On the importance of good mentors

Was there anything you discovered about your creative process through writing your first book that you’re carrying forward into your writing now?

Totally. Thing one is that I know now that the way that you write a novel is by consistency, not by any kind of genius. You can choose your number, but for me, it’s 1000 words a day. I have to be writing that every day. That’s a very achievable goal. That’s actually two, maybe three hours of hard work. If you’re really working on the novel, you can’t skip. If you miss a day because you were sick, fine. But besides that, no. Weekends off, but it’s your job.

The other thing for me is that I get unbelievable back pain and hand pain while I’m writing. In her book acknowledgements, Elaine Dundy, who wrote The Dud Avocado, thanks the masseuse at this one hotel who she got a massage from every day because working at the typewriter hurt her neck so badly. I wish I could get a massage every day, but for me, I have to stretch. I do yoga. If I don’t do it, I am screwed. My hands get numb and tingly. So that’s my training, like an athlete. An athlete who sits on their ass the whole day, but an athlete who writes their thousand words, who’s consistent.

And listening to the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. That’s like my drugs. Mozart Clarinet Concerto, you turn that on. Maybe it’s because I played the clarinet, but not well. So I listen to that and I’m like, “Look, bitch, you’re not good at the clarinet, but you’re going to try at least with one thing.”

Work on your other thing!

Exactly.

I’d like to hear more about your feelings about autofiction. Because, knowing a little bit about your life, you let the narrator of your new novel, Happiness and Love, have a fair amount of autobiographical similarities to you. She’s also not given a name, which is always a nice invitation for people to project that it’s you. I assume that’s a choice you made consciously. How do you think about this book and the genre of autofiction?

Well, this book is certainly not autofiction. The narrator is certainly not me, just in that she’s got a bunch of qualities that I don’t have. One of them being the ability to be quiet for an entire night. I can’t really relate to that. I left those autobiographical details in there because I don’t think those details even mattered. With the other characters, I was so thoughtful about what they looked like and their specificities. But there’s not much about what she looks like. I don’t care what she looks like. I wanted the narrator to be a sort of void that the reader could look through.

I don’t mind if people think that it’s autofiction. I think that we’ve lost a little bit of the ability to understand that fiction is fiction, unless it’s about unicorns and dragons having sex with each other. If a reader needs to think that it’s real life to make it interesting to them, fine. But it’s not. I don’t think I would be as good of a long-term house guest as the narrator. I’ve got to speak my mind more than she does. But the book does come from observed experiences. I have witnessed those worlds, but not from the same vantage point as the narrator.

One character who stood out to me was Nicole, who the narrator describes as someone who “made nothing, did nothing, curated, but did nothing.” The narrator says she feels sorry for her, and I did too. She feels like a blocked creative. What are your feelings about her?

Nicole is the character that I feel the most ambivalent about in the book because she represents the way that having everything you want can ruin your life. When everything is available to you, suddenly everything becomes a choice that you don’t want to make because it forecloses other possibilities. Nicole has no idea what she wants out of her life; she only knows what she finds valuable in other people. So she’s in a really bad position.

I wish that she could take up oil painting or something, but because she’s seen the best of everything and she wants to fill herself with the best of everything, well, then suddenly she can’t really do anything because she’s not going to be the best at anything. She can’t even make the leap of trying. So it’s better to not try and just to be judgmental and go, “Well, I’m a curator. I’m going to pick the best one of that, and the best one of that.”

We as a culture are addicted to watching depictions of wealthy people on television and film and in books. I mean, literature has always included very wealthy people and their struggles. Does it make us feel better to think that no matter how rich they are, they’re still having a bad time? Do we as artists just want to stab these people over and over in the best way that we can? Hard to say.

I’m curious how this book came to exist. It’s your first novel, and I think I read in the acknowledgments that you started working on it as part of your MFA?

Yes. When it was time to do my thesis, I met with my adviser, John Keene, who’s an amazing short story writer and poet. And I was kind of going on these rants to him because he was showing me all of these articles that were being written about Dimes Square and this cultural moment in New York. And he was like, “Are these people for real? Is this cool? Am I really supposed to care about this? I can’t tell.” And I’d sit with him in his office and I’d go on these rants about these articles. Then we were talking about the novel Woodcutters, and I was like, “I sometimes feel like I should do my Woodcutters.” And he was like, “Well, that is your Woodcutters, what you’ve been doing, sitting in my office ranting about various annoying bullshit, that is Woodcutters. That’s exactly what Thomas Bernhard was doing.”

So I just started writing it. And because I respect John Keene so much, I was writing really quickly, and working hard on my writing, to give him something every week that I was proud of. He helped shape it. He’d tell me what was funny, what to do more of. He gave me direction. That’s how it started.

And then, what gave you the sense of, “I want to get this into the world, I want somebody to see this?” Because you mentioned you wrote another novel before this that you did not want to get published.

With the first novel I wrote, I was just doing it to teach myself how to write. For this book, I was really enjoying writing it. And John’s reaction was really positive. I didn’t want to show it to anyone but I had to in my MFA. When I showed it to people in workshop, their reactions were positive. So I thought, “Okay, this is a real book.”

MFAs get a lot of shit about art by committee but I didn’t have that experience at all. I think the real thing of an MFA is that you get more comfortable sharing your work with other people. Because for me, with my fiction writing before that, I’d find sharing that really intimate, like reading somebody’s diary. The workshop is a bit of ripping off the Band-Aid. Being like, “Okay, I’m in a room with functionally eight strangers and they’re going to read this and say a bunch of stuff to me.” I’m more used to it now.

When I went out to find an agent, luckily I have a bunch of friends who are writers, and some recommended specific agents to me. I didn’t have to do as much cold emailing. I’m a very sensitive person. So I was lucky to just be able to go to people, not that I knew, but people that had been pre-vetted for me.

Totally. And at least they might have a better chance of understanding what you’re up to, even if they don’t know whether they can sell it. They’re not going to question the whole premise of it.

Exactly. The other thing that the MFA teaches you is to be better with, not exactly rejection, but to be better with going, “You know what? I don’t like anything that person likes and they don’t like my story. The stuff they do is not what I like, so if they liked what I did, I’d probably be upset.”

It is really good not trying to be liked by everyone, and actually being relieved when you’re not liked by a person if you don’t like their work.

Right. Like, great, great. He hates it.

Okay, so I haven’t ever read Woodcutters, or anything by Bernhard actually. I know you said in your author note at the end, basically: it’s fine if you don’t read it, but this is the book that mine is in conversation with. So I’d love to hear a bit more about when you encountered Woodcutters and your relationship with that book.

When I first met my boyfriend, I was going on these huge rants about various things. You know when you’re first meeting somebody and you’re kind of downloading your whole life to them? “Okay, we’re going to be together for a long time, so I’m going to explain everything that I think about basically everything to you.” And he was like, “This is a Thomas Bernhard rant, what you’re doing right now.”

And I was like, “What is that?”

And he was like, “You got to read Woodcutters. This is so you.” Is that a compliment from your boyfriend? I don’t know. But I read it. That was years before I started working on this, but it was always a joke between us that various people had gone full Bernhard. Once we were at a dinner party and this guy started really ranting and raving. We’re like, “It’s a total Bernhard. He went full Bernhard.”

My favorite Thomas Bernhard is actually the first volume of his memoirs. They’re collected in English as Gathering Evidence. The first one is about when he’s a little boy. And it’s amazing because you think of Thomas Bernhard as this hyper intelligent, hyper cultivated person who is very cold and has all of these negative opinions. Very closed off. But there’s an intimacy in the first volume of his memoirs about his grandfather and his bedwetting and how much he loved his mom and hated his stepdad. It shows you in the later Bernhard where he has these glimpses of real tenderness among the vitriol.

Also, the form of Woodcutters and all his memoirs even are that one paragraph form. I found that to be such an amazing way of writing a novel. How come we think that novels have to be these paragraph, paragraph, quotes, whatever thing? Bernhard is just like, “Let’s go. These are my thoughts. We’re in this room, we’re going.” When I read Woodcutters, I thought, “I really should do this. This is just awesome.”

There’s a lot in this book about how the characters make or have their money. Which is not always the case in fiction; a lot of times I’m reading a book and the whole time I’m thinking, “What do these people do for money? How do they live their lives?” I find that very frustrating. But in your book, the narrator is actually kind of obsessed with identifying and explaining people’s class situations. So I’m curious to hear more about your money situation while you were writing the book. It seems like the MFA was a major part of how you could focus on this?

Yeah, big shout out to the Rutgers Newark MFA, which is fully funded. I applied to do an MFA because I was turning 26 and that’s when you get cut off of your parents’ health insurance. I needed to get health insurance and I didn’t know how. One of my friends was like, “I got health insurance through my MFA.” So I looked up all the ones where they pay you and you don’t have to pay, and you get a job and you get health insurance.

I was teaching freshmen to write. Really interesting endeavor. These were kids who finished high school in COVID and they didn’t know how to write a sentence.

And you were living in New York City while you were doing that?

The first year was on Zoom. I was living in London with my boyfriend in a sublet of his friend’s friend’s apartment. Then I moved back to New York for the second year in person. That’s the other thing—I grew up in New York. I live in a rent stabilized, very cheap apartment. I’m very lucky to get that. I can live the kind of life that a lot of other writers can’t live, truly just based on the fact that I am lucky enough to know somebody who was able to swing me a rent stabilized apartment.

Right, because this is your hometown.

This is my hometown. So I get a markedly different quality of life. Instead of having to pay 100 percent of my money every month to rent, I can have a slightly more normal way of living.

Okay, you know the questions that the narrator is asking the emerging artists in her fashion magazine interviews? I want to ask you a few of those. Has anyone done that yet in an interview?

No, that’s so funny.

Okay. First, what are a few of the items that you can’t live without?

Very fine teas, nice olive oil, and the expensive eggs from the farmer’s market. They remain $7 and the yolks are yellow.

The thing is, and I think this is very much like my narrator, I go through periods of being extremely finicky and picky and being a total epicurean. I need the finest foods and fine wines, and comforts and luxuries. But then I can also flip the complete other way and be like, “I don’t care. I’m eating Saltines for dinner.”

But I can’t do the middle. I will not go to Costco. I will not eat store-bought bread. I’d rather just eat some nuts and berries like a little bunny.

What’s your morning routine?

I wish that I had a better morning routine. I’m so routineless. My morning routine is yoga, Ashtanga yoga specifically, because you don’t have to listen to the yoga teacher say things, you just know what you’re doing yourself. I drink tea or many teas. I can’t have coffee; it drives me nuts. If I’m honest, I let the endless terrible news that’s happening in the world come directly into my brain. I turn on the radio and listen to Democracy Now, then switch to the BBC World Service, and WNYC. But if I’m trying to actually be someone that writes, then halfway through Alison Stewart, I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s 12:30. I have not done my homework for the day.”

What’s your morning routine in your ideal world?

In my ideal world, I wake up. I actually just don’t even touch my phone. I don’t interact with what’s going on in the outside world. I’m so focused on what I’m writing. I’ve had all of my dreams and my thoughts about it, and I’m immediately working, and then I’m finished with all my work at 10:00. It’s 10 o’clock, and I’m like, “Oh, you’re all just beginning? That’s crazy because I’ve accomplished everything I need to do and now I can just do whatever I want.”

I’m fine with the fact that I’m not a hyperfunctional person. I think I became a writer because I knew that I was not a hyperfunctional person, and the notion that I needed to have a boss to report to all the time, that was going to be a nightmare for me.

From when I was young, I knew that I would do anything to not have a job. I also knew I had to figure out a way to make money. Unfortunately, I’m not like the characters in my book that didn’t need any money.

Even at school, when the teachers expected things of me, I’d be like, “Sorry, I don’t believe you’re in charge of me and can tell me what I’m supposed to do.” I had an authority problem, not in the sense that I would rebel or act out, but I would be like, “I genuinely don’t understand why I’m supposed to listen to you. I’m in charge of my own destiny here.” So that’s a really nice thing about being a writer.