I don’t think it would ever be possible for me to disentangle poetry and friendship in my life—friendship is so central to my composition and editorial process, and poetry is so central to basically all of my relationships.
Richard Scott Larson & Matt Lee
We often look into a mirror to check our appearance and make sure we’re presenting ourselves the way we want to be seen by others, and the memoir as a mirror allows us to control our self-presentation even as it also involves acknowledging our flaws, the things about ourselves that we can’t ever change.
I don’t know how I would feel if I read myself as a character in someone else’s work. It must be—what’s that feeling? Disorienting, maybe.
When it comes to indie music in Zagreb and Belgrade . . . those times were truly inspired. It was great to have a front row seat to all that . . .
In the course of living, are we acting? In the act of remembering, are we editing life? And when we first began to watch movies, did the act of watching films become the way we experienced our memories?
I think of [the Russian soul] as acknowledging our suffering, our collective suffering. I think of it as a connection point with other people. Exquisite pain. I think there’s also a perverse enjoyment of suffering. It’s like, there’s something kinky about it.
At a basic level . . . houses are like corsets for the characters to break out of; they are stuck exploring and returning and opening doors over and over until something within them or within the world is sorted out and overcome.
There was, for a time, genuine class mobility—jobs for people who really didn’t expect them, who pursued their studies out of burning interest—out of trust and faith in what they did not know.
Writing Snakeskin taught me to remain open to the world around me—honestly, a pretty important trait for any memoirist—and to allow meanings to shift.
The 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic narratives . . . essentially whitewashed the problem and privileged the lives of white gay men . . . Those narratives also infiltrated the publishing industry at the time: the only book-length narratives by a single author to have been HIV-positive, and probably later died of AIDS, were written by white, gay men.