At some point during the fortnight fever dream of constant food preparation, extended family time, and keeping up with my paid job that was my children’s spring break, I managed to read this interview with Ottessa Moshfegh. Her first answer – the idea that loneliness and isolation are critical components of her writing life – is the kind of thing that used to put me on tilt because it’s exactly what I thought a writer needed to do and be. And it’s probably what I would try to do and be if I didn’t have four kids and the Sword of Damocles that is dinner hanging over my head each afternoon. I love it for those who love it and can do it, but this newsletter has been my attempt to poke some small holes in its suffocating mythological presence. People write in Panera and they write in the middle of the living room; sometimes they write for three hours a day while a wizard looks after their toddler.

The concept of living in the non-ideal, and the belief that happiness and satisfaction can flow forth from the non-ideal just as surely as it can from its opposite, has been on my mind lately having finally read Lindy West’s Adult Braces instead of just inhaling what everyone else was saying about it. I agree with the internet that I would not want to be married to that man and I agree that the Lindy West who lived in our heads prior to whenever they put that video on the internet would have told us to stay away from that man. But maybe that Lindy West was also the voice that told us we could live a life without compromise when all evidence points to the contrary. Real life is messy and chaotic and full of imperfect options. Everyone I know has made choices that don’t align with their ideals. Maybe we’re mad because we think Lindy West is presenting a compromise as if it’s a best case scenario and what we wanted her to have done in this book is tell us how to think about the compromises we all have to make. Maybe that’s what she thought she was doing.

If you’re looking for a great book about mess and desire and the blurriness of real life, might I suggest you immediately order yourself a copy of Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein? Her books defy holistic description but this one opens with a saint’s life of Monica Lewinsky, features an extremely compelling lasagna, and has just the right ending. It’s smart and hilarious and we had a great time talking about the value of a humanities PhD, Notes app novel writing, and Langbein’s mixed feelings about cooking for her family.

Let me start by saying that I recommend your first book, American Mermaid, to everyone and they all love it. I can’t wait until I can start recommending this one.

Did you read it?

I did, actually. That’s an important part of the Write Like A Mother process.

Yeah, well, I mean, you never know. You’re a busy lady!

I was already a big fan of yours, having read and loved American Mermaid, and I just couldn’t believe you had written a book involving two of my pleasure centers: the late ‘90s and medieval saints’ lives.

There are more people than you think out there with pleasure centers that somehow involve the medieval. There’s a lot of people out there who have a lot of thoughts about early Christianity, or just sainthood, or these kinds of tropes and schemas that haunt our ways of thinking and storytelling.

As a Jew, I really have no right to be a saints’ life person, but then I became a medievalist by academic training…it was all very roundabout. But before we get to that, take me through your career arc, because you pivoted, it seems, from improv…

It’s so weird. I make no sense, I know.

…to academia, and then to fiction, which is…just a wonderful journey. How does that happen?

So I think that when I was really little, I was super convinced that I was a writer. And I think I got talked out of it by a family culture in which that got managed in the direction of something productive, like academia. My dad’s a professor. But then, the comedy stuff- I just always did comedy. And again, I was really talked out of that, too. The years that I was most active in comedy were 2003 to 2007, and I was performing constantly in New York. And I loved it so much but it was becoming professional for me, so I had a comedy agent, and I was sending spec scripts out to TV shows, and I was getting callbacks for getting staffed on TV shows and things. And I got into a PhD program at the University of Chicago at the same time that the actual professionalization of comedy was becoming a reality for me.

So you had decided to apply to grad school while doing comedy.

Yes, I did, because I had been very intense as an undergrad about art history. I really loved it, and I did a senior thesis that I slept in the library overnight for days to write. I was into that at the same time that I was into comedy, and these two things seemed incompatible or like a kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing for a really long time. I have two children, and one of them is really studious and the other one’s a total maniac and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you gave birth to your two sides. Your two sides finally got divided.’

But it turns out those two things can coexist in fiction.

Exactly. So I went and got a PhD in art history and I wrote about a kind of comic perspective on the world in the form of these caricaturists, how these caricaturists in the 19th century were the most trenchant analysts of an incipient modernism. And it’s not that I want us to take comedy seriously. There was a moment where I was like, ‘Ew, gross, am I gonna be, like, a person who writes serious books about comedy forever? That sucks. So horrible. I’m the worst.’

Instead you’re a person who writes funny books about serious stuff.

I was just like, these guys are really funny and nobody takes them seriously. Everyone thinks that if you laughed in the 19th century, if you laughed at art, it was because you didn’t get it. And then later, these 20th century critics ratified that perspective. The real heroic critics of modernist art said, ‘I’m sorry, modernism isn’t for a mass market, it’s not for a popular audience, because those people will just laugh.’ And so it was actually very political and historical revision to say, wait a minute, the people who were laughing were actually very informed and they were part of the culture that created this art. So it was more than just sort of standing up for comedy or something, but I do think that in fiction there’s an intelligence in comedy. I never think of comic fiction as fiction that’s been decorated or made palatable by comedy. That is something I care a lot about, finding writers who are deeply hilarious, and have hilarious depth. I want hilarious depth.

And so when and under what circumstances did you start writing American Mermaid?

I think I saw the writing on the wall. At that time, I was a junior research fellow at Oxford which is a very serious position that usually leads to full-time jobs in academia in the UK. I don’t usually see the writing on the wall, it’s not really on brand for me. I don’t know what happened there. It just came out, I just started doing it, and then, when it sold, I just realized that…obviously. Every single person I knew said, ‘Oh, you’re finally doing this! We always knew you were gonna do this.’ And I was like, ‘Well, why didn’t you tell me?’ I didn’t know. I thought I was gonna have to move my entire family to Cambridge for a 32,000 pound a year postdoc and feed four people on 32,000 pounds a year. Why didn’t you tell me I could be a fiction writer?

But maybe you needed to do all of that to get to the fiction.

I’m so glad that this is how it happened. I’m so grateful that this is how it happened, because I think I learned so much about writing for free in a PhD program. And I haven’t gone back to teaching, but I want to, and I think that all these teacher chops I’ve got are gonna resurge. I got so much out of that PhD program, and I was paid to do it.

What specifically do you think the PhD gave you in terms of the writing? Because they’re obviously very different genres. Content-wise, this book certainly draws on academia and art history.

Thematically, yes. And I think becoming an expert on something and knowing something about something helps you be a storyteller because there’s real content there that you have to organize and manage. You know, for my orals, I spent a whole year reading all of the 19th century art criticism in the world. That’s a crazy amount of stuff to manage. Those are so many voices and so much dialogue. And so, becoming an expert on something, it gives you a backbone, and it gives you a kind of dignity and rigor that is so useful. I think art history gets a bad rap – in the public eye, certainly, maybe not among academics. I think it’s seen as, like, cocktail party conversation or rich girl stuff. It didn’t help that Prince William, failed out of geography and had to go do art history. But to me, to write art history really well involves motivated description, argument that is already in description. And I think talented writers can tie themselves up in knots describing ‘til they’re blue in the face. Listen to me with my mixed metaphors, I’m giving you an example. I think if you are somebody who likes to write and is even good at writing, you can write yourself into a beautiful mess. And I think learning that a description carries forward something bigger while it’s describing something in the short term is really important. So those are two things. And then also, just discipline. There’s nuts-and-bolts stuff about having to read and write huge amounts of text efficiently.

Yeah, just the sitting in the chair.

Yeah and also, everyone in academia was so mean. Not interpersonally, but I remember I got someone at- I’m not gonna name the journal, but an art historical journal was basically, like- I’m paraphrasing but I was like, ‘I have something interesting to say about Manet,’ and they were like, ‘You should fucking die.’ It was the craziest rejection.

Right, this is something that exists in a part of the world that nobody else knows about. It’s a bonkers milieu.

I never knew anyone could pocket so much ready venom for when I was gonna come along with my little essay about Manet. I was so blindsided by the kind of vituperative feedback. But I think that kind of thing has really been great for me as a fiction writer, because I really have very little ego. I’m just out here trying to make my projects work as best I can, I fully understand if you don’t like me. I have no sense of entitlement about success or anything.

Goodreads reviews cannot touch you after academia.

I know, exactly! I’m just like, ‘Good day to you, ma’am. I hope you find the books you love.’

Try harder with your vituperation. Ok, so talk to me about the timeline in terms of having kids alongside the writing journey.

I can’t explain this, but I got pregnant in 2016, had my first child in November 2016, and I started writing the novel in 2016. There’s a lot in American Mermaid about motherhood. It’s kind of covert because it’s mostly about a single young woman without kids who’s a teacher but there are some themes there around inheritance and the way we model identity, or even gender, things like that. It doesn’t make sense that just when writing should have become so much harder, I took a shot at this book. I would love to spin that into an inspiring narrative about how motherhood pushed me to take a leap but, actually, I think it had more to do with the fact that I’d gone back to doing comedy in London. I was performing in bars again and stuff, and then all of a sudden I got pregnant, and I was grounded again. I couldn’t be out in bars late at night and I refused to give up comedy for the second time. It would have killed me to give up the comedy for good. And I think that’s what happened. I think that American Mermaid was a document that I opened and started writing because I needed to be on stage still.

You needed a place to put it.

I needed a place to put it, and there’s a reason why so much of American Mermaid is comic dialogue. It basically comes out of missing improv and the give and take of sketch and stand-up and all that stuff.

So what is it like being everyone, playing all the roles? When you’re doing it on the page you have no one to play off.

I think I’m highly dissociative or something because I think it’s not hard. More than anything, I’m trying to shut those other people up when I’m on the bike with my kids. I think every fiction writer must be the same. It is actually really compulsive, and the more you give in to it, the more the dialogues happen. And I was always a big reader of plays and as an undergraduate in a writing program in college, I was on the playwriting track. So I’ve always liked dialogue. Also, I spent so much time, thousands of hours, doing improv and writing sketches and developing standup with the funniest people on earth, and those people, still some of my closest friends, are with me in my head. Those were such formative years, when I was actively performing, and those voices are now just completely embedded in me. Not their particular personalities but their ways of interacting, their openness to crazy ideas, their special, warm, available, generous, brilliant companionship. I owe a lot to my hilarious friends, for burning channels into my brain that I can always travel, even alone.

And so what were the nuts and bolts of writing American Mermaid while you were pregnant and with a baby? How did that go?

I started when I was pregnant and I guess I wrote 15,000 or 20,000 words a year for four years or something, because I finished a first draft in 2020 or something like that. I’ve read a lot of your interviews, and I’ve seen people describe the same thing of, like, lying on the floor, cross-eyed, feeling like you’ve been leeched? You’re so tired, you feel like a Baroque doctor came and took all your blood out while you were sleeping. You’re dead but you still have some kind of ideas thumping away, and you just open the Notes app and it happens. And that was me. I did that. I still don’t know how it happened. But I also had to keep up with my postdoc, so I was forced to commute to Oxford once my kid was nine months old. I still had a little bit of forced separation, and I did a lot of writing on those trips.

And has your process changed since those early days when you didn’t know where it would go or whether there was a professional endgame to it?

I decided after American Mermaid sold that I wasn’t going to go out for academic jobs anymore. I had already started writing Dear Monica. I got the idea in 2019 because my parents moved house, and I found an old diary in which I had been really cruel about Monica Lewinsky. And I prayed to her for forgiveness and then I was like, that’s a crazy thing to do, and I stopped and thought about it, and then the whole thing made sense. The idea just came to me instantaneously.

I love that.

I had to put it away in the back of my mind and finish other things, but it was like, okay, well, are you gonna try to make a go of this? I had a railroad ahead of me that I could get on and just start traveling and it was this next book. And now I have another book that has 85,000 words, my third novel.

That’s excellent news for me personally, and probably a lot of other people.

I can’t wait for it to be done, because I have another thing that I want to go research. So, it turns out that this academic thing of being responsible for your own intellectual trajectory- that’s another thing that comes out of academia, you have to be responsible. You don’t have a boss.

You’re the project manager.

You’re the project manager and you know you have to have a quality detector. You have to have a sense of what makes a good project.

What has legs and what doesn’t.

What has legs. And I’m not talking at all about taking the temperature of, like, pop culture or thinking about markets or anything. I don’t do that at all, in fact.

No, it’s about what’s a story and what’s just an idea.

Yeah, and if I had thought at all about a marketplace ever once in my life, then maybe I wouldn’t write these books that have absolutely no genre and cannot be defined.

There’s a blurb on the back of American Mermaid, if I recall correctly, that’s like, ‘This shouldn’t work, but it does.’

Yes!

And I was like, that is 100% correct. As I said, I recommend it to everybody and I have to be like, it sounds weird, but just trust me on this one.

That is the hurdle that my career has to jump, is that people have to get a taste of this thing because it basically can’t be described.

But that’s really hard to sell. The way the market works right now is you have to have a simple pitch.

The algorithm cannot find me because there’s no thing that it’s like, ‘if you like this, you’ll like that.’ There’s very little in terms of comps.

Yeah, comps. Ugh.

There’s a lot of extremely wonderful writing out there that’s also across genre, and I find that the algorithms are not helpful for me getting to that. I am a huge lover of, for example, Amie Barrodale. I’m so glad that book is getting lots of attention, because her short stories are indescribable. I say to people, ‘Just read these. I don’t understand how it works, but they’re amazing.’

Ok, so American Mermaid publishes and you’re working on Dear Monica Lewinsky and you decide to make a professional go of it.

Yeah, all of a sudden, I went, ‘Okay, I’m gonna take the attic. I’m gonna go up there at nine o’clock, and I’m not gonna leave until I have X number of words.’ I was never a reader of contemporary fiction. I’ve always been a big fiction reader, but not contemporary. 19th century stuff or random- I’m an incredibly random reader. And now I make it much more my job to go to The American Library once a month and sit down and read the first 30 pages of everything new and see what’s going on. Again, not out of a market thing, but just because I want to know what’s good. I want to be stimulated. Like, I need colleagues.

Yeah, I took a long break from contemporary fiction in graduate school but have now come back to it. I like switching off between old and new.

You know, what’s interesting? The way you read as an academic, like one book will lead you to another book, will lead you to another book but things that are in dialogue could be written 20, 30, 50 years apart. Somebody picks up someone else’s idea and responds to it, and that’s legitimately called a conversation in academia. And so you end up reading things that all feel like they’re on a plane of intellectuality together, even though they’re so far apart in terms of chronology or nationality, or culture, or context, right? Someone can just suddenly be in conversation with Viktor Shklovsky. I’m in conversation with all these dead guys from the 1860s, you know?

Yeah, that’s the kind of fiction I enjoy the most, the kind with those seemingly disparate elements.

Exactly, and that’s a really good model for reading fiction. Reading the way academics read is a really good model for reading as a fiction writer.

I love that.

I mean, I like to read contemporary fiction because I want to know what people are doing but actually, to me, the most productive mindset as a fiction writer is that mindset that says, ‘Oh, I’m gonna connect super hard right now with someone that no one else is thinking about.’

Things that feel fresh often draw on old ideas that nobody’s talking about. You have to read beyond Twitter and Substack.

If it’s happening on Twitter, it’s already over and it probably sucks.

Yeah, no, I want things that have been over for, like, hundreds of years. Which brings me to my next question. I believe that the first pages of this book — a life of Saint Monica — should be in the Smithsonian. Was that always the beginning of the novel?

No. The beginning of the novel was always in the throne room with Monica. It was the moment that Jean sees Monica and falls before her. It was the throne room, which I later realized was the bathroom at the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City.

Sure, sure.

But, you know, it was that moment, because that was the moment for me when I realize that an everyday, kind of, average person- I’m not an extraordinary person. I haven’t had extraordinary access to Monica Lewinsky, or access to power, or anything. I’m a very average person. That I could feel as an average person that’s just a member of the public a really powerful connection to her suffering. And I could feel deeply apologetic for how I “behaved” toward her in 1998 in my diary. And that my having transgressed, my having been wrong, was actually an opening. That I needed to ask her for forgiveness, and once I’d asked her for forgiveness, I’d opened a dialogue in my mind with this person. And that’s how martyrdom, that’s how sainthood, that’s how it works.

So from the beginning that kind of mashup of late 90s sexism and medieval saints’ lives was there, that was the conversation for you. Or one of the conversations.

It was trying to think about how I’d gotten it so wrong when I was 16. And I had been living in France when I was 16. I did a junior year of high school abroad and so the whole Lewinsky scandal filtered through the French news to me and I found that really interesting. And part of why I situated this whole book in a study abroad program in France was the way that a little bit of cultural distance actually serves to distill these things. But also, I think that I thought that I was really smart. I think I thought I was a culturally sensitive person and an independent thinker. I was reading, dissecting, you know, Toni Morrison. And I was also very much getting a lot of unwanted male attention as a 16-year-old American with big boobs in France. And I had never left the tiny, completely inaccessible suburb that I was raised in so I was totally sheltered. And then all of a sudden people are whistling at me, and I’m like, ‘Can I help you?! Do you need something?’ So if anyone should have understood, it was me. And I really wanted to think through how it is that these incredibly- like, this Epstein thing that’s happening now, you know? I don’t want to open up this whole can of worms, but for Epstein, in, like, the 20-teens, he was still laughing at Monica Lewinsky. He never had to have a reckoning. There are lots of people that are never going to have a reckoning. And so, as I was having this reckoning in 2019, when I was looking at the way that I hadn’t understood her and hadn’t had a sense of her as someone who’s being completely dragged through the mud and was being misrepresented, it made me ask, what are the deeper causes here? What kind of deep storytelling tropes were functioning in my mind at that time?

We are all, to a certain extent, the sheep of our moment.

I was being a big moment sheep.

I’m interested, though, in the appeal or the utility of saints’ lives and how you decided which ones to include. You even have one from the 20th century.

What’s amazing about those saints’ lives is that I didn’t doctor them at all. I didn’t change them at all. I updated a little bit of the language; I just polished away a tiny bit of the kind of antiquarian language. But they’re full of horniness, they’re full of the male voice which tells those stories. The authoritative male voice who’s inveighing against sexuality is himself so turned on. And it is the voice of the Starr Report and it is the voice of Kavanaugh’s memos advocating constantly for details about ejaculate. It’s very easy to look at what I’m doing and say that I’m being willfully eccentric, or I’m pulling together these disparate things. I am following logically. I’m coming to logical conclusions about things that are lying in plain sight. And the language of the saints’ lives are funny and shocking without me doing anything. And it’s amazing how many people have read this book and pointed to those saints’ lives as their favorite part. And it’s true that this is one of the earliest storytelling forms. These lives were the most widely read stories after the Bible. They were wildly popular in Europe for 500 years.

How do you think about the medieval more generally in our time? I kept thinking about Carolyn Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast while I was reading Dear Monica.

Yes! That’s one of my sources. A great book.

Such a good book. We’re so used to thinking about the past, especially the medieval past, as this extreme other but the connecting of the dots that you do, across time, between women who exert whatever small powers and control they can amid general disempowerment is brilliant.

Yeah, I think the medieval is having a bit of a moment right now and I have a couple theories about why. One is that there is historical rhyming between the medieval as a time of darkness, you know? I don’t actually think of it as a time of darkness, but the cultural stereotype about the medieval is that it’s a period of anti-intellectuality and crisis and plague. And it’s a transformative, witchy, fucked up time, and the literature is full of monkeys with trumpets blowing music out their butts, even in the holiest scrolls. It’s a time of intense weirdness. And so I think that there’s a kind of appetite for the medieval right now as this really slippery- people do not feel like we’re living the Enlightenment right now, put it that way. No one’s like, ‘this really feels like the age of Diderot.’

Progress!

“The new Voltaire” isn’t, like, a phrase you’ve heard any time recently, right?

Not recently, I don’t think.

And the medieval was actually so much more wild and brilliant than it’s given- this is what medievalists have been working on for a long time, dusting off the idea of the medieval as an anti-intellectual moment. My friend Nancy just did this show at the Cloisters on medieval sexuality and desire, and that actually these notions of hybridity- there’s something like 35 saints that were transgender, or had indiscriminate gender, or cross-gender, right? The medieval might be a period that helps us contextualize and historicize as continuous and unending a lot of questions about how porous and unboundaried and unsecured our bodies and our sexuality and our spirituality are.

The thread that runs through your books, to me, is female desire and what you’re supposed to do with it. And desire specifically in these liminal states, and the pleasure of staying in that liminal state. Like desiring as pleasure itself rather than working toward the goal of a different pleasure. A recent non-you example of this would be the Heated Rivalry fandom. This idea that all sorts of people, especially heterosexual women and mothers are like, this show is so hot. And I kept thinking, you know, this must have been how the nuns felt about Jesus.

Yeah, yeah.

I finally get it, that it wasn’t necessarily, like, I want to have sex with Jesus. It’s a container for desire that is pleasurable in and of itself without having to be consummated physically.

Oh my god, I love that Heated Rivalry made you understand Jesus. This is so good.

I spent years in graduate school…

Yeah, this was the missing piece.

You talk about the desire of nuns in the book but there’s also Jean, the main character, whose desire, unformed but powerful, is stigmatized and used against her.

Yeah, so American Mermaid is about this woman, Penelope, who wants not to feel desire because it’s just so messy and then she’d have to tick a box and be a category of person. And she doesn’t want to do that. She wants to be as indeterminate as a mermaid. And I think that, in a way, Jean is a bit of an answer to Penelope. She feels the desire so strongly but she’s also analyzing it and holding it up and saying, ‘What would it be like not to feel this?’ And there’s this scene where she goes for a run and she’s not good at running because she just smokes all the time and she’s never run before. And then suddenly she imagines this guy seeing her run and suddenly she can run really fast. And it’s like she’s realizes that having someone to perform for makes you ambitious, makes you do things, makes you create, makes you powerful. That to give up desire, actually, is to give up such a profound, primordial, motivating force behind beautiful things, behind your ability to literally run as fast as you might not otherwise run.

There’s a tension in the book between the people who have lives, who are living, and that includes people who participate in religion and its rituals and its life cycles, and then there are the people like the academics who observe it, and analyze it. Jean’s not sure where she fits and I think the book ends up making a mess where people like to see a more simplified division.

Yeah, Jean exceeds herself, she learns about her own talents – as a cook, as a reader – by pleasing people. In a way, I think this book is a defense of the connectors and the people pleasers, and the people whose instinct is to give pleasure. And to go back to mom stuff, I often feel really guilty about how much I love making food for my children and making a really nice dinner for my husband. I’m like, ‘You pathetic, servile victim of ideology in your apron here feeling so proud of yourself because you basted a fucking partridge when you should be writing a book.’ I have a very hard time with my own love of feeding. And I think that’s definitely in this book a little bit, that I want to think through a real kind of defense of the connector. I never did any research on Monica Lewinsky at all. I wanted to write this book from a place of being a private person just like anyone else, just a private individual with no special research knowledge of her. I wanted to hold in me exactly what I remembered from the 90s.

That’s interesting, because what I don’t think I got in the 90s was her voice, and you had to be in charge of her voice.

When I went back afterwards, after I’d finished the text, and I looked at an interview, the Barbara Walters interview, I think. And Barbara Walters is trying so hard to shame her. The entire interview, she’s just turning the screws, trying to make her admit to being flighty, slutty, needy. And Monica is so good, and in her defense, she says something like ‘I’m naturally loving,’ or ‘I’m loving’, and I had already had a scene in Dear Monica where she says, ‘You’re very loving, and you’re very smart.’ And this book is a defense of that person, of the person who is rewarded for being loving as a mother but is condemned for being loving when that love isn’t channeled appropriately. We’re constantly told to be people pleasers, to please our dads. And then when that isn’t channeled appropriately in a kind of patriarchal direction, the world comes crashing down on you, and you’re damaged.

A great example of this is the story Jean tells about her mom wanting to change her name and the rest of the town where she lived did not agree to let her change her name, they just wouldn’t call her by that name. But of course it’s expected that you change your name when you get married. These things exist but they have to be in the right container, otherwise you’re finished.

Exactly. And when that desire spills over and isn’t contained, you present such a danger. And if you look at, culturally, right now, the Heritage Foundation memos and so on that are actively conspiring to channel the desires for self-determination, for reproductive responsibility, all of it, they want to channel women’s desires into the family and into a “productive” kind of realm. And they’re very scared of amorphous, self-serving, erotic, poetic, whatever it is, female desire. Even just the demonization of the single woman, it’s all part and parcel. Like time immemorial, it turns out.

Talk to me about your decision to not make Jean a mother?

I think there was a moment when I thought about her being a mother. I don’t remember why I decided against it. I think I just had a sense of her having turned that down. I just think she never felt- not that people have to feel stable to get pregnant but I think she wasn’t gonna let that happen. I don’t think she ever will, actually. I’m not sure. She loves to cook, and she loves to give pleasure. And she loves to have sex, it turns out. And that’s allowed, too.

Yeah, that’s such a good scene.

I gave an early draft of this to a friend of mine, and that scene had kind of pulled some punches, it kind of hinted at some fumbling, but it wasn’t fully a sex scene. And my friend Kate Cortesi – God love you, Kate – she said, ‘This needs to be the anti-Starr report. You have to go all the way with this.’ And she was right. I apologize if I spoke too little about motherhood and family and stuff, but I’m very confused about its relationship to my entire creative life, and I don’t know whether it’s killing it or creating it, and I’m never gonna know.

Isn’t it always a little bit of both?

Yeah, it is, I think it is. Although the working title of my next book is How to Leave Your Family When They Need You Most, so we’ll talk again.