Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Jessica Alexander’s piece “Daughter” appeared in our April issue – below, she and Simon talk condition narratives, desperation, and volatility.

1. This piece is written as a series of twelve steps along the disappearance of a daughter. What is this the path to? Acceptance? Annihilation?

At the time, I’d coined this phrase “condition narrative” – and I was very proud of it – as in a physical or mental condition. I thought I was finished with events. Done too with characters and settings. I’d just write condition narratives. I’m no longer sure what that meant. I remember thinking a condition is a pattern, not a plot; a repetition, an obsession, or a personal discordance with public time or progress.

2. A sense of abject, frantic loss runs through this piece. I can imagine that things that disappear without explanation are much worse than those you watch vanish before your eyes (or perhaps it’s the other way around) – is this, do you suppose, a universal reaction to this kind of grief?

I have no idea. At the time, I was reading Bataille’s Visions of Excess and I was really struck by the violence of substitution. To me it seemed like he kept situating animals, planets, body parts in a space of impossible longing. So what interested me was not so much the disappearance of a thing, though that’s significant, but that space of impossible longing where objects are almost mythical. Continue reading →