Fiction writer and visual studies scholar Valerie Werder and I catch up over Zoom and across multiple time zones. She’s prepping for a busy semester of teaching and trying to mollify her very demanding black cat, who stares with her into the camera as we chat. I’m in the midst of a jaunt through Scandinavia, hanging with some friends in their Oslo apartment while they make pizza in the next room.
Despite the distance, our recent work interrogates some common questions: What drives us to steal? To become a thief? To get the things we want—physical objects, words, ideas—by taking them?
Valerie’s fantastic debut, Thieves, which recently won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, is an autofictional account of a young woman also named Valerie, who becomes romantically involved with Ted, a con man and criminal with whom she steals everything from steaks to lavish beauty products.
In my debut novel, Static, Paul, the musician at the heart of the book, also steals. He steals lunch by slipping a sandwich through the fly of his jeans. He lifts records from the shop where he works to flip for cash, and plots to steal a priceless collection from his wealthy bandmate to help his own family, who have fallen into financial distress. And, in a fever of creativity, he begins to steal (some might say “sample”) the voices in his life to produce the music he hopes will save him.
We wonder: For our characters, to what extent is stealing an attempt to fill a void and construct some semblance of self? To inhabit the physical body in a visceral way and feel well and truly alive? Over the course of our conversation, Valerie and I begin to hypothesize that perhaps, with our own personal thieving careers behind us (for now), writing is an attempt to do this very thing.
Brendan Gillen: I loved Thieves. It was inspiring, because, in a beautiful way, I think it’s a book of ideas. And as I’m sure as you’ve read with Static, it’s made of discreet scenes and fairly linear. Thieves is the kind of book that pushes me to engage with ideas in a more circuitous way.
Valerie Werder: Thank you for saying that. Actually, I found so many parallels between Thieves and Static, even though the forms the novels take are quite different. If we were to think of them as two different ways of taking the raw material of life and lifting parts from the ground of reality and into the realm of representation, it may be that the “lift” we perform is different, but the raw material is quite similar. We’ve got two young adults, both white, both American, moving from so-called Rust Belt areas—for Paul, the protagonist of Static, Ohio, and for Valerie, the protagonist of Thieves, the Western New York region. Both move to New York City, both engage in a lot of shoplifting, start working in creative industries.
In Static, we’ve got this hero who, by the end, is revealed to himself as being kind of an asshole. And there’s this moment in which he fesses up to it—like, “Yeah, I am an asshole.” He’s been lying and stealing and fabricating stories to the people that he’s trying to develop intimate friendships and relationships with. But, by the book’s conclusion, he’s utterly emptied of his stories. He’s utterly emptied of his lies. This is what made your choice to write a relatively traditional, linear narrative interesting to me. Because you’re developing a story—a fiction, a particular kind of lie—in which the main character is slowly being revealed to himself and everyone around him as a liar. And then, after all the stories collapse, after he comes clean about his lies—
What do we have left?
Exactly.
I think Paul was, throughout the novel, trying to fumble his way into re-forming the relationships that, at his core, he knows are important to him. And he’s been blinded by the pursuit of his music, and what he thinks success is. Static is not a metafictional text in the classic sense, but in some ways, I was talking to myself in terms of the pursuit of making art and writing this book and wanting to find an audience with it. Wanting people to engage with it and have it find a life. And I think Paul’s doing the same thing with his band, They Is, and his music, to the detriment of the relationships in his life, specifically his mother and father.
By the end, I think he’s come to realize—this might sound cliché—look: album deal or not, novel or not, debut film or not, job promotion or not, it’s your people, your family that will be there for you at the end.
And that dovetails with some notes that I made about—to your point about us having some similar clay that we’re working with—the notion of hard work and this traditional journey that we’re supposed to have gone on. You write: “And the point of college was to train and be industrious, get a good job.” I’m just so curious about whether or not that was a conscious part of your upbringing or for your protagonist, Valerie’s worldview. I think Paul’s family comes from a similar mode where, Whatever you’re doing over there? Shake out of it. You got to move on, you got to participate in this traditional system.
Absolutely. I burst out laughing in recognition at certain scenes in Static when Paul and his father were speaking. Like, “Yep. Okay, Dad. I hear you.” I’ve heard similar things from my own parents so often. I think we’re confronting another area in which the two novels deal with this same raw material. The difference between the two isn’t only in form, though, but also in genre. My work is autofiction, and so the answers I give to your questions swim in this middle ground—which I think is the only real ground, a kind of groundless ground—between fiction and reality. And, because of that, I’m so tempted in our conversation to conflate you with Paul, just because that’s the terrain I’m operating in—
Totally. And I’m not intending to conflate you and Valerie, or to push you to do so, because I know you’re operating in the autofictional mode.
No, conflate away! The thing is, this “work ethic,” or injunction to be productive, to orient yourself toward some future goal, is simultaneously and at its core an injunction to make something of yourself. To fashion a self, to fashion yourself into a self that you can be. So, treat yourself as the main character in a bildungsroman that is your life, that you have to actively create, but according to these very strict formal parameters: get this kind of job, have this kind of relationship, do X, Y, and Z at this particular age. There’s a real internal contradiction at the heart of this worldview that Valerie struggles with in Thieves: She has to make something of herself, but she can’t get “too big for her britches.” My parents used to tell me that so often! Don’t think you can escape the standard narrative, don’t have artistic or spiritual ambitions, don’t pursue fame or deep feeling or nontraditional relationships.
So, Valerie has this real confusion: What is she making in making a “self”? Who is she outside this self-fashioning, this fashioning of a standardized object that she nonetheless is? She’s adding lines to her resume, applying for jobs, achieving certain markers, and yet she never achieves the feeling of having coincided with the self she’s making. She never quite becomes “Valerie.” Instead, she keeps on getting more and more confused, forging all these masks and fictions and roles and lies and stolen bits of life, all of these means by which to assemble a face to wear, and yet none of them actually stick to her in a real sense. She never “makes it,” because she can’t quite form any real intimacy with the selves that she’s attempting to make.
And, of course, I’m Valerie’s author and creator, but I am also Valerie. I am writer and written, and I can’t disaggregate writing myself from being written by myself. So that’s why I said, “Conflate away!” Because, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to bring myself into being as a self, and also to destroy any such self as soon as it begins to cohere.
I’m curious, was stealing Valerie’s way to try to regain some kind of control over her life? Is that an attempt to put her feet on terra firma and feel alive? There’s a really visceral moment I love where you write about “the blood pulsing and pooling in her fingertips.” Is stealing her attempt to grasp solid ground?
I’m reminded of the pages early on in Static when Paul is wanting to recapture the thrill of first making music with Bunky, this “blend of yearning and possibility back when it felt like something, anything, might happen.” I wonder if we’re getting at something about the relationship between embodiment and yearning for the unknown. Possibility. Because, although you kindly refused to conflate me with Valerie, if you had assumed that, like her, I’ve engaged in some shoplifting, your assumption would have been correct. Yes, I have participated in a good deal of theft!
When I was trying to write the experience of pocketing something, I kept coming up against the fact that stealing is a moment in which you’re suddenly dropped squarely into your body. It’s a very visceral, present-tense thing. You can’t help but be precisely here. And this is why I bring up the passage in which Paul remembers the feeling he had when he and Bunky first began playing together. Stealing, playing music, and, for me, writing, when it’s going well, are all these moments of ecstatic sensorial overwhelm, of immersion in one’s body to such a degree that one ceases to be a self.
I love that. I’m never going to be the type of writer who can sit down for five hours and write. I think I’ve learned that about myself now. But if you can catch the wave, for lack of a better term, and really be in that moment, it’s such a beautiful thing. And I think that’s why we do what we do: to try to chase that pocket.
Paul and Valerie are both chasing it in stealing. Valerie’s chasing it in writing. Paul’s chasing it in music. Stealing, though, has a certain shame to it.
I want to talk about Paul’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Sara, particularly this moment around the middle of the novel, which was one of the most moving points in Static. You write about this gap that opens up, this kind of space of ease and possibility. It seems like Paul’s relationship with Sara was a space in which he was able to be totally at ease with himself, in his body, and he felt there was the possibility that this space or gap in time could extend forever. It’s similar to the degree of embodiment we get in the stealing scenes, in the scenes where he’s playing music, but it’s different in kind. Because with Sara, he’s achieving real intimacy. It’s not the thrill of transgression or the loss of the self in sensorial extremity. And Paul struggles so much with emotional intimacy in his relationships. I wanted to hear you talk a little more about this—what their relationship does for the narrative of the book, and also about the moment in which Paul realizes that, through the recordings he has of Sara playing, of her speaking, he can return, if in a mediated form, to this pocket of intimate connection. It’s nostalgic, maybe even a way of grieving—he’s able to both re-inhabit and grieve this space that they cultivated together, this space in which she no longer exists.
Thank you for saying that. That means a lot. The Sara character represents an amalgamation of different relationships of my own life, I guess. And you can’t help but think about what could have been. And also, this notion that Paul shares of, “Well, if I make this beautiful piece of art and send it across the cosmos, that somewhere she’ll see it, and she’ll, you know, love me or whatever.” God, that sounds gross.
But I think Paul is trying to reach across that threshold with his art, and he is stealing her voice without her knowledge to make this music that he believes in deeply. And it’s only because of her presence that he’s able to tap into sort of that flow or that pocket like we were speaking about before. But he can’t help but do it, right? He knows what he’s doing is without her permission. He’s stealing her voice. And I actually thought there were some real parallels to when Valerie is stealing or plagiarizing from an old Matisse catalog for some of the writing that she’s doing. This sense that stealing isn’t just about a physical object, of course, but also about stealing ideas and voices. And so, Paul is doing that. With Sara, with his mom, his dad, his brother, with his friend and competitor, and even with his coworkers at the record store. These are all the people in his life that he wishes he had intimacy with. And the only way that he knows how, at least right now, to achieve any semblance of intimacy is by weaving their voices into his music. Because that’s how he interacts with the world in an emotional way, through the music. At least for right now, until he’s able to grow the hell up and do that interpersonal work in real life.
Actually, the moment in which Paul has the impulse to steal Sara’s voice—I was really feeling for Paul in that moment! I wasn’t like, “Oh, damn, how dare you?!” Because he really is so longing to be able to see her and understand her, and to be seen by and understood by her—to be understood by her, I think, in ways that he’s utterly unprepared to communicate in language, or face-to-face. He can only gesture toward it in a mediated form. So, more than “the one who got away,” Sara embodies, for me, this person who Paul had so desperately wanted to communicate with, and who had desperately wanted to communicate with him, and now that they’re no longer together, this gap, this in-between that they once inhabited together, hangs in the air, utterly abandoned. It exists only as a kind of distance, an unnavigable space that keeps them apart.
And unfortunately, it’s too late for him in a real sense. The timing has to align, right? If you’re not in the space from a maturity level to be vulnerable or to trust yourself enough to share how you really feel with someone, then that connection is almost impossible. So, it’s almost like it has to happen with him and Sara for him to understand what it would take to develop that kind of relationship with someone in the future. You almost have to go through the shit to emerge on the other side.
Which makes me want to get to Ted as well. Literally, I just have a note that just says: Ted, explanation point.
Cool. Let’s go there.
Paul and Sara, Valerie and Ted—
Two very different relationships.
Yes, but I was trying to find some common ground because is there a part of Valerie that wants to be seen by Ted in a way that he is incapable of seeing her? Or is stealing her way of trying to develop an intimacy with him that she wants but might not be possible?
Yeah. As I was reading Static, it became clear that Paul was developing an awareness of this lack of true intimacy in his relationships, and that he was attempting to bridge that gap or divide in his music. And, by the book’s end, he begins a repair process. He’s apologizing, making amends, revealing himself to people—sometimes clumsily, sometimes beautifully.
Valerie never quite gets there. Or the problem she’s trying to navigate in relationships is a bit different. I think that, for her, beginning a relationship with Ted is really about wanting to jump ship from one story—the story she’d been living: the work ethic, the good student, the good girl, the good worker, this very specific American mythology—into another, also very American mythology: the story of the con man, the trickster or criminal who doesn’t have to work for anything, who steals and lies and cheats his way into the semblance of a success that Valerie has put in all of this narrative effort into becoming.
There’s something very glamorous, to Valerie, about the idea that she could just jump from one narrative arc to another. From a John Hughes film into Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands. I think that Valerie and Ted remain characters to each other. And yet, of course, real intimacy can also develop between two people as they articulate or co-construct a fantasy together, especially when that fantasy coincides with your life—when you’re living your life as a fictional narrative.
So, when Valerie realizes that Ted has to some degree been tricking her, as well, she experiences this utter collapse. It’s a real cruelty to her—she’s been trying to write herself into being as the main character of her life since her childhood, and she’s really attempting to find this self to inhabit in her relationship with Ted, and then she’s forced to confront the fact that she wasn’t writing herself at all. She was being written by Ted. And she wasn’t even being written as a main character. Like, “Oh god, I’m just a sidepiece, a side-character, someone who briefly features in this other narrative arc that I wasn’t even aware of.”
At one point, Ted says to Valerie, Not buying is the easiest way not to exist. And I’m wondering if that was the fundamental disconnect for them. For Valerie, stealing, writing, is a really visceral experience. And if Ted’s saying, well, you are off the grid if you’re stealing and you’re not leaving a trail . . . I’m curious if that rings true at all.
One key distinction between Valerie and Ted is that Valerie has an ambition to create. She wants to create a self, she wants to write, she wants to touch something real, although she can’t quite define what that word means. She still wants for the real to be of her own making. Ted, though, is primarily invested in evasion. I think that his primary goal is avoiding himself, rather than creating a self.
For some reason, I’m drawing a parallel here with Static, and particularly Paul’s relationship with his brother, Will. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship? Because Paul, himself, and the people with whom he’s attempting to form relationships outside of his family, they’re all people who are deeply invested in making music, in creating. They’re overwhelmed with feeling and with a sense of immersion in the sensory flow of life, and they need to somehow digest it and externalize it into some representational or aesthetic form in order to feel right, and to connect with other people. Now, this need for an emotional outlet, this desire and yearning, can be corrupted into careerism, superficial ambition. But it’s also a very genuine desire, I think, of wanting to fashion a relational sensory space. A space where someone else might join you and say, “I feel this way, too.” And yet, at the end of Static, these aren’t the feelings and spaces and relationships that Paul finds himself returning to. He returns to his parents, to Will.
I don’t think I set out to make Will a villain necessarily, but he does represent someone who is at the stark opposite end of the world that I inhabit emotionally. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t listen to music. He is like, I do what I do. I make a check. I put food on the table for my family. Hard work is a means to an end. And I think I was interested in the value that our capitalist society does or doesn’t put on creativity, especially when people believe in it so deeply and want to express themselves and be vulnerable through their art in a world that doesn’t always make room for it or appreciate it or even understand it.
So, I think Paul is trying to close the gap of understanding. He’s trying to come to terms with the distance that will probably always to some extent be there, but also to try to be empathetic in a way. To begin the process of understanding. Because maybe his parents and his brother aren’t willing to or aren’t ready yet to make their way towards him. He’s going to have to come to them.
So, a blunt question: What were you stealing? Was this book a fairly accurate representation of your own thieving?
Ha! Yes, it’s a very accurate representation of my own thieving. I was laughing out loud at some moments in Static, because it’s set in New York City, and I’d think, “Yep, I know that bodega. I’ve stolen sandwiches from that exact fridge.”
I don’t shoplift anymore, though. After publishing Thieves, I realized that shoplifting and writing and constructing masked versions of a self in this way left me circling around a kind of constitutive void. And that another way of fashioning a self might be to do what Paul does, or attempts to begin, at the end of Static: saying to oneself, listen, I need to take accountability for the stories I’ve created, for the people I’ve roped perhaps unwillingly into my stories, for the ways I’ve misrepresented myself. I want to figure out what honesty might mean to a fiction writer, and I want to attempt to live that.
What about you? What’s your relationship to stealing? How much does your thievery overlap with Paul’s? Do you still steal?
Valerie in your novel starts shoplifting at eleven, which struck me, because I’m working on a manuscript now about a kid who’s eleven. And I think there’s something about that age that is very vulnerable. You’re not quite a kid anymore, but you are still interested in childlike things. You also see the horizon of teendom and the grownup world. There’s something very confusing and exciting about that age period.
But my stealing career, if you could call that, started a little later, and it revolved around music. I had summer jobs and stuff, but records and CDs cost money. Especially at the time, late-nineties, a CD was twenty bucks or whatever. I loved music. I wanted it. I had to get my hands on it, and the only way to get your hands on it was to take it.
And this is early in your book, page five, this brilliant notion that when you’re stealing you can buy something small as an offering to the economic system you’re cheating. And for me, that resonated so hard, because often what I would do, and Paul does this in the book, is go to the used section and find a dollar record and slip a more valuable record inside it. I did that all the time, and that’s how I got a lot of valuable shit.
But it was less of me contributing economically I think, than it was about me trading on the spiritual bank because I was raised Catholic, and there was just an enormous sense of Thou shall not steal. And here I was, But it’s not really stealing if I’m paying for something, right? I’m assuaging my own guilt and shame in some way. Maybe I’ll get thirty-five Hail Mary’s instead of fifty or whatever. I’m a reformed Catholic at this point. Or lapsed or whatever you want to call it. No longer practicing. But that shit is deep. And I stopped because I got caught. One day I slipped some CDs into a case that was not meant to hold them, and the clerk had the wherewithal to check, and he just eviscerated me with this look like, You dumb ass. I left with my tail between my legs, and I just sat in my car, sixteen or seventeen years old, and I was like, I got caught. What the fuck am I doing? I feel like shit. I’m an asshole. So, it was his look that did it. It was just a deep disappointment in me as someone who he didn’t even know.
Did you get caught or was it really an internal moment that you had?
Oh, it was an internal moment. An internal reckoning. Much later than the age of sixteen, though!
That’s a real sign of self-interrogation. I think that says a lot about someone who is trying to inherit or establish a self, right? You’re going through the process of growth in real time. And I think for me, if I didn’t get caught, I don’t know that I would be a career shoplifter necessarily. But without that, I don’t know . . .
But Paul does come to this moment of internal reckoning. He does choose to confess to Bunky of his own accord. That’s absolutely a decision he didn’t have to make. So, perhaps you didn’t have that yourself, but you did write it into your character. You gave him what you couldn’t give yourself.
I’m curious as to what you’re working on now. Could you tell me a little about what you’re writing?
Yeah, I’d love to. I have a manuscript that I’m running through the querying traps right now, a literary coming-of-age novel about an eleven-year-old kid. His infant brother drowns in the bathtub, and his mother and father are grappling with their responsibility. And so, it’s interrogating questions of masculinity at that age. What does it mean when your dad tells you to be the man of the house and to look after your mom when you’re eleven, and what does that do to a kid?
What about you? What are you working on?
I’m finishing up my PhD in the next year or two, so I’m working on my dissertation right now. It’s about police bodycam footage, about the whittling of state violence into an audiovisual first-person perspective. More broadly, my argument is that handheld smartphone footage, police bodycam footage, even POV pornography are all ways in which an I or subject-function emerges in audiovisual discourse. So, in a strange way, the dissertation grapples with some of the same formal questions that Thieves does, but in a scholarly voice. Aside from that, over the past few months, I went through this intense period of textual germination in which I began two different novels, but one of them is literally just eight spiral notebooks in a suitcase under my bed, and the other is a bunch of fragments and scenes and documents on an external hard drive. Now that I’ve compiled these two archives, I won’t look at them for a few years. The projects need to ripen and mature without my meddling. I trust that they have their own life, their own way of growing, and that I need to shift, too, into the next form of Valerie in order to become the person who will write them.
Valerie Werder is a writer and recovering art worker who uses autofiction and multimedia performance to navigate questions of consent, complicity, and institutional transparency. Her debut novel, Thieves (2023), was winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, and her work has been published in Public Culture, BOMB, Necessary Fiction, and Flash Art and performed at Participant Inc, New York, and Artspace New Haven. Werder is a doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University, where she researches the intertwined histories of audiovisual technologies and the US criminal legal system. She is currently a 2023–24 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Mentor, and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with a black cat and hundreds of books.
Originally from Charlottesville, VA, Brendan Gillen lives in Brooklyn and earned his MFA at the City College of New York. He is the winner of the 2023 Wigleaf/Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction and his short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. His fiction appears in the Florida Review, Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, Necessary Fiction, and many other journals. Static is his first novel. Brendan is also an Emmy-winning writer/director at Boomshot Productions where he has developed films and content for ESPN, Condé Nast, BBC, Fox Sports, the US Open, Resy, Anheuser-Busch, NASCAR, FanDuel and other global brands.
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