What drew you to write ‘But With Blood’?
‘But With Blood’ is, I think, about how history reaches through the present. I started working on it while I was in the Bay Area over Christmas/New Year, and the Black Lives Matter movement was raging. I was simultaneously side-line participating in a kind of political activism I hadn’t encountered before, learning a great deal from American friends who were more involved, and spending a lot of time in public libraries reading all I could find on the East Bay’s radical history. So it’s about people’s place in radical activism, it’s about race, gender, complicity, and allyship, and it’s about trying to find a way of thinking and being in today’s political climate that’s not totally hopeless.
Which nonfiction writer would you most like to have a drink with?
I suspect that my favourite nonfic authors are all a bit serious, busy, intimidating, dead, or currently practising sobriety. Also, I’ve learned by now not to expect my idols to do or say anything remarkable on the rare chance I have them cornered, because as human beings, that’s really not their job.
So I’ll go with James Franco (is he a nonfic author? Maybe he doesn’t qualify), whose cultural contributions to this world are, well, questionable, because I think he’d be entertaining. I’m sure he’d make an effort to remember my name and comment on my generic earrings, and that’s probably better than what might happen if I started spilling my drink all over Angela Davis or Renata Adler or Elizabeth Hardwick.
If we asked a friend of yours what you were good at, what would they say?
A true friend would say that I apply lipstick without a mirror very accurately.
Which nonfiction writers are doing the most interesting things with the form at the moment?
I think there’s a nonfiction renaissance happening in the States at the moment. Authors like Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, and Maggie Nelson, who have nonfiction books out with Greywolf, are just incredible, each in different ways. Hilton Als, who writes for the New Yorker and has a collection of essays and stories riffing on the concept of ‘white girls’ with McSweeney’s, has authored some of the most masterful essays I’ve come across in the past couple of years, and I return to them again and again. I’ve also only started reading Anne Carson this year, which is terrible, because she’s way ahead of the game, but her work in her hybrid nonfic form has been really influential. What these authors share is that they write in multiple forms: poetry, essay, fiction, journalism, criticism, scholarship. So maybe the brilliance of their nonfiction has something to do with the collapsing of these generic distinctions. The nonfiction style they all play with is a bit smartypants, a bit confessional; rigorous, but with feeling.
Who is guilty of greater crimes against literature: James Franco or James Frey?
Franco. Is that too mean?
Which book would be least likely to gain a place on your bookshelf? Diana Rajchel’s Divorcing a Real Witch: for pagans and the people that used to love them, John Howard’s Lazarus Rising, or Linda Sunshine’s Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons — a companion.
On principle I don’t want to eliminate any book from possibly one day sitting on my shelf, but the Linda Sunshine book, which I had to google, is apparently an illustrated companion book to the Dan Brown Angels and Demons movie? I can’t imagine having any purpose for this object in my life. Divorcing a Real Witch, though.
If you had to award a prize for nonfiction writing to one of these books, which would you choose? Anna Funder’s Stasiland, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Joan Didion’s The White Album, or Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
Oh, that’s actually difficult, and now I feel very sorry for prize judges; these titles are all the ideal versions of their own thing, and many of them have actually changed the culture in meaningful ways.
I’d have to say though that The White Album is so artful, and it made such a significant dint in both pop culture and in the formal conventions of nonfiction at the time, so I’ll give the prize to Joan Didion.