I have an agent for my novel, Happy. He is kind of a bigshot, so he will remain nameless, for the time being. But the point here is that I had a dream this morning that I ended up in a nightclub that was like DNA, and I saw him, and he was this crazy rock star on stage with a giant black mohawk, and his backup singers were the Vivid Girls. I turned to whomever I was with, and I was like, "Wow, I had no idea." He looked like Edward Scissorhands. I was impressed. I have no clue what all that adds up to mean, except to say the dream was rather pleasant. In any case, I am supposed to finish my novel by the end of the summer. Which is fast coming. I guess I better hurry the fuck up.
Writing isn't easy. Probably, I could write that line a million times, and that would say better whatever it is I'm trying to say. I'm working on my novel. The title is Happy. It was born out of my experiences in Porn Valley. It isn't easy. Not only is it hard to write, but I don't know what to say about it, so I say not a lot. Writing is crazy-making. Writing about these things made me crazy in the past. At this point in the story, my main character is going crazy, and that means it's like he and I are on a seesaw, and sometimes I'm up and he's down, and sometimes I'm down and he's up, and it's a lot like a battle, and nobody knows who wins in the end.
It's about pink salons, soaplands, and geisha bars. It's psycho-noir, apocalyptic tomorrows, dogs in nightmares. It's the story of waterboarders and whales, IEDs and pornography, Happy and Chance. I read an interview in I can't remember where with an author who had written a mystery, and the interviewer asked about the ending of the story, and the writer said something to the effect of why would he have written the book if he'd known what was going to happen in the end? Writing is like walking down the street blindfolded, and you're being led by a blind man.
Did you know Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks? On a turned over wheelbarrow? Working nights at a power plant? True or false? Does it really matter? When it comes to putting words on paper, what's made up is more true than what's real. Faulkner: "Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain." When you write blind, the words spill out on the page, and you can't help but see yourself.
What's this book about? The more I write, the less I know. Porn? I doubt it. Death? Maybe. PTSD? Suicide? Insanity? Yes, all that, too. But I don't know. In a way, I guess you have to turn a blind eye to it while you do it. Otherwise, you trip yourself up on your own psychoanalysis, the blind man leaves, and there's nothing left but you and the yawning chasm of the white page.
I am sure of one thing. Writing is lonely. The loneliest.
I spent part of this weekend working on my novel, Happy. It's based on my experiences in Porn Valley. Writing this novel has been a most unusual experience. Previously, I would say that I was at the helm of everything I'd ever written. This time, it feels like my main character is a tiny man driving a little car, and I am following. As a control freak, I wouldn't have liked the sound of that going into it had I known what was coming. But when it works for a writer, you don't ask too many questions. You just shut up and go along for the ride.
Yesterday, I came across a great review, "Speaking the Unspeakable," of Kathryn Harrison's new nonfiction book, While They Slept, written by Robert Pinsky for the New York Times Book Review. Harrison is best known for The Kiss, a memoir in which she recounted her adult incestuous relationship with her father. In While They Slept, Harrison focuses on the true story of Jody Gilley. When Gilley was 16, her 18-year-old brother Billy murdered their parents and 11-year-old sister.
Harrison writes about writing the unwritable: "People who cross the threshold between the known world and that place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey their experience. Some of us don’t talk about murders or intergenerational sex within our families. We find words inadequate, or we lose them entirely. Those of us who insist on speaking what’s often called unspeakable discover there’s no tone reserved for unnatural disasters, and so we don’t use any. We’re flat-affect; we report just the facts; this alienates our audience."
Writing about porn--or, really, sex, for that matter--is near impossible. Whatever one says in the act is more often than not secondary to the act itself, and if we write of sex, what can we say of it? The danger is falling into the gap between words and that which they seek to represent, never to return. Pinsky, whose many works include a translation of the The Inferno, ends with the hope writing will save us: "the daylight gaze of narrative itself as a form of empathy." Sometimes writing is like walking an imaginary tightrope between two invisible skyscrapers. It's hard to know if you're flying or falling, saying something or speaking in tongues, drowning or surfacing.
I'm written the first 40 pages of my porn novel, Happy, and it's coming along. I've been calling it a "porn novel"--even though it isn't, not really, anyway. I guess that's my shorthand way of saying "a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley."
The first section focuses primarily on Xerxes Xavier, the novel's main character. He's 34. He was born and raised in Arlington, Virginia. I've been redacting his occupation, although if you read this blog you may be able to figure out what he does from previous ruminations. Suffice to say, he lives in Virginia for a reason. Of course, the story takes him to Porn Valley, which is another world, and story, altogether.
In the second section, the lens pulls back a bit, beginning to interweave the stories of other characters, among them William Randolph Hearst IV, who is the editor in chief of the San Francisco Times, and Lucy, who is a reporter. Lucy, I suppose, is me. But Xerxes is me, too. So it's hard to say.
Sometimes, I think the novel is about the death of my father. Sometimes, I think it's about love. Sometimes, I think it's about madness. All I know is that the scene I wrote today stars a French midget chanteuse. And what is one to make of that?
I've got more to write--about waterboardings, flashpoints, suicides.
So, I worked on my novel, Happy, some more, and now the first 30 pages are done. Like a Brit boy with a biscuit, I quite fancy it. It's coming out pretty well-formed, which is nice, and not a mess. Xerxes is the main character. He took a trip to Barstow. I love the desert. He drank too much. I didn't. The only part of it that's missing something is a poker scene in Vegas where I don't know quite what the cards should be.
I'd like to post an excerpt from it, but I suppose I shouldn't.
Well, I wrote the first twenty pages of my novel. The one I restarted the other day. This is very different from all the rest. (Oh, aren't they all?) It's got Xerxes Xavier, now a Jr., and he keeps moving, so I keep following. He's pretty endearing. He started on the top of the Hollywood Hills, found a place to live at the base of Kagel Canyon, took a road trip out to the Mojave Desert. Sometimes, I have to run to keep up with him.
There's also a little girl. And a porn star. And a Happy Darling who doesn't remember who she is. Go figure! And a lot of waitresses. And a black woman named Chanterelle. And a landlord named Jesus. And where all these people came from, I don't know.
Writing is lonely except when you're in love with your main character.
In "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," Lori Gottlieb's controversial polemic on what the hell love has to do with marriage (not a lot, she says), Gottlieb opines: "Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." Maybe she's right. Maybe she isn't. I don't know. But I will say that the same could be said of writing. My paraphrase: "Writing isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a series of very small, mundane, and often boring acts undertaken in service of a business that rarely turns a profit." Maybe writing is like a marriage, one in which you can never quite make out what your spouse looks like. Or maybe writing is like a religion, one in which the true believer waits for a god who shows himself only through inscrutable signs. Yesterday, I had a fit over my novel-in-progress, Happy. I suppose this was inevitable. I am nothing if not an undoer. Luckily, the Harpoonist, a writer and book doctor, was there to help. Like an expert surgeon, she grabbed a scalpel and began slashing at the book on the operating table before her. Happy thanks her for the intervention that brought it back from the dead. If you are a writer whose book needs doctoring, I recommend the Harpoonist highly.
Update: I woke up for some reason at 2AM and was eating some potato salad in my pajamas when I found that Time.com has declared the Reverse Cowgirl one of the "best blogs in the world" in their 2008 Top 25 Blogs First Annual Blog Index, and I'm their choice for sex blogger. Gulp. A big thank you to whatever closet pervert at Time managed to pull that one off. You are awesome. I'd send you some porn as a thank you, but I don't have any. Sorry! If you're interested in reading Letters from Johns, it's here, and Letters from Working Girls is here, and the story that I wrote for Newsweek.com in the wake of Spitzergate about what I've learned from doing Letters is here. If you'd like to look at some of my photographs, they're here. Oh, and if you want to check out my stream-of-consciousness style sex blogging, my obsessively updated Tumblr is here. Or, if you'd like to check out my favorite sex blogs, do pay a visit to Melissa Gira and Debauchette, two smart women who take sex writing to a whole new level. If you want to vote for Reverse Cowgirl at Time.com's poll, you can do so here. And thank you for reading the Reverse Cowgirl. It makes me happy. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, starring my relentless preoccupation with the weird world of pornography. SB
Every so often over the last five years or so, literary agents have approached me about writing a nonfiction book about Porn Valley. Over the years, I have approached my share of literary agents about the same idea, something I have detailed in various posts here. For some reason, it never really seems to work out, agents and me. I like the idea of agents. You know, like agents of change, or something like that. But I've never really needed one that badly, and, frankly, I've never really gotten along with any one of them all that well, and there's this way in which I think it's like I just don't get it. It's like, what do they do exactly? I mean, I know. But, you know. Anyway, they always have a new! totally! different! idea for this porn book. One thought it should be like Nickel and Dimed. One told me I should write nonfiction and not fiction because I was better at telling than showing. (Um, thanks?) The most recent one wanted me to be the one writer who finally told the "truth" about porn. And that's the rub, isn't it? I can't think about me, agents, and a nonfiction book about porn these days and not think of this crappy line: "You can't handle the truth!"--and I don't even like that movie. I am loathe to think of how many ways I've tried to spin the realities of Porn Valley in who knows how many proposals, for how many agents, for how many editors, for what? My mind always goes back to a meeting I had with one agent in a bar that rotated in a circle around the bartender. That's what this enterprise is like. Going around and around in a circle. Trying to tell the truth about Porn Valley to people who do not want to hear it. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as bad would sell. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as good would not. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as neither good nor bad disturbs people. I can't say porn is good. I can't say porn is bad. I can tell you this disturbs people. So, after banging my head against that wall, I let that go. I began writing my novel. In writing it, I've come to believe I was unable to tell the truth about porn in nonfiction. Facts are not enough. As I wrote here recently, Happy contains elements of noir, cyberpunk, and sci-fi. It's like I've created a kind of alternative universe, parallel to our own but wildly exaggerated, because it's the only world I could find in which I could tell the truth about porn. By creating a world that doesn't exist. Sometimes I think that's the only way people can tolerate the true story of porn. Either way, I don't know what I know, but I have come to the conclusion the opinions of agents, editors, and publishers are like assholes. They all have one.
A masterpiece is like pornography: it is difficult to say what it is exactly and yet, as the Supreme Court judge once said of porn, I know it when I see it. I know that a masterpiece, like porn, excites me when I see it. I know that, like porn, it reveals something to me. I know that, like porn, it tends to avoid sentiment, which is another way of saying that it has deep connections to truth. I know that, like porn, a masterpiece can often be shocking or scandalous. I know that I not only know porn when I see it, I know the difference between good porn and bad — and a masterpiece is always like good porn. And above all I know that, just as porn makes me want to fuck, a masterpiece makes me want to create. It’s a stimulant, an incitement that does to the aesthetic sense what porn does to the libido. -- Supervert
Usually, I try and write a focused blog post because it enables me to engage in the delusion that I have control over my life, which is a ridiculous fantasy because, of course, I have none. Right now, I'm working on editing a portion of my novel-in-progress, Happy. It's an interesting experience, different from the pure--if such a thing is possible--creative act. Helpful, nevertheless. In late 2003, I relocated from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The purpose of that dramatic act--I'd never been to New Orleans before, much less the South, and I'd decided to do so on a whim two weeks previous--was to get out of Hell-Ay and write a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley somewhere else. When I first got there, I stayed in a tiny room in a little B&B of sorts not far from the French Quarter. One of those nights, Richard Ford was on some terrible cable access show talking about how you had to be somewhere else to write about the place from whence you had come, so it seemed like a good idea, what I had done, at least to the gods who live inside the TV from whence they send you signs electronically. Not long after, I found a 1,000 square foot apartment on Esplanade, which borders the French Quarter. It had 15-foot-high ceilings, the biggest doors I'd ever seen, a balcony with a wrought-iron railing. In front of this converted old mansion was a giant Oak tree from which hung strands of forgotten beads from Mardi Gras past. There I started writing my novel. At that time, it was called something else, If Only These Hands Could Talk. I rode a pink bike along Bourbon Street. I made a billboard covered with inspirations. But, over time, that novel seemed to not so much not work but to unwork. It's central character was unhappy. And, I don't know, looking back, maybe I was, too. I thought I had left what was haunting me behind in LA. Instead, I think I brought it with me, inside of me. And, eventually, the novel fell apart. And then I did, too. As I've written here before, I had something of a nervous breakdown in early 2005, when I was living in another part of New Orleans, not far from where I had started, in the Bywater. I lived inside a pink shotgun not far from the Mississippi River. But this place was darker. The walls were a kind of moody gray-green. At night, I listened to the trains slamming their way down the tracks, shaking the house to its foundation. That's where, in the spring of 2005, I went crazy. And I gave up that version of the novel. I spent that hallucinatory summer reading The Divine Comedy, having imaginary conversations with people who weren't present, starting to wonder if there were things in this world that could not be explained, and began to envision another way to tell my story. The version of Happy that I'm working on today was born out of that summer in 2005, the summer after the spring I went crazy before August came and took everything, and me, away. After that, I came here, where I am today, and now I'm writing my story the only way I know how. As it turns out, that's from inside the mind of a madman named John Chance, a pornographer, a character who may be the only way I can bear to look at everything in my life that has come before this day. This version of my book has elements of psycho-noir, high-punk, and "Blade Runner." I don't know why. Does it matter? I don't know. But lately I've been thinking that I don't think so. In any case, it's all an evolution, isn't it? After all, I didn't set out to write this post about what happened in New Orleans. That is something that I do very, very rarely. But there I've gone and done it. So, thank you for reading it. I suppose you know who you are. Don't you? In any case, this is the quote that starts my novel. It's by Danilo Kiš and can be found, fittingly, in The Encyclopedia of the Dead. In a few weeks, my birthday is coming. And I can assure you, I never, ever thought that I would live this long. Surely, this is a posthumous life.
"Was it a dream? Was it the dream of a somnambulist, a dream within a dream, and hence more real than a real dream, since it cannot be measured against waking, since it cannot be measured by consciousness, because it is a dream from which one awakens into another dream? Or was it a god-like dream, a dream of time and eternity? A dream without illusions and doubts, a dream with its own languages and senses, a dream of both soul and body, a dream of consciousness and corporality both, a dream with clear-cut boundaries, with its own language and sound, a dream that is palpable, that can be explored with taste, smell, and hearing, a dream stronger than waking, a dream such as only the dead perhaps can dream, a dream that cannot be denied by a blade nicking the chin, for blood flows at once, and everything one does is but a proof of reality and waking; the skin bleeds in the dream as does the heart, the body rejoices in the dream as does the soul, there are no miracles in the dream other than life; the only way out of the dream is to awaken into death." -- Danilo Kiš
While I was sleeping, my friend Melissa sent me an email entitled "is this...?" and a link to this, a Susannah Muxtape. "I hope that music is yours," she wrote. I didn't make it, and I don't know who did, but I had a strong reaction to it, and I am listening to it. Now, I have to go to work for 12 hours, but I'll be thinking about my novel while I do it. The next part I'm going to write is about Porn Valley. The place. Have you ever been there? I go there in my mind every day. Today, I will be there while I do this other thing I have to do, as I shuck and jive, as I bow so low my face touches the ground, so that no one ever sees me.
He gave me a silver ring But I turned away And he heard me say, "Oh, he doesn't, he doesn't understand I don't need riches to make me care; Just a ribbon for my hair..."
Today was the first day since I started working on Happy, my novel-in-progress based on my experiences in Porn Valley, blah-fucking-blah, where I was stumped, stucked, whatevered. I did a lot of writhing and procrastinating, surfing the interneting and eating of potato salading, self-hating and then finally lying on my bed with my head stuck in my pillow, imagining myself into the head of my main character until I finally had some idea of where I could start with it. Time is not something I have a lot of due to other obligations, so I wanted to, you know, get with the fucking program and also not have to spend the night tossing and turning and wondering what the hell is wrong with me for the 45th time. I was trying to make a point here, but I have practically forgotten it. I wrote anyway, and it was OK, and then I got something good at the end that I wasn't expecting. Wow, that was my point? How anticlimactic. I think it seemed more interesting when I read this afterwards via Boing Boing. It's COOP writing about what happens when the art gets away from you and becomes something else altogether, something better. ("I felt like a safe cracker, listening through a stethoscope as the tumblers fell behind the steel door, locks clanking open to reveal...") By way of another example, you can see the creative process at play on the page in the image above, as well, which is from Graham Rawle's collagist Woman's World. ("I decided on Mr. Hands for my antagonist because the word hands is easy to come by in adverts for nail polish, soap powders, and the like. The name also describes his licentious, groping nature.") And here's Rutger Hauer talking about improvising tears in the rain. ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.") Art will make you believe in God, dammit, because how else can you fucking explain it? Chance? Fate? Destiny? At the end of my scene, I wrote something unexpected. As I wrote, the words written on the man I was writing about began to shift, to writhe, to move. Maybe this pornographer is the story itself, and the story I'm writing is one in which pornography comes to life.
In hindsight, I could say I spent five years doing research in Porn Valley, and five years trying to write this novel, and now that it's--ohmyfuckinggod--ten years later, and I'm finally writing the novel, I'm not sure on this random Monday after which we have celebrated the death and resurrection of Christ what the hell to say about it. I will say a few things, though. One is that this, a short film featuring Godspeed You! Black Emperor's "The Dead Flag Blues," which was brought into my life by Debauchette, was invaluable, and I played it over and over again while I wrote, so thank you, D, for that. As a side note, I asked the Harpoonist, one of only two people who have read what I've written thus far, if she thought my novel was misanthropic, and she laughed uproariously at me. As I've stated previously, the main character of the novel is John Chance, who is a pornographer. The novel is written in stream of consciousness style. The entire book takes place during a long, dark night of his soul. In addition to including pornography, bestiality, and cannibalism, as I mentioned in another post, it's got a wunderkammer, a Glock, and the line, "Vexilla regis prodeunt porn," a reference to this that I intend to mean, "The banners of the King of Porn advance," although, you know, I don't know Latin. The novel is based on a short story I wrote many years ago. The book's working title is Happy, which rates an "obscene" on the irony meter, but there are many ways in which the book is really about Happy Darling, its porn star, as much as it is about John. On a good day, I think Happy is a 21st century American Psycho. On a bad day, I think there is something wrong with me.
Ain't she a beauty? That's Monica Bellucci. I used to look at photos of her and think of Happy Darling, the porn star in the novel that I'm writing. Yes, writing. I don't know what has happened, but between the minor meltdown I had a few days ago and restarting my novel by focusing on the pornographer character, there has been an explosion of writing activity the likes of which has not been seen around these parts in years. I suppose one could call it exciting. Although, it feels a little odd. Like waiting for a bus that never comes, and then there it is, and for a moment you're, like, oh my god, am I actually going to get on it? And you do. Better on the bus than under it, I guess. Now, I am feeling better. Dare I say, I'm feeling good (via). I wrote yesterday and today, and I enjoyed it. I like this character. I love this character. His name is John Chance. He's a bad man. Or is he? "The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell." Thus far, the story contains pornography, bestiality, and cannibalism. It is rather strange to be a woman writing of these things, but what can one do when one looks in this funhouse mirror, and this is what one sees? Thanks to the girls I don't know who dropped me cool emails last night, and the boy who wrote this.
So, rock the fuck on sex bloggers. You are our collective Id, without which we would be lost. There is no need to turn toward the mainstream. Nor is there a need to succumb to any of the porn cliches so deeply ingrained in our society. Just keep on doing what you’re doing. If nothing else, talent will carry you forward.
Since I posted When Dorothy Surrenders, I received many kind emails from readers. So, thank you, MH, MG, LF, AF, SK, MW, S&C, BE, FJ, JP, YJ, CV, JS, and especially RdC, who wrote about hope. In light of a variety of recent events, I've decided I am going to undertake a project I've been attempting since the first day I set foot in Porn Valley. And that, of course, is to write a novel based on my experiences there. One of the many things that I didn't like about attempting to hock my wares to publishers on the nonfiction front was that there were so many things I wasn't supposed to do. I wasn't supposed to be too graphic. I wasn't supposed to be too provocative. I wasn't supposed to blog about any of it. So, I'll be blogging this process. I don't know why writing is supposed to be such a mystery. My father was a writer, that was the story of his life, and I remember well how he tucked himself away into the study with his typewriter, tick-tocking at the typewriter keys as the balls of crumpled paper piled up around him. Here, I'll try to keep the door open. Maybe, that way, you can peek inside. I've undertaken such an attempt before--and failed, for lack of a better word. Today, I'm hoping that some of my life experiences--from Porn Valley to Hurricane Alley to suicidal tendencies--will enable me to write the book that I want to write. The title of the book is HAPPY. Technically, it is a novel, but I prefer to think of it as the nonfictionalization of a series of fictional events based on my real experiences in Porn Valley. The story itself is one that I've written about previously; it centers around the making of an adult movie that has the same title as this book. If you've read the title story of You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?, you know something about it already. This time around, I've created an omniscient narrator, one who, I hope, really can see all. Most significantly, I'm attempting to create something approximating this novel's own language, something halfway between Jabberwocky and porno-speak with a hint of Molly. For now, the first line of HAPPY goes like this:
Down in the Valley where the girls go-go and the men moan, where woodsmen get it up, get it in, and get it off and reverse cowgirls roam, the American dream was reborn as a 21st century porno.
In November, I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month. For some time, I've been working on writing a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley. A few months ago, I had a new idea on how to go about it. So, this will be a fresh start for me. Online, you'll be able to track my progress here. The novel's title is Happy and the genre is literary fiction. To a degree, the book is in a way a mystery, an LA-noir look at the adult movie industry; in another way, it's highly influenced by one of my favorite books, City of Glass, a mystery about a mystery. I'll refrain from mentioning the plot for now, but I'll share other matter related to the book on the blog. Last night, I did research that took me from James Ellroy to My Dark Places to psycho-noir to Fucktown to "Elevator to the Gallows." The book has six parts, each composed of five chapters. For a long time, I've thought about this book as a book about porn, a book about Porn Valley, a book about those characters that have populated that world in my mind. When I outlined the first half of the novel, I realized it's about all of that and none of that. In reality, it's about one person's descent into madness.
Was it a dream? Was it the dream of a somnambulist, a dream within a dream, and hence more real than a real dream, since it cannot be measured against waking, since it cannot be measured by consciousness, because it is a dream from which one awakens into another dream? Or was it a god-like dream, a dream of time and eternity? A dream without illusions and doubts, a dream with its own languages and senses, a dream of both soul and body, a dream of consciousness and corporality both, a dream with clear-cut boundaries, with its own language and sound, a dream that is palpable, that can be explored with taste, smell, and hearing, a dream stronger than waking, a dream such as only the dead perhaps can dream, a dream that cannot be denied by a blade nicking the chin, for blood flows at once, and everything one does is but a proof of reality and waking; the skin bleeds in the dream as does the heart, the body rejoices in the dream as does the soul, there are no miracles in the dream other than life; the only way out of the dream is to awaken into death. —Encyclopedia of the Dead
I started my novel. Again. The title is HAPPY. The story starts with a dead man. Will it work? We'll see. Now, I've got nothing left to lose.
GRINDERMAN I'm the grinderman In the silver rain In the pale moonlight I am open late Yes I'm the grinderman Seven days a week In the pale moonlight In the silver rain I'm the grinderman Any way I can In the silver rain In the pale moonlight I'm the grinderman Yes I am I'm the silver rain In the pale moonlight I am open late Yes I'm the grinderman In the silver rain In the pale moonlight I am open late Yes I'm the grinderman Yes I am Any way I can
Last night, a man asked me: "What kind of guy would be with you?" And, at this rate, I have no clue. So, this morning I bought a bottle of perfume called Ange ou Démon by Givenchy, which the slick French woman behind the counter said was for a woman of two minds...an angel and a devil, I'd imagine. By the end of this week, I'll be done with the first chapter of my novel. I guess I'm writing it in something of a stream-of-consciousness style. In the new millennium, Molly Bloom is waiting tables, it would seem. In the meantime, I keep listening to this and wondering when someone will let me know when I've passed this acid test of a life. Sometimes, I feel like I'm on the telephone, but I'm talking to a dial tone. Are you hearing me? Like I'm hearing you? (via)
This time, my novel has a new narrator. She is, for reasons too obvious to explain, a waitress. She works the graveyard shift at a roadside diner called the U Dine Here in Barstow, California. She spends a lot of time thinking about what it's like to be halfway between someplace special and nowhere at all. For now, she has no name, and who she is will remain a secret until the end. Until recently, I was working on a proposal for a nonfiction book about Porn Valley. At one point, the manuscript consisted of a sample chapter about a porn star named Justine Joli. At the end of it, there was a scene that imagined her in bed, flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine, and dreaming of other things. That voice is the voice of this narrator. How do these things happen? According to Auster: "The question is the story itself, and whether nor not it means something is not for the story to tell."
I'm a freelance journalist. I've written for Details, Harper's Bazaar, Newsweek,
Radar, Women's Health, Salon, Slate, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Variety, Inc., Esquire, The Atlantic, and I'm a Forbes contributor. In 2008, TIME named me one of the best bloggers of the year. I've appeared on CNN, NPR, and "Politically Incorrect." [EMAIL]
