You mentioned that your short story “The Metal Bowl” was partly inspired by the work of the Austrian artist Friedl Kubelka. How so?
My husband bought me a book of Kubelka’s work about six years ago and I fell in love with it—so much so that I named a character in my first novel Kubelko Bondy, after her. (At one time, Friedl’s last name was Kubelka-Bondy.) I did this without asking her, but I eventually tracked her down and reached out. She was very kind, formidable, and sharp, and I felt we had a bit of kinship. So I pushed my luck and asked her to engage in a series of quasi-conceptual Skype interviews. She agreed and was incredibly generous and open with me. About a year later, she asked if I would write a story that could serve as the introduction to her new book of photographs. My usual answer would be “Are you insane?! Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a good short story?” But I very much wanted to give Friedl whatever she wanted.
I’d started this story a few years ago, thinking that it would be easy and I would get the satisfaction of finishing something quickly amid many long, slow projects. It wasn’t easy at all, and, after many drafts, I put it away until Friedl asked me for something. Still, despite feeling that I owed her (big-time), I couldn’t bring myself to write/finish the story until she offered to give me a photograph in exchange. I chose one of my favorites: a nude woman standing, facing the wall, as her husband and child, comfortably seated at the breakfast table, look calmly and curiously at her naked butt. I wrote the opening scene of the story with the photo on my desk, finally submitting to the possibility that this idea might be interesting: a woman, living with a man and their child, who has both wild and boring thoughts.
The narrator of the story appeared in a porn video when she was twenty-two and needed money. Since then, she has been interested in sex only when watching the video or imagining other people watching it. Do you think the experience was damaging for her? Or did it fuel something positive in her life?
I think the assumption is always that these experiences are regrettable and traumatizing. But I never write from a stance like that—there isn’t some pure, undamaged human type that I think we should all try to be. I’m always interested to hear how a woman conceives of herself as a sexual person, because there is really no map for this, only a series of contradictory and shaming warnings. So whatever any of us comes up with is going to be wholly unique and perhaps a little monstrous—like a creature that has survived multiple attacks yet still walks, still desires. It sounds too extreme and valiant when I spell it out. In the story, you can tell that this is just ordinary stuff.
On one hand, your character has a huge amount of agency—she married a man she loves and had a child, she has built a career and is a self-described workaholic. On the other, she’s somehow frozen at that particular moment in time, seventeen years ago, and can’t break free of it. Why this contradiction?
I think this is how life is. It’s not a linear march through time; you revolve around the same old things as you age and acquire experiences. You might spin around something for decades and then suddenly see it in a slightly new way; I think this woman does. That doesn’t allow her to break free of the event but it lets her invite it in more formally—into her life as it is now, into her marriage.
She feels so in love with her husband that she wishes she’d met him the day she was born, and yet, in her mind, they’re at a distance from each other, trying to tunnel toward some kind of meeting point. Why is there that gulf between them?
Each couple’s version of intimacy is so fascinating to me. A friend will tell me about her marriage, and I’ll think, Yikes, they have horrible communication! They’re going to get divorced! And then I’ll hear about them at another time and think, Wow, they love each other so much! They have sex on the bathroom floor! I’ve come to see that it’s all true, and true of my marriage, too. These wild contradictions are the unique heart of each couple.
You were concerned that people would read the story as autobiographical, which it isn’t. Do you often get confused with the characters you portray, onscreen or on paper? Why do you think that is?
Women writers are often conflated with their narrators—as if we can’t consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries. So I think this would be happening anyway, but, from all reports, the fact that I appeared in my first two feature films compounds the problem. I generally don’t worry about this too much, because it seems so obvious to me that the details of my stories and movies don’t line up with the details of my life. But “The Metal Bowl” doesn’t have those details. I say that this character works, but I don’t say if she’s a potato farmer or a therapist or whatever. So she could be a writer/filmmaker/artist—we don’t know. Plus, the thought of a married woman writing a story about a marriage gives me a kind of queasy, embarrassed feeling. What a clichéd waste of time! And therein lies the challenge: this shame. I’m now remembering that I proudly wrote a story about a married couple when I was in my twenties—back then, that was like writing about a potato farmer.
What is it that most draws you into a story, whether you’re writing or reading it? What do you think a short story should be or do? Do you have any models—favorite short stories you think everyone should read?
I’m often drawn in by a description of a woman thinking something familiar that’s never been articulated before, as in Diane Cook’s “Somebody’s Baby” or Nina Berberova’s “The Tattered Cloak.” Or by a bracing frankness, never mind if it’s familiar, as in Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl.” I return to Alice Munro a lot because of her agility with time. She’ll whoosh you to another part of a life in a way that leaves you gasping, as in “My Mother’s Dream.” Or, sometimes, I just like a very linear plot, the kind that makes you wonder what will happen next, like that Frank O’Connor story about a man having an affair and his sex-loving, unflappable wife.
I suppose that I think a short story should be a little startling, have some kind of revelation in it. A novel can be more like a life, profound even if it doesn’t amount to anything; the ride itself is meaningful.
Your first novel, “The First Bad Man,” was published a couple of years ago. Are you working on another?
This week, I have a large-scale art work opening in London, commissioned by Artangel. It’s an interfaith charity shop built inside Selfridges, the luxury department store. I’m also getting ready to make my next feature film, which I began writing after “The First Bad Man.” When I’m done with the movie, I get to write another novel.
