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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
I feel like anyone who was a 13-year-old girl at some point can relate on some level to what Jasira goes through. The decisions she makes based almost solely on what she's feeling certainly felt universal. In some ways, "Towelhead" reads like a radically updated version of "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret."
[Laughs] Times 50.
Were you influenced by young adult books?
I was a huge reader of young adult novels as a kid. When I became too old to read them, I was devastated. I had a terrible time transitioning from Y.A. books to adult books. My mother's a librarian and she'd try to bridge the gap. But I missed reading about those kids. I read a lot of Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, S.E. Hinton and Robert Cormier. It's a great genre. I haven't followed it since [then], but certainly when I was a kid, I loved that stuff.
When you were creating Jasira, did you grapple with how to handle her relationship with sex in a way that wouldn't be construed as sensational or make people think of, say, Larry Clark?
[Laughs] Larry! I think about him all the time. But that was the other reason to do the kid voice: She would get to talk about her sexuality. If someone else like Mr. Vuoso had talked about it, it would just be a book about a pervert or something. Jasira's relationship to her sexual life is very complicated. She falls into this life accidentally because she has these parents who are not very good parents; they're somewhat inattentive and selfish. She feels neglected. And then the mother's boyfriend likes [Jasira], and she discovers that there's a way to be liked. When she moves in with her father, it's a nightmare. He's frightening and she can't figure out what his rules are because they change all the time, and he's violent. Then she gets into this thing again where this guy pays attention to her. I think when you're that young and lonely, and you're feeling that beaten by the people you're not supposed to feel beaten by, you really don't have a lot of control about where you're going to get your attention. Her relationship to sex becomes sacred to her: It's the one part of her life that feels good. I don't think Jasira has any agenda, except to feel good. Her goal is not to titillate the reader. It's my goal, because I have a view about abuse, that it is titillating, and that we're never allowed to say that it is, but in fact when we read about it, it's titillating.
Why?
Because sex in general is titillating and everyone has their own pathology, which means they're going to pick one side of somebody dominating or being dominated, and there's a lot in there that's going to set them off or make them horny. That's a fact. But if you say that, that's bad. Mary Gaitskill, who I didn't mention before, is the most influential fiction writer in my life. Particularly her story "Secretary," and not the awful film that was made of it.
You didn't like it?
No. It's horrifying to me. The story is about a very depressed girl with a horrible home life; it's relentlessly sad and bizarrely funny. Its genius is that she's in an awful situation with a bad guy and it's not pretty and funny like the movie, it's awful. And instead of thinking, "Get out of there, girl!" the reader's going, "No, just please stay, just let him do this." And I read the story and thought, what the fuck is wrong with me? Because this writer has made me want a horrible thing to happen to this girl, and I'm really horny. And then I thought, that's what a real writer does -- a real writer makes me feel like I read this wrong. She made me feel like a messy human being. And I never stopped thinking that the goal of writing is to make people feel like messy human beings. When we feel messy, we're more at ease with ourselves. The point is that the book should titillate because there's nothing illegal about being titillated by an inappropriate scenario. It doesn't mean that I want some kid to get abused or I'm going to abuse some kid. But the point is, that's not Jasira's goal. She's just telling the story. My goal as the writer is to do what Mary Gaitskill did to me. Because I felt like that was a very complicated and rich reaction I had. That story changed my life.
