An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman

WEST 10TH: In an interview with Vogue, you said the impetus for writing your novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine was the desire to tell a big, American story. Why was it important for you to write that story?

KLEEMAN: All through my college career and through grad school, it seemed like one genre of book that really did impress me was the big, impressive American novel. And those were always written by men, as far as I could tell. When you ask people more widely they say Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, things like that, but in America at least, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, those guys— Franzen too—seem to dominate the tone that captures our time and our country. But all of those books are very strongly gendered, I feel. They’re written by men, they usually have male protagonists, and a scattershot of female characters who make the world seem accurate, I guess. I wanted to go for that same meat—a story that explicitly wants to be about something in the world that surrounds you—but I also wanted to move the lens over a few inches and make it about the female world of today.

WEST 10TH: Vogue also called your novel a “female Fight Club.” Do you think that’s a fair comparison? Why do you think some people are inclined to interpret the book as a female version of a male narrative? Is that problematic?

KLEEMAN: I wouldn’t have thought of it as a female Fight Club while writing it, but the person who wrote that article has become a good friend of mine, and I really like what she said. I think what it gets at is that there’s some emotional texture that’s particular to living a gendered life. You have to deal with this whole landscape that’s hard to communicate to people who aren’t living there as well. Fight Club sets into allegorical motion some of those raw feelings, and some of those irrational urges that stem not precisely from you but from who you’re supposed to be in the world. I think that there’s some of that in You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. Not so much fighting to get out some innate aggressive urges that are laid in your gender identity, but that transformation is oddly at the core of being female. When you look at teen movies, I feel like female puberty is portrayed as something so much more transformative and so much more unsettling than male puberty. We’re built from the start of our infancy as creatures who have to go through major transformations in order to achieve our fundamental functional state. So that’s built into how we think about our bodies. But then there’s also the whole culture of how we cultivate and tend to and tweak elements of our bodies to bring out different parts of our personalities or to change our identity. It seems much more possible to change as a woman, I think, but that’s a kind of pressure in and of itself. It really puts pressure upon you, as the body, to decide what you want to do with yourself.

WEST 10TH: You touched on the idea that certain great American novels are centered around this depiction—and maybe this is gen- dered, too—of a reality that’s very close to realism, versus the experimental, sci-fi worlds that your characters inhabit. I’m wondering about this “strangeness” that critics have cited in your work—Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine—and how you manage to make the surreal or absurdist elements of your fiction reflect actual circumstances of society.

KLEEMAN: I think that the relationship between the strange and the realistic is a lot blurrier than people think it is. I think that what’s realistic and what’s normal is what’s been normalized. There’s old ver- sions of normal that seem bizarre now and there’s future versions of normal that we can’t even wrap our heads around. The potential fake news world of the future—I would have never expected that. And so in that way I think that the strange isn’t really a separate thing. It’s just the underrepresented normal. But then there are some things that happen in my stories that are genuinely and truly strange. For me, these still have a close connection to life because I think of how the dream world is flush up against our real world. It makes use of our same emotional machinery, it takes the elements of the things we see every day and realigns them. In my experience or in my interpretation, genuine, 100% creativity is impossible because it’s always adapted— pulling from what is known or what is common and transforming it. But to invent something that has no basis in any experience would be impossible or really incomprehensible.

WEST 10TH: I’m thinking about how if an alien came down and looked at our world, they’d see us going through these marriage ceremonies and be like, “What is this?” I really like what you said about the line between strangeness and normalcy being blurry. Do you see the worlds in your writing as closer to our reality or further, as alternate universes?

KLEEMAN: I see it maybe as an off-brand universe. You know how we have all the familiar brands and stores that we’re used to, and then you have the brands that sit right next to them that are not familiar but maybe even come from the same place, but have some other name on them? You feel more comforted by the one that you recognize, but I wondered what would it be like to write a world that’s made up of all of these products that are just a little bit to the side of the ones we know.

WEST 10TH: I’m wondering about the implications of the kind of social commentary that may or may not be operating in your work. Are you conscious of taking particular stances or making particular conclusions about society or pointing out certain things about society in your fiction? As a writer, how do you navigate making cultural criticisms?

KLEEMAN: I think that in a lot of ways, writing something with an argument to make is an easy way to make your book no wider than a single point. I also wouldn’t really think of my book as having an argument it’s trying to make about society at large because I’m not entirely sure what should be done about society at large. I think that the most important thing, for me, was to point out what I feel are some new processes that are really surreal and really wild if you think about them. Like the fact that we’re now asked to join our identity to specific products and ways of caring for yourself that can also be bought by anybody else. So your identity hinges on this thing that is, by definition, for mass consumption. How do you want to think about that? Do you want to think that it’s something that brings you closer to other people, makes your identity less of a lonely sad island floating alone and more something that has the potential to join, blend, and make stronger? Or is it a threat to having self-determined properties and having intrinsic properties? I don’t know what side I fall on. I sort of think that it’s amazing to live in late-stage capitalism. A lot of strange things happen. We are so far from nature in some ways and yet nature still exists in all the spaces in between and it persists and we can ignore it or pay attention to it. There are a lot of interesting places to go living now. But I think that we can’t decide what position we’re going to take on it or what we’re going to do about it until we see the processes that are happening.

WEST 10TH: None of this sounds good, right? That we’re dependent on these strange products, that we’re a part of this huge system that seems to be pigeonholing us. It all seems dystopic to me. But I was wondering if you could talk more about why you think that this is also a world full of possibilities.

KLEEMAN: What has our insistence on individualism and the isolat- ed and unique individual really done for us psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally? I think that even though it’s maybe a horrifying prospect, there’s something to think about there. Whether allowing some of those long-held values to change would actually relax a sort of hold you can have on your happiness. If there’s a way that you can blend together and find fulfillment there. Basically there’s a contradiction between the way that mass consumerism works and the way that individualism’s value works. I went to school in Providence, and there’s one of everything in Providence. One capitol building. One masonic temple. One big mall. And in the mall, there was a group of kids, including a couple of people who I knew, living in a room in the outskirts of the mall, living unseen. They would just come into the mall, walk through the hallways. They hauled in a couch, they hauled in all this stuff, and no one working at the mall or in mall security knew that they were there. So they were living in the center of consumerism and the capitol of buying, but doing it all for free. That seems incredible. I’ve been watching the beauty industry since I was thirteen, and I think there’s an anxiety now about how to get the feeling in consumers that there’s something new happening. How much further can this process of trying to reinvigorate their products go? Maybe the industry will exhaust itself to some degree and there will be some new industry that people will put their money into and it won’t be so superficial.

WEST 10TH: What sparked your fascination in the beauty industry and consumerist culture?

KLEEMAN: I was interested in it because it really is something I en- gage with every single day and it’s never depicted in literature, especially the processes of doing it. I’m really fascinated by things that exist in people’s lives but don’t have enough literary heft to be used in literature. For one thing, it’s strange that we spend so much time on our phones now, and plot-driving information comes through our phones, and yet phones are totally suppressed in literature. I under- stand why—there’s something so arbitrary about these portals where anything can happen at any time. There’s nothing constraining it, so it doesn’t feel meaningful or special when something happens through a phone. But I think that people are going to have to push themselves to do that because I think we’re behind ourselves in our understanding of how the way we communicate and the way we use media has shaped us. We still think of it as a world of newspapers, and it’s not a world of newspapers anymore.

WEST 10TH: Moving into less thematic discussions and more about your actual process, I’m wondering how you build your worlds, and how you know whether that world belongs in a short story or a novel?

KLEEMAN: It’s really difficult to write a novel without building so- ciety into it. A lot of times I’m interested in these really unrealistic, untenable situations, but if I’m only interested in how they affect one individual entity, it doesn’t make sense for me to write it as a novel, because I’d have to artificially make it about the whole world. I love reading dystopian fiction. All of the books I have vivid memories of reading as a kid were dystopian, because they scared me and got un- der my skin. One thing that I always miss from a lot of them was seeing into how people would adjust psychologically or make sense of mentally a very untenable situation that became the new reality. That’s why I think a lot of my dystopian stories are short stories. When I work on a novel that has some of those qualities, I always feel the urge to keep it as close to experience as possible, which makes it hard to see the entirety of the problematic system that’s taken over, so it loses some of the satisfaction that’s usually there in the genre.

I never understand someone who tells me “I started writing a short story and halfway through realized it was a novel.” For better or for worse, when I start a project, I always have a sense of where it begins and where it has to end, and a rough idea of the distance between those things. Even if I don’t see a clear scene or plot outcome, I know what feeling it’s supposed to end on and what is supposed to have happened emotionally by that point. It’s just the job of filling in the middle and populating it and making the people who populate it ar- rive at the end—which is actually a lot.

WEST 10TH: You feel like there’s more structure. 

KLEEMAN: There’s at least some place to start and some place to go. I can never start writing until I have a place to go, even if I don’t know how I’m going to get there or what’s going to exist between point A and point B. It’s really intuitive, which is satisfying when it happens and a problem when it doesn’t happen, because there’s nothing like trying to force an intuitive insight into what the right ending of a story is going to be to really frustrate you. So I have a bunch of things I do to try to get me through my work process, which is a lot of times contingent and hazy. When I’m stuck when I’m writing, I often watch five minutes of a movie. Just long enough to get your mind out of the world it was in and someplace else, even if that other place is irrele- vant. I watch a lot of bad rom coms and things, because they have an extremely clear sense of themselves and extremely clear sense of what their tone is and what they’re about, and then once I’m not looking at the same problem, I go back to it and see if I see it any differently. I’ll repeat that as many times as I need to to think of something. Or I’ll do the same thing but write down five possibilities of what could happen next and then I’ll leave them and then I’ll come back and see if anything stands out, and if not, I’ll write five more. Do you know the phrase “brute forcing”? It’s one of the early ways of cracking a password, just try every permutation until it finds the right one. It takes a ton of time, but it’s also a simple, multi-use strategy, instead of writing something that’s tailored to the specific system you’re trying to get into.

WEST 10TH: How does your academic work inform your creative work, especially considering your scientific background and PhD in critical theory?

KLEEMAN: I always expected my academic work to inform my fic- tion more than I feel it has. I feel like there’s a reason many theorists aren’t writing novels, and it’s that when you translate a piece of ex- cellent theory into narrative, you lose a lot of the nuances that the theorist would want to keep in place. You bring other dimensions to it and, in the world of theory and philosophy, so much of what’s important is tending your patch of garden and keeping it separate from oth- ers so that people understand what your theory and thought is and is not. That’s always something that was dissatisfying for me to do. I’m a blurry thinker, and the more time I spend with two things, the more similarities I find between them. It takes a lot of work for me to keep things within the boundaries that they should be kept in. But I think that what really affected my writing was some base-level worldview of mine. I was in biology for a while, I did my undergrad in cognitive science, and I worked in a cognitive linguistics lab. I have a really sincere belief in every entity existing at the level of being a motivated, conscious being, but also seeing it at the level as being made up of parts that have their own evolutionary history and their own impetus to maintain themselves and maintain their difference from the things around them. I would read my AP Biology textbook in high school and it would bring me to tears sometimes. I remember one thing that did it was the story of the mitochondria being absorbed into the cell and how they had their own life beforehand as energy-converting microorganisms and suddenly they’re trapped and can reproduce, but they can no longer see what their energy conversion is working for. Everything has its own individuality and its own collective relation, and that is really important to me.

WEST 10TH: What have you been working on now?

KLEEMAN: I’m working on another novel, set in Los Angeles thirty years in the future. The water crisis has become much more extreme and people are drinking synthetic water. There might be a faster way to do this, but the research I have to do is read about the chemistry of water and see if I can conjure an explanation that can hold for someone who knows something about it. I don’t want to invent the properties or fudge how it works—I want the properties derived from how it could work.

WEST 10TH: What would you advise for young writers who want to publish a novel? Are there any consequences or pitfalls you didn’t expect?

KLEEMAN: One thing I’m really glad for is that in college I didn’t really think I would ever publish a book that would be read by more than a handful of people. My college experience was with a small press, and so many of my favorite books were written for small presses, and they felt like they were written for a person like me to find. I had a really direct and personal relationship to those books. I think that it’s important to dwell in that understanding of publishing for as long as possible because you don’t write to get some abstract recognition that even the achievement will not feel like you imagined it would; you write to communicate something to someone like me, to send out a signal and see who responds or what happens as a result of it. So I think that it’s important as much as possible to not worry about the future but to enjoy the fact that you can write a book, you can figure out what you’re interested in without worrying if anyone else is inter- ested in it. It’s the period of time when you get to totally self-motivate your own growth as a writer, and then when you’re ready, it’ll enter the world.

Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island-based writer of fiction and non- fiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction es- says and reportage have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, n+1, and the Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper, 2015) and Intimations (Harper, 2016), a short story collection.