Klausner: There’s so much insidious sexism out there that doesn’t get called out because it’s not, like, The Game. People assume that the crop of asexual, sensitive-seeming guys who write you off as crazy or stupid for wanting to fall in love are better than the guys who will neg you at a bar and fuck you that night before disappearing. But they’re just shitty in a different way. I think [I Don’t Care About Your Band] is an advice book as much as it speaks to anybody who’s able to learn from example. I told stories I hoped would resonate, but I tried not to be pedantic. But women love learning shit. So, I do hope it contributes to the process of our collective adult education, [even though] it’s as much of a self-help book as The Apartment is a self-help movie.
Rumpus: “[I]f I’ve learned nothing else from Martin Lawrence’s stand-up it’s that (a) men hate talking about stuff you think is going wrong in a relationship that you’re not sure is actually a relationship, and (b) women be shoppin’.” This totally explains why men hate shopping. This isn’t a question; I’m just in awe of your profundity.
Rumpus (again): So, a feminist walks into a bar, and a dude treats her like shit. That’s a joke I can’t finish. I’m actually pretty serious about feminism. Your memoir is hilarious, but you often throw off the ballast of conceit “to be funny” and eloquently discuss the female experience of dating—as a confrontation of emotion and self-identity. Although we get dumped, cheated on, and hurt in a way that makes a fool of physical pain, we persist. We can’t help ourselves. Even if we’re left with an empty space in us, or something worse, left with a heavy pain that we try to ignore by going out or writing about it, we keep doing it. We keep dating. Even when we think we’re going to be okay, better even, smarter and inoculated, we’d still do anything to throw ourselves into it all over again. So we do, and suddenly we meet someone else, maybe someone better but probably not because we’re too young still, and that pain comes back so hard that we’re scared. But not so scared that we don’t fall back into again. Because we have hope; we’ve never not had it and we wonder if we never will. So we say, okay, I’ll have it, the pain, now and again, and acceptance washes over us like nails. If we know about the pain, why doesn’t it make us say we won’t do it again? When the pain is so bad that we could say that, but we don’t. As you say in your memoir, “You don’t stop trying to connect. You don’t close up like a clam, even when it gets hard to tell the difference between who you are and how you are treated.” Is it all worth it if in the end we may or may not get to something good?
Klausner: You never give up on something you want badly enough. Haven’t you ever seen a movie? You have to keep going, otherwise you’re not the protagonist. Otherwise, you’re that old guy from The Shawshank Redemption who hangs himself after he gets a job in a grocery store.
Rumpus: You say, “I blame hippies for everything, but most of all for preventing me from getting laid until college.” When you first agreed to this interview, did you know you and I were the same?
Klausner: Well, you’re in San Francisco, aren’t you? I just hope there are enough foodies and homeless people to balance out all the hippies I’m sure you have to trip over to get to the burrito place.
Rumpus: I’m torn between laughing and making fun of New York. Instead, here’s this: What it really means to have a sense of humor is to find your own life funny, particularly after you cry about it. What keeps your life funny to you?
Klausner: Recounting incidents to certain friends. Hearing yourself tell an inane story out loud and learning in that moment how ridiculous that experience was, in the presence of somebody you want to make laugh.
Rumpus: I want to talk about being funny professionally. You interviewed for an on-air writing position on the show of an ex. When he saw you, he gave you this nugget of advice: “’When you’re around an office like this one . . . Well, you might want to turn down the glamour.” You wore a suit, heels, and makeup. You say this interaction “motivated [you] to succeed in [your] field.” Even though you didn’t get the job, you’ve clearly succeeded in your field. In the end, did glamour help? Or were you just so good that glamour didn’t fucking matter one way or another?
Klausner: I think that when it comes to pursuing a creative profession, which is hard enough as it is, you are only going to make things harder when you try to be something you aren’t. When you do, it’s a short-term solution that you think will help you get a gig, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but usually it doesn’t–and the only way to endure is to be true to yourself and wait for the right fit to come along.
Rumpus: Because you’re funny, I am surprised you discuss issues like pornography in your book. I’d like to praise you for showing, in your writing and your being, that humor, intelligence, and cultural sensitivity can be found behind a nice pair of tits. I pulled this long quotation from your book: “Now my attitude toward pornography is markedly different; I don’t think the insane amount of crazy porn that’s instantaneously mass-accessed on a daily basis by men of all ages is so great for women, in general. Maybe I’ve gotten cranky in my old age, maybe I’m scared of the Internet, or maybe I’ve just concluded that life is harder for girls; that it’s more difficult for us to rise to any sort of professional prominence than it is for men, or to be taken seriously if we’re too sexy.” How do you feel about Andrea Dworkin?
