{"id":80062,"date":"2014-11-25T12:06:56","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T17:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=80062"},"modified":"2014-11-25T12:06:56","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T17:06:56","slug":"the-in-between-space-an-interview-with-shelly-oria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/25\/the-in-between-space-an-interview-with-shelly-oria\/","title":{"rendered":"The In-Between Space: An Interview with Shelly Oria"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: T. Kira Madden<\/p><\/div>\n

The eighteen stories in <\/em>New York 1 Tel Aviv 0<\/a>, Shelly Oria\u2019s debut collection, are beguiling, bizarre, and wise. (One of them, \u201cMy Wife, in Converse<\/a>,\u201d appeared in <\/em>The Paris Review earlier this year.) Her sentences, with their clear-eyed, authoritative calm, underscore and complicate the unlikely circumstances in which her characters find themselves, and the chaos of their inner lives. Here, for example, is the narrator of \u201cThis Way I Don\u2019t Have to Be,\u201d on her addiction to sleeping with married men:<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

I always look them in the eye throughout, and that can be tricky, because they mostly try to avoid the intimacy of eye contact. I wait, and then suddenly it\u2019s there, passing through them like a wave. In that moment, their entire lives turn to air \u2026 For one brief moment, they go back in time, they make different choices, they are different men. And my body is the time-travel machine that takes them there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Born in Los Angeles but raised in Israel, Oria moved to the United States at twenty-five, five years after finishing her compulsory military service. Though she was fluent in English, she thought\u2014and wrote\u2014in Hebrew; hoping to attend the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, she taught herself to write fiction in English, an experience she describes as \u201cone of the hardest things I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d Her prose is both energized and measured, and perhaps this is the effect of<\/em> customary Israeli volubility short-leashed by an inner translator\u2014a tiny version of the author herself who sits at her little desk inside the brain, reading the rough transcripts as they are faxed up from the heart, and forever sending notes back down that read, Yes, but is that really exactly what you meant to say? All authors live with a version of this little demon; it just happens that Oria\u2019s is bilingual and combat trained.<\/em><\/p>\n

I should mention that Oria is my colleague at the Pratt Institute. She is also a life\/creativity coach and hosts a reading series in the East Village. Between all of that and a book tour, she is very busy, for which reason, though we would have much preferred the pleasure of each other\u2019s company, this interview was conducted via e-mail.<\/em><\/p>\n

I find myself returning to the scene in the title story where Pie\u2014who is in a three-way relationship with a woman and a man\u2014divides herself into \u201cMe No. 1\u201d and \u201cMe No. 2.\u201d No. 1, \u201cthe Israeli who was taught that being tough and being strong are the same thing,\u201d is ready to walk out the door on both lovers immediately. No. 2, \u201ca woman who successfully impersonates an American\u201d and \u201chas a lot to prove,\u201d wants to stay. Pie seems to think that No. 1 has the right take on the situation, but it\u2019s No. 2\u2019s position she adopts as her own, and I for one am hardly convinced that she\u2019s wrong. Might you speak, then, to the risks and allures of pulling off a successful impersonation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The thing is\u2014and maybe this is obvious\u2014both Pies are wrong. By which I, of course, also mean that they\u2019re both right. And to me that\u2019s what the story is trying to do, and what the book is trying to do, and what I\u2019m trying to do, not only as a writer but as a human\u2014challenge this idea of either-or, hang out a bit in the in-between space. Or really, the both<\/em> space. As far as I\u2019m concerned, that goes for nationality, for sexuality, for identity in general. We\u2019re hardwired toward this dichotomous way of thinking about and constructing identity. It\u2019s almost an addiction\u2014a cultural addiction to categories. <\/p>\n

One finds it even in those places, namely the arts, where one might have hoped to be excused from such rigidity. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Doing interviews and readings, I\u2019ve noticed a prevalent idea in the book, of lies repeating themselves to the point of becoming truths. Big shifts in identity function that way \u2014you lie to yourself in some small or medium-sized way until you start buying it. A successful impersonation is not only successful in that it fools the person you\u2019re interacting with. A truly successful impersonation is the kind where the impersonator starts believing her own lie. In that moment, that lie has become, at least to some extent, true.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think this is a bad thing at all. I mean, of course it could be\u2014it depends on how far reality is from fantasy, I suppose. But the point I was making is that the experience of an impersonation becoming more and more successful over time is the experience of integrating a new identity.<\/p>\n

\"newyork1telaviv0_b\"<\/a>So it makes sense that in the very next scene in the story, as the three of them are making love, Pie asks herself, \u201cWho is this person? That me who isn\u2019t Israeli and isn\u2019t American, isn\u2019t gay and isn\u2019t straight\u2014who is she?\u201d Pie has found\u2014or at least found a language with which to seek\u2014identity from the very fact of her in-betweenness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a way, the moment you\u2019re referencing is a product of that \u201ccategory addiction,\u201d the culturally cultivated idea that our identity should fit neatly in a box. Which is predominantly a Western and male and white idea\u2014by which I mean, it\u2019s a privileged idea. That moment for Pie is a moment of inhabiting the \u201cboth\u201d space, of saying, Oh, wait a minute, I am all these things at once. It\u2019s her inability, or refusal, to choose or fit into one box that defines her.<\/p>\n

You also work professionally as a life\/creativity coach. Do you think your coaching work makes you more comfortable with these kinds of big questions about who we are and what we want?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, the kind of conversations I\u2019m having when I coach are inherently open and flexible, sort of stretching themselves in different ways to meet the client where he or she is, and so in that sense, yes, sometimes. But mostly those conversations tend to be very specific. A person is less likely to say, You know, I\u2019ve been wondering about the relationship between truth and lie, and more likely to say, Last night at the gala I felt like a fraud. And coaching is not about giving advice, really. It assumes the person has all the answers, but that these answers aren\u2019t always or aren\u2019t fully accessible. Much of the work, therefore, is in asking the right questions.<\/p>\n

In a few of these stories, like \u201cVictor, Changed Man\u201d or \u201cThe Beginning of a Plan,\u201d reality itself is dynamic and mutable\u2014what a category addict might resort to calling magic realism\u2014but I was reminded most strongly of the fictions of Gary Lutz, which was surprising, since at the sentence level your styles are radically different.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I discovered Gary Lutz in grad school, when I was very new to writing in English, which is my second language. I think one of the biggest gifts of reading him has been learning both to credit the reader and to trust language much more. A Gary Lutz story assumes an intelligent\u2014arguably brilliant\u2014and fully engaged reader. And, of course, a Gary Lutz story trusts that language in and of itself can create suspense and hold emotional weight and punch a reader in the gut\u2014all the things we traditionally attribute to plot. So if you\u2019re a writer who thinks about language a lot, reading Gary Lutz changes you. But I think all the writers who inspired me during that formative time in my writing life will forever be more than just influences. Their voices had a huge, long lasting effect on me. Grace Paley is another such hero. Judy Budnitz, Joy Williams, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Amy Hempel.<\/p>\n

So many of your characters seem to want, more than anything else, to have their reality confirmed by a lover\u2019s attention. There\u2019s a lot of ego in that desire, but a lot of supplication, too. You\u2019re giving someone else enormous power over you, and that person might not know what to do with it or even want it at all. Are people too quick to give away this kind of power? Is love just a form of attention? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I do think love is a form of attention, yes. It\u2019s arguably much more, too, of course, and I think it has the power to confirm and confer not only our reality but our humanity. But at its core it\u2019s a deep form of attention\u2014we fall in love with the people who pay attention the right way, to whatever it is in us that most needs attention, and who let us do the same for them, no?<\/p>\n

But then, yes, some of the people in my stories get in trouble for it. I think you\u2019re right to use the word power<\/em>, because that\u2019s what really gets them in trouble\u2014not wanting or needing the lover\u2019s attention, but rather giving themselves up to it in some profound way. This can happen at any age, but I do think it\u2019s emotionally young, the feeling that I will cease to exist if this person stops loving me. Ideally, over the years and through experience and awareness, we learn that no one really has that kind of power over us, and that when we feel as though someone does it\u2019s actually our psyche asking for our own attention, et cetera, et cetera. But in fiction, these are the characters we want, right? Young hearts make the best mistakes on the page.<\/p>\n

Justin Taylor\u2019s new book, <\/em>Flings<\/a>, is available now. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The eighteen stories in New York 1 Tel Aviv 0, Shelly Oria\u2019s debut collection, are beguiling, bizarre, and wise. (One of them, \u201cMy Wife, in Converse,\u201d appeared in The Paris Review earlier this year.) Her sentences, with their clear-eyed, authoritative calm, underscore and complicate the unlikely circumstances in which her characters find themselves, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":769,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[16186,71,16187,583,14131,2111,7931,16185,14485,3375,16184,7845,8247],"class_list":["post-80062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-dichotomy","tag-fiction","tag-impersonation","tag-israel","tag-issue-209","tag-love","tag-lying","tag-new-york-1-tel-aviv-o","tag-polyamory","tag-sarah-lawrence-college","tag-shelly-oria","tag-short-stories","tag-truth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Interview with Shelly Oria<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Israeli writer on her debut story collection, \u201ccategory addiction,\u201d and the best mistakes on the page.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/25\/the-in-between-space-an-interview-with-shelly-oria\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The In-Between Space: An Interview with Shelly Oria by Justin Taylor\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 25, 2014 \u2013 The eighteen stories in New York 1 Tel Aviv 0, Shelly Oria\u2019s debut collection, are beguiling, bizarre, and wise. 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