{"id":128846,"date":"2018-08-28T11:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128846"},"modified":"2018-09-06T13:49:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T17:49:16","slug":"the-answers-are-not-important-an-interview-with-catherine-lacey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/28\/the-answers-are-not-important-an-interview-with-catherine-lacey\/","title":{"rendered":"The Answers Are Not Important: An Interview With Catherine Lacey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Catherine Lacey (Photo by Daymon Gardner)<\/p><\/div>\n

I read Catherine Lacey\u2019s first novel, the gorgeously despondent <\/em>Nobody Is Ever Missing, in a gulp. It unfolds like a hungry gasp. Nothing much happens really: one day, Elyria takes off for New Zealand to visit a poet who had once extended an offhand invitation. In sentences that hurt you with their icy precision\u2014that make you envious of their implacable beauty\u2014Lacey stages a woman\u2019s internal disintegration as though it were an especially potent bit of performance art.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Her second novel <\/em>The Answers has an almost sci-fi premise: an actor hires women to play out distilled threads of a relationship, i.e., the Anger Girlfriend, the Maternal Girlfriend, the Intellectual Girlfriend, the Intimacy Team of Girlfriends. Mary signs up for the \u201cincome-generating experience\u201d of playing the Emotional Girlfriend, because she needs to generate income. <\/em>Like Elyria, she is desperate\u2014for a cure, for reprieve, for release. In many ways, <\/em>The Answers is a more plot-driven novel than Lacey\u2019s first, but its title is ironic: answers are not possible, resolutions a misbegotten fantasy.<\/em><\/p>\n

In her new collection of short stories,\u00a0<\/em>Certain American States, Lacey\u2019s characters are in mourning, aggrieved, disappointed by life and hurt by death. \u201cYou are still alive, so you have to keep living. That\u2019s all you can do,\u201d the narrator of the story \u201cur heck box\u201d is told by a friend after her brother dies. But the insight of the eponymous story may be more true: \u201cThe loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely.\u201d <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I recently spoke with Lacey about the new collection, which includes several stories written before <\/em>Nobody Is Ever Missing, about her sense of herself as a writer and about the meaning and politics of \u201ccertain American states.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Where do these stories intersect with the timeline of your novels? How has writing stories been different for you than writing novels?<\/p>\n

LACEY<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a big difference, although I will say that when I first started writing, I wanted to write essays and profiles and nonfiction. As an adult, I had pretty much been just doing that for a while. And then\u2014I\u2019m not really sure when it started\u2014I started writing fiction a bit more seriously. I started by writing a bunch of short stories. That was really all I had time for, all I felt I had enough stamina for. \u00a0The stories all belonged together, and they needed to talk to each other in order to find their cohesion. So I had a series of stories that ended up turning into Nobody Is Ever Missing<\/em>. I backed into writing that first novel by just repeating the same perspective.\u00a0 I hate the phrase \u201cfinding my voice,\u201d but inevitably, when you are a younger writer, there\u2019s a period in which you are straining, and you just throw everything at the wall and see what comes out that is meaningful to you. Two or three of the stories in the new collection were first written around the same time that I was writing my first book. They were outliers, they didn\u2019t fit in Nobody<\/em>. And that\u2019s been true the rest of the time that I\u2019ve been writing stories. There have been stories that I either finished and published, or finished and didn\u2019t publish, or finished and even believed were going to be in the collection until another story showed up and was just a better fit. The oldest story in Certain American States<\/em> is the title story, but at the point of writing that story I had no sense of working toward a collection, I was just writing stories that were appealing to me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the defining things about your work is the comfort with irresolution. Conclusiveness is not your goal. Maybe the goal is simply the acceptance that some things are not and cannot be known.<\/p>\n

LACEY<\/p>\n

There were many writers\u2014especially throughout the twentieth century\u2014who were very comfortable with places of irresolution. The last twenty years have somehow been more of a conservative swing, towards a conservative technique, so things that are old, techniques that are old, now seem rather weird. The dominant literary mode that has taken over in the last two decades is actually quite\u2014not necessarily archaic, but it\u2019s conservative. It\u2019s just boring. There\u2019s this need for everything to tie into political issues, to make a specific statement, and to offer the reader some sort of nonfiction credit for reading fiction, to make some sort of clear, hard statement. Instead, I want to create a fictive space in which the questions can be addressed and the answers are not as important\u2014because they change, every reader brings a different sense of need to the book. I guess I just gravitate toward that naturally. You don\u2019t always realize what you are doing until you have been doing it for a while, which is something I have started to realize now, publishing this third book. I can see patterns a little bit more, and I can see intentions that I didn\u2019t know I had.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the questions that I have\u2014and it maybe follows you talking about patterns\u2014is if there\u2019s a starting point for you. Do you start with a voice, an image? The voices in your work are indelible in some way. Do you hear a voice and put it in particular situations? Is there an image or an event or, since a lot of these stories are about mourning and grief, a feeling?<\/p>\n

LACEY<\/p>\n

There tends to be a sentence that occurs to me. But a sentence is not just a sentence. In the sentence, I will feel a very specific bodily posture, a very specific rhythm, and a very specific level of intensity at which this character, this voice, is living. The sentence holds a lot. It\u2019s always way more than a sentence. I\u2019m constantly thinking of processing the world in terms of words. I\u2019m looking at everything and thinking automatically about how to describe it and what it feels like. These sentences come to me all the time. I try to be idle and bored as much as possible in my everyday life. If I\u2019m just walking around, I try to resist the impulse to listen to music or a podcast, at least some of the time. I find that idle spaces of not doing anything, not reading, not trying to get anything done, just aimlessly and slowly being alive, are the times when a sentence can arise that has more in it than just language. There\u2019s a code with an entire story in that sentence, if I can just get it down and take it apart. The process of uncovering where the sentence came from is the process of writing stories for me. Sometimes there\u2019s an image, there\u2019s a character, there\u2019s a voice, but it generally comes as a sort of complete syntactical object.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When and how did you know you wanted to and would be a writer?<\/p>\n

LACEY<\/p>\n

There were different points when I knew I wanted to do this, but I was making compromises with myself. I’d say,\u00a0I\u2019ll do this, but I have to do this other thing for money, and I\u2019ll do this on the side. I allowed myself to pursue writing as long as I had other ways of making money. This was because I didn\u2019t think I could survive off of writing alone. It didn\u2019t occur to me as an option, so it wasn\u2019t even a matter of could or couldn\u2019t. From a very young age, the dominant story I was told was that all the things that I wanted to do, I didn\u2019t get to do them. And I didn\u2019t even argue with it, I didn\u2019t even notice it until recently. In the last few years, I realized that I was always writing, my whole life, but I didn\u2019t consider myself a writer for a long time, nor did I even want to be a writer. From a very young age\u2014I was reading a lot, I was writing a lot\u2014but I never even tried to write a novel until I was already writing one. It\u2019s funny, I moved away by myself when I was young. I was like, Fuck this place, I don\u2019t belong there.\u00a0I thought of myself as being past those things, when in fact I was not.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your writing is often described in otherworldly or supernatural terms, even though it\u2019s largely quite realistic. Is there a paradox that\u2019s there in how you write?<\/p>\n

LACEY<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m writing, I am very much thinking of the body, the character\u2019s posture, the way they might move across a room, how quickly their heart is beating. I think physical sensation is the beginning of all stories, but\u2014and I don\u2019t think this is necessarily a very modern concern\u2014I do think there\u2019s this very human, ongoing problem of people being dissociated from their own bodies. So sometimes work that addresses the intricacies of what is happening in a body and the way that it relates to our thoughts, the way it relates to the way we see the world, seems kind of familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Beneath our lives there is the physical rhythm of our existence, and yet so much of the time we are trying to ignore it. One could say, Oh, this is really a modern thing, it\u2019s because we are all on the internet. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s that. I think that\u2019s just how human beings are. We want to ignore it, because it would be too upsetting to acknowledge the sort of temporary bloody mess that is your life.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mentioned earlier that you don\u2019t necessarily think of your writing as political. Obviously \u201cCertain American States\u201d is the title of a story in the collection, and you\u2019d mentioned that it was the first story you worked on. But I do want to hear a bit more about why you chose this title and what you think of its instinctual political overtones.<\/p>\n

LACEY<\/p>\n

Oh, I don\u2019t mean to say that. I don\u2019t think anyone writes anything that is apolitical. I think my comment earlier about the dominant literary mode of the last twenty years is that it must engage overtly with specific political events in order to be considered political, which to me is crazy. Because I do think that all writing is political, maybe even especially the work that is about the domestic sphere, that is about the way that fathers treat their daughters, the way that mothers treat their children, and the way that spouses treat each other. All these things are microcosms of the way that we treat each other on a global, political scale. There is a lot of power in the stories that are just about relationships. It\u2019s often what our laws gets based on, the love of this person over that person.<\/p>\n

When I realized I was working on a story collection, originally I had titled it Small Differences<\/em>. But after I had written all of the stories, I went back to that earlier story and used that title. There are several reasons. One is that there are about four different meanings in that phrase, and so I liked that it invited scrutiny and reinterpretation. You know, there\u2019s the state of being certain about something, and then there are \u201ccertain American states,\u201d as if there are a few different states of being that are all-American. Then there are certain states that are American, like Mississippi or New York. I liked the variability that that title gives. I do think that the collection of emotional states that are in the book are all, for better or worse, a variety of American problems. They are in American settings, people are grappling with the theater that is America. The more I travel, the more I realize that the way we have our country put together, the problems and the different scales of nuance we have here, are very different from the rest of the world. We as Americans get very America-centric over time\u2014I think we are all guilty of this. I\u2019m certainly guilty of this. Our international culture machine allows this. You know, it\u2019s our movies that are being translated, our books that are being translated, and our music that is sent out across the world and reflected back at us. I had to admit at a certain point that my concerns were American, whether I wanted them to be or not. I think I just wanted to acknowledge the limits of the collection as well. It\u2019s not all American states, it\u2019s not the United American states. It\u2019s not all of them, it\u2019s just a few of them that I happen to have access to.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yevgeniya Traps lives in Brooklyn. She works at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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