BITCH MAGAZINE: FEMINIST RESPONSE TO POP CULTURE 1999, No. 10 PLANET JANICE Interview by Andi Zeisler She writes longhand, loves Motley Crue, and imagines that Elvis is alive and in hiding as a Hasidic Jew in the Bronx. What's not to love about novelist Janice Eidus? Whenever pop icons stroll right in, take a seat, and make themselves comfortable, you can be sure you're in Janice Eidus's world. It's a world where James Dean shows up at a writers' colony with his '50s charisma transformed into '90s hucksterism (he lies about the screenplay he's writing, agonizes over how sensitive to be, and sleeps with everyone in the colony), a world where Barbie joins a women's self-esteem group only to get pummeled senseless and thrown down an airshaft by a group of unimpressed adults seduced and disappointed by her perky-breasted promises. A world, in short, where normal life is superimposed on popular culture, rather than the other way around. Eidus's most recent collection of stories, THE CELIBACY CLUB, mocked subjects like child celebrity, fitness culture, and the Prozac-riddled 12-step landscape with equal parts cynical wit and sincere compassion. Her first collection of stories, VITO LOVES GERALDINE, paid sweet, goofy homage to high-haired '50s teens in love, performance artists searching for a stage, and the ever-confusing vocabulary of sex and love in a world where safe is never safe enough. In addition to the release of IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL—a book of short stories she edited with her husband, John Kastan—this year has seen the reissue of Eidus' 1994 novel URBAN BLISS. One woman's take on city living, therapy, homelessness, infidelity, and the perils of marrying a man with the same name as your favorite Beatle, URBAN BLISS is a swift-moving comedy of manners with a forked tongue and a stinging backbeat. BITCH recently had the pleasure of chaffing with Janice about writing, rock 'n' roll, and why women are really, once and for all, not from Venus. If one of your stories could be made into a movie, which one would you want it to be? Well, VITO LOVES GERALDINE, the title story of my earlier collection, has actually been optioned. From the time it first came out—its first publication was in THE VILLAGE VOICE—I was getting calls from producers and directors. There's been film interest in ELVIS, AXL, AND ME, although nothing's been signed. With that one, my plan is a rock opera—I want somebody to do, like, Elvis Christ Superstar. No matter how different the audience is, who the audience is, that is a story that has universal appeal. Elvis just brings people together like that. Yeah. What politicians are supposed to be able to do, Elvis does. That story was recently included in the OXFORD BOOK OF JEWISH SHORT STORIES. And it was almost not included because it's so irreverent about Jewish culture; there were some people who were a little bit taken aback by it. But I'm really delighted to be included in that company; it's wonderful that they're opening up and they're able to include a story that's irreverent about the Hasidim, and irreverent about noodle kugel and kreplach and rock stars and integrating Elvis Presley and Axl Rose with Jewish tradition. It's nice to sneak pop culture into conservative forums. People are gonna buy the MONDO ELVIS anthology if they're already into Elvis, but it's more interesting to have something like your story slipped in where people who would never pick up anything Elvis-related can stumble onto it. It's more subversive, and more enlightening. I think those are good words, yeah, I would use both of those words, subversive and enlightening. I'm absolutely delighted that the story's in the OXFORD. Unexpected. URBAN BLISS has an almost surreal quality—I kept expecting something bizarre to happen, but nothing did. But there was this heightened sense of realism. That's exactly the term I use to describe the book—heightened realism. Some of my short stories and my first novel, FAITHFUL REBECCA, veer into magical realism, or whatever it would be called. But in URBAN BLISS, nothing bizarre happens, but everything is just a little more real than real. It was really fun to write in that format. Babette Bliss deals with universal issues—career, self-esteem, women's pressure to have children, fidelity vs. infidelity, and how to cope with these things in the sort of changing mores of our time. At the same time, she's always aware of what's going on as far as social justice, the homelessness problem in New York, the underfunding of the arts. One of the things that turns me off about a lot of contemporary writing is how narcissistic and solipsistic characters are. So as much as [Babette] is going through all of these personal crises, I always wanted her to be very aware. Homelessness is a central metaphor in the book: The theater company Babette works for is about to become homeless, she basically becomes homeless when she leaves her husband, she's constantly trying to give out quarters and food to people on the street. There's a way that people put on blinders to get by, but I can't—my husband often calls me the Mother Teresa of Midtown—and I really wanted Babette to manifest that as well. Would you say that New York City is the source of your inspiration? Yeah—I mean, I've actually been called a regional writer. The level of anxiety, the level of freneticisrn, the ironic humor...I think those are part and parcel of living in New York. I've lived in the Virgin Islands, I've lived in Berkeley, I've lived in upstate New York, I've lived in Iowa, and I've lived in Baltimore, but wherever I've lived, I've really yearned to come back to New York. For me, Manhattan is like a small town, and I tried to capture that in URBAN BLISS. But I also do a lot of my writing in artists' colonies outside of New York. And I find that sometimes to do a lot of sustained work I'm happiest in these very protected environments. I can get a tremendous amount of writing done and then come back to the city and start being crazy again. Right now I'm working on a book of nonfiction, a memoir about coming of age in New York, and about the effect of place on how I came of age and on my self-image and things like that. I've always written short personal essays, and I figured that there would be a time when I would want to write a longer book, and this just seems the moment. Well, there's been a big run on author memoirs in the past few years, but it seems like it's become a my-childhood-was-more-traumatic-than-your-childhood thing. It's interesting, because there has been such a sensationalizing of memoir, and I even know—without naming names—two people who had memoirs come out that were simply untrue. I mean, I know the facts of their lives, and they were more than just exaggerating, they were really not true. But I think more and more people are feeling out what's inauthentic and what's being written just for the sake of sensationalism. And then there's a book like Kathryn Harrison's THE KISS, which got all this flak, but which was quite beautiful. I was deeply moved, and I felt that the attacks against it seemed completely from people's discomfort; they turned her into a whipping girl for the whole memoir craze. But if you're [writing] deliberately to take advantage of a trend, you'll always be out of step, and I've never allowed myself to think in those terms. Growing up in the Bronx, did you ever read Kate Simon's memoir BRONX PRIMITIVE? Actually, I just reread it. There were things that I really identified with. She's older, so her Bronx was a simpler, safer Bronx, and she grew up in a real Jewish enclave. My family is Jewish, but I grew up in a very tough Italian neighborhood. My parents were very politically progressive, and very different, so I felt like in a lot of ways I had the best of many worlds. Another book about coming of age in the Bronx that I really loved is Vivian Gornick's FIERCE ATTACHMENTS, which is about her and her mother. You should read it; it's a great book. Were you a rock 'n' roll girl from the start? It's been a lifelong passion. When I was a kid. I would take the subway into Manhattan and camp outside hotels waiting for British rock groups to come to town and then I would be part of the sea of teenyboppers, screaming and beating up cops to get to our idols. [Laughs.] Mick Jagger dropped his sunglasses at my feet and I picked them up and handed them back to him...and I've regretted it ever since. And yeah, I think one of the reasons I became obsessed with rock music and rock stars at an early age was because I really wanted their freedom. I mean, it wasn't even so much that I wanted to sit in the audience screaming; I wanted to be them. We didn't have Courtney Love back then, so I know a lot of what I'm looking at when I use [rock stars] in my fiction is the desire of women to be on stage—to be strong, to be public, to be uninhibited, to be very sexual. I'm constitutionally incapable of repressing anything sexual [laughs], and I think that's all tied in, for me, with music. And I'll often use rock stars as sort of emblems of the mass worship of celebrities. In ELVIS, AXL, AND ME, I used Elvis Presley and Axl Rose to explore sexual power and idolization. Did you recognize the gender inequity in rock 'n' roll when you were younger? Totally. I mean, clearly there are advantages that this generation of women have. But then at the same time, there's still the mass Barbie phenomenon happening, and it's unbelievable to me. That and the idolization of the '50s and the Rat Pack. This is so mind-boggling, that people would idolize Frank Sinatra, who called women "cufflinks"—you know, one on each arm. I guess what's great now is that there's room for Courtney Love and also room to go back into that '50s idolization. But I think it's just terror; I think people are frightened of the freedom they have, and these are really censorious times that we're living in. I've noticed this with writers, too. Like when people apply for NEA grants now, instead of sending their best work, they send their most palatable, most timid work. And to me that's just horrible. My story THE CELIBACY CLUB is a real celebration of uninhibited sexuality during times of censure; it's a send-up of 12-step programs. It's funny, because when that story was published in THE VILLAGE VOICE, I got a call from a movie producer who wanted me to write about 12-step programs—he wanted me to document them, which was not at all anything that I had any interest in doing. [Laughs.] He just completely missed the point. The story was written in a kind of rage against what I felt has been such sexual repression in our time. It seems like in earlier decades it was only women who were pathologized sexually, but now it's men too. And I guess that could be considered evening out, but its not the kind of evening out that we need. What do you think of the whole Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus attitude that seems to permeate pop culture more and more? You know, I don't know the details of it, I've never sat down with the book. But it seems so absurd to me that rather than working toward a kind of common humanity and a common vocabulary, there's this fashion to say, "Well, this is just how it has to be—and isn't it cute!" We have these nonsensical books giving rules to people who really just need to be open to themselves about what they're feeling. And I mean, I suspect that people in this society are just from Mars and Venus to themselves, really, because we're so out of touch with what we're feeling. So it's more like, "We are from Mars, we are from Venus." I saw an ad just yesterday in the paper that was advertising a workshop called "Three Minutes Toward Self-Actualization." It was, you know, if you spend three minutes a day doing these certain rules that this guy has, you'll be a greater person. I don't even know what that means; I don't know how anybody could attend that. But I know people will—it'll be sold-out. Yeah, our self-help culture seems pretty directed toward putting men in one place and women in another, emphasizing the gender polarization. Another debate that was in the media a lot last year was about whether men and women write differently, the "Why hasn't a woman ever written the Great American Novel?" question. You know, it's interesting—I write a lot of male characters, and people have said to me, "Oh, you're so lucky that you can do that, I could never write from the point of view of a man!" Or men tell me, "I could never write from the point of view of a woman." And I find that incredible, because it seems so natural to be able to go into the other point of view. It's unfathomable that a serious writer would be terrified to enter the voice of someone of the opposite sex. I think the reason there's never been a Great American Novel written by a woman is that there have been, but they don't tend to be about fishing or war. I was on this panel the other day, and people were asking what writers had influenced us, and I talked about Grace Paley, who was a tremendous influence on me, and I talked about Vivian Gornick and, you know, nobody else was talking about these people. I think we have a long way to go. Infidelity is a central theme in your books and stories; it seems like you see it as an inevitable element of relationships. I think I see it almost more as a metaphor for how we come to know ourselves—how far are you willing to go, what can you do, what are you comfortable with, how much can you trust another person, how much can you trust yourself? It pushes so many buttons for so many people in different ways. But I'd like to think that if people don't want it in their relationships, then it doesn't have to be inevitable. But I do think—and this is one of the things that URBAN BLISS is about—that you have to be able to really communicate, and I mean really communicate, not just with this New Age sort of bullshit. One of the problems that Babette and George Harrison, her husband, have is that she has kind of idealized him in a way, and he's not a real person to her. Because he's George Harrison. Because he's George Harrison. At the end of the book, what she's finally able to do is find a way to see him as who he is—a real person who happens to look like and have the same name as George Harrison. What about love? It's a primary theme in your work, but it's always tied in with ambivalence or unhealthiness. In this society there's a way in which people view love and romance in very false, sentimental terms. It's like THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, which has nothing to do with real depth of feeling and real connections between people. We're not a very grown-up society. Is love conducive to writing? Well, before I got married, when I was unhappy in relationships it could be both a real catalyst to great work or a catalyst to depression and misery and wallowing and eating ice cream in bed. [Laughs.] I'm in a really good relationship now, and having someone intelligent to talk to, supportive, interested in many of the same things I am...that's incredibly stimulating to me as a writer, and invaluable. Every writer I've ever known is somebody who felt that they were simply not listened to well enough when they were growing up. I mean, they were not heard. And so there's this constant need to express oneself—part of what happens with Babette Bliss is that, as her idealization of her husband is going out the window, she's getting more in touch with who she is and therefore she's able to be creative. I definitely believe that creativity and having an imagination is what rescues us. A lot of my stories—VITO LOVES GERALDINE, THE MERMAID OF ORCHARD BEACH, even THE CELIBACY CLUB, if you think of being free sexually as being imaginative, which it is—deal with the triumph of the imagination. And so many people are so frightened of their imaginations—when I first started publishing, there were people who would say, "My goodness, you certainly have an imagination!" And it was not meant as a compliment. But I just think that's the greatest compliment you could give to a person, writer or not. Was there some point in your childhood when you suddenly realized, "Hey, I'm good at making up stories"? Well, I always wrote, but I didn't know what it meant. I didn't have a game plan—you know, "I will have a novel published by 18 and go through the Yale MFA program." It was nothing like that; it was a completely emotional thing for me. I'm always amazed when I meet people who have completely strategized their careers from an early age. People have said to me, "When did you stop being a good girl?" I don't know that I ever was. I came from a very volatile family; my father was very creative, and there was a lot of intensity and a lot of emotion, and I never really repressed myself. I mean, I'm a very good girl [missing text...] came a beautiful image of her, and her name, and it all came like a package. I knew this woman, I knew her voice, I knew her hairstyle—teased to the ceiling—I knew her makeup, and I was able to go. Of course, I had no beginning, middle, or end, I just had the image and the voice in my head, but that story virtually wrote itself. The whole thing was born from her voice; she was just wholly formed from my unconscious. All I could think was that for many years, she was growing inside me and I just didn't know it, and one day I just woke up and she was sleeping next to me. What do you think about the idea that someday all books will only be published electronically? Actually, I have a friend who published a novel only electronically. And I always buy my friends' books, so I bought the disk, but I've never been able to bring myself to read it; I just can't imagine sitting there and reading the book that way. I love the covers of books, and holding them, and having a library of books in my apartment. It's just something I can't imagine living without. I'm old-fashioned in that I do a lot of my writing in longhand, in cafes. The computer is like the last place I turn to. To me, it's just a glorified typewriter, and I don't like staring at a screen. I'm not a neo-Luddite, but the fun of the technology has kind of eluded me. There's this group called the Lead Pencil Society, writers who absolutely refuse to use computers. I won't go that far—at the end of the process, it's nice to have the computer to speed up the process. But it's a technical thing for me, it's not a creative act at all. When I had e-mail and had all this mail to answer, I ended up with tendinitis. I never used to get it; I could write and write [longhand] and never suffer physically for it. It wasn't really writing that caused it; it was the e-mail and extraneous stuff that was adding hours [on the computer]. And I was briefly on the web, and I thought, you know, life is too short. So much of it was just like watching bad television. Is there good television? I can really enjoy watching certain shows. Like the other day I was watching Pee Wee's Playhouse, which they're showing again, and I was trying to picture, like, the pitch meeting where he went in and convinced somebody that this was a children's show. That's the kind of thing I get tremendous pleasure from. And I can watch almost any movie; my tolerance for movies is really different than for TV. I can watch the most grade-D piece of crap; I just have no standards whatsoever. Somewhere along the line I just turn off all my critical faculties and I can sit and watch Joan Collins playing evil twin sisters or whatever. What about fashion magazines and women's magazines? I would say that I feel utterly detached from fashion magazines at this point. I mean, it's so obvious what's wrong with them—in terms of anorexic models and emphasis on the superficial and emphasis on materialism. But it's not as though I feel that I'm not hit with those things in a million other ways every day. But [fashion magazines] aren't fun to deconstruct in the same way that TV is for me. At one point I started writing a story in the voice of a supermodel and it just wasn't fun or funny. My story TEEN IDOL is written in the voice of a has-been TV star who had been a kid actor and is now an alcoholic and is holding up gas stations. But writing in the voice of a supermodel didn't give me the same pleasure in terms of looking at pop culture. So many people I know, including myself, are sheepish about looking at those magazines, but at the same time we'll freely admit what a guilty pleasure it is. I just can't say that. When I channel-surf late at night, there's the E! network, which just has all of these fashion shows, and I think: "Do people actually sit still for this?" I mean, fashion, to me, is fun. But I don't know that fashion magazines are the place that I would look to for fun, and I wonder what it is that people do get from them. Personally, my guilty pleasure is that I really like crass, vulgar rock groups like Motley Crue, you know, who sing the most misogynistic lyrics. I get a kick out of looking at them, it's got a good beat, it's completely politically incorrect, and I love it. And I've always liked John Mellencamp—his hip little small-town country boy thing. I read an article in THE NEW YORK TIMES the other day that said you are never supposed to say in public that you like John Mellencamp. I didn't even know he was considered so uncool. So I guess he's another guilty pleasure. Popular culture is so wonderful, though—it's just out there and ready to be deconstructed. There's almost nothing there that isn't ripe for some kind of irreverent excoriation, and I'm sure that I'm the girl for the job. Get Janice's books at your local independent bookstore or straight from her publisher, City Lights, at 415-362-8193 or www.citylights.com. Read the next interview... Biography  |  Books  |  Other Works  |  Writing Tutorials  |  Links