{"id":96965,"date":"2016-04-14T14:23:49","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T18:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=96965"},"modified":"2016-04-14T16:16:51","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T20:16:51","slug":"exploding-autobiography-an-interview-with-mark-leyner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/14\/exploding-autobiography-an-interview-with-mark-leyner\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploding Autobiography: An Interview with Mark Leyner"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: David Plakke Media NYC<\/p><\/div>\n

When <\/i>The Paris Review last interviewed Mark Leyner<\/i><\/a>, in 2013, he announced his next book. \u201c<\/i>Gone with the Mind is my autobiography in the form of a first-person-shooter game,\u201d he said. \u201c<\/i>You\u2019ll have to blast your way back into my mother\u2019s womb.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Now, three years later, <\/i>Gone with the Mind<\/a> has arrived, and it\u2019s \u2026 almost nothing like that. The autobiographical elements are intact, yes, and Leyner\u2019s mother appears early and often\u2014but the notion of a first-person shooter is unceremoniously jettisoned on page forty-six. (\u201cPretty much everyone I mentioned it to thought it <\/i>sounded really cool, but what <\/i>is that, actually? What would a book like that actually be, y\u2019know?\u201d) In its place is a loose frame story in which Leyner appears at <\/i>the Nonfiction at the Food Court Reading Series at Woodcreek Plaza Mall, where he reads before a crowd of precisely three: a Panda Express employee on break, a Sbarro employee on break, and his mom.<\/i><\/p>\n

The introductory speech he gives comprises the bulk of <\/i>Gone with the Mind, a discursive farrago that touches on Freudian mother-son dynamics, constructivist aesthetics, fascist metaphysics, Twizzlers, women\u2019s antiperspirant commercials, prostate cancer, and formative episodes from his youth. In earlier novels, Leyner cast himself as a paranoid egomaniac (<\/i>Et Tu, Babe) or a feckless, oversexed adolescent (<\/i>The Tetherballs of Bougainville), but the Mark Leyner we meet in these pages is transparent, erudite, self-deprecating, even tender. This is an autobiography that dramatizes its own creation\u2014the pathos in attempting to express \u201cthe chord of how one feels at single given moment, in this transient, phantom world.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

I met Leyner at Marco & Pepe, a restaurant in Jersey City, where he arrived with a copy of Gershom Scholem\u2019s <\/i>The Messianic Idea in Judaism<\/a> tucked under his arm. We began our conversation by learning, courtesy of our waitress, what a Portuguese muffin is.<\/i><\/p>\n

So it sounds kind of like an English muffin, but bigger.<\/b><\/p>\n

Does that mean anything called Portuguese is just a bigger variant of the English version?<\/p>\n

Yes. Portuguese-breakfast tea is just a vat of English-breakfast tea. Anyway\u2014it\u2019s been three years since your last interview with the <\/b>Review.<\/i><\/b> I gather there\u2019s been a sort of formalist struggle for you since then.<\/b><\/p>\n

I waited on the idea for this book for a very long time. It\u2019s important to me that each book is starting from scratch. I\u2019m trying to think of a vital, unprecedented idea for a book that I haven\u2019t seen. It\u2019s not because I\u2019m so ambitious\u2014it\u2019s just the way I\u2019ve always worked. I have a feeling it\u00a0comes from my being most engaged and inspired by visual artists when I was younger. Duchamp, Picabia, all the Cubists, Apollinaire and his people, Andr\u00e9 Breton, his people. And then all the great Abstract Expressionists, whom I adore still. I\u2019m a big Clement Greenbergian. I\u2019m a high formalist. I would always say that when, back in the day, people talked about postmodernism and things. I thought, No, I\u2019m a card-carrying modernist, and I\u2019m proud to say it. I approached this book in a formal way. How does one represent an autobiography, which in itself is a representation of confabulated memories? I began thinking about my mother\u2014the meals we used to have at various restaurants and how we\u2019ve always been so keen to make an audience out of each other. And that\u2019s one of the really fundamental themes of this book\u2014how intimates make audiences of each other. I really do think there\u2019s a reading of this book that sees it as just me and my mom talking, and the rest of it being some kind of wonderful filigreed delusion\u2014this pathetic event.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You\u00a0<\/b>capture the energy and potentiality that books have in their incipient stages. At one point <\/b>you\u2019re watching a Twizzlers commercial \u201cwhere everything in the world is made out of red Twizzlers,\u201d and the thought comes\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what <\/b>Gone with the Mind<\/i><\/b> should be like! It should all be made out of the same thing!\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m very interested in Russian Constructivism and this idea of transparency. There\u2019s this Russian word, factura<\/i>, that\u2019s used about transparency of process, and the volition of your material things. In a way the book is a relentless explanation of what I\u2019m doing as I\u2019m doing it\u2014it may be a book-long explanation of what the title means. The\u00a0<\/em>Sugar Frosted Nutsack <\/i>also shares that. I\u2019m constantly saying, Okay, that\u2019s what we mean by x<\/i> \u2026 that\u2019s what my mom and I mean by Gone with the Mind<\/i>. It comes from this idea of transparency. I think this is my most accessible book, sentence to sentence, but it\u2019s also the most conceptually complex. With my other books, you\u2019re kind of just watching me do my thing. It\u2019s like concert footage of me writing. This is very different.<\/p>\n

The Mark Leyner character in this book is much more reflective, sensitive, and forthright than the Leyner in <\/b>Et Tu, Babe<\/i><\/b> and <\/b>The Tetherballs of Bougainville<\/i><\/b>, which are sometimes regarded\u2014unjustly, I think\u2014as mere exercises in irony. Do you have the hope that <\/b>Gone with the Mind<\/i><\/b> has a retroactive effect on the Leyner of the earlier books? <\/b>\u00a0<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t hurt. One of the things I like especially about this book, and talking about it, is that it forces readers to ask about the process of writing it and the \u201creal\u201d Mark. It\u2019s a good way to point out to people that there\u2019s no such thing as a real me or a real you. We\u2019re all engaged in manufacturing ongoing fabrications of ourselves, making audiences out of one another, all that kind of stuff. The book is just a rumination on what goes on.<\/p>\n

I suppose it was silly of me to expect that someone else would realize this, but when I wrote Et Tu, Babe<\/i>, I thought the persona was so obvious. The character in that book is a kind of antipodal representation of myself. It\u2019s so hyperbolic as to be the inverse of me in every way\u2014so honestly the opposite of who I am\u2014and for that reason I felt that there was no irony to it. I even thought, at the time, that I was being so completely vivisected with candor about it. So to hear that this is some kind of postmodern irony, to me it was like Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath telling you, Really, everything? In the days of grand book tours, people would see me and invariably I could see them sigh and shrink in disappointment. I was this small, nice guy, and they were like, Oh, that\u2019s it?<\/p>\n

I saw Et Tu, Babe<\/i> as the most unsparing portrayal\u2014of someone little and insecure, of the little kid in Jersey City looking across the river at Manhattan and thinking, I\u2019m going to live and die here, and perhaps never make it. That author is a complete fantasy of the child from that socioeconomic milieu thinking, That can never be me. Coming at it from that angle, it was strange when someone would see me on the PATH<\/small> train and say\u2014this happened a number of times\u2014You take the PATH<\/small>? Like, you\u2019re not choppered in or shot through a pneumatic tube or something?<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s a beautifully empathic, insightful thing to ask me about. Will Gone with the Mind<\/i> have a retroactive effect? Yes, I hope. I think of it whenever I\u2019m appearing somewhere to read from this book\u2014that for these few people in the audience, it\u2019s good. They\u2019ll all go back to the previous personae and see that there\u2019s more, actually, to them. They\u2019ll maybe be aware of the deep, mystical constant of my work. That, between us [he leans over and taps the Gershom Scholem volume<\/i>] will only be revealed when the messiah comes.<\/p>\n

\"gonewiththemind\"<\/p>\n

Three years ago, <\/b>you said you wanted to write about fascism<\/b><\/a>, about Mussolini. Plenty of fascism seeped into the final book, but it\u2019s there obliquely.<\/b><\/p>\n

I have a very longstanding fascination with fascism, with despots and demagogues. What is it like, I wonder, maneuvering each day and not trusting anyone? But I shudder when Trump is compared to Mussolini. I feel bad on Mussolini\u2019s behalf. Mussolini was an enormous intellectual, and spoke several languages. He wrote many, many, many, many things throughout his life, and had relationships with D\u2019Annunzio, Marinetti. And then, come on, we\u2019re talking about Trump? [The meal arrives, featuring a Portuguese muffin.<\/i>] Thank you so much, that looks beautiful. What a nice, neat-looking thing.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve set the book in a shopping mall, too\u2014a freighted place for people my age, who grew up as malls were dying. Many of my formative experiences are knit up in these aspects of consumerism that, in an intellectual way, we\u2019re supposed to revile. But there\u2019s a warmth there, too. I have these immensely pleasurable memories of drowning myself in consumer culture at malls, and then a few years later they were gone.<\/b><\/p>\n

I have the same, but over a longer period of time. When I was in high school, malls were relatively new. There were two pretty big ones near where I lived in New Jersey. At the time, they seemed\u2014if you can imagine this word being applicable, because malls are such moribund things now, symbols of American death culture\u2014but then they seemed very futuristic. Like something out of The Jetsons<\/em>. They brought all the stores into this one incredible space station, like a colony on an asteroid, and everything was filled with wonder. The ambient noise of the fountains, the smell of Mrs. What\u2019s-her-name\u2019s cookies wafting. There was a chain bookstore called Brentano\u2019s, long folded, and there was one really nice one in this mall. My friend and I would get a ride from someone\u2019s mom, and they\u2019d drop us off at this Brentano\u2019s and come back and pick us up, like, seven hours later. We would stay there, split up, and just look at books. For seven hours. And so, oddly, one of my enduring, abiding associations with malls are books. The mall is supposed to represent the citadel of totalitarian consumerism, and yet there I\u2019d be, reading some Yeats. That was something that interested me. The main valence of the mall is its moribund quality, and I used that in this book. It\u2019s the site of my own constant reappraising of what I\u2019ve made of myself in life. And what better place to reappraise than a completely empty, dying mall?<\/p>\n

The novel opens with a forty-page introduction from your mother, Muriel, ostensibly the coordinating director of the Nonfiction at the Food Court Reading Series. Much later, we learn that her remarks are drawn from actual transcripts you\u2019d made. What was it like recording your mom?<\/b><\/p>\n

I felt ever so slightly guilty about it, because I had to use a certain amount of subterfuge. If I said to my mom, I want you to be introducing me, and here\u2019s the premise\u2014I\u2019m such a failure that you have to drive me to a mall no one comes to. She would, because she\u2019s such a great sport, try to do that. But it\u2019s not what I wanted. I wanted her to tell a very convoluted, expansive, prolix story about herself, only marginally connected to me. And her pregnancy was perfect, because it has everything and nothing to do with me. She was just going about her business most of the time. So I said, Talk about being pregnant with me. And then, as I like to joke\u2014it\u2019s not a joke\u2014like, six hours later, I said, I think we\u2019ve got enough. And she said, But I\u2019m just getting warmed up.<\/p>\n

Opening the book in someone else\u2019s voice is something of a gambit, since you\u2019re known for your prose style\u2014you\u2019re eschewing your trademark. And it inflects your part of the book with a spoken quality, too.<\/b><\/p>\n

The part in my voice is painstakingly created to seem<\/i> extemporaneous. Sometimes I\u2019m giving clear signals that it\u2019s not, because I\u2019m using a certain kind of big word\u2014say, indexicality<\/i>. I would pretend to search for that\u2014\u201cthe uh \u2026 uh \u2026 um \u2026 indexicality.\u201d I sat and thought, maybe I need another uh<\/i> in there. It\u2019s so easy to vitiate the effect of extemporaneousness. The tiniest thing can fuck it up and disrupt it, where then it seems very contrived in a way I didn\u2019t want\u2014and then at other times I did<\/i> want to open the door a little on the contrivance. It was very tricky, doing everything I wanted in that register.<\/p>\n

I write sentence by sentence. I\u2019ll write a sentence and then think about that for a very long time. I think of the photograph of Mark Rothko sitting back, smoking a cigarette, and looking at one of his big canvasses. That always seemed to me paradigmatic of being an artist. It wasn\u2019t so much making something, it was thinking, What is that, and what does that augur, possibly? I think about whatever dialogue exists between the few sentences I have and the next few, and then some third avenue opens up. I can look at a paragraph for a week and keep reading it and looking at it and writing things in the margins, and it will amplify and grow, but by the time I\u2019m done with a section, with very few exceptions, it\u2019s done. I move forward at a very methodical, glacial pace\u2014inexorably forward. When I finish the book, it\u2019s done. And I never read the book again. I don\u2019t go back. With Gone with the Mind<\/i>, that was a very good feeling.<\/p>\n

I have to ask about the ending and its \u2026 finality. \u201cAnd so with this I say goodbye to you, a very real goodbye,\u201d you write. It makes it seem\u2014and I can only imagine this was purposeful\u2014as if you\u2019re not going to write anymore.<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s so perfectly evocative of that, that I probably should stop. I hadn\u2019t intended to. Of course, I had feelings like that at the time. I really am, as I\u2019m writing, rummaging through everything I\u2019ve encountered in that day, including my own feelings, as evanescent or fugitive as they might be. There are very incidental things that become absolutely essential to books of mine, because I try to maintain that sense where there\u2019s no prioritizing anything. If I\u2019ve had an idea for a\u00a0hundred and fifty pages that a book is about something\u2014or, I don\u2019t mean \u201cabout,\u201d because that\u2019s a pretty, as they say, \u201cinterrogated\u201d term in my work\u2014but if I think, Oh, there\u2019s a kind of underlying thematic to a book, and then one day I\u2019m at a stoplight and I get another idea, I\u2019ve made a sort of pledge to myself that my new idea needs to be taken as seriously as the year-long commitment to something else. So I incorporated the feelings I was having toward the end\u2014they\u2019re certainly genuine.<\/p>\n

If I were to have a last book\u2014and I\u2019ve said this elsewhere\u2014this would be it. To the extent that each of my books feels like both a corollary and a refutation of the last book, it\u2019s possible, somehow, that this can be my last book. If I were negotiating\u2014if I were, like, an Iranian nuclear negotiator\u2014that\u2019s what I would say. It actually is<\/i> my last book, even if there\u2019s an ensuing book.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a political dimension to it\u2014to how you\u2019ve structured it. You argue that conventional forms of narrative and autobiography are \u201ccounterrevolutionary.\u201d I think about that Breton quote you\u2019ve cited before. <\/b>\u201cI salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive.\u201d <\/b>How do you bring about that negation\u2014politically, aesthetically, whatever? <\/b><\/p>\n

It has to do with alienation. This sounds so pretentious, but I think one of the deepest kind of politics to engage in is that question\u2014what is politics? I revere Artaud almost beyond any literary figure. And that quote comes from a really beautiful piece that Breton wrote. They had a very contentious relationship. Artaud was routinely excommunicated from the surrealist group. Breton loved purging people, and I love that in Breton, that he would consider these things important enough to issue excommunicatory edicts over\u2014because of what someone said the night before at some caf\u00e9. Breton said in an interview, I realize in the end that Artaud went further than any of us, meaning as a Surrealist. Breton sort of fired Artaud\u2014he said Artaud\u2019s work got too violent. So to see Breton say, in the end, that Artaud was the person who most authentically lived this life was a remarkable thing\u2014to do that is a kind of deep politics. And maybe in a naive but deeply felt way, I\u2019ve always been aware of that. It\u2019s a hard thing for me to describe in a precise way, and inherently so, because part of what I think is so corrosively political about it is its indeterminacy. But from the minute I wanted to write, I\u2019ve always felt that there\u2019s value in alienation. If one wanted to look at my work and find some sort of antibourgeois thematic thing, sometimes fascist antibourgeois, sometimes Maoist antibourgeois\u2014it\u2019s there, yeah. It\u2019s part of whatever liberational politics derive from, like, the radically, cosmically alienated person. At a certain point you have to say, as Breton did, On behalf of everyone you\u2019ve alienated, thank you.<\/p>\n

And yet there\u2019s so much in your work that\u2019s not at all alienating\u2014the humor, most readily.<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always had the really simplistic idea that laughter is a kind of communal, consensual acknowledgment of how incredibly hard and shitty life is. That sounds right to me. And I\u2019ve always been interested in kind of hidden literary techniques in nonliterary procedures, stand-up comedy being one. When I started out doing this, I was thinking, Do I really have to do all this stuff within books, like, if I have someone in a house, do I have to start describing the walkway and what it\u2019s made out of? But stand-up comedians have this completely artificial way of linking their bits, these interstitial techniques.<\/p>\n

The sort of alienation I\u2019m engaged in\u2014let\u2019s take something I knew was a truculent feat, the repetition in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack<\/i>, where whole paragraphs repeat for, like, three pages, and then another three pages. I thought that people were going to think it was a manufacturing mistake\u2014but if I did it enough, it would become so obvious that it would kind of tickle the reader. The reader will finally start laughing, like, An author couldn\u2019t seriously be doing this. It would become transparent, and there would be pleasure in that. This idea of transparency was always really appealing to me, even as a kid, when I saw the fourth-wall breakdown in something like a Chuck Jones cartoon. Bugs Bunny would be doing something to Elmer Fudd and he\u2019d turn to the camera and say, Can you believe they\u2019re making me do this stuff? I just think that\u2019s so cool. It\u2019s demystifying, and kids love that. Demystification of any sort is an enormous relief for a kid, because everything seems impossibly complex and beyond one\u2019s reach.<\/p>\n

So yes, when I write there\u2019s a kind of alienation keeping you there and me here. But it\u2019s so you can sort of see what I\u2019m doing\u2014you can be palpably in contact with me, even as I\u2019m watching you. We\u2019re getting back to how this book is maybe retroactively instructive\u2014I think this book unveils all of that to some degree.<\/p>\n

Since you gave us \u201c<\/b>a huge scoop<\/b><\/a>\u201d about your new book last time, I wondered if you\u2019d do the same now.<\/b><\/p>\n

I was thinking of\u00a0maybe doing a book that involved my daughter. I\u2019m very close to my daughter. My daughter is like my red line. I\u2019d kill for that girl. I would. I also\u2014and I don\u2019t know if this is the same book\u2014I want to write something about alcohol. Because it\u2019s a part of my life. I can be a really big drinker. I mean not day after day after day, but when I do, it\u2019s very willful. I commit to it. Again, in contradistinction to the Et Tu, Babe<\/i> thing, I\u2019m very, very, very, very, very, very shy. I very much prefer a solitary\u00a0life. Alcohol is a handy way to deal with that, to be with a bunch of people. It would be conspicuously avoided if someday I didn\u2019t think about it a little bit. Again, maybe through formal means.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard that on Bon Jovi\u2019s extensive property, he rebuilt the bar he liked to go to when he was young. He had it rebuilt, every stick of it, to precise\u00a0specifications. And I was thinking about that. In the way I like to re-recapitulate, through painstaking methods, something that is supposed to be off-the-cuff, I\u2019ve thought about what it would be like to write a drunken book in the most sober way.\u00a0What are the locutionary tactics that make the text feel drunk? I would want this to feel really drunk. I don\u2019t know if this is the same book as the one about my daughter, that sounds so perverse, but maybe it\u2019s exactly right. She\u2019s seen me in dire straits.<\/p>\n

If you want to do some shots right now, we can get this thing started.<\/b><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just forget the rest of the day and tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of <\/i>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When The Paris Review last interviewed Mark Leyner, in 2013, he announced his next book. \u201cGone with the Mind is my autobiography in the form of a first-person-shooter game,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ll have to blast your way back into my mother\u2019s womb.\u201d Now, three years later, Gone with the Mind has arrived, and it\u2019s \u2026 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