Writing this I thought a lot about the way Bennett is being marketed in the US: the bizarre Internet-novel cover they’ve given this book and the whole idea that the defiantly Emersonian, curmudgeonly Bennett has finally written her version of a romantic book. What I like about Bennett is what is totally anti-modern and uncategorizable in her books. Pond is like a hallowed alien artifact.

The other piece, out online today, is a profile of eclectic photographer Talia Chetrit for Art in America. This was my first time writing a profile, as well as my first time writing for this type of magazine, one that feels somewhat more brisk and news-oriented. Meeting Talia was a great pleasure and I had the sense of encountering an artist with the kind of ruthless laser focus I aspire to. Something she said to me—”I could make my work from anyone’s negatives”—has infected my ideas about perspective and artistic drive. I couldn’t resist discussing this phrase with my revision students in November. I love this conviction, which seems necessarily imported from a visual medium, that raw material is arbitrary, and that we make our work through a process of relentless selection.

Talia took this self-portrait as a teenager. This picture of Alex Consani, this “bottomless” picture, and this picture of two friends (also taken when Talia was a teenager) are some of my other favorites.

I hope you encounter so exciting a mind this season, and if you do, let me know… I need some holiday reading.

xx

My new novel, WOMEN & CHILDREN, is on its way from Riverhead & Faber. TRAVESTY came from the world of this book and I’m excited for you to encounter the full expansive landscape of Prima, Heiss, Fernanda, Anne, Caroline, & Aaron (!!)…

The epigraph for this novel comes from one of my favorite books—and the book that lent HIGHER GOSSIP its title—Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives:

Like the aged Lear handing over his kingdom to his daughters, when we resign power, or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. Perhaps that is what love is—the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.

Can you imagine a tastier morsel?

More soon xx

This piece is about why I think our thinly-veiled, ubiquitous fear of porn is a bit lazy and confused. Here’s a taste…

Popular porn is almost entirely made up of videos in which people are allegedly coerced into sex they very much desire and enjoy, but which they are not supposed to desire or enjoy. (There is plenty of violent nonconsent porn out there, but that isn’t the stuff of the front page.) Stepsisters seduce stepbrothers, daughters seduce fathers, roommates seduce each other’s girlfriends, and men and women find themselves reluctant and then elated participants in unexpected orgies; all of these situations are merely quick signifiers for “forbidden thing.” If it’s about anything, the most popular porn is about the experience of being witnessed saying, No, no, that’s not me, I would never, and then receiving gratification that is all the more intense because you’re blameless—the sex is something that just happened to you. This paradigm is gender-agnostic. There is enormous traffic on the front page in point-of-view videos of men being seduced by women with whom they have some taboo relation and succumbing to her desire “despite themselves,” only eventually admitting that they really wished for it. The vast majority of popular porn is playfully coercive. Desire must be hidden until it explodes into view. To consider these playfully coercive setups inherently nonconsensual or degrading is a deliberate misreading of this profound, ubiquitous desire, which must haunt every puritanical and sex-negative society: to disavow what we want and still get it.

You can read it now… as well as the rest of this excellent issue.

Also: I’m teaching a month-long class on revision this fall at The Center for Fiction, using the great Emmanuel Carrère as our style guide. I’ve never taught revision or Carrère before; this is the class I want to take right now, essentially, and I think it’ll be really generative and fun. If you’ll be in New York/Brooklyn in November, sign up.

More soon xx

Would you look at that font!!

An excerpt from the novel I’m currently working on is in The New Yorker this week. It’s a story set at Columbia, and this is a special NYC-themed double issue (with a great essay from Lena Dunham, a sprawling poem by Anne Carson, etc…!). “Travesty” involves professors, students, indiscretions, accusations, and my favorite New York stoop, St. John the Divine. I need to thank not only Deborah Treisman but also my secret stealth editor, Dan, and my #1 reader, Parker.

TRAVESTY in TNY

A conversation about it!

I hope you like it. More is coming, in novel form, whether you like it or not…

More soon xx