I think that a lot of what I was trying to do in the book is to explore a sense of play within a knowledge that things probably won’t get better.
I was trying to capture something I feel very acutely in modern life, which is: if we don’t work intentionally at keeping connections and keeping people close, there is a drift.
The project became much more interesting to me as a novel, as satire, and as something with a lot of psychoanalytic dimensions, around the melancholic incorporation of voices of people whose politics we deeply reject.
I like that idea that forgetting can be generative. And I would add that forgetting is sometimes necessary to learning, to change.
The Lenin mummy has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for more than a hundred years now, after all.
If there is one place where one must not censor oneself, it is in art, isn’t it? If there is one place where there should be no social punishment, it is in art.
I find my poetics even more interested in situatedness than knowledge, and that’s why place became so important in the book as an organizing principle. Or like an active interlocutor and a site of convergence.
I feel at ease in male friendships and at ease in what some might consider male spaces. I hate men. I love men.
To me, the most sensational thing in life, the real trippy thing, is to realize that everyone you know, everyone you hang out with, everyone you’ve ever met: they’re all thinking at all times. To really know that, to really understand that is sensational.
What does it mean to have a fake novel? What does it mean to have a novel that’s thinking, aware of itself as a novel, and thinking about