Gary Indiana in his New York apartment, February 2002. © Sylvia Plachy.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Natalie Shapero, whose poem “The Top of Hell” appears in our new Fall issue.

Tobi Haslett’s prefatory note to Gary Indiana’s Art of Fiction interview, published in issue no. 238 of the Review, mentions the very large number of books lining the walls of Indiana’s New York City apartment.

“More books,” Haslett observes, “are always arriving.” Three years later, following Indiana’s passing in 2024, this impressive and assuredly eclectic book collection was boxed up and shipped across the country to a planned library site in Altadena, California, where, on arrival, it was promptly incinerated in its entirety by the Eaton Fire.

So the books are now gone. But we still have documents like this one, a sharp and wide-ranging look into a wild mind. Beginning with a discussion of Indiana’s on-screen performances—screaming in a bathrobe in Valie Export’s The Practice of Love, screaming on a train while being shot with a machine gun in Christoph Schlingensief’s Terror—the interview winds its way through Indiana’s life and work as he changes cities, influences, and art forms. I’m a big admirer of Vile Days, the compendium of Indiana’s Village Voice columns from his time as an art critic—I highly recommend the piece in there on the quintessentially eighties spending frenzy at a Warhol auction—and I appreciate how this interview illuminates the throughline from that mode of Indiana’s writing to his work as a novelist. I’m also grateful for Indiana’s reflections here on trauma and the evaporation of trust, survival and the perils of nostalgia, and the necessity of distinguishing between attitude and action. “Having a million opinions about everything comes cheap and easy,” Indiana tells Haslett, “whereas actually doing something can cost you quite a lot.”

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 250
Gary Indiana

INTERVIEWER

Did you know that you wanted to be a novelist when you were writing for the Voice?

INDIANA

I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit. Writing about films and architecture and books was never the end point of what I wanted to do, but it forced me to get outside my own head, to describe physical objects and action. And then somebody handed me a story. I fell in love with a very comely young man who was trying to be an artist and was being a junkie without trying at all. I didn’t understand him, I didn’t understand his behavior, and I didn’t understand my behavior either. Francesco Clemente told me once that when you’re in love, the economy goes out the window. And that was my experience—he was all-consuming to me. A lot of what’s in Horse Crazy is pretty much how it went.

From issue no. 238 (Winter 2021)

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