12 Questions for Rayne Fisher-Quann
The princess of poignancy on sleep, dignity, grief, being understood, fictional crushes, her relationship with memory, cigarettes, and more.
‘Everything we hate in other people is just a projection of something we fear in ourselves’ the twenty-two year old Canadian memoirist Rayne Fisher-Quann (RFQ) writes in her answer to the third question of our meticulous interview. It’s a nice quote: tidy while inarguably true and very personal — this an equally tidy way to describe RFQ’s blossoming style of self-investigation. Although every RFQ thought is ordered and clear, they’re each prone to merciless self-questioning. But I wouldn’t say she’s unconfident, rather cognizant of the shifting nature of perspective; assured while maintaining a sense of curiosity, the knowledge that she could be wrong. The style (style: the summary of one’s flaws) is a departure from confident declaratives strewn across the internet, and, more classically, in the work of macho literature. Yet I’m hesitant to label RFQ’s tendency toward self-questioning the word feminine. It’s more complex than that, the comfort with being only temporarily certain.
***
‘I’m interviewing Rayne Fisher-Quann,’ I say to Dean Kissick. We’re sitting in the outdoor garden of a restaurant on the Lower East Side, having coffee, getting to know each other, feeling one another out. Dean’s slightly older, more experienced, a bit wiser. I figured I should try and get his advice on something… ‘I’m interviewing Rayne Fisher-Quann, do you know who that is?’
‘Of course, yeah. She’s quite young, pretty influential.’
‘Exactly, yeah. I actually thought she was older. Not, you know, cuz she looks older, but because her writing and also, like, her disposition is much more mature than what you’d expect from a Gen Z twenty-two year old. When she told me her age on the phone I almost gasped.’
‘Young writers are often quite assured in their initial style.’ Dean remarks. ‘Have a look at early Bret Easton-Ellis. The stuff from his 20s is like, something a forty-year old would never have the confidence to write with such elegant flow.’
‘To be honest I’m struggling a bit with the Rayne interview, avoiding writing the intro and publishing it. It’s not that I don’t like her as a writer. I think she has these very composed, depth-filled sentences with lots of poignancy, all packed with meaning. The thing is I just don’t completely relate to it, though I really enjoy what she has to say about iPhones, the internet, and grief. And like, I don’t want to write this long, praise-filled intro that’s not genuine. That’d be kind of ugly, wouldn’t it? On the other hand, I’d prefer not to write a whole thing about how I can recognize a writer is talented but that their work is not something that opens up to me. In the end, I’m just not her audience. But I think she’s interesting. And I think her success is interesting. And very much deserved, whatever deserving success means. So yeah, I’m not really sure what to write, or how to approach it.’
‘You could always…. Hm.’ Dean takes a sip of his latte. ‘You could always just write something unrelated yet in the faint style she evokes? Something random, like getting a haircut or going for cup of coffee. Then lead in, somewhat naturally.’
‘Yes.’ I reply. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’
But it is a bad idea, I think later in the day. It’s a bad idea in relation to good ol’ RFQ. Because, even if I don’t really relate to her work, or if I’m not her ‘target audience’, one can’t deny that there is plenty of there there.
***
To fall under the spell of art is to accept influence, to suspend one’s disbelief, to allow the rhythm of your perception to be guided, if not perverted, taken somewhere new unto the path of transcendence, hopefully beauty. I’ve spent several days pining through RFQ’s oeuvre. I find myself inspired to write something about how I’ve recently quit smoking and how this addiction relates to the iPhone.
It’s now been two months without a cigarette. I don’t remember the exact date I stopped, the problem was never that dire. I would smoke while writing and reading as well as in social situations, something to do with my hands and mouth, oral fixation, as the saying goes. It’s difficult to write without cigarettes nearby. I’ve purchased a stress ball and lollipops, a good solution for when I’m alone. In public, not so much. A friend of mine suggested I start sucking cock, though they mentioned it might be just as, if not more, addictive. For now I’ve managed to quit the habit, however inconvenient. It does feel good to go on runs and do yoga without constantly heaving for air. I’ve also stopped, sort of, drinking hard alcohol, only one to two glasses of red wine per night and, well, the occasional beer or whiskey, and of course, the odd digestif here and there. Some would say, perhaps RFQ would say, that I’m falling into the habit of self-optimization, of what has come to be known as the wellness industrial complex, a facet of contemporary life that RFQ deems inescapable. I’d respond, though, in this hypothetical exchange, that I’m attempting to save my life, or at least add a few years. In our interview, RFQ does preface, however, that the wellness industrial complex is inescapable for ‘young women online more than anyone.’ This is probably true, although I don’t know why. People online are faced with all sorts of horrific influences. To draw an oversimplified binary, for women it’s wellness, for men it’s porn and vitriolic message boards. I guess, according to RFQ, that with all my yoga and nutrition stuff, I’m more of a woman than I’d like to admit. This is all well and fine.
I’ve never had too much of an addictive personality, just within the norm. All my life, I’ve been able to temper my poor habits through sheer will, without the need for group psychoanalysis or faith-based meetings. More than anything else, literature, my vocation, the reading of it more than the writing of it, usually helps me get out of destructive behavioral patterns. I’ve got a tendency to fall on my face before picking myself back up, playing the past off with considerable whim. Other than my iPhone, there aren’t many enticements I haven’t been able to overcome. But it’s getting to the point where my phone is destructive enough. My addiction to the black rectangle is, like with everyone else in the generations above and below me, agonizing, all-consuming. Most addictions are empty, if they were productive we wouldn’t use the pejorative noun addiction, but instead something approbatory, like passion. Not even the lamest of losers would say, ‘my phone is my passion.’ But the iPhone, unlike drugs, the cigarette, or sex, really gives us nothing other than, like Christian Lorentzen says, ‘the ability to sometimes make it easier to meet-up.’ But even that is arguable. Smartphones offer no tangible experience, only facsimile, the dopamine rush of being notified, pure simulacrum, a mere reflection of something that could, in theory, at one point in time be real. But the craving isn’t for the real, the actual, the existent material structure. Our addiction (from Latin: addicere, ‘enslaved by’ or ‘bound to’) is only for the idea of the real, a ghostlike silhouette without gnostic pull. What an empty emptiness. The emptiest of emptinesses takes hold of the collective consciousness, no way out, I sometimes think, sometimes feel. RFQ feels this too. The influence of this emptiness is one of her primary subjects. And when I read her I feel simultaneously more and less alone, that others are experiencing what I am too, laying it bare with significant insight; a sense of community, but only sort of. Does this make it any better?
***
Ringo’s barbershop had the faint smell of lavender and mint. It had the feel of inner-city luxury, the room adorned with sparse, minimal, Scandinavian zeitgeist simplicity with a claustrophobic, Lower East Side edge that is, somehow, still semi-existent. I was pacing around the city this past Wednesday, in search of a new barber. I’ve had a break-up with my last one, Rosa, which wasn’t easy at all. It can be more difficult to break up with your barber than a therapist or a friend. It’s easier than breaking up with a girlfriend, yet harder than breaking it off with a situation-ship. This is the level of difficulty in breaking off the transactional yet oddly personal relationships we all tend to build. So what’s RFQ to me? She’s not quite a subject, because what I’m doing isn’t really journalism. She’s not a friend either. I’m not working for her, and she’s not working for me, no finances are being exchanged. It’s also not quite PR, since PR is usually either flattery or the opposite. It’s a bond with no name. We’re colleagues, sort of, collaborating on this thing. Is the relationship similar, in anyway, to the weird one with me and Rosa, or am I, as the cliche goes, grasping for straws?
A barber, at least for a guy like me who has his hair cut once a month, can be as much a fixture of one’s life as a family member or friend. Things got quite weird when my longtime barber began to lose her touch. I’d kept going and going, out of loyalty, but the cuts kept getting stranger each time. ‘You look a bit challenged,’ my friend Josh said after the last one, and I knew it was time for a change. I’d been going to see Rosa on Clinton St. on and off for twenty years. She knows where I live, where my parents live, and she waves to me when my dog and I walk past the shop. To be completely honest, I more ghosted Rosa than put a formal end to the relationship. This was cowardly, indeed. I didn’t feel it necessary to ceremonially call her and say: I’m sorry Rosa, I just don’t think it’s a match anymore. Instead, I did something on the sly, a bit sneaky, and have started seeing other people. What will Rosa think when she sees me walk by with a cut by someone else? I’m terrified, I must admit. I’ve begun a new route for my afternoon walks and haven’t passed by her shop in over three months. I’ve seen four different barbers since, all a bit mediocre. They’re worse than she is, and to boot, lack the formidable experience. Some were a bit too new-age, others clearly in the wrong field altogether.
Wednesday, in desperate need of a shape-up, I decided it would be my last hurrah before throwing my hands up in surrender and returning to sweet Rosa. I’ve never been one to make appointments with barbers, preferring to walk-in, suss the place out, and see if there’s any room. There has to be a level of serendipitous kismet to the whole experience. Walking around the Lower East Side, four establishments previously unbeknownst to me were thoroughly examined. A couple of them seemed nice but had no room for walk-ins; it wasn't meant to be. The other two, well, I don’t think I’d let them comb my dog’s hair (poor hygiene, bad atmosphere). At the very end of despondency, I found myself on Ludlow between Stanton and Rivington. This is the opposite of the kind of street where I thought I’d find my match, a hyper-commercial pathway I’ve walked down at least a thousand times, where I thought I knew in the back of my mind every storefront on offer. And but, there’s always, in this city of surprise and horror, shock and awe, a few things one has a propensity to miss.
And it was, you might have already guessed, the aforementioned Ringo’s Barbershop. Affable and gregarious, Ringo ushered me in with delight.
‘Have time for a walk-in?’ I ask. ‘I just need a little trim, a clean up.’
‘Of course I do, gorgeous! Come here, come here. Sit down.’
Ringo started playing with my hair, massaging my head up and down.
‘You shouldn’t do too much, you shouldn’t cut the sides too short. You’re a handsome white man, you have it in your favor. Yes, your hair is thinning, but that’s fine, it just means your brain is growing. You must be smart! Very good at, I don’t know, something? I have an idea of what to do with you, something very simple, not try-hard, very natural, almost as if you’ve never gotten a haircut at all. Better, you know, it’s your first time here, so I’m going to give you a discount. Just send me forty dollars on Venmo, I’ll give you the real price if you ever decide to come back.’
Ringo’s presence felt warm, so sharply caring and amiable. In his grasp, I would have let him do whatever he wanted to me, mohawk, buzzcut, you name it. He was so comforting. I felt, confidently, that I was in the hands of an expert. It was similar to reading a book by a great author like Gary Indiana, Emmanuel Carrere, Annie Enaux… I fell under the influence of his charm right away. He mentioned that, more than anything, he would cut my hair to correspond with the shape of my head, sort of like how I try to write an intro that matches the evocative tone of whoever I’m interviewing. This excites me. I couldn’t wait to see what he’d come up with.
‘I completely agree with whatever you’re about to do.’ I tell him.
‘That’s wonderful, Jordan. I’m not going to disappoint you.’
People usually talk to their barbers while they perform their work. I don’t like this cultural practice; it’s something I endure. During the whole experience, Ringo was going on about how he’s been in Manhattan for thirty years but just recently moved to Brooklyn because he’s aged out of Manhattan, how Manhattan is nice to work in but to live in, no, makes him feel crazy, totally overwhelmed, this began at his twenty year mark, he says. Ringo has a faint accent I can’t place. I mean, I know he’s Asian, because he’s Asian, but I felt it would be rude to ask from where exactly. I sort of asked at the beginning, and he said America in an incredibly strong yet unplaceable accent. So whatever, he’s from America, that’s good. Instead of pressing the topic, I say:
‘It took you twenty years to become overwhelmed by Manhattan?’
‘Oh yeah.’ He responds. ‘The first twenty I was just go-go-go, party-work-party, non-stop, hoo-rah-rah. Now everything is a bit calmer.’
The haircut came out weird. I liked it right away, because it was different, and he smothered me in product, and everything in the barber’s mirror looks better than in reality, but it wasn’t anything similar to what Rosa accomplished in her prime. I looked deranged, I realized not until I got home. But he styled the cut to correspond with the shape of my head, the one that Ringo said became bigger because of the way I think, the way my mind has adapted to my environment. So what does this awful new look end up saying about me?
***
‘If I read one more proclaimed internet writer I’m going to kill myself,’ my friend Cece remarks while walking with me and my dog up Allen St. ‘It’s just overdone, the internet style, the internet reflections. It comes out as drone-like as the very society they’re trying to represent. Or criticize. I’m never sure if they’re trying to critique it or embody it.’
‘That’s a pretty good critique.’ I respond. ‘I think RFQ…’
‘No, no, Gordon, I can’t hear you talk about fucking RFQ anymore. Just write your intro and then move on.’
‘Hear me out for a second, I’m almost there…’ I say, pulling my dog away from a pile of another dog’s shit. ‘I think that RFQ does a pretty decent job, in that endless collection of internet writers, of distinguishing herself. The self-reflection isn’t that narcissistic. There’s a genuine yearning, an authentic tension between who she wants to be and who she is, between her tensions and her ideals, between her perception of reality and of the reality that the internet has, I guess, cornered her into. With every action she’s like, constantly aware, it seems, of what’s internet-borne behavior and what’s influenced by the tangible and real, that is to say family, friends, the socio-cultural elements surrounding her. And even further, she’s reflective on how the internet, by now a monstrous noun in and of itself, has warped what we’ve come to perceive as the more pure emotional elements, like love, grief, or the experience of moving to a new city. Am I encountering the world as it is, or am I imitating very unnatural behaviors? In what way has this always been the case, and in what ways has the internet, has the iPhone, made everything worse? Is it possible to even trust oneself without knowing the answer to these questions? This is the tone that lies in the background of everything she writes. It’s impressive, it really is.’
‘Sure.’
‘I get the disquieting sense-’
‘Oh god.’
‘Stop, I’m almost finished. Hear me out. I get the disquieting sense while reading RFQ that nothing, anymore, might be real… like, as soon as the fish realizes they’re in water they’re fucked, sort of thing. But with RFQ, what is real is the desire to understand, the genuine yearning I was just talking about. That’s what I think distinguishes her from the massive pool of contemporaries doing similar things. She’s got an impetus I don’t think any of the other internet writers have… it all amounts to something very moving, if not mournful. I think it’s a little more sophisticated than the cheapness of nostalgia. There is plenty of there there.’
‘You think she’s like, a voice of a generation, kind of thing?’ Cece says. And I’m not sure if she’s being ironic. I decide to take the question at face value.
‘Could be, sure. Whether that generation’s voice is worth considering is another question entirely. Like, I’m definitely going to read her new book, though I can’t say I’m excited. Again, like I’ve said before, her work moves me, intellectually, but not really to my core. This is what’s bothering me. I want her to move me to my core, to go past just the ability to understand what she’s doing. I want to feel it in its entirety. I want it, more than anything, like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, to fully open up to every aspect of my being. Is this something that can be contrived?’
‘Every generation’s voice is worth considering, worth trying to understand and relate to. I think the question is whether it offers anything novel to the conversations that have come before it. In terms of whether you can force yourself to be moved from your core through sheer will, desire… honestly, dude, I have no idea.’
‘Whether intentionally or not, RFQ has tapped into something no millennial ever could. Perhaps, then, yes. The short answer is yes.’
***
In the middle of trying to write the intro to this interview, I came down with one of the nastiest flus in recent memory. 103 degrees, fever dreams where RFQ’s prose came to life, where the answers she wrote to my questions gained different meanings, sensibilities. One night, in bed, covered in sweat, I said to myself: You’re going to go write that fucking intro tomorrow, you fucking piece of shit. You’re gonna sit down, and you’re gonna write it, be done with it, publish it, and stand by every fucking word, and that’s that.
The next morning, even more sick, I didn’t do it.
In Chinatown, at the worst Urgent Care I’ve ever been to for the third time in one week, the doctor, a white woman in her fifties who looked smacked out on LSD, wearing a purple Care-Bare t-shirt, arms covered with colorful tattoos in the shape of little night-time stars, tried to express sympathy for my condition.
‘Ohhhh poor boy. Look at you!’ She says.
I’m almost thirty, you cunt, I couldn’t help but think.
‘Yeah. I’m yeah.’ I respond.
‘Awww look at you. So sick. What are we going to do with you!’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
‘So, RSV, corona, strep, all came back negative. Urine, blood, clean! No STD’s. Hah. So that’s great to hear. Isn’t it? I don’t know what you have! The rhinovirus has been going around. It could be that.’
‘Is that like a mutation from a rhinoceros?’ I ask.
‘What! No! What a stupid thing to say. It’s just a common cold.’
‘Oh.’
‘There’s the also the chance that it’s psychosomatic. I’ve seen temperatures and high blood pressures with no cause but the mind.’
‘That’s not what it is.’ I respond.
‘OK! Mister, “I’m not crazy.” No. Hahah. Poor you, poor guy, What are we going to do with you?’
For some reason, she ended up prescribing heavy painkillers, which I didn’t end up taking. Even though I have insurance, which I pay over two hundred dollars a month for, each visit had a copay of one hundred and fifty dollars. I had an urge to go back into the consultation room and flip the desk over, throw the computer monitor against the wall, all these aggressive things. I was galvanized by frustration, a rush of energy I hadn’t had for days.
That night I went home and took a very hot shower for forty-five minutes. I listened to Nat King Cole, some techno music, Sam Cooke, and then Billie Holiday. I screamed into a cup and then threw my phone against the wall. Covered in flu-driven sweat, I took another shower. I went to the fridge and ate two apples before starting to vomit with intensity. I showered yet again and then ate a grapefruit. I watched an hour of news about the war in the middle east and the student protests on college campuses. I watched a debate on YouTube about how the protests compare and heavily contrast with the student movement of 1968. I listened to all sorts of takes, left, right, and fringe. I thought about my being Jewish for a while, about how much I love Shabbat dinner with family and friends, the traditions of Judaism I was raised with. I thought about the way my grandfather, Jew, would eat not just the apple, but the apple’s core and seeds too, the whole goddamn thing. I began laughing, somewhat manic, uncontrollable and bizarre; a real guttural burst. I then started crying. I vomited once more before taking another shower, jerking off to the idea of a world with no murder, just tits, penis, pussy and ass. I AM OTESSA MOSHFEGH, I said aloud while coming. I AM OTESSA MOSHFEGH. In my robe, I sat down at my desk and emailed a good friend of mine. He responded right away, a much shorter response than what I’d written. I decided not to answer. I opened this document and sighed. I got nauseous but kept it down. I began writing RFQ’s intro and then fell asleep on my couch.
The next morning, I felt better.
***
Dear Rayne,
I’ve overdone it here, haven’t I?
As I write this, I’m thinking about what Sean Thor Conroe once said, about how literature is the secret place, the quiet place, the destination to say what everywhere else would, and probably should, go unsaid. It reminds me of the scene from In The Mood For Love, when Chow talks about how, in centuries past, when people had a secret, they would go to the top of a mountain and whisper it into the hollow of a tree, before covering it up with mud, walking back down the mountain, and moving on. Then there’s that part at the very end of the film, where Chow travels to Cambodia and does just that, whispering the secret of his never-consummated romance into a hole of bark. I remember the goosebumps I felt the first time I saw that scene, the whole film, actually. I had similar goosebumps when we met. I’d sensed, for whatever reason, that you understood where I was coming from. I said all sorts of bizarre things and you didn’t flinch at all, though it’s true your editor did. This was lovely, a delicate comfort. I really was shocked when you told me you were only twenty-two. It didn’t make any sense.
Writing, what we’ve chosen to devote our lives to, it’s kind of similar to Chow putting the secret into nature, isn’t it? The difference, I guess, is that instead of letting the deepest, perhaps most verboten aspects of our selves linger within the confines of nature, the bark of a banyan tree, we feel a perverse compulsion to offload the inescapable contents of our minds into form, making it accessible for anyone who’s interested. This is insane, what we do, wouldn’t you say, Rayne? No ordinary love, our profession, our compulsion. And an even more beautiful thing, for you it’s a true compulsion with no outside influence; one gets the sense that you write because it’s the only way to feel alive within the world; it’s genuine and pure; no one can ever, no matter what, take that away from you. You walk around, everywhere you go, with a million dollars that can never be wasted nor spent.
It’s worth reiterating: I really don’t know you. I met you only once in person, when we became aware of one another at that playhouse in Greenpoint. And then a week later we talked on the phone for twenty or so minutes, about this interview. Practically, that’s the extent to which I know RFQ the person. Though through your writing, the illusion of your existence, your documented brush with existential crises, I feel as though I know you much more than many of my friends and family. Parasocial, is that what they say? Is it the real you anyway? Does that, the real you, exist in the first place? Or are we just the sheer aggregation of what we come into contact with, both practical and physical? Where and how do our souls meet the material world that torments and inspires? That’s the question I think you seek not to answer, but to understand in the first place.
As detailed above, I’ve struggled with writing your interview, more, so far, than with anyone else. I’ve accurately reflected this struggle and presented your work to a certain degree, so I think my job here is done... Though it’s long, much too long, I’m happy with what’s come out; it’s enough for now.
Much admiration
-GG
Gordon: Someone said something to me recently, about how the best writers are willing and able to investigate themselves as a whole, not only the persona that their era finds acceptable. I find this true with your work. Can you define and describe your own form of self-investigation? Where has it led you?
RFQ: It’s difficult to know how to talk about the process of self-investigation, because I tend to have a gut feeling that making any kind of definitive proclamation about how you relate to yourself --- especially at 22 --- is sort of asking for trouble. It’s become very in vogue, I think, to brag about one’s capacity for self-awareness, and I don’t like to make blanket statements, but I’ve noticed that no one who’s actually particularly self-aware seems to spend much time talking about how self-aware they are. I will say that, in part because so much of my work deals with performance and artifice, I’m very interested in three ways of looking at things: I try to look at what they are, what they pretend to be, and how those two things interact with each other.
I also think my philosophy around self-reflection is based on the fact that I’ve always been extremely interested in the parts of ourselves that are difficult to look at, both personally and in my art. I think there is a culture around personal writing that demands that the author write from a point of moral privilege or purity, that they be a hero we can root for and agree with, and I couldn’t disagree more --- I am obsessed with selfishness, anger, jealousy, envy, spite, narcissism. I think investigating these things, digging into our worst thoughts and impulses, shining light on them until they aren’t scary anymore, is the only way to eventually give them less power (and, hopefully, to eventually begin to understand ourselves).
What do you now enjoy that you never have before? What do you no longer enjoy? Is there anything you’d like to enjoy, take pleasure in, that you’re simply not able to?
I only recently started to enjoy walking. I used to hate walking --- it was sort of embarrassing. I’d wait 20 minutes for the bus rather than walk seven minutes to the subway station. I found it boring, I think, or I didn’t know how to be alone with myself. But I started walking when I first started coming to New York, and now I love it no matter what city I’m in.
I used to enjoy spending a lot of leisure time at home. When I was in my last long-term relationship, I was very domestic --- making dinner every night, watching an episode of TV, going to bed --- and I really did love it, until I didn’t anymore. I think this is another thing that really and truly changed when I moved to New York. Now, spending even one night at home makes me feel crazy and restless. I don’t think this way of being is any more sustainable than the last one, and it’s maybe even less healthy, but I’m sure one day I’ll find a balance.
I’ve always wished I could enjoy going to the gym or eating a salad. But I’ve only truly enjoyed eating a salad once in my life, and that time it was mostly just nuts and cheese.
Let’s say you're on a date with someone. They say: I'm from (x city). You think, 'oh fuck, red flag.' Why is it a bad idea to date someone from this city? What does coming from this city say about that person? Moreover, how do you think a city defines somebody's personality, their way of meeting the world?
I actually experienced this recently, when I found out on a first date that my date was from Toronto. I genuinely considered leaving. This might have been sort of unfair of me, considering that I am also from Toronto --- but everything we hate in other people is just a projection of something we fear in ourselves, anyway. I will say: Toronto is the biggest and best city in a country that no one cares about, and as a result, people from Toronto tend to have a kind of joint superiority-inferiority complex that is usually only found in male incels. It’s why Drake is like that!
This is a little different, but my only other location-based non-negotiable is when someone says they moved to New York from New Haven or “outside Boston”. I like to keep my sex life proletariat -- no Ivy Leagues. In part because I think it’s important for their development that they be denied something. I have a state school pussy. But, full transparency, I’ll accept a liberal arts college grad if they have student loans.
When you write who are you speaking to? What is it that drives the need for self-expression? Is this something an artist should know about themselves?
I’ve begun to think that injecting too much self-awareness or meta-analysis into art --- about the technicalities of why we make it, who will consume it, what they might think about it, and what that would, in turn, say about us --- can be a great impediment to the production of art, especially in its earliest stages. I think especially in this age of instant consumer feedback, it’s very easy to get wrapped up in how your art will be received and very easy to lose sight of the personal, sensuous experience of making it. I write for myself, I think, and I try to think as little as possible about who could be reading it (I try not to even think about what my own opinion of it will be when I read it back in the future). I write because I feel like I have to.
How has the wellness industrial complex, or, as you put it, ‘anti-social wellness culture’ had an effect on the way you live your life and see the world?
Well, I’m trying to fight it all the time. But for everyone, and I think for young women online more than anyone, the wellness industrial complex is pretty inescapable. I wrote a long essay about this question, and don’t want to repeat too much of it here --- but I think the fundamental lesson this culture has tried to teach me is that community, connection, and fulfillment are things you have to earn through the process of obsessive self-optimization. The self is treated like a project that can be completed through consumption of the right media, food, products, health choices, therapeutic practices. There are always parties actively interested in giving you very specific instructions on what you need to buy in order to become whole. It’s a narcissistic culture, even as it traffics in the language of empathy and connection and community care; it demands that you basically never stop thinking about yourself. There’s a lot I could say about how I’ve tried to resist this culture, but basically I am just trying to think about myself less.
How does someone's taste define their personality, their identity? Further, what does a method of consumption say about a person?
I think identity can be defined in a lot of different ways. There are people --- many people, I’d say --- who define themselves almost entirely by the things they consume. Some people I’ve met give very little meaning, relatively, to their taste or their consumption, and base their sense of self on less tangible things (or, they just don’t spend that much time thinking about themselves at all). I think the latter option is admirable, in part because it’s so mysterious to me --- I can’t imagine who I’d be without consuming things and then presenting myself for consumption. And, while I’m critical of this dynamic, especially when it interacts with the hyper-capitalist consumption culture of the internet, I think it also has the potential to be very beautiful. What are we if not a collection of the things we love? It can be a very sacred process to assemble yourself from bits and pieces of art, music, movies, books (especially when you realize that all that art was assembled from bits of people in the first place, too --- that this can be a reciprocal transaction).
Is it better to give an adolescent a smartphone or a carton of cigarettes? Why?
Well, in many ways, the cigarette is kind of the anti-smartphone. Smartphones turn your whole life into work. Cigarettes give you a break. Smartphones are deeply unsexy, and smoking is very sexy. (I don’t mean that as a personal endorsement but an observational statement of fact --- they’re a phallic sex object, for one thing, and it’s just the truth that the best way I’ve ever found to flirt with smart and interesting people is to smoke cigarettes nearby and have a lighter.) I’ve always found smartphones very disconnective, from reality and from other real-life people; smoking is the glue that holds many relationships together and also creates them in the first place. I take no pleasure in saying this, but smoking --- I smoke herbals --- has improved my life in a series of tangible and observable ways.
But, with all that being said: as far as I know, a smartphone has yet to directly give anyone cancer. There is much to be said about the large-scale harm of mass surveillance and biohacking and strategic decimation of our collective attention spans for corporate profit, and I’m sure an intellectual argument could be made that there is nothing more harmful than the proliferation of those evils onto young people, but come on --- if I’m being asked to make a serious moral choice, I have to give the teenager the thing that doesn’t give you cancer.
What does grief do to someone? How have you coped with grief and what life-lessons have you learned?
Grief can do many things to many different people. The most universal thing I can say about it is also the most banal, which is that it changes you deeply and irrevocably; there is a profound difference between people who have experienced serious grief and those who haven’t yet. Grief reminds you in the clearest possible terms of your smallness and powerlessness against the machinations of the universe, of the quiet cruelty and tragedy that lies latent in all of our lives. It reminds you of your own narcissism --- it is so great that it makes everything else in your life seem meaningless, and you wonder how you ever cared about any of it, and then you of course go on caring about all the insignificant stuff anyway with the uncomfortable newfound awareness that it’s all a kind of delusion.
Grief has taught me almost nothing. Everything it has taught me, I would give up in a second in exchange for the things that I’ve lost. The meaninglessness of it is the worst part.
Do you think the internet made us half-human, half-cyborg? Is this inescapable, or is it a choice?
I think spending just about any amount of time on the internet makes it so that your sense of self is impossible to disentangle from the influence of technology. Even if you’re not particularly online, the world at large has shifted to a kind of cyborgian mode of being where it is almost impossible to live life as normal, to work or study or travel or socialize, without collaborating with (or, some would say, submitting to) technology in some way. I think that this of course makes us cyborgs; I don’t think most people can separate the material workings of their lives from technology, and I think at this point that’s become pretty compulsory.
What’s your relationship with memory? How do memories define someone? Can you share a memory of yours that’s gained meaning and significance over time? How has this memory changed? How has it defined your current perspective?
I have a horrible memory. I can’t remember most of my childhood. I have a type of OCD which makes it very difficult to tell real memories from very unpleasant false ones. I also love to embellish stories, even just to myself (this is called being a STORYTELLER, not a liar) and it makes it hard for me sometimes to remember the difference between what actually happened and what I invented to get closer to the underlying emotional truth of the story.
Is there a fictional or non-fictional character from a book, play, or film that you’d love to sleep with? If so, who and why? If not, how come?
JD from Heathers was probably the first person I ever really wanted to sleep with in my life. I’ve always liked the idea of a romantic partner who would kill for me. Although I think one of the really sexy things about him is that he didn’t really care that much about Veronica, ultimately --- that she was just a sort of conduit for his grander and larger-scale psychopathy. It’s always good for a boyfriend to have a robust inner world!
Do you care about being understood?
In some senses, deeply. In my intimate relationships, the feeling of being understood is I think the thing that has brought me the closest to feeling true, warm, enduring happiness. There are a few people in my life who I think truly understand me and those relationships are unquestionably the most tangible things that lend meaning to my life. The feeling of being understood and, of course, loved on top of that (being understood and disliked is a similarly satisfying but less joyful experience) is very similar to the feeling of being redeemed, and the feeling of being redeemed is basically God. I mean that in a pretty literal sense --- for myself, and for a lot of people (or maybe just Catholics), a main function of the God figure is just the idea that there is a force that truly understands you and still believes you can be redeemed. It’s one of the most important feelings in the world.
In some senses, though, particularly on the internet, I’ve been able to detach from the desire to be understood. I think you have to do this to survive when you’re any kind of public-facing person --- whether you’re an online personality or an artist or just a normal social person who meets a lot of people.
Your writing appears as a confessional, a place to express both your highest self but also your most secret self, your most hidden self. How would you define your highest and most hidden self? What’s an aspect of this ‘self’ that you’ve been afraid to show your audience? Moreover, on a quotidian, daily basis, do you feel connected or disconnected from this higher, hidden self?
My highest self is generous and measured and uninterested in her own victimhood. She is observant of other people more than herself, and she knows that giving love and attention is a practice with spiritual value independent of what one might get in return. I have brief moments of communion with this self, and I can feel very connected to her when I’m writing. But I think writing can also bring me closer to a self that I would prefer to keep hidden, too --- a self that is self-involved and solipsistic and gossipy; superior, competitive, attention-hungry. I don’t like this self very much, and I’d like to see her less often, but I try not to be ashamed of her. I think there’s an interesting balance to strike between revealing your “lower” self, which I think is artistically and personally valuable, and indulging it, which I think is less so. I work on striking that balance all the time.
Beyond the benefit of a strong social welfare system, how does the sense of dignity in Canada, in the spiritual/personal sense, compare to the sense of dignity that can be found in the United States? Is dignity something you find important to consider in the first place?
I don’t think very much about dignity, to be honest, except when I’m joking about my personal lack of it. As I said earlier, I think that Canada has a real cultural inferiority complex because so much of our culture is directly downstream and derivative of the US, and so there’s sort of lack of dignity there --- but I think, also, that it’s sort of impossible to separate any appraisal of Canadian dignity from the immense dignity lent to us by a social welfare system there. Any dignity that America has by virtue of its mythology, its artistic output, or its international cultural power is still decimated, I think, when an average person dies in debt because they can’t afford healthcare.
As a young teenager, I used to get mad at my parents for living in Canada instead of the US --- I was hypnotized by the glamour and the power and the projected dignity of American culture, and furious at the feeling that I’d been denied it. But then, one day, my dad sort of snapped at me and said, “well, Rayne, if we lived in New York, we’d all be homeless and your mother would be dead.” Which is certainly true. So that pretty much shut me up.
Do you think polyamory is a realistic ideal? What about monogamy? How might polyamory and monogamy be related to capitalism? Which one, would you say, is more capitalist? How?
Well, I’m a big believer in the Dworkin line that says, essentially, that the big difference between right-wing men and left-wing men is that right-wing men think women should be private property and left-wing men think women should be public property. I think there is a theoretical version of the heterosexual relationship in which no one is property, but I think that very often monogamy makes women private property and polyamory makes women public property, and so I’m not sure if either one works well for us most of the time. I think that capitalism has a vested interest in the dominance of the nuclear family model --- a family model isolated from community incentivizes consumption and keeps wealth in the private sphere. I also think that there are versions of polyamory that seem to be very infected with a mindset of transaction, optimization, and maximization that is very connected to the interests of American capitalism. As for which is more capitalist --- Marxists believe that the monogamous nuclear family is essentially one of the building blocks of the capitalist system, and I don’t think polyamory is anywhere mainstream enough to have that kind of structural power.
I try to avoid using the word ‘process’ in these interviews, because in interviews the word process is disgusting and overused. But fuck it. Can you tell me about the process of writing, bringing together, your forthcoming book? How did it change your life?
I haven’t written most of my book yet --- I sold it on proposal --- but the process of writing the proposal was very revealing to me. I was “writing” it for about two years before I submitted it, but I spent almost all of that time writing literally nothing at all. I thought about it constantly but I just couldn’t get it onto the page. Then I woke up one day and had this burst of inspiration, almost totally at random, and wrote the whole thing in about three days. My agent had essentially no notes for me --- I submitted it a week after that and went into meetings immediately. Three weeks before I sold my book to Knopf, my book proposal was a blank page.
This is very similar to how I write essays, too, albeit on a smaller scale --- I’ll spend weeks thinking constantly and writing nothing, moving the ideas around in my head, talking out loud to myself, until the final piece clicks into place and I can finally write it all down.
For me, I think writing often has to feel urgent. And I think I stoke that by forcing myself to let an idea build for so long without release that eventually I have to write about it just so I can sleep at night.
Nabakov said there are two kinds of people, those who can sleep and those who can’t. He found people who slept well somewhat plebeian, complacent. What’s your relationship like with sleep? In your sleep, what manifestations of reality come to fruition? How does it then affect your day, your life?
I’m a horrible sleeper. I haven’t had an uninterrupted good night of sleep in probably months, if not a year. When I do sleep, I have extremely vivid dreams. I would say about half the time they’re nightmares, usually sort of gruesome and gorey --- my dreams usually have a lot of body horror, blood, death, sometimes suicide. I find it very distressing. Other times, I just dream in vivid detail about pretty normal things. I sometimes dream about writing --- like I’ll dream about writing an essay for my book, and I can remember what I wrote when I woke up and transcribe it into my notes word for word. Or I’ll have ideas for essays while I’m sleeping, like subjects to research or dots to connect. My unconscious life is very explicitly connected to my waking life; my dreams always have a very obvious connection to things that are on my mind while I’m awake. I don’t think I have a very complex subconscious.
What do you find oppressive, what do you find repressive, what do you find depressive? And how about happiness, what’s that to you?
I find humourlessness oppressive. I find borders and boundaries repressive. I find lack of clarity depressive. Happiness, to me, is a very blue sky and someone you love making you laugh.
I would read a book of just these introductions.
I enjoyed this so much 💐