Talia Blatt

Mira Alpers

Tadhg Larabee

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. Among other awards, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, received a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Award.

On August 25th, three members of the Advocate’s fiction board – Mira Alpers, Tadhg Larabee, and editor Talia Blatt – met Lerner at the 15th Street entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We discussed Lerner’s recent, trilogy-concluding novel, 

, an intergenerational and autofictional bildungsroman. We found ourselves playing with twigs and making knots in leaves of grass. (Whitman made an appearance in the conversation.)

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for brevity and clarity. We wanted to condense it more, but everything he said was so good we just didn’t know what to cut.

Mira Alpers: Obviously debate is a spoken form of communication. I was wondering if you found it challenging to take the intricacies of pacing and tone, and translate that into your novel, representing in written communication the ways in which communication breakdown happens in speech.

Ben Lerner: When I went to college, I thought literature would be the opposite of high school debate. That the opposite of the weaponized eloquence that reduces people to winners and losers would be this literary relation to language, interested in ambiguity and nuance. And that was true, in a way. But it turns out that a lot of avant garde linguistic practices were actually similar to the weird thing called the spread, where you push language into this glossolalic, cultic ritual. It becomes asemantic; it becomes embodied. It’s like Kurt Schwitters' dada-esque performance. In a funny way, the extremes of debate lent themselves really well to literary representation, because they were actually like scenes of experimental poetry. So I felt like I had the resources to dramatize linguistic collapse more than I maybe had the resources to perform certain traditional realistic functions of the novel. I started as a poet, and I was influenced by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and experimental poetry that was interested in staging breakdowns in normative referential language. Personally it was this weird realization that debate was actually continuous with literary practice.

All the novels I’ve written involve scenes of depersonalization, or of language reaching a kind of limit. So that actually ended up being the part of my adolescence that was most easy to represent. That was a surprise. And part of why that surprise was interesting to me was because – you know the cliche that you campaign in poetry, and govern in prose? Trump-speak is like Dada poetry all the time. It’s totally agrammatical, it’s fragmented, it’s gestural, so there’s a way in which debate had a relation to both the prehistory of my understanding of literature, but also to the prehistory of the dada performance of bankrupt mainstream political speech. And the uncomfortable and interesting thing for me was that all these things I thought were avante garde – disjunction, nonsequitur – actually seemed to have been recuperated by the far right. I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with certain political claims made for difficult poetry, or staged breakdowns in speech.

Tadhg Larabee: I noticed in one of your more recent poems, “Meridian Response,” and also in your recent series of prose poems, that you seem much more interested in care and the recovery of language. Like I really loved the sequence of lines where you write:

changes in pronunciation, a call goes out

Is that concern motivated by those political issues we were discussing, or more of an internal evolution in your poetry?

BL: Both. The original impulse of modernist and experimental poetry was deconstructive – it was gonna fuck up the normal bourgeois regimes of representation. But we’ve learned the lessons that the self involves construction. We’ve learned the lessons about the ideological constitution of our worldviews.Then what? Instead of just being satisfied with art as another hammer, what are the possibilities for intersubjectivity? What can language make shareable? Which love might be a shorthand for in that poem. So there is a sense of the reconstructive. Learning how to speak again in the wake of the spread. That the good thing about the bankruptcy of American political language is the idea that we have to invent a new language, that we’ve arrived at some kind of limit. So I do think that I’m increasingly invested in that notion of a reconstructive project, but not with nostalgia for some idealized previous historical moment in the arts, or life – that would be participating in Make Poetry Great Again discourse. There’s that great quote – order and disorder are equal threats in a work of art. How do you really dramatize the construction of the tiny public in art? And I’m interested in what that looks like formally.

TL: I actually wanted to ask you about form. I noticed that in this particular poem you're returning to the form of

. I’ve always been curious about that form— it wasn’t one I recognized, and it seems like one you’re really committed to. How do you think about that particular eight line stanza, three line indent structure?

BL: Yeah, this stanza has a history. There’s this great, very unknown Charles Olson poem that I stole this pattern from. There’s something about the internal margin, the imposed form of the rule of the stanza but also the internal margin that multiples all these soft line breaks. Much of that poem is a meditation – not on the big project of poetry, or the achieved eloquence of a certain kind of vernacular poetry – but the smallest possible claim, what the smallest possible sound is, the minimal conditions for a poem doing the work of reconstruction. And the more margins the poem can produce, the more sites there are for soft landings or little enjambments. Instead of thinking about the stanza as a container you virtuosically fill, the imposed form of an intricate stanza pattern represents the receding history of poetry that you’re then wrestling with. Robert Creeley taught me a lot about that. Like “For Love,” this great love poem that’s mattered a lot to me, is a record of his failure to ever arrive at a definitive statement. The wrestling match he has, trying to get something said within the imposed form of the quatrain, is really beautiful. Alice Notley has this great elegy called “At Night The States,” and it’s a different pattern but it similarly has this internal margin that becomes like a tear in the voice. Every stanza starts “At night the states,” and then decays. “At night the states” sounds like it’s going to be this pronouncement, and then it falls apart across the margins of the stanza in this beautiful way. But then the next stanza begins “At night the states” and falls apart again. So instead of the refrain coming at the end of the stanza as the site of poetic closure, it’s this initial moment that fragments.

But I don’t know why something becomes writable in one form or another. You invent a fiction after the fact about it. Also, that poem has a fair amount of citation; most of my poems do. There’s a little Oppen in it, a little Whitman. With all those internal margins, you can take a quote and re-lineate it, which is this nice way of dramatizing your relationship to the received language. It’s another opportunity for collage, for wrapping around your found language.

Talia Blatt: Returning to the idea of constructive language, one of the parts of

I found most fascinating was the cow rhyme back-and-forth between Adam and his mom, which changes slightly in each exchange, opening up possibilities for intergenerational healing — not through discarding the past poem but innovating within it. I’m curious if parenting has opened up new formal possibilities for you.

BL: That to me is the central part of that book. Each of my novels is about poetry, and there’s less explicit citation of poetry in 

, except for that moment, which is about the way that the ritual misquotation of the poem becomes continuity and discontinuity, getting rid of something and reconstructing it at once. You’re really right.

I think the kid question is really interesting – men usually don’t get asked that question, except ‘Do you still have time to write if you have kids?’ ‘Yeah my wife takes care of them,’ that’s what men usually say, right? And at first I was very dismissive. Like when I first had a little kid, I was like, parenting doesn’t change anything. Now, I think it’s really profound. My new book of poems – I'm still finishing it, it will be out in like five years– I've been rereading it, and I've been surprised to realize the degree to which it is a book about the changing pressures of having brought possible readers into the world. Parenting changes you in all kinds of ways, but now my girls read. And they’re like, what is this weird totally incomprehensible thing, but they’ll try to read my poems. They’re 7 and 9, so they’re not actually reading it, but they’ll see their names, like in the acknowledgements, and they’re really interested in that.

And they’re also really baffled, as I am, by what it is I do. Is it a real job? This is a big question for them. And I don’t know. Not really? In 

, I wrote about how historically the value of poetry was the fact that it was useless in all existing economies. That’s in Whitman, because on one hand Whitman’s trying to write this secular bible for the United States, and on the other hand, he’s always sitting under trees, loafing. You know bring your child to work day? I don’t know what that means for me. You can kind of hide behind teaching; they think of that as a real thing.

To not even answer your question but honor the question, there is this question first on the level of composition. There is this thing, of them as possible or future readers, and I don’t know what it does exactly, but it’s there, and it’s intense. It works in two ways: It both makes me want to make something that is to them, makes me feel that whatever I’m writing is to a certain degree to them, or aware of them, but it also makes me want to write something totally outrageous and irresponsible. Because you don’t want to be a writer who just becomes responsible. Your job as a parent is to make your kid feel safe, but imagine if your job as a writer was to make your readers feel safe. Maybe in some way that’s a serious project, but it’s not my project. I have this newer poem, “The Readers”, that’s really about this – the change from when you can kind of say anything in front of your kids, because they don’t understand you – or they always understand more than you know – to now, they hear everything.

Topeka School only became writable when I was remembering my childhood from my parent’s perspective, when I had imaginative access to the generation above me. That only happened when I had kids. Because you have a kid, and you open your mouth, and all this father bullshit comes out. And it’s your father. I have this great gentle dad, so usually it’s just stupid jokes that are not mine. I’m not passing on violence from him. But the Father as a thing is always bigger than your father. It’s alarming, because you realize the degree to which you don’t know what you’re doing, and in that vacuum, this kind of intergenerational voice moves through you. There’s so much great literature about being terrified of your father. In Knausgård there’s that scene – I don’t know if you guys waded through the million pages of 

 – but there’s this one scene I’m thinking a lot about. His dad gives him a key to the house; he’s supposed to let himself in after school. And he can’t get the lock to work; it’s sticky. And he’s so terrified, he can’t tell his dad he can’t get the lock to work, his dad is gonna be like “you’re a fucking idiot,” so he starts breaking into his own house. But then his dad is obsessed with the lawn, the appearance of the lawn, so he’s horrified he’s going to leave traces in the lawn. In that Knausgård way, it’s told in the time of the kid, drawn out and elaborate. He’s an intruder in his own house because he can’t tell his dad that the lock doesn’t work. That’s a figure of mundane fatherly terror. So I’ve gotten really interested in how you evacuate the Father of authority. I have a story in 

 next week that’s very much about the ridiculousness of the Father. And maybe the role of a father is to be laughed at, to undo that bad historical work.

 wouldn't have happened if I wasn’t having that experience of having kids, where you look down at your kid and suddenly you’re like a grown-up, or “a grown-up,” and you imagine your parents looking down at you, and you know they didn’t know what they were doing, just like you don’t know what you’re doing, but that you also remember looking up, so you also become the kid again— you operate in these two perspectives at once, and that’s very much what 

MA: I’m really interested in this doubling and broadening of perspective. An image that really struck me from Topeka School is when Adam thinks he’s in his girlfriend’s house, then realizes he’s not – it’s almost like he’s in everyone’s house. And I’m from the suburbs of Oklahoma –

MA: Norman. So the every house looking the same thing hit very close to heart. But your approach to fiction has been so focused on autofiction and your own experience. What was it like to start writing from the perspective of the parents in the novel?

BL: The obvious but inexhaustible concept at the heart of a book like 

 is that the voice is corporate and intergenerational technology. And so producing a genealogy of your voice, which is on the one hand very self-involved or autofiction-y, actually passes back into the intergenerational and the social. It’s a portal that isn’t about the self in any easy way. It actually has race and class and historical circumstance in addition to your mother’s voice or your father’s voice or your debate coach’s voice, or what was on the radio. Even in the most personally expressive, sometimes even precisely when you think you’re in the most personal or interior moment, the voice is actually shot through with every social contradiction. There’s a way sometimes that the discourse around autofiction is kind of like the discourse around the lyric in poetry – that there isn’t actually a lyric that’s separate from the social. You can’t take Keats seriously without thinking about what was happening in the world, what his relationships were, his professional ambitions, etc.

That said, writing in a version of my mom’s voice was still a kind of auto-anthropology in the sense that my voice has been so influenced by my mother’s voice. But it also was psychologically unsettling and risky in part because of what it’s dealing with: a version of my grandfather. To write in my mother’s voice about her fucked up father, when I’m a father, was a way of thinking about how those experiences and events are in me too. It felt psychically dangerous, more dangerous than most writing, although writing always feels a little crazy to me.

The goal in the representation of voices in Topeka School is also not to pretend to have perfect access, or to produce a flawless mimesis of someone else’s voice. There are tears in the voices, or moments where it’s clear that it’s the older Adam imagining those voices. And those glitches in the voice are important, to really see that the pathos is in the effort, for the son to inhabit imperfectly the voices of the older generation, as opposed to this achieved ventriloquism.

For a long time I thought I wanted to write a book about Topeka, the book of my adolescence, and so I should do that in the first person. I’d only written fiction that I’d liked in the first person. But I could only do it as pure comedy. The tone couldn’t hold any of the stuff I actually wanted to address. So it was only when I could write the older generation in the first person, and flatten a lot of the Adam stuff into the third person, that the book became writable. And I actually can’t remember my teenage years from the inside anymore. I can remember pure terror. But if somebody asked me, why would you do that, why would you say that thing, I just don’t know. I really feel I have more access to my parents’ baffled handling of me than I do to my own behavior.

I think that autofiction is a useful term for sorting, but I think there’s a kind of fiction conversation that’s like, do you write about autofiction or do you write about the world? Which is not how the self and the world work. It becomes this reinscription of an asocial interiority I don’t think is real.

MA: I have a follow-up about perspective, looking more to the political. The book obviously focuses on Adam and his family, but it also focuses on the character of Darren, investigating his rage as a white man in the nineties. At the end of the book, it’s revealed he’s a Trump supporter, which feels like the book is gesturing at the question that plagued a lot of people after 2016: Why did people vote for this guy? How did this happen? I’m wondering if that was an explicit question in your mind when you were writing – and if so, would your answer to that question change at all now that we’re at least a couple years out of, well, the first Trump era?

BL: In a way the debate coach is the most relevant Trump supporter. In the nineties, at least in the pundit class, there was this end of history discourse, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the rise of Bill Clinton and the destruction of Bob Dole. It was going to be baby boomer post-ideological technocrats from here on out. And all of that talk about guns was a backwards conservative past that was just going to recede. Obviously this was always a dumb elite fantasy. But Adam in the nineties believed it in the sense that he believed his debate coach was on the wrong side of history. The book is about the confidence of Adam and his parents in a certain kind of conventional liberal progress as a forgetting of the lessons of authoritarian regression.

So the book wants to remember the texture of nineties naivete from the Trump era, where history is horrifyingly alive. Now Russia’s back too. Of course the language stuff is related to Trump, not just in how the spread can be a metaphor for the Twitter storm, or the bankruptcy of language in debate as related to the collapse of political speech, but the prehistory of Trump is more distributed in the relation between those two periods than in any particular figure.

I wanted the book to be funnier, because the situations I was in were the greatest, messed-up comic material. But it wasn’t funny, because the pressures under which it was being written were not lending themselves to comedy. And parody is impossible to sustain now, because everything outpaces parody. That’s part of the genius of the right, that it contains its own parody. People talked the same way about Hitler– it’s not a perfect analogy – but people didn’t take him seriously because he had a Charlie Chaplin mustache, and people didn’t take Trump seriously because of his hair. People don’t take Boris Johnson seriously because of his hair. I think there’s an essay to be written about fascist hair, and about how the pre-embarrassed fascist hair allows you to be smuggled in a project. Maybe you guys can write that. Look into that. But part of why I couldn't be funny was that the buffoonery of white masculinity has been incorporated into this project.

When I was your guys’ age, we were Fredric Jameson readers, and our left imagination was of a neoliberal order so secure and run by such powerful evil geniuses, that although we must resist it, we also have to acknowledge that it doesn’t matter who’s elected; it’s all the same. And now it’s like, you can just fucking walk into the Capitol? James Meek writes really well about this for the London Review of Books. For all the horror of January 6, if Trump takes back over, is anyone learning lessons about modes of resistance? Obviously condemn this racist mob on the capitol, but also, what’s the left equivalent of actually reclaiming these spaces? My friends and I would go to protest, but we’d be like, ‘No one can ever touch the halls of power. No one could ever disturb the Bush-Clinton dynasty.’ Now, starting with the tea party, it was all up for grabs, you know? There was a kind of hubris and confidence in the nineties – either in the pessimistic mode – the capitalists have won, the neoliberals have won – or in an optimistic mode if you were a Clinton supporter. That all seems naive from the present.

TL: I remember a funny moment in that James Meek essay – I’m probably misquoting it, but it was something about the inconceivability of seeing leftist paramilitaries march through Prospect Park, some snide reference to Park Slope. I’ve heard you described as a Brooklyn writer; some of your books are set here, and I think you have a lot of devoted readers in this area. Do you ever worry that your readership is a bubble?

BL: I know it’s a bubble. One of the interesting things about starting as a poet is the idea of having any readers at all. And I’m not bestselling– I mean George [Saunders] sells a lot of books – but I don’t have a massive readership. My novels, and a lot of the literature I most love, involve a lot of self contempt – trying to see if through a ruthless self-criticism there are opportunities for humor, pleasure, energy, eros, and also some kind of authenticity that’s arrived at through a spiral of self-repudiation. It can of course become a manner like anything else, but I don’t think you write for whatever position you imagine you inhabit, you write against whatever position you imagine you inhabit. The best and worst thing about writing is that you’re writing for the dead, you’re writing for some imagination of the future, you’re writing in a way that you can’t control. You have to write what’s given to you to write. You can’t do that much about it. The imagination of perception always enters the work. But like we were saying about kids, there’s more than one person over your shoulder.

I really care about the poetry, but most of the people who read the novels don’t read the poetry. And to me it’s all one body of work, and it’s a really different body of work if you read the poetry, or if you read the criticism I’ve written. A metonym for that: 

 grew out of this love for John Ashbery’s work. There’s a passage cut from an essay I wrote for boundary 2 about John Ashbery a long long time ago. It describes Adam Gordon having a profound experience of art, being really moved. All the reviews of that book – which were often very generous, and I didn’t think anybody was going to read this weird book– but usually they just skipped that part. But it’s actually a very different book if you take those moments about poetry seriously. That doesn’t make it less of a bubble; it’s just a slightly different body of work, less about a kind of skepticism of art and value in the present.

When you have some event, such as three really smart people asking you about your writing, the tendency is to act like you think your writing is so great, because why else would you guys be taking the time to talk to me? But I don’t have a huge confidence. Sometimes I think I've written really well, and I'm doing something in its own terms that’s an achievement within whatever contemporary writing can be. Other times I’m like, I don’t really like this, I don't think this worked out. So that’s the other thing about reception – my own reception of my work is full of ambivalence and conflict. And the literary world in Brooklyn is shot through with all modes of misogyny and racism and class-exclusion. It’s all corrupt, and commodified. But you have to believe it’s not exhausted, that there’s still something that’s more than that, or escapes that, or is other than that.

I was just in Denmark. It’s great but hard for poems to travel. Translation is an example of when reception gets troubled, where the things you’ve written mean something else. I'm not making a claim for that in the world, but for me, that’s really great, to see how unstable reading is, how much it changes when the context changes. But also, I do live here and love it here and am disgusted by the ways New York feels increasingly like living in an Apple Store. I am from somewhere else, too.

One of the weirdest personal ways I navigate reception is how what I write is received in the family I've made. Not just kids, my wife and I have lots in common. We went to the same college, she’s an anthropologist of education and she’s a reader and a writer, but she’s also a Puerto Rican woman, and she doesn’t come from the place of neurotic interrogation of privilege that is the engine of some of the work I've written. It’s not alien to her now, she fucking lives with me, but it was very alien to her. So there’s also this sense of reception in how what you do enters your relationships, and my relationships are not just within the bubble of perception we’re talking about.

It’s also weird because I’m 43 now. Before, I was the kid. I was the kid for a really long time. First I was the young poet, and just when I was not going to be the young poet, I accidentally wrote a novel, and it started over. So I was the young novelist. And now, I’ve become some kind of establishment thing, and you want to work against that too.

All of my answers are I don’t know. I have a story coming out next week. You guys don’t have to read it –

BL: It’s about all these things at once. I’m not going to fucking write another story unless it’s funny. I’m committed. I need to know I'm not becoming humorless.

TL: It sounds like you’re working on a book of poems now. It also sounds, from what you just said, like you’re starting to become a little alienated from fiction. Do you think you’re moving back to poetry, and if so, why?

BL: I don’t think I’ve ever moved away from poetry. I’ve written poems the whole time. Poems are the centers of the novels as we were talking about. But I haven’t published a book of poems. Part of it was this trilogy of novels, not that I saw it as a trilogy, but there’s something about the number three for me, a totally indefensible relationship to three.

BL: I couldn’t think about a book of poems until I had finished the three novels. So I’ve been writing poems the whole time, but I’m going back to the book of poetry as a form. I do think poetry’s resistance to certain kinds of reception is freeing. But also, I don’t know what reception is in the age of fucking Twitter. It just feels like Twitter all the way down. You can’t look away and you have to look away.

TB: That reminds me of one of the funniest scenes in

, the beginning: Adam’s so busy monologuing on the boat that he completely misses it when his girlfriend jumps and swims away. It raises the question of reception, what it means to talk when no one’s listening. Do you ever feel that your reader has slipped off the boat? And the girlfriend is such an interesting foil to Adam in that scene. In some reviews, your novels are described as “boys’ books.” I don’t agree with that label, and I'm curious what you make of it.

Winter 2023

Fiction

An Interview With Ben Lerner

The hole in his paper is perfect. Completely flat and circular. Even on a blank page it looks empty.

Will slips in the tip of his mechanical pencil, until the base of the cone is too wide and stretches a curling, anxious lip of paper around the edge of the hole. The cylindrical body of the pencil barely fits through; when he pulls it back out, a tear forms from the hole to the bottom of the page.

In the top left corner, he starts drawing a Palladian window. He traces his thumbnail to make the central arch.

Gabe elbows him and makes a face. Gardner’s announced assigned project pairings. Gabe’s screwed with Rylee. Will’s with Zoe, which is fine. She’s nice enough and takes school seriously. It’s a much better shot at an A.

Will shrugs. Gabe rolls his eyes and mouths 

 Gabe thinks Zoe talks like a professor but Will likes listening to her talk. He can tell she curates her words, like her sentences are museum exhibits she needs people to experience in a particular order. He has to stop drawing whenever she talks, but not because he can’t hear her. It’s sort of like how he has to turn down the radio whenever he is driving somewhere unfamiliar.

Gardner drones on with the project guidelines. No PowerPoints, he’s saying. Be creative. Will is thinking about what Zoe said in class before winter break.

Their class met 7th period on Friday, the last obstacle between school and vacation. They made it through the Civil War with fifteen minutes to spare. Gardner asked them to answer a final question before they left for break.

“When I say ‘history,’ what do you think about?”

Will pictured pyramids, shifting like sands into temples, Gothic churches, clocktowers, Art Deco skyscrapers. Protrusions of solid rock from dust, evolving like something animate. When it was his turn, he said, “Things that don’t fall apart.” Gardner frowned thoughtfully.

Gabe said, “The past.” Gardner frowned disapprovingly.

Zoe went last. She said, “Dead languages.”

“When you lose a language you lose what happened to people but also how it was understood, how it was felt, how it was seen. History is all of that.”

Gardner tilted his head. Then he smiled. “See, now somebody’s thinking.”

Will had never thought about dead languages before. Maybe Latin, but some people still speak it in church, so does it count? He doesn’t get when a language counts as dead. Even now when he pictures a dead language he imagines the oversized alphabet posters from his elementary school classrooms in two-dimensional coffins.

He shades in a roof (Dutch, but maybe it should have been a Gable) above the thumbnail window, deciding that he disagrees with Zoe and Gardner. A dead language is the opposite of history. It’s not just gone, it was never even alive, never even real, never even there. He looks up from his drawing; people are already moving seats to be next to their partners. Zoe motions to the empty desk next to her. Before he gets up he adds a spire to the roof he’s drawn. It’s rushed and crooked.

Zoe asks him if they can meet Sunday morning. He reminds her that he has church. They decide on Saturday afternoon. He gives her his number and she texts him her address.

On their way into her house Zoe touches something on the door, then brings her fingers to her mouth.

“It’s a mezuzah,” she says, like he’s supposed to know what that means.

He didn’t think they would work in her bedroom. She leads him through her kitchen, where her parents are arguing over a New York Times article, something about a stolen museum artifact. He can’t remember the last time he saw a print newspaper.

They go up to the second floor, and he feels too big. Why are second floor ceilings always so low? His head knocks the ceiling above the stairs and immediately throbs.

He has never been inside a girl’s room before. Her bedroom walls are covered in posters for artists he either doesn’t know or doesn’t like. She is neat but not organized in the anal-retentive way he had pictured. He doesn’t remember thinking about how organized she would be. There is a bird feeder outside her window with six molting brown birds moving in stop-motion.

He sits on the floor in front of her bed – she doesn’t have any chairs in the room but sitting on the bed seems presumptuous. She crosses over and sits down next to him, leaving the door open.

“We can use my laptop,” she says, tapping the touch pad. She opens a Google Doc and titles it “History Project: Planning.”

He hates that he has to hunch down and in to see her laptop screen. It’s exhausting, taking an unending inventory of his body. He tries to shift closer to her to type in his email, but it ends up being too close. He feels like a marionette with tangled strings, knees and elbows at wrong angles. He can see a tiny freckle on the shell of her ear and the top swell of her chest, visible above an electric blue sports bra.

“I think we should write an essay. I’m happy to write your parts if you’re busy with practice.” She makes the offer like it’s the opening statement in a debate.

From what little of Gardner’s instructions Will retained, he thinks the project is being graded on creativity. Writing an essay does not strike him as creative. He’s also a little offended at her willingness to remove him before he’s said or done anything.

“Well, it’s supposed to be creative ---”

“Yeah, but. I think Gardner wanted something, more, I don’t know, outside ---”

“Outside the box, unconventional, sure. I know what you mean.” She sighs. “We can figure out the content, then pick a form.”

“You’re right, the form will inform the content. Or they’ll be related.” She thinks for a second. “We could do a faux news article? Like Yellow Journalism?”

“Sure,” he concedes. It’s not a bad idea. “I could do some illustrations. And the layout. If you want.”

She looks disgruntled, which is how she’s looked every time he’s opened his mouth. But she doesn’t object, vocally at least. Two vertical creases deepen between her eyebrows, which together remind him, abstractly, of a suspension bridge. He takes out his notebook to sketch newspaper layouts.

It’s difficult to explain what he’s thinking while he’s drawing; he can’t think in two different languages concurrently.

“Gilded Age, gilded, like ---” he starts.

“You’d use metallics, like the Cross of Gold, it would connect the writing and the color scheme—” she interrupts.

“If we, I mean, if the paper was, like faded somehow---”

“We could artificially age the paper, so it’s literally yellowed—”

She seems to know what he is trying to say before he does, cutting him off or finishing for him halfway through a sentence, impatient when he takes too many words to get to the point she knows is coming. She winces when she does it but also does not stop doing it; in fact, the longer they work, the more she intervenes in his sentences. Will wonders whether conversations just seem tedious to her, whether she is more offended by the waste of time or by the waste of language. He thinks he has said more words to her in an hour than he has to anyone, total, in the last month. This realization makes him want to – he isn’t sure. Close off? She’d have the perfect word for it. Taciturn, she’d say. But he can’t help it, he keeps talking.

It's humiliating. She’s pulling words out from him she doesn’t even want. He isn’t making a dent in her and she’s gotten inside him, lodged in his throat. He sees at least four different dictionaries in random places on her bookshelf and some of her posters are askew in a way that does not seem deliberate. And he’s still so close to her. Her head would fit under his chin.

They don’t get nearly as much work done as he can tell she wanted. Will knows it’s his fault. The longer they spend in her room the more he feels out of breath. Whenever he talks he feels both buried in his head and trapped outside of it. The wooden post of her bed digs into his spine but every minute adjustment he makes seems to echo. He keeps looking at her when she talks and looking away from her when he talks but he can’t stop looking back at her, like she is a constellation and if he looks away for too long he won’t be able to find her again.

He starts to pack up around 5. She’s looking at the back cover of his notebook, which has a design for a treehouse he sketched during math.

“You still want to be an architect.” It’s not a question or a judgment; all of the words are equally emphasized. This is why Gabe says she sounds weird, Will thinks. She never means more than the words she says.

“Yeah,” he says, zipping his backpack.

“You probably remember this. We had to design a school for art class, in fifth grade. You were allowed to use a steel T-square. No one else. Just you.”

He remembers the class she’s talking about in the artificial, hazy way he remembers stories his parents told him about how he acted as a baby.

“You sliced your finger on it, but you didn’t notice until the blood stained your paper. You were so distressed, and we all thought it was because of the blood, but then you said it was because you couldn’t finish the drawing.”

She is already typing again by the end of the sentence. She doesn’t elaborate.

Fall 2022

Two Weeks in Omena

Annika Inampudi

Eve Jones

Kyle Mandell

Serena Jampel

Sidonie Brown

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel 

 won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her subsequent novel 

 bestseller, and will be adapted for film by director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Moshfegh judged the Advocate’s 2022 Louis Begley competition for short fiction, and selected Yash Kumbhat's "Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending." On May 13th, the fiction board interviewed her about her decision, as well as her upcoming novel, secret talents, approach to historical fiction, insomnia, and storytelling. Fiction editor Talia Blatt was joined by former editor Tadhg Larabee, and members Sidonie Brown, Serena Jampel, Eve Jones, Annika Inampudi, and Kyle Mandell.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Talia Blatt: Let’s start with your decision in the Begley contest this year. Can we hear more of your thought process? And in general, when you read fiction critically, what do you look for?

Ottessa Moshfegh: I'm always looking for something that grabs my attention and sustains it. Second, I'm looking for a story that I want to understand. And the winning story was one that I felt immediately confused by, and not because it was written in a confusing way, but because it was about something that I didn't understand. I thought it was profoundly deep, and I was very impressed by how the story is woven in an almost abstract way through firsthand experiences as told by various characters that are all part of this strange world, going through this disaster. And I also just thought that it was beautifully written.

TB: You don't have any presence on social media. We're wondering to what extent you think authors should participate in the online conversation about their work.

OM: I think authors should participate to the extent that they care to. I don't think that there's any real requirement or restriction there. I think for me personally, I'm doing this interview from my car because I'm so busy. If I tried to have a life online, I don't think I could live my life IRL in the same way. And this is the life I care to live. For me, the way that I work with language, and the way I express myself, is my art form, and giving it all to Twitter or Facebook feels a bit like energy wasted. I can have conversations with people, and I'm satisfied with those conversations, when it's not being published online by an app or mediated in any way through a third party. I don't know. I like direct conversations.

Tadhg Larabee: I was incredibly excited to hear, maybe a year ago, the rumors about Yorgos Lanthimos adapting

, since it's one of my favorite books and he's one of my favorite directors. And I was wondering, especially given what you just said about the importance of unmediated language to your art form, how you're thinking about that book being adapted visually. How is that process going?

OM: I've written a bunch of screenplays, and most of them are adaptations of my own work. 

 is definitely the hardest adaptation because the novel is so much an interior monologue, and moves around the inside of the unnamed protagonist's mind back and forth through time. It required a whole new lens for me to see it as a movie. And I can't really talk about what's happening with that. But it's been an interesting process.

TB: I think we were hoping to do something of a fun speed round. Short questions, whatever comes to mind first. So: What's on your night table?

 by a friend of mine named Daniel Saldana Paris, a Mexican writer. I've been meaning to read his book for a long time. And I just saw him in Mexico City last week.

TB: You can have three writers, alive or dead, over for dinner. Who are they?

OM: James Baldwin. Honestly, I would just want James Baldwin to myself. Yeah, him and two empty chairs. I think that would be one good evening.

OM: Well, my high school graduating class was like 25 people. So it's hard to say. It was a very small school, very intimate. I think we all loved each other in a way that isn't possible in a bigger school. Two of my best friends now at almost 41 are friends I made in high school. So maybe I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, but I definitely had some really great friends.

TB: What was the last gift you gave someone?

OM: My friend stayed at my house dog sitting while we were in Mexico, and I brought her back a peyote-stitch, beaded bracelet.

OM: Maybe voices? I have a secret ambition to be a voice actor and do cartoon voices.

TB: What is one small thing that brings you joy?

OM: Probably when my husband comes home with flowers.

TB: If you didn't write fiction, what do you think you'd do?

OM: I think I might have ended up being some kind of executive. I don't know.

TB: Alright, that's the end of our speed round.

, but I was unsettled by it, particularly the femininity that's portrayed. I was interested in how you think about writing about women, because that book is a totally different femininity than I've ever read.

OM: Well, I think of writing about women the same way I would write about men: that they are human beings with very complicated egos and belief systems. Everybody has a past and everybody has a strategy of coping with what hurts them. I identify as a woman so often I feel that I am adjacent to my female characters because if they don't feel exactly like me — and they never do — I'm sort of observing them from the outside more. And weirdly, when I'm writing a male character, maybe because I'm not male, I find that I can feel possessed by the character best if I fully embody him. So I might imagine myself on the inside, rather than adjacent to him. But that's a very abstract way of answering your question.

TB: Your answer reminds me of conversations the board has had recently about autofiction. I'm curious what pieces of yourself you find appearing in your work — if it's like looking at a funhouse mirror.

OM: When I look back at my work, it is an archive of my curiosities, and the things that fascinate me, things that repulse me, things I find really funny. Still I don't actually identify with autofiction, and I'm not quite sure I understand what it is, not that I need to. I've always been interested in first person narratives because it's a way of writing from a different perspective, unique to your character. I've always thought about that kind of storytelling as voice-driven, almost like a song. It also has a lot to do with acting. And because it's such an interior form, or it can be, I think it's really easy to project the consciousness of the author onto the character. That's really common, and really funny to me, because if that's so, then I'm not a creative person. I'm just writing about myself. Trust me, if I wrote about myself, it would be really boring.

TL: On the subject of proximity to yourself, proximity to our world and our time, I'm really excited for your new book, which is historical fiction. I'm wondering how you wrote about a time so far from our own, and people so different from ourselves.

OM: Thanks for asking about the new book. It’s funny — I've written several novels that could be called historical fiction, but I've never really thought of them as being part of the genre, in that formal way. Like my first book was a novella and it takes place in New England on a ship in 1851, and I've been working on a long term novel project that takes place in Shanghai and San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. Lapvona, the new book, felt more like it was playing with the genre of fable than the genre of historical fiction. But it is not in any strict sense of the word, a genre book, or at least I didn't intend it to be. I love research, and my methodology of research is really unscientific. I see research as part of the creative process, in that, in each detail that I find, I find a new trail of breadcrumbs to follow, into the next subject, the next article, whatever is going to bring me closer to understanding how to describe, in language, the world of my story. So I never mean for my work to be historically accurate. It's more like I'm stealing from history to inform my own work.

Eve Jones: On this note of the creative process, what does it look like for you to sit down and write? Do you have any rituals?

OM: Good question. I really wish there was a ritual, because then I could just, like, do it. Usually when I'm writing a first draft of something, like a novel, I just set aside a certain number of hours each day, and have a goal to write a certain number of words. It's different when I'm writing a short story. A short story, because it's shorter, because you can sit back and hold it out and look at the whole thing at once, the process of drafting is way more one of revision and rewriting and moving things — it's like a constant shifting collage, until the story snaps into place. But when I'm drafting a novel, I just try to keep moving forward every day, so there is a kind of rigid discipline. And when I’m revising, I have a really specific method. It’s very boring, but it looks like me with my manuscript and a pencil, for hours and hours each day over and over and over again, until I can read it though and not make any scribbles. Then I’m like, okay, here's a draft.

TB: Your work seems to really relish in disgust, especially as it relates to the body. I'm curious — why disgust? And has it changed the way you relate to or inhabit your own body?

OM: I think it's more that my feelings about my own body were showing up in my writing. Revulsion has always been a prevalent emotion in my experience, especially when I was younger, starting from puberty up until a couple of years ago. Disgust was a primary emotion for me; instead of getting angry or sad I felt disgusted. I think that's why I've had to write about it so much—it's part of my make-up. I don't find the human body disgusting. I actually find human intelligence kind of disgusting. But I like conflating the two. I do think there's a lot of value in writing about a character's physical being. Reading is such a thoughtful process, that I think we do it to escape the physical world. But if you can bring the physical world back into that experience, I find that very interesting. Having a visceral response to literature is something I think is important to keep up the power of the written word. It's also just sort of my jam.

Sidonie Brown: We discussed the ways in which the self creeps into writing. But on the other side of that coin, I'm curious if you find writing creeping into your life. For example, the narrator in

just has this intense apathy. While you were writing that character, did you notice apathy creeping into your life?

OM: No, but what I can say is that you're absolutely right that whatever you're working on starts to appear in your own life. I think that's true for everyone I’ve talked to who works creatively. I had struggled with insomnia before, in my early twenties, but it hadn't been a very big deal, not a big enough experience to write an entire novel about sleep. I mean I've always been fascinated by sleep, and I'm always really tired, so I think that's more what motivated me to write about rest and relaxation. But as soon as I finished writing that book, I developed horrible insomnia. I lost the ability to fall asleep. That really felt unlucky, and weird, uncanny.

TB: Last two minutes — we're all here because we're college kids who like to read and write. Any words of warning or inspiration?

OM: I don't really recommend seeking a career as a creative writer, but if you are supposed to be one, you will totally not care that I just said that. It's extremely hard, and it's extremely unlikely, even if you're a fucking genius, that you will get the attention that you so desire. It's a real gamble. And it's extremely hard work. If you want to be great at something, you have to work at least five times harder than you think you do. But you guys are all at Harvard. So you're probably all overachievers. I would say, Jesus, go swimming. That's my advice. Go swimming.

Talia Blatt

Talia Blatt

Fiction

Winter 2023

An Interview With Ben Lerner

Fall 2022

Two Weeks in Omena

Spring Summer 2022

An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh