow him to have his truth.

Rumpus: There is part of me that is also trying to get through to him and say, this is not so bad, what I am writing. I am not so bad.

Elliott: No. No. You have to stop. There is no getting through to him. The point of writing this is not getting through to your father. Your book is not a letter to him.  You cannot argue your side of the story, to me or to anybody else.  It is like you have to accept that there are multiple versions of reality and that people have different views on what happened. You have to let these contradictory truths exist and just love your father and live your life and let him do whatever he is going to do.  But do not let him impact your actions, or your image or your identity.

Rumpus: I feel like the book is going to be kind of meta – a lot about my finally giving myself permission to write the book.

Elliott: You know, you might have to write in circles. You might not be able to do it in a linear way because the glare might be too bright to go straight forward.

Rumpus: So, what is your relationship with your dad like now?

Elliott: I see my father when I am in Chicago.  He sends me emails from time to time. Occasionally we talk on the phone. If I am in Chicago I certainly stop by to say hello.

There was a moment, which I think happened because of the writing of The Adderall Diaries, where I just felt all that resentment toward him leave me. That was a moment where I realized that I do not want him to be unhappy. I want him to be happy. I hope for him to be happy. I do the things I do because they are what I do, but I do not do anything to actively make him unhappy. I do not get any pleasure from that, and yeah, you know, like, I love him.  I am not under any kind of like illusion that he was a good father, but really, who am I to judge?  It doesn’t matter. I feel like I am more concerned with, am I good a person.  Am I satisfied with the way I am living my life? This is more important to me than whether my father a good person.  That is not really relevant.  He’s just my father.  He is just who he is.  He is a difficult person and he is capable of giving what he is capable of giving and he is not capable of giving what he is not capable of giving.  We are never going to be that close. I will never have grown up with him, and not left home. There was so much distance between us for so long and at one point I did not speak to him for five years. You cannot undo that. You know this idea that it’s never too late? That’s bullshit. It’s always too late.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Order The Adderall Diaries from The Rumpus.

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