Hello feelers, connectors, relaters, friends, and lovers!
This week Write-minded reaches broadly into the topic of intimacy to explore its many permutations—not just romantic, but innocuous, violent, collective, and more. Guest Stacey D’Erasmo invites us to consider intimacy in writing, how we do it, how we feel it as readers, and also to consider acts of intimacy, like an older actress showing her authentic self as she ages. Intimacy is felt, and not always something we know how to put words around, so this conversation is a particular treat, thought-provoking and enticing.
Stacey D’Erasmo’s tips for writing intimacy in your own work:
If the writer isn’t feeling it, the reader isn’t feeling it.
Create a real atmosphere and mood to bring the reader into the felt experience of the intimacy before and around the characters.
Be less anxious about what the characters are saying and doing, and more interested in “Have I and can I create an atmosphere on the page that seduces the readers?” The characters can take care of themselves! The writer’s job is to woo the reader.
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m here in the intimacy of the Write-minded podcast with my co-host Brooke Warner, and we’re here today to talk about the art of intimacy—and a book titled The Art of Intimacy, by the novelist Stacy D’Erasmo. The Art of Intimacy is part of Graywolf Press’s series of “The Art of …” books on different writing topics. We also had on Peter Ho Davies a while back, who wrote The Art of Revision. I’ve read almost all of the series, and I love them.
Brooke: It’s wonderful because the books are short, so they’re almost like long essays, and they approach writing craft from different and sometimes unlikely angles.
Grant: It’s the unlikely angles that interest me the most, and on that note, I should tell listeners that we’re not necessarily here to talk about the racy kind of intimacy, but the varieties of intimacy that can occur between characters and between reader and story. The spaces in between, as D’Erasmo puts it. You know, Brooke, when I think of what I like to read and why, I think I read primarily for intimacy—the kinship and closeness I feel for certain characters, but also the kinship I feel toward authors who carry it off on the page. And I’m not sure if I can explain how they carry it off, or why I react to their prose in such a way, but I know if I don’t feel an intimacy with the story, then no matter how exciting the plot or how strong the other elements, it won’t move me in the ways I want to be moved by writing. When I go through my list of favorite writers in the last 10 years or so, I think of authors like Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, Sigrid Nunez, and Ocean Vuong. They’re all poetic writers, but it’s not just their poetry that draws me: I literally feel our souls connect when I read them. I feel like we share something deep, which I might not even share with friends and family, and maybe that’s why I don’t even want to meet them in person—I just want to have that intimate connection with them on the page. What about you, Brooke, do you find you read for intimacy as much as I do, and what authors do you feel an especially intimate connection with?
Brooke: What a beautiful sentiment, Grant, and yes, I’ve for sure felt that. And I know what you mean about maybe it’s better not to meet those people. It’s funny that you mention Rachel Cusk because she would be a great example. I felt that reading her writing, too, but then I interviewed her for Women Lit, which is a local series connected to the Bay Area Book Festival, and she was a difficult interview subject. It wasn’t like I felt this automatic spark of connection with her, I found her to be very cerebral. I love her work and she was wonderful, but it was just not like the connection I might have with her words. So, of course, you can for sure feel more connected to people through their written words than you ever would or will in real life. I’ve had those moments of connection with countless writers over the years. I think it’s what makes us lifelong fans of certain authors’ work, and why, as is the case with our favorite singers or actors, we can feel like we really know them. That somehow they’re ours. I felt this way for the first time probably with Toni Morrison, who I discovered in a freshman year of college literature class with the book Sula and then promptly read everything I could get my hands on. I felt this way with Dani Shapiro, and then funnily enough I’ll say that because I’ve met her several times, I’ve again had that same experience where I just had a better connection to Dani through her words. But, of course, because she’s opening up in this very honest way and you have this insight into them, you feel like you know them so when you have interactions with them in real life, it’s not exactly the same. I’m in a privileged position to get to meet a lot of authors, but I almost think the intimacy you’re talking about is best preserved by not knowing the authors. In addition to Morrison, I have felt this way with Virginia Woolf—no chance of ever meeting her, and with my recent Annie Ernaux reading spree. Certain authors take you there, and yes, it’s an intimacy and a depth and a perspective. I think you can also only know it when you see it, when you feel it.
Grant: One thing I like about The Art of Intimacy is how it expands the notion of intimacy beyond the conventional romantic or sexual connotations of the word, and Stacey explores these different types of intimacy through novels that she examines. For example, she goes deep into Percival Everett’s The Water Cure, a novel written in a fragmentary style about a writer’s torture of another man, and it’s interesting because Stacey posits that we become party, through the gaps in the narrative, to his crime. We become intimate with his violence, in short. This made me think of the time I was mugged at gun point. One of the strangest parts of this experience was something I didn’t expect—how an act of violence can create intimacy. I feel like I’m connected forever to the two guys who held me up, to the extent that I often think of them, often wonder how they’re doing, what they think of this odd experience we shared, and I find myself strangely caring for them—all because we shared this intense, precarious, dangerous moment. Also, another type of intimacy she plumbs is the intimacy of regret or guilt. She explores this through William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. In Maxwell’s book, the narrator imagines the story of a childhood acquaintance whose father has killed his wife, and then himself. Years after these events, the narrator sees the other boy at school, and fails to say hello to him as they pass each other in the hall. That’s not a big deal, of course, except the slight plays large in the narrator’s mind, and the book becomes “a kind of reparation for a failure of empathy.” The story he imagines, in other words, fills in the space in between the two boys, and this is crucial to D’Erasmo’s notion of intimacy because intimacy is the space in between people. Likewise, I have a similar real experience, of being unnecessarily mean to a friend of mine in second grade, and like the narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow, I carried this guilt and regret with me for years, becoming a little obsessed by it. I finally found my long-lost friend on social media and apologized, and he said he didn’t remember anything. He only had fond feelings for our friendship. But it made me think of how we create intimacy in the spaces in between we experience with people, and how we need stories to essentially illustrate our lives for us so that we understand them. Have any books illustrated or evoked surprising or different kinds of intimacy for you, Brooke, especially on a personal level like this?
Brooke: Yes, for sure certain memoirs that have been inspiring my own writing–notably Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which anyone who’s connected to me in my memoir life knows made a giant impact on me, so much so that it caused me to throw out my 30k words in progress and start over on my memoir. And Carmen Maria Macahdo’s In the Dream House, and Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, and Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down. Oh, and Chantel Miller’s Know My Name. All of these books are sharing deep intimacies and peeling back the layers on complexities and traumas but doing so in a way that is… well, intimate. So that inspires me. These are the books that are my benchmark in my own writing, and writers that move me.
Grant: One intimacy is our relationship to ourselves as artists, which Stacey goes into in a different book—her book that’s coming out this July, The Long Run. I loved this book because she profiles older artists she admires to find out how they’d done it—how they’ve made art over the course of a lifetime. It’s a topic I haven’t seen covered in this way—at the end of artists’ creative journey rather than at a peak—but then maybe the end is a peak. She talked to Valda Setterfield about her sixty-year career that took her from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to theatrical collaborations with her husband to roles in films. She talked to Samuel Delany about his vast oeuvre of books in many genres—and the intensity of his desires in real life. She talked to Amy Sillman about working between painting and other media, and between abstraction and figuration. She talked to landscape architect Darrel Morrison, composer Tania Léon, actress Blair Brown, musician Steve Earle, and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña. And then she weaves these stories into her own creative journey, so the book of essays is a type of memoir.
Brooke: I was taken by her piece on the actress Blair Brown, and how she talks about aging women doing their art. Aging and art are particularly challenging for women who are performers and actresses, of course. E’Erasmo says,
It takes one kind of shamelessness to show up on camera naked when you’re thirty-three. It takes an entirely different strain of shamelessness to show up on camera with your natural face in your seventies.
There really is a whole wave of women who are doing this so much better, and I’m in the middle of Feud, Grant and all of the women in that show are 50+ for sure. It’s just a wonderful way to see these women looking very much their age. It’s so interesting because we don’t often talk about shamelessness in this way, but D’Erasmo traces it to the urgency an artist feels for their art, and shares that she’s had to restrain herself from punching someone who has made pursuing her vocation difficult. Very tempting sometimes.
Grant: I recently read a survey that actually said people were generally happier in their 60s than their 50s, and that applied to women in particular. The angle was that people left behind a lot of their hang-ups about their looks or how other people perceived or judged them, and they were just more comfortable in their skin, literally and figuratively, so aging was a type of liberation. They had no fucks to give, in other words. I think we’re in an era in our culture when we’re seeing new possibilities in aging, so I like the idea of exploring aging as something that can enhance creativity—simply because we can be shameless, which I think is a trait to cultivate.
Brooke: Agreed, Grant. We have a lot of authors who are on the older side on She Writes Press and they’re constantly inspiring me with their perseverance and their refusal to be boxed in. This Boomer cohort, you know—they’ve been a generation to change the way things are done from early days, and they’re laying a nice groundwork for the rest of us when it comes to creativity and self-reinvention, for sure.
This Week’s Book Trend:
This week’s trend is one that people will face for generations to come: what to do with a great writer’s work after their deaths, and especially if that writer has given word to have their work destroyed. One famous instance is Franz Kafka, who told his friend Max Brod to destroy his work. Fortunately he didn’t because, for one, a young writer named Gabriel Garcia Marquez read Kafka, and Kafka was one of his inspirations to be an author. Now Marquez’s sons have overridden their father's wish for his last novel to be destroyed, moving forward to publish this work posthumously. A writer at the Times wrote: “We all benefit when works by great artists that are marked for destruction are instead preserved." Do you agree?
ABOUT STACEY D’ERASMO
Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of five novels and now two books of nonfiction. Her first novel, Tea, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Her second novel, A Seahorse Year, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday and won both a Lambda Literary Award. Her third novel, The Sky Below, was a favorite book of the year for the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun Times, and the New York Times. And her fourth novel, Wonderland, was named one of the ten best books of the year by Time and the BBC and was also among NPR’s best books of 2014.