Blog

“I want to say Don Quixote by Kathy Acker but it seems like that wouldn’t be a *fun* gay marriage so I pick Iron Council by China Miéville.”

So I am writing from here, as one of the left-overs, one of those weirdos, the ones who shave their heads, those who don’t know how to dress, those who worry that they stink, those who have rotten teeth, those who don’t know how to go about things…

SPOILER ALERT: this alternate ending contains, in some sense, spoilers. It is not necessary to read Lee and Elaine first in order to appreciate it, but we highly recommend it!) 

I still have the card from Steve Ross’s grave I pinched the first time I took Heather to Green River Cemetery. If I hadn’t visited Hannah, I might never have become so cathected to Steve Ross.

Chris Kraus is the author of several books, most recently Summer of Hate. Her work is one of our favorite things about being alive, and if you have never read her books we implore you to do so immediately. She interviewed her friend Ann Rower about Lee and Elaine, whose setting she’s intimately familiar with, via email.

I started off my creative career firmly outside of the closet. I felt like straight people had enough art by and for them, and since I was queer, then by god, my art would be too! I thought the distinction between “gay artist” and “artist who is gay” was irrelevant because I thought it was nonsense to rank aspects of myself.

My girlfriend while I was writing this book (who I met on the subway), Debby Karpel, a singer, was the lovely office temp whose co-worker complained to her about a gay man sitting too close to him. “How would you like it if some butchy woman was in your face all night long?” Anna O.’s femininity was partially hers.

Barbara Browning came to life before me on a chilly gray Sunday, as I lay under the bedsheets, dressed in wool for warmth. I’d just finished Sheila Heti’s How Should A Be?, a book that left me feeling a little bit empty and angry. I was in the mood to read more, it was a day made for reading, and so I followed it with Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, a book about artists and writers performing their art on the pages, through video and film.

CS: First question–Maybe it’s too tedious or too politically correct to mention it, but the racebending in this book is more convoluted than the genderbending in a performance of “As You Like It” during the Elizabethan era. What does it mean to be a white person writing a mixed race man who deals with intrusive Stupid White People questions about his life and art? What does it mean for you to write a mixed race character who notices a paucity of other people of color in the spaces that he’s in, or gets tired of children asking what exactly he is?

Emily Gould: What surprised you, if anything, about reaction to Nine Months? Paula Bomer: Well, I wasn’t surprised to get that one-star review that was like “this is disgusting!” A friend of mine checked out all the other books that person read and they were all, like, bodice-rippers.  So that’s just not my audience, and I’m fine with that person thinking it’s disgusting. And I got a lot of “the narrator’s not sympathetic,” which I’m not surprised by, because it took me ten years to sell this book, and it was mostly because all these agents and editors didn’t find the character sympathetic enough.

You call it hanging out. She tells you this is a weird euphemism, but she is older than you and though that makes her decidedly more attractive, you won’t say dating or even seeing each other, as she does. You won’t call her your girlfriend, even after she calls you her boyfriend.