Emily Nussbaum has always been an engaging thinker, from her creation of The Approval Matrix for New York Magazine to her truly thoughtful television criticism for The New Yorker. After twenty years of writing about television, Nussbaum remains curious about the ways in which it’s shifting, and how that impacts our culture. Her criticism often places each show in historical context, and considers what it is bringing to us that is new or different. At times in defiance of popular opinion, she will find new prisms through which to appreciate unpopular shows, or make trenchant critiques of beloved but pretentious ones. This ability won her the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2016, and it’s what makes her new book, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution, so singular and captivating. We spoke by phone about Netflix, the legacy of The Sopranos, and how she manages to stay interested in TV.

INTERVIEWER

You were in a doctoral program, and then found your way to television criticism. Did you finish the doctorate?

NUSSBAUM

No, I did not. One of the things that I write about in the book is how when I was in graduate school, I watched Buffy and my incendiary fandom sparked a kind of intellectual change in me, and a deep interest in television as a medium. I think that a lot of TV critics have that kind of conversion story. I happened to start getting interested in television right around a moment that TV was changing. There was already an enormous and rich conversation going on about television critically online. There’s really no way to separate the changes in television from changes in technology. I think this is true of a lot of artistic mediums, but it’s strikingly true of TV that the explosion of the internet, and the subsequent radical changes in the way TV was created and distributed, altered what it was capable of, and changed the way people talked about it. In the late nineties and early aughts, I was writing on anonymous discussion boards, and it was a model of criticism that was more about joyful debate and conversation, not about opinions from on high. That’s still very much a model for me.

INTERVIEWER

How has television criticism changed over time?

INTERVIEWER

It’s changed significantly. Around the time that I watched Buffy, The Sopranos was considered the greatest show on television. I absolutely love The Sopranos, and I have a piece in the book about it that I’m very proud of. However, I was really struck by the difference in critical reception to the two shows. It’s not that I didn’t think The Sopranos should get praise, but there was this top-ten-list approach that was not merely about The Sopranos being a great television show, but about it not being a television show at all. Being better than television as a medium. Being more like a movie or book. I think a lot of this had to do with the status anxiety that TV had as a medium and industry. I was very passionate about Buffy, which is also a very ambitious, powerful, and interesting show. But there’s nobody who would describe Buffy as being like a novel or movie. So I basically went around having arguments with people about the fact that they should really be watching it. In the process, I developed this sense of wanting to talk about TV as TV, as worth celebrating in itself. When I started writing about the subject, TV was considered a junk medium that had to prove its worth. As I’ve been writing about it, it’s drifted closer and closer to the center of the culture.

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Mona Awad (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe)

Mona Awad’s first novel, the prismatic and devastating 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, started working its way into me by the end of the second chapter. I’d been feeling awful for the protagonist, Lizzie—it’s hard not to. She seemed, to me, so vulnerable, so unaware, so needy. But then, a sharp shift happens: Lizzie suddenly seemed fully aware of her vulnerability’s pull, and starts using it, inverting and playing the power dynamic, making a fool of the drunken, failed musician who falsely believes he’s the center of her world. I broke out in a grin and thought, “This seems quite impish.” It’s one of the few times that book made me smile—the pedicure scene made me sob, and the ending is wonderfully mysterious and lonely.

Transformations, inversions, and longing are Awad’s specialty, and in her new novel, Bunny, the impish quality is turned on in full. Samantha Heather Mackey (what a name!) is the archetypal outsider at an exclusive east coast M.F.A. program. The program’s mean girl clique is cloying, referring to themselves and each other as “Bunny” (how perfect in its layers of meaning—cutesy and pagan at once), while they critique Sam’s work as being “in love with its own outsiderness.” Sam gets an invitation to join the Bunnies’ off-campus salon-style workshops. She drags her feet, but, of course, she can’t resist. The workshops quickly reveal themselves as literal magical coven meetings. In the name of their artistic “practice,” the women conjure broken humanoid men (who look sort of like “pre-TB Keats” or Tim Riggins or Dracula or James Dean)—pseudo boyfriends who they refer to as “drafts.” The Bunnies themselves are rendered in a hilarious mix of self-seriousness and cluelessness, giving and withholding pep talks throughout:

Bunny, we know you sometimes get depressed that your sister is this incredible neurologist in training or whatever … But then the day came when you went into your mother’s room and dragged her diamond ring across her vanity mirror … etching messages from the goddess of Wisdom … That was the day you started giving your special gift of you to the world. Sure your sister saves lives, Bunny, but you save souls with your diamond proems. And how many people can say that?

The first part of Bunny is a shifting, gleeful collage of cultural references and stereotypes. Then, the novel breaks and reforms its own logic, going deeper into the nature of creation, friendship, community, and the boundaries between reality and perception. The ending, which I won’t give away, has some achingly sad, and very real moments.

Mona and I met at a reading last March. After gushing a little at her, I asked if she’d like to do an interview over email. 

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Two years ago, I listened to Ocean Vuong read poems from Night Sky with Exit Wounds in a crowded university hall. At the far end of the room, I leaned forward, closed my eyes, and heard his voice as if he were right next to me. Vuong reads with precision: he embraces the quiet between words in such a way that every sound is allowed to reverberate. Later, I found his reading of “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” published by The New Yorker. I listened to it over and over, and recited it to myself, trying to remember where he paused, which words he made sharp, and which he made soft. I wanted to draw as close as possible to this writer who had named something in me. I experienced a similar sonic pull reading his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The novel is a letter to a mother, but it is also a letter to anyone who finds it.

On Earth uses the kishōtenketsu structure of classic east Asian narratives, which does not rely on conflict to advance the story. As Vuong told Kevin Nguyen for the New York Times, “It insists that a narrative structure can survive and thrive on proximity alone. Proximity builds tension.” Much of Vuong’s artistic practice—including the public reading of his work—seems to hinge on this principle. To listen and repeat, to read and reread, brings you into a proximity with his voice.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous concerns the most terrifying proximities, those involving the people we love. On the very first page, Little Dog, our protagonist, says, “Let me begin again.” He is writing to his mother about people and ideas he once fastidiously hid from her. There’s a boy he loves, for instance, who she has never and will never meet. But even if some isolation endures, the space between them collapses as Little Dog writes into it. He tells her about sex; about slipping under the water’s surface in the river outside the barn; about staring at the small tail of hair on the back of Trevor’s neck, the part of a “hard-stitched boy” that was “so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings.” His mother responds with her own truths and memories. The voice of On Earth is at once singular and various. Vuong performs a generous magic: he imagines every piece of each character all at once, in dialogue. And so the self’s fractal parts coalesce, if only for a moment.

In our interview, Vuong speaks to the urgency of choosing to make art, “to breach new ground, despite terror,” to learn about himself and his relationships. I am grateful for his company, the words he presses down that I can carry, as we all go spinning forward.

INTERVIEWER

Little Dog says, “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” There’s both intimacy and distance here: “used to be.” I imagine it’s not always clear how exactly our family’s voices arrive—or fail to arrive—in our work. How have you balanced your family’s voices with your own?

OCEAN VUONG

That’s a beautiful question—and one I think we must navigate for the rest of our creative lives. I wonder if balance is possible, but I think in attempting it, we begin to parse out who we are, what made us, where we are going—all of which are means toward self-knowledge. I think that’s what a novel is, at its core, one person trying to know themselves so thoroughly that they realize, in the end, it was the times they lived in, the people they touched and learned from, that made them real.

This is why I chose the novel as the form for this project. I wanted the book to be founded in truth but realized by the imagination. I wanted to begin as a historian and end as an artist. And I needed the novel to be a praxis toward that reckoning.

This book is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a coming-of-art. I would say that I begin with the voices of those I care for, family or otherwise, and follow them until they drop off, until I have to create them in order to hear them. My writing is an echo. In this way, On Earth is not so much a novel, but the ghost of a novel. That’s the hope anyway.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a moment where Trevor, Little Dog’s best friend and lover, asks Little Dog to close his eyes while they kiss, but Little Dog keeps them open. He is watchful, both observant and prone to staring. There’s another line in the novel about how mothers always look “too long.” Is there such a risk? To look too long?

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Left, Varian Fry. Right, Julie Orringer [photo: Brigitte Lacombe]

From the fall of 2008 until the spring of 2009, I was colleagues with Julie Orringer at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. We both had the extraordinary fortune to receive fellowships to do research for our novels. I was researching New York City at various moments in the twentieth century, along with the history of AIDS in the city. Julie was researching the historical figure Varian Fry. Neither of us knew what we were about to make, nor could we make any sense of the pile of books the other had stashed in their office. Ten years have passed, and now we know: I wrote a novel called The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and Julie has just published her novel The Flight Portfolio. It is an honor to watch a writer in the beginning stages of work, fiddling with their magician’s equipment, and an astonishment to see what flies, at last, out of their sleeve. In her case: a breathtaking work of wonder, set in occupied France. I waited for the world to take notice. Then I saw The Flight Portfolio featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, reviewed by fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick, who is now ninety-one. The words on the cover are glorious praise, but buried deep in the second page, I found an unsettling critique: Ozick was perturbed that Julie’s fictional Varian Fry is portrayed as gay. Ozick stated: “there is no evidence of homosexuality.” She even abstractly alluded to the dangers of keeping the record straight when writing about the Holocaust. And I did something I had never done; I wrote a letter. The New York Times Book Review printed it, along with letters from Fry’s biographer, and, of all things, from his son. Fry’s son clearly refutes Ozick: his father was gay. I wrote my letter about the invisibility of gay people in history, the lack of evidence, and the worth of the novel to use empathy and invention to imagine the lives of others. I have great respect for Ozick, as I know Julie does. But since I had seen the beginnings of The Flight Portfolio and the vast amounts of research, I wanted to ask her about the process of using history, biography, and imagination to create a novel—and, of course, about this strange misapprehension that occurred in the newspaper of record. What nerve did Julie strike here? And, looking at myself, what nerve did Ozick strike? These questions have been on my mind since I read that review. So I asked Julie.

INTERVIEWER

Historical research can be overwhelming. How did you decide where to begin your story, and where to end?

ORRINGER

The story of Varian Fry’s lifesaving mission in France has a seemingly obvious beginning and end—he arrived in Marseille in September of 1940 with a list of two hundred writers and artists he hoped to save. He left thirteen months later having rescued, against all odds, nearly ten times that many, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Andre Breton, and Hannah Arendt, among others. But time in fiction doesn’t function along a strict continuum, or doesn’t have to. It can bend and loop, as we often experience it in real life. From the beginning, The Flight Portfolio explores how the past extrudes into the present, and how the prospect of our future—and of how our future selves might judge us—exerts pressure on our present moment. The more I learned about Fry’s personal history—his clinically depressed mother and work-preoccupied father, his decision to drop out of Hotchkiss in protest against its hazing rituals, his conflicts with the dean of Harvard when he was a student there, his relationship with future New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein—the more I knew this stuff had to be present in the novel, and had to press upon Fry during his time in Marseille. That meant, of course, that my research had to push beyond its initial boundaries, a daunting prospect when the available materials already included twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s papers at Columbia. But it was necessary to go further for the sake of full emotional accuracy. It also meant I had to exercise restraint, or the book might have been a thousand pages. Read More

Amy Irvine (Courtesy Torrey House Press)

Amy Irvine is a writer and a mother, a competitive rock climber, an activist, a caregiver, and a truth teller. (She is also a friend.) Her latest book, Desert Cabal, is a fiercely tender and provocative response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—his classic and now canonical account of the desert West—on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Desert Cabal is about Irvine’s own life in the West—raising a family, falling in love with the land and working to protect it—and it explores the myths of Western masculinity, the sublimity of endangered territory, and the kinds of intimacy enabled by spaciousness and proximity.

Near the beginning of Desert Cabal, Irvine evokes Abbey’s seductive evocation of solitude as “loveliness and a quiet exaltation.” But her book challenges his understanding of solitude in nuanced and surprising ways. “Now that I have been a working mother wrangling a special-needs child in a complicated and congested world,” she writes, “my definition of solitude has changed.”

As soon as I read that line, I thought, Yes! Solitude means something different for women. It has to do with the intense expectations we face around caregiving—the assumption that we’ll take care of places, people, objects, schedules. Before I became a mother, I remember thinking, How does parenting work for introverts? These days—as someone who loves my ten-month-old daughter so intensely I can hardly stand it, but still loves to be alone—I’ve spent much of the past year thinking about the vexed relationship between care and solitude.

I’m not an expert in wilderness literature, but Irvine’s book is written for all of us: those of us who know the literature of the wilderness, and those of us who don’t. Because the wilderness matters to us all. We are all beholden, and we are all culpable. In proposing a new way of thinking about the wilderness—not in terms of solitude but in terms of relation—Irvine is posing even broader questions about how we understand ourselves in relation to one another. This is a book written for anyone who has ever wanted to be alone, and for anyone who has ever realized solitude is a delusion.

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Franny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering AI ideas she wished she could have addressed in her poems. Reckoning with the mythology of a “finished product,” Choi is coming to terms with having a book that is both out in the world and still in progress. The process isn’t easy: as one of Choi’s cyborgs says, questioning reality makes her feel “a / little insecure / a little embarrassed haha.” But to be insecure, or still in progress, should never be mistaken for being incomplete.

Soft Science asks what it means to live as a queer Asian American femme, someone “made a technology for other people’s desire.” How do we distinguish between the constructed pieces that have been imposed on us versus the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen? Are they always distinct? The voice of Soft Science is often corrupting: Choi inhabits colonized language and uses it to her own ends. In the poem “The Cyborg Wants To Make Sure She heard You Right,” Choi runs negative comments directed at her on Twitter back and forth through Google Translate until the language is transformed into something new. By repurposing language, Choi offers up a record of what is happening to our bodies and minds under whiteness and capitalism, and the beginnings of a way forward.

Choi is the co-host of the podcast VS, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and will begin teaching this fall at Williams College. Soft Science is Choi’s second full-length collection, following Floating, Brilliant, Gone and her chapbook, Death by Sex Machine. Her poem, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula” also features in our spring issue.

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