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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Do you listen to music when you write?
I listen to music when I write, yeah, especially instrumental music. And very monotonous, simple kinds of experimental and serious music are important to me. I also like Indian classical music quite a bit. And electronic, some rock 'n' roll. But not as much rock 'n' roll as when I was younger.
Do you remember what you were listening to when you wrote "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal"? That last scene, in which you describe female plumbing in explicit detail, is quite the feat.
I don't remember what I was listening to. It was '98, and I was pretty into Richard Buckner that year, if I remember correctly. As for the story itself, I had to talk to a biologist for that. It took about a month to write that whole story and then a month to write the last page, just to make sure I did it right. The story was assigned to me at the time when Fiona Giles was doing "Chick for a Day." This was my reply to her challenge. It's a story by a male writer written in the first person from a woman's point of view, in which that woman tries to prove to her cross-dressing boyfriend that he will never know what it is to be a woman. So, in other words, it's so convoluted and paradoxical that it demonstrates all the convoluted forces having to do with the politics of gender. I happen to believe that the masculine can't ultimately know what the feminine is, but I was trying to embody the complexity of gender politics, not write a treatise.
In "The Mansion on the Hill," the male narrator works at what seems to be a wedding convention center. Do those places really exist?
Mine is hyperbolic. The genesis of the actual marriage-planning business in the story is a hall my mother went to in Jersey. She came to dinner with me one night and had just been at a marriage of a friend's daughter, and it turned out to be at a multiroom marriage facility. It makes perfect sense from an American point of view -- if you're just renting a minister and you need space, why not? It certainly takes all the mystery out of the ritual. But that's no surprise. That's what we do in America: Take all the mystery out of everything until we're just left with a business.
Where do you see yourself now, as a writer living a writer's life?
I just want to be able to keep producing. The process of publishing is really grueling and I'd rather be thinking about writing something else than concentrating too heavily on the grueling part of publication, so I think about work, about the next book -- as with this nonfiction book I'm trying to finish.
Do you think that nonfiction truly exists when there's a narrative story you have to tell, when you have to fill in the blanks?
I tried to tell the truth in "The Black Veil," my next book. I tried not to make up anything. There's only one passage in the whole book where I fudged a little, and I admitted it on the page. The exercise, when I first imagined it, was to try to escape from novel writing for a minute to see if there was any relief in this other neighborhood, the neighborhood of truth. Turns out there's no relief.
What relief were you looking for?
From the awesome responsibility and difficulty of extended narrative. It's so hard. I'd love not to write another novel.
Why is it so difficult?
For me it's like torching your apartment because that's the level on which you have to use everything that you have. It's as if all your worldly possessions got burned in some conflagration, and now you're coming back to an apartment that's just sheetrock and fried electrical wire. That's how I feel afterward -- that I can't possibly put myself through this again.
