![Marco Roth shared his questions from last night’s event with us. If you weren’t able to attend but would like some reading group fodder, these are fascinating ways of looking at Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some. People who were there: weren’t her answers incredible?
* One of the great things about the collection is how you structure your stories often by playing off a term, acronym or diagnosis. You do great things with the scarlet letter A, but I’m thinking mostly of the story called “The Bride,” a condensed memoir in its own right, where you introduce us to “pwv”—person with a vagina—pwa—person with AIDS—“glamour girl,” “bride of Frankenstein,” “addict,” and “the compliant personality,” just to name a few. These terms are all imposed on you from the outside, and yet you manage to make them your own and make them meaningful—simultaneously an act of resistance and acceptance. Can you talk a bit about this process of acronym appropriation, how conscious you were that this is what you were doing as you were writing, or at what point you realized that the labels that professionals and peers put on you didn’t oblige your complete surrender and submission to those labels?
*Genre Fiction and psychoanalysis, “Dawn of the Dread”—the first radio story, WLUV, the enchantment of inanimate objects. A mixed blessing to have a relative as your interviewer, since I know that you’re an aficionada of Japanese horror and monster movies—I’d like you to read this passage on p. 70 and then talk a little about what drew you to horror films and then also a more difficult question about memoir writing and recalling childhood: do you find that certain sensations of childhood can only be recaptured and brought out on the page via allusions to what’s usually called “genre fiction”? Maybe another way to ask this is to suggest that as children we’re subject to fearful emotions whose objective correlatives we meet only later in the pages of genre fiction or on the movie screen.
* Following off of this, although you express what’s almost become a de rigeur disgust for and rejection of psychoanalysts, you and I both know that it’s not so easy to bury the corpse of the Freudian father, and once in psychoanalysis, even as a background to family life, it’s very hard to get out of it…So, here’s your chance to discuss about what you learned from psychoanalysis, has it helped you as a writer?
*Another thing that will surprise readers of “Glory” is how many of the stories are really about and from the point of view of other people who are not Glory. Men, especially. [Bad Boy Walking story and Zemecki’s Cat…and then a cast of memorialized ex-boyfriends, men met in bars, etc…] What led you to draw these portraits of down-and-out male loners, recovering addicts and perverts?
*You lived on the LES when it was still dangerous; you lived in Williamsburg in 1989, I think, before it was gentrified; you were punk from the beginning, Goth before people knew to call it that, you got tattoos when it was still seen as transgressive or lower class, how do you feel now when you see how what was a visceral and original style for you has become part of “fashion,” inoculated against transgression?
* What, if anything, would you change about this book, looking back on it ten years after publication? Are there things you’d add to it?
Perhaps particularly about HIV as it becomes not just “no longer a death sentence,” but also something that’s faded as a cultural signifier. You convey a sense of what it’s like to live with a chronic condition, but it seems to me that you can sometimes be almost decorous about the details of various side effects and opportunistic infections. This might be a reflection of my own experience of living with a PWA who dealt with the disease at an obsessively micro-biological level, but I’m curious whether you felt that a certain degree of medical realism might be more than the average reader could be asked to bear.
* How would you distinguish the feminism in your work from your mother’s or from Katie’s. Is it important to you that readers understand your work as feminist? If not, why not?](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxndpn8ANW1ql9sv8o1_250.jpg)
Marco Roth shared his questions from last night’s event with us. If you weren’t able to attend but would like some reading group fodder, these are fascinating ways of looking at Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some. People who were there: weren’t her answers incredible?
* One of the great things about the collection is how you structure your stories often by playing off a term, acronym or diagnosis. You do great things with the scarlet letter A, but I’m thinking mostly of the story called “The Bride,” a condensed memoir in its own right, where you introduce us to “pwv”—person with a vagina—pwa—person with AIDS—“glamour girl,” “bride of Frankenstein,” “addict,” and “the compliant personality,” just to name a few. These terms are all imposed on you from the outside, and yet you manage to make them your own and make them meaningful—simultaneously an act of resistance and acceptance. Can you talk a bit about this process of acronym appropriation, how conscious you were that this is what you were doing as you were writing, or at what point you realized that the labels that professionals and peers put on you didn’t oblige your complete surrender and submission to those labels?
*Genre Fiction and psychoanalysis, “Dawn of the Dread”—the first radio story, WLUV, the enchantment of inanimate objects. A mixed blessing to have a relative as your interviewer, since I know that you’re an aficionada of Japanese horror and monster movies—I’d like you to read this passage on p. 70 and then talk a little about what drew you to horror films and then also a more difficult question about memoir writing and recalling childhood: do you find that certain sensations of childhood can only be recaptured and brought out on the page via allusions to what’s usually called “genre fiction”? Maybe another way to ask this is to suggest that as children we’re subject to fearful emotions whose objective correlatives we meet only later in the pages of genre fiction or on the movie screen.
* Following off of this, although you express what’s almost become a de rigeur disgust for and rejection of psychoanalysts, you and I both know that it’s not so easy to bury the corpse of the Freudian father, and once in psychoanalysis, even as a background to family life, it’s very hard to get out of it…So, here’s your chance to discuss about what you learned from psychoanalysis, has it helped you as a writer?
*Another thing that will surprise readers of “Glory” is how many of the stories are really about and from the point of view of other people who are not Glory. Men, especially. [Bad Boy Walking story and Zemecki’s Cat…and then a cast of memorialized ex-boyfriends, men met in bars, etc…] What led you to draw these portraits of down-and-out male loners, recovering addicts and perverts?
*You lived on the LES when it was still dangerous; you lived in Williamsburg in 1989, I think, before it was gentrified; you were punk from the beginning, Goth before people knew to call it that, you got tattoos when it was still seen as transgressive or lower class, how do you feel now when you see how what was a visceral and original style for you has become part of “fashion,” inoculated against transgression?
* What, if anything, would you change about this book, looking back on it ten years after publication? Are there things you’d add to it?
Perhaps particularly about HIV as it becomes not just “no longer a death sentence,” but also something that’s faded as a cultural signifier. You convey a sense of what it’s like to live with a chronic condition, but it seems to me that you can sometimes be almost decorous about the details of various side effects and opportunistic infections. This might be a reflection of my own experience of living with a PWA who dealt with the disease at an obsessively micro-biological level, but I’m curious whether you felt that a certain degree of medical realism might be more than the average reader could be asked to bear.
* How would you distinguish the feminism in your work from your mother’s or from Katie’s. Is it important to you that readers understand your work as feminist? If not, why not?
