>> Rob Casper: Hello, and welcome to the National Book Festival. My name is Rob Casper from the Library of Congress. I'm here with Elizabeth Tallent, whose featured book at the festival is her memoir, Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism. If you'd like to see Elizabeth's presentation with Carmen Maria Machado, titled, The Exam Itself, log in to National Book Festival.com. You'll find it at the Poetry and Prose Stage. Welcome, Elizabeth, and so good to have you here today. >> Elizabeth Tallent: It's really good to be here. >> Rob Casper: We're thrilled to have you answer questions from anyone who sends them along. So please do send questions. I'll try to get to as many of them as I can in the time we have allotted. Note that questions will be recorded and are subject to the Library's comment policy. And let's begin. So Scratched was your first book in 22 years, and it's a memoir. Can you talk about what led you to want to write this memoir and tackle the subject of perfectionism? >> Elizabeth Tallent: Yeah, I had a sense that I wanted to write in that kind of first person that memoir permits. I've had that sense for a very long time. And often in writing fiction I would be aware of kind of wanting to have that, wanting to take that turn to a more autobiographical memoiristic voice. So it was like a long-time intuition, and then I think about perfectionism obsessively, which means that you have a lot of sort of, you have a lot of, of material that you've been engaged with, and you've been living with. And I think that that can be, that can be a kind of fertile way to get into something is just to have been living with, living with your emotions, your experience of something for quite a long time. So it was a long time in coming, and a lot, a long-time desire. And I was glad when the time seemed right to commit to it. >> Rob Casper: How did you handle the challenge of creating something that can be as messy as a book that was about perfectionism? The subject seems to challenge the creation of the very thing itself. >> Elizabeth Tallent: Yeah, it does. I mean, I like it because I think of perfectionism as so, such a paradoxical phenomenon, like just riddled with these paradoxes. And that's one of them that, that like, anything that you're trying to make, it's going to, the process of writing a memoir is going to launch messiness, your tolerance of messiness of the process. And then perfectionism is deliberately countering that with the, by imposing these maps that are, that are goal-oriented, and have this kind of a destined way that you're supposed to do something. It mitigates against the messiness that the process actually needs. So it was more like a willingness to kind of inhabit that paradox, to inhabit-- because it's my mind, I have to inhabit both of these sides of that paradox, and to try and inhabit them both with a kind of equilibrium and bring some, bring some tolerance to both sides of that paradox in the process. But you're exactly right about the messiness, and I'm a big believer in messiness, the process when I teach, so I'm an advocate for it, and a better advocate than practitioner, I think. >> Rob Casper: We have a question from Angela. It is about your book Mendocino Fire, and the arc of that collection, and especially the last three stories, and she asks if you could talk about structuring that book. And I wonder if you could talk about that as a lead into how you might have approached structuring Scratched differently than a book of short stories or a novel? >> Elizabeth Tallent: In short stories, I'm looking for the intuitive ways that the stories might talk to each other. So I'm, I'm not, I'm not probably very consciously designing something so much as I am looking for those intuitive connections with it. And that means that I'm, I'm sort of doing a kind of search for resonance that might be like barely on the threshold of visibility. I'm not, I'm not sure it's a very clear architecture, but for me it would, it would have a meaningful relationship. And with the memoir, one of the seductions of memoir is that you've got chronology, right? If you start where I did with a with a with a baby, with infancy, then you've got this kind of template for unfolding things. So what I liked about that template was that, then and this, this goes back to Rob's earlier question about messiness, once you have a template, you can fracture it, and you can splice things into it. And you can see where it's got chinks and loopholes and what kind of writing might be interesting in those chinks in the template? So I guess, I guess the short answer would be something like I like a template that you can then start to deconstruct. Linley asks a question about other memoirs you recommend, or books about how to write a memoir that you might recommend for folks who want to try it themselves. >> Elizabeth Tallent: I think, thanks for that question, Linley. I mean, I think it's such a, it's such an encompassing genre that you can find all kinds of voices that you can, you can use as your spirit guides. But the big one for me was Virginia Woolf, and she turns her memoir quite late in her life, and then writes these, writes moments of being which has this, gets at the uncanniness of certain interior states. And so she was really, in terms of the interiority that she was unfolding. It was really Woolf who I turned to quite a lot. And then I just love Montagnier, going back to the origins of the essay. And he's kind of astonishing because he'll be incredibly intimate, like about his, all of his health problems, all of his, every thought that crosses his mind, to get a kind of spontaneity for this, for this thinking that is in the essayistic form. So he was another, he was important. And then, you know, poetry, which [inaudible], one who writes from kind of a fraught first person. I liked that as a vantage point. So and that's just, this is a short list, but it's really a fortunate genre, because you've got so many resources to explore. >> Rob Casper: I'm curious about the notion of voice, which is something that's so discussed with fiction writers, with stories and novels, and how especially given that you're not only a writer, but as you said, a teacher, how you had to think about voice differently. Or maybe you didn't, as you suddenly approached and wrote through Scratched. >> Elizabeth Tallent: I love every conversation about voice because I think very often we are not sure what we're talking about. So I kind of love it, because you have this term voice and then you're, you embark on a search for what is it you're actually describing? And one of the things I think about when I'm teaching is how afraid people get that they don't have a voice. And it's, I want it to be something very simple in response, something like yeah, you do, you think in your voice. Your voice is what's going on inside your head. And it's, it's keeping you company from beginning to end like you, you've got a voice I think we get, we run into the problem of being alienated from our own voices, or critical of our own voices, or disowning our own voices for one reason or another, thinking this isn't the right voice. This voice doesn't sound literary enough. This voice isn't poised enough. It's, you know, it's not, it's not polished. It's not impressive enough. So all of these, all of these kind of tropes for discerning our own voices when maybe it's simple like write, write two pages, write 200 pages, and what you've got there is your voice. And then you're going to do the work that we all do, which is of doing another draft, and kind of heightening the meaningfulness of what you've been able to get on the page. That's part of our work as well. I see voice as a really generous concept. And be like really like, for recognizing and owning your own, even if it doesn't, if it doesn't look like what you might want it to look like. >> Rob Casper: And you think that applies, whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction, poetry, what have you? >> Elizabeth Tallent: I think it does apply, because in writing memoir, and writing, in writing from that [inaudible] first person, you're subject to all the same kinds of attempts to fool yourself that you are subject to when you're writing fiction. You're working just as hard to con yourself into saying things that look better, that aren't, that aren't actually true. Like you're persuading yourself away from, from that kind of vulnerable honesty, that honesty that is what you need to get to if you're going to-- . If you're going to write a memoir that I think has electricity, it is going to need that work of resisting and writing through all those seductions to look better, to look better to all those seductions that writers are so aware of whether there is a page of a short story or a page in a memoir. >> Rob Casper: Yeah, Myka asked a question related to another issue writers talk about facing all the time, which is writer's block. And Myka says that they've felt writer's block attached to the place they are in Florida. And if you have any advice about how to address that? Of course, we're all stuck in the states that we're in, including Myka. So. >> Elizabeth Tallent: Myka, that is a cool thing to think about. I mean, the notion and I like what Rob just did of saying Florida as a state, but also a state of mind or a state of being? And, and feeling, I think, locked about writing that. I wonder if there's a way to take that and turn it into something like in the sense that if you feel inhibited or ashamed about writing about something, it kind of, you've run right up against the culture's resistance to it being written about. You run right smack into that resistance. And the weird thing is that while resistance to what you want to write feels terrible, and it can feel like, it can feel anguishing, and like you're really alone with it. It can be a very revealing place, because it means it's the culture is paying attention to transgressions of that prohibition to write about it. I mean, you're onto something. And I know that it feels, I know that it can feel enormously frustrating. But I think being onto something is a big part of the ballgame. Like it's a really crucial thing. You're onto something, and to just make all of those forays into transgressiveness, and be willing to make [inaudible], try it, try it, try it, try it, try it. Try it again. Because you're onto something. If you're, if I'm ashamed of writing about my, my lesbianism or what because of my generation, what if there would have been some shame attending coming out or any of those things, it means that I'm facing something that's got-- it's hot, it's hot. It's a little bit dangerous. And as social creatures we want to respect danger and shy away from it. And as writers, we want to go towards it. We want to go towards the heat. >> Rob Casper: Ann asked the question about writing memoir, if, in doing in writing Scratched did you have a point of view in mind, or did you just sort of let the memoir unfold? >> Elizabeth Tallent: Yeah, I, it was interesting. It was some of each and maybe alternating stances. So I did have a perspective which I wanted to have it be experiential. I wanted to write from within, and I didn't want to have any caste, or caste or sort of any status of authority. I didn't want, I didn't want anything to be sanctioned about what I was doing, or to speak, to speak with anything except privacy, and the kind of groping towards delineation of experience, groping towards a story. And that is, that's what, that's what [inaudible] to me was when there was that, really repeatedly groping to get to what, what was seriously there, what my, what I have honestly experienced perfectionism was like. This process, which was, I guess, groping is my word for it this morning. But this kind of process, which was, which was charged with vulnerability and unsureness actually felt like where I wanted to be with it. >> Rob Casper: Well, Beth has the great follow-up question. She's curious about how Scratched affected you, if it did. I imagine it did. You know that that process went through, you wrote the book, there it is. You've talked about perfectionism. Where are you now? >> Elizabeth Tallent: And that's, thank you. Yeah, because it's so different than what I expected. Like I really had, I had, because I had written books before. And I, I published them. And in an odd way, the things that changed, change while you're writing the book, you are changing as you wrote it, and then the aftermath, you are kind of just trying to be a competent social being and [inaudible]. This one, so I thought that this one wouldn't change me very much. And, and it has, and I'm really grateful to have had the chance to try it. So I guess that's what this, some of the folklore about writing, writing a memoir is that it can be, there can be catharsis with it. And I was so sure that I wouldn't be subject to the folklore, that it would be just so-- because I'm a literary creature, and it wouldn't work on me that way. And, and yet it did, it did. It was something transformative about it. And it was also fortunate to be 65 years old and have a transformative experience like to be feeling like things can, are still malleable, there can still be changes, there can still be a book that alters my experience of being alive. And I think that's, that's great good luck. And I'm grateful for the question. >> Rob Casper: Have you had that experience or a sort of parallel experience in writing fiction? >> Elizabeth Tallent: No, no, fiction is no. With fiction you, you look at it, and you can, like if you, if you have a long enough trajectory as a writer, which I've been lucky enough to have, you look at it, and you think, "Oh, God, I made all of those mistakes right out in public. I did you know, I did this wrong. I did that wrong." I look at it, and I, because I'm teaching all the time. And I'm working with other writers, and I think I look at something of mine now, and I think I can see how to make it better. And I get this like where my mind as a writer goes is how could it have been, it could have been stronger? And so there's frustration with it. Even if there's even if there's pleasure with having, I find the actual books themselves, like just the fact that it comes from your head, and it ends up looking like that, I think it's a miracle. I think it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing to be able to live in such a way that what was first originally just in here, ends up like this and finds readers. So there's that pleasure. But no fiction was always like much more about, I think about craft. >> Rob Casper: Susan gets to that challenge she sees, and I think it's sort of related to memoir is that unaffirming voice that we all have that she talks about distinguishing between an internalized bully and the self, and how you negotiate that. >> Elizabeth Tallent: It, tell me the questioner's name again? >> Rob Casper: Susan. >> Elizabeth Tallent: Susan. Hi. So it sounds like you've got an acquaintance with that. The worst, the bullying voice. Yeah, that is I think kind of like what I was really trying to describe, really trying to get at was how, how I didn't want to be distanced from it because that didn't work with perfectionism to try and be superior to it or distanced from it. But I found it, I found it worked for me in the negotiation to-- this is going to sound kind of-I'm worried that this will sound kind of like it's coming from uncomprehending, as if I don't understand what you're talking about. So I'll try and say this carefully. But, that the, that I wanted to try and recognize what that voice was for, what it had, it originated in an attempt to, to save the integrity of the self. Like it's, there's power in it, it was a powerful attempt at self-rescue. And then you can look at it and say, but as it, as you continue living with it, it becomes, it becomes a source of inhibition, like a deadening source in one's own life. So yeah, I think you are trying to have different relationships with it. It's also worth having conversations with, with other people who've been through it or other people who have notions of how to contend with those different voices. But for myself, it was I wanted to, my sort of very patchy Zen practice would mean that you, when something comes up, when something arises in your consciousness, you don't make that movement of disowning it or distancing yourself from it, but you recognize it and name it. So you could name it, I would name my perfectionism. And then just say there you are, and you're part of consciousness at this moment. And then that act of recognition, you can sometimes feel that there are margins around it where you can get other things done. So you're looking for those margins, you're looking for those ways to begin to have some suppleness. And perfectionists are often very driven people with a great deal of passion. And a great, you know, they're, they're people who are determined. So if those qualities can then achieve a slightly different configuration, they can be great for you as a writer. They can come into, at least sometimes come into alignment with what you want to get done. And you have them. If you're a perfectionism, you've got drive, and you've got commitment, and you've got, you've got a willingness to tolerate an arduous process. You've got a lot of the things that writers need going for them. >> Rob Casper: Marley asked the question, which is such a, such a straightforward question and I think so profound. Why do you love to write? I know, you said that writing has transformed you. Has it done other things for you? Do you ever feel any negatives from writing? >> Elizabeth Tallent: I mean, yes, yeah. I mean, yes, I feel, I definitely feel the negatives with it. I think I'm in the minority of writers who would say something like, it's, I feel so honored to get to do it. I feel such, I feel like it's a, there's delight and there's joy, and there's, there's incredible pleasure in the prospect of making something that matters to another human being, incredible pleasure, and that I am just conscious of it. And if I, if I think about the writers that I work with, the students that I work with, how badly they want to, to make something as writers, to make a life for themselves and to make a book for themselves, then it just, it keeps you aware of how contingent this is and how small a slice of human culture has afforded someone like me, a queer woman of a certain mindset, has afforded me a chance to get that, to get some kind of honesty or, or perception about reality onto the page. It's like, it's tiny. It's tiny, and it's embattled on every side. And so it's, it feels to me like luck. And I feel I love it, and I love it. >> Rob Casper: Well, you also provided the perfect segue to Kathleen's question, which is what are some of the prompts you give your students to get them started on their memoirs? And I would add fiction to that too. >> Elizabeth Tallent: Yeah. I guess I, I have a, I have a kind of thing of maybe it's a slant that I would, I would sort of try and offer it to students, which is to say you have your antenna, and you're thinking about, when you're writing you get to something that's disturbing in it or troubling to you like, a lot can be gained by learning to go in that direction. So I would say my shorthand for that is something like write into the fire, write towards the fire, write towards the heat, you can feel it. Like that's, and also, Kathleen, if you practice that, your awareness of it can get keener. Like you're not, you're like, you're doing some of the work of allowing it to, allowing the heat to make itself felt. And so it is that. I'm, I'm sort of careful about generalizations because different writers want to do very different things. And, but even for a writer who wants a kind of cool or ironic style, there can be material that's hot, there can be material, that's [inaudible]. So I guess that's my, that would be the slant I would offer. >> Rob Casper: I love that you're talking about it in terms of heat, in terms of something that you can feel that can be both sustaining and dangerous. >> Elizabeth Tallent: We are really well aware of that right now in Mendocino County. >> Rob Casper: Yes, god, how could you not be? Well, thanks so much for joining us here this afternoon. Thanks to all the attendees. I want to just say, I've been speaking with Elizabeth Tallent whose new memoir is Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism. And you should check out her presentation on the Poetry and Prose Stage of the National Book Festival on our website, nationalbookfestival.com. [ Music ]