Andrew Foster Altschul is the author of the novel Lady Lazarus. His short fiction and essays have appeared in publications including Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Fence, One Story, StoryQuarterly, and anthologies such as Best New American Voices 2006 and O. Henry Prize Stories 2007. He is also the books editor of The Rumpus.net, a new arts & culture website. A former music journalist and rock DJ, he currently lives in San Francisco.
Your story, y = mx +b, recently appeared in the Winter 2008-09 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Jean Valentine. Where did the idea for this story come from?
I have to confess that this story had a more or less personal basis, though I don’t like to write about my own life. But I went through a few months about a year ago where absolutely everything was going wrong, one thing after another – my dog was very sick, my landlord – a very sweet man – died and his widow was thinking about selling the building, there was a crazy student threatening me, my car broke down, my publishing house had begun its slow disintegration just as my book was going to print. Lots of other small stuff I can’t remember now. I woke up every day and just wanted to hide. Everyone has periods like this, where you just feel like you can’t possibly deal with one more thing – and then one more thing inevitably happens.
I’d love to say that when life throws so much at me I respond by sublimating it into fiction, but the truth is that usually I can’t write when there are so many other things demanding immediate attention. In this case, I got up the day before Thanksgiving and sat down to make a list of things I needed to do (I’m a classic Virgo), but instead I wrote, “This is how the day begins: badly.” Something darkly whimsical about the line amused me. By lunchtime, I had a draft.
I was impressed by the compression of y = mx + b. Despite the relative brevity, the story offers a tremendously full and wrenching rendering of a life. Was writing such a compressed narrative something you’d set out to do with this story?
No, but there were a number of reasons I knew this story could only work as microfiction. The most important was, frankly, the whininess of it – seen a certain way, the whole piece is one long lament, and I’m a pretty firm opponent of writing that inflates the quotidian hassles of life into Greek tragedy. I see a lot of this from students and I always tell them there has to be something more. But microfiction is not the same as narrative fiction, or at least not entirely. It doesn’t have the same requirements and doesn’t promote the same relationship with the reader. In many ways, microfiction is “about” itself and its own form – it’s a kind of performance, like Robert Frost says about poetry. So you can take a subject that would be too slight for a proper short story, but the real interest and engagement becomes what you can do with it in such tight confines.
The other reason was the music of that first line, and the wordplay it led to. This, too, is something more appropriate to microfiction- or poetry – because the shape of a very small piece puts a kind of pressure on the language and makes it rev up higher than it otherwise would, do more tricks, roll over, play dead, etc. But if you do this kind of thing for more than a few pages, it gets annoying.
Your debut novel, Lady Lazarus, was published by Harcourt this spring. The book involves—quite awesomely—celebrity, punk rock, suicide, and a confessional poet named Calliope Bird Morath. Can you talk a little about the origins of the novel?
The origins are probably as numerous as the subjects you mention above—and you can add to the list Zen Buddhism, psychoanalysis, alchemy, and Vegan cheese steaks, some of the novel’s other crucial concerns. But the deepest source was probably my fascination with so-called confessional poetry and confessional poets (the novel’s title is also the title of a Sylvia Plath poem). I do admire some of the poetry, especially Plath and Berryman—but the fascination is with the phenomenon of an artist’s work and her life story getting conflated in the public imagination, to the extent that it’s impossible to read the poetry without mixing it in your head with the (often tragic) biography. Are we reading the same poems as we would be if we knew nothing of the poet? Is there any way to evaluate the work separate from the life? And, to take it to a different level, if an artist knows her public behavior will influence the reception of her work, who could resist the urge to create a little drama and drum up interest? Who doesn’t love a little scandal?
It seems to me a phenomenon that’s just as relevant today, in the age of Paris and Britney, David Duchovny’s sex addiction, Angelina’s adoptions, “wardrobe malfunctions,” and all the other highly manufactured ways celebrities draw attention to themselves. So my main character, Calliope, is a modern-day confessional poet whose public antics bring her a lot of attention. She’s also the daughter of a famous ‘90s punk rocker who committed suicide when she was a toddler – so a life of obscurity was never really an option.
Then, too, there’s this whole thing about biographies, memoirs, and the fakeries thereof, à la James Frey, Margaret B. Jones, et. al. But I don’t want to bore you.
What is your favorite first line from a work of fiction?
“Way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.”
[For print, though, you can’t beat Lolita.]
What music are you loving at the moment?
Sadly, I stopped finding out about new music a few years ago, when commercial radio became unlistenable. I spent my early 20s working at an alternative rock station in Providence, RI, and my late 20s, living in San Diego, listening to 91X. So in some ways I’m still stuck in the ‘90s, or at least the artists who came into the public eye then. There’s usually a CD by Radiohead or PJ Harvey in my stereo (and yes, I still listen to CDs, which further proves how stuck in the past I am). Leonard Cohen is a perennial favorite. Last summer I went to see Liz Phair perform Exile in Guyville song for song, amazed that this album I love is already “nostalgia.” Things I’ve been turned onto lately include Cat Power, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Hold Steady. Some Latin music, from my time living in Peru: Shakira (pre-English), Jarabe de Palo, Manu Chao… Sometimes one of my students, shocked by my utter un-hipness, will make me a CD of something new and interesting.
What are you working on now?
A cycle of novellas set in Peru, tentatively entitled Gringo. But I’m researching a new novel, also with a Peruvian element, that promises to be bigger, more complicated, and potentially more interesting even than Lady Lazarus. Hard to believe, I know!
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