An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte

WEST 10TH: How do you write (day-to-day, when, where and how)? Which medium do you like to work with? If you use your computer, which font do you like to write in? Where do you find inspiration for your characters, settings and plot points?

TULATHIMUTTE: I’m a computer guy but will go longhand to keep from fucking around with what I’ve already written if I need to just squeeze a draft out. I like a basic Times New Roman, which ever since the shift to Calibri will end up marking me as a “product of my era.” It really doesn’t matter though, font fussiness is for poets. As for inspiration, like every other writer, I get it wherever I can get it, but inspiration doesn’t count for much in writing.

WEST 10TH: Similarities between you and your character Will, both being Asian and having worked in tech, have often been pointed out. Do you at any level resent this identification or do you find it natural? How much of yourself do you see/integrate in all your characters?

TULATHIMUTTE: I did worry about being identified with Will on the basis of race, which ended up being core to his character. I wanted him to self-consciously inhabit a stereotype, as a way of getting at one of the more invidious aspects of racism, the way that its gaze gets internalized into a DuBoisian double consciousness. Then I refracted that through Internet-era image culture and Asian-American identity. In other words, I knew people would see Will as The Asian Character, and Will knows it too, and that’s what’s fucked him up. Anyway, Will is no more or less autobiographical than the other protagonists. And even if it were memoir it couldn’t be comprehensively accurate. All narrative is fiction in the sense that it arranges and frames experience selectively. Like, in this interview, I can claim these opinions as my own, without claiming that it adds up to any- thing like an accurate picture of me. I’m trying to be interesting, for one thing.

WEST 10TH: As an Asian “millennial” writer, how do you grapple with people’s expectations of the kind of fiction you should write? Do you have any advice for young minority writers who may feel obligat- ed to write explicitly about their identities?

TULATHIMUTTE: One paradox of developing as a writer is that at first you rely on external reception to gauge your improvement, but ultimately you’ll never be happy with your writing until you can make your goals strictly intrinsic. This isn’t to say feedback is useless; it’s about using feedback to strengthen your work on its terms, ignoring that which wants it to be otherwise, and exercising your gratitude and spite.

WEST 10TH: How valuable do you find satire as critique in a world that seems to have gone insane? In a world where people can’t tell the difference between Onion and NYT article headlines anymore etc.

TTULATHIMUTTE: I don’t know if satire has ever been useful in re- cent history. It didn’t work for Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq. It has produced no change I’m aware of. If by “valuable” you mean aesthetically effective, right now you’d find the best stuff in reality TV and not fiction. Nathan Fielder is just a god-tier satirist of capitalism and celebrity, it’s like watching a comedy version of the Milgram experiment. The one Sacha Baron Cohen bit where he got a congressman to humiliate himself so badly it led to an actual resignation, that was good. But in general the powerful are shameless and humiliation-proof and can and should only be usurped. Fortunately I don’t write a ton of satire. I think my writing just kind of sounds like it.

WEST 10TH: How does one write sincerely and with vulnerability in world where humor is a self-effacing tool and irony is performed as a defense mechanism?

TULATHIMUTTE: Okay so I’m an elder millennial and veteran of the Irony vs. Sincerity Wars of the aughts. I’m Team Irony and we lost big, but not because of like 9/11 or Jesse Thorn or David Foster Wallace. It’s because irony doesn’t scan as effectively as hyperbolic sincerity online. But I see no reason to prefer one to the other, neither are values in and of themselves, both need to be earned, and it’s not like you have to choose, and who knows if it’ll even be read as intended, or at all?

WEST 10TH: Do you see your writing as political? Do you think writing should, as you’ve mentioned before, “enlighten or emancipate”?

TULATHIMUTTE: Here I would distinguish between writing about political issues vs. writing intended to affect political change. I do the former, and you could argue that it’s impossible not to, but I know better than to confuse literary fiction for activism. I think that fiction *can* have political effects, it just usually happens in unintended ways. Like the Thai coup protests a few years ago—people defiantly read 1984 in public until it was banned, then did the Hunger Games salute, also banned. I love reading and writing political stuff, it just shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of praxis.

WEST 10TH: What kind of impact do you want your books to have on your readers and on the world? What is the most flattering re- sponse you could receive for your writing? What do you consider your most notable accomplishment?

TULATHIMUTTE: I love money and compliments but I don’t care about impact. The best flattery is strong criticism that both comprehends and adds to the writing. People can like your book without getting it. Intellectual investment is the real appreciation. I thought Sarah Nicole Prickett’s review of my novel in Bookforum was superbly accurate, even though it contains virtually no flattery, except for the phrase “militantly ironic,” which I do take as a compliment. Good criticism can even redeem bad writing.

WEST 10TH: Do you have any suggested reading? These could be books, twitter feeds, reddit threads, instagram hashtags . . .

TULATHIMUTTE: Just anything? The best IG animal accounts are @chillwildlife, @earlboykins2, and @realllllllycooldogs with 7 L’s I believe. I love Achewood and Paranoia Agent and Samantha Schweblin’s Fever Dream and both Sally Rooney novels. Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days is correct and useful. Andrea Long Chu’s Paper View newsletter and her review of Jill Soloway’s memoir is just full of third-degree burns. The indie game Return of the Obra Dinn is like Raft of the Medusa meets Clue meets non-racist Lovecraft. I got around to reading Alissa Nutting’s Tampa and you know a book’s good when it makes you shower more.

WEST 10TH: Can you speak about CRIT? Who (what kind of writer) is it meant for? How is it different from other writing workshops? Why did you feel the need of establishing your own program?

TULATHIMUTTE: CRIT is a writing class I teach out of my living room in Brooklyn. I started it because I knew I wanted to teach, but not within the confines of the academic or private workshop system. Its aims are to provide writers with all the craft pedagogy they could ever need, realistic career prep, and most importantly, community— many people who sign up just don’t know any other writers. Since 2017 I’ve offered over $13,000 in financial aid to make it more accessible to broke writers. So far almost every CRIT session has had a writing group come out of it, which is not a necessity, but is a massive boon to morale and practical support. The end goal is to get outside funding via fiscal sponsorship or nonprofit status, make the class entirely free to attend, and eventually form robust alternatives to the New York publishing industry with a big-ass network of small, di- verse, tight-knit writing groups. Maybe they’ll go on to do their own publications and agencies and institutions. To quote Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, which partly inspired the class, “One hundred radical students in low-income writing classes in New York City could actually have an impact on our literature.” I’ll be hitting a hundred by the end of the year.

WEST 10TH: Are you working on any new projects right now?

TULATHIMUTTE: Sadly yes.

Tony Tulathimutte is a New York–based author who has written for The New York Times, VICE, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, N+1, Playboy, and The Paris Review. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award, and his debut novel, Private Citizens, has been called the “the first great Millennial novel” by New York Magazine. Currently, he teaches a writing class in Brooklyn called CRIT.