Elissa Schappell is a powerhouse, an amazing writer, and also very, very funny. She's Vanity Fair's Hot Type book page editor, a senior editor at The Paris Review, she co-founded Tin House where she is now editor-at-large, and her amazing debut, Use Me was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. I raved about Blueprints for Building Better Girls in the Boston Globe, and it's now available in paperback. Buy it now. Trust me. You need this book. I'm so jazzed and honored to have Elissa here on my blog Thank you, Elissa!
Society has always proffered, nay,
dictated, rules of conduct, since the first time a cavewoman was grabbed by the
hair in front of the neighbors and questioned, Do I make a fuss, or not make a fuss? Should I invite them back to the cave to share our mammoth shank?
I do think good manners are important.
In that regard I take Emily Post’s point of view that, “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of
others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter
which fork you use.”
You may
damn the forks, but you should, no must, say Please and Thank you, and Pardon me,
and Please take my seat, and It’s fine I wasn’t using my left foot anyway.
Rarely have I regretted not being polite in a social situation. There are, of
course, certain situations where rudeness is not only acceptable it’s demanded.
As to the blueprints for women, I’d start
with: Don’t Give Away Your Power, and
If You Wait for Someone to Give You
Permission to Be Yourself You’ll End Up A Nobody.
There’s a whole list for men too, but
I’ll start with: Don’t Tell Girls It’s
Cute When They Get Mad, and Don’t
Rape People
I loved and deeply admired the
structure of the book, linked short stories, where the same characters would
sometimes re-pop up.
I’m so glad. I love this structure too.
Only recently have I come to terms with the fact that at my core I’m trans. A
proud trans-structural writer. People always ask when I’m going to write a
novel—like, When are you going to grow up and get serious? Get a real job. As
though the pinnacle of achievement is the traditional novel. Preferably one of
those two-hander, he-man-sized doorstops.
I’m mad for linked-story collections as
a reader because they deliver the pleasure of a story—a contained world with
beginning middle and end—with the gift of the novel, a unified landscape of
characters and storylines joined in a larger web of meaning.
The form speaks to the way I
think—which is far from linear. As well as my abiding desire to capture those
transformative experiences in our lives, big or small that make us the
individuals we are.
Having the characters appear in each
other’s stories whether directly or indirectly was appealing to me because
that’s the way life is when you socialize within the same social strata,
there’s overlap. We exist on the peripheries of each other’s stories without
even being aware of it. Sometimes we are characters in other’s people’s minds
or memories, and sometimes we simply occupy the same space.
I wanted to highlight the ways women
judge each other on the basis of looks, a pre-conceived notion of who they are,
or what we’ve heard about them. In truth we have no idea what we might have in
common with someone else, or how other people suffer.
One of the nice things about having the
women pop up in each other’s stories is that reader knows them in a way the
other characters don’t. We know their secrets, while the other players in the
story don’t. (I love this as a reader) That intimacy between reader and
character bonds them the way people who know each other’s secrets are bonded.
Plus, by getting to see the characters
through a different lens, from another angle, at a different time in their
lives challenges the reader to consider the judgments they made about them, and confront
their own biases and prejudices.
Your brilliant novel Use Me, was also
linked stories, but it seemed more to focus on just one character, so I wanted
to ask, were there any problems or surprises in doing linked stories? Did you
end up preferring one form to another?
I hadn’t intended to write linked
stories. I loved Alice Munro’s “The Beggar Maid” and Elizabeth Tallent’s “Time
With Children” I fairly worship Grace Paley’s
work and the recurring character of Faith, although her stories aren’t linked
in a chronological narrative. Still, I hadn’t considered it--obviously this was
pre-Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Jenny Egan’s Goon Squad--I was just
doing what I always have done which is write the stories that I wanted to,
needed to write.
It wasn’t until my agent pointed out
despite having different names my main character was always the same person (I
thought by changing the names perhaps no one would notice) and when you laid
all the pieces out—it was almost like a scrapbook—the trajectory
of the stories was clear.
In Use Me I
wanted to tell the story of how one young woman’s sense of identity was shaped
by the love and loss of her father and on a larger scale how a woman’s sense of
power, her sexuality and ability to form intimate attachments with men, are
related to their relationships with their fathers. What was surprising to me
was that as I was writing that book, which is episodic in nature again like
postcards or photos capturing the pivotal moments in Evie’s coming of age—I
kept hearing another voice, a Catholic school girl who was in love with her
abortionist. This young woman, Mary Beth would become the other point of
character in the book. (The only
other time this voice insisting on a story has happened to this same degree was
in Blueprints when I started hearing the voice of Bender.) Unlike Evie,
Mary Beth, in the absence of a good father has a very different power dynamic
with men.
In terms of
Blueprints for Building Better Girls I wanted to write about a range of
universal female experiences and female archetypes, subverting the reader’s
expectations and pre-conceived notions of who these women are. The cast of
stereotypes: the good mother, the bad mother, the slut, the party girl, the
good girl, the bad girl, the good wife, the artist. The structure can be seen
as a sort of etiquette or anti-etiquette book as the stories all address the
way our cultural mores influence women—what is valued, what is considered
appropriate behavior, what is attractive—and how these messages inform our
sense of self. Each story is a reflection or response to the image we have of
these female stereotypes
Belinda, one of the characters, says,
““Everybody forgets who they used to be, and they become better people, even
though inside they’re exactly the same.” Do you think there is ever really a
possibility of change on a deeper level? (I’m afraid of the answer).
I do think there is the possibility of
change on a deep level, if one wants it bad enough. No, you can’t change where
you come from or what you’ve done, but you can change how you choose to look at
it. You can grow out of that. At the risk of sounding like a goof ball, your
past is the seed, you are the flower. That said, on some cellular level I am
very much the girl I was at thirteen—in fact I am more like her now than I was
twenty years ago. I am passionate and I want to change the world, I think I
can, in some way change the world.
You are taking the pulse of modern
America, from discontented moms on the playground to women who are struggling
to become moms (discontented or not) to young women with eating disorders, in a
wickedly funny way. Do you find yourselves always watching people and
situations?
Always. Like all writers I am continually
registering information. Having a writer in the family is like having an
assassin at the breakfast table. It’s no different with friends and
acquaintances, which may explain why—after the last book—I’m not getting
invited to as many parties. While I am writing about experiences that are not
necessarily my own, I hope that I am doing so in a way that feels truthful and
empathetic. No matter how unlike me a character is, I hope I never write about
them in a way that suggests they’re a stranger to me.
You’re also the co-founder of Tin
House, the ravishingly great literary magazine, and you write the Hot Type
column at Vanity Fair. So, when do you sleep?
I don’t sleep. Or not often, and when I
do—whine, whine--it’s poorly. That’s something I have to learn how to do. Seriously.
Actually, the question is what’s your
daily writing life like?
My whole life I’ve struggled with
organization (perhaps that’s clear from my answers here?) were I not to
organize my writing life I would spin out of orbit and do nothing but careen
through the universe, shooting out sparks and clouds of dust. Which I did for years.
What works for me is to break down my week thusly—Monday’s I scheduled
appointments, lunch dates, shop for food and sundries, what have you. If I’m on
deadline, I’ll write once this is accomplished. Tuesdays are wholly dedicated
to teaching, again if on deadline, I’ll work at night. Wednesday through
Friday, I’m in the studio writing. Mornings are dedicated to fiction—I have to
start as early as possible to beat my super-critical ego out of bed, and lock
the door. In the afternoon I work on non-fiction. Saturdays and Sundays I try
not to work unless I’m on a roll or absolutely have to. You know as a writer
you can work all the time, you can convince yourself that you must. (I have a
dread fear of being thought lazy.) However, what I found was that when I went
into the weekend thinking I was going to get to write, I was resentful when I
couldn’t find the time because I was with the kids or doing something else
around the house. And when I was writing on a Sunday I felt guilty for not
hanging out with my kids. I longed to be with them but thought, No you can’t. You have to work. This way
everyone wins. As they’ve gotten older and have their own plans and lives on
the weekends it’s easier for me to work, should I really desire it, or have to.
I do also want to ask, since I’m also a
book critic, how you feel reviewing books has impacted your own work.
It’s made me a harsher critic of my own
work. I can be rather thinned skin--imagining a writer/critic reading my work
as critically as I read theirs--makes me reluctant to publish anything before
I’m certain it’s perfect. I’m not about to publish a book—which is really the
equivalent of sending poorly lit naked pictures of yourself cleaning the
tub--into the world, until I’ve fixed every flaw I can see.
On the flip side I hope that being an
author has made me a better critic. I know how hard it is to write a book, so I
go in rooting for the writer to win. It’s why I never review anyone’s work I
don’t care for.
(Personally, I find being able to
figure out what works and why and what doesn’t and how it could be fixed,
really helps me in my own work. Is that the case for you?)
Absolutely. I find reading other
writer’s incredibly instructive and inspiring. And yes, I can always see how
someone else might improve their piece, but rarely can I see the flaws in my
own. Oh that stories were tires you could just immerse in water, and follow the
bubbles to find the holes.
What’s obsessing you now, and why?
As you know if you ever go to my
FaceBook page or read “The Weeklings” online, I’m fairly obsessed with the war
being waged against women by the GOP. Once I’d have written, “radical
Conservative right wing of the GOP” but they are in the majority now, and while
they’re radical—in terms of extremism, they aren’t radical in relation to the
majority views of the Republican party.
I’m also obsessed as it were with the rising acceptance of rape-culture,
this idea that rape really isn’t that big of a deal. This despite the fact that
1 in 4 college girls, and 1 in 6 women will be the victim of rape of attempted
rape. The majority of these women ages 12-34, will be assaulted by someone they
know. The victim shaming and blaming is something that angers me greatly.
So, yes, that, that has me a bit
obsessed.
What question should I be mortified that I forgot to ask?
Darling, I think you’ve covered it all.
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