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>> Poetry and Prose is sponsored by
the National Endowment for the Arts.
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>> Welcome to the 2020 National Book Festival.
My name is Colleen Shogan and I'm the Vice Chair
of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission.
I'm honored to moderate this
session entitled The Examined Self,
which is part of the festival's
Fearless Women programming.
We have two remarkable authors
with us this discussion.
Before we begin, let me tell
you briefly about each of them.
Elizabeth Tallent is the author of the memoir
scratched, which we will be discussing today.
She is also the author of the novel Museum
Pieces and four collections of short stories.
Her stories have appeared in publications
such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's,
Grand Street, The Paris Review,
and The Threepenny Review.
Her teaching has been honored with
Stanford's Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award
and the Northern California Chapter of Phi
Beta Kappa's Excellence in Teaching Award.
In 2009, she received the Stanford University
Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
She has been a finalist for
the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of
the bestselling memoir In the Dream House
and the short story collection
Her Body and other Parties.
She has been a finalist for the National Book
Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize,
the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction,
the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Non-Fiction,
the Brooklyn Public Library Literature
Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award,
and the National Book Critics
Circle's John Leonard Prize.
She is the writer-in-residence at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Welcome Carmen and Elizabeth to the
20th Annual National Book Festival.
>> Nice to be here.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
>> Yes.
>> Absolutely.
So I've interviewed other authors who have
written memoirs for the National Book Festival
and I always start out with some variation
of this question: Why did you decide
to write a memoir and why
did you decide to reveal some
of your most personal experiences
and thoughts in this format?
Carmen, maybe -- do you want to start us out?
>> Oh, sure, yeah.
I mean, I guess the short answer
is I didn't know what else to do.
I sort of described -- I feel like on my book
tour for this book, which I got kind of in
under the wire before COVID, a lot of people
were asking me about if it felt cathartic
to write this book or if it was necessary
for me to write this book, and for me,
it felt something closer to passing a kidney
stone, like it was terrible and I had to do it
because I had other things I needed to get
done and other books I wanted to write,
and this felt -- it felt like it was in my way
and I had to sort of get it out of my body,
which I wouldn't call "catharsis."
I think it's like an entirely
different sort of process, but yeah,
it certainly wasn't because it was fun.
>> Elizabeth, can you tell us why
you decided to write the book?
>> I think for me it was kind of as if this
book haunted with a narrative or my thinking
about perfectionism haunted so much else that
I was writing that I began to feel that need
to really -- to write it, to really
write it and see where that would go.
So I really resisted it because of the --
because of the questions of disclosure,
but then it -- there's a
paradox because it seems to me
that every sentence a writer writes
is sort of helplessly self-disclosing,
that we are always sort of like -- Virginia
Woolf in Orlando says something like,
"Why do we need biographies of writers?"
A writer is telling you who she
is in every single paragraph.
You always know that mind
that you're in contact with.
So it was kind of trying to just map it on to
the page instead of keeping all my thinking
about perfectionism inside my head.
>> Can you talk to us about the
titles of your respective books,
Scratched and In the Dream House?
When I thought about both of your books,
I thought of how unique these titles were,
but after I had read the books, I
understood why you had selected those titles,
but perhaps you could talk about
why you selected those words
and why they were meaningful to you.
Elizabeth, to start us off.
>> Yeah, I liked that it was physical.
I wanted to get at the embodied quality
of the trauma of -- and embody --
I like that it was past tense because it
seemed like in the past tense of Scratched,
the damage had already been inscribed, and so
you could either find ways of living with it
and writing with it, or you could yield to
it and let it dominate in that kind of --
seemed to me it's a lot to make
out of a single-word title,
but it gave me what I needed
to go on with the book.
>> I similarly found my title -- the
process of arriving at my title to be kind
of an essential part of the
project, so when I sold it,
it actually had a completely different title.
Part of the book is set in Indiana and
the title I had come up with was House
in Indiana, which was just a placeholder.
I never liked it, but it was -- because --
and the whole sort of structure of the book,
each chapter is house in Indiana as blank, so I
knew I wanted a title that could sort of serve
as both the title for the book
and also as this sort of --
these sort of subtitles that
use the different sort of tropes
in genre the book uses to
sort of articulate that.
So it had a lot of heavy lifting to do, but I
knew that the House in Indiana was not going
to work, so -- and I just ignored
the problem for months and years,
and then as I was finishing up, my editor and
my agent were like, "So we really need you to,
like, pick a title, like we're beginning
the part of the process where you have
to know what the title actually is going to be,"
and I was like, "Okay, give me, like, two days.
I'm going to just, like, focus all my
creative energy on figuring out the title."
And I just began to -- I mean, I knew "house"
had to be part of it, like houses are a big part
of the book, and so I began to just do
things like write down every title --
every title I could think of, existing art that
had the word "house" in it, like every painting
and every movie and every other book and I
wrote down all the house idioms I could think of
and I just began, like, scrambling words.
It was like this weird exercise that
was -- I used to do copyrighting,
so it was sort of similar to that, I feel,
like very pleasurable, and I actually --
so I came up -- and I liked "dream
house" sort of kind of popped out at me
and I ran it past my editor and they were
like, "How about In the Dream House?"
And I was like, "Okay, that works," but it
actually ended up working out really beautifully
because once I -- like once I started
sort of, you know, put that as the title,
I realized that a seam of dreams actually
came up a lot in the book and dreaming both
as fantasy and as a place where like your
body is one place and your mind is another.
It actually all kind of worked out, and also a
dream house is like this idyllic place, like,
I don't know, the word ended up doing a
lot of sort of weight-bearing in this way
that I actually found very fruitful
to sort of finish the book out.
So it actually worked out
really well in its own way.
>> Elizabeth, you write about
perfectionism and you write in the book
that perfectionism is a strange
affliction because a lot
of people actually view it as a strength.
So how did you approach writing
about a crippling condition
that some people consider a virtue?
>> I think I directly kind of contested that
notion of the description of perfectionism
and sometimes as like -- it's a
description that's acknowledging
that the person has these impossibly high
standards and they have phenomenal drive
to reach these standards and goals, and so
it's even supposed to be something that you say
in a job interview if you're asked
what your biggest flaw is and you say,
"I'm a perfectionist," and that's supposed to
be sort of like that's a positive attribute.
So I tried to contest it directly because
my definition of perfectionism would be
that there is this very abusive internal
discourse, so it's the abusiveness
and the relentlessness that I was characterizing
and kind of taking it in that direction
as an experience of the internal
censoriousness, which is highly inhibiting
and which is an ongoing force and it's
disrupting the tolerance that you need in order
to make something, that if you
want to make something, you --
it seems to me you need an appetite for
flaws and failures and a willingness to bear
with your own shortcomings
that is ruled out by the kind
of perfectionism that I'm writing about.
>> And Carmen, your memoir focuses
on an abusive relationship you had
with a woman over several years.
I think some people probably
misconstrue domestic abuse
as a predominantly heterosexual problem.
What do you think the impact
will be of In the Dream House?
What will it have -- what impact will it have
on broadening awareness about psychological
and domestic abuse amongst
non-heterosexual communities?
>> Well, I suppose that one of the
most wonderful and terrible things
about being a writer is that
one does not know, I think,
what the impact of one's work
will be in any real measure.
I mean, I feel like you get a small sense
of it when you're in the world, but, I mean,
one of the things that I find so interesting
about writing is its ability to reach, you know,
across national boundaries and languages
and time, like I can have a conversation
with a writer who died long before
I was born and there's no way
that person could possibly have imagined me
or know that I would be reading their book
and having whatever reaction I am
having to it, and so I don't know.
I mean, I hope -- I hope
it's helpful and useful.
I feel like I've done the
thing that I knew what to --
that I knew how to do, which was write a book,
and beyond that, it's sort of hard to say.
I mean, I hope it opens -- I think my
biggest hope is that it opens a door for sort
of other writers who want to write about
this or similar topics, because, you know,
I'm only writing -- yes, I'm writing a story of,
like, domestic violence in a queer relationship,
but I'm, like, one person with, like, one very
specific sort of intersection of identities.
I know lots of other people who have had their
own experiences and I think there's just,
I don't know, like a lot of ways -- a
lot of ways to have that conversation
and I just really hope that that space feels a
little more open for other people, and I also --
actually, I don't know, that's
the end of my thought.
>> I think a lot of our listeners and readers
and viewers, they love to hear about the process
of writing from our National
Book Festival authors.
So can you talk a little bit about, each of
you, about how you approached writing a memoir?
Writing a memoir is very
different than writing a novel
or writing a short story
or an interpretive essay.
How did you ensure that as a writer,
you were telling your stories
in a way that you wanted them to be told?
>> Oh, that's the whole ball game.
That's -- that is the work that you're doing,
is trying to figure out where it feels to you
as if it really carves through
the way you are seeing it and --
but I knew from writing fiction
since I was in my 20s that my --
so much of my brain is devoted to my literary
inheritance, so it is full of these templates,
and one of the templates is that there's
a hero's journey or that it would be --
I have a notion that reading about an
affliction, reading about a disorder
like perfectionism would be really
unbearable if there was no arc,
if there was no hero's journey, but I didn't
feel myself to be heroic, so it was a decision
to kind of keep that in mind, that
tension between the way that part
of my brain thinks it ought to go and the
way it honestly feels to me, but, see,
that didn't feel different
to me from writing fiction,
because if you're writing a fictional
character, you're -- I think you're --
you have to do the same work of trying
to get to their emotional reality,
and it also means discarding a lot of
bullshit that you've got in your head,
a lot of ways that this story should
be told, ways that it has been told,
and so there's this -- there's a lot
of the -- a lot of those tensions,
a lot of that work felt familiar to me
from writing stories, from writing fiction.
>> I found the process for me to be
very different than writing fiction.
It's so funny.
I did an event once with Jennifer Egan and we
got into this really interesting discussion
about whether we write fiction to get closer
to ourselves or further away from ourselves
and I said, "Oh, I get -- I write to get
closer to myself," and she was like, "Oh, no,
I write fiction to get, like, far, far away from
myself," which I thought was really interesting,
but even though for me both, you know,
both fiction and non-fiction is a way
of sort of excavating personal material.
You know, non-fiction felt -- I mean, in a
way, it's like I had a hand tied behind my back
because I was, you know, with fiction,
if something's not working, yeah,
I can throw it away, I can start over,
I can, like, you know, I'm like, oh,
I'll make this happen or I'll add a new
character or I'll do this, but, like,
I don't have that option in a memoir.
And also, I was writing a book
that wasn't just a memoir.
It also had criticism and essays and pop --
you know, there was a lot of
other stuff going on in the book.
So I mean, for me, it was actually
about, like, kind of getting out --
I call it like the "wet baby giraffe," like
the wet baby giraffe of the actual events
of the relationship kind of fell out of me, and
then it sort of had the potential for the rest
of the book, and then I began to, like, do a
bunch of research and look up other sources and,
like, read legal papers, and then
kind of building the rest of my sort
of argument or the rest of the book.
But for me, it felt really different
and it was much harder, I should add.
Like, I will write fiction any day.
I love writing fiction.
It relaxes me.
It makes me happy.
I'm like, I'm so good, this is so great,
what a great writing day I've had,
and with the memoir, it was just a mess.
I mean, I was a complete mess from beginning
to end, so it was really different for me.
>> Both of your books have been described by
critics and by others as uncomfortable reads
because they grapple with difficult subjects
such as affliction or domestic abuse.
How does someone who writes a
memoir or interpretive essays
as you have entice the reader to keep going,
to forging ahead with you while
considering such discomfort?
I know there were times when I read both
of your books when I said, "I enjoy this,
but I need to take a break from this book so
that I can come back and then fully engage
with the subject matter that
she's dealing with."
So talk a little bit about how you're able
as a writer to keep the reader along with you
when you're dealing with the subjects
that you have dealt with in your books.
>> Well, I loved what Carmen
said earlier about, you know --
Carmen, tell me if I'm paraphrasing
you wrong, but it was like --
it's kind of part of the
pleasure and part of the --
part of the pleasure of writing is that you
don't have to know what the reader is going
to make of it, but you -- I guess I feel a lot
of trust that it's going to work for some minds.
Some readers' minds it's going to work for, and
I've never thought I was writing for everybody.
So I guess I feel like I talk
to people the way I would talk
on the page or the way I would think.
It's kind of transcending the page
and trying to go to the mind --
to mind that could bear with me, that could
be interested and could find it compelling
and to -- I'm kind of -- when I teach,
I advocate against slanting things
for an imagined reader who's sort of
less than, who's kind of less than.
I think you want to write for the
person who can really get every nuance,
go with you every twist and turn that there is.
For me, there's optimism in imagining that
there's this readerly willingness to bear
with you when you could say the hardest things
that you're capable of saying in the most sort
of -- in the most sort of nuanced way.
That feels like optimism to me and
trust and good stuff like that.
>> I love that and I agree.
I mean, I feel like the fastest way to sort
of make yourself crazy as a writer is to try
to write for everyone because
it's literally impossible.
There's no way to do it.
You will just turn yourself
in circles and then never --
and be exhausted and never
finish what you're doing.
You know, I knew when I was writing this
book, like I knew also that the subject
that I was writing was fairly niche, I
knew that the material was very grim,
and I knew that there was a levity I had
to create with a kind of frothiness to sort
of get a little energy into the -- because,
you know, if it was just this happened,
then this happened, then this happened,
this happened, it would be unreadable
because it would be so grim and so sad you'd be
like, "Why am I reading this terrible thing?"
But I also feel like even my imagined -- like,
this is why you can't imagine your readers,
like, you know, I wrote it thinking this
is a book for queer folks who have been
in an abusive relationship or, like,
know somebody who have and, like,
looking to find some sort of -- something
to reflect their experience or to, like,
engage with, and even before the book
came out, like when there were sort
of pre-publication copies in the
world, I got emails from people
who I never imagined the book would speak to.
I got emails from people being like, "I've never
been in an abusive relationship, but, like,
my relationship with my parent is very fraught
in ways that I recognize in this book,"
and I had somebody else say, like, "I'm
not gay, but, like, I'm a woman and, like,
I've just never seen verbal abuse talked about
in this way," and I had another person be like,
"I'm a man and I was never with an abusive woman
and I have never seen an abusive
woman portrayed in a memoir before."
So like, you know, my book hadn't even come out
and already people were showing me that, like,
the readers that I had theoretically
kind of envisioned was just
like such a tiny percentage of, like, the
people for whom the book meant something.
So yeah, so I knew -- which is like, okay,
you know, I guess I don't know anything.
So yeah, I feel like for me it was just about
like sort of, you know, writing into the unknown
and also trying to think about ways to sort
of break up some of the intensity of the book
with other things was sort of my process.
>> Can you tell us a little bit about, both
of you, what you're working on these days,
and talk to us a little bit about
your writing during a pandemic.
We're certainly in different circumstances
than we were six months ago or a year ago.
Has the isolation of a pandemic,
has it affected your writing?
Do you think it's made you more
productive, less productive?
How has it affected you?
And also, you're both teachers.
You both work at universities.
You both interact with students.
How do you think that will affect you
as the fall semester begins
in your respective positions?
>> I would say for writing that is --
it's difficult because you're
aware of the context, right?
You are aware and might -- my daughter-in-law
is -- she's been an ICU nurse throughout this
and having inadequate PPE, having one mask
that she's supposed to wear from the beginning
of her 12-hour shift to the end of her
12-hour shift, and having that awareness,
which is just a familial connection,
but having also the sense that the --
the context is pretty dire, and so within
that, to say that, listen, I'm a mad,
insane introvert, I think introverts
probably have an edge in adapting to this,
and I love being with my wife, I love being with
our dogs all the time, and I love being able
to read and to write all the time, so there's
a kind of bind there between that sort of --
I don't know if I can be more articulate about
it than that, that I feel a lot of dismay,
consciously, socially, politically, you
know, phenomenal anxiety and dismay,
and it's sort of like, hey, I'm at home and
it's sort of been instructive about how much
of capital -- a working life in late capitalism
is involved with like being away from your home,
being apart from your family, and I
adore teaching and I love nothing better
than a seminar table with people who want to
talk about their -- what they've just read.
It's like heaven to me.
So there's some deprivation in doing it
on the screen, but I'll take it, right?
I still get to see their faces, I still get to
be in conversation with their beautiful minds,
they're still out there, they want
to talk about what they're meeting,
they want to talk about what they're -- they
want to write, and so it's very touching to be
in that teaching conversation
with them and it's --
if I could say it without sounding
woogy-woogy, it's, you know, it's one of the --
it's a great thing to be able to feel like
you can try and nurture something in a time
when our story is a story of pandemic
and illness, a separation within illness,
people dying alone, to have your
-- to have the work that you do
for a paycheck be about connecting with people.
It's just a privilege, it's fortunate.
>> Yeah, that was beautifully articulated.
I mean, I have not been very
productive on my personal work.
I am a hypochondriac.
I am an extravert.
I have been really struggling
with being at home 24 hours a day,
and to sort of make things worse, I recently
had -- or a few months ago I had surgery,
so I can't even do all the things that I
normally do to relieve my stress, like cleaning
and cooking, so I've been a real mess for
a while now, and I have managed to do sort
of paid assignments, which is great,
and then I'm also like extremely lucky,
like I have a beautiful home, my wife can
work from home, we have a wonderful dog,
like we don't have to put our lives on the line
every single day, like an essential worker,
and so, like, I understand how lucky I am,
but, yeah, you know, it's been difficult
to get work done just because,
yeah, it's not a normal time.
It's not -- my brain is not in a
normal place, like, yeah, and also,
I actually also haven't been teaching this year
because I had coincidentally taken
the year off prior to all this,
so I don't know what teaching is
going to look like when I come back.
I'm just going to go back in the spring and
I'm sort of assuming we'll still be online.
I'm assuming it's not going to be over for a
while, so I'm just sort of preparing myself,
but even though I do kind of hate -- I hate
online stuff, I hate Zoom, I hate video chat.
I find it very stressful, and I also love,
like, a seminar room full of undergrads,
like just talking and being really
excited, but I also recognize that, like,
if that's the way we got to do it to keep
everybody safe, like, that's what we have
to do, and, like, we'll figure it out.
But yeah, I don't know.
>> Well, I want to thank both Elizabeth and
Carmen for such a fascinating discussion
about women's lives, about writing,
about the challenges of teaching
and instruction during this very difficult
time, so thank you very much for joining us
for the 2020 National Book Festival, the 20th
National Book Festival, and thank you for all
of our viewers and listeners who
have joined us for the program.
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