Puer aeternus: with Sheila Heti
Fated to live naked... so the rest can be exempted by fate.
On the eve of the first new moon of the new year, a super new moon, the writer Sheila Heti and I did a live conversation for the paperback release of my novel, Fuccboi, at the McNally Jackson Seaport bookstore in the Financial District.
I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to do an event, the book had been out a while already, I felt pretty done talking about it. Sheila wasn’t sure either.
After thinking on it, what we decided was, if we were gonna do it, it couldn’t be a stock literary interview, with talking points, going over “how it’s been since the release.” We had to find a way to do it that would be both fun and useful to our current projects.
We decided it should be a genuine conversation about what we’ve been genuinely thinking about and grappling with. To try to clarify, or better articulate, the reasons why we’re writing what we’re writing.
My most urgent questions had to do with the risks of writing intensely vulnerably / confessionally. From the perspective of a narrator, like Sheila’s in How Should A Person Be?, who shares my name. This had to do with writing the book I wrote, but also to do with the fact that I’d spent the last month reading five of the radically confessional French memoirist Emmanuel Carrere’s books, and writing an essay1 on them asking just that question: does baring your soul on the page save or ruin you? Is there credence to what “Sheila,” the narrator of How Should A Person Be? says, that “Some people were fated to live naked … so others could be exempted by fate”?
I wanted to ask her directly.
*
The upstairs of McNally Jackson Seaport is a long narrow room. They had it set up where we were on one of the long sides. The chairs went maybe ten rows back, but then far to the left and to the right, with people standing back by the stairs on my left, such that they were almost behind me, turned as I was to face Sheila on my right. The area filled up nicely. It was nice to see people filling up a bookstore, on a Friday night, for literature.
I initially wasn’t even gonna read anything. When I mentioned to Sheila that the bookstore’s itinerary suggested I do, that I had a bit ready if needed, she was kinda like, Really? We’re doing that? I said I didn’t have to, I agreed it could be better if I didn’t. But that I did find a bit that could lead nicely into what we wanted to talk about. Sheila said, Show me.
It was a quick bit, this part near the end, where the narrator is finally coming out of his convalescence, goes out into his backyard, opens a letter from his friend, gets floored by the intimacy of his friend’s sharing, feels moved to share something back—feels the letter gave him permission to. He sits down to write his response, only as he does, he realizes that he’s writing his book. He decides he wants to write a book in this mode, sharing what he would to his friend, except to the world. To see what he felt comfortable sharing, like he would in a letter, with the world. To see how he could do so artfully.
“Because that’s the question we’re really asking, right? The ‘living naked so others can live clothed’ idea? Is that what we’re doing? Writing intimate letters to the world? Is that what we’re still doing? What we did?”
Sheila said OK, I see. That sounds good. Read that.2
*
After I read it—it was fine, it led into things some, it might have stilted things (books should be read silently, in solitude, as your only solace, your only friend)—I said something implying I hadn’t liked how the book was received.
Sheila asked if I felt like the reception of Fuccboi was affecting my next thing, pausing to confirm that I was comfortable talking about my next thing.
I said, It must, right? If you let it. Before slightly defensively describing how I block everything and everyone out, how that’s part of writing, before realizing partway through that I wasn’t positive I agreed with this, and trailing off.
This caused us to stall out a little. I was spiraling slightly, feeling the estrangement of any conversation you prepare a lot in advance for, and then, upon starting, realize almost immediately that you won’t be able to control.
But I snapped out of it.
I sorta belligerently went, And so but what about you? Which for some reason made people laugh.
No, no, I mean when How Should a Person Be? dropped—thinking how, despite having read it maybe four times, I realized I didn’t have a copy this past week, having either given away or gotten stolen from me every previous copy I owned, and when I got my new one, seeing the back of the book say “By turns praised and reviled upon its US publication,” realizing that this time around, a year into my book coming out, that line hit different.
It seemed mutually relevant. I wasn’t being cheeky turning the question back onto her. It was what I genuinely wanted to know.
*
Sheila said, It was terrible! I hated it.
I got excited by at this, hearing someone else openly admit how it felt, to write something generous and vulnerable, for the benefit of others, thinking it will be received with gratitude, like I felt when I first read her, only to have many receive in the exact opposite way.
I said, OK, this is good! This is what I wanna hear!
She said, What, how much I hated it? How terrible things were for me?
This got a big relief-laugh, the room settled in, recovered from the seriousness of “my reading,” and it felt like we were off.
*
I asked, But in what way?
She said, Well, readers thinking the narrator is me, and then hating me!
Right, right, I said.
She said, It’s like, you don’t think I know that the narrator is being vile when she’s being vile? Everything you’re hating I put in there. For a reason!
OK, yes, I said. This gets to the crux of it. In How Should A Person Be? you have this passage, that we’ve spoken about, where Sheila says,
Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it’s not—it’s luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.
This probably impacted my life more than any other line in literature, set me off on a journey in how I engaged with writing, podcasting, all art making—privileging a vulnerability that bordered on exhibitionism. But then, in Pure Colour, when Mira shows up at the Critic School, the professor goes on this rant about Manet. He says art is supposed to make you “take flight spiritually,” to make you feel like “the human endeavor has wings,” only Manet’s paintings not only don’t make you take flight but make you feel like “wings are not even a thing.” He says they’re missing some essential thing, they just sit there naked. That “we dress up to go outside,” and an “artwork should also dress up.”
And while you recently told me you’re much less interested in writing about yourself than you used to be, you’re also about to publish your Alphabetical Diaries in book form…
Here Sheila brought up a thing I wrote in my Carrere essay, that she read the night before, about archetypes. How I say that my book is distinct from Carrere’s in that his are memoirs, whereas mine is fiction in that it’s “taking aspects of my life to investigate an archetype: the fuccboi.” She said, “That’s how I think about it, how I’m doing it in Alphabetical Diaries. It may have started as diary entries, but as I edit and shape them, each character becomes a different archetype. The ‘close friend,’ the ‘husband,’ the ‘fling’—the ‘person you’re fucking,’ or, in your book, a type of ‘bae.’ I think, over time, they become their own entities.”
I said, I think of it like that too. Continuing like, One thing I was thinking—excited to be able to say one of the things I’d been thinking, that I’d prepared to say—was in your book and in mine, we have a narrator who’s stuck in a childish archetype, and the book investigates that archetype. In my book it’s “the fuccboi,” in HSAPB it’s the “puer aeternus,” the eternal child, who can’t make a decision, can’t follow through, who would prefer to stay forever in the realm of possibilities. That’s basically the “fuccboi”: the minute it gets difficult, a project or a relationship, they flee, and in so doing they miss out on life.
That is similar, she said. That’s interesting.
Because another funny thing happened, I continued, ranting now. So my friend, actually… who the ‘best friend’ in the book is based off of, over the past month, has been texting me, sending me pictures of passages from the original book you cite in HSAPB?, The Problem of the Puer Aeturnus (1970) by Marie-Louise von Franz. He’s been reading it, totally unaware of its HSAPB connection. But from what he sent me, it seems like she’s saying that the solution for this type of person, who can’t decide, can’t follow through, is work, it doesn’t matter what type, the point isn’t the job, it’s the work plain and simple, to do any job diligently. Which, in a lotta ways, is also the case my book makes: he doesn’t indecisively “go back to his ex,” nor move onto a new relationship to replace her; he just starts working again. And so in your book, you’re witnessing this character spiral, unable to finish her play, but of course the wink is that the book you’re reading is the thing she put in the work to finish. Which, again, is like my book. He doesn’t want to put in the work to get back on his feet. But then the thing you’re holding is the evidence that he, at some point, did.
It was a long rant, and mighta killed the flow a bit.
But Sheila rolled with it. She said, I think that’s right, that work is what saves the puer.
She then went on a long rant about this Iris Murdoch quote. About how Murdoch writes her books, reading this long quote she had prepared. It was about the rigorous planning, patience, and work that goes into writing a novel, planning out each chapter in advance, exercising care in the names you choose for your characters, how the choices the characters make reflect the themes, that a novel should have themes, how writing a novel requires “sitting still” for a long time, “say a year,” to get the whole thing into some kind of shape. And while it starts out focusing on “specific situations” you dwell on, waiting for some extraordinary aspect to arise from them, by the end, she says, “I don’t think I have any autobiographical tendencies and can’t think of any novel I’ve written that is a copy of my own life.”
This seemed both related to how I was saying I was writing, in that the path it takes to get your novel into novel shape, no matter how autobiographically presented it is, requires a type of work the puer lacks, and also seemed like counterpoint to what I was saying, in that she sees no “autobiographical tendencies” in her work.
I said Fuccboi was the first novel I wrote that I planned out the chapters in advance, how all previous novel attempts I’d done, I’d let them go wherever they went and they all got away from me. Sheila seemed surprised by this.
*
Here we reset again. Like sure, there’s the archetype aspect, the work aspect. But isn’t there something bigger going on in writing this way? Intimately, vulnerably? Whether we’re planning things out deliberately or not, there is that aspect of living naked, if only insofar as you’re opening yourself up to that kind of scrutiny, presenting your books like that, no? Carrere’s books had me feeling like there’s something dangerous about it... the danger of spilling things out and having all these wild effects on the world in unseen ways. Carrere expresses explicit regret over previous books he’s written, that he went too far exposing himself and others.
This set Sheila off talking about predetermination. How, sometimes we go through life overthinking what we write. But then when we look back, we realize we couldn’t help but write what we wrote. “Or you look back on friendships, relationships, people you connected with, and it’s like, Of course we were meant to go through that with them, of course we were always meant to be friends!” She spoke about a class she taught on fate at Yale this past fall, about how everything is fated, we’re just retracing steps we’ve already taken, just doing everything over again, everything we do happens over and over again throughout all of time.
It was a spirited rant, and I remember feeling in awe at how hard she was going. This was probably one of the moments I got distracted from what she was saying, realizing what an idiot I was for not having recorded this convo for a podcast.
But I said, So you’re saying… Everything is predetermined?
I said this slowly, thinking about it before I said it.
She thought about it, then slowly said, Yeah. Basically.
We both went quiet a sec. I felt like the room was really locked in, some people giggling quietly, it was like a full-on Socratic dialogue we were doing. But totally genuinely.
That’s interesting, I said. That’s the opposite of how I’ve been looking at it.
Your way, I continued, seems… better.
How do you mean? she said.
Well, just insofar as, the world only is according to how you choose to look at it, and looking at it in that way seems less... stressful. Also, less narcissistic: If you’re going through life constantly worried that anything you say or write will cause this whole chain of events to happen, that’s a tough way to go through life. It also puts yourself at the center, and holds your power to cause god-like changes in pretty high estimation. Your way seems less controlling, less assuming of your own control.
She said, You think whichever way is less stressful is a better way to look at things?
I think so, I said. Whichever way is more useful, for your work and well being, makes it a better way to look at things.
*
Sheila then brought up this Carrere bit I quoted in my essay about how a book should be edited, or rather not edited. How “sometimes the flaws of a book in the moment later turn out to be what make the book inimitable.” How we have less control over the paths our books, and our lives, take than we’d like to think. How this is a calming idea, if we renounce ourselves to it.
She read the quote, about Paul, his editor who just died, in full: Paul saw a book as something organic, to be taken or left, and not to be put through an editing mill...
Adding that, It seemed like you were talking about Gian, your editor who also died, when you quoted it.
I said, I was thinking about Gian when I quoted that.
And just like that, our forty minutes were up. Felt like we coulda kept going for hours, like we were just getting going.
Mikaela from McNally Jackson stepped in, said Thank you guys, it’s time for the Q and A.
*
The first question was about what role crudeness plays in art.
I said it plays a big role. I brought up how it seemed tied to the “ugly painting contest” idea in HSAPB. How, in Fuccboi, it was a decision Gian and I made, to make readers question the distinctions they make between crude and not crude, how an artwork should challenge the culture, should have that aggressive energy of messing with those who are too comfortable in their ideas of what is and isn’t a valuable mode of expression. Ending with another Manet quote from Pure Colour, how the head professor at the Critic School says Manet’s paintings are crude, Manet feels shame for not being able to make something classically beautiful, he just bumbles along like a three-legged dog making crude paintings he decides are beautiful, and so his canvases turn out shameful. So “the critics shame him, for he makes them feel ashamed.”
I kinda hogged this question. I think Sheila agreed. That moments of deliberate crudeness are a part of her art, too.
The next question was about the distinction I made, between “fiction” and “memoir.” Basically asking how, in the end of Yoga, Carrere admits to lying in his book. Doesn’t that make it “fiction”?
Sheila made the point that in poetry there is no distinction between “fiction” and “nonfiction.” It’s all just a story. She said maybe there’s something to be learned from that, that as soon as it enters into poetic language, it’s just a story. That maybe these categories have to do more with marketing than art.
I jumped in and, somewhat carelessly, said it’s fiction or memoir depending on how the author chooses to categorize it. This was unsatisfying to the asker, and I think to myself as well. I continued, that the minute you start writing things into scene, artfully arranging their ordering, picking up on patterns and themes that repeat, it becomes fiction.
The asker wasn’t satisfied by that answer either, began to press harder, we riffed some more, till Sheila, freed from the sense of surveillance this question generally elicits in authors in interview settings, given it was just us in the room and no one was recording it (except for me, mentally, remembering as much of it as I could, to artfully arrange it, selectively remember it, later—although I didn’t know I was doing that then) Sheila went, Well sometimes writers call their writing “fiction” so that it avoids the possibility for legal ramifications.
This was so blunt and funny, it made the whole room laugh, and it felt like we achieved something we set out to do: to speak openly about everything we’d been thinking about, in a way that went beyond the formality and conventions of your standard “writers in conversation” literary event.
*
The final question was about naming narrators the same name as the author.
I answered how I’d grown accustomed to answering, when asked this question, which I was often asked: that the books I most enjoy do this, invite the reader to question where the line falls between what’s true and what isn’t. To ask why a narrator who shares the author’s name would share vulnerable, unflattering things about themself. To get the reader to consider why they would. How this adds another dimension to a novel that I, as a reader, enjoy.
It was a little coy, a little cop-out-y.
Sheila said, Well for me, some parts of the book were true, some were not, and when she and Margeaux—her friend in HSAPB who is named after her friend in real life, the painter Margeaux Williamson—were talking about what they should name the characters, they thought, if we give them fake names, people will assume everything is true and that we were trying to “hide” that fact, but if we give them real names, no one will assume everything is true, otherwise why would we name them our actual names.
This was such a funny and idiosyncratic and honest answer, I suddenly felt lame for copping out like I had, for hiding behind my stock literary answer. So I stepped up and said what I really thought, what I’d recently come to think, or recently remembered was the point of writing it how I wrote it: That writing in a vulnerable, confessional way, under your name, is to make a wager to yourself. Now that all that you wrote is out there for everyone to see, you have no choice but to change how you live. You’re not those things you wrote that you are, or you can always decide to not be, even if versions of your past selves might have been. Now you can’t avoid it; you have to look at it. The challenge is, to remember that that was the point. If you forget, and you don’t change, that’s when, like Carrere talks about, you ruin your life. You wrote how you are all those reprehensible things, and you’re still living in those ways, only now you not only can’t avoid it yourself, like you could before, but everyone else knows and assumes that about you too! That’s when life becomes a living hell. The only way forward is to radically change how you move, you write something like that, in that way, to leave yourself with no choice but to radically change how you move.
Pp. 301-304, which starts like this:
:
fuccboi is Matisse tho
Dude so good - possibly as good as going to the actual event. The turn at end, that you are artfully arranging/remembering, good landing.