I first started communicating with Nate Lippens during a period when I was more online. He had read and written about my work in such a generous way—I didn’t realize until later that Nate reads everything, he’s an omnivore, maybe the best reader-writer I know, totally self-educated. Our correspondence with each other—and I mean that in a spiritual way as well as a literal one—began sometime in the past year, although we hadn’t met in person until we conducted this interview. For both of us, friendships are the true affinities of our lives—besides the literary traditions we also share (New Narrative, etc.). Conversations with friends and ghosts are everywhere in his series of books that Semiotext(e) is just publishing with the reissue of My Dead Book and Ripcord, which will continue, hopefully, to be read as parts in one of the most vital series of autobiographical fiction in the canon, particularly American, like from a state of grace from this hellscape. Like when I read Nate’s Wisconsin series, I think of Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy, Hervé Guibert’s illness books, Thomas Bernhard’s artist satires, Eileen Myles’s ongoing Künstlerroman. There is no one writing queerness, aging, mortality, class, and desire—desire for bodies, yes, but also more than anything for art and literature—like Nate is now. We talked for Document about novels of consciousness, working-class literature, productivity, and humor.

Kate Zambreno: I’m finally letting myself read Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost, and of course I’m thinking so much of you, because you told me to read it, you went on a Baltasar kick this summer and I was allergic to reading, I couldn’t read anything, except we were reading each other, each of our works and works in progress, these cycles that we’re writing. As opposed to what I’d usually do—write you another email telling you I was finally reading Eva Baltasar, tell you about the rest of my day—I thought I’d start this conversation here. Because to open a novel like this reminds me so much of what it was like to first read My Dead Book, and then Ripcord, and then the next, Bastards, which I also got to read, in progress, this summer. And like how we had a conversation for the first book, and I brought up how your voice reminded me of Silvina Ocampo’s The Promise, which I had just read, and of course you had read it and knew it, and it had inspired your book because you have read everything, you read more than anyone I know, I really feel at any time you’re reading about 10 books at the same time, poetry, translation, everything. We were immediately on that wavelength of a certain tradition—which I want to hear you talk about. It’s the voice of a novel that’s mid-drowning, or teetering on an edge, but is tough and mordant yet humane and incredibly alive. I opened Permafrost and all of a sudden I remembered again why I inhabited these books, why this is my life, that I write in order to read. It was like the voice was a life raft, which I also get reading your books. We live in this voice, in its wildness, we live through the memories, the encounters. Can we talk a little bit about what we’ve been talking about this summer, our interest less in what is often tabbed autofiction but more the novel of consciousness, and also our mutual and intense love of the novel cycle or series?

Nate Lippens: Our summer emails and reading each other kept me going on Bastards. It was inspiring to see how you were working on and thinking about Foam, Performance Art, and Realisms. There’s something about a series or a cycle that has always appealed to me, or even sort of lumping writers’ work into periods or movements. Vastly different tones, syntax, forms unified by thought process that creates the rhythm of narrative. And that’s consciousness. That’s the thing novels do that no other form can do in the same way: They can capture the mind’s sorting and memory’s porousness, that the past is present, and it doesn’t come to us in complete scenes. A particular voice establishes itself, stakes out its territory, and then begins to move. It’s why I wrote My Dead Book, Ripcord, and Bastards, the way I did. That mix of vignette, aphorism, anecdote, declaration.

And I was thinking about time today while working on the next book—and I know you’ll appreciate this, there are two books and I’m uncertain which one this belongs to—but it was about music, about playlists and continuous play, infinite options, and why I sometimes love listening to records and having to get up and flip sides. A streaming playlist is unbroken time and the record’s format, its so-called limitations, works closer to how I experience life. And that reminded me of an anecdote about Lana Turner, who listened to music to prepare for her scenes. A kind of Method listening. The studio—MGM I believe—hired someone as her assistant to change the records for her. Then the line, I don’t know who the speaker is yet, came to me: ‘After that Lana Turner-Stompanato murder mess I sent my daughter to live with my sister. I knew better.’ And I was off and running. I used to be kind of embarrassed by how my mind works, ashamed actually. I’ve never been someone who thinks of a topic sentence or works with an outline. The whole point for me is discovery. The speed of connection and juxtaposition is what I’m drawn to. It’s not simply about a story. Maybe it’s from too much bartending, but any time I hear a writer describe themself as a storyteller, I picture a guy on a stool getting cozy with his tried-and-trues, making a joke about ‘ Irish facts.’ The spiel. I like something intimate that borrows a diaristic stance, steals from the illusions of autofiction, and torques the plainspokenness of memoir. Why not use everything and anything to create immediacy? Vanity Fair has a column called ‘Royal Watch’ and that’s kind of what I was doing in Ripcord. I was recording a fictional documentary of aging working-class homosexuals in the Midwest. My queens.

I know one of the concerns I’ve circled back to with you is about repetition while working on our novel cycles. But, of course, so many writers I love do that—Thomas Bernhard, Enrique Vila-Matas, Marguerite Duras. And I remembered a live recording of Neil Young where a heckler yells, ‘ They all sound the same,’ and Young replies, ‘ It’s all one song.’ That’s how I feel. I’m writing one long book in installments. No matter if the narrator changes age, gender, geography, occupation. I’m marking time. That’s my project.

“I’ve never been someone who thinks of a topic sentence or works with an outline. The whole point for me is discovery.”

Kate: ‘My queens’ is so Genet in Our Lady of Flowers to me, which Ripcord feels like in séance with, just that idea of being a body writing in a room/cell/space that becomes the atmosphere we’re inhabiting, making these glittering shines of memory, fiction, etc. With Bernhard it definitely feels like one song. Someone once said to me of Bernhard, they are all one book, punctuated by these book covers of his face, and of course with Bernhard, we are immediately inside some fiction of an artist standing in for a writer, we are immediately in his operatic and hilarious suffering. It does take some ambition for us to realize that we are allowing ourselves—in opposition in a way to market forms or the expectations for American authors to sell big books that are heavy on plot, character—to cast ourselves as having a project that is both autobiographical and undeniably fiction. It’s a project of voice, of time and memory, but also I think how a mind works, as you say, the synaptic energy of connections. I feel so ambivalent now to Duras, I have to confess. When I moved to New York more than a decade ago I was asked to do this panel on The Lover, and I found myself the only lover of Duras among these writers, including this extremely successful memoirist who was tenured at an MFA program who just workshopped the book. It was horrible, I became like a harridan singing my love of The Lover, of what Sofia Samatar calls its distilled nature. But then I had to read a lot of Duras when I wrote an intro to one of her earliest novels, and some of it’s bad. Like, it’s a draft. It’s less good, but there’s the compulsion to rewrite the same material over and over again, and even in the more hackneyed material the voice is still so undeniable. I feel like with Baltasar or Ariana Harwicz—this current Latin-American tradition of women writers writing through personal horror—the work is always so so good, but I don’t get that with Duras. With Duras I get the compulsion, the need to write, the process with the notebooks. I guess with Acker too. Is it because Duras became such a star, and then she’s churning out material? That she didn’t allow herself editors, or reflexivity? But I just got done teaching a seminar where we read all of Annie Ernaux, and almost all of Ernaux feels undeniable, like such a life force, although some of the later stuff is paper-thin—like, is this a book?—especially all of the later young man material. I feel this with Guibert as well, the later work is all so strong. Maybe with Guibert, and with Bernhard, like with you , there is this overwhelming cloud of mortality and the body, that becomes the concept and the deadline (as I link, I think, my own recent and current work, including my own study of Guibert, to having a late-stage capitalist body suffering through precarity, labor, pregnancy). So the urgency to write time—and increasingly I’m realizing that’s the subject of the work, of our projects, not memory, but time—drives the books.

So this is my little web of sticky questions to you next, I guess—let’s bring up the specter of productivity, how we’re always accused of being productive, of writing (or publishing?) too much, the fears around this, and also I think—how your meditation on time in Ripcord and the entire series relates to the fear around the body, the death drive, and aging. And I’m curious how you see your books, this project of time, as related to queerness and generations (thinking of that Eve Sedgwick meditation about how AIDS and cancer altered the logic of time, friendships, generations, of who survived).

Nate: I’ve had people criticize my productivity, which is a strange word because I don’t think of anything I do as a product or useful. I guess I’ll call it my pace, and I know you get dinged for this all the time. People say to you, ‘You’ve written so many books!’ My first novel didn’t come out until I was 51, after a decade of trying to get published. I have a lot of material, so much short fiction and poetry. Lots of notebooks. There are probably three more books in what I already have. Twenty years of writing. So, it will seem like a lot. Were you telling me about an author told to wait for four years between books? It seems so archaic, that kind of militaristic planning of art. I’m on a different pulse than all that. My writing is completely integrated into my daily life. I don’t get up and sit at a desk and write a certain number of words or pages or follow an outline. I write every day in short fragments and notes, probably closer to the way poets I know do. What happens eventually is a line is persistent and I know more can hang off of it and I get a strong image from that. Often very disconnected. I know that image will be the last scene in the book. Once the first line and the last image are in place, I look at the writing I’ve accrued and notebooks and begin finding what I need. Scenes magnetize around very loose themes or half-questions. It’s a big puzzle and the frustration and joy is figuring it out.

I’ve always been death-haunted. AIDS was synonymous with being gay when I was 14 in 1985. I came out just after Rock Hudson died. And then I was on my own a year later. It felt like my friends and I were being stalked. I know part of my writing these books is my mortality. The impetus for My Dead Book was that several people I’d known died from suicide and addiction on either side of 50. For me turning 52 was fraught because it was the age my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she died at 56. That’s why I pushed myself so hard to finish Ripcord and then Bastards, this sort of loose trilogy. My brother died at 47 when I was working on My Dead Book. In the back of my mind, I thought I’d better get these books done. I think you have this too, with your mother dying young. It alters your relationship to time and the idea of what life markers are. Like the idea that a person should have achieved certain things at certain ages. That’s all just blown to hell. It’s a terrible freedom.

I knew with Ripcord that I wanted to write more about class, queer aging, sex, and intimacy. I’m kind of obsessed with obsolescence, personally and culturally. With the dissolution of personhood over time. I like being irrelevant, not mattering to what other people think is important. And I wanted to show the opposite of the vaunted witnessing that typically surrounds remembering the dead. I wanted it to be partial and messy and bitchy and tender. The dark humor comes from time feeling bent. A friend and I used to say: If it’s funny later, it’s funny now. Why wait? We may not have the luxury of time and distance.

“The queer joy in my books is a glory hole. The trauma narrative is mumbled complaints on a cigarette break.”

Kate: It was an agent, admonishing me for writing these series of small books, something about the market and having this big book that gets the attention, like a scarcity model, so the big shiny hardback sells. We’re just not that mode of writer. And I know we’ve talked about this before, but there’s some class element to all of this. Like Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, a lot of the tradition of New Narrative and what Chris and Hedi publish at Semiotext(e)—it’s queer, but it’s working-class, it’s a working-class literature, it’s not about luxury, it’s about survival. Writing these books is, for me, a form of survival. But this is the contradiction here. Capitalism wants us to be these passive, productive subjects—killing ourselves, having no slowness or time. In some ways, we are talking about speed—the speed in some ways in which you’ve written this mid-life series of books—but also your body of literature also represents slowness. It demands time. It’s an antidote to the erasure expected of us, to insist on writing as a form of witness, of personhood, that we write our consciousness and the lives of others, the lives of those who have been erased, into these books. To insist on messiness and bitchiness—intimacies—as opposed to producing this story, this product. The twinning between us was when I realized that our mothers both died of cancer in their 50s when we were in our mid-20s—that we were both alt-weekly failures, that we came from a working-class Midwest where we were definitely outside of literature.

Nate: It’s why we have this shorthand between us. I don’t feel like I have to explain anything or give you context—you already know what I mean. Hell, I probably don’t need to say anything, but I can’t shut up. Part of the energy in your work and in mine is that we both had to elbow our way in. Come in through the service entrance and take up space. I feel like the small book, the short book, the paperback are my speed and there’s something working-class about that. I want to respect people’s time. Of course, I’m taking it too. The short books feel more like dispatches to me. A friend was on a tear about how novels are bourgeois. I mean, yes, of course. He asked me who has time to read, who has leisure time? But that’s part of why I love novels. I always feel like I’m class-crossing. Finish a catering gig or a bartending shift and return home to ‘work on my novel.’ It’s ridiculous and that’s why I do it. I don’t write as one of those vendetta artists who want to settle personal scores or to be right, but I do enjoy the sprawling generalized revenge of being a high school dropout, a so-called unskilled worker, who writes novels in a tradition I love—fragmented, scavenged, very homosexual, a little arch and cranky, a lot of death and sex. No resolution, no redemption. The queer joy in my books is a glory hole. The trauma narrative is mumbled complaints on a cigarette break. Writing novels feels like if I was catering and sat down at the table and helped myself. Are you gonna eat that?