The Cups Came in a Rush: An Interview with Margot Bergman

Do cups have souls? If you look at Margot Bergman’s portfolio in our Summer issue, you might be tempted to say yes: the cups she has painted, from various vantage points and in bright colors, seem filled with life. Bergman, who was born in 1934, has been painting for nearly her whole life. She is best known for her series Other Reveries, which features collaborative portraits painted over artworks she has saved from flea markets and thrift stores. Each painting is layered with decisive, bold paint strokes, revealing a face latent with layers of emotions. They are at once beautiful, frightening, humorous, and welcoming. Who knew that cups could contain similarly human emotion? We talked about the joys of painting, the female form, and of course, what drew her to cups in the first place.

—Na Kim 

INTERVIEWER

Much of your work revolves around faces, and especially female figures. When did start painting these?

MARGOT BERGMAN

In the fifties. The artist R. B. Kitaj was painting very flat paintings. I was attracted to his style. I began to paint like that. I still have some of those paintings in the basement of my home, left over from the fifties—a series of flat paintings of naked women. They were very flat, very unsexual, though the women were butt naked, with their backs turned to the viewer. At one point, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wanted some of my paintings for the hallway of a government building. They were these Kitaj-like paintings of women, all naked, their backs turned, with what look like bits of collage randomly placed in the paintings. There was a controversy, and the paintings made it in to the newspaper in Milwaukee, because some women’s group had demanded for them to be taken down.

INTERVIEWER

What happened?

BERGMAN

They were taken down. It was the fifties. I thought it was so funny. And kind of outrageous, but mostly I thought it was funny. Strange, funny, and uninformed.

INTERVIEWER

These women with their backs turned, were they all the same woman, or different women? Who were they?

BERGMAN

I have no idea. But they did not represent me. They were very planiform. There was no voluptuousness to them. There was no shading. They really revealed form. They had shapes, but no real substance. And they were looking out into a courtyard, and the coloring was a bit Impressionist. They were really not expressionistic in any way. I would say that I was influenced by Pierre Bonnard at this time—that was probably my first true love of an artist’s work.

INTERVIEWER

What about Bonnard was particularly inspiring to you?

BERGMAN

I thought his work was beautiful. I thought it was intimate. Later in life, what I’ve come to know is that there was an intimacy to his work that I was not seeing in the work of other artists. And that’s probably what drew me to him.

INTERVIEWER

What led you to start painting the cups that are featured in our Summer issue?

BERGMAN

I had started another body of work that wasn’t working. I was disappointed in it. It had to do with bricks, both rigid urethane ones and children’s building blocks. They were three-dimensional, and I was trying to do paintings of the bricks so that the works on paper were geometric forms. I just could not make them work. So I tore one of them up. I tore up a piece of paper in my frustration, and then I just made a painting of a cup on one of the scraps. God knows. God knows why.

Perhaps now I can look at it and say that the original work had so much geometry, so many hard lines, that I needed a circle. But that really did not go through my mind. My process is very intuitive. I just found myself making a circular form, and the form that came out was a cup. Then the cups came in a rush—I’ve now done seventy of them. It was one after another, after another, after another, just pouring out of me.

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to talk about another important body of your work—your found collaborative paintings, which are portraits overpainted on paintings you often find in flea markets and thrift stores. There’s something so haunting about them. The faces really stare back at you. Do you ever think of real people when you’re painting them, or are they people who come from your mind?

BERGMAN

No, I do not think of them as real people. But when they come out, they frequently have names. There is something in my subconscious that finds a name. I don’t analyze it. Almost always, after a portrait is done, I know the figure’s name. It’s like the painting itself: it just is.

INTERVIEWER

What led you to begin painting over the works of others?

BERGMAN

Before I started making those paintings, I was embedded in the world of art. I was in the galleries. I had lived in New York. I walked the walk and did the talking, and I realized that I was uninspired by the things I was making and didn’t like what I was seeing on the walls either. These works had no heart for me. And when I would go to a flea market, it was all heart. There were these inexperienced artists who were giving everything to make something that they truly cared about. I was drawn to that, so I would bring their work back to the studio. At first, I felt it was a no-no to paint on them, so I didn’t, but I kept collecting them. And then, one day, I just saw a face in one of them, and I painted it on top. That was very satisfying. For about ten years, I worked on that body of work. I had to go out and hunt down these kinds of paintings, which is not an easy thing to do. And nobody wanted the paintings I did with them. I tried in Chicago to have them be seen. Until John Corbett came along, many years later, nobody would show them. I had pulled myself away from whatever I thought was the art world, and I was making strictly for myself. I love them. I love doing it.

INTERVIEWER

You talked a little bit about the difficulties of being an artist. What would you say were some major roadblocks for you?

BERGMAN

It’s trite to say it, because everybody knows it. But let’s start with being a woman. I had children. I was married. I lived in the suburbs of Chicago in the fifties and I had a husband who could support me. I was attractive. I had no network because I didn’t finish my degree at the Art Institute—I got married when I was twenty-one, and my husband was in service and I followed him. How many things worked against me there? I was not part of anything, and I was different, then. But it didn’t stop me from painting, ever, ever, ever, ever. I worked like hell. I was always working. I think we’re working even when we’re not working. I think when we walk in our space and we sweep the floor, we are working. It is something that’s inexplicable.

INTERVIEWER

What part of the painting process would you say is your favorite, if you have one?

BERGMAN

I like pencils. I like paint. I love paint. I love paint. I love mark-making. I love the end, when one can see something that one could say is complete.

INTERVIEWER

How do you know when a painting is done?

BERGMAN

Sometimes I’ve been right and sometimes I’ve been wrong. I’ve often thought, Can I make it better if I keep going? It’s a well-known fact that artists can leave their studio or workspace, think they have completed a painting and are satisfied with it, and come back the next day and say, “Oh my gosh, that’s not nearly what I thought it was.” So, how do we know? We don’t always.

INTERVIEWER

Is painting intuitive to you? Do you find it difficult?

BERGMAN

I don’t take myself too seriously until I need to be serious. I like playing. I don’t mean that I am not working seriously. I am looking hard, but I’m also having a very good time. Painting is a very joyful process for me. And even though it can have dark undertones, for me, painting is the unearthing of whatever is there for me to find. That’s just intuitive.

INTERVIEWER

Where do you think this curiosity and urge to create comes from?

BERGMAN

When someone comes to me and says, “I just traveled to India, and I did this, and I did that,” I think to myself, I just traveled on my own adventure. I love adventure, and I equate what’s happening to me on the canvas with a journey. My journey has no map.

 

Na Kim is the art director of the Review.

On Paper: An Interview with Thomas Demand

The Review has long been a fan of Thomas Demand’s work; our Spring 2015 issue featured a portfolio of his paper sculptures of cherry blossoms. His series The Dailies recreates quotidian objects and images: a coffee cup, a tray of cigarette butts. Only tiny flaws (pencil markings, tape) reveal them as constructions; otherwise his compositions are stripped of everything but their form. But paper isn’t just a blank canvas; it also carries meaning, even if these associations are subtle: it’s the medium of office workers, receipts, menus, greeting cards, origami, newspapers—and, of course, of The Paris Review. To accompany a selection of images from The Dailies, we talked to Demand about paper, literature, and the home.

INTERVIEWER

What does paper mean in your work?

THOMAS DEMAND

Paper is a formidable, malleable material that everyone touches on a daily basis. We all share this experience—we know its haptic and aesthetic possibilities more than perhaps anything else. We mostly use paper for temporary purposes—napkins, newspaper, coffee cups, the Amazon box, and so on. We make notes on it and throw it away, wrap our gifts in it and rip it to receive them. I find that important to consider, if I look at the more commonplace iconography in my work, like in The Dailies. I’m also interested in paper’s relations to information, model-making, and geometry.

INTERVIEWER

Paper has been disappearing from the real spaces you photograph for quite some time, being replaced by screens, stickers of QR codes, audio recordings. Do you have a sentimental attachment to paper?

DEMAND

I don’t think it has disappeared, actually—think of any sustainable recycled packaging effort, like Amazon’s. The production of paper has increased monumentally. But it might become a more valued material, which is good. People used to drink the worst piss called “coffee”—now it’s a drink prepared by baristas with butterflies in the milk topping. Am I sentimental about the old bitter filter coffee? No. Note, however, that that coffee was made through a paper filter, to be consumed in paper cups. As far as we know, the paper cup was first made by Chinese craftsmen around two thousand years ago. In all its forms, paper has accompanied our civilizations, enabling us not only to drink but to write, to remember. I don’t see this as a metaphorical value but as one which enables the production of other values.

INTERVIEWER

If The Dailies were the work of a particular writer, who would it be?

DEMAND

When it comes to The Dailies, I think of writers who don’t use an overarching narrative—Walter Benjamin, Alexander Kluge, Hans Blumenberg, Botho Strauss.

INTERVIEWER

What do your home and your workspace look like? Do you make frequent “Home Improvements”?

DEMAND

I need to wake up in an environment that is as empty as possible, and I like to live in a sparsely furnished place. I am not afraid of an empty room. I also try to part from things I haven’t needed nor missed for two or three years (apart from art, which mostly is from friends). However, I enjoy when the work spills over the tables I work from and the leftovers of my makings are scattered around the actual piece. But I need to return to a clean space to approach my next work. I hardly ever work on more than one project at once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Demand is a German photographer and sculptor who lives in Los Angeles. His new, expanded edition of The Dailies is out now from MACK.

The Review Celebrates Seventy with Fried Eggs by the Canal

For the cover of our seventieth-anniversary issue, we commissioned a painting by the artist Peter Doig, of a boy eating his breakfast beside a London canal. Our contributing editor Matthew Higgs spoke with Doig about his influences and fried eggs. 

INTERVIEWER

How did the cover image come about?

PETER DOIG

I’d made a birthday card for my son Locker—a more cartoony version of what became the painting. I quite liked the subject: he’s sitting at a café on the towpath of the canal in East London. Everyone who knows London knows the canal—we take it for granted. I can’t think of any paintings of it, but it seems to me a sort of classic painting subject.

I started working on the image alongside a big painting I was making for an exhibition at the Courtauld. I was thinking about how my work relates to the Impressionist galleries there, which contain Cézanne, Gauguin, Daumier, Van Gogh, Seurat, et cetera. I had begun many of the paintings before I was invited to make the exhibition, but most of them had a long, long way to go before being finished. I’d brought all my paintings to my London studio from New York and Trinidad, and all of a sudden I had more paintings in progress than I think I’d had in probably thirty-odd years. It was quite exciting in a way, but then I had to make an edit, to decide which ones I was going to concentrate on, because I was getting carried away and I was never going to finish everything. The canal painting was the one very, very new one. That’s why I liked it for the Review—and because, although I thought of the image as very much a London painting, somehow after I made it I was reminded of Paris, and of French painting more than of English painting.

INTERVIEWER

Is it important that the viewer knows the boy is your son?

DOIG

Perhaps for people who know him. I’ve got quite a large family, and so it’s important to me that when I make a painting that depicts one of my children, the others can relate to it and feel that they understand why I did it. In the painting of Locker, I wanted to capture a person at that stage in life, the way Cézanne did when he used his son as a model. Another one of the paintings in the Courtauld exhibition features my daughter Alice in a hammock surrounded by greenery. I began working on the painting in 2014—I know that because I recently found a photograph of Alice standing in her primary school uniform looking at it when I very first started it. I finished it this year in my studio in just a few hours, after having returned to it after all those years. One of my other kids saw it and said that I had absolutely captured Alice at that age. That’s why I left it not quite finished, with translucent tones—I wanted it to feel almost ghostly. She’s now a grown woman, and it captures the passage of time.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the significance of the canal?

DOIG

The canal, up until fairly recently, was a place of dread. After the industrial revolution, the canal no longer served the buildings on it, so for a long time stepping onto the towpath at night meant risking a mugging or worse. That has changed and is changing. The painting’s setting is a real café very close to where we live at present, and where I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few years, looking westward at the view through the bridge. Sitting there I realized how beautiful it is, and how much like a painting it is already. I also thought of paintings by Manet and others—paintings of railways and train stations, with figures in the foreground.

INTERVIEWER

The Impressionists painted some of the earliest depictions of what we understand as modernity.

DOIG

I was looking at Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Behind the girl at the bar, there are two globes in the background, two spheres. It’s not obvious at first, but they are electrical lights, and Manet painted them in very, very sharp focus, whereas everything else in the painting is quite blurred. I suppose at the time Manet made the painting the viewer would have been really surprised by this very modern element entering a work of art. In my painting, the eggs are a bit like that—in a way, the eggs are the most contemporary thing in the painting.

 

Matthew Higgs is a contributing editor of The Paris Review.

Two women issued the same Social Security Number, and the SSA won't help

Jieun Kim from Los Angeles and Jieun Kim from Evanston, Illinois have more in common than just their name and birthdate — they have the same Social Security number, thanks to the conscientious public servants of the Social Security Administration (SSA). — Read the rest

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end. 

Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.” 

Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.” 

At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.

 

INTERVIEWER

Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems?

 MILLNER

I hadnt imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated. 

 INTERVIEWER

What was missing in the couplet form that the prose was able to provide?

 MILLNER

There’s a relentlessness to writing in rhyming couples that for the reader can be exhausting and claustrophobic. I was concerned about the lack of formal surprise. But also, life has formal qualities, and a relationship model is a formal question. The book was also very much about putting things in dialectical relation to each other, so I realized that there needed to be some other secondary mode or interlocutor. 

INTERVIEWER

The title of the book, Couplets, is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it. 

MILLNER

Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think. 

I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up. The book’s jacket copy says something about coming out: one woman’s coming-out, coming undone. But I do think those two things are discrete. The consummation of queer desire is a realization that anticipates a later realization, which is that relationships are not inherently meant to be durable.

INTERVIEWER

In Couplets, the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?

 MILLNER

The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.  

 INTERVIEWER

Much of the story of these two couples takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the highly specific proper nouns that anchor your speaker to a sense of place and social milieu aren’t easy to square in verse. Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words. Why did you include them?

 MILLNER

Through this new relationship, the speaker is stepping into an identity, but she’s also stepping into a social class and milieu that is not entirely comfortable to her, where queerness is the opposite of marginal, and where being a person in an alternative relationship model is actually quite common. She is hyper-attentive to the signifiers that attend this world, which she too finds ugly (and alluring). On the one hand, she longs to be naturalized into it, but on the other, there is also this inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for. Part of why this isn’t a more triumphant coming out story has to do with the fact that queer life, within the circles she’s in, doesn’t attract public shame. On the contrary, there’s social cachet in stepping into that identity. Which is not to elide the homophobia and queerphobia that continue to dominate most spaces in this country, or the elders and activists who have made communities like this one possible. But for the speaker, there’s something disingenuous about claiming her queerness only as a socially marginal identity.

INTERVIEWER

Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry?

 MILLNER

As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem. 

 INTERVIEWER

The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?

 MILLNER

There might be more references to novelists in the book than to poets, which is reflective of the speaker’s taste and of a desire to be maximally immersed in experiences of every aesthetic kind. Novels provide that exhaustive immersion. It’s not that poems don’t, but poetry is more condensed and demanding and doesn’t act on attention the way that novelistic prose acts on attention. There’s a passivity and submissiveness that the reader of a novel gets to enjoy. The reader of poetry is invited to focus on granular particulate dimensions language—it’s a less submissive experience, or at least a less passive one.

As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.

INTERVIEWER

The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms? 

MILLNER

A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them.

I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality? 

MILLNER

I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition.

INTERVIEWER

I was struck by how resistant your speaker is to the endings that might otherwise be imposed upon her; she leaves her boyfriend but feels herself conducting his mannerisms in her relationship with her girlfriend, so that the two meet in her. Why were you drawn to that choreography, which seems impossible for a book about couples, written in couplets?

MILLNER

On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event. 

There’s a reason that literature is still being written about the fundamental question of how to know when a relationship is over, even if you still have an attachment to that person. We don’t have cultural scripts for those questions, and the way they are legislated is still retrograde and dependent on conservative notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family. The speaker of my book is very much reckoning with the residues of historical expectations of what women owe men. There’s a great temptation on the part of women in hetero partnerships to feel an outsized sense of responsibility for their demise. 

 

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of the Review.

Space for Misunderstanding: A Conversation between A. M. Homes and Yiyun Li

A few times a year, the writers Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes sit down to lunch. As friends, they often find themselves talking about almost anything but writing. Often, though, as they ask each other questions, something interesting and unexpected happens: “The thin thread of a story might be unearthed,” Homes recently told us, “or the detail of a recent experience, or a gnawing question one finds unanswerable. Somewhere between the menu, the meal and the coffee, maybe the story begins to form.”

Last year, Li and Homes both published new novels. In Li’s The Book Of Goose, she tells the story of a complex friendship between Agnes and Fabienne, farm girls, who each have been in some way neglected by their families. Homes’s latest book, The Unfolding, is a political satire that explores the fault lines of American politics within a family. 

At the end of the year, the two friends sat down for one of their lunches—and what follows is a bit of what they talked about.

 

HOMES

Funnily enough, as colleagues and friends, one of the things that we never talk about is writing.

LI

Once in a while I will tell you a story or say something has happened, and you’ll say, “Write that into a story.” That has happened three times. Particularly with the story “All Will Be Well,” as I explained in an interview with The New Yorker: “Sometimes it needs a nudge from another person. I was talking with my friend A. M. Homes one day, and I told her about this practice in California, where we were asked to send care packages to our children’s preschool with a letter, in case of a catastrophic earthquake. She said, ‘You have to write a story about that.’ It had not occurred to me until then, and it turned out that there was a place for the care package in a story.” I think you have a specific talent for saying, “Well, that’s an idea.” There’s an expansiveness to the way you look at the world. Do you look through a telescope or a microscope? Where does it come from?

HOMES

I would say my way of looking comes from growing up as an outsider in my own family—a person adopted into a family. I felt other and different and experienced the world as an observer. There’s a space between me and other people that would otherwise perhaps not exist.

LI

Do you still feel that way?

HOMES

I do. It’s a strange position that has also given me enormous freedom to inhabit others and create characters. I don’t feel wedded to any particular identity because I don’t feel I have an identity.

LI

I come from a different kind of family, where I often wished that I were adopted. When someone’s scrutinizing you all the time, your instinct can be not to look at them, not to think about them. Because I’m sheltering myself from all these things in my own life, I can create an alternative universe where my perspective is.

HOMES

It’s like you’re on the outside, and a shade has gone down that says “Closed for the afternoon” and no one can see that you’re inside, looking off in a different direction.

LI

Yes, and for you, it’s like you’re outside the house and the shade comes down, and you’re thinking, “What’s going on inside the house?”

HOMES

Exactly. And wondering: do I even have a key to the house?

LI

So, where are you looking at this moment?

HOMES

For better or worse, I’m a very American writer, so I’m looking at the way we consume things. I’m increasingly interested in economics and how a person’s economic life affects their narrative and trajectory. Where and how a person lives, whether they have money or have access to health care, all these things change the course of their life profoundly. I always feel that, in fiction, and certainly when we discuss fiction, we don’t talk about those things enough, but I’m fascinated by their implications.

LI

I always say that every character has to have a job. Many students create characters who don’t have jobs. They don’t work.

Certainly the reason I’m so curious about the concept of the quintessential American writer is because I am not one, although my coming of age as a writer happened in America. So I’m curious about how you define an American writer.

HOMES

That’s a good question—how does one define an American writer? To be honest, I think that raises another question that until recently I’ve been loath to discuss. That questions is, How does one define an American female writer versus an American male writer? The gender gap with regard to material and expectation and even who reads the books feels larger to me in America than in other countries. In the U.S., men write the Great American Novels—the books about the scale and scope of the American social, political, economic experience—and women are supposed to write the smaller-scale, intimate, domestic stories. In other countries things are not so divided. There is not Women’s Literature, or Chick Lit, and then Men’s Literature. This bothers me a lot, and I would say that my most recent book, The Unfolding, is an attempt to do both—to write both the large-scale, state-of-the-nation novel and also unpack the small-scale, intimate life of a family. But almost as soon as the book came out, a bookseller asked me, “Who is this book for?” and I was caught off guard. I didn’t know what she meant. Was she asking is it for men or women? Was she asking is it for people who agree with my point of view? I don’t know—when I am writing I never think about who this book is for—beyond the hope that my fiction is both entertaining, funny, and provokes thought, robust conversation, and debate about the issues of our time. Does that make any sense or say anything about the American novel?

LI

One thing I can relate to as an American writer is clarity. I was in a cab in Beijing recently, and the cab driver asked me what I did for a living. I said, “I’m a writer.” This cab driver, who had apparently read many books translated from English, and especially American writers, said, “American writers are very straightforward. In China, we consider writing as making circles. You do all these hide-and-seek games. You never say what you want to say.” He said, “American writers, they say what they want to say.”

HOMES

That’s a super-interesting idea—depending on what country someone is from, one has more or less freedom to say directly what they want to say or to code their writing in some way so that someone can extrapolate another meaning from it.

I think there is accuracy to the idea that there is a bluntness to American writing. It aims for an immediate connection with the reader. And it’s almost as though sometimes there’s not a lot of room to build the relationship, because the attention span is so short that either you connect immediately or it’s over. It’s almost like, Swipe right. You escaped that in The Book of Goose, which I think of as originating from a more European model.

LI

The world of my novel is entirely rural. It’s set in the French countryside. My characters are French girls. But they will never place their own lives in a historical setting. They will never say, We are two French girls living in the countryside in poverty post–World War II under American occupation. All these historical terms describing their existence do not matter to them. I felt liberated writing about them because I did not have to worry about all these things that critics would say about rural France, post–World War II, the American occupation. No, this is a world made up by two girls, entirely made up by two girls. I feel that I got a little, like, a shortcut because my characters live in their own world in a way. Would you say that you are the opposite?

HOMES

Yes and no. It’s beautiful the way you described the characters in The Book of Goose as living in the world of their imagination and their physical existence and their environment. It’s a world from inside out—and actually I always start from that point, too, the interior of the character—although in The Unfolding in particular there is a lot of social, cultural, and political framing and large amounts of history and fact. So it is absolutely both in the mind’s eye of the characters, but as they are participating in the known world in a very obvious sense.

Another thing we share: We both live in our imaginations and we pull in threads from our worlds and our experiences, but they are not the dominant theme. We are not writing about ourselves.

LI

I don’t find myself that interesting.

HOMES

I don’t find myself that interesting either. Like you, I have written about myself at times and about experiences that I’ve had, but fundamentally, it’s not the thing I enjoy most.

LI

Do you think readers like to go beyond themselves?

HOMES

I’m not sure anymore. When I was growing up, all I was looking for was a way out—a way into another world. So I read biographies. I thought, “Just show me how to be a person. Show me how to live a life.”

I think that, as things have become more fractured, people seem to read to confirm their ideas about themselves and their identities. They’re looking for a mirror. We also are in a moment when misunderstanding is not tolerated. But misunderstanding is fundamental to growth because you cannot assume everyone will understand everything, nor can you assume that they will agree. So you have to have a zone where you can navigate that. I’ve always found that reading and writing books helped me to do that.

LI

Where is the zone now? Where is that space? How do we make that space? I did an event with Garth Greenwell, and he mentioned—and it’s true—that people always say my work is too bleak. I said, “The bleakest thing is when life is bleak and you pretend it’s very rosy.” I’m in the William Trevor camp of writers. John Banville described Trevor and said, “William Trevor arrives in a beautiful town, and he looks around and says, ‘How beautiful is this town? Let me write and find out what’s wrong with it.’” My belief is that there’s something innately unsettling and troubling underneath. I want to write to find that layer rather than cover that layer up.

HOMES

I’m curious about your relationship to secrets. Are secrets helpful? Do you think of yourself as secretive?

LI

I want to make a distinction between secretive and private. John McGahern famously said that Irish people don’t have privacy, only secrets. It’s a lie that you live your entire life inside the church, inside society.

Even with no secrets, you can always hold something in your heart. So I feel that at this moment I’m not secretive but I have my privacy. How about you? I think you are more outgoing, more out there.

HOMES

I don’t have secrets anymore. I think it comes from the fact that I’m actually painfully shy. When I was younger, people sometimes misread that as my being formal or off-putting, and so I worked to show that I’m not scary. But now it’s like I’m naked, I have no covering, no shell, which is another problem. I definitely don’t have any secrets. I also don’t feel like I have a lot of privacy.

LI

What about your characters? All characters have secrets, but they don’t seem to have privacy because of the way we look at them. How do you think about that?

HOMES

I would say my characters in my most recent book have so many secrets that I don’t even begin to know how deep they go, and they are also pretty private. In the book before this one, I was writing this character, Harold Silver, who’s a Nixon scholar, and I found him very difficult. I kept asking myself, “Why is it so hard to write this?” Slowly, I came to understand that I didn’t know Harold Silver because Harold does not know himself. And only as Harold came to know himself did the book become easier to write.

I have a craft question for you. When I read your work, it feels to me so well-crafted and so fine-tuned, and each line is really perfect and beautiful. I wonder, do they come out that way? Or what is your revision process like?

LI

No, of course nothing comes out perfect, right? With this new book, The Book of Goose, the first draft was one hundred fifty pages longer than the final. Secondly, there was an unnecessary frame, a bit like the one in Lolita. I was very attached to that frame, but everybody, all my early readers, indicated that it was not going to work.

HOMES

But you needed it to write it.

LI

I think that frame was for my psychological comfort. I argued, I defended the frame, and eventually my editor said, “I think you want the book to be a different one than the book is meant to be.” And when she said that, I thought, “Oh, that makes sense.” So I cut away the frame. I rewrote the second half. How many drafts did you do of your recent book?

HOMES

What’s interesting is that each book defines its own terms. With The Unfolding, the complexity was in figuring out the weave of the stories. I didn’t want each person’s story to repeat itself or each character to have to expound upon the same experience. So it was a question of how to keep it moving forward without accounting for each character in every moment.

Grace Paley used to say to me that the bummer about being a writer is that you’re never promoted to senior vice president of writing. Every time you are thrown back to the beginning. You might acquire some skills for the management of problems, but each book is so different, and you have a different agenda because you’re not trying to just repeat yourself. So you have to discover what the terms are of that book and how it will operate and the ways in which it has weaknesses.

LI

Totally. That’s an argument I constantly have with how books are read—they’re read as products. Books are not products. A book cannot be perfect. Nothing is proportional. Nothing is perfect. Some of Mavis Gallant’s books, for instance, are just so good and terrible at the same time, and all I can say is that she gave birth to a baby that looks different from all the babies in the world.

 

A. M. Homes is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Unfolding; May We Be Forgiven, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and the bestselling memoir The Mistress’s Daughter. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation, and is active on the boards of numerous arts organizations. She teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Yiyun Li is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a PEN/Jean Stein Award, and a PEN/Malamud Award, among other honors. She teaches at Princeton University.