Category: Issue 13

Rachel Kushner’s acclaimed novels — Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room — have immersed readers in mid-century Cuba, the New York art world of the 1970s, and a women’s prison in the early 2000s. Each one is densely populated with ideas; her forthcoming novel, Creation Lake, takes on leftist communes, Neanderthals, and the bureaucratic state. Kushner doesn’t call her preparation for these works “research”; her approach to history and fact is more expansive and generative than that word typically connotes. But her broad field of vision has also led her to write penetrating nonfiction on subjects from prison abolition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. (Some of her essays were collected in The Hard Crowd in 2021.) It’s hard to think of a sharper voice to animate the evergreen concerns of The Drift, from politics and history to the role of art and literature in responding to them. Kushner spoke to us over Zoom about capitalism and environmentalism, the uses of prehistory, calling oneself a feminist, intergenerational responsibility, her new novel, and more. 

Since October 7, some have called for writers to speak out against the war in Gaza, and others have argued instead that novelists have the responsibility to capture “nuance” and extend empathy to “both sides.” You reported from East Jerusalem in 2016 for The New York Times Magazine. How does that experience inflect the way you’re reading the events of this year, and how you think about appeals to nuance? 

Before I went to the West Bank, in 2016, it was hard for me to picture what the military occupation felt like and looked like. I had often heard the expression “open-air prison.” And as somebody who has spent a lot of time visiting prisons in California, I’m sensitive to the use of prison as a metaphor. So at first I had thought, Well, it can’t really be an open-air prison; it’s 2.7 million people. But indeed, it really is. And it is galling. The control of movement and the presence of these 25-foot-high concrete walls everywhere.

I was there for ten days with a group of international writers. We’d get up at 3 a.m. and go to a checkpoint at 4 a.m. to start witnessing what happened to the day laborers lining up to go to their jobs in Israel. And it was really an absolute mind-fuck. It was a total assault on the dignity of people who were trying to get to work. To get to your job, you’d spend hours going through a checkpoint, which are like cattle chutes, with a low overhead and tight walls on either side, and they’re screaming at you through loudspeakers from behind bulletproof glass. If somebody was sick, or something happened in the line, they were stuck. There’s a reason why Israelis don’t see this — it is hidden from them by design. Maybe they know, and they just choose not to look.

I went to a military prison in the West Bank, where I saw hearings. This is a court system that is only for Palestinians. A settler in the West Bank who commits a crime will go to an Israeli civil court and have due process, and the proceedings will be held in their language, Hebrew. But there’s no reliable guarantee of language accommodation for Palestinians, or Bedouins, who speak a different Arabic dialect. People are pressured mightily to plead guilty, and something like 99 percent of the cases resolve in guilty verdicts. And they’re trying children in those courts — one of the only courts in the world that does so. I’m not suggesting that everybody should go to the West Bank, but being there is different than reading about it.

I wrote long essays about my observations for both The New York Times Magazine and later n+1, which has published important contributions (as has The Drift) on Gaza since October. There’s been a lot of criticism about the Times’s coverage of the war, and rightly so, but I will say the magazine and its editors supported me completely when I wrote that piece in 2016. Their fact-checking was incredible and there was no feeling of an agenda or bias. In my essay, I reported what I saw. The facts spoke for themselves. Shuafat, the refugee camp I wrote about, has an estimated population of more than ninety thousand people living in less than one square kilometer. I believe Shuafat gives some idea of what Gaza was like, in terms of density and lack of infrastructure, before this current war began. I was lucky to get to go there, even as luck seems an odd word for an experience that afforded me a view onto a situation of unbelievable cruelty, humiliation, and violence. My host was murdered less than two weeks after I left.

At the current moment, appeals to nuance seem to be functioning as a smoke screen to distract from Gaza: what’s happening is the annihilation of a people and a culture. And the United States is directly involved in this annihilation.

But of your question, when people ask writers to speak out against the war on Gaza, do they ask them to speak out as writers, or as human beings horrified and furious about what is happening there? What makes writers’ voices especially authoritative here? I myself have been most moved by the students, who have spoken up with clarity and incredible bravery. I’m so proud of them, as if they were my children. (When you are a parent, you feel like you are a parent to all children.) The week that the campus uprisings started, my own son, who is almost 17 and still in high school, was preparing to perform Schubert’s “Erlkönig” on the piano, with a friend singing the Lied, which is based on a Goethe poem, in which a child is telling his father that death is pursuing him, and the father doesn’t believe him. The surging rhythms of this incredibly dramatic and powerful piece of music my son was playing were coursing through our house, and meanwhile friends’ children were getting physically beaten by a vigilante mob at UCLA. In the poem, the father dismisses the child’s warnings as naive and confused. He says the child is seeing things — the mist, the willows — and not the Erlkönig, the embodiment of death. The father ignores the child’s warnings at his own detriment, and so do we.

The Mars Room (2018) is set in a women’s prison, and in 2019 you wrote about the prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore for The New York Times Magazine. In 2020, “Defund the Police” became a popular slogan on the left, and anti-carceral politics entered the mainstream. But there’s also been a backlash. A year after the George Floyd uprisings, both liberals and conservatives were more likely to say that police spending should increase. How do you think about what’s next for the abolition movement?

When people ask, What do we do about violent crime if we don’t have police? I would ask them, How often, when a violent crime is in the middle of taking place, does somebody call the police and the police come and prevent it from happening? What we saw in Uvalde, Texas was children slaughtered while police tried to prevent parents from going in and saving the lives of those children. Police save themselves. As a group that is funded by cities and counties, law enforcement is incentivized to justify those cities’ and counties’ need for them. Los Angeles spends a huge amount on police. In fact, police are the largest single-item expenditure in the city’s budget. It’s a huge dynamic city that can be a brutal place to live if you’re poor. I have a perhaps untested but deep conviction that people, and children especially, need parks and trees and shade. They need experiences that make them feel valued and valuable. This is how we make a functional society in the long run, not with cops in helicopters flapping around expensively and disturbing the peace. 

It was living here for the last twenty years, and being from California, and wanting to write a novel that reflected life as I saw it, that led me to write The Mars Room. In certain ways, it’s harder to write a contemporary novel, to “hold a mirror up to the times,” because you don’t have hindsight as a tool. To set a novel in my own time, in recent times, it was necessary for me to have some interpretation of those times. Because the present, too, is history. What is shaping people? What are the pressures that delineate how they think, act, speak? In California, part of it was, for me, the shuttling of sheriff’s department buses that I see constantly. And once you start to see them, then you see more of them. These are aspects of society that are intended to be invisible to a middle-class person like myself. I was trying to get at textures of life that I felt I had the capacity to write about, based on things I’ve experienced, people I’ve known, and political work that I was involved in at the time, without having any argument or specific critique, which is not how I would approach fiction or produce it. 

Instead, while writing The Mars Room, I had to face a kind of intense bewilderment. Why does society offer no mercy for some? Even Christianity offers mercy. What I witnessed in the criminal courts, walking distance from my house, was revenge. But also, I had to face the specter of bodily violence, which, up close, has a lot of power. It demands to be reckoned with. It can’t be brushed away. People in California with long prison sentences are not there for writing a bad check or for drug possession. My own high school friend, who in part sparked my lifelong preoccupation with prison — who went at age eighteen or nineteen and found there an identity as a man of influence and strength inside — he stabbed someone. I have friends inside who have done things that are difficult to think into, where the truth of what happened and why was foreclosed at the moment it was decided that violence was a solution to a problem. The quandaries I was in while writing The Mars Room were to some degree existential. I wasn’t going to find the answers that I was looking for in any book -— although actually, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was helpful to me, and so was Augustine’s Confessions. But mostly I had to just think into something almost impenetrable, as if I was at the bottom of a well. This process probably made me stupid to some degree. But it was the only way forward. I ultimately thought my way out through the characters in the book. There was a lot of comedy and amusement for me in writing that novel, but it was also a kind of shattering experience. And later I kind of thought, Well, if readers ask themselves questions as I had to ask myself as I wrote, that’s the most I would want to produce, as an effect. I had no solutions for them.

It was after I finished that novel that I began working on this long piece about Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the prison abolition movement. The two projects stand in quite stark contrast in my mind. Art, first. And after it, something else, analysis, “nonfiction,” a two year project of talking to Gilmore, and reading a lot, studying numbers, and then writing a profile of her and what has shaped her own thinking. But by the time I needed to address the questions of my editors — good questions, because the average reader would ask them also — I had acquired an understanding of what’s difficult for people to process in regard to prison and who goes there and who doesn’t, in part through my experience of writing my novel. I felt intensely aware of how painful moral complexity is for people. It’s easier to think on some deep level that those who commit acts of violence are violent people. But the truth is that there’s no way to know, for the average middle-class person, whether you’ve abstained from violence because you’re gentle and good or because you were simply born lucky. You don’t know what you would have become if you’d been born less lucky, or unlucky.

The novel is sometimes called a fundamentally bourgeois art form. How do you conceive of its radical potential?

To assess which art form now, in the 21st century, is bourgeois, seems quaint, because all art is bourgeois. And yet the majority of the professional classes are not interested in art, whether it’s visual or literary or cinema or music. They’re Googling shit, or they’re reading nonfiction. And so we work in the margins and that seems fine. Just the other day I read a line in Fredric Jameson’s new book that hit the spot: “The novel, meanwhile, is time’s relief map, its furrows and spurs marking the intrusion of history into individual lives or else its tell-tale silences.” If the novel is sometimes regarded as limited to the private lives of petit bourgeois families, married people and children, etc., in fact, much else can happen there. The novel seems to me full of open possibility, as a form that can gather and render and reproduce the absurdities and convulsions of modern life, which is to say, history as it is happening.

But regarding this question of “radical potential,” there is this scene in Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner that kind of cuts to the heart of the matter, where the narrator says something like, My poems should get people to smash shop windows. It’s hilarious. At the same time, it’s not meant to be merely satire. Maybe nothing in a novel is meant to be merely satire — if the writer has some skin in the game, they’re making fun of a long-held dream, they’re trampling on their own dream, but they get to keep their dream.

This came up for me as I’m thinking about the work of a French crime novelist I admire, Jean-Patrick Manchette, who I’m trying to write something about. He died in 1995, and in the seventies he wrote about ten novels. I’m reading a book of interviews with him, if slowly, because it’s in French, and I’m so desperate to know what he says that I’m forcing myself to bushwhack my way through. Manchette was adamant that the solution to the problem of the bourgeois form of the novel was the genre novel — the crime novel. He considered his own novels romans alimentaires, “potboilers.” It’s kind of heartbreaking to see him contort himself into pretending that what he’s doing isn’t art, when he knows that it is. At one point he gets this insulting letter from Lebovici, Guy Debord’s publisher — Manchette was deeply influenced by Debord — who says something like, What’s even worse than these garbage novels you write is your false modesty about them. Heh. Manchette did seem to believe that he could get around the problem of being a leftist and writing novels that would be immediately recuperated by the marketplace by using genre as a template to reveal that people themselves had been rendered into automatons, that they were being controlled by the spectacle.

In a certain way, my most recent novel, Creation Lake, is a kind of homage to Manchette, even as what I’ve written cannot be considered a genre novel, or crime novel or roman noir. As a friend of mine who read it said to me, it’s like the main character is inside of a genre novel, but the novel itself is a Rachel Kushner novel. I don’t know what that means, but there you have it. I learned action from Manchette, perhaps. He knows how to make people do things. He puts guns in their hands and plans in their heads. I don’t expect people to read Creation Lake and go smash shop windows. But this novel was a rich landscape for me to think into how we are meant to live. There’s a character in it named Bruno Lacombe, who is a ’68-er, an early Lettrist who was close to Debord and the infamous circle at Moineau’s, who later decides no revolution is coming, that the once-held dream that population-dense places in Europe were going to be sites of uprisings is over, given that there wasn’t a single successful leftist revolution in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the hopes of some to the contrary. In the wake of those failures, some retreated to the country, thinking that if the factory worker just wants to buy consumer products and partake in the small rewards for his alienated labor, then the peasant class could be the site of uprising. There were leftists who moved into rural outposts in France — like the one in my novel — that were suffering from out-migration, high unemployment, and the collapse of small farms as economically viable. A lot of these people who moved to the country as a political project in the 1970s eventually abandoned that plan, because it turns out that farming is really hard, and sometimes the farmers didn’t want the same things that the hippies with college educations wanted. Bruno has let that dream go, although his followers, young people attempting to build a commune in a remote nook of southwestern France circa 2013, have not. Bruno is producing his own homespun anthropology and philosophy, a set of theories about the human community and what we’ve lost, where we’ve come from, what our mystical orientation toward the past and future might be. He starts to have an effect on the narrator of the book, who is a spy, and cynic, and who thinks everyone else is her pawn. And who knows, perhaps he might attract some disciples in my readers, while I would never dare. We’ll see.

People are frequently radicalized by texts, but not so often by novels specifically. Can fiction radicalize people? Should it? (And is your own writing political?)

A novel is a retreat, made from a place of profound curiosity, and profound doubt. It’s never a polemic. Art is separate from the sphere of the social and the sphere of politics, which, in a way, is what is political about it. The role of art, the magic of it, is to render the unseen seen. And if the reader is reading a novel and finds there an interpretation or a description or a conjuring that they recognize in an intimate way, either having to do with them or having to do with the writer, or having to do with neither, with some sense of experience or sensation, then that can be radical, but perhaps not in the way you intend in your question. It can be a radical recognition of a delicate or fragile truth. Or a crude and disturbing and vulgar truth. 

Even when I write nonfiction essays, I do not write polemically. I always try to withhold judgment. And I do that for two reasons. The first is that, selfishly, I want to be changed through what I see and observe, what I write down, and then what I do with what I see and observe. In terms of making a piece of writing, I want to have a journey that’s transformative for me, where I arrive at a conclusion that wasn’t foregone. And then, secondly, withholding judgment makes for much more effective writing. I want the reader to feel that if they, like me, were standing at an intersection in a refugee camp in East Jerusalem, regardless of who they are and what baggage they bring, they would see what I see and am describing, and would have reactions that aren’t so different from my own. What I describe, the facts as I present them — that there are no emergency services in a refugee camp — are their own position.

I have a kind of disquisition on politics in Creation Lake, in which the narrator says there are actually no politics inside of people. And maybe I’ve come to believe that as well. What’s inside of people, “their four a.m. self,” as my narrator puts it, is much more elemental and vast and hard, like a salt. There may be, in that undifferentiated root of personhood, some idea of right and wrong, of how life should be organized, and what justice would look like or feel like, but it’s far deeper, more difficult to apply, than the opinions and positions people take in their waking life, in response to politics in the narrow sense.

The novel as a form is not an occasion for taking a political position. In real life, sure. But writing isn’t really living, as Marguerite Duras says somewhere. It is to the side of living. Duras, for me, is a radical writer, because she’s forging her own philosophy out of the rock wall as she writes. She’s making these declarative, almost flabbergasting statements with total and absolute conviction, and I believe her, I’m always convinced. But it’s so much deeper than politics. She said she was viscerally a communist, but had no hope in the world. She worked for the Vichy regime on the commission that determined what publishers could publish, but then she was in the resistance. She was close with Mitterrand, and they were both in the underground. Her husband went to a concentration camp and barely survived. She either left the Communist Party or was kicked out, I can’t remember. Her life is full of life, and it’s full of politics, but to my mind she’s too radical and alone for groups. There’s always a way in which she forges a line that isn’t directly political, that is subterranean to the thin surface of topicality. Art for her is the thing, not opinions. Her sentences have a burnish that’s almost biblical, Old Testament — it can verge into the ridiculous, but I love it. She’s my big daddy even as I would never imitate her. Here’s a fragment from her short film, Les mains négatives: “I’m the one who screamed, thirty thousand years ago, ‘I love you.’ I love anyone who hears my screams.”

In Creation Lake, you’re also historicizing the present, or rather a recent past that speaks directly to a contemporary set of ideas about capitalism and the environment and the left. How did you conceive of the period you were offering an interpretation of, as you say?

You two make it all sound rather rigorous, but I simply wrote using what had soaked in from life as I have known it, to conjure this world of the novel, which was an incredibly fun place for me to be. I can even say I greatly preferred it to the actual world, while I was writing it. I got sucked in. It was like a fourteen-month hallucination, which was the actual time it took to write (after years of fumbling).

It’s set in 2013, although there’s no explicit recognition in it of when it’s set, and there isn’t something crucial about that exact year, to the narrative or what I was getting at. The believability of a world involves ingredients. What music are they listening to? What technology do they have? In this case, the narrator goes to Marseille with the guy she’s manipulated into being her boyfriend, and “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk is everywhere. In real life, it was the song of the summer in France in 2013. I was in Marseille that summer for a week or so, and everywhere I went it was playing — in the train station, in the restaurant, in the hotel lobby, in a taxi, from a radio on the beach. The day I got there, I went to the Plage des Catalans, and just as I was going to walk down to swim, the CRS, the French riot police, stormed the beach and tear-gassed everyone, including small children and babies. For years I thought, Oh, that’s just what happens: it’s tear-gas beach. The CRS do seem to harass and rough people up regularly at that beach, but what I experienced was, I later figured out, a pretty singular incident. Two young guys had tried to drown a cop. So I gave that experience to my protagonist, and set it when it actually happened. She draws from it not that French riot police are brutal, like I did, but a lesson on provocation and how to incite it, because she’s an agent provocateur looking to complete a job.

In the novel, the narrator travels to this remote region to infiltrate a group of anarchists trying to farm. The state is launching a project there to leach out groundwater and store it in an aboveground “megabasin.” The megabasin fits with Bruno’s concerns that the underground world is being disturbed by industry. But also, the megabasin, which would redirect water away from small farmers and benefit only massive corporate operations, becomes the project that the anarchists, kids from Paris, are trying to sabotage.

For centuries, France has been an agricultural center in Europe. In 1950, over thirty percent of French people were still farmers. In 2019, three percent were. It’s really hard to be a farmer in France, it’s not a viable living , because they have to compete on the open market of the E.U. Those involved in farming tend to have complicated, ambivalent feelings about the E.U., because of its oversight and regulations and price-setting. After I wrote the novel, it turned out that these megabasins were becoming a flash-point issue, sites of pitched combat between police and protestors in actual France and not just the fictional France I created. Maybe I just got lucky, but reality did follow the lines of what I had written about.

The general ambiance of the French state in my novel is keyed to reality, but refracted. I have a fictional subminister, the deputy minister of rural coherence, which is not a real ministry; it’s a blend of two different French ministries. The narrator is surveilling him and later assigned to more or less dispose of him. He’s called Paul Platon, and I made him Spanish, which is a slightly satirical reference to Manuel Valls, who was formerly the minister of the interior, and then prime minister, and the most despised politician in France. But I didn’t think I could pull off a novel where the character is asked to be the hit person for the prime minister; maybe Manchette could do that, but to keep a firm hand on plausibility, I demoted my ersatz Valls to subminister in an obscure ministry. When the state wants to build a new prison or a new military base or a new high-speed train, they send in Platon to tell people that they should want a prison, or a nuclear waste dump site, or a high-speed train. So he’s sort of like cannon fodder. And that was really fun for me. Platon goes to an agricultural fair and gets attacked. After I wrote the book, Macron tried to go to the big ag fair in Paris and was chased away by enraged farmers.

Bruno has a revisionist theory of Neanderthals and prehistory. In recent years, the study of humanity’s genetic history has fed into a very different set of ideas involving race science and white supremacy. How did you become interested in prehistory, and what do you think about the ways it is marshaled into grand theories?

Bruno is speculating into a past that has left no written documents. He says Neanderthals were true artists because their art was abstract markings, while Homo sapiens, i.e., “we,” were frauds who depicted uninspired (representational) scenes on cave walls exclusively of eating and killing. How is that revisionist? Seems pretty convincing if you ask me…. He says Homo sapiens were devious bastards who created destructive and unfair societies that have led us to a point where we’re more or less trapped in a driverless car that is careening off a cliff. Where’s the fiction? Bruno yearns to find meaning in some earlier time before growth at any cost, perhaps before self-annihilation was fixed as our destiny. He dreams of a past when a lot of different kinds of humans roamed the earth and perhaps had different ideas, and could have had different horizons, had they not died out or been trounced by the sapiens with his breadstick limbs and his preference for large crowds and cowardly long-range throwing javelins.

The Neanderthal has historically been considered subpar, inferior, perhaps simply because he died out, “couldn’t hack it,” compared to the conniving Homo sapien — although we still don’t know quite why. Bruno kind of fixates on the Neanderthal as his “beautiful loser.” I, too, have always been drawn to the underdog.

When I finished writing The Mars Room, the world of anthropology was being upended by advances in genetic studies of human migration patterns and DNA analysis. I’ve never really been into science, which is a little bit ironic, because I come from a family of scientists, but suddenly, with the early-man thing, I got interested. I read a book by David Reich, and was transfixed by his research and by discoveries of interbreeding among Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and Denisovans, and the concept of “ghost populations” — traces, as I understand it, in DNA, that suggest we had mysterious genetic ancestors, but we don’t know anything about them, at least not yet. All of this turns up the volume on the mystery. Now we know there were Neanderthals and Homo sapiens and Denisovans occupying Europe and Asia simultaneously. But did they each know the others were there? Reich presents maps of when people came into contact, i.e., produced offspring, but what were those unions?

I had been going to France every summer, but not really thinking about the fact that there are all these caves near where we stay with cave art in them. Lascaux and Pech Merle and Les Combarelles were there. That had never really been my thing, but I became more and more interested in it through the question of time, and of how little can be known about the distant past. In a cave painting, somebody made a mark on it, and somebody else completed that mark in the same style, with the same sense of a consensual reality, with the same kinds of perceptions, but like five thousand years later, and you’re looking at it thirty thousand years later. It’s mind-blowing.

It would be ironic to regard having a high percentage of Neanderthal DNA as a mark of superiority given that throughout history the word has been used to denigrate and demean. To your question, I don’t know anything about “race science,” so-called, which sounds both diabolical and nineteenth-century. But I did notice that David Reich has a very carefully worded chapter in his book about the genomics of race and identity. Here is what he says: “If as scientists we willfully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.” 

In 2020, studies established that Homo sapiens from Africa have Neanderthal DNA also. This suggests that maybe Homo sapiens went north to Europe, and also came back to Africa. People do not walk in just a single direction, as my character Bruno points out. If migration patterns are abstract to us because they are “slow,” science is moving quickly. The “ideas” you’re alluding to require a crude simplicity, and genetic evolution is anything but.

Are you a feminist? How do you think about the feminist movement today?

I was raised by a very strong mother. My grandmother got polio while she was working for the Red Cross, saving people in a flood on the Mississippi River, but she had trained to be, and hoped to become, an architect. My grandmother’s mother also went to college, and so did my grandmother’s grandmother, believe it or not. So I come from a lot of privilege in the sense that there are multiple generations of female college graduates, if just on that one line. As teenagers, my aunt and my mother both participated in civil rights training at the Highlander Folk School in east Tennessee, where Rosa Parks was trained, and they were always activists. So I was deprived of a sense of women’s limitations growing up, and I think that probably has something to do with who I am, and why I may not have a fully formed answer to this question you’re asking about feminism.

So, for better or worse, it’s almost like I didn’t really need feminism. Because I hadn’t been told there was any such thing as male authority, and when I encountered versions of that in the real world beyond my family, I had nothing but contempt for it. So the classics were often written by men. But when you read fiction, I think that there’s a natural inclination for the reader to identify with whoever in the book is the protagonist. And if the protagonist is a man, I’m not waiting for girls to show up to have a character to attach to in the book. I am not putting myself on the level of Sontag and Didion by referencing them here, but I think about them both and the way they each seemed to kind of surge forward alone, without use for any movement, and maybe it’s because they never felt they needed to.

I was interested in the movement of feminism that was probably the most significant outcome of the Autonomia movement in Italy in the seventies. I had friends while I was writing The Flamethrowers who know that history, such as Maya Gonzalez, who is an important friend and influence. I read a lot about the Wages for Housework movement partly just to reproduce it in my book, but I also came to the conclusion that it was a really interesting moment in Italian society, and it’s been one of the Autonomia’s real achievements. I got to go to the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective for a meeting among the collective and it was amazing. They were all dressed to the nines, but called each other by their last names, which I found kind of wonderful — you know, behaving like men, but almost as a joke. I didn’t really know what I was getting into at that point, I had just started writing the book, and I got schooled by the philosopher Luisa Muraro, who was like, You haven’t read this, you don’t know that, and she and the others gave me a pile of books to take with me.

You’ve written about youth culture and cross-generational communication. Is there any truth to the idea that people get more conservative as they get older? And conversely, do we sometimes put too much responsibility on younger generations to lead the way and to save us?

I don’t really feel like I am old, but I also am not in denial of my age. I have friends of all ages, but I’m comfortable with who I am and where I am and what I’ve seen and done — and also with letting go a little bit from having to have a handle on the future our current reality is leading us toward, which sometimes feels inscrutable.

If you believe in art as a transcendent act, it’s about the unknown, which involves seeing what younger people can make, what they can produce that’s new, what they can render seen that is to me unseen, partly through the limitations of my age. On the other hand, I really enjoy getting older, because I know how to live my life better, and I know what kind of art I want to make. 

You experience your age, I think, in fits and starts, not as an even, continuous, gradual process. I’m not exactly one day older today than I was yesterday, and I won’t be exactly one day older tomorrow than I was today. You only encounter your age every few months, or every few years, or maybe once in a decade, or just at a couple critical moments in your life. And when you do, it can be kind of shocking.

Proust has this line about coming to realize that you’re part of the past, rather than part of the future. It’s an extreme way of putting it, but there’s something freeing about it too, if one were to fully believe what he says, because it means you can allow yourself to live in a more interior way, to begin the work of sorting the past inside you, rather than being always so concerned with the world outside of you. You don’t have to pretend to be a part of the future, or to pretend you have a firm grasp on all the ways the world is changing. And nor do you have to wrestle with ideas that are unfamiliar, and fight them, because you’re part of the past and not repressing a fear of irrelevance. Instead, you’re able to accept that you were once young, and now others are young. But I’m still here to learn, rather than to say, This isn’t reality as I know it, so it must be invalid.

I see people who’ve gotten older but have lost no verve, and I want that suppleness. My aunt DeeDee Halleck, for instance, is a radical media activist who lives more fully and intensely than maybe anyone I’ve ever known; even her voice is young. She’s just always interested in life as it is happening, and she’s my mom’s older sister, and 84 but you would never know it. Wallace Shawn is another example I think of, in terms of someone who has stayed so energized and principled, and stands as an absolute counterexample to the idea that people turn conservative as they get older. I look to older people to see how they do things and I hope I can do life with such grace. I will never be like DeeDee, but I can set her as the far marker, the ideal.

The climate crisis we face now started with the industrial revolution, not with my generation or that of my parents, who were hippies with a tiny carbon footprint. My son says electric cars are not the answer, and instead, that we need to fully and completely and permanently halt production of all new cars, and all new car parts, and simply learn to be resourceful with what we already have. The Cuban solution. My son is incredibly gifted at working on old cars, so for him, this is a world that seems possible. If a future generation is able to “save us,” they will in fact be saving themselves, and I’m not even sure I’ll be around for it.