Conversation with Elizabeth Zaleski

 

You divided up the essays of this book into sections that gather similar material—“With Family,” “With Meaning,” “With Men,” “With Us,” “With Home.” The book’s organizing principles are key to the reading experience of it. What’s at the heart of this book’s taxonomy? Tell me about what it means to you to have written an essay collection rather than a memoir.

I’m happy to hear that the structure worked well for you, because it took me approximately eight million years to figure out how to organize these essays. Of course, I’m not unique in that—it’s an almost universal struggle with poetry, essay, and story collections. The themed sections were a somewhat late development in the life of the manuscript, but adding them was the point at which it finally felt like a book instead of just a bunch of stuff I’d written. You’re right that the collection doesn’t shy away from trying to characterize itself, whether in the title, which tells you it’s got something to do with trouble and failure, or in the table of contents, which is essentially a map of complaints, but I hope at its core Trouble isn’t a cynical book and instead more like an accounting of how I wish many things could have gone better. (I’m not sure if “Most people aren’t cut out for being human” is my own thought or something I heard once, but it’s certainly a generalization I endorse.) In terms of memoir versus essays, the line between them isn’t a clear one, obviously, and all of these essays have a whole lot of me in them. And while I do think these particular pieces are best read in order, I also like the freedom that collections grant to readers, who can dip in and out as they like and might wind up having wildly different feelings about one essay versus another. I certainly appreciate the greater freedom for variation in form, voice, and exploration that an essay collection grants (at least to my mind), and I can’t wait to find out which essays people thought were the best—and the worst.

In multiple essays in this collection, you reference revision. You write that the essay about your family’s moves from place to place grew in length over many drafts. Tell me about how you approach revision and how you know when the writing of something is done (even when the living of it is not).

Well, I’m not the first person to say that a piece of writing is finally done when it’s published, but even that wasn’t true with the moving essay, which was first published in a lit mag many moves ago. I eventually came to understand my earlier conclusions differently and was happy to rework them. The essay about penis size also grew over several years while I figured out a conclusion with staying power (those were fun insights to gain), because I knew the place I started from was unsatisfactory. I think essays almost always improve with greater distance from the events they cover, and I’ve yet to outlive my interest in any experience that merited a first draft. More practically, I’m wedded to revision because (1) I’m a perfectionist who’s obsessed with sentences and (2) I hold onto the quaint belief that essays should have a point, and a fairly clear one at that. I’ve never been interested in the kind of writing that adjudicates that job to white space, and I’m content to sit with the same essay for years until I figure out what it means. Finding the question at the heart of an experience is the first step, and then you have to cobble together an answer. For me, that takes a lot of tries and a lot of time.

Earnestness plays an important role in this book. In your essay “Pretty Dead Things,” on making art of the rotting animals along Seattle’s coast, you say, “I walked in the company of sincere and unsubtle ideas.” Say more.

I’m delighted that you used the word “taxonomy” in your first question, because “Pretty Dead Things” was originally called “Taxonomy”! And yes, that essay is unabashedly about—dare I say it—“the search for meaning.” I like big ideas, but I also poke fun at this tendency in myself throughout the book. At one point, I considered making “Pretty Dead Things” a prologue, a kind of ironic disavowal of all the sense wrestling that was to come, because that tension—between everything mattering so much and nothing mattering at all—is probably the through line of the collection (thank you for homing in on that). The speed with which I can move from obsessing over ass-puckering, invisible minutiae (removing italic formatting from spaces in a Word document, for instance) and wanting to chuck the whole enterprise of civilization into a bonfire (see “Original Syntax”) is remarkable. A lot of the essays, especially the last one, look at the not-at-all-original experience of moving from idealism to more lived-in outlooks, but I hope I’ve done that in memorable ways.

Particularly in the back half of the book, this collection is brimming with disclosure. Tell me about writing so personally. Does it scare you?

Hmm, not especially. You learn right off the bat that I grew up in a household that was very sex-positive (and then a little later about how that introduced its own set of problems). When it comes to talking about my personal or family life, whether in conversation or in my writing, I’ve noticed that when I set out to say something I assume will be surprising or funny, it often falls flat. But if I relate the facts of my circumstances totally plainly, with no sense that what I’m saying is unusual, people will crack up or express disbelief. I remember sometimes getting draft feedback that said, “This doesn’t seem like a place to exaggerate” about lines that were among the truest I’d ever written. In other words, honest precision is more compelling than shock value. I hope I’ve avoided writing anything salacious, because, as my friend Allison helped me understand, salacious writing tends to buttress the very boundary it intends to cross. Ideally, I’m writing from a place where I don’t even see a given boundary, usually because it’s a stupid or arbitrary one I never got the shame memo on. That said, given the hellscape that is discourse in America right now, we’re all at risk of waking up in the public pillory, so yeah—that dynamic is certainly something I’ve thought about.

Who do you hope finds The Trouble with Loving Poets? To whom are you speaking, and who do you want to reach?

I feel I am writing most directly to the selection committee for the MacArthur Genius Fellowships. Just kidding! Among the many sorts of readers I hope this book appeals to are grumpy tryhards; women with bodies (though men and ethereal women are also welcome); the happily uncoupled; people who are or once were super clinically depressed; recovering academics; people who work in publishing, especially as editors; pet skeptics and pet lovers alike; people who played a lot of sports growing up but somehow didn’t become professional athletes; people who (as I do) have both “ain’t” in their dialect and “semiotic” in their vocab (in other words, people from rural America who don’t often see themselves represented in nuanced ways); people who want to learn new things and laugh and experience tenderheartedness toward the doomed efforts of their fellows; everyone who went to my weird and wonderful Mennonite high school; anyone who has ever optimistically googled “Christian atheism”; writers who are drawn along by syntax as much as story; at least one prominent comedian; and more than two guys named Tim (one of whom would preferably be Tim Kreider).