Elizabeth Hall’s second book, Season the Rat, is a lyrical mediation on rats in Southern California, in which the rat becomes a metaphor for queer identity, desire and gluttonous wanting, and the search for love, home, and safety in places—Laguna Beach, once a queer mecca, or an apartment shared with one’s abusive ex—where one no longer feels welcomed.
Her writing is terse, specific, and sensual. Similar to her first book, I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, Hall’s literary sensibility is rooted in what I would consider her trademark heady mix of research and personal narrative. Whereas her first book was a love letter to the clitoris, her latest is a love letter to both her now-wife Heidi and to rats. If that seems like an impossible pairing, only Elizabeth Hall could draw out the romantic, murine metaphor of the rat and link the overlooked and uncared for rodent to love, queerness, and beauty.
Kristin Sanders: Let’s start with a little context: Season of the Rat starts in fall 2018, and I was living in California from 2016-17. I remember hearing about the rat in your apartment, and I recall your living situation—cohabitating with an ex and wanting to move out but the rents in LA were too high. Reading Season of the Rat brought me right back to the start of our friendship, ten years ago. When I look at the interview we did for Weird Sister, it seems so naïve and optimistic, talking about the clit lit tradition and me asking you, “Is there going to be a clit revolution?!” The next year, Me Too. And now so much has changed, which Season of the Rat speaks to: you’re in love, married to Heid, the two of you live in L.A. What’s your memory in general of that time?
Elizabeth Hall: I think, because it was also Trump’s first term in 2017, and my relationship had ended around the time of his election, and my partners’ reactions to Me Too were often misogynistic, that time period sometimes felt like the end of the world in a way that now doesn’t, despite all of the tragic things happening and continuing to happen. When I flew back to LA from New York for my book launch in February 2017, the travel ban protests were happening at LAX. I remember that vividly—the protests and the fight I got into with my ex on the car ride home
There’s also a lot of expectations you have for what publishing a book might do in your life. I was on this track through my 20s, probably to prove to my family that writing was valid, of wanting to publish a book by the time I was 30. Achieving that goal happened at the same time my life was imploding. It made me realize how much having any kind of artistic success doesn’t impact real things in your life the way you might think. The gift of my first book was the writing and research part, because those are the things that changed my life. Whereas having a book published had no impact on my life, other than I got to meet cool people like you. A lesson that I took away is that, despite things happening around you, deeply engaging in something like a research project is ultimately the rewarding part of an art practice.
There’s a line in Season of the Rat about the beauty of yearning: “What is happiness without the romance of the search?” That sounds like what you’re saying, but with writing: the yearning to be published, having your writing practice, and working on your book are often more pleasurable than the end result of publishing.
Yeah, absolutely. Wonder Press sent out a postcard and on one side it says, “Prayer is whatever you say on your knees,” and on the other side, “Yearning feels better than love change my mind.” I have that postcard on my fridge (but the knees part). Wanting is always going to be something that gives you more pleasure than getting what you want, because wanting is a state of anticipation. If you’re trying to chart hopefulness, being in a state of anticipation is pretty important. You have to pick things where attainment wouldn’t matter. If you go into writing a book and your goal is to get it published, but then you don’t, you might be disappointed. But if your goal is just to discover something new and be curious, and live deeply alongside another person’s thoughts, say, if you’re researching something, the pleasure will likely be greater.
Your two books are stylistically similar because you conduct research, you’re finding these facts that have been lost or forgotten or ignored, and you’re making connections between disparate things. Your books have a very recognizable style. But how do you feel you’ve changed as a writer since your first book?
For the New York book launch, I thought it would be full circle to read both from the clit book and the rat book. When I read from the clit book, I was surprised by how little of my own voice was in it compared to the amount of research. In Season of the Rat, there’s a lot more of me and my lived experience. In the clit book, the facts felt very exciting to me, and I didn’t have a lot of personal stuff to draw from because I had only had sex with one person. And I was very unhappy. So the book was a learning process: of myself, and that I wanted more or could want more from life. That dearth of pleasure is a testament to why I wrote the book in the first place. It’s telling that the only moments of pleasure in the book are masturbation or the thrill of research, which were my poles of pleasure back then.
With this book, I’m so much more of a fully formed person. I wrote the rat book in the early stages of being in a new relationship that was completely different from my past relationship, and that gave a new lens on the previous relationship. It was important to me to write it in the moment, to capture my actual sentiments, which is different from my approach with the clit book. When you first leave a partner who is abusive, you don’t immediately hate them. Many memoirs are written after a lot of processing has happened. I thought—what if I wrote the book in the moment where I still felt some sense of, not longing for this person, but I still grieved our relationship in a real and raw way. I have very different feelings now about everything. The very fact that I wanted to preserve that part of my emotional journey is a testament to me of how much I’ve changed as a memoirist, from the first book where I was dancing around the lack of lived experience.
How can we categorize Season of the Rat? It’s listed as literary fiction on Amazon but you’re talking about it as memoir. Is it autofiction?
Autofiction is the phrase I use. The book was originally intended to be a memoir, but I did play around with dates and composite characters, and that’s why it’s not fully a memoir. There is some shifting of dates. Technically, I met Heidi a little bit earlier, and there were women I dated in between Heidi. Stuff like that. But all the individual things that happen in the book are real, with minor shifts.
As a craft person, I’m fascinated that each of the different people so far who I’ve been interviewed by have categorized it differently. One person thought it was a memoir, one thought it was fiction. The very heavy noir vibes make it seem fictional. Fiction was my first love, so even when I’m writing memoristic stuff, a lot of the devices I’m using are more rooted in literary fiction than in memoir.
Do you think of this as a post-Me Too book?
It is post-Me Too by definition. But my decision to write about sex assault was incidental, because it happened. I was already writing about the queer bars, and the rat was already living on my roof, and then the assault happened. That was something I wanted to capture in the book, that sexual assault happens alongside every other annoying thing in your life. You’re assaulted, then you go home the next day, you make coffee, and there’s no milk in the fridge. Sex assault doesn’t happen in isolation. So I slotted it in alongside the things I was already writing, because I felt that was true of the experience of living after that had happened.
That’s powerful. There is also the element of you falling in love. But there is no explicit sex.
I was weary of having a neat bow at the end of the book. I did fall in love. But I didn’t want to go from a heterosexual assault situation to “now I’m having really amazing queer sex,” if only because that’s already such a common trope, women get burned and then suddenly have this amazing queer sex. I had quite a lot of bad queer sex, as well. It’s a myth. Connecting sexually can be challenging regardless, maybe you’re shy or don’t feel fully comfortable in your skin, all of the reasons that can cause different things to happen. I also felt the love was more important than sex, which could be a book unto itself.
You talk about being seduced by rats, becoming charmed through your research, and rats as romance. Do you feel writing is a type of seduction? Maybe rat-like seduction, in that we show our trauma and ugliness, and then turn that into something seductive. It makes me think of something you said to me years ago: “Beauty is boring. Ugliness is much more interesting.”
I don’t remember saying that, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would say because it’s so extreme. That’s very me to speak in extremes. But yes, I’m more attracted to ugly things. The aesthetic that attracts me is trash and discarded stuff. That’s the rat seduction.
For me, writing is in some ways a form of seduction because my practice started with diaries. In my teen years, when I started writing, I wrote to shapeshift my reality. I would write these journal entries, not to capture what had happened, but the version I wished had happened. That was a thing I did until the clit tour—some wild things happened on the tour where I felt I’m not benefiting from constantly romancing my life in this specific way.
I often wrote to seduce myself as a form of self-soothing, to make my life less sad. It makes sense that when an unpleasant thing came into my life—a rat—I immediately attempted not to necessarily solve the problem, but to make myself more comfortable with the problem. One of the things I discovered in writing the rat book was how I had this compulsion, this constant need to make reality more exciting or make my day-to-day life more tolerable. One way to do that is to find beauty in ugliness because there’s much more ugliness that abounds in the world than beauty. But you’re also making your own beauty.
I often see these images on Instagram that say “you have to romance your life, you have to fall in love with your life.” What you’re pointing out is the negative side of that.
Yeah. It can be a great thing, too. I see it on TikTok, people saying “romance your life, romance dillydallying.”I’m not surprised that romancing your life is big during recession times. It’s so recession coded. But it’s also a useful strategy.
You write: “I crave the buzz of the hunt. The romance of research. Details, minor histories, shards of human experience. When I hold what’s been lost or forgotten in my gaze, it feels like love.” That’s such a beautiful passage that applies to your work as a writer who scours the archives, and to rats, and to the queers of OC—everyone who has been “lost or forgotten.” And you write about Templeton in Charlotte’s Web, and connect him to the queer bars: “When I imagine what it might’ve been like to party as an openly gay man in Southern California in the 1970s, I imagine Templeton’s fair scene. A smorgasbord of bodies, powders, bottles, bathrooms where I can unzip a stranger’s jeans. In my dream, I’m Templeton rooting through the night with my mouth, awash in red lights.” What I love about your writing, in both books now, is your devotion to pleasure, sensual pleasure and also the intellectual pleasure of teasing out connections, building metaphors. Your books are deeply researched, smart, insightful—and then there’s this visceral pleasure that makes your writing a pleasurable experience for the reader, too. Do you think about pleasure when you write?
Yes, absolutely. It’s at the forefront of my mind, in part because writing, reading, and research is escapism for someone like me. Templeton, especially in the movie version, where the song comes from, “pleasure on the ground, all around, it can be found,” was such a visceral, formative image to me, the idea that pleasure and joy truly are anywhere. So even if all these horrible things are happening around you, there is still the pleasure of a piece of cheese. It really is that simple. When that cheese hits, it hits. I’m never going to miss a moment to steal a little joy.
In writing, too, so often the pleasures that are given in a book are drugs and sex. Those have both been big parts of my life, but I want to highlight all the other kinds of pleasures, a piece of graffiti you might see or a snatch of news copy or eavesdropping. Templeton embodies that idea of going out and finding random pleasure. But the other thing about Templeton is that we don’t know how much pleasure he’s getting from these things because we don’t get his interiority. We only see his bravado. Is he happy when he comes back from the fair? Was it a distraction by going out and getting this pleasure? Or was it something that gratified him? We don’t know, right? That tension is what really interests me about him.
Also, a big shift in me from the first book to this book, and in terms of how I view pleasure, is I’m less critique-focused and more into finding other ways of approaching the topic, other ways of engaging with history that aren’t just critique.
That critique is what we’re all trained to do in academia.
It’s the most common way to go about approaching something as an academic mind. It’s maybe even the least interesting approach to me now. One of the things I loved about Charlotte Shane’s newest book, An Honest Woman, is that it talks about sex work and does present unsavory aspects of it, but not through the lens of a critique. Most people would have been tempted to write a cultural history critique of sex work and then a balance of their own perspective. It was so refreshing that she dialed into, and dropped us into, her experience.
Another big shift in my mind is how much I now believe that experience itself is a great teacher. Of course everybody knows that, but I was someone who believed books were teachers. The idea that lived experience can be valid as a form of engagement in the world, that my own perspective is valid, is a huge change in my thinking.
I love that: books as teachers, but prioritizing your own lived experience and your own inner wisdom?
In a nutshell, that’s the difference between the two projects. The clit book is almost entirely other people’s ideas teaching me things. With the rat book, the research is woven alongside my experience because I was reading and researching those things, not because I was actively turning to them to replace my own thinking on things.
In 2019 you told me you were working on a cult memoir and “a queer history of Laguna and the OC.” When did you metaphorically connect rats and the OC queers, who were essentially forced out? Because it is the most brilliant analogy. How do you do that, make these leaps of connection that feel at once very detailed, a pinpoint of specificity, and also like broad, sweeping extended metaphors? You seem to luxuriate in the metaphor.
It’s an aesthetic approach that I like, that tickles my brain. With the rats, I was sitting in Orange County at one of the bars in the book, Woody’s By the Beach, which is now a Mexican restaurant, drinking a margarita with my friend, and I was like, “We’re just a couple of bar rats.” It was that single phrase, the bar rats. I was trying to make her laugh, but I kept thinking about it. Then I started thinking about how Orange County is perceived as so clean and yet, because of the manicured lawns and the privacy hedges and all of those things, they have more rats. If you have fruit trees, hedges, flowers, they love all of that. They don’t eat trash, they’re not attracted to dirty spaces. That was an interesting parallel, that this place you think of as being so pristine has this whole secret network of rat life happening that is imperceptible. Once you start seeing the telltale signs of rat abatement, the black boxes everywhere, it was a bonanza of rat abatement everywhere I went in Orange County.
In the book, you can really see the pleasure that you get from making these connections and then drawing the metaphor out through the length of a book. Do you do that in the writing process or editing process, or both?
Definitely in the writing process. I have trouble writing things that don’t please me. I write slowly towards the paragraph. When I finish a draft, it’s pretty close to where it’s going to be because I’ll work on a single paragraph until it’s ready to go on. Then editing is more about changing things that are redundant, punching up language, or rearranging things and making it more electric, as opposed to fundamentally shifting the content. The biggest shift that happened from the initial draft of Season of the Rat and the finished copy is that instead of the person who does the assault just being referred to as a “friend,” it’s very clearly the roommate, very clearly my ex-partner. I rewrote some of those scenes to be more authentic to the experience that happened. I feel if I wrote it now, it would be yet another book. I’m a big believer that you can write the same thing over and over. Someone recently was like, “You only get to write about your mom one time or you only get to write about your divorce once.” No, you can write about it eight times, and it can be different each time, because you’re a different person with each book you write.
Was it healing for you to write this book in light of that sexual assault?
Not really. A healing process takes place over a very long period of time. I had to continue living with that person after it happened. But being someone who was already well trained in how to deal with the after effects of sexual assault, from it having happened previously to me, but also with everything that had happened with my family. I felt really well prepared to handle it when it happened. It really just was an irritant. I mean, it was devastating from the fact that someone who loved me hurt me, but the actual assault itself felt like one more devastating thing among many. There are a lot of ways to be violated, and sex is only one of them. Class violation is also a huge thing. If LA had affordable living options, I would not have been in this situation to begin with. It’s important to remember that, yes, sexual assault is degrading. But so is having to fight to get my healthcare instated, or, when I was an AmeriCorps fellow, I was supposed to get SNAP benefits and had to fight tooth and nail to get them (never did receive them). Those things are also violent. I tried to create a world in which all of these things were happening at once.
After reading Season of the Rat, I saw a rat on the street in Paris and I felt affection and compassion for it. The whole book is shot through with this compassion for rats, a deep, metaphoric understanding of them. And the book ends on such a hopeful, positive note, because of love—this celebration of hunger, appetites, fear of change and fear of the future, recreating oneself nonetheless, becoming oneself, and recreating one’s sense of home. You write: “Our collective failures add to our knowledge of the most important of all art forms—the art of living together.” The art of living together, rats and all. People who are different from us and all. So going back to the world we’re all sharing today, and going back to my earlier questions: do you feel more optimistic having written this book?
The part you honed in on is a really key part of the book. The idea of living alongside is so much more important to me than living against. Another big shift in my thinking that happened over time is I really value connection. Connection is the number one thing that makes me happy in life. Whereas I used to try to be really disciplined about writing and reading, I now prioritize spending time with other people and cultivating relationships. For some people, those things have always been interwoven. They don’t need to go on a journey to realize connection matters. But I grew up in a very rural setting, without a lot of family. So it has been a newfound thing, influenced in many ways by seeing the strong connections that Heidi has with her family, with her friends, and being able to see the love she has, how it has shaped her life. And recognizing, oh, my life could have those things, too.
Wow, that’s beautiful.
It’s a little sentimental.
No, no, I love that. As writers we put so much pressure on ourselves. There’s always something to be writing or reading or submitting. It’s pleasurable and nourishing to have an art practice, but at the same time we have to find a balance.
Absolutely. I’m trying to find that balance. If you work a regular job, to be a writer, you have to work your regular nine-to-five and come home and do a second shift of—guess what, work—which is what writing is. I’m not one of those people who thinks work is going to set me free in life. I’m more of the ethos that my productivity doesn’t make me a human. As a writer, you can feel you’re going to fall behind. But you can have huge gaps between publishing books. If the book is interesting, people will want to read it. All that other stuff doesn’t matter. The product or the thing you produce and the experience that you feel while producing it to me is what matters.
Do you think, in a way, writers are rats? We’re everywhere, in increasing numbers, no one really wants us around, but it’s fun to know a tamed (i.e. famous) pet rat, and rats are “master archivists.”
I love that question. I definitely think writers are foragers, right? Writers do try to find things in their environments to sustain themselves. Whether that be food, novelty. You know, pack rats love novelty. They will take something because it appeals to them. They took a gold key from me one time. They’re curious. That’s something writers do as well, always searching the environment for something that might appeal to them.
And we’re all over in droves.
I love that. Nobody really wants us. I can’t agree with that more. Writers don’t have a great reputation in society. And, you know, rats are not that different from the clit. They are these little overlooked things that are literally everywhere. You can’t walk down the street without encountering a clit or a rat. So it doesn’t shock me that I wrote a book about another small thing that nobody cares about.
It’s very on brand.
Attention is love, right? Never more than now in society, the attention economy. Attention is how we can show love to things that are forgotten or overlooked.
Kristin Sanders is the author of CUNTRY, a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series, and two poetry chapbooks. Her work has been included in Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP), Longreads, Literary Hub, Columbia Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hobart, Bitch, Mississippi Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She is currently based in Paris.
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