Helen Phillips (left) and Laura Van Den berg (right)

When an early copy of Helen Phillips’s new novel, The Need, turned up at my apartment, I had not read a book in two months. I had been unable to read, in fact. My father had died recently and each time I tried to open a book, longing to slide into an alternate present, I instead hit a wall. The Need broke that wall for me. The novel concerns a woman named Molly, a paleobotanist who is home alone with her children when she thinks she hears an intruder in the house—and the events that follow upend her understanding of her world. The book is written in short and thrilling chapters, at once a cat-and-mouse tale of suspense and a profound exploration of identity and reality, of fate and time.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Helen at the Harvard Bookstore recently and as we talked we discovered some intriguing overlap between our most recent projects. So we decided to keep talking. This conversation took place over email, over the course of several weeks in August. We discussed The Need, published by Simon & Schuster in July, and The Third Hotel, out in paperback from Picador this month, plus dislocated realities, genre, maternal love, and endings.

PHILLIPS

On the first page of The Third Hotel, your protagonist Clare admits, “I am experiencing a dislocation of reality,” a sentence that stayed with me as I read the book. The sands of reality do seem to be shifting under Clare’s feet in each scene, which brings me to a perhaps unanswerable question that arises for me in many of my favorite works of fiction. Do you consider your protagonist to be an unstable narrator in a stable world, or a stable narrator in an unstable world?

VAN DEN BERG

I am inclined to claim both, if I may. Clare is wild with grief of various sorts, which creates instability in her own perspective. At the same time, I do think the world—her world, our world—is inherently volatile. To make an obvious point, there is just so much we don’t know and can’t explain. I was just reading about the physicist Leah Broussard’s work on mirror matter, which is bananas, and a concept that is certainly relevant to The Need. After my father died, I thought on several occasions that he was speaking to me through my sister’s dog. I know how that sounds, and yet after a series of deeply uncanny occurrences, such a thought not only seemed possible but also like the obvious and logical conclusion. Was that instability coming from my own grief-deranged self or from some other cosmic force or a collaboration between us? Who can say?

I would love to ask the same question of your protagonist, Molly. The novel opens with a dawning awareness that there is an intruder in her home—and, without veering into spoilers, the intruder’s identity introduces major questions about Molly’s grasp on reality. The intruding force is a wholly real element in the book, it’s not a dream or a fantasy, and at the same time, the novel could also accommodate a reading more grounded in psychological realism—that Molly unconsciously conjured this threat. Do you see the instability as rising from the world around Molly or more from Molly herself? Or both?

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Jia Tolentino. Photo: © Elena Mudd.

Is there any topic Jia Tolentino can’t tackle? Since becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2016, she’s written features about the electronic cigarette brand Juul and the culty athleisure company Outdoor Voices; commentaries on the disastrous Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the violent rise of incels; and examinations of the “large adult son” meme and the YouTube phenomenon of remixing popular songs so they sound like they’re echoing in abandoned malls. In the early years of her professional writing career, she conducted a series of funny yet deeply sympathetic interviews with adult virgins at The Hairpin, and her work as deputy editor at Jezebel helped shape online feminist discourse as we now know it. She also has an M.F.A. in fiction, and the first short story she ever submitted won Carve magazine’s Raymond Carver Contest. “If I got fired tomorrow,” she told me, “I would probably go to the woods and try to write a novel.” Even her tweets are good; for what it’s worth, my introduction to her work came via the occasional dog photos and thoughts on music she posts, which are often the bright spots in my feed.

What unites these wildly disparate threads is Tolentino herself. Although she’s been called the voice of her generation, her writing is sharp, clear, and utterly her own. Tolentino’s first book, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, vibrates with her presence. Over the course of nine long original essays, she turns inside out the fast-casual restaurants, pricey exercise classes, and dubiously simple narratives we use to propel ourselves through our overmediated lives. The result is a sort of revision of Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” for the late-capitalist horror show that is the twenty-first century. Read More

Rebecca Godfrey (photo: Brigitte Lacombe); Leslie Jamison (photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

I came to Rebecca Godfrey’s Under the Bridge as a woman who has had a long-term love affair with sadness and a fraught relationship to anger, as a guilty wielder of weaponized vulnerability, and as a writer fascinated by the ways we try to represent the suffering of others. Which is to say, I came to this extraordinary book with all sorts of personal and creative baggage. But part of its importance, I think, stems from the fact that very few readers could possibly approach this book without baggage. Under the Bridge directs itself toward questions that cut to the core for all of us: How does sadness transmute into rage? Where does violence come from, and how should we expect to find any sort of meaning in it? What do we do with acts of aggression that seem to defy understanding or explanation?

Under the Bridge explores the life and death of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk, a Canadian high school student beaten and murdered in 1997 by a group of teenagers, some of them classmates. Godfrey’s book tells a shocking story, but the most searing impressions it left on me weren’t the stuff of Law and Order reruns, but rather quieter moments of humanity and heartbreak: the rusty car of a grieving uncle, the meticulous beauty regime of a girl in foster care, the Gandhi quote a boy decides to include in one of his letters from prison—how he writes it down to fill up space, then second-guesses himself and erases it, then ultimately decides to write it again.

If true crime as a literary genre often gets a bad rap—dismissed as intrinsically voyeuristic, as if violence were the sworn enemy of profundity—then Under the Bridge is a brilliant illustration of what that knee-jerk dismissal ignores. If we bring rigorous, unflinching attention to acts of unthinkable cruelty, to our rage and our betrayals—we can find difficult and important truths lurking inside sensational stories: truths about trauma and its afterlife, varieties of claustrophobia, and the dark alchemies by which sadness or longing turn to anger.

Perhaps true crime has been dismissed because too many stories about crime have been told with too much fidelity to formula, and too little fidelity to nuance. Under the Bridge runs against the grain in both senses: it pays close attention to the complexity of human life—its ordinary days, as well as its moments of extremity—and refuses the standard tropes and narrative formulas of the genre.

The book is structured as a kaleidoscope of closely observed narrative fragments—drawn from more than three hundred interviews—that toggle between the perspectives of a large cast. In this prism, the book observes the lives of its subjects so closely that they slough off all the familiar snakeskins of archetype: The Evil Villain, the Innocent Victim, the Slut or the Savior or the Bad Girl or the Saint. Godfrey brings the granular gaze of a novelist to the kind of material often flattened into moralizing argument, and her characters emerge as mysterious, contradictory, heartbreaking, and plural—in short, as human. She lets them hum and shimmer and confound us. Her illumination leaves room for the persistence of mystery in a way that feels aesthetically ambitious and also humble, and ethically useful in that humility.  Read More

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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