saké blue: An Interview of Estelle Hoy

All images courtesy of Estelle Hoy

interview with Estelle Hoy
saké blue is published by After 8 Books
edited by Antonia Carrara

OLIVER KUPPER: Hi Estelle! Congratulations on launching your new book. As I mentioned yesterday, my colleague said of saké blue, “It’s like Clarice Lispector and Curb Your Enthusiasm had a baby.” 

ESTELLE HOY: [laughing] That’s excellent. My favorite review yet. After we launched saké blue in New York with After 8 Books, Lisa Robertson asked some astute questions about satire within a text and its role in politics. Lisa is brilliant, so she doesn’t understand that some of us need time to think. Now that I’ve thought about it for a few weeks, I think satire in a text has a kind of mutant state that reverberates differently with different people. People don’t always like satire; they find it belligerent. Something I’ve maybe observed, at least in my own life, so this is by no means general, is that my least educated friends find me funnier; there’s something in that I think, and I feel artistically safer within the working-class environment I grew up in and a little bit fearful that people with a certain level of post-grad education, who’ve taken grave offense to something I’ve written, will slide into my inbox. And slide they do. I’m generally a bit scared of people. How does this relate to Lisa’s question? Maybe one answer is that satire in my work is simply a way of finding the characteristics of sociology and how to understand social forces and their stratifications. Which demographics respond to the conflicts of satire the most and revile it the most? I should do some empirical research, but I’m not in the mood. 

KUPPER: When we spoke last week, you mentioned your childhood. Has growing up around sign language and non-hearing people highlighted the difference between those who can and those who can’t? 

HOY: My remarks were more about method than deafness. It’s not a relationship of inaccessibility, dependence, filtration, or the progression of hearing to non-hearing entities. My interest in deafness and non-vocalized communication came from the pulsations of sign language that I grew up in, sure, which is very confronting and anything but non-vocalized. In fact, sign language is frequently accompanied by a loud, varying, staccato-type rhythm, which is not the first and most apparent association for people who’ve never been around deaf people. For me, speaking in sign and observing signed language are a few things: 1. There is a challenge to duration; words are freed from regular or irregular measures. Sign language introduces the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronic, non-communicating durations. The metric cadence, oscillations, and the non-retrograde rhythms interest me. 2. AUSLAN and ASL (Australian Sign Language) are markedly different, at least to my mind. For example, the former relies on a two-handed alphabet and ASL one, so there’s radical hermetic incoherency, and communicating across lines is not always possible. (Or desired, but that’s another political story.) Pioneers of indeterminacy and non-standards, like John Cage, with his electroacoustic music and a-typical use of instruments. My art writing methodology relishes these ideas and sensations. I don’t know why people are so hellbent on understanding absolutely everything they read. I appreciate being bamboozled, confused, out-smarted, cheated out of, or left in the dark. It’s fun and maddening. And obviously, I’m deeply concerned about those who can and those who cannot, those who have and those who have not. But it’s also wildly involute.  

KUPPER: I like that you said you appreciate being ‘cheated out of comprehending.’ Can you tell us a little more about that? 

HOY: Hmm, ok lemme think. So, people profit from different sounds or the absence of sound at different times. Those combinations map out the variation that causes an apparent ‘disunity.’ Par example. My partner and neighbor are infuriated by our upstairs neighbor using this weird bird machine that delivers an intensely high-pitched sound that reputedly scares crows and pigeons away. They are driven mad by it, complain endlessly, and even write to the Hausvewaltung and owner. Generally, I can’t hear it; ok, not generally; I can’t hear it. It’s precisely in this case that we can see how the absence of a punishable pulsation of sound molecules can shift beyond making cracks in homogeneity: 1. Function (I can keep working, whereas, for them, it makes thought impossible) 2. Sanity (I’m oblivious and therefore nonplussed) 3. The Organization of Time (The bird machine, in a way, intensifies the length of time. They wrestle with significantly developed audio material, which makes forces that are terminable feel interminable)

It’s a potent variable that descends briefly but elaborates on purported ‘disunity’ because I’m cheated out of something that I cannot hear and, quite frankly, not sure even exists. I’ve dodged comprehending, and I’m pretty chuffed about it. This is a long conversation that could be longer, but I’d need another half hour. 

KUPPER: [laughing] Many of your texts deal with political freedom, neoliberalism, and becoming nothing. Can you talk about this?

HOY: I guess we’re kind of at the end of the acceleration cycle, and extinction is most definitely looming. Our psychical energies have been drained by this pandemic, wars, social injustice, and neoliberal frameworks; this whole recession results from psychological disinvestment. I think my focus on political freedom is an idealized expectation that the future can be better–I’m like a 7th grader who got their hands on Marx too early. I think the task of my writing is to conceptualize ways to free ourselves from the framework of capitalism, the pursuit of ‘useful’ exchange values, and our delusion that pleasure comes from consumption. Though, my new red couch is gorgeous, just quietly. My writing has never been reluctant to castigate those in positions of power or peddle the implication that there’s no alternative to capitalism.

I don’t believe that capitalism is an insurmountable structure, and it’s crystal fucking clear to me that this assumption is bringing us to the brink of extinction. We don’t have to resign ourselves to the concept that this is the sole future that our progeny can expect. Liberation can come from freeing ourselves from our obsession with economic growth. Beyond resource sharing, I’ve come to think more and more that there’s an element that could informally reframe our instinct of accumulation and expansion. It’s a proposition of ‘Mentorship.’ This will speak to the notion of becoming nothing. Stay with me: 

Okay, so I call it ‘mentor-futurism,’ it’s an aggressive aesthetic, as all good political solutions should be. I hope the Greeks, Italians, or Coldplay didn’t think of this first. 

The inimitable writer Chris Kraus has generously offered me mentorship, criticism, and encouragement for the past nine years, dilating my notion of neo-liberal conversion. It’s an activity born of extreme magnanimity requiring extended periods to read work, proffer criticism, and keep artists levitating just above creative defeat. The labor of time and intellectual generosity prevails, growing and expanding others but with zero expectation of return. What could I possibly offer Chris Kraus, an artistic and intellectual heavyweight, professionally? I have some great recipes she couldn’t know. Fiscal sharing and redistribution have been a notion I cherish and am good at, but I have no investment in money, so expanding on this may mean nothing. This ‘Mentor-Futurist’ rant is becoming a manifesto that’s probably already out there, but I’m always 5 to 10 minutes late to artistic-military activities. I spend a lot of time watching inter-species friendships on YouTube. 

KUPPER: You’re frequently referenced as an auto-theorist or part of the New Narrative movement; however, you’ve mentioned identifying as a ficto-critic. Knowing you personally for some time, you come across as fiercely private and elusive, frequently deflecting conversation back onto the other person. Does this miscategorization bother you as an artist? 

HOY: [laughing] Yes! It does. As you say, I’m a private person and, as many have described over the years, a little evasive. It mostly bothers me because the critique I’m trying to make is usurped, and I become the focus. I’m all about ideas and action. The ‘I’ in my work is a platform for examining politics and aesthetics, not a reflection on or exposition of my life. I spend a lot of time jotting down ideas in my iPhone notepad or WhatsApp conversations with friends, and 20 to 30 percent of them are solid. I focus on expanding the 20 percent, which takes an incredible amount of energy, so I’ve little left over. Also, my essay, “I’ve Been Told I’m So-So in Bed,’ doesn’t make me look terrific if people think I’m an auto-theorist. 

KUPPER: [laughing] Do you think being elusive and ‘others’ focused has helped you become so successful?  

HOY: Geez, you have a low bar for success. I’ve not much thought about the role of elusiveness, if that’s a word, but I certainly believe that focusing on and considering others is a way to change your art through empathy and insight. For instance, runners who jog in place at a stoplight just need to chill the fuck out. Stay with me. I mean, what’s going on there? In-place joggers at stoplights have much to say philosophically and politically, non? Hasn’t this answer gone downhill?

KUPPER:  It did, ha! What is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you? 

HOY:  I have this wildly excellent friend whose spent much time on fishing boats for someone living in Berlin. But that's another story.  She came to my first madhouse apartment in Neukölln in 2014 and sat on the splintered hardwood floors with a gift she'd made me. She was maniacally pulling all these things out of her bag like Mary Poppins on heat, more and more until these little black and white frames were scattered around her. 50, to be precise. I know this because she told me exactly. She'd spent the last several months sitting in the grass at Görlitzer Park in K-berg most afternoons, drinking lukewarm Club-Mate while looking for a four-leaf clover to give to me as a token of luck for my career. It turned out she has a freaky knack for finding them, and she collected 50 individual four-leaf clovers and framed every single one in little mini squares. I made bigger frames for all of them, splitting them into three large artworks hanging on my wall where I work daily, sipping my own Club-Mate with its 400 grams of caffeine. Being wired is a nuisance but also refreshing. Although the clovers browned over the past decade, they're a floating reminder that someone out there believes in my artistic practice, and sometimes, that's all you need. 

KUPPER: Chris Kraus recently interviewed you about saké blue, a mind-blowing collection of texts and a phenomenal read. She asked if you’d ever considered becoming a philosopher, and we’d be interested to hear more. 

HOY: Yeah, she angles questions uniquely. I find a lot of geometry in philosophy, and its quixotic skirmishes are very entertaining. And soothing. This week, I’ve considered what we could learn socially vis-à-vis formication. Formication, the new word I learned, is this weird, imagined sensation people experience where they feel ants crawling under their skin. It’s disturbing for the person, but I like this idea of indirect and triangular things. So you’ve got: 1. The real person 2. The inexistent feeling, and 3. How those crawling feelings synthesize. Stay with me here! [laughing] 

So, I’m thinking of Zionists. You’ve got a human who’s been brainwashed with a creepy-crawly agitation about another set of humans they resultingly deem a colony of insect vermin, which is a reality that doesn’t exist. It’s skin deep, this sensation, but that doesn’t mean the propaganda is superficial in any way. So, what do we have to work with here? How can we synthesize faux-feelings to restore the knowledge that ‘formication’ isn’t real? It’s imagined. It takes a lot of courage to obstruct psycho-somatic manifestations, especially when you’ve been fed this insidiousness indirectly–and directly–all of your life.

This is all very three-dimensional, which again lends to the triangle symbol. What’s fascinating and maybe even promising about a triangle is that no matter what type –Isosceles, Scalene, or whatever–the angles add, every single time, to 180 degrees. Maybe seeing socio-political formication as a triangle is promising because it leaves us with the guarantee of 180, which is another way of saying a complete about-face. We can do a 180 at any moment.      

I in absolutely no way answered your question, did I.     

KUPPER: Estelle, you are a total pleasure. 

Scrap: An Interview of Calla Henkel

interview by Oliver Misraje

Stepping out of the chaos of Santa Monica Blvd and into the New Theater to meet Calla Henkel for our interview about her latest book, Scrap, had the transportative quality of entering a portal; exiting the speedy streets and entering the hermetically sealed darkness of the cool, dark, velvet-lined theater for a different kind of vector. Side-stepping two girls in prom dresses rehearsing a cat fight, Henkel mentions she had just returned from a swim at a public pool a block away, thus explaining her swimwear. She has an incredibly disarming demeanor—a calm, collected amiability rare for Los Angeles, perhaps equal-parts informed by, and resistant of, the twelve years she spent in Berlin running TV, a smorgasbord performance space, nightlife venue and film studio with Max Pitegoff (also co-founder of the New Theater).

The New Theater is something of a nexus for the burgeoning literary scene and (stagnating) gallery-circuit of Los Angeles, buttressing each through its unique hybrid programming. And not unlike the New Theater, her latest novel Scraps is an intersection between Henkel’s understanding of narrative and lived experience within the arts. It’s a lesbian neo-noir trojan-horsing a deeper critique of the gallery system, true crime, and the underbelly of schadenfreude inherent to both.

OLIVER MISRAJE Scrap operates in the incredibly rare space between a commercial thriller and a hyper-localized critique of the art world. What is it about the thriller genre for you that makes it the ideal form for that kind of discourse?

CALLA HENKEL I love thrillers because they provide a really fast engine, and you can strap anything to it. The art world may not be completely interesting when you talk about it in another set of prose or language, but there's something about a thriller that allows me, as a writer, to focus on minutia, sadness and pain, the flaky parts of a universe which would otherwise maybe be annoying, but because it’s a thriller it can still be consumed with violent pleasure.

MISRAJE You can plug into it.

HENKEL Exactly. Photography and theater have an immediacy. And in a funny way, the thriller novel sort of replicates that immediacy. It is like the cocaine of literature. There's a relief and a joy in that for me. For a long time, Max Pitegoff, my artistic collaborator and I were writing plays in Germany, partially in German, partially in English. And I was like, “These are for twelve people.” I wanted to find a format to write in that was more accessible, but still allowed me to exorcize the same questions I’d had when making theater. 

MISRAJE The social dynamics of the art world, especially from the perspective of industry, is so heavily gate kept—I’m curious how you’ve had to tweak the thriller in relation to such a specifically in-grouped context.

HENKEL I think a big problem is that the art world lends itself to such a unique bastion of extreme satire. It’s a total tragicomedy and it’s easy to make fun of it. But it never feels right because the pain is in the detail. You know, it's not in the big funny abstract painting with an insane price, It's the mechanics of the exchange of energy. That is what I think is rarely captured well. I'm really interested in the politics of labor; how works are sold and in turn how they're used to sell an idea of politics or a performance of identity. The art world always looks fake because what’s portrayed is not what it’s really about. But I wrote the book when people I knew were dropping out of the art world. There was a lot of complaining and melodrama at the moment, and my gut reaction was to sort of laugh, and be like, Cool, then do it. Nothing's holding you here. I stole a lot of their rhetoric for the book. I think it’s interesting how people working within the arts pretend like it's a cage that they're stuck in—when in reality they've decided to be there. And I think Esther, the main character, is caught in this thought trap, which is only exacerbated by her obsession with revenge, which disables her from moving forward.

MISRAJE I appreciate the gray morality of Scrap. There’s a nuance to each of the characters that feels very human, regardless of their social and class positioning. The relationship between Esther and Patrick especially stands out.

HENKEL I don't plan my books out in advance. Really, not at all. I’m always surprised by who my characters become throughout the writing process, so none of them end up representing one thing or another. There is never a moral agenda. With Esther, she was a character who reacts linearly, so every time she gets hit with something, she goes ten inches farther than she should each time, which mirrors the logic of true crime. It's invasive but I also think true crime has this propeller engine where they have to get to the bottom of something within the time-span of an episode. But violence is confusing. And those two things together create this type of narrative netting where people are constantly trying to cover violence with something that makes total sense, but it never makes total sense. With Esther, she has this desire for justice that’s really just a desire for a palatable shape. And that's not real.

MISRAJE Was Esther a character you channeled from within or without?

HENKEL I always have this feeling that there's a bar or like an annex in the nightclub in my brain where the characters sit and smoke cigarettes until I finish the story. It can be annoying and kind of disruptive to have them always there, especially with someone like Esther. She was a difficult character to live with in my head. It got quite claustrophobic. It's this thing where you satisfy them with an ending, and till that ending is set they're just blabbing at me all day long. So, I feel like most of my characters usually sort of get what they want. But It's not always the right thing.

MISRAJE It’s a monkey paw situation.

HENKEL Right. It just maybe costs something they weren't willing to pay, but they didn't know that when they made the request. I had this meltdown because I had written this Esther as someone who has nothing to lose which is arguably very difficult narratively speaking. But then I realized, Oh wait, that has to become her power. So, that enabled the ending.

MISRAJE Do you consider yourself a noir writer?

HENKEL It's so funny because I never would've decided for myself that this is what I’d be doing. ButI also really love committing to a form. That’s what I like about the theater we run here, because it’s a form. We could do pop-up Shakespeare in the park or whatever, but instead we have fifty red seats and a bunch of lights. When you commit to a form, you really have to sit inside of it, literally speaking. And that’s also what I am doing with writing. So yeah, I guess I do consider myself a noir writer. 

Tits Up: An Interview of Author Sarah Thornton

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Annie Sprinkle "Bosom Ballet" 1990-91, courtesy the artist

interview by Mieke Marple

From the auction house to the titty bar, the art fair to the witches’ retreat, Sarah Thornton has moved her ethnographic eye from the art world to the titty world—and we are all better for it. Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts explores what breasts mean to five different breast-experts. The result is an ambitious collage of uplifting sagas (also the original name for Thornton’s book before the publisher asked her to change it). Thornton and I met over Zoom to talk about some of these lived experiences, particularly her own—everything from what inspired her to write the book in the first place to how writing it changed her relationship to her own body. 

MIEKE MARPLE: How are you doing?

SARAH THORNTON: I’m excited. I worked hard on Tits Up and I care deeply about its content and mission. I’m keen on a broad readership. I don't want to just preach to the converted. Yes, it's a feminist book, but it’s also critical of the women's movement’s general disregard of breasts. While researching breasts from different grounded locations — a strip club, a human milk bank, an operating room, a bra design studio, and a pagan witches’ retreat in the redwoods — I realized that each of these social milieux raised issues of historic discomfort to mainstream feminism. The American women’s movement has generally not embraced sex workers, breastfeeding, or beautification, and definitely not plastic surgery. It has historically had a negative relationship to fashion and has been embarrassed by feminist spirituality. 

It feels good to grapple with an elemental body part. All humans have nipples and most of us have a relationship to breasts. But Tits Up is full of surprising information. I hope Tits Up is useful for conscious-raising.

MARPLE: You told me that Tits Up is the best thing you've ever written. How do you know that? Or when did you know that?

THORNTON: I love researching. Every time I write a book, it's like completing another PhD. This is my fourth book and it took me six years. During that time, I had the benefit of twenty-three student apprentices because I was a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. Their library research allowed me to be even more ambitious for the ethnographic part or primary research of the book. 

I also think I'm getting better as a writer. My voice is pretty distinct. It's mine. I'm not apologetic. So, it’s my best book because of the depth of the research and my greater facility at conveying insights in entertaining ways. 

MARPLE: When did you know that this was the book you had to write?

THORNTON: Well, um, I didn't initially know it was a book. I started off by writing an article called “A Brief History of My Boobs.” It then became a therapeutic preamble to a deeper investigation as well as a position statement and declaration of purpose. When you write about a body part, you need to be honest and clear to both your interviewees and your readers about where you're coming from. Then, I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I have bookshelves full of breast-related books, body books, and feminist books. Then, there were hundreds of academic articles, usually very siloed in terms of discipline. But there was not much written that joined it up together.

MARPLE: No holistic view.

THORNTON: Exactly. So, after reading everything I could get my hands on, I realized nobody had written the book that I would write. I realized there was very little about contemporary breasts, especially the in-person real world of living bodies. I've taught media studies, but living breathing experiences (rather than virtual ones) are what give me a buzz. I realized that nobody had done what I felt I could do. And I knew I could do it because I’d written Seven Days in the Art World. I understood early on that a kaleidoscopic perspective on breasts could be rendered as an engaging five days in the titty world.

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Chitra Ganesh "Black Vitruvian Tiger", courtesy the artist

MARPLE: How did you choose those five worlds? And what were some of the other ones you considered?

THORNTON: I started out by interviewing between fifty and seventy possible experts. I interviewed all sorts of people like ballet dancers, breast cancer survivors, gynecologists, feminists, all sorts. And what hit me over the head were five clusters of people who were saying things that I had not heard before — things that blew my mind.

MARPLE: Because they have been largely marginalized from mainstream feminism?

THORNTON: Yes, absolutely. They were the people who had the most interesting things to say about breasts. The number five was not a specific choice. It was just the number of worlds that came up as relevant to the story of breasts in America today. I didn't see another social world or boob environment that I needed to examine in the same way as these ones.

MARPLE: Is there any significance to the order of the worlds, starting with the strip club and ending with the witches’ retreat?

THORNTON: I moved from dominant perceptions of breasts to more obscure ones. The dominant view of breasts in America is that they are erotic playthings. I thought, okay, I'm going to start there, but I'm going to look at it from the sex professional's point of view. The women who make a living from breasts as erotic objects. The second prevailing association, because most women become mothers, is breastfeeding. Even women who don't breastfeed will have had the experience of their boobs get big when they’re pregnant as they prepare to breastfeed and their milk comes in. The most obscure niche culture is the nature-worshiping neo-pagans that came out of the hippie movement. So, the chapters move from perceptions of breasts that are mainstream through to a very small subculture, but the religions I touch on in that chapter are huge: Judaism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism. So, I intersperse the very specific with a pretty grand historical narrative. 

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Loie Hollowell "Milk Fountain," 2020-21, courtesy the artist

MARPLE: And at the witches’ retreat? Was it mostly older people?

THORNTON: Yes! The other trajectory is from young to old because age is super important for the life of our chests. The youngest interviewees are in chapter one, “Hardworking Tits.” Sex work skews young. Then, comes “Lifesaving Jugs,” and motherhood. Between postpartum and menopause, a massive number of breast surgeries happen. Chapter 3, “Treasured Chests,” discusses all the “Mommy Makeovers,” the lifts, trans surgeries, and the plastic surgeries that women have after cancer. The bra chapter, “Active Apexes,” named for the apparel industry term for nipples, is for all ages, but then “Holy Mammaries” focuses on the crones. So, yes, the lifecycle is part of the chapter sequence.

MARPLE: Interesting how the dominant view intersects with youth and the most obscure intersects with age, though that is where the most collective wisdom and grandest insights lay. Of course, that mirrors societal attitudes towards women and the devaluing of them as they get older. Still, I appreciate the youth-to-old-age life span in Tits Up. It gives the book this subtle, epic narrative quality.

THORNTON: Thank you. I aspire to epic. 

MARPLE: So, how did writing the book change you?

THORNTON: Oh, my god. Well, I feel much happier in my body. I actually feel transformed by the experience of researching and writing the book. All of my characters’ experiences and insights have enlightened me and uplifted me. I feel less stressed and shamed by my fake boobs and my aging. I still lament the loss of my original, natural breasts. But then, losing them led me to write a book that I'm really proud of, which I would never have written.

MARPLE: Why not?

THORNTON: I don't think I would have felt like I had the authority. In writing “A Brief History of My Boobs” which appears in the book’s introduction in an abbreviated form as “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder,” I was like, you know, the gals have chalked up quite a bit of experience. They’ve never done sex work, but they’ve understood from the inside a lot of important narratives – budding womanhood, sexual harassment, breastfeeding, cancer scares, amputation, and reconstruction. Then, I did all the reading, and interviewed over two hundred people, and did all of that on ethnographic on-site fieldwork. So, I'm not a doctor. I don't have the obvious credentials about “breasts,” but I have gathered, synthesized, and thought hard about many women’s perspectives. I know a hell of a lot about tits, jugs, chests, racks, and knockers. 

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photograph by Aya Brackett

I Hate Books for the Happy Few: An Interview of Love Me Tender Author Constance Debré

interview and photographs by Sammy Loren

Until Semiotext(e) published Love Me Tender, Constance Debré was unknown in the United States. Like most French novelists, Debré’s life and literary career happen in Paris, a city she’s called home since birth, a city that seems to have shaped her classic French distaste for many current American cultural exports and obsessions. And perhaps it’s that Parisian je ne sais quoi that helps explain, in part, Love Me Tender’s splashy reception among American literati. Few foreign novels get translated and even fewer receive glowing reviews in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The LA Review of Books. So why is this novel appealing to Americans? And what does its embrace say about US literature? 

Love Me Tender follows an unnamed narrator who abandons her bourgeois marriage and law job to become a writer. Along the way the protagonist loses custody of her young son after her spurned ex-husband weaponizes her newfound lesbianism against her. In a surreal literary twist, the ex-husband’s attorney convinces the courts that her collection of books by Genet, Bataille and de Sade prove her degeneracy and the embittered ex wins full custody. As the narrator’s legal appeals inch through the French courts, she writes, swims and takes many lovers, her months punctuated by awkward, chaperoned visits with her son at a state-run center once every fifteen days. Love Me Tender is a painful examination of motherhood, family and the lines an artist must draw between themself and the world. But it’s also a punky take on sex and freedom drawn from Debré’s own biography, though the novelist provocatively insists that the book is not ‘about’ her.

Reading the novel in LA during the waning days of 2022, I couldn’t help but see in it a rebuke of the current literary moment, one often critiqued as straight-jacketed by moral and social objectives. On the other hand Love Me Tender is deliciously French, the narrator unsentimental, blasé even about choosing literature over motherhood, responsibility, and the trappings of upper middle class life. 

Originally, Debré and I met at the LA launch of Love Me Tender in October, 2022. After inhaling the novel, I invited her to read at my reading series Casual Encountersz — I was curating one in Paris and Debré enthusiastically accepted. Though a health issue ultimately kept her from the event, we met the following afternoon at Chez Jeannette, a bistro in Strasbourg Saint Denis popular among Parisian artists, writers and glitterati. Debré, like the narrator in Love Me Tender, has a swimmer’s build and in person she’s warm and intellectual, kind of grand in her own way, gently tapping sugar crystals into an espresso, often palming her buzzed head of hair. Despite the lousy January weather, we sit outside, Debré across from me with her back to the street, just beyond Chez Jeannette’s awning. Though it drizzles throughout our conversation, Debré seems indifferent to the rain.

SAMMY LOREN: I really loved the book and found it very refreshing. No one is writing books like this in the US right now and I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the state of American literature.

CONSTANCE DEBRE: I'm gonna answer, but why do you have this feeling? 

LOREN: Well, I read a lot of contemporary literature, I'm following it. Many have MFAs and are focusing on identity. 

DEBRE: Something I hate, of course. There are many things I hate in literature. I hate books for the happy few. I really hate that. I hate psychology in literature. I hate sociology in books. I'm really fed up with trauma. I don't believe in identity. But I believe in the human condition, which is something we don't know what it is, but it's being crossed by many emotions and hidden feelings, this thing that drives a path through us. 

LOREN: Why don't you believe in identity? Can a belief in identity and the human condition not coexist at the same time?

DEBRE: I mean I don’t even know what people mean when they talk about identity. I feel things. I think things. I’m doing things. That’s how I would describe being a human being. I don't know how those external things people are referring to define our or their identities, or what that has to do with life as we really live it. I am sorry, but I really don't care about being a woman, or white, or French: it's there somewhere but so, so far away from what's really happening in my life, and of what interests me in my life or others. I read Dostoievsky and his characters are Russians, men who lived 150 years ago under the Tsars and yet I am, for instance, Ivan Karamazov more than myself. I am also Swann, Ishmael, etc. We are all the possible identities because identity is nothing, at the level which interests me. I can be Descartes, Blaise, Pascal. That is why I don’t have any problem identifying with people who have nothing to do with me. That’s what literature is all about, that we can talk to each other, even the dead with the living because we have something in common: the human condition, and the language to try to shape it. Identities and categories are useful, although always simplistic and vague, for sociology or marketing: not in art or literature, I think. Art or literature is about one topic: being, which means the one and the whole, the singularity and humanity, it's almost mathematical.

LOREN: Your writing style is very clean and direct. Which writers — French or American — influenced that stylistic choice and why is it important for this book to employ such simplicity of language?

DEBRE: Thank you for speaking of stylistic choice. Because it is. I used to be a lawyer and I loved law school. At some point I even almost became a law professor. And French law is very specific and different from US law. It's all based on written law — not case law — and on very specific language which is precise, clear, and effective. And I think — as many writers used to do — that it's the most beautiful style. I think the most beautiful thing about literature is the fact that it's so simple. One thing everyone has is language. I love the simplicity of language, which can be understood by everyone. The aim is not to prove that you have read Spinoza or that you go to museums or art shows. That’s one of the reasons my sentences are very short. My vocabulary is very simple. I decided to write like that because I wanted my book to be very direct. And — regarding French law or my stylistic choice — it's also related to a political conception: it has to be immediately understood and more, felt by anyone. It has to work, and to work on everybody possibly, and not only on a few super educated people. I hate that boring French bourgeois tendency. A good book is about what all of us have in common, what makes us human, not about our little singularities and snobisms. I am influenced by a pair of jeans, William Eggleston’s photography, or Terry Richardson’s or Tillmans’, by music from Bach to rock ‘n’ roll to rap, by the beauty and simplicity of American English: by our modernity. From all of that I make my style. Writing about things Dostoievsky and Shakespeare and Conrad and Hugo and those kinds of writers have written about. I don’t read a lot of contemporary literature, I have to confess. 

LOREN: I'm curious how you describe Love Me Tender. Is it a memoir? Fiction? A mix of both? 

DEBRE: It's a novel. Everything is true. The main character is made out of me. And the events are representations of true events. But it's not at all a memoir. It's not about me. The difference is that there is a form. I mean, you can take a chair or me or anything, but the thing is to find a form that has a meaning. And the meaning is not the meaning which is written, it's the meaning that helps us to live. 

LOREN: What are your thoughts on autofiction? Do you see a distinction between fiction and autofiction? 

DEBRE: Distinction? It depends what you do about it. Because it could be a memoir, for instance, or it could be something completely different. What is very interesting is the first person and I have been very interested in this question. The moment you choose to write in the first person you experience something that has no evidence. You don't know what it is. So, that's exactly the evidence that identity is a narrative. It's not something true. So this, I, what is I? Okay, I am having a coffee. I can say that. What does it mean? What is this I? When you try to write in the first person, you have to decide what you're gonna put in this I. I mean, I'm not interested at all about telling my own story, or in this literature of talking about all the little dramas of personal life and of childhood, I'm just fed up with it to tell you the truth. 

LOREN: You spoke about writing in the first person and how this proves that identity is 'narrative.' I wonder if you can expand on this concept. 

DEBRE: The first person is great in literature. It works instantaneously. Think of “Call me Ishmael” or “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure” [“For a long time I used to go to bed early”],which are the opening sentences of Moby-Dick and À la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrances of Things Past]. We identify immediately with a book’s first person, and we follow the voice, the character. This is something almost magical. The character who says I has a strength no other has: he’s the one telling the story. And this power is what we readers are looking for when we open a book. And yes, if identity exists, it is moving, and up to us, it's a narrative and not an origin, it’s the way you tell stories and the way you walk, not where you come from. It is the form we give to everything. And this is where freedom lies, in the form we chose. 

LOREN: Reading the book, I kept thinking of punk music for some reason, like, it had a punky spirit. Do you listen to music when you write?

DEBRE: A little, yeah. I mean I'm not, not listening to music, but like anyone living there's music, movies, there's this culture around me: punk music, rock music, rap music, classical music. But it's another thing I think we have in music and a little bit in movies, but more in music, much more than in books: transgression. Literature in some ways can be much more conventional these days than music.

LOREN: What do you think is driving that? Why do you think literature is more conventional these days than other art forms?

DEBRE: Oh my goodness, I don't know, but listen, there are many reasons. Everyone is very cautious now, publishers and writers as well, because they're afraid of being canceled.

LOREN: Do you feel like that's a big fear in France?

DEBRE: Less than in the US, but yes. For instance, that's why I didn’t want to present a main character that would have been too easily likable. She’s a mother and the story with the son is very sad and unfair. And she's a lesbian, so it would have been very easy to represent her as a victim. I didn't want that. That’s why I emphasize that the character is not complaining, she's not explaining anything. And I wanted her to be a lesbian but not in a bourgeois way and for many lesbians that’s not a ‘good’ way to be a lesbian. I wanted there to be some discomfort. That's the trick when you write in the first person and the main character is made out of yourself: the moral obligation is to draw a character, which is not completely likable.

LOREN: Especially when the writing has many parallels to one's own life. Like, you could paint the character as the most sympathetic version of itself. Sort of like, everybody be nice to me and like me, you know? 

DEBRE: Yeah, writing about me is fine, okay, I'm gonna gonna write about me, but it's not me. But I do have, I mean, I have the obligation to be a bit scary too. And, if I want to represent a lesbian in these times where actually it's very acceptable to be one, to be gay, I mean, nowadays in our countries, it's, I'm sorry, it's extremely easy and it's almost trendy. But if being gay is being a ‘good gay,’ I want to represent a lesbian who is not ‘good,’ who doesn’t want to have one partner, that’s more fun. 

LOREN: Maybe the most interesting part of Love Me Tender to me was where you write about what you basically just said, which is when the protagonist concludes that if she had left her husband only to keep practicing law and to get together with a similar upper class woman and was a conventional bourgeois lesbian, it wouldn’t have meant anything. Why is this radicalism central to the character’s project? 

DEBRE: Yeah, I think the more radical thing is refusing money to dictate her choices, to write whatever the price is, even if it means to have no money and then lose her son. To do what she wants to do.

LOREN: Did you notice any differences between the way the book was received in France and in the US? I'm curious about how the reception has been different, like how do audiences see the book for you?

DEBRE: I'm very happy with the American reception because I think in France, well, it depends, but some people were a bit more interested in me. They thought it was about me telling a story about myself. No, it's great, this girl, she used to be a lawyer, and then she did everything to become a writer and she cut her hair. And this is not important at all. But in the US I think the radicality has been seen through the language itself.  

LOREN: Why was it important for you that the protagonist not be perceived as a victim in the novel?

DEBRE: Because I don’t believe in a world of victims and the guilty. I don’t believe in innocence and am not interested in it. We are all victims and we’re all guilty. We are sinners and we are pure as the newborn. It is the human condition. Moreover, we are all the innocence and the guilt of one another. It is something complex but absolutely certain. This is much more interesting and beautiful than a world of victims and oppressors, which is a boring and dangerous lie.

Thought Girl Winter: An Interview Of Nada Alic

interview by Annabel Graham
portraits by Paige Strabala

I first met Nada Alic in the fall of 2019, in New York, at a literary reading held at the Nolita headquarters of a women’s sleepwear brand. The small storefront was packed, and readers perched on the edge of a gigantic feather bed in the center of the room. Most of the guests were there to see a certain Instagram poet with an especially rabid fan base—I witnessed actual tears of joy when said poet opened her mouth—but it was Alic who captured my attention. Radiating her trademark blend of confidence, self-deprecation, and deadpan humor, she read from a short story in progress. In it, an anxious, painfully cerebral young woman questions “this whole business of being alive,” pursues an obsessive friendship with a woman named Mona, and considers the pros and cons of lightly grazing her hand across a stranger’s penis. At a cocktail party with her husband’s business associates, Alic’s narrator muses: “They all looked so vulnerable, so up for grabs; concealed only by a thin layer of fabric. I imagined them as windchimes waiting to be struck. The impulse wasn’t sexual, it was destructive. I just stood there, not touching anyone’s penis, quietly frightened by who I was and what I was capable of.” Suffice it to say that I was riveted.

Alic and I struck up a conversation after the reading, exchanged email addresses, and made loose plans to get together for a coffee next time I was in Los Angeles, where she lives. What followed almost immediately was a global pandemic, a government-imposed lockdown, and a 19th-century sort of pen-pal correspondence conducted over the entire year of 2020. Alic’s emails are just as surprising and enjoyable as her short fiction—witty, dark, vulnerable, sharp-edged; weird in all the best ways. The story she read that night in New York (featuring the penis-windchime simile that’s eternally burned into my brain) is now entitled “My New Life”—this past year, it was published in the literary journal No Tokens, where I serve as fiction editor. You can read it here.

2021 was a landmark year for Alic—she married her partner (Ryan Hahn, of the indie band Local Natives), and sold her short story collection, Bad Thoughts, to Knopf, in a two-book deal (her second book, a novel, is slated for release in 2023). The title Bad Thoughts stems from the eponymous Instagram series Alic created in 2020 during quarantine, wherein she posted bimonthly lists of Tweet-like aphorisms that were at once wildly humorous, razor-sharp, and deeply relatable. The stories in the collection—which will be published in July 2022—are brash and heady, breaking established rules of narrative and form. Like the Instagram series, they’re also delightfully funny. In one, the spirit of an unborn child hovers over the bodies of its future parents, willing them to copulate and bring it into embodied existence. In another, a woman’s musician boyfriend goes on tour, leaving her alone in their home for the first time ever; she proceeds to question all of her life choices and tumble down a frighteningly familiar Internet rabbit hole; chaos and body dysmorphia ensue. Alic is well-versed in the awkward, writing into our most neurotic, shameful habits and thought patterns with an unparalleled acuity.

For Autre, I sat down with Alic in her Mount Washington living room to talk about the holiness of humor, becoming an artist with no formal training, and the archetype of the eternal child-god. We’re real-life friends now—a true privilege!—but sometimes I miss our extremely long emails.  

ANNABEL GRAHAM: What was your path to becoming a writer?

NADA ALIC: I came up in the 2008ish blogging era; a famously naïve and earnest era of the internet that had yet to be colonized by brands and pathological cynicism. I wrote about music, mostly. I loved music in such a pure and unselfconscious way. I had no ambition to become a writer; I just wanted to support my friends, go to shows, be in that world. Writing was my way in. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started writing fiction. I would send short stories to my friend Andrea [Nakhla, who is a painter and illustrator], and she would visually interpret them with paintings and drawings, and we made zines together, for fun. Making zines feels incredibly wholesome and old-timey now—I recently had the humbling experience of explaining what a zine was to a 22-year-old. I continued writing short stories from then on, but I never thought of myself as a Writer, and didn’t until about five minutes ago. This was due to my core wound of not having an MFA and never once having lived in New York. I tried compensating for this by reading Twitter, submitting to literary mags, and attending a writing workshop in abandoned strip mall in North Hollywood. Each experience was like passing a test, and I’d emerge with a tiny crumb of belief in myself. 

The paradigm shift towards becoming a writer was very slow; it was largely internal, but also required some external factors to align: getting an artist visa, saving up money, quitting my job, getting my own health insurance, finding freelance work to support me through the transition. Just a lot of boring, admin stuff. I felt like I had so much to prove. I still do. But the benefit of feeling like an outsider in the literary world is that it motivated me to work really hard. I felt like there was so much I didn’t know, so I had to seriously commit to the work and forge my own path in the absence of any formal infrastructure or connections or community.

GRAHAM: Did you read a lot as a kid? 

ALIC: I enjoyed reading as a kid, but I didn’t grow up in a super intellectual environment. My parents were working class Croatian immigrants; they didn’t have the time for literature and art. That’s not to say they weren’t smart; they were and are far more competent than me in almost every way; they can build a house from scratch, hunt and prepare meat, keep children alive, etc. They could easily survive the apocalypse, whereas I will die within hours of losing my contacts. What they did give me was lots of free time to play, imagine, dance, terrorize my sister, etc. I didn’t start reading for pleasure until my early twenties; mostly just books I’d find in thrift stores. I remember performatively reading guys like Steinbeck, Bukowski and David Foster Wallace because pretentious boys in beanies kept referencing them. It wasn’t until I discovered contemporary fiction writers like Sheila Heti and Tao Lin that I realized what writing could be. Those writers made writing feel accessible and real and exciting to me.     

GRAHAM: How are you finding the process of working on a novel? What are you encountering that’s more or less challenging than writing short stories?

ALIC: The story for the novel came to me fully-formed. I felt like I had to pay attention to it, because none of my short stories had come out that way. Writing the story collection was like feeling my way around in the dark. In a lot of ways, I was learning how to write through the process of writing the collection. I didn’t really have a plan or a vision other than “keep going” and “don’t be bad.” My biggest challenge has been sustaining the potency of the short story within a longer form. I don’t want to lose that; I still want every moment to feel funny and alive.

GRAHAM: How do ideas for stories usually come to you? Do you start with a particular element? An image, question, atmosphere, or character?

ALIC: I keep a notes document for random thoughts, ideas, dreams, etc. Often it’ll be about a humiliating or painful encounter that I’ve either observed or experienced, and I’ll want to diffuse it of its power over me. Then I’ll take that idea and stretch it out beyond its limits into absurdity. Like with “The Intruder,” for example, that came from a real experience I had mistaking a friend’s boyfriend for an intruder breaking into my apartment. I was really tired and overworked and somehow forgot I had [house]guests. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a dark shadowy figure and panicked. I basically jumped out of bed and tried to defend myself before realizing what was happening. It was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. In the story, the protagonist doubles down on her paranoia and submits to the fantasy that someone really is out there, watching her, waiting. Submitting to her delusions paradoxically gives her some semblance of control. Most of my characters suffer from some form of delusional thinking, and there’s a lot of humor in that. Humor is a useful device for confronting and overcoming shame, which is my life’s purpose.   

GRAHAM: What’s your writing process like? Do you have any routines?

ALIC: I sort of cringe when people talk about their process as if they’re the ultimate authority on it. I remember early on, after I quit my job and committed myself to writing full time, I read a lot about what other people had to say about their creative processes and it really affected me. It just set me up to fail. It was a lot of like, “I wake up at 5am and write till noon, then I eat a cracker and stretch and keep writing till dinner…” I’m very suspicious of that kind of self-mythologizing. Most people who say they write every day are full of shit. Even if they do, who cares? Keep it to yourself! Stop bullying us! Process has very little to do with good art. Reading about how prolific a writer is has never once compelled me to write. I don’t know, maybe it helps other people? 

I still don’t really have a routine. I make space for solitude and work every day, but sometimes life gets in the way and I try to forgive myself. The hardest thing for me was unlearning a lot of capitalist programming that had been burned into my brain from years of working in the corporate world. I had to learn to be okay with “wasting time” and letting go of my obsession with productivity. I’m very slow and inconsistent, but I also have this very dogged, Slavic commitment to the work in a bigger, cosmic sense. I feel like larger forces are at work, guiding me. Or haunting me, actually. I can’t really explain it.  

GRAHAM: You write about the Internet a lot, and you started an Instagram series entitled Bad Thoughts. What’s your relationship to the Internet like?

ALIC: The internet is so seductive and shiny and infinite, so I have to take mini-breaks or block certain sites for a while in order to spiritually recalibrate. Sometimes I really do confuse it for reality and forget that I’m located in space and time, contained inside a body, etc. That’s when I need to just get up and pee and go for a little human walk outside, feel my blood move. 

For Bad Thoughts (the Instagram series), I just had a lot of fear and I wanted to get over myself. When you’re working on something in private for a long time, it can start to feel too precious. I needed to break the spell and stop overthinking it. I just started sharing random thoughts that came to me in a quick and unpolished way. I knew I was going to feel embarrassed, but that was the point. I comforted myself by thinking, whatever, this isn’t my real work. But once I started doing it, it was like this portal opened up in my mind and ideas started pouring in. Not to be a witch or whatever, but I do feel like I was tapping into a spiritual plane through my subconscious mind. It was an interesting experiment. But like with anything, once I started taking it too seriously, or cared too much about what people thought, I knew I had to stop because I didn’t want it to become another “thing” that I did. The ego will identify with anything, even if that thing is meant to set you free. It’s like what Ram Dass says: “all methods are traps.” I might do it again when I’m a little more enlightened, who knows. 

GRAHAM: What do you like, or not like, about living in Los Angeles as a writer and artist?

ALIC: I worked really hard to be able to move to LA and stay here, so I have this immigrant humility and gratitude that colors my entire experience of being here. Even my worst days offer this consolation of, “at least I’m in Los Angeles.” When you grow up in Canada, America is this mythic place that only celebrities and millionaires can move to. You’d take a day trip to Niagara Falls and be like, wow, I’m in America. It’s been eight years and I’m still walking around like, wow, I’m in America! So cool! Figuring out how to live here on my own gave me the confidence to pursue bigger things.

Most of my friends [here] are musicians and visual artists, and being surrounded by them helped accelerate my own creative ambitions. There was a safety to not being in the [center of the] literary world, too. I didn’t know any other writers, so I could just do my own thing. I had the freedom to experiment [with writing] without the pressure of turning it into a career. Writing professionally hadn’t even occurred to me; I was still driving three hours a day to and from my shitty office job and writing on the weekends. I think if I lived in New York, I would have been too affected by the competitive energy. Whenever I’m there I feel exhausted and out of place and I don’t know what anyone is talking about. I need to go home and sit in a dark room alone for a while to recover.

GRAHAM: Since the pandemic, my reading habits have changed so much—I have a much shorter attention span and much less patience, and I won’t stick with something for more than about fifty pages if I don’t find it compelling. I’ve found it a bit more difficult during this time to find books that grip me throughout, but yours did. It is literary and cerebral, but it’s also incredibly fun, and funny, and uplifting, which feels like the best kind of medicine right now.

ALIC: Thank you so much. I try not to ever take myself too seriously, and I knew I wanted to write something light and fun and enjoyable. A lot of people conflate Serious Art with trauma and darkness, and there is a lot of great art that emerges from pain, but humor and silliness feel just as holy to me. Life can be so brutal, and humor can really soften the blow. I can see how it can be a defense mechanism too—my inability to be purely earnest without adding a little wink to everything. I admire people who have to courage to write honestly about their lives. I know some people say art is not entertainment, but I really tried to entertain. I really considered the reader’s experience, and I wanted it to be joyful.    

GRAHAM: Would you say there’s an idea or theme that’s emerged in your work, or something you keep circling around?

ALIC: Broadly speaking, Bad Thoughts deals with women who are sort of stagnating at the precipice of a threshold, stuck in their own thoughts, feeling estranged from themselves and the world. I recently read this book called Puer Aeternus (Latin for “eternal child-god) by the Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz, who coined the term “Peter Pan Syndrome.” She mostly writes about men, but briefly mentions the female version of this archetype, which is called a “Puella.” These women resist crossing over various thresholds to adulthood, namely the more heteronormative milestones of marriage and motherhood. This represents a bigger resistance to confronting their own mortality. Especially with motherhood, which is the ultimate death for a Puella. As much as it is expansive and generative, it reduces a woman to her earthbound body. Her body undergoes a transformation, and she emerges changed. She becomes a new person with a new life. But who will she become? What is that life? I’m not making any moral judgements for or against, I’m more exploring the anxiety that comes with this human experience. 

That anxiety has been amplified by the fact that we now conduct a large part of our lives online, on screens—it allows for this more disembodied experience of reality. We can happily live in the domain of the mind and of our online personas. There are many valid reasons for feeling stunted, or even disenchanted with the prospect of “growing up.” There’s a pervasive nihilism and hopelessness [when it comes to thinking about] the future; [sometimes even] an inability to imagine a future. I think a lot of people assume that only men grapple with [this], and women are just waiting around for them to get their shit together and give them a baby—but women struggle, too. Taking anything from the realm of the imagination or spirit into the material world is scary and limiting—like putting out a book. It’s a kind of baby. I can’t control what will become of it, and maybe that’ll be good for me. 

Getting Off: Brad Phillips Interviews Author Erica Garza About Her Journey Through Sex & Porn Addiction

In the following interview, Brad Phillips speaks to author, Erica Garza about their mutual experience with sex and porn addiction. In Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, Garza challenges the stereotype that sexual addiction is within a man’s nature, and for a woman, the result of sexual trauma. Recounting a life of “revolting” fantasies both imagined and realized, she lays out a lifetime of orgasmic pressure begging to be released, and courageously retraces her road to recovery. Throughout the conversation, Phillips and Garza share their experiences of responding to fans who look to them for guidance, the benefits of being triggered, and the sexual taboos that continue to plague our sense of moral authority. 

BRAD PHILLIPS: I wanted first to say how happy I felt to discover your book. Having written about sex addiction myself, it felt valuable to read about a woman’s experience with participating and recovering from the same addiction. Particularly in that you wrote about it without nostalgia or redemption. What motivated you to write the book? Was there a sense that this was something you wrote in an attempt to process your experiences, or was it more of a desire to share with other people; make them feel less alone?

ERICA GARZA: It was a bit of both. I've always turned to writing as a source of comfort—a way to get troubling thoughts and memories out of my head and body, and onto the page. When I started writing about sex addiction, I did so in an essay online for Salon. I'd already been experimenting with telling my story in therapy and 12-step, but this was a more public telling. The response I received was overwhelming. So many people reached out and thanked me, and they were from all walks of life. I felt then that I could serve others by continuing to write about this. We aren't often presented the opportunity to help a wide range of people, and this was my chance.  

PHILLIPS: Sometimes there's trouble in writing about personal subjects that are taboo, in that readers develop projections about you, and a sense of attachment. Have you had any response from people who felt like they were connected to you in a way that felt creepy? I also was curious if men reached out to you, ignoring the aspects of shame and recovery you write about, and simply saw you as someone “into sex,” and approached you that way. Has that happened?

GARZA: Several men (and a few women) have reached out to me because they see me as someone “into sex.” This ranges from unsolicited dick pics, to requests to meet up, to full-blown erotic stories they want me to read. I usually block them immediately, or if I have the energy, I tell them they’ve crossed a boundary and we have a discussion. But I receive more messages from people looking for help because they’re dealing with sex/porn addiction. I always try to acknowledge and address these messages because I know how isolating addiction can be. I usually direct them to 12-step meetings because they can offer connection and community, but sometimes this isn’t enough for them. Some people reach out to me as if I’m a therapist, as if I have the magic solution to their pain, and this can feel overwhelming. I am not a counselor. I’m just a person who shared my story as honestly as I could. They have access to this honesty too. The best I can do for those who put me on this pedestal is to bring myself down to eye level. To remind them that I’m just as vulnerable as they are. The biggest difference is that I’ve come out of the shadows—maybe they should too.

PHILLIPS: It’s interesting and disappointing that people might read your book and completely miss all the shame and intense pain you discuss; things which go hand-in-hand with addiction. You mention other people coming out of the shadows. I think that there are certain people who find the shadows themselves sexual. I feel like on some level there would be very little new information to discover about men coming out of the shadows, which again is why I think your book is important. You’ve done mainstream press, and mentioned to me that you were told there were certain words you couldn’t use, or certain parts of the book better left not discussed, because they could ‘trigger’ someone. How do you feel about this climate, where we’re told we need to prevent triggering strangers? 

GARZA: I tend to disagree with the sentiment that there’d be nothing new to discover by men coming out of the shadows. I think the act of telling can help the addict discover a world of new information about who they are or what they want. And other people can be positively affected by hearing these confessions, because they too can confess without fear of judgment or criticism. As far as people being triggered by stories of addiction and sexual language, I’m sick of it. It reeks of Puritanism. We can watch zombies eat off people’s faces on prime-time television but we can’t see breasts. What does that tell us about what we fear as a culture? Our own animalistic primal nature? Our complicated desires? Our grip on control? When I’m triggered, instead of acting out or shutting down, I become curious. Why am I being triggered? What is being reflected to me? By asking questions like these, I learn more about myself.

PHILLIPS: Censorship and the aversion to natural female bodies on Instagram is insane to me. Curious is a good word my therapist uses, it helps take the shame out of self-reflection. I think the complication of desire can feel scary to express because really, we’ve never seen it done. When you say animalistic, do you think it’s elemental to our fear of expressing all the ways we’re still animals? 

GARZA: Maybe being reminded of our bodily functions and the natural impulses we share with animals only reminds us of the other most natural physical experience we fear most—death. If we stick with our intellect, we can form elevated ideas about what’s right or wrong, and we can let religion and the media tell us how to desire and how to express that desire in the same way that religion and media tells us that we don’t have to die. But I think all of that is a distraction from being present in our mortal bodies, accepting and indulging our natural impulses.

PHILLIPS: Having once been close to death I’m no longer afraid of it. That hasn’t helped in managing my daily unease though. I recently read, for a radio show, the entire list of paraphilias from the DSM-5. What shocked me was that the only two paraphilias classified as mental illnesses were sadism and masochism. I’ve seen it be particularly shaming for masochists, especially women, to be told that what they like in bed makes them ‘wrong’ in multiple ways. There is a lot of very quiet research around the idea pedophilia is an innate sexual preference in the same way that homosexuality is. The recidivism rate for pedophiles offenders is above 99 percent. But these are the pedophiles that offend. There are far more that don’t, and by default are repressed. Sympathy for the pedophile isn’t something people want to get behind. Maybe you could tell me how you think these more ‘extreme’ sexual predilections could be managed, or re-evaluated.

GARZA: I think the fear of things like child sex dolls and cartoons for pedophiles mirrors the fear that some have about tolerance to porn, not just the most extreme kind. If you see images repeatedly, those images might lose their charge and so you’ll need more extreme images to feel something again. Pedophilia is one of those subjects that upsets people because the trauma can be devastating and I understand why people shy away from the subject because they are trying to prevent any more harm being inflicted upon those who’ve suffered. They want, justifiably, compassion to be directed to the victims. But I do think that there is value in trying to understand the pedophile’s motives, by conducting more research, and by including them in the discussion. As difficult as it may be to hear their stories and understand the why of what they do, the better equipped we are to prevent future incidents of harm. I think when something has been deemed socially unacceptable and there’s so much fear around the thing that we won’t even talk about it, then it’s a good indication that we MUST talk about it. Silence eventually implodes and the aftermath is rarely pretty.

PHILLIPS: Long ago Susan Sontag predicted ‘image fatigue,’ which she related to the Vietnam War photographs being relayed back to American viewers, and how they would eventually lose their impact. That same thinking can definitely be extended to pornography and the absolute nadir it exists at in 2019. I agree with you and have tried myself to address the idea that if things are uncomfortable or difficult to talk about, then it does mean we should. There is difficulty in seeing both the victim of a crime and the perpetrator as two separate people involved in a scenario from which information could be gleaned.     

Erica Garza’s book, Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, published by Simon and Schuster, is available through Amazon, Google Play Books, Barnes & Noble, and likely your local bookstore.

Follow Erica via Twitter and Instagram - @ericadgarza