The Lightning Room with Bree Barton

 

–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

December author Bree Barton talks lust, secrets, spiders, and how she uses “fiction as a landfill for all the banal little happenings in my day.”

1. Your character is a ghostwriter, and so are you. How do experiences from your own life transmute when you write about them, and especially when you assign them to characters who might be entirely unlike you?

I hope this character is entirely unlike me, the poor schmuck. But of course the “you” in this story bears the marks of my own experience. I, too, ghostwrite books for a living. I, too, am driven mad by inconsistencies in hyphenation. I, too, have an intimate relationship with spiders (don’t ask). Sometimes writing a despicable character gives you more freedom in borrowing from your life; you can infuse him/her with your own troubling obsessions or rank desires. I’d much rather create an unlikable character than be unlikable myself. For me the real trick is to harness that transmutation and make it serve the story, rather than just using fiction as a landfill for all the banal little happenings in my day.

2. The line that turns the story does so much work: “Then you see the pound sign has grown legs.” The mechanical keyboard becoming animate, suggesting words taking on form and life of their own, words creating action. The narrative power of a spider as a symbol more than itself. Does that resonate?

It’s interesting, how different lines resonate with different people. I’m not sure I had any idea when I wrote that line that it turns the story, proof that sometimes writers are the absolute worst at analyzing their own work. But I think you’re onto something. I might add that the character makes multiple attempts to physically expel the spiders, and yet, in the act of expulsion, the spiders only gain more power. This seems like a fairly accurate mirror of the writing process. The more words I get out of my head and onto the page, the more power the words take on, until I am utterly convinced the story has a mind of its own.

3. What made you wait to reveal the narrator’s gender (when his boss calls him “buddy” in an identifiably bro-to-bro way) until almost halfway into the piece? I was really interested to find a narrator of indeterminate gender whose girlfriend was “asking you to fuck her, so you do, you fuck[ed] her like a freak show.” It left an open question for me even as I imagined the pornography that’s so influential to the narrator’s imagination–a refreshing change from mainstream porn which is so often circumscribed, scripted, performed.

Funny you should ask. I tried like hell to keep the character gender-neutral for the entire story. I was very interested in exploring a narrator of indeterminate gender, especially in light of the POV, as this is one of the gifts of second person: you are giving the reader a chance to read her/himself into the story. On a more ideological level, I am ravenous for stories from underrepresented perspectives. I recently read Frankie Thomas’s brilliant and nuanced “Equinox: A Spooky Queer Pagan Love Story” and it absolutely blew my mind.

So I spent a while combing out anything that threatened to give the game away, like the boss saying “Hey buddy.” I actually thought I’d done a pretty good job creating a gender-neutral character with some stereotypically male attributes—and then I got to the scene with the urinal.

That fucking urinal.

I realized then I had a character with a certain anatomy—and a girlfriend—so safe to assume he was probably cisgender. I think at some point when you’re writing a work of fiction, you have to decide if you’re just being coy. And the minute I catch myself massaging plot or characters into some kind of Message, it’s over.

On the subject of pornography: I think a lot about porn myself (form, not content) and also the way that gender—­especially femininity—is circumscribed, scripted, and performed. There’s a good bit of “the male gaze” in this story. When the spiders grant the first of the narrator’s three wishes, his hippie girlfriend is essentially transformed into a two-dimensional porn star: a girl who’s always down to fuck. And since we never see her through any gaze but his, we have no idea what she wants. (Sound familiar, women?)

Ideally in Act II, the hippie girlfriend gives him a good punch to the jaw and gets the hell outta there, because that dude is the last thing she wants.

4. Contemporary fiction is often characterized as being beyond morals or fables, functioning as a flat affect (think Tao Lin), or at the very least morally relativistic. Yet you’ve written a sort of allegory, in which the narrator hopes for “life to go back to the way it was, before the spiders started laying egg sacs that hatched into everything you ever thought you wanted.” How and when can fiction still instruct?

This is the embarrassing moment where I confess to never having read Tao Lin (sorry, Tao!). Can fiction still instruct? Sure. George Saunders’s latest collection comes to mind, particularly “Escape from Spiderhead” (again with spiders) and “The Semplica-Girl Diaries.” I found these stories beautifully haunting, not because of their otherness, but because the worlds the characters inhabit do not seem terribly far from our own. I think Saunders can get away with telling moralistic tales because he never sacrifices story or empathy in the process. Even his children’s book, while necessarily more pedagogic, is chockfull of compelling characters with a veritable axe to grind. Of course trying to imitate Saunders is like trying to imitate the sun. Believe me, I’ve tried.

5…and following the fable is another old-fashioned device: slapstick! I loved the revelation of the enema, which expunged any dignity (or sexiness) from the scene. How can we write to make these devices new and relevant?–or, how do you?

I still remember falling in love with Gogol as a college sophomore. My Russian lit professor caught me cackling outside the cafeteria reading “Diary of a Madman” half an hour before it was due. Who the hell needs dignity? Why can’t literary fiction be funny and bawdy and gross? It can be, of course, but I often find myself hunched over my laptop, intoxicated by the promise of pathos, trying to squeeze out dark, humorless, dour little tales. You know what else is dark, humorless, and dour? Turds.

Why can’t we have enemas in our fiction? shit? fucking? I’ve been sitting on that enema story for years now (no pun intended); it seemed like the perfect way to heighten the dramatic tension and the disgustingness of the story. The writing I most love eschews stale jokes and finds dark humor in unexpected collisions of the absurd. Julia Slavin’s “Swallowed Whole” comes to mind; it’s about a woman on fertility drugs who lusts after the teen boy mowing her lawn and ends up swallowing him whole. That story is a masterpiece—it’s poignant and hilarious. The kid is literally pushing on her organs the whole time, saying surly teenage things while she and her husband try to have sex.

6. At the end of the piece, the narrator’s body violently expels spiders and lust, but still his girlfriend’s “eyes are radiant with yearning.” Can you speak a little about the relationship between desiring and being desired—and maybe between writing and reading and wanting to be read?

I believe Cheap Trick said it best: “I want you to want me.” Don’t we all? The relationship between desiring and being desired is endemic to making art. I’d wager that most of us writer types burrowed into our books as kids, finding comfort and even salvation in those dog-eared pages, and here we are today, trying to write them. It’s exhilarating when we feel like people want to read our words.

But once we open the door to desire, it’s easy for our vision to become myopic. The narrator sees his girlfriend’s eyes as “radiant with yearning” because he wants to believe she wants him more than anything. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she wants the checkout guy or a freaking Coke. Maybe she wants a nap. And maybe you don’t want to read my story. Maybe you want a nap, too.

I loved Heather Havrilesky’s “How to Contact the Author” piece in Shouts & Murmurs this fall. It made me laugh and wince—such a clever take on the complicated relationship between writers and readers today, especially in the age of ubiquitous social media and over-sharing. Authors are not hiding away in woodland cabins anymore; they’re tweeting 100+ times a day. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.

What I do know is that we all want something. And at some point in your life, the wish-fulfilling spiders will crawl into your ears and give it to you. Maybe it will be lustrous and golden; maybe you’ll wish the spiders had never come. Just remember: there is always an enema in a purple box.