June 12, 2019 At Work Monstrous Cute: An Interview with Mona Awad By Halle Butler Mona Awad (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe) Mona Awad’s first novel, the prismatic and devastating 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, started working its way into me by the end of the second chapter. I’d been feeling awful for the protagonist, Lizzie—it’s hard not to. She seemed, to me, so vulnerable, so unaware, so needy. But then, a sharp shift happens: Lizzie suddenly seemed fully aware of her vulnerability’s pull, and starts using it, inverting and playing the power dynamic, making a fool of the drunken, failed musician who falsely believes he’s the center of her world. I broke out in a grin and thought, “This seems quite impish.” It’s one of the few times that book made me smile—the pedicure scene made me sob, and the ending is wonderfully mysterious and lonely. Transformations, inversions, and longing are Awad’s specialty, and in her new novel, Bunny, the impish quality is turned on in full. Samantha Heather Mackey (what a name!) is the archetypal outsider at an exclusive east coast M.F.A. program. The program’s mean girl clique is cloying, referring to themselves and each other as “Bunny” (how perfect in its layers of meaning—cutesy and pagan at once), while they critique Sam’s work as being “in love with its own outsiderness.” Sam gets an invitation to join the Bunnies’ off-campus salon-style workshops. She drags her feet, but, of course, she can’t resist. The workshops quickly reveal themselves as literal magical coven meetings. In the name of their artistic “practice,” the women conjure broken humanoid men (who look sort of like “pre-TB Keats” or Tim Riggins or Dracula or James Dean)—pseudo boyfriends who they refer to as “drafts.” The Bunnies themselves are rendered in a hilarious mix of self-seriousness and cluelessness, giving and withholding pep talks throughout: Bunny, we know you sometimes get depressed that your sister is this incredible neurologist in training or whatever … But then the day came when you went into your mother’s room and dragged her diamond ring across her vanity mirror … etching messages from the goddess of Wisdom … That was the day you started giving your special gift of you to the world. Sure your sister saves lives, Bunny, but you save souls with your diamond proems. And how many people can say that? The first part of Bunny is a shifting, gleeful collage of cultural references and stereotypes. Then, the novel breaks and reforms its own logic, going deeper into the nature of creation, friendship, community, and the boundaries between reality and perception. The ending, which I won’t give away, has some achingly sad, and very real moments. Mona and I met at a reading last March. After gushing a little at her, I asked if she’d like to do an interview over email. Read More
June 11, 2019 Redux Redux: Lost Causes Confound By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Lydia Davis in Paris, 1973. This week at The Paris Review, we’re reading archive pieces written by contributors to the Summer 2019 issue. Read Lydia Davis’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Richard Ford’s short story “Shooting the Rest Area” and Ishion Hutchinson’s poem “A Horace to Horace.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Lydia Davis, Art of Fiction No. 227 Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) Back in the early eighties, I realized that you could write a story that was really just a narration of something that had happened to you, and change it slightly, without having really to fictionalize it. In a way, that’s found material. Read More
June 11, 2019 In Memoriam Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now By Brian Cullman Dr. John at the 2007 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (photo: Derek Bridges) There was a press junket, and at the last minute someone with real credibility dropped out, and I was invited to fill in even though I was only a teenager. A number of us journalists were bused out to a beautiful old country estate. Frank Zappa was there, deep in conversation with a bunch of record collectors. Candy, the publicist, took me by the hand and led me to the back porch. Mac Rebennack was out there in full Dr. John regalia, with a modified turban wrapped around his head, and feathers and rings and voodoo beads, a carved walking stick by his side, and he was slouched there, a walking Mardi Gras, a sitting Mardi Gras, and the makeup on his face was starting to run, with the sun beating down on us like that, and he lifted his eyes and gave me a nod before he lowered his head. And then he closed his eyes. And nodded off. I was seventeen, what did I know about pills or publicists or the dangers of the road, all I knew was that this wasted, beautiful man in front of me was exhausted, his soul left behind in some barroom far away, and he’d gone too many miles, played too many shows, had to explain himself to too many strangers, and I was one of them. Was I supposed to address him as Doctor? As John? I settled for Sir. “Maybe we can do this later, Sir. Seems you could use a little sleep. I can come back.” “No,” he said. “No.” He seemed genuinely concerned, and he opened his eyes and tilted his head, he looked suspicious, like maybe I’d been playing with his beads. “No. I got to edumacate the peoples. Tell them things. I got to.” I said something about getting some rest. He gave me a look. “Listen. How you know I’m not asleep right now?” He stared at me hard. If he had a third eye, it was staring at me, too. “How you know I’m not asleep right now, and you simply part of my dream?” Read More
June 11, 2019 Arts & Culture The Anonymous Diary By Kathryn Scanlan I had her diary in the top left drawer of my desk, held together by the cutout bottom of a paper grocery sack. She’d been eighty-six years old in 1968—the first of the five full years she recorded. I didn’t know her. I had her diary because the person who’d previously possessed it passed away, and when their effects were sold at public auction, the diary—discarded, unwanted—ended up in my hands. I searched for her online in 2004 or 2005 or 2006. I may have searched again in 2007 or 2008 or 2009. I couldn’t find her—not even an obituary. I wanted to know more, but when I was not able to find it, I stopped wondering. This was a life not retrievable by search engine, I thought. There was something pleasing in that. The diary became something I took out often to look through, to read, to think about. It had none of the posturing I’ve seen in other diaristic endeavors, none of the tortured self-evaluation. Instead, the diarist wrote about bodily dailiness: weather, meals, sleep, hobbies, housework. Fire whistle in night. Steady rain at 8. He brought us some mush to fry. She wrote about the people she knew: their comings and goings, their physical and emotional states, their deaths. Maude ate good breakfast, oatmeal, poached eggs, little sausage. Maude ate her dinner pretty good. Had letter from Bertha she better and contented out there. Read More
June 10, 2019 First Person We Are All Scared by What We Aren’t Saying By T Fleischmann IML Winners’ Kiss, 1980. From the International Mr. Leather collection, Leather Archives & Museum, Chicago, Illinois. As fall begins to exert its emptying onto Chicago, I become aware both that the cold is near and that I’ve barely had sex since moving to the city. These are linked because if I do not figure out how to have sex in this new city soon I will sleep alone all winter, everyone hiding inside and covered in blankets and sweaters. I find sex differently, depending on where I am. In Seattle, the best way to find someone to have sex with was to go to a basement where maybe a band had been playing or to this one punk bar with dicks on the walls. In New York, walking on the street between any two places seemed to work well, while in Berlin I just kept taking drugs when they were offered to me and then when someone suggested a different party, I went to that new party, and I had sex there. Chicago is different, though. I even have to actually quit smoking here, where my Virginia Slim Menthol 100s are fourteen dollars a pack, which is the same as in New York but also, actually, too much. No one here knows I used to wear different eye shadow, here where some people call me “T” instead of “Clutch,” an old name back again. Soon I’ll put on a long puffy coat and then even the people who recognize me won’t recognize me when I’m walking toward them. The lingering warmth of fall means I’m more often in a light jacket over a dress or a button-down collar and skirt, my shape still available. I never really write poems but in Chicago sometimes I write a poem, I think because of all the transit. Being vulnerable to other people’s hands and voices twice a day makes me want to think about what is inside a moment, which poems are good at doing. Read More
June 10, 2019 Feminize Your Canon Feminize Your Canon: Catherine Carswell By Emma Garman Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Catherine Carswell The life and career of the gifted Glaswegian writer Catherine Carswell was marked by such alarming and recurrent notoriety that her present obscurity is baffling. In 1908, still in her twenties and working as a newspaper critic, Carswell made headlines when a judge ruled that her husband, who suffered from murderous paranoid delusions, was of unsound mind at the time of their wedding. Although the couple had a daughter, Carswell got the marriage annulment she’d fought for and an enduring legal precedent was set. In 1930, she became a pariah in Scotland thanks to her sexually frank biography of national poet-hero Robert Burns, which offended zealous keepers of the Burns myth. One reader saw fit to send the author a letter containing a bullet, with the suggestion that she “leave the world a better, brighter, cleaner place.” Then, in 1932, Carswell’s biography of her friend D.H. Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, was sensationally withdrawn from stores amid accusations of libel—not from the subject, who died in 1930, but from John Middleton Murry, the writer and critic. Murry, Lawrence’s posthumous biographer and the widower of Katherine Mansfield, had a tangled and volatile history with the late novelist and his wife, Frieda. An angry Lawrence once told Murry he was “an obscene bug sucking my life away.” Lawrence and Carswell had hit it off immediately upon meeting in London in the summer of 1914, when she showed him her autobiographical novel-in-progress, Open the Door! At twenty-eight, Lawrence was nearly seven years Carswell’s junior, but he’d already published three novels. In 1915, the publication of Lawrence’s The Rainbow occasioned a typical Carswell quagmire. Carswell’s Glasgow Herald review praised the book as “so very rich both in emotional beauty and in the distilled essence of profoundly passionate and individual thinking about human life.” She offered some criticism, too, warning of “revolting detail” and descriptions “which will be strongly offensive to most readers.” Nevertheless, unlike some reviewers, she didn’t unequivocally censure the elements that led to an obscenity trial and the book being banned in the UK. No doubt aware of the brewing scandal, Carswell arranged for her review of the novel to go to press without her editor’s say-so. The review was pulled from the evening edition of the paper and Carswell, a Glasgow Herald critic of nine years standing, was fired in disgrace. Read More