Welcome, everybody.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can project
without a microphone.
My name is Claire
Messud, and I just
wanted to welcome you to
our first Writers Speak
event of this academic year.
And it's a real thrill to
have Leslie Jamison with us.
And I want to say thank you to
our director Professor Sunil
Amrith and to Professor
Steve Beall, whose title also
involves the director
and another word
that I'm not sure what it is,
and also to Lauren Doan, who
has made everything
happen, and to Jeff
Mayersohn and the
Harvard bookstore, who
will be selling books.
I just wanted to let
you know that there
will be the second and
final Writers Speak
event of the semester
on October 28
when the Libyan-British
now living part
time in America writer Hisham
Matar will be speaking.
The book sale after
the event will
be right around the
corner in the lounge.
Leslie has asked me to let you
guys know that she will be,
in addition to signing books,
she will be stamping books--
she has special stamps--
and that there is an act
of reciprocity involved
and that you are asked
to sign her book too.
So start thinking of
something pithy to say now.
Please silence your cell phones.
So I'm just-- I'm going to
do a super quick introduction
for Leslie and one for James.
Then James is going
to introduce Leslie.
And then Leslie
is going to read,
and then they're going to chat.
And then you get your turn.
Sound good?
OK.
Welcome back to Leslie Jamison,
a 2004 graduate from Harvard
and an English
concentrator-- here, here--
and an alum of The Advocate
and the Signet Society
who then went on
to an MFA at Iowa
and a PhD in English
literature at Yale.
Leslie is the author of
a novel, The Gin Closet,
which came out in 2010 and
two earlier best selling
and beloved works of nonfiction,
The Empathy Exams in 2014
and The Recovering Intoxication
and its Aftermath in 2018.
Celebrated for her particular
combination of personal memoir
and essayistic reportage,
Leslie is the director
of nonfiction in the MFA
program at Columbia University.
Her new collection of essays,
Make It Scream, Make It Burn,
is it--
when's the pub date?
When was the?
Last Tuesday.
It's been out for one
week and is described
by the LA Times in
a review just a day
old as fabulously quirky and
unconventional, intelligent
and vibrant, and
her prose is hailed
as sonorous and captivating--
all apt adjectives indeed.
We're so thrilled and
honored to have you with us.
Thank you, Leslie.
James Wood, that
guy, is a professor
of the practice of
literary criticism
as well as a literary
critic on staff
at The, New Yorker magazine.
He's the author of two novels,
most recently Upstate in 2018,
and five books of
criticism, including
How Fiction Works, reissued
in a tenth anniversary edition
last year.
His selected essays,
Serious [INAUDIBLE],,
will be published this winter.
Formerly the literary critic
of London's Guardian newspaper
and of The New
Republic magazine,
James is also a
longtime contributor
to the London Review of Books.
He will be in conversation with
Leslie following her reading.
He's also, on the
full disclosure
front, married to me.
Over to you Jane.
All right.
Thank you very much, everyone.
It's a real pleasure to welcome
Leslie Jamison to this room
and to this campus.
Like most of you, I first
encountered her in the essays--
probably like most of you-- in
the essays that became her book
The Empathy Exams, a
series of adventures
in empathy with others
and empathy for oneself.
The title essay recounts a
time when Jamison found work
as a so-called medical
actor, someone who acts out
the role of a
standardized patient
with certain fictional symptoms
so that medical students can
practice their
empathy on said actor.
Jamison uses the gift of
this job to practice empathy
on herself among others,
imagining the non-standard
patient--
sorry, imagining herself as both
an ideally standardized patient
and the impossibly non-standard
patient she must actually be--
the young woman who is
drinking too much who
has to have an abortion and
whose irregular heartbeat
requires the insertion
of a pacemaker.
The essay vibrates on the
borderline between patience
and impatience and questions
the usefulness of empathy
even as it demands the
succor of its existence.
It's deservedly celebrated
for its formal ingenuity,
its moral complexity,
and brutal honesty.
You see it as a template
for everything that was yet
to come in Jameson's
work, not least
her stylistic brilliance,
describing her pacemaker,
for instance as the
barnacle of a false heart,
or how empathy is a choice,
something that needs
to be worked at, practiced.
Quote, "its mode of-- its mode--
it's made of exertion, that
dowdier cousin of impulse."
Jameson's next book,
The Recovering--
Intoxication and its Aftermath,
was published in 2017,
and it's a long, supple,
and shattering inquiry
into addiction and recovery--
Jameson's own alcoholism and the
alcoholism of several writers,
among them Raymond Carver,
Jean Reece, Malcolm Lowry,
John Berryman, Denis Johnson,
and David Foster Wallace.
It fearlessly examines
the impulses of dependency
and the causes of
correction, the reasons
for the destructive
surrender of addiction,
and the reasons for the
constructive surrender
of recovery.
It's marvelously well-written.
On Carver's stories,
quote, "his stories
were painful and precise, like
carefully bitten fingernails."
The ragged divinity
of barfly living--
[INAUDIBLE] Malcolm Lowry.
And there's a terrifying moment
when the pregnant author, who
has not stopped
drinking, pictures
the tiny, damaged
fetus inside her
like a tiny ice cube
cloaked in whiskey.
But I'm most struck by that
book's remarkable honesty,
its openness toward
human complexity.
Jamison isn't afraid
to see both the shame
and the excitement,
the battered prestige,
in chronic drunkenness,
even as she
subjected herself and her chosen
writers to pitiless critique.
And she sees with
cold generosity
her own episodic
narcissism, self-pity,
and moral impossibility.
More even than this because,
anyone can be ashamed,
she's ashamed and
a little proud,
which takes real honesty.
"Booze," she writes, "was proof
of extreme interior weather.
If you needed to drink that
much, you hurt," close quotes.
And by implication,
you were interesting.
But by the same
token, Jamieson is not
embarrassed by the earnest
sincerity involved in recovery
and the language of recovery.
Like David Foster Wallace, whose
novel Infinite Jest she came
to rely on, she learns
to embrace the very thing
that late modern writers
are supposed to disdain--
cliche, sincerity, simplicity.
Her latest book of essays,
Make It Scream, Make It Burn,
is, if anything, even more
intimate, self-reckoning
and porously empathetic
than her earlier work.
Jamison opens herself up to
a great range of subjects.
There are essays
about photography,
about giving birth, about
how people project their pain
and fantasy onto
certain animals,
a wale in the first
essay, or constructions,
the virtual reality
platform "Second Life."
Jamison frequently battles
her own skepticism.
In an essay about children
who have reported remembering
past lives, she has to
suspend her own suspiciousness
around such psychic
fancy, an operation that
involves doing battle with
the bullshit detecting
irony of one of her essayistic
predecessors, Joan Didion.
Jamieson in the end doesn't care
for Didion's skepticism around
how we tell ourselves
stories in order to live.
Quote, "I have my doubts
about her doubt," she writes.
A final suite of essays
tells us about Jameson's love
of her brother, her marriage
to Charles Bock, her role
as a stepmother to a
little girl, and finally,
rapturously, her pregnancy and
the birth of her daughter Ione.
Those essays dare something
new in her work, I think--
the intimacy of ordinariness,
of blessed banality
she thought she might never
want, let alone cherish.
Leslie Jamison.
Thank you.
Can you all hear me?
Good.
Thank you, James, for that
introduction, and thank you,
Claire.
Thank you to both of
you for hosting me here.
Thank you, Lauren, for
putting everything together.
[INAUDIBLE] Lauren-- Lauren.
Yeah, it's really--
I was saying to Claire
earlier how much
it means to me to be back here.
I've been really sort of deep
in memory over the past 24 hours
but in this layered way of
bringing my daughter, who
is almost two, to
all these places
that were part of shaping
me when I was young--
the places where I lived and
the places where I studied.
To teach at Barker
Center today was
incredibly meaningful to me.
So.
It's wonderful to be back.
I'm excited to talk to James.
I'm excited to hear
from all of you.
I thought that I would
read a bit from the title
essay in this
collection, in part
because it gave the
collection its name
and in part because it's
at the very beginning,
at least, about a
Harvard freshman.
So it felt right.
This is "Make It
Scream, Make It Burn."
And I'm going to start
from the beginning.
So it doesn't need
much introduction.
But because I won't
get to the whole thing,
I guess I'll say it's really
looking at James Agee's
classic text Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men
and thinking about
that text in relation
to Agee's first draft, which
was a much shorter magazine
piece he wrote about
three sharecropper
families in Alabama that
ended up getting rejected.
And instead of shelving it,
he wrote another 400 pages,
which is itself something
worth remembering.
But yeah, it's to me, it's this
powerful-- looking at that work
and looking at a bit of the
process of that work that
gets revealed and looking
at that first draft is
this kind of beautiful,
passionate, difficult inquiry
into how it is that
we make things at all
and how it is that we
understand ourselves as citizens
of the world and
accountable to the world
and accountable to pain in the
world, all of which are things
that Agee, though he
frustrates me and angers me
and makes me feel
all the things,
he also feels like company in
some of those primal struggles.
So here it is--
"Make It Scream, Make It Burn."
In the summer of 1929, after
completing his freshman year
at Harvard, James
Agee headed west
to spend a few months working
as a migrant farm hand.
As he wrote to Dwight
MacDonald, his fellow Exeter
alarm, longtime friend,
and eventual boss
at Fortune magazine,
he had grand visions
for what the summer would hold.
"I'm going to spend the summer
working in the wheat fields,"
he wrote, "starting
in Oklahoma in June.
The thing looks
good in every way.
I've never worked and
greatly prefers such a job.
I like to get drunk and will.
I like to sing and learn both
dirty songs and hobo ones
and will.
I like to be on my own--
the farther from
home, the better--
and will."
It's an amusing letter.
Agee has never worked
but knows he'll enjoy it.
He has gotten drunk, and he
knows he'll enjoy that too.
There's a sense of
manifest destiny
in his hypnotic syntax,
a grammatical insistence
on the fulfillment of desire.
I like to and will.
I like to and will.
I like to and will.
He fantasizes about
camaraderie and distraction.
He wants to be delivered
from his own interior life.
He's done too much hard time
with too many sonnet writers
in Harvard Yard.
He wants-- this is like--
I knew this was the right room--
the laughter and resonance.
He wants out.
The thing looks
good in every way.
As it turned out, it wasn't.
"Kansas is the most utterly
lousy state I've ever seen,"
he wrote McDonald on,
quote, "maybe August 1."
He continued, "I'm now working
at hauling and scooping grain
on a "combine crew."
I rammed a pitchfork
into my Achilles tendon."
AG paints a vivid
portrait of himself
suffering under
the heartland heat,
hobbling along a dusty
road, raising grain dusted
fingers to put scare quotes
around his newly inherited
life.
But it's also clear he took
pleasure in the hardship
he described, or at least he
took pleasure in describing it.
He signs off-- "have
to tackle a load now--
Jim."
At that point in his
life, Agee's manual labor
didn't have much to do with
his creative work back home.
At Harvard in the fall,
he'd been focused mainly
on getting elected to
the editorial board
of The Advocate, the
campus literary magazine,
and composing dubious love
lyrics to his long distance
girlfriend to whom he was--
painfully, it seems--
trying to remain faithful.
Quote, "I murdered
joy that your love
might abide, a precious
skeleton, lass at my side."
it was-- I just ended, like,
six long distance relationships
in this room.
It was largely anxiety
about this girlfriend
and their joy-murdering
relationship
that had made Agee
so eager to work
the fields in the first place.
"It will be hellishly
bad work," he wrote.
"So for once, I won't have
a chance to worry and feel
like hell all summer."
His letter imagines hard
labor as liberation.
It's absurd, of course, but Agee
acknowledges his own absurdity
before anyone else could
possibly call him out on it.
"I'm afraid it sounds a little
as if I were a lousy bohemian
and lover of the
earth earthy, but I
assume I'm nothing so
foul quite as that."
He is aware of how
naive he sounds
as soon as he sounds that way.
This preemptive self-excoriation
would eventually
become one of his hallmarks.
Agee's early letters
bears so many traces
of his later voice--
a fascination with worlds
far removed from his own,
an anguished reeling between
judging and valorizing
his encounters, and
an abiding obsession
with the relationship between
hard labor and interior life.
How does feeling reside inside
a body that works all day long?
Does that kind of brutal
monotony banish consciousness?
Is it degrading to
suggest that it does?
To deny it?
"The thing looks
good in every way."
Seven years later,
AG would indict
the thing from every
angle possible.
Researched in 1936 and
eventually published in 1941,
Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, Agee's sui generis work
of sprawling lyric
reportage wrestles
with the material lives
of three sharecropper
families in rural Alabama.
The book describes their
homes and the necessities
of their daily labor.
It catalogs their clothes and
meals and physical possessions,
their illnesses,
and their expenses.
But it also forces us into
the anguish of Agee's attempt
to do this describing
as if his attempt were
another house, a
labyrinthine architecture
of thwarted narratives and
self-sabotage and journalism,
built of convoluted syntax
and tortuous abstractions,
charged by feelings
of attachment
and, beyond and
beneath all else,
guilt. The book is
exhaustive and exhausting.
It is tormented about
what it finds beautiful.
Sometimes, it doesn't
even want to exist.
"If I could do it, I'd do
no writing at all here,"
Agee announces at the
start of the book.
"It would be photographs.
The rest would be fragments
of cloth, bits of cotton,
lumps of earth,
records of speech,
pieces of wood and
iron, files of odors,
plates of food and of excrement.
A piece of the body
torn out by the roots
might be more to the point."
He'd do no writing at
all besides the 400 pages
he ended up writing.
He hadn't worked but
knew he'd like it.
Now he had worked at writing
this book, a thankless job,
and knew he didn't like
what his labor had made
but offered it anyway because,
what else could he do?
This was what he'd done.
The project of praise began
when Fortune sent Agee
to Alabama on assignment
during the summer of 1936.
He traveled with Walker Evans,
whose accompanying photographs
would become as famous
as Agee's words.
"Best break I ever
had on Fortune."
Agee wrote in a letter.
"Feel terrific
personal responsibility
towards story, considerable
doubts of my ability
to bring it off,
considerable more
of Fortune's ultimate
willingness to use it,
as it seems in theory, to me."
Evans described
how this sense of
terrific personal responsibility
shaped Agee's research.
Quote, "AG worked in what
looked like a rush and a rage.
In Alabama, he was
possessed with the business,
jamming it all into
days and the nights.
He must not have slept."
Agee's doubts about his
ability to bring it off only
deepened once the
business itself was done.
As he wrote to father
James [INAUDIBLE],,
a teacher at his Episcopal
boys school in Suwannee
and one of his great
lifelong mentors, quote,
"everything there was
unpredictable from day to day.
I was half crazy with
the heat and diet.
The trip was very
hard and certainly
one of the best things
I've ever had happen to me.
Writing what we found
is a different matter--
impossible in any form and
length Fortune can use.
And I am now so
stultified trying
to do that, I'm afraid I've
lost the ability to make it
right in my own way."
Agee was on staff at
Fortune, outfitted
with an office in
the Chrysler Building
back in Manhattan where he
went on all-night whiskey
vendors turning out copy about
cockfighting in the Tennessee
Valley Authority.
But he was right to doubt their,
quote, "ultimate willingness
to publish."
The magazine killed
the piece in late 1936.
At that point, AG began
looking for other ways
to write and publish
the material.
He applied for a
Guggenheim grant,
calling his project,
quote, "an Alabama record"
and describing it as an attempt
to tell everything possible as
accurately as
possible with as total
a suspicion of
creative and artistic
as a reportorial
attitudes and methods
and, humbly, quote,
"likely to involve
the development of some more
or less new forms of writing."
He didn't get the grant.
Eventually, he got
a small advance
from a publishing house, so
he holed up in New Jersey
and began expanding
his original article
into the glorious sprawl that
would eventually become Praise.
The book was published
to little fanfare
in 1941, sold about 600 copies,
a few more in remainers,
and was, in MacDonald's
words, "a commercial failure
in every sense."
Not until it's 1960
re-release did the book
catch fire, fueled by the energy
of the civil rights movement
and appreciated by a readership
primed for the rich narrative
texture of the new journalism.
Lionel Trilling would
eventually call Praise, quote,
"the most realistic
and most important
moral effort of our
American generation,"
arguing not only for
its cultural stature
but also for the ways in which
it could shift our expectations
about what realism
might mean and the kinds
of messy, emotive texture
that realistic portraits
of human existence
might require.
In the meantime,
it was generally
believed that the original
manuscripts of Agee's magazine
article had been
destroyed or lost
for good until his
daughter discovered it
in a collection of
manuscripts that
had been sitting in
his Greenwich Village
home for years--
a 30,000 word typescript
simply titled "Cotton Tenants."
Reading this carefully
structured original draft
alongside the unspooling
book it eventually became
offers a split screen
glimpse into the process
of witnessing itself.
How does the morally
outraged mind
begin to arrange its
materials, and then,
once it begins to doubt
itself, how does it
rearrange them all over again?
And I'm going to read actually
from the last few paragraphs
in the essay as well.
Oh, I promise there's some
really good stuff in between.
So you should read the
rest of the essay to.
Jacob Reese describes how
he once fought the impulse
to cry out at a city
planning meeting
when a builder called
for designing more humane
apartments.
"I wanted to jump in my seat
at that time and shout, amen,"
Reese writes.
"But I remembered that I was
a reporter and kept still."
He wrote The Other Half instead.
It was his way of trying to
make the world a place that
could deserve an amen.
It was an accusation
and an exhortation--
a prayer directed
at the entire city.
Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men is the prayer,
but it is also an admonishment.
To read it, says writer William
T Vollmann, is to be, quote,
"slapped in the face."
AG wasn't thinking just
about himself, his own guilt,
his own love, his own arms flung
hopelessly around his subjects.
He was thinking about
you reading his words,
what you could see
and what you couldn't.
He wanted to throw a pile of
excrement on your open notebook
and let you figure it out.
The dilemma of impotence,
the quest to keep speaking,
and the inability
to ever say enough
is one of Agee's great legacies.
It choked and
spurred his speech.
But Agee's legacy isn't merely
his sublime articulation
of futility.
His legacy isn't just
journalistic skepticism.
It is his attempt to find
a language for skepticism
and to rewrite journalism
in this language--
to insist upon a
sincerity that lies
on the far side of
self-interrogation.
In the 400 odd pages of
praise, we find a lot of guilt,
but we also find
a lot of research.
The rough draft of "Tenants"
helps us remember this.
It lets us witness
what Agee made first
and examine it alongside
the epic it became
once it got digested
by the organs
of an endless self-loathing.
In "Tenants," we have
the first failure
in a long line of
failures, all of them
filled with rush and rage,
all of them beautiful.
We have the first
record of eloquence
before it learned to scream.
"Tenants" summons a you
and extends an invitation
that becomes a command.
You can look.
You must.
Look at what Agee wrote when
he remembered he was a reporter
and wouldn't keep still,
wouldn't keep quiet.
Look what happened
when he sought an amen
and found these words instead.
Now look closer.
You can feel him
getting restless.
You can hear the
rustling of his guilt
like the beginning
of a brush fire.
Thanks.
So I was saying to my
students yesterday,
we were discussing your essay
In Defense of Saccharin.
You're now on the
syllabus, right?
You haven't just come
back to university.
You're on the syllabus.
And I was reminding
them that one fact
about contemporary literature
is that essentially,
from about the '50s onwards,
writing is increasingly
being produced by people who
studied at the University
and that that marks
quite a shift between us
and previous ages.
I just wanted to start that
thinking about that in relation
to here you are
coming back to a place
that you studied literature at.
You went on to do a
great deal more study,
both in creative
writing and doing a PhD.
And it's a powerful
dynamic in your work too,
I think, that you're a very
good reader of yourself
and other people and of texts,
as you've just displayed.
And you're paradoxically much
less good at living often
or have been, right?
I mean that's
something you-- right?
You--
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm just interested
in how that-- right?
It's not [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE] to say, yeah.
Right?
OK, let's make it general.
We're all good-ish readers, and
we're all terrible at living.
But it is obviously something
that you come back to
again and again.
So I just really wanted
to ask you, first of all--
Yeah.
--what kind of
impact do you think
being trained to read texts
has made on you as a writer?
Yeah, and then I do--
yeah, I have definitely things
to say about that and also
things to say maybe about
the second part too,
about that disconnect
between reading and living
or that disconnect
between self-awareness
and self-transformation
and the ways
in which maybe that
connects to some
of the thinking about failure
that is happening in this book
or what's generative
about failure.
Yeah, I mean, I--
I feel so deeply
constituted by really--
I mean, I feel like a
palimpsest inside of everything
that I've ever read.
And some things
in that palimpsest
loom larger than others,
but so many of those texts
were brought to me--
bless you-- through classrooms
and through those discussions.
And so I think in a way, and
especially coming back here
and coming back to the
Barker Center today,
I was having these
very embodied sense
memories of being in
certain classrooms--
the classroom where
I studied poetry
with Jorie Graham or
the basement classroom
where I studied poetry with
Peter sacks or, you know,
reading many, many texts of
18th century travel literature
in that little seminar room
that overlooks the atrium.
And I think that for me, like,
the ways in which those--
Vendler's Whitman
seminar, which was,
like, hugely informative for me.
And so just remembering
those classrooms,
but also remembering
those classrooms
and what I read in
these very bodily ways.
Like being in that
building again,
I think that's so much of what
my writing practice ultimately
comes back to is how all
of these different ways
of absorbing the world are
living alongside each other,
like what we read,
what our bodies do,
where our bodies
have been, that those
don't exist in separate
compartments, right?
They're always kind of speaking
to each other inside of us.
And so in that
sense, I think there
can be these easy or
reductive narratives about how
too much programming
around contemporary writers
or these contemporary writers
coming out of MFA programs
can sort of impose a
kind of cookie cutter
stylistic approach or that
you can sort of recognize MFA
writers because they
all write the same
and that there's something
sort of getting increasingly
institutionalized
about how we write.
And there's been really
smart thinking and writing
about that.
But to me, I don't think
that will ever feel true,
or I don't see the
truth in that because I
think that the
writing is only ever
as flat as the veins
of literary influence
that are coming into it.
And if those veins are varied
and multiple and dynamic and
alive, then the writing is going
to remain that way in response
to them.
So to me, it feels like,
yeah, all those classrooms
are there, but those classrooms,
like, they were really
surprising and dynamic places.
So if you'd skipped Iowa--
Yeah.
--I mean, I know
a lot of things--
you experienced a lot
of things in Iowa,
and you read them about them,
particularly in The Recovering.
But if you'd skipped
Iowa and just
gone straight to
graduate school,
how would your writing--
what did you learn as a writer
at Iowa, apart from the fact
that you had time, which
is so precious, as you say,
to read more--
Yeah.
--literature?
Yeah, I mean, I think part
of it was as simple as, yeah,
just having space and prompting
to write and like less
that it was like I got
this series of lessons
and internalized them.
And once I got, you know,
good at all the lessons,
then I could produce
competent fiction.
It's more like, I think you
write and write and write,
and you fail and fail and fail,
or you don't quite hit the vein
and don't quite hit the vein.
And then-- at least for me.
And then maybe after years of
that, you find some new voice,
and it's not
necessarily clear why
you had to write the seven
mediocre stories before you
could write the eighth story
that had found something.
But you kind of do.
And actually, to come back to
that Vendler seminar again,
one of the Whitman
poems that I first
met in the Barker Center
that has meant a lot to me
in the years since is
that poem "This Compost"
and the idea of, well, in
that case, trying to think
about the carnage of the
Civil War in terms of compost
and how the dead are living
always underneath our feet--
or not living but are existing
always underneath our feet.
I mean, there was a powerful
sort of national project
at work in that poem.
But when I think about
most of experience, like,
I often come back to
that image of composting
and how even if we can't
understand the mechanisms
by which what we've lived or the
ways in which our failures kind
of constitute what
we're able to do next,
I really believe in that
process of composting.
And so I think Iowa gave
me opportunities to write
the seven mediocre stories
I needed to write in order
to write-- because there really
is only one thing I wrote
at Iowa that I
think was any good,
but I needed to write
all the things--
Right.
--around it before
I could get there.
So I think it gave me time.
I think it gave me sort of a
sense of muscle memory for how
the process needed to work, that
you needed to keep showing up
for uncertainty and failure
before you showed up
to the thing that felt
like it could sing.
And then I think there
were certain, like, truths
about writing that I
absorbed while I was there.
One of the ones
that comes to mind
is, like, things that I learned
in the classroom from teachers
that I wouldn't have come to
otherwise or maybe I would my--
life would have delivered me
in some different way to them.
But one of the ones that
I often come back to
is an idea that one of--
my final teacher there, who was
the fiction writer and essayist
Charlie d'Ambrosio,
he talked to us
a lot about the ways
in which the problem
with a piece of literature
could become either its subject
or a way into renovating it
and giving it what it needed
so that you could sort of--
either that you could
diagnose what a story needed
through, say, flaws in
its sentences or flaws
in its syntax, or that
you could actually,
in the case of certain
essays, take the thing that
felt like a liability--
like, say in the essay
you were mentioning in your
introduction, "The Empathy
Exams," when Charlie first read
that essay, he said, you know,
when you write
about your own pain,
you have this kind
of clinical distance.
And that piece of
feedback or that critique
was part of what gave
me the idea of narrating
my own experiences
almost as if they were
clinical dossiers, which was a
formal experiment that ended up
actually allowing me to narrate
the emotional experiences
in them much more fully.
Yeah.
Well, let's talk about--
I mean, talk about the
form of these essays.
I mean, the beautiful way
you interpolate autobiography
into often history or reportage
but also just the whole idea
of interrogation, right?
You talk about
interrogated sentimentality
in In Defense of Saccharin.
And just hearing reading
the essay about Agee,
it's clear how much
he means to you
and how much that notion of
preemptive self-excoriation
is meaningful to you.
I suppose-- the
question I have is--
and I know it's one that you
wrestle with because it seems
to be looking at your work
that there's half of you
craves a kind of
simplicity that will
get beyond an endlessly
additive self-excoriation,
self-examination.
And then there's
another half of you
that is absolutely
committed to it
both in principle but also
perhaps more haplessly, right?
Mm-hm.
Mm-hm.
So, well, what's the question?
What is the question?
This is the thing.
It's always easy
to say what the--
so the question is, is that
a dynamic that sounds right
that I'm describing?
And if so-- and
obviously, it's there,
I think, in David Foster
Wallace's work too.
So does one need to talk about
having an escape from that?
Is there an escape from it,
or is that just the wrong way?
Is that me, the moralist,
sort of composing a kind of--
maybe that's an absurd
way to think about it.
Yeah.
One can oscillate between
a desire to escape
and the inability
to escape from--
Yeah.
--endless self-examination.
Yeah.
Well, first of all,
absolutely, that tension
or that dynamic or
that oscillation
feels very accurate to
me as a characterization
of a lot of the work and, yeah,
probably a lot of the life
as well.
And I think the--
you know, in that
last portion I read
when I talked about Agee
wanting to believe in something
on the other side, to insist
upon us sincerity that
lies on the far side
of self-interrogation,
I think that is one way of
thinking about what I often
feel like I'm striving for is to
find this point of landing that
is a sincere point of landing.
And that's something that I
do stand behind and actually
something I believe that
you can stand behind
even if you haven't gone
through the endless process
of self-interrogation
to get there.
Like, the final lines
and empathy exams
are I want our
hearts to be open.
I just wrote that.
I mean it.
I want our hearts to be open.
And obviously, there's a kind
of self-awareness in there
when I say I just wrote that.
It's like acknowledging
that there are people
out there who say,
I can't believe
you just wrote that, I
want our hearts to be open.
But the hope or
the ideas that you
arrive at that simple statement
in a very different way
because you've read 240 pages,
in the case of that book,
of really wrestling
with, well, who
does that me-- why is that
a good thing for our hearts
to be open?
What is achieved
in that openness?
Is it possible for our hearts to
ever really comprehend anything
about another person's heart?
Like, trying to kind of break
down every piece of that
and then land on it
anyway is sort of the--
it's not quite the
same structurally
as just oscillating back
and forth between two things
and endlessly not resolving
the battle between them.
It's sort of saying when we can
get to this simple statement,
maybe it can mean
something more by virtue
of holding the residue of all
the wrestling [INAUDIBLE]..
It makes me think about
something actually you
and Claire and I
talking about just
before the event when you
asked if I'd had any downtime.
And I said, no,
because when I'm not--
when I'm in between teaching
here and speaking here,
right, I'm mainly with my
toddler but that there's a--
and so it doesn't--
like, as most people
probably who've
spent time with a two-year-old
wouldn't describe it
as, like, downtime, you know?
But-- but--
Except when they're asleep.
Except when they're--
and actually, to be fair,
she was asleep for
part of the afternoon.
But that it was--
you know, it's two
different kinds
of exhausting to
be with a toddler
and to be speaking
about the aesthetics
of self-interrogation.
They use different muscles.
And-- but that I think
there is something
useful in that counterpoint.
I mean, in that case, I'm
thinking about the toddler
time as involving a certain
kind of simplicity that's
like about being a body
alongside this other body
you love and want
to help survive
and exploring the world
in this very physical way
and that that's different from
the sort of endless processing
and self-awareness of writing
and thinking about writing
and talking about writing.
But that I-- ultimately,
I'm so interested in how
the simplicity and
the complexities
speak to each other.
And it's like what we
were talking about.
Some people here
were in this session
on keeping a notebook or a
diary that I was leading earlier
today, and part of
what's very moving to me
about reading the diaries
and notebooks of others
is the way that they
become [INAUDIBLE]
or transcriptions of that
conversation between complexity
and simplicity where you see
Susan Sontag writing about what
she ate for lunch and
then trying to sketch out
her ideas about camp.
And both of those were
happening in the same day.
She ate lunch and she
thought about camp, you know?
So--
Yeah, totally.
I mean, but when you read
then Sontag's essays,
do you feel that that
admission is missing?
Or do you--
Yeah.
Even as you enjoy
her and admire her--
Yeah.
--do you feel,
OK, that you could
have built that into the essay?
Right, as opposed to
just being in the diary.
Yeah, I mean, when it comes
to questions of taste,
I sometimes do miss it.
You know, and I guess
some of the examples
that people often come back
to with her work are illness
as metaphor and to write a whole
book about [INAUDIBLE] cancer
without narrating your
own experience of cancer
or even alluding to it
or AIDS and its metaphors
and to write that book
without talking about being
part of a queer community.
And you know, I
mean, ultimately,
And I guess I kind of think
about this pedagogically
too, like, when I
teach a workshop,
my goal is not to
tell my students,
like, what they should write.
Like, oh, you shouldn't
write this essay.
You should write
this other essay
that's personal narrative.
But I do think that often,
the writing that moves me
the most, part of why
and how it moves me
is that it finds a
way somehow to move
between the scales of the
granular and the personal
and the emotional and that
other scale of the analytic
or the conceptual because
they're never separate
and lived experience.
And so I like when
literature finds
ways of bringing them together.
It doesn't have to be
confessional, autobiographical,
nonfiction narrative that brings
that scale of the personal
or the emotional.
And I think it--
Just the [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, yeah--
--is what we have.
Yeah, yeah.
I totally get that.
You've written
brilliantly and so
movingly about
addiction and recovery,
and I just wanted to ask--
I mean, I wanted to ask
you about those structures
of addiction.
It's somewhat rhetorical
my asking you this
because you've written so--
I mean, you've asked
all the questions
and answer them so
well that there's
a slight foolishness
in this pantomime
that we're engaged in.
But-- that was my
self-reflexive moment.
Like a contagion.
That's like when Leslie
breaks into one of her essays
and says, I was on an assignment
and being paid, you know,
so-and-so for this
glossy magazine,
but I didn't want to do that.
I wanted to do this instead.
But you've written so well
about these structures,
and you've written
very honestly about how
to be addicted to
drugs or alcohol
is of course to be addicted
to other things too--
oneself.
You're very upfront about that.
It's to be addicted to
desire itself, wanting more.
I think, wonderfully, you write
about in the recovery about how
for you, I mean--
when you discovered
that anorexia and alcoholism
really weren't very distinct.
Both of them involved an
obsession that shamed you,
the sense of being
consumed by a desire that
was so limited in its object.
If addiction is addiction
to desire and to the self,
how do you ever get beyond it?
I mean, how does
anyone get beyond it?
Yeah, I mean-- yeah, it's funny.
When you were setting
up that question,
you treated it as
if it was something
I had already answered,
which is funny because I--
Well, I suspect you have.
Oh, I haven't answered answered
how we make addiction go away.
But I think the--
yeah, I mean, I do often--
one of the definitions
of addiction
that spoke to me most fully
in the course of researching
and writing that book
and sort of living
the lived material that
became part of that book
was a clinician at
Johns Hopkins, who
described addiction as a
limiting of repertoire,
that your sort of world get
small around a certain thing.
And you know, it's what
David Foster Wallace
finds his own, like, crazy,
absurd way of dramatizing
in "Infinite Jest," which,
for those who haven't read it,
this isn't really a spoiler.
It's like, you know--
or the novel is organized around
this kind of a cartridge, which
is like a video
technology, where
when you see this cartridge you
never want to do anything ever
again except for watch it
over and over and over again.
And that cartridge
becomes part of the way
that he talks about other kinds
of more recognizable addiction
that are all through that book--
crack and booze and pot and
the self and desire and sex
and, you know, all the
things that we want endlessly
or encounter the
endlessness of our desires.
But I think the idea
of that limiting
of repertoire and sort of the
way that the rest of the world
goes away because you
only want this one thing--
Right.
--it is the kind of frightening
core of addiction, I think.
And so one of the
ways out of it,
I think, on a kind of
psychological level, which
isn't to discount all the things
that are important to talk
about with addiction on
a physiological level,
right-- like sometimes,
the way out of it
might need to be you know
[INAUDIBLE] or methadone
or-- you know.
And so I don't
want to of speak as
if it's like all about a
psychological readjustment
or something.
I think there are also real
physical realities there.
But I think that sense
of finding some way
to take the limited repertoire
and make it large again
and sort of tune into
the world in its vastness
and its infinitude--
and different people
find different ways to
tune into that vastness.
But I think it's part of what I
love about the essay as a form
and even doubly so part of
what I love about the essay
collection as a form
is that it can go deep
into its central consciousness,
the consciousness
of the narrator, the
eye, and also remain
tuned into the side of the
world and the infinitude
to the world.
And part of what I loved
about putting this collection
together is the ways in which it
can both go deep into the self
but also involve a lot of
criticism and reportage, which
are not the only ways
but are some ways
to kind of bring in
the size of the world--
the people who become obsessed
with the loneliest whale
in the world, the people
who construct stories
around prior lives,
the people who spend
12 hours a day in these
elaborately curated
digital lives online.
Spending years reporting those
pieces was, for me, I think,
experientially as well
as aesthetically a way
of tuning into the
world in its size.
Yeah, yeah.
The idea of expanding the
range of addiction, in a sense,
makes a lot of sense.
But are you then still
stuck with just a larger
range of addictions?
I mean, the narrow
focus is gone.
But then, I guess, we're all
addicted to desire, right?
We're all variously addicted
to ourselves, right?
But what you do with that,
particularly if that's
been the structure of
the narrower addiction--
that's what really interests me.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess I wonder--
But I'm talking nonsense.
I don't know--
No.
[INAUDIBLE] I don't know about
the structure of the narrower
addiction.
If it's nonsense, it's the
only nonsense I ever speak.
So you're speaking
my language, James.
But I think it's--
yeah, I mean, I
think for-- well, I
guess the first
thing I'll say is
I think for me, part of
what's toxic about addiction
is the narrowing.
So if a kind of
addictive self can
apply that addictive
curiosity or that sort
of obsessive desire to absorb
or learn or pay attention
to like a polyculture of things
rather than a monoculture
of things or many things
rather than just the one thing,
then I think it has actually
thwarted some of what's toxic.
I mean, I think when
you talk about being,
like, addicted to desire
itself, I think part of the way
out of that is--
and part of what I was trying
to map in some of these essays
is, like, structures
of desire, I think,
are often about projecting
the sort of ideal version
of a thing that you don't yet
have or maybe can't ever have.
And so to desire something
endlessly or to long
for something endlessly
is sort of to long
for this perfect,
distant version of it
and that I think the way out of
that, [INAUDIBLE] endless cycle
of longing for the
thing you can't have
or longing for the thing
when it's far away is,
to also try to figure out how
to be with things close up, how
to be with things in a daily
way, how to be with people
in their flawedness
and their complexity,
how to show up for relationships
that are many things at once,
to sort of replace the
perfect, distant vision
with the close, proximate,
messy, imperfect one,
which feels like a very
non-addictive way of being,
right, to me, to
just like show up
for dailiness and imperfection.
Right, and that's
something you write really
briefly about at the end towards
end of the book with the more
personal essays where you're
writing about giving birth,
about marriage, about the
ordinariness of your brother's
life that seemed,
when you were younger,
stayed inaccessible--
admirable, but not yours.
So if that is very
much the texture
of your life at the
moment, something
that in a different context
you called unbland wellness--
I like that phrase,
unbland wellness.
If unplanned wellness is what
you're about and after right
now, is that going to produce
a different kind of essay?
Has it already produced a
different kind of essay?
Are those essays at the
end a little different
from the early ones?
Yeah.
Well, it's funny because I've
also started to think about
working on a novel again, which
is maybe another genre answer
to that dilemma, to
imagine things that aren't.
But yeah, I mean, I do think
that structures of experience
that are ongoing and that aren't
totally constituted by rupture
or things going wrong, that
are about sort of showing up
for daily experience, and
that involve kind of paying
attention to what
might be glorious
and the things we're tempted
to call mundane-- like, I do
think those ask for
different structures,
although the ask is maybe a
little bit different each time.
So you know, the essay I write
about stepmothers sort of--
I mean, there's quite a bit of
difficulty also [INAUDIBLE]..
It is an essay about
dailiness and caregiving.
And giving birth isn't ordinary.
So I mean, just to--
Well, it's giving--
yeah, well, that's
part of what's fascinating
about giving birth is, like,
giving birth is ordinary.
Like, it's literally the most
common experience in the world.
We're all here
because it happened.
But the fact that it's
common doesn't make it
any less meaningful. it doesn't
make it any less intense
and it doesn't make
it-- and I think
we have this weird cultural
logic that associates intensity
and singularity when, of course,
most of the most intense things
that happen to us
aren't singular at all
and they're not unusual.
And by asking,
demanding, that something
be unusual in order to
sort of earn its place--
I don't know.
I would be curious, actually,
for your thoughts on this.
I think it's something
we've accepted
in literary fiction
for quite some time--
that, like, ordinary experience
is absolutely the stuff of art.
But I think in nonfiction,
it's somehow harder
to arrive at that truth, that
ordinary things are, like,
the stuff of art.
But they are.
I think they are no matter
what the genre is, then.
Yeah.
So that's why giving birth
is both ordinary and--
I wonder if that's, in
part, a formal thing,
that when we think
about certainly novels,
we think about the patience
of a long form that
is then hospitable to a
great deal of ordinariness.
Yeah.
Whereas essays are--
Yeah, right, right, right.
[INAUDIBLE] that.
I don't know.
There's more of an expectation
of that bursts of intensity
or-- yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
But I think there are
different ways of sort of--
I think there are
different forms, I guess,
that ordinariness can ask for.
And you know, in the case of
the stepmother piece, I'm also--
there's quite a bit
of personal narrative,
but I'm also really looking
at a whole tradition
of the stepmother archetype
and how that archetype shows up
in fairy tales, in historical
records, and, you know,
the really fascinating
ways by which
that sort of vilified
figure of the witch
gives way to the vilified
figure of the stepmother.
But basically, in terms
of form and structure,
the essay is living
inside daily experiences
like picking a little girl up
and taking her to ballet class.
But it's also thinking
about the relationship
between those
ordinary experiences
and centuries of storytelling.
Or in the final
essay, which is very
much about the ordinary
experience of pregnancy,
it's putting that
conversation in relation
to a narrative strand
from 15 years earlier
of an eating disorder.
And so in that sense,
it's illuminating
the unbland wellness
of pregnancy
by putting it in relation to
unwellness in that sort of way.
Is that how you
keep the sort of--
the texture of
interrogation going?
[INAUDIBLE] right?
I think so partially.
I mean, really, with
that piece, it actually
started out as two
separate essays,
where there was an essay
about the eating disorder
that was formerly experimental
in a different way
and then an essay
about pregnancy.
And I realized each
strand on their own
didn't have quite
the right charge.
It didn't feel quite
motivated enough.
Maybe it didn't have a strong
enough question at its core.
And eventually, my
editor asked me, like,
are you sure that this
eating disorder essay needs
to be in this collection?
And I said, well, I
really like the way
it speaks to the pregnancy
essay at the end.
And as soon as I
said that to him,
I realized if I was
invested in the ways--
if my main investment was in the
ways those two experiences were
speaking to each other,
I needed to actually make
them speak to each other rather
than just having them speak
to each other in that sort
of vague, permissive, two
things in the same book are
always speaking to each other
somehow in some way.
[INAUDIBLE] yeah.
Yeah.
I was like, no, I really
need to figure out
what exactly it is that
they're saying to each other.
And in that case, it is
like when you formally
braid two things
together, you force
yourself to think a lot
harder about the specificity
of that exchange.
Right.
Yeah.
right.
Had not been published
[INAUDIBLE] this is the first.
Mm-hm.
And that was-- how
many of the essays--
and we'll soon get to questions.
How many of those
essays have been--
I mean, how many
are not published?
Most of them were published.
So the pregnancy essay and
the essay about Las Vegas
and marriage and the essay
about the photographer Annie
[INAUDIBLE]--
yeah, three very
different essays--
Had not appeared.
Had not--
OK.
--been published anywhere.
And the essay
about the layover--
I mean, that one
came out just right
around the time of publication.
But there was an essay about--
it was funny.
Somebody in an
introduction recently
was like, Leslie
Jamison covers topics
as diverse as reincarnation,
digital avatars, and airport
layovers.
Then I was like, oh god,
that really sells the book.
But there is [INAUDIBLE] fair
enough because there is a whole
essay about it layover in--
I did see the layover.
That's very good.
So I've got a final
question, and then we'll
go to the audience.
And I think I might have final--
I hope that this is
when you can't answer.
Oh, good.
So as someone who was brought up
in a very religious household,
I'm very alert to
religious structures
and particularly to
the presence of guilt,
which was the thing you
are most responsive to, not
surprisingly, in James Agee
and which I think absolutely
drives your work--
guilt and shame along
with some other religious
structures like atonement
and so on.
I love this question already.
As far as I know,
you didn't have--
you had the opposite of
a religious upbringing.
So where did they come from?
Where are the Jameson pastors
who were in their frock coats--
I should ask my whole--
--breathing down--
My family is in the
second row, so maybe I
should ask them where the
Jamison guilt comes from.
Yeah, I mean, I think that
it's probably easier--
what?
[INAUDIBLE]
There's a rhetorical--
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, I mean, I think--
and maybe it's easier for me to
locate the sources or origins
of shame than of guilt, which
is itself an interesting--
I mean, shame maybe
has more to with how
one fears being seen or
being seen in some way that
feels like it's
calling out some rot
at the core versus the
internal experience of it.
I think that I always had some
sense of something being not
quite right or not quite
enough inside of me,
and I don't actually
think that that's--
and you talk about
things being common.
I don't think I am particularly
unusual way to feel.
But I would say I didn't grow
up in a strongly religious way.
So the language
that was attached
to that feeling of something
being a bit wrong inside
wasn't a moralistic language
of sort of original sin
or something like that.
By the opposite of
religion, I didn't
mean that you grew up in an
increasingly immoral household.
I said--
I know.
--there wasn't a lot
of religious presence
is what I mean.
have even more to write
about if that was true.
No, I think I--
so I think it was almost like--
because, I mean, the kind
of religion of my home,
if anything, was with the
religion of excellence
or of doing things well.
And so I think that that sort
of the sacredness of, like,
achieving and being good
enough was more that
was the kind of language
in which that sense
of inbuilt insufficiency
was articulated was somehow,
I have to be good enough
in the sense of achievement
rather than good enough in
this sense of morality, right?
Right
But I think it's
been interesting
because my relationship
to spirituality
has sort of deepened a
lot in the last decade.
And it does feel, to me more
than anything, very connected
to what we were
talking about earlier
about finding ways
not only to tune
into the sides of the world
but to the sense of being
small inside the world.
I've been really,
really obsessed
over the last few months
with this Garry Winogrand
photography exhibit in Brooklyn.
And part of what
I love about it,
it's the sort of
darkened hallway.
Have you been?
No.
It's really gorgeous.
But it's this darkened hallway
of his color photographs
projected as slides
onto the walls.
And there are 16
at any given time,
but they're in
constant rotation.
And it really feels
like secular church.
It feels like a
church of the human.
It's these human lives that
are quite ordinary and quite
beautiful.
And part of what I
like about going there
is that I feel small
in a really good way.
And that sort of feels
like one of the closest
things to a kind of a spiritual
experience that I've had.
So--
Huh.
Well, thank you
very much, Leslie,
and we could now take sort
of 20 minutes, half an hour
to take questions
from the audience.
Anyone who has a
question-- yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh, and a microphone
is on its way.
Yep.
I think it's-- yep.
I have like 50 million I could
ask, but I can only ask one.
I was thinking about--
I guess it's like a
question and a comment.
I was thinking about the--
as someone who's been in
different kinds of recovery
myself, the religious
framework of it,
of like a lot of
recovery-based programs.
Do you think that informs
sort of the almost
religious framework you
had in your writing?
Yeah.
I mean, I think--
it's a great question.
I think there are certain things
that my writing is seeking
or wants that are related
to some of the religious
frameworks that show up in
religious institutions but also
show up in recovery around both
ways that it kind of really
related to what we were
just talking about--
sort of ways of feeling small
in a good way or ways of feeling
in contact with or finding
some faith in something kind
of bigger than you can see
the edges of or something more
complicated than you
can comprehend that--
sometimes how we talk about
that is, like, believing in God.
But there's another
way of thinking
about it, which is to say,
like, sort of believing
in the presence of something
more complicated than you
can understand.
And I think in that way,
commitment to literature
is also an act of
faith, right, insofar
as it's a commitment to
something more complicated
than you can understand.
That sort of the desire to
bring your consciousness up
against something larger than
you can see the edges of,
I think, is a very
religious desire.
But it's also a desire
that can express itself
in a lot of other ways.
And I think my writing is
really interested in what's
the thing that's larger
than I can see the edges of,
and how can I kind of narrate
experiences of coming up
against that threshold?
How can the writing
itself create
some version of that threshold?
And I also think, like, kind
of possibilities of grace
and where grace lives.
And I just did this conversation
for the Paris Review
with this poet Kaveh
Akbar, whose work
I would recommend to everybody.
He's a really phenomenal poet.
And he's really interested
in grace and the way
that grace lives
an ordinary moment.
So I think that that again is
a-- you know, religious faith
traditions have a certain
way of talking about grace.
But there are lots of
ways of investigating
the possibilities of grace.
And I think my work is really--
it's almost like it shares
that hunger with them,
religious frameworks
or religious pursuits,
but doesn't always share
a sense of the same means
or the same method.
Yeah, I love your
heart and your boots.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi.
I just went to a wedding last
weekend and then on Monday
ended up reading the
essay on weddings
that was just published
somewhere on the internet.
And I was struck by your one
line about sort of a moment
being a little too
sweet, but it's yours.
And it just got me
thinking about writing
in general and sort
of personal writing
and how you come
to kind of regard
that because it's both
yours and not yours
once it's out in the world.
And I guess it's something I
want to ask a lot of writers,
but what is your relationship
to your writing, I guess,
and how that relates
to your life itself
and having to talk
about it so much?
Because it seems like it
would be sort of hard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's
a great question.
And actually, your
framing of the question
itself begins to answer
the question, which
is to say that one of
the things that I--
I don't love
everything about work
going into the world,
especially when it
involves or has sort of--
some of the materials of the
work has arranged or drawn upon
or excavated are
personal or are materials
from my own lived
experience that
can make its entry into the
world even harder or more
charged or more fraught.
But one of the things I do
love is the way in which--
and this gets to what you were
saying about how something
is simultaneously kind of yours
and not yours anymore when
you put it out in the world.
I do love the way that
something I've written
gets implicated in 1,000
experiences that I don't know
or can't fully imagine so
that that essay about weddings
is now involved in, like, your
consciousness about weddings
and the wedding that
you just came back
from and the next wedding you'll
go to in ways that I can't know
and won't ever know.
But I love that it's like
part of that kind of tapestry.
And so in that sense,
there's like a relinquishment
or a relinquishing of owning
the thing that feels really good
because it's like, it's--
the work is taking up residence
inside of all of these lives
or becoming implicated
in processes
of meaning making or
making sense of the world
or, like, how do I
live in the world,
or what is my experience of
like a wedding as a beginning
and also an ending?
And you know, I just--
I love that the work
is becoming part
of other lives in
these ways that I
can't really see or understand.
Maybe it's related
to the first question
too, because it's like,
when the writing goes out
into the world, it
becomes part of something
that I can't see the
edges of anymore.
Like, I can see the edges
of the essay itself.
But I can't see the edges
of how it's been received.
And that's sort of--
it's like humbling and
terrifying and exciting
and all of those things at once.
But in terms of the kind of
emotional aspects of putting it
into the world, I do think it's
also a really important part
of my process that I just--
I revise so much almost
always before pieces go out
into the world.
And so it's not that
I no longer see them
as holding personal
experience that
has often a fair
amount of charge to it,
but it's like, I also, by
virtue of having revisited
the essay as like a
crafted thing or the book
as a crafted thing over and
over again, it also very much--
I have a relationship to
it as a crafted object,
as a kind of sculpted thing.
And so by the time it
goes out into the world
I'm seeing it as like just
the raw material of what I've
lived but really as this
thing that I've made,
which doesn't actually make you
feel less vulnerable about it.
It's like, if somebody
has a problem with it,
they have a problem with it.
Then you may not
[INAUDIBLE] you've lived.
But it does sort of-- it
inflects the experience
in a particular way.
Yeah, and there was a--
yeah, I wanted somebody
in the middle too.
So I'm curious.
One thing I feel
personally unites
you and David Foster Wallace,
you're writing, is that you--
I like this question already.
Say no more, yeah.
Well, I just-- you both
feel fearlessly vulnerable.
Like, I've always thought about
David Foster Wallace's writing
as extremely self-deprecating.
That's why I think we feel very
close to him when we read him.
That's why we trust him.
I see the same thing
in your writing,
and I'm curious because
I love it and respect
it so much in David Foster
Wallace, when I try to do it
myself, I feel like I always
fail because I think there's
a tendency to, when you're being
fearlessly vulnerable, when
you're talking about all the
hard parts about yourself,
when you're being
self-deprecating, I
think there's a
tendency to be saccrine,
to borrow your phrase.
I think there's a tendency
to just give into it so much
so that it feels fake almost.
How do you find
yourself straddling
the line when you're talking
about those hidden parts
of yourself?
How do you find
yourself trying to make
it authentic to the
point where it doesn't
feel put on or affected.
Mm-hm, yeah, I mean--
yeah, so there's so much that
feels right and intelligence
to me in the framing of that
question around essentially
the ways that
self-deprecation can become
its own form of
simplicity or reduction
or its own sort of
knee jerk posture.
So I think part of
why we're turned off
by a certain sort of
self-ennobling impulse
on the page is that
among other things,
you know, not only do you
not want to sit there hearing
about what a wonderful person
somebody is, but it just feels
too reductive to be the truth.
And I think that sometimes
where people get confused
or certainly where I got
confused when I was first
starting out as a writer is
I thought that the satisfying
opposite of that one-note
self-ennobling posture was
a one-note posture of
self-deprecation where if I
just said all the bad things
about myself or the, you know,
all the pre-emptive
self-excoriation could sort
of buy me endless
vowels on the, you know,
Wheel of Fortune game
of literature, you know,
that if I--
I would sort of
purchase the right
to a reader's sympathy
or a reader's attention
just by saying enough bad
stuff about myself before they
could say it about me.
But part of what I realized, and
I think this gets to the kind
of self-deprecation
that feels inauthentic--
it feels inauthentic when
it's not complicated enough,
when it doesn't--
because nobody is it's all
bad, whatever that would even
mean, just in the
same way that nobody's
all good or all virtue.
And so I think when
we just hear that sort
of defensive, fear-driven,
endless impulse
to self-implicate, it can
feel like it's crowding out
the other parts of the
truth in the same way
that the self-ennobling
account feels like part
of why we're suspicious of it.
It feels like it's crowding out
the other parts of the truth.
And so I think for
me, it's, like,
always about trying to let as
much complexity in as possible.
And maybe this connects to what
you were saying about anybody
can feel ashamed, you know?
But the next layer of
the piece is, like,
how it can also feel proud.
It's like-- you know, there's
a part of that's like, oh god,
I don't want to be the person
who's like proud of dysfunction
or something like that.
But what I agree with and that
is that feeling that's always
more interesting if there
are two things coming up
against each other that
conflict in some way.
And I think that's why
when self-deprecation feels
unsatisfying, it's
because there's not
enough conflict or
enough internal tension.
And that both never rings
true because lived experience
is always full of contradiction
and tension and things
pointing in multiple directions,
and it's also just less
interesting when things aren't
pointing in multiple direction.
Maybe time for a
couple more questions.
Yeah.
This-- I know that
this person has had
her hand up for a little while.
All right.
My question is about doubt.
Across your life, has there been
a moment or a series of moments
in which you've experienced
kind of the most
doubt about any theme?
And then any
takeaways from that?
Yeah, so I won't
just deflect and say
Agee will answer that
question in a personal way.
But part of why I was excited
to read from this piece was,
I mean, I don't--
maybe doubt isn't
the right word.
Maybe there was a
kind of humbling
that actually didn't create the
doubt we might expect it to.
But part of why I like
this part of Agee's story
is that he was
humbled in this way.
Fortune magazine didn't want
the story that he'd written.
The Guggenheim didn't
want to give him
a grant to write it again.
When he did find a way to write
it, nobody wanted to buy it.
And that just feels like
such an important part
of the story to me
is those moments when
the world sort of resists
what you're trying to give it.
And in a way, it's
like, OK, we also
see Agee's ego sort of
raging against that.
And you know, when
Fortune kills his piece,
he says, well, it
looks like I'm just
going to have to invent
some new forms of writing.
You know what I mean?
Sort of like the
opposite of doubt.
But there's also a
way in which that I
don't know where all
the doubt and guilt
and sort of constant
self-questioning
comes from in the
pages of that book.
But it's hard for
me to believe it's
completely independent
of all the ways
that his writing
around that subject
had been resisted by the world.
And so I think to get to your
question, one of the takeaways
from my own
experiences of doubt--
and there have been many.
You know, I think it's easy to
look at the kind of paragraph
bio of somebody's life and
their book jacket or whatever,
and you see all the
things that they've done
and all the ways that they've
gotten the things that they
wanted, and they've gotten
the things they wanted
to put on their book jacket.
But you know, in the midst of
in between the lines of what
shows up in the book
jacket are all sorts of--
I can remember, actually, and it
makes me sad that this probably
isn't the case
anymore, but I can
remember going to the
post office in Iowa City
with my stacks of Manila
envelopes of the stories
that I was sending out, and
none of them got published.
And that sort of process
of being young and wanting
the world to be excited to read
the things that I was making--
and the world isn't always
excited to read the things
that you make.
And it's still not excited
to read all the things
that I make.
And so that kind of constant
process of rejection--
I can remember a
particular bathroom stall
in Iowa, where I went
after a workshop.
I had workshopped a story
about Vietnam War veterans
who were living together on
a houseboat in the Venice
canals in California.
And I thought it was
like Agee thought.
I thought I had maybe more or
less invented some new forms
of writing with this story.
I wrote it exclusively between
the hours of like midnight
and 5:00 in the morning.
I was writing at this, like,
truck stop outside of town.
I was, like, you know,
it just felt wild
and it, like, had
emerged like Athena
from the forehead of Zeus.
Except Zeus was
like a fever dream
I've had in the truck stop.
And then, you know, it was
like getting a B plus in class.
Like, people didn't hate it.
They didn't love it.
They were like, oh, it's, like,
had some interesting sentences.
You know, it's like the
least overwhelmed reaction,
you could possibly imagine.
And my teacher just said,
you know, I don't really
know what to say
about this story.
I don't think I
got it, you know?
And that was like
what he had to say.
And so anyway, I remember
going to the bathroom stall
and just crying
and really feeling
like I thought I had
done something special.
And nobody else in
that room thought that.
And I just-- you know, I
think everybody comes up
against some of those moments.
And even in the moment--
and maybe this is
to get to letting
things be complicated or the
pride underneath the shame.
I think there was also
some part of me that
felt glad to be feeling
as much as I was feeling
in that moment, to care enough
that it kind of wrecked me
at least in that bathroom stall
in that moment that nobody
else had seen on the page
what I wanted them to see
or what I'd hoped
was there for them.
And so I guess some
of the takeaways
are both that there's the
ferocity with which doubt can
strike or the ways in
which it can be crippling
are also often
signs of investment
and that kind of caring
about the thing enough.
So there's a way
in which it can be
read the way a fever is your
body fighting something off.
It's like a sort of symptom of
the heat inside or the desire
inside.
And also, I think
there are things
the doubt has to tell us
about situations we might need
to get out of or stories that
we might need to figure out
how to tell a different way.
And I think trying to exercise
those muscles of learning,
to listen to what doubt
might be trying to tell you,
and then also those muscles
of sort of lashing yourself
to the mast like Odysseus and
just trying to block it out
and how [INAUDIBLE] involved
in navigating both that sort
of listening and that self-faith
of ignoring is like a--
it's a necessary
balance to learn
how to hold both of those
imperatives that one.
Final question.
Yes, thank you.
Right, so this might be
a minor local question,
but maybe it will lead
somewhere valuable.
I'm a big fan of The Recovering.
Listened to it up and down
to Vermont a couple of times
this summer and was amazed
by the close reading
and the taking down of the
myth of the alcoholic writer,
that one must go with the other.
The specific moment
I want to ask about
is buying Carolyn Knapp's
Drinking-- a Love Story,
I think, over in the
Harvard bookstore.
And it's one of the
few of them I had read.
So I was looking forward
to you going into it.
But you didn't at all, and in
fact, you didn't say the name.
You have this beautiful
moment about the Martini
glass on the cover and
the word love in the title
and an exchange
with the bookseller.
And I wonder if you could
talk about your decision
not to name her, not
to name the book.
Obviously, you've got to
edit somewhere, but just
the crafting of that
particular moment.
Yeah, I think it's
actually a white wine
glass on the cover of
that book, which I only
say because one of the things
that I connected to so deeply
in that book with
the way that she
talks about her
relationship to white wine.
And it's funny.
Somebody, a friend of mine--
What's the book, by the way?
The book is called Drinking--
a Love Story by Carolyn Knapp--
K-N-A-P-P.
[INAUDIBLE]
And it's a beautiful,
beautiful memoir
about drinking and recovery.
Yeah, and I will
answer your question.
I think-- yeah, I
had a friend who
recently read my
book, The Recovering,
and said that, you know, he
had really admired my writing
and himself is sober but
did many other things
that weren't white wine.
And he said that he
had really resisted
reading the book because
he felt like it was going
to be a book about
a white wine drunk
as her book is a book
about a white wine drunk.
And when he read it, I
said, so what did you think?
Was I a white wine
drunk or what?
And he was like,
well, you really were.
You really were a
white wine drunk,
but the book was
really good anyway.
And I realized, like, there is a
lot of white wine in that book.
But I was glad it had
some useful things to say
despite that.
You know, I think--
and I think this
actually connects back
to Agee in an interesting way.
Like, I loved
Carolyn Knapp's book,
and it was so important to me.
It wasn't that I got sober
right after I read it,
but it stayed in me.
It was like a little ticking
time bomb for years--
Did you read it--
--after I read it.
Did you read it before recovery?
Yes, a couple of years before.
And I actually, like--
you should never, like,
confess this as a writer.
I just sat on the
floor of the bookstore
and read it straight
for like three hours,
and I didn't buy
it, you know, which
is like-- it's a real
testament to the book
that I was like so
engrossed that I did it.
But then it's like, oh,
but everybody should always
buy the book.
And I did buy it
subsequently years later.
But I think I didn't write
extensively about it.
I didn't write extensively
about it because I didn't--
I wasn't wrestling
with it in the way
that I was wrestling with
some of these other books.
I just inhaled it, and I
needed it, and I loved it,
and I feel like it has all
these important truths.
But it's almost like if I
were to write about that book,
I would probably just
quote long passages of it
and with a big checkmark
next to them, you know?
And that's not necessarily
what people need for me.
But I feel like
some of the writers
that I come back to,
it's not necessarily
because they're the
writers I love the most,
although I do write about
lots of writers that I love,
but that they're
writers that somehow I'm
thinking both with
them and against them
and that there
feels like something
more productive about
transcribing that engagement,
because it has a couple of--
more of a push pull with it.
And you know, I probably
never stop writing about Agee,
but it's in part because
my relationship with him
is not that relationship
of unequivocal love.
I admire many things about him.
I find his language fascinating
and often inspiring.
I find this
relationship to failure
aesthetically and
structurally inspiring.
But I also, like,
he drives me crazy.
I find him frustrating.
I find him ethically
problematic.
You know, it's like, I find
that his guilt takes up
so much room on the page,
and like, that's frustrating.
But it's because I'm sort of--
part of me is loving
him and part of me
is railing against him.
And I felt that, you know,
with many of the writers who
show up in the recovering, there
is somehow more of a push pull.
And I love something about
what they did with words,
but there's also
something I feel upset by.
And their legacy is either
this kind of protective impulse
around their
self-destruction or--
you know, but there's something.
There's a little bit more of
a feeling of a struggle there,
and that's what
motivates the writing.
And I'm not sure I had
that sense of that struggle
with her work.
And that was why you
didn't mention her name?
Was it the name
or the title or--
Yeah, I don't know
if I have as smart
and answer for why I didn't
mention the name of that book.
I think I knew that
anybody who knew
that book would know from
the mention of a love story--
What it was.
Yeah, and then it
felt like there's
an exchange with
the bookstore clerk
where he sort of comments on
it being labeled a love story.
And I think it felt-- and like,
what did that imply about what
it was saying about alcohol?
And I felt in the way that
he said that that he was also
saying something about his
own relationship to alcohol.
Hm.
But it felt sort of
more powerful to me
maybe to just embed the title
in that moment of exchange
rather than to sort of lay
it out there and then have
it come up in the exchange.
Just sort of let the love story
come from his voice rather than
my text.
Wonderful.
Well, thank you
very much, Leslie.
Thanks.
