Talkin' Shit With Trisha
Imagine you’re standing outside a reading. The reading was great. It’s a beautiful night, or maybe a freezing cold one. You’re smoking a cigarette with Trisha Low. You wish you had a tape recorder, You wish you had a photographic memory, you wish you had a camera crew. Everything she says you want to throw down into some eternal medium. It’s all deserving of immortalizing. That’s what it’s like to talk to Trisha. A desperate attempt to remember it forever. It’s intercut with salacious bits of gossip and shit talking, joyous celebrations of writers you both love, and of course screams of infatuation about romantic comedies.
Two conversations outside of readings were enough for me to ask her to let me interview her for Triangle House Review. After months and months of life and the world and America getting in the way, we sat down in different parts of the country and wrote back and forth. The following interview was conducted over a shared google doc.
JB: Hi! So something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately was the last time I saw you, we talked about T. Fleischmann’s Time Is A Thing The Body Moves Through. T was at the reading we had done and we were both so starstruck! I vividly remember you starting to say something about the way their book deals with desire as a framework, but I cannot remember the rest. I remember you saying it was different from how you view desire in your own life, but that you respected it, and it seemed like you even longed for it. Can you talk more about that? God, I'm sorry for being corny and starting with desire.
TL: LOL, but how could we not start with desire? I take it back actually, most of the time it feels like a personal failing that I am always compelled to start with desire, and basically can’t seem to stop gazing at it from one million different angles as though it’s some kind of unsolvable rubik's cube. It’s this exact quality though, that makes me so obsessed with how desire functions as a lens through which we organize our experience. It’s is just so fickle and mutable, it never stops changing. You see, I don’t really believe in an ethics of desire in the sense of trying to distinguish between ‘good’ desires, (like for universal healthcare, or for communism) and ‘bad’ desires, (like wanting revenge, or the touch of someone else’s body.) I’m more interested in parsing out how often a ‘good’ desire can morph into a ‘bad desire’ and vice versa and how easy that slippage is. So often our desires feel unattainable or difficult to obtain, or maybe we even prefer the quest for them to actually attaining them, and because of this, they can become transmuted or displaced in really distinctly flawed and complex ways. Yet desire feels so necessary. I think a lot about what it would be like to live in a world where no one desired anything, where no one wished for anything. I can’t imagine it, can you?
As for T’s book, it’s so fucking good, isn’t it? For all my talk about rejecting the good/bad desire binary, I think that I have a very rigid formulation of desire - in my life I’ve mostly experienced it as having detrimental effects on others in equal measure - i.e. if I get what I desire, someone else will necessarily suffer, which makes for a pretty tortured experience of scrabbling to find balance, constantly measuring what I want against the requirement of other units and institutions - the family, my friends, a Greater Good etc. The thing that struck me about T’s conception of desire in Time Is A Thing The Body Moves Through is that it’s so generous and unrestrained, which is not something I really account for in my own thinking. It taught me so much! In truth, I think it’s more productive to think about desire as T does - as expansive because of the way it can move and change as it travels through intimacy and sociality - in other words, as it is shared - rather than in spite of it. But experiencing it that way is pretty alien to me and therefore I am jealous.
JB: T’s book really does break apart that rigid idea of desire in such a beautiful way!! The scene at Lake Michigan with their mom always makes me cry like a baby. Speaking of being a baby, I’m still so sad that I never saw you read after The Compleat Purge. You used to do these wild (and incredible!) performances at readings (but you know that already) and after the release of The Compleat Purge you’ve completely stopped. Was it just a loss of interest or a conscious decision to stop?
TL: Ha, it’s true, I am retired from those performances. But I don’t feel like I’m retired from performance in general! I’m a firm believer that each text or project deserves appropriate performative framing when read out loud in a live space - a consideration of intention, venue, audience. I try to pay attention to these factors when I put readings together. In fact, I almost never read from the book sequentially because I like to shuffle the parts to make sure I create an arc that can be completed within the time frame, I don’t like to feel like I produced something that’s left hanging. I want to give the audience a full experience. I do think that my performances of The Compleat Purge were very intense and I felt like I had to push myself to the brink of a particular physical and emotional edge in order to really perform in the way that piece required. After a lot of practice and time, it became harder and harder to get to the place I needed to get to for a really good performance because it became too familiar. Trying to continually find the right tension between control and letting go, forcing it to resolve itself in vocal fry and fake blood, it was exhausting.
More exhausting than that though, was being ‘known for it’ and feeling the kinds of restrictions that come with audiences expecting a certain type of performance. Kim Gordon has talked about how what’s difficult for a musician over time is not learning to play an instrument well, but ensuring you don’t learn to play it too well and that feels apt to me. Charli XCX on tour once got so exhausted she laid down on stage and did her whole set face down. So much respect for that. I think good performance requires what Kim is gesturing towards - circumstantial intuition, jaggedness, fear, but it also has to come from the place where you’re at in your life, and sometimes where you’re at and the performance just don’t line up any more. Charli found a way to negotiate that difficulty in a way that was apt in just that one performance, that one moment, and that’s so cool. But I just didn’t feel like it was possible with The Compleat Purge any more. And at a certain point, just reading words off the page for Socialist Realism felt infinitely scarier to me than any other performance I could give, the work was so different, more exposed, and that made me want to do it. I like to think I put a lot of thought into the way I read that book, since the prose is so particular, should be read more like poetry, but I can’t tell as much how it comes across, you’ll have to ask people in the audience! I do miss the adrenaline of doing more complex and scripted performance though, so perhaps one day I’ll end up writing something that necessitates it again. Can’t force it.
JB: Okay I’m obsessed with this Charli fact. God that sounds so fun. I would’ve lost my shit if she just took to the floor, it sounds almost like antagonizing the audience to say something, while also just saying “this is where the fuck I’m at right now and you paid for it so lap it up.” You’ve spoken in the past about using your work as a form of antagonizing, and that this has had negative effects on your personal and family life before. Do you have to pause more now to avoid the desire to antagonize, or is it still better to ask forgiveness than beg for permission?
TL: Sorry to Scorp out, but I don’t feel as though I’m interested in making work that doesn’t provoke strong reactions, whether positive or negative! After all, there’s not a lot that’s pretty about being a person living on this earth. My very existence is going to antagonize someone, whether it’s a stranger, or someone really important to me, because that’s how life works, it’s totally unavoidable and I don’t think we should be scared of that, or have to ask permission to write about that complexity from an individual perspective. I guess someone could say that’s antagonistic, but actually there is nothing I’m less interested in in transgression for transgression’s sake. So when I think about the ethics of life writing and what rules I cleave to, I think primarily of making sure that I don’t say anything that I don’t really mean and that’s about it.
I don’t think this is commendable honesty or anything - after all, saying what I mean is often not that pleasurable for others, especially those close to me. Not to mention that my own thoughts and opinions are dynamic and can change, and I may reconsider something I wrote last year. Where the ethics come in is in making space for the people in my life to express their feelings about what and how I’ve written, afterwards. Essentially, I think if you’re going to write about shit in your life in the way that you want to, then you have to take the blowback, and graciously. I am not perfect, and sometimes my decisions regarding what I include in my work turn out to be wrong - it’s the least I can do to feel like I can admit that, learn from it, and apologize if necessary.
Ultimately, I don’t think my work is antagonistic so much as it’s interested in extremity, maybe emotional extremity to the point of melodrama. Like a horror movie, I like pushing that point of ‘is it fake, or is it real? Is it too lurid and therefore fake? Is it possible that our reality really got this lurid?’ I think a lot about the violence and sex in Dennis Cooper’s work as a model for this, where it feels like a physical manifestation of overwhelming, transcendent love, the kind of love that reaches a cathartic peak of ‘I love you so much it will kill you, I love you so much that if I don’t kill you I might die.’ The kind of love where in its throes you can’t see the whole of your beloved’s face, only the different parts of it and how you might take it apart, muscle from bone, just to get that much closer, to know it that much more fully, even if this is destructive. The range of reactions Cooper’s work can inspire range from repulsion to overt romanticism but they’re all intense, they’re all a way of forcing readers to look within themselves to confront and examine their own limits on a range of crucial issues - sexuality, class etc. I’m not sure my work has really gotten as masterful at this as Cooper’s has of course, or works entirely in the same way, but I feel a lot of kinship with how he negotiates limits.
JB: Dennis!!! Papa!!! This all makes me think of your truly incredible twitter bio “Melodrama at the marxist conference.” I feel like one of the other ways you negotiate limits is dialogue! The dialogue in Socialist Realism is sparse, but intimate always. You seem to remember dialogue as if you always have a tape recorder on you. When I met you I was so happy to discover that you’re an infectious conversationalist. Do you think being a good conversationalist makes remembering dialogue easier or more difficult? I’ve always thought it at least makes the dialogue more fun, more righteous.
TL: Oh wow, that’s so funny because I don’t often think about dialogue really! But thank you, that’s nice, because I’m working on a new project that’s going to involve a whole lot more dialogue and I don’t feel confident about it at all. But that’s exciting, I love learning things. I’m bored already of the way I learned to write essay in Socialist Realism and want to do something totally different, something that I’m really bad at to begin with. I do think I’m really invested in trying to make my writing not ‘realistic’ per se, feel real, and when I’m stuck, I find that transcribing recordings of myself, or others talking is a good way to get in the flow. Maybe that helps. More generally though, I do want my work to feel like ‘conversation’ in all the ways a good chat can be, torqued and wry, and gossipy and sometimes exaggerated for the benefit of the person you’re talking to. The kind of familiar, mazey, delirious conversation with someone you trust, that makes you reel at the knowledge that that friendship is the best drug. I do want my writing to feel like that.
JB: You KNOW I’m absolutely obsessed with conversations that are wry and gossipy. Speaking of conversations, in a conversation you had with the believer you said that Socialist Realism is more like a country song to The Complete Purge’s nihilistic punk, What are some of your favorite country records? Are you a Lucinda Williams fan? Is this just an allegory or did you really try to imbibe this book with the kind of hopefulness found in a country record?
TL: I mean, I’m certainly no country expert, but it’s the one genre of music I didn’t expect to learn about or love when I moved to the US and that felt apt to the exploration of diaspora and the American Dream I was thinking through in Socialist Realism. Some country music feels so specific to that Gold Rush California Americana sense of boundless fantasy, yet there’s always this undercurrent futile longing, aching yearning. It’s hard for me to get into specific albums because I don’t have that kind of chronological, organizational brain, more like I like what I like, but I do like Lucinda Williams, I love Kitty Wells and Tammy Wynette, I love Emmylou Harris and Roy Orbison duets. I love Gillian Welch. I did a reading once where I did a ‘cover’ performance of Gertrude Stein’s essay Sentences and Paragraphs (my favorite, it starts “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is”) and cut it with a version of Wynette’s Stand By Your Man - honestly, sacrilegious, but still one of my favorite performances I’ve done to date.
JB: oh my GOD. Why wasn’t I there. I’m truly losing my damn mind over this lol. I wonder what Tammy would’ve thought, and Gertrude of course. I have to get back on track now but I don’t want to. I want video!! Anyways, your view on the confession, from past interviews anyways, seems to be that it is a freeing experience but also a trap, similar to the concept of topping from the bottom, is that still true today?
TL: Ahahahah if I start talking about confession, the genre of the confessional (the term I like to use, rather than memoir or creative nonfiction) we’ll be here all day, I have a weird theory about the 18th Century novel, specifically Richardson’s Pamela - as the beginning of this public fascination with the imagined interior life of a woman and how this developed alongside an increasingly popularized architectural feature within the middle/upper class home - a room known as the ‘cabinet,’ which functioned as a woman’s private writing room. I think this is connected to the way that readers through history have fetishized the feminine confessional to the point that it has become a site of public fantasy, where the idea of an ‘authenticity’ is part of the enjoyment. So even if someone writes about their feminine experience in a way that is true to them, it tends to still be received by readers in a way that involves this fantasy. I’m interested in work that plays with this, manipulates the expectations we have for confessional writing - that it’s necessarily exhibitionist or even cathartic. In this sense it’s similar to topping from the bottom in that the confessional is about playing out these expectations in order to mess with a specific relation i.e. between a feminine writer depicting her inner life, and the public who have an expectation of what that might look like and might not be able to see beyond it. It’s the kind of relation in which power is strangely distributed and thus can be misdirected, used for something more nefarious, like revenge. For me, work like Dodie Bellamy’s or Kathy Acker’s has really slyly confounded with our gendered expectations for this kind of confessional writing and rejected the essentialism that gets applied to life writing in general. I’ll probably always be obsessed with the confessional but at the moment am pretty tired of writing about my life - it never comes at no personal cost. So I’m excited to see what I might start thinking about if I move beyond it as a mode.
JB: I think maybe my favorite genre of the confessional is the romantic comedy? Or maybe it’s just admitting that that’s confessional. Who’s to say. We’ve spoken multiple times about romantic comedies and our shared love for them, would you ever write one? Or a romance novel? If you did would there be tropes you would love to engage with and would there be tropes you would love to avoid?
TL: Oh my god, I don’t know! Embarrassingly, I love writing about love, but like, the frustrating, impossible, terrible, unfulfilled kinds of love. Romantic comedies are the antidote to this in the sense that they give me the same satisfaction as baking a cake - over a short period of time, you can move through a variety of exciting emotions and messy moments, yet ultimately end up with a happy ending wrapped up in a little bow. I can’t help but love that, it’s very therapeutic for me, when Things Work Out. So, more a coping mechanism than a form I want to engage in. I have to get my false hope from somewhere. Truth be told, I don’t think I could really write a romance novel but I’ve written enough fanfiction in my time to know that I can write… emotionally engaged porn?? I’d have so much to learn about the genre before I really even started, and there’s so much… plot?? What is that? Don’t make me do it Jo, I’m scared, maybe unless I get to re-make A Simple Favor (not really a rom-com but I consider it one) as like a Douglas Sirk-ian lesbian thriller with additional swooning-in-the-courtroom scenes. In technicolor!
JB: If I don’t get to produce your remake of A Simple Favor I will DIE TRISHA. You’ve done so much with form and style over two books, and I know (from incessant lurking) that you’re working on a novel now. You’ve also said previously that film is one of your main points of reference for experimentation and growth. How is film impacting your novel? And what films seem to be the inspirations for your novel?
TL: Ugh. Am I working on a novel? It doesn’t feel like it yet. I’m working on something. I’m building out a formal architecture for my next project, how I want the sentences to feel and the different positions I could hold a reader in. So many of my friends are regular writers, good at routine, they can accumulate, but I’m very slow, very project-oriented, so I’m trying to be patient with myself. You’re right, though, in the sense that when I’m thinking about these questions I find it most helpful to return to art and film, to do a clean dissection of my experience of a particular piece I love, try to understand how it did what it did to me, to experiment with replicating this in text. I really still love Maurice Pialat’s work so much and return to it often. I rewatched a film of his recently called We Won’t Grow Old Together - it’s simple, about an affair a man is having with a younger woman, how they hurt each other and break up and get back together. A lot of the scenes are set in his car, or at her parent’s house because they don’t have anywhere private to go. There’s only a handful of sets and shots, so it becomes difficult to tell one scene from another when everything happens in the same place, and the content is so unyieldingly repetitive. Cuts are abrupt, often happen before any kind of resolution. The two of them will be yelling, broken-up and devastated and the next scene will just be them, together again, nursing a quieter fight without any indication of what must have been a prior reunion. It’s so banal and brutal. I love the way time and space conspire in that movie to anchor everything to a frustrating sameness, or even an induced and cyclical regression, two people stubbornly refusing to change who they are; in the process turning away from each other, yet they can’t quite escape the orbit. The way they move, already a portent of the relationship’s end, and yet it never comes. I’m trying to write something similar, focused on a not-unromantic relationship between two friends, one who roots her politics in a stringent materiality, in mutual aid projects, in organizing, and the other who is more prone to drifting too far, plays too fast and loose into escapist fantasy. Together they imagine and refine a series of increasingly bloody plots to improve the world, but who knows if even a single one will travel beyond the bedroom in which they discuss these plans. Who knows how it turns out. For now, I just really like thinking about how I fucking love that Pialat film, and maybe that’s enough for me.
Trisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books, 2019). She lives in the East Bay.
Jo Barchi is a writer and editor living in Chicago.
