I interviewed Acker at her basement flat at 14 Duncan Terrace in Islington, near the Regent’s Canal. She was very welcoming and hospitable, keen to talk despite being very weak. She told me she was ill because she had been poisoned with parasites from the canal; her Evian bottle had fallen in, and her lover Charles Shaar Murray had retrieved it. Our conversation took place in September shortly before she returned to the States. She died in November.
BODDY: In an interview published after you lived in London in the 1980s, you said that you felt both the lack of a literary underground in Britain and misunderstood by British press. Can you say more about that, especially now that you’re living here again? Is this still true?
ACKER: I don’t think you have an underground here. By underground I don’t mean young writers who aren’t known yet. What I mean is a recognizable alternative to what we call commercial literature, that is really as public as anything else. And no, I don’t think you have that.
BODDY: You missed it?
ACKER: It’s changed here, so now I’m talking about how I felt back then. I felt that it was easier for a writer to get published here, especially for a writer who was slightly, or more than slightly, unconventional. But you couldn’t go too far because there was no underground. William Burroughs would have never survived here, and certainly wasn’t published here until he was famous enough. In the States there is a true underground, in which people like Burroughs, of course, are published. It was both good and bad. In one way, it was easier for writers here, and in another way it was harder, because you had to stay somewhat within the norm.
BODDY: So you stood out.
ACKER: Well, I was American. It’s very different. And I was brought over with a big bang. Sonny Mehta, who was head of Picador at the time, did a number, and for whatever reason things caught on. They had never seen—“they,” the English—had never seen anything like it, but I don’t think that there was ever any sense of where I came from. I was seen as a loner. There was more of a cult around my image, around my personality, than there was interest in my writing. And certainly there was no interest in where the writing fitted in in any history of writing. The sectors of the American underground that I come from are fairly well known in most countries—most people know who the Black Mountain poets are, or the art scene. Process writing would mean something. They just don’t mean very much here.
BODDY: Why do you think that is?
ACKER: I don’t know. This is just a guess: there is a position that literature has in English society that really has to do with properness, with class. One speaks properly: whatever the subject matter, the elegance and the proper use of irony shows that one fits properly, one upholds the class structure. There is something different with the Irvine Welsh thing…but then I wonder. The Scottish writers are closer to American writers—like James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. So there are ties. There is a certain network. There are very few writers here [in England]—Ballard, but that’s very peculiar, Iain Sinclair—who’re very well known to the American scene—and some poets.
BODDY: So how did you fit in?
ACKER: I don’t think I did. I was seen as the oddball wild woman. So I was fitted in to places that said, “We like wild women.” To my mind I was in a little cage in the zoo that instead of “monkey,” said “female American radical.” So whenever they wanted the female American radical to comment on anything, to make a token appearance, they’d pull me out of the cage and give me some money. It was quite lucrative, I must say.
BODDY: How have things changed now?
ACKER: England on the whole has got very American, and I think the publishing industry has changed a great deal. When they consider now if they’ll take a book, trendiness is the name of the game. I’m not sure it’s better to tell you the truth. On the one hand, I like the way Irvine Welsh and friends have gone against proper language. On the other hand, there’s a kind of interest in surface spark, surface lightning, and little interest in anything else. It’s very conservative in a way. I think literature is deeply about lineage, and there is nothing to do with lineage here. Basically it’s realist writing. Okay, so it’s grungy realist writing and it talks about toilets or dope.
BODDY: In the Nelson Algren tradition?
ACKER: Well, I take Algren to be not just a realist. I love Algren. Next to Faulkner, he’s my favorite.
BODDY: In In Memoriam you speak of Faulkner as “the American writer.” What is it about Faulkner that makes him “the American”?
ACKER: First of all, there weren’t any novelists around then who weren’t just realists. The way I see it is that it starts off with Hawthorne and Melville—you have Cooper on one side, the realist telling fairy tales (realism has always looked like fairy tales, even Dickens). For me, the American novel starts off with Hawthorne, Melville, Poe—and it’s not a novel, it’s a reaction to the novel, it’s a romance. The novel, as Roland Barthes would say, is deeply about bourgeois life. Hawthorne and Melville and Poe are revolutionaries in lots of ways. So you have the novel in America starting off being radical, not being real. Just in literary terms, the fight is against realism. Moby Dick is not a realist novel, and Pierre just makes fun of the whole idea—it’s the first genre-fuck novel. But then you don’t really have the tradition continuing. You go through a lot of radical writing that is mainly poetry. And nobody is that interesting until Faulkner, who just shines. He does something interesting—he does a novel that is both realist and radical. He keeps narrative, and yet it’s absolutely radical. What I take to be radical is that interest in America in something called guts—a heart. What does Poe say? That if you wrote the truth of the heart you’d set the whole world on fire. It’s like fuck you, the rules, that’s what you do. That’s what Faulkner did. Algren’s like that for me, but I can’t think of anyone else.
BODDY: What about Stein?
ACKER: I don’t think of her as a novelist.
BODDY: What about The Making of Americans?
ACKER: Well, you definitely get the experimental novel. And you have Djuna Barnes—Nightwood is totally radical.
BODDY: Lots of people have acknowledged your own radical influence.
ACKER: Oh yes, and the academic industry on me is getting fairly large.
BODDY: What do think you’ve given other writers? Do you notice that influence?
ACKER: I think I’ve freed other writers. I think it’s different with men and women. But I broke rules. I said you’ve just got to write however you want to write. What’s said to me most often is that people felt freed by my writing to do what they want to do rather than what they were told to do. Here I’m guessing, but I think for women, there’s this real empowerment. Coming out of sixties and seventies feminism, women so felt that they had to write in certain ways, that they couldn’t talk about certain things, have certain attitudes. I think I gave a lot of women the freedom to say I can still be strong and yet I can talk about this. I can see the influence most strongly with women. Dennis Cooper is another. We are about the only writers of our generations who crossed over—who didn’t compromise at all, but crossed over to some extent.
BODDY: Your recent work seems more interested in the idea of its audience than perhaps you used to be. Is that fair?
ACKER: I’m more interested in narrative—that’s for sure. Being ill, having the cancer, has changed a great deal for me. So I’m rethinking everything yet again. In some ways, it’s just a continuation of my work. The cancer wasn’t devastating; it was more like a fabulous school which I went to, where I learned a lot. I don’t know how all that is going to churn out.
BODDY: You’ve always rejected the idea of writing as self-expression.
ACKER: I’ve certainly said that. On the other hand, I’ve always felt that you have to write what you have to write. I don’t have an idea of a reader out there, in my best moments. That’s certainly true of what I’m writing right now. I write what I have to write. And then there are the moments—because you can’t do that every day—when you’re doing your technique stuff, theory. But you just have to do what’s coming through you. In that way, I’m close to Robert Duncan, who talked a lot about inspiration and the muse. I do a lot of drafts, and I certainly think of the reader towards the final drafts. I make my money still by performing, and I can’t afford to lose audiences. So I can’t afford to have too many chapters in a book that I can’t read aloud.
BODDY: What do you do in that revision?
ACKER: I first of all make it clear, whatever the intent is. They may or may not be interested but at least they can get it. This will be about this problem and you will all get it. There is a certain clarity that is necessary, even in the most experimental of texts. I didn’t think this when I was younger, but now I think there is a kind of pacing. You can’t go too fast for a reader. You can’t have too many characters, or people won’t be sure who the characters are. Technical stuff.
BODDY: What do you mean by pacing? You’ve spoken before of breath.
ACKER: I read all my texts out loud as a final draft. In terms of breath, I mean the same thing that poets mean. I was trained by poets, not by novelists.
BODDY: The idea of the line seems central to poetry.
ACKER: With me too.
BODDY: How does that work in prose?
ACKER: Let me get a copy of Pussy and I’ll show you. [She reads the beginning of the abortion sequence on page 79.] You see how the rhythm works. I hear the very simple rhythm. It goes for the jokes. It’s a very straightward, limpid rhythm that will close up at the moment you want to close the meaning. But it won’t do so obtrusively. I can see the rhythm is almost transparent. Whereas something like “Antigone’s Diary”…[She reads the beginning of that section on page 163.] So it’s that long sentence which just gets the anger out. That to me is a very oral rhythm, where you get the emotion of who the person is—as opposed to the transparent rhythm, where there is no emotion, no character. And there are times when there is something like a poetic rhythm. This is from the second chapter; this is what Louise Vanaen writes to the whores. [She reads from pages 30–31.] So there it gets to depending on each word and sentence. It’s more poetical.
BODDY: Do you think when people read to themselves they get these rhythms?
ACKER: People say to me it’s very different to hear me read aloud.
BODDY: William Gass has said that he doesn’t want his readers to speed-read and so he tries to slow them down. How do you slow the reader down?
ACKER: You just increase the tension in language. The first section I read is very open language, and you read it fast. The more poetic it becomes, the more density there is, you slow it down.
BODDY: It’s also punctuation.
ACKER: Well, a comma’s a breath, and a sentence is a thought, and a paragraph is an emotion. This is just pure Charles Olson. You’re always working the paragraph against the sentence.
BODDY: Writing your work to be read aloud means in some ways you are emulating the techniques of oral storytelling as well as poetry.
ACKER: I think I’m totally into storytelling. My interest in narrative is an interest in myth. That’s what I do, is tell stories; I just don’t tell one story, I tell lots of stories and they all intertwine. I mean now, in the later novels. I have very little interest not in storytelling; what I read is mainly storytelling. But it’s an oral tradition.
BODDY: In his 1934 essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin claimed that storytelling was dying out.
ACKER: I think now the novel is dying out, and the big question is: What is needed? What is necessary? The novel is irrelevant in a way.
BODDY: Benjamin linked storytelling with community life; the novel was the genre of solitary individuals.
ACKER: Now people don’t have the kind of lives where they sit and read a novel. Except the most commercial stuff, what you read on a plane just to get through the plane ride—which is when most people read novels. But there is a real need for performative stuff, for oral stuff. In America the oral tradition is huge now, the spoken word is very lively. Dennis [Cooper] is very involved in all that stuff.
BODDY: Does the internet provided a kind of community?
ACKER: I think there was a golden age of the Net, when people were suddenly just allowed to write and they wrote incredible amounts of stuff. People felt free to write however they pleased. One thing that doesn’t go on the Net is punctuation, proper grammar. I think it’s all changing; the Net’s changing. Right now all the publishers want all the rights whenever you do anything for them. And the reason is that they want Net rights. What are they going to do with them? I never sell Net rights. I put everything up on the webpage. But I think Grove can go fuck it. They’re not going to make money out of Net rights, but they just want to own what you do outright.
BODDY: You’ve described yourself as coming out of a poetry tradition—the Black Mountain poets, who were all concerned with finding individual voices. You’ve said that you moved away from them because you couldn’t find your own voice, you didn’t have a voice. Now your novels are certainly recognizable as yours. Do you think you have a voice, or is style different from voice?
ACKER: I guess something’s developed that sounds like me. I would say it’s narrowed. I can’t answer that. I think I’m probably fairly identifiable, but I don’t know what it is. For me, voice meant I want to express this—what Jerome Rothenberg thought was that voice meant “This is my stance in the world, and therefore I’m going to write the piece from this stance.” I think that was what I was revolting against. Do I think that I have a certain stance? Probably one’s developed because there certainly is a kind of history now. I think the main problem when I write is that you get into these troughs where it is too easy, you’ve done it already and could easily do it again. Worse than that is that you build up expectations.
BODDY: How do you resist that?
ACKER: God, you just have to search for new material that’s free, that hasn’t been touched. That’s difficult, because it is so easy to go where you’ve gone before, and it’s such a bad mistake.
BODDY: I was in Brighton two years ago when you spoke about “languages of the body” that you find, and which you distinguished from language about the body.
ACKER: I little knew how that idea would escalate, that’s all I can say! That’s what my whole life has become, because that’s what the cancer was—literally language coming out through the body. It was totally transformative in that way. That’s what I’m writing about now. I don’t know how to say this theoretically—the connections between my body, language, and meaning, if you like—myth or narrative. One thing I learned working with cancer is—and we’re talking metaphorically now—that it’s as if there are different emanations. Only the physical emanations are visible, and behind the physical lies what’s called the emotional body. You can regard cancer as a physical disease and treat it accordingly, or you can go back and search for the roots of it in the emotional, causal body. It has to do with various turnings of meanings, and it has to do with how energy works. So suddenly story, meaning, and energy are very closely intertwined. Now we don’t think that really because we are big old rationalists; we think story basically doesn’t exist—it’s something we make up. But to find out that story lies there, behind material reality, is something incredible. For instance, this parasite thing—I haven’t been able to get well—and then I realized that the thing that led to it was an incident that for whatever reasons was like a little window to something that happened before I was born—that is my father left my mother before I was born. And suddenly I saw the reason I wasn’t getting well. I thought what was it to be in my mother’s womb and have my mother lose her husband. I think it is what Benjamin meant when he was thinking of Karl Kraus, by “breath,” or “in the beginning was the word.” In the beginning was me, “causality is perfect”—it all means something. And that is absolutely antithetical to what we’ve been taught; we don’t really think it means anything. The novel’s all based on “you make it up.” I’m finding the opposite. You don’t make it up. It’s sitting there. The universe is meaning.
BODDY: How does what you are doing, not necessarily now but in the past, link to modernist writing about the body? A sense that when other value systems break down, there is a refuge in the body, in sexuality. Do you feel a connection?
ACKER: Absolutely. I think that is an ongoing tradition. The turn to sexuality is a basic. That’s very American, I think—that kind of physicality: Emerson, Thoreau’s body in nature, Margaret Fuller saying the best thing is waves. I work with my fascinations, and sometimes I don’t know why I’m fascinated—and I’ve always been fascinated with sexuality. Some of the time I was just goofing or parodying; I wasn’t trying to find a meaning there until the later work. I guess that alternative tradition in America is very strong. Sex is something very weird in Britain. It’s always seen as something satanic.
BODDY: How much is coming to language through the body like automatic writing?
ACKER: It’s about language and the body. Coming through the body can also just mean speech; it doesn’t have to mean cut-up or poetic. If you hear it, it’s coming through the body.
BODDY: The Surrealist experiments with automatic language were all to do with the mind and the unconscious, rather than the body.
ACKER: To an extent I was influenced by the Surrealists, but they were Descartians, they were Freudians: they weren’t interested in the body. The body deals with narratives. I don’t mean stories. The knee gets hurt and then it gets better.
BODDY: Narrative is about chronology, which was one of the things Surrealism rejected. It was also a rejection of rationalism.
ACKER: Which was really valuable, and a lot of their experiments were certainly behind a lot of the stuff I learned as a kid.
BODDY: Do you see a turning point in your work, from destroying in some way, to building?
ACKER: I think it’s both building and finding meaning. The way I think of it now, and I guess I’m totally influenced by having gone through all this stuff, is that you don’t build—because that puts you in the position of maker—but you find. You free the energy, and in that way you build. That’s what literature would do; that’s the old idea of catharsis. That’s one of the well-springs of literature for us: that it’s the healing that’s done prior to the ceremony. That’s what those Greek dramas were. One thing literature can do is healing. It’s the old stuff—prior to the novel.
BODDY: How much is the finding of meaning individual, and how much is it something like the Jungian idea of tapping into archetypes?
ACKER: I’ve been reading Jung all summer. I haven’t put this together theoretically at all. If you’re asking how individuality fits into all this, we’re probably going to posit a whole other idea of what it is to be a self, and the self/other relationship. In this way, the work Blanchot and Bataille did was seminal. Blanchot, talking of Bataille, shows how consciousness comes from intercourse with another person. We’re going to find that we’re related to each other in ways that we didn’t imagine. I certainly don’t question individuality. Reading this book about Emerson and his friends, I was thinking how writers really come in clumps—not that there’s a group soul, but there are certainly times when energy is there, and other times when it doesn’t exist.
BODDY: Do you feel then that you’re part of a clump? Of a group?
ACKER: I do and I don’t. I feel very close to two writers—to Iain Sinclair and to Jeanette Winterson. I feel that we are on the same wavelength. I feel very close to the healing community. There are writers I am close to in America, but they are not novelists.
BODDY: Would you define your books as novels?
ACKER: To tell you the truth, not terribly. There’re big chunks of prose. But are they novels? More groups of stories. Some of them aren’t even that…somewhat philosophical treatises. They’re hotchpotches, aren’t they? I don’t know how you’d define them. They’re romances. They’re really that American strange thing. Melville was always my great hero.
BODDY: You describe yourself sometimes as a pirate—finding things, taking things—but also as an explorer. Explorers discover new places, whereas pirates always go where someone else has been. Are these two roles different?
ACKER: They’re not different for me because everything under the sun starts from stuff that’s left. I don’t see how you go somewhere new without going through detritus, garbage. You have to have ways of understanding the thing or you won’t come back. What did Cixous say about Moses? Most people who go into the wilderness don’t come back; they’re transformed. To come back, there has to be something of the old system of meaning. Otherwise how can Moses talk to the people?
BODDY: What have you taken with you in your explorations into, say, the languages of the body?
ACKER: In my case, I’m really linked to certain lineages. I’m a very traditional writer in certain ways. I come so definitely out of Burroughs and Miller and that group of writers. You can see where I’m coming from. I go my own steps further—added a bit of theory, added a bit of Black Mountain poetry. If you’re asking what I take with me, I couldn’t have done what I’ve done, whatever that is, if I hadn’t come out of those lineages.
BODDY: It’s a very male tradition.
ACKER: Extremely.
BODDY: The only woman you talk about in your book of essays, Bodies of Work, is Colette.
ACKER: Those essays are just what people asked me to write. But it’s true, I do come out of male traditions very strongly. Men have had the power, the language, the voice.
BODDY: Yet there have been many women writers, and women’s traditions. Was there something there that you didn’t want?
ACKER: Well, the feminist sixties and seventies turned me off because it was really strident. What I was given when I was growing up was the women’s tradition of writing…was fairly staid realist writing. Ellen Friedman, when she published that book Breaking the Sequence, about radical women writing, she turned me on quite a bit. Until then I didn’t think it through, but it’s very obvious that the strong radical tradition in America in prose is female. But that’s not the accepted story—especially after The Madwoman in the Attic—because that book was the canon, and everyone thought the most radical you’d get was Willa Cather. I actually like Willa Cather a great deal. But that’s it. I grew up hating that stuff. I’d rather be one of the bad boys than be a good girl. Feminism, when I grew up, was restrictive. I remember going to them in the early days and saying “Hi, here’s my writing,” and them saying “You’re a man, get out of here.” I just didn’t fit at all.
BODDY: Some critics argue that nonlinear writing—breaking the sequence—is particularly female—that women don’t live linear lives, think linearly as men do. Do you agree that a particular way of writing like that can be particularly male or female?
ACKER: I wonder if there is a woman’s experience. I would say that if I thought of anything being a woman’s experience it would be like Cixous taking about the spectre, and the spectre talks about stealing. And she says the thing is to steal and not know you’re doing anything wrong. It would be to just write the way you do and not know how radical it was. What would women’s writing be like? I guess that part of me does feel that there is this flow that’s spiral and undulating and has to do with female writing. It comes down to the question of whether there are essentially women and men. What would non-difference look like?
BODDY: In Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson explored the idea of androgynous language. Do you think there can be androgynous language, language without gender?
ACKER: Actually I don’t think so. I know Jeanette thinks so, and I wonder if she’s preserving certain territory when she says that. I used to think so until last time I was pregnant. I knew it was the last time I was ever going to have a chance to be pregnant. There was no way I could keep the child. It was a very painful abortion, emotionally, and it made me think that like it or not, there is a very deep way in which we are connected to wombs, to childbearing. It’s there. One can’t discount the physical. I have friends now who are changing genders, and I know it’s very big. I know there are probably mid-genders but, in my experience, there is something about having a womb that can’t be discounted.
BODDY: Do you think you can identify a piece of writing as being by a woman?
ACKER: No, I don’t at all. Partly what a novelist does is write in other voices. We don’t write ourselves. Henry James is one of the great writers of women. In that way, I agree with Jeanette that the writer is truly androgynous. The writer is a channeler. In a way, the writer doesn’t exist; you’re as good as what comes through you, and God knows what comes through you. I guess I think both—that there is something about having a certain body and maybe that has its imprint on the writing, but there is also the fact that one isn’t writing oneself. Although in the transmitting, one is writing a self.
BODDY: I was reading an interview in which you described In Memoriam as a turning point in your writing: that before that, form was determined by theory, and that now form was “coming more organically in the sense that it’s based on theme.”
ACKER: I did an interview with Iain Sinclair, and Iain said it very precisely: that what you do when you write is go out and find. You’re looking for the story and you find it. It’s organic in the way that you’re not making the story up; the story is already there and you’re letting it come through.
BODDY: And the form in which the story comes is in some way natural?
ACKER: It’s in whatever it’s in.
BODDY: Do you think your earlier work was imposing forms on stories?
ACKER: No, I think I’ve always written this way. I don’t think I ever imposed a form. I’ve always written organically, except for Kathy Goes to Haiti—that was totally different, there was nothing organic about that book. I just wanted to write a porn novel so I could make money. It was a calculated grab for money, and I lost. There was a porn company which was giving poets $800 for a porn novel. All my friends had done one, and I thought I could use $800. So I went ahead and it was really boring. I got totally bored and I started making jokes and messing around. But it was planned. By organic, I mean it forms itself as it proceeds, as opposed to you sit down and you plan it out.
BODDY: Do you think you’ve always been more interested in form than content?
ACKER: I’ve always thought more about form than content. I never thought about content. And now? Probably not. It’s hard to think about content. Now it’s just voices, I look for the energy. I’m a process writer; that’s all I’ve ever meant.
BODDY: What’s the new book?
ACKER: God knows. I’m just starting it. I was going to write a book about healing, and I got through the introduction and about fifty pages and thought I really hate nonfiction—I’m totally bored. Why write about what you know already? So I thought it does have to be fiction, but I definitely want to use a lot of the material. It’s great material. I’ve written quite a bit, but the beginning is just starting.
BODDY: The humor in your work is something that I think tends to be overlooked.
ACKER: I think my sense of humor is very black. It’s goofy. For me to write and be satisfied, there has to be something outrageous. I have to have the feeling that nobody could possibly do this, it’s too stupid. And then I feel comfortable with it.
BODDY: So it’s not that you’re trying to shock?
ACKER: No, I don’t have a sense of an audience that would be shocked. I live in my own baby-crib to a large extent. When I first came over here and all these people were shocked, I was in shock! “It’s just words, what’s your problem?!” I had been in New York and I was in a baby-crib with poets and artists, and they’re not shocked. I had no sense that what I was doing was shocking.
BODDY: Is that something that distinguishes writing today from earlier avant-garde work—that it’s no longer possible to shock?
ACKER: My stuff still upsets people. I can’t get Pussy published in this country. Looking for junk down toilet bowls is okay, but girls having good sex isn’t!
BODDY: To get back to the idea of humor…
ACKER: I think I’ve got a quirky sense of humor. The beginning of Blood and Guts in High School, making it about a father and daughter, was just my idea of a joke. Basically, it was stuff to do with the breakup of my second marriage and I thought it was really boring—I do think of an audience!—so I thought I’ll make it about a father and daughter, that’s more interesting. That’s just my sense of “Why not?” I didn’t mean anything. Underlying it there was a great deal of myth about fathers and daughters, but it was just a bad joke.
BODDY: And no one got the joke!
ACKER: No. No one even thought it was funny. Everyone was asking me about deep meaning. In San Francisco a lot of the dykes came out of incestuous homes, and a number had told me “You were the first person to write about it!” I think my novels are bloody goofy. I don’t think In Memoriam is terribly funny, and My Mother: Demonology is kind of a serious book. But I think there are sections in Empire of the Senseless that are goofy—the last section. I get on a roll. I thought in Pussy, the girls are goofy, and all the rat stuff. And everyone got very shocked—“Oh, these girls are so dirty. They’re such violent, filthy girls.” I just thought it was fun. I had a good time writing that. After all, they’re pirates. It was just a boys’ book I turned into a girls’ book. I was ripping off Treasure Island, obviously, and I really thought Pussy was less violent. There is a scene in Treasure Island where there’s an actual killing, and I turned it into a girl throwing a stone at another girl. When it came to girls, it didn’t feel that right to be that violent, although God knows, I know enough cases of lesbian battery. People get offended awfully easily, I think. Even the bloody queen who writes the astrology column in the Bay Times went on a rant about how of course he didn’t believe in banning books, except in one case—me!
BODDY: What do you think of the way publishing has latched on to identity politics to market books?
ACKER: Identity politics took over the States. Very dangerous. I think it’s repulsive. Even though it comes out of postmodernism, it’s a backlash to postmodernism. I can see the point. I can see why ye olde black lesbian wants to assert black lesbianism—for all sorts of political reasons. But I think that you have to be really careful that when you’re asserting identity you’re only asserting in a certain time and place, and that you don’t make an absolute. And writing, novel writing, just isn’t about that. It can be for a moment. If you’re going to just write about yourself, you have to do what Emerson and Thoreau did, and go through the I to something else—something deeper. You have to end up somewhere that doesn’t just go “Today I went to the bathroom five times and ate an apple.” I think that my work is extremely difficult given this sign of the times because I don’t fit into any identity. I can’t be marketed as gay, I don’t even look good in the feminist sections, and yet I’m not ye olde straight novelist. There’s no way to categorize the writing.