An Interview With Helen Schulman

Feminism, Lish, and Lots and Lots of Revision

Dear Republic,

I was blown away by Helen Schulman’s story, “Fools for Love” in The Atlantic. Helen’s ten novels include Lucky Dogs, Come With Me, This Beautiful Life, and A Day at the Beach.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH HELEN SCHULMAN

Okay so let’s talk about writing. How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

You know it’s hard to really know the answer to that. I always wanted to be around books. I read a lot as a kid. I went to Bronx Science — I grew up in the city — and it really wasn’t a place for readers. But when I went to college I was like blown away that I could get credit for reading and writing. At the same time it just seemed like the biggest scam in the world. I thought ‘wow if you could do that with your life that would be great.’

How would you describe like your childhood in New York at that time?

In high school I really had a lot of fun, I mean the city was crazy but everything was really cheap and parents were asleep and so we were out all the time, going dancing, going to bars, playing in pool halls. So while it was Son of Sam and people didn’t have any money, there was the energy shortage, but it was really fun. It was was pre-AIDS and it was post-sexual revolution and it was second-wave feminism and so in my school we had kids who were out and who were couples, and I thought the world was going to be great. I thought I was lucky to be born when I was because I thought we were going to clean up the environment and I thought women were going to have everything open to them, and of course I was wrong about everything, but yeah I had hope.

Which writers were shaping you as you were growing up?

I really didn’t realize that there were living writers — I’m sorry to say that — until I went to college and then I remember a boyfriend gave me a copy of Raymond Carver and I was like ‘what? he’s alive?’ Everything I read I read with my boy hat on because we hardly ever read women writers in school. I think we read Black Boy all four years of my high school education. It was like a token book that we read. But I just read everything I got my hands on. I loved John Steinbeck. I loved Little Women. It was just in college that it exploded.

To ask it another way, as you’re writing your novels or reading your own novels do you feel like the presence of different influences on it?

Oh sure. I really liked Criers and Kibitzers — Stanley Elkin was one of my early heroes when I got out of college. William Faulkner definitely changed my life. I took a class on Hemingway and Faulkner in college that changed everything for me. I didn’t know you could write from different points of view, I didn’t know you could do itty-bitty chapters, I didn’t know that you could give inarticulate people the voices of the angels. This was all very exciting. Then when I was a senior in college my dad got sick and I came home to save money and to help and I had two classes I needed to graduate from Cornell and so I took some extension classes at Columbia and I’d been writing basically bad poetry in college but I wanted to write fiction and so I signed up for this guy Austin Blunt or something and his class was full and they put me in Gordon Lish’s class and I’d never heard of Gordon Lish but that class changed my life. He was a crazy teacher and his classes were six hours long and people smoked through them and if you went to pee he would talk about you behind your back and you had to read out loud what you wrote and he would listen and if he didn’t like what he heard he’d say ‘oh Schulman Schulman Schulman, this is shit, you’re hurting our ears, you’re poisoning our minds with this shit, don’t read me this shit,’ and then he’d go on to the next person and it was sort of stunning. I’d come from a bucolic college where people wrote stuff and we drank wine during class and talked about it but that’s not what class with Gordon was like, but he taught me that every word matters and how it’s placed matters and he taught me that this was, I thought, a noble way to spend one’s life.

What were the interactions like with you? What were you bringing to him at that time? What would he rip apart?

I was just trying to get him to let me read another sentence. I mean really. I took his class for a year and by the end of the year he said ‘this is ready to go out and come to my office at Knopf’ and I did and he started editing it and it was crazy and I don’t know if you know much about Gordon but if you’re interested in short stories you should know about him and about how he edited Raymond Carver —

Yeah I definitely know the legendary version of it.

So when he edits he crosses it out and puts in his own lines, and I was sitting there and I was 22 and I was like ‘what?’ It was exciting, but I also thought it would be bad for me, so I stopped going, though a lot of the people who were in that workshop stayed with him for years. It was traumatic and it was thrilling and it was scary and it was very intense. It completely changed how I read and how I wrote and how I teach — I certainly don’t teach the way he did but often students say to me no one has ever gone through my sentences like this and I think it’s a little bit for me like the Helen Keller ‘wah-wah’ moment when all of a sudden she understands it’s water. It’s like wow if I put this word here instead of there everything changes. I didn’t understand that — I read for story, I read for escape, I didn’t read for immersion and I didn’t see and I didn’t hear until I worked with him so it was seminal for me.

What was the first thing you wrote where you were just like ‘you know what I think maybe I’m really good at this, like maybe this is working for me.’ Do you remember?

I don’t know and I don’t know if i ever think that. I mean people always say ‘who do you write for?’ and I’ve always just written for myself. I have two kids who are now grown, I have this great husband, I have lots of friends, I teach. I have a very sort of normal life, but I think had I not had been a writer I probably would have flown off the face of the earth — like anything could have happened to me — but I put all my crazy into my writing and that allowed me to have this kind of bougie life, you know that Flaubert quote that ‘you live an orderly life like a bourgeois so you can be wild and free in your work,’ and I think it’s the other way around for me, it was like if I could be wild and free in my writing then I could handle all the responsibilities of adult life, including being first line of resistance for both my parents as they aged and aged poorly, so I had a lot of responsibility but I could handle it because I could write.

So are you saying if you didn’t have writing you don’t know what else you would have done with your life?

I have no idea what else I would have done. I don’t think I could have done anything else.

Because you’re like so incompetent at everything else?

I mean I’m not so incompetent but I am incompetent. I mean, I’ve run programs. I run the fiction program at the New School and I’ve started programs and I’m pretty good in an academic situation. I really handled my parents’ health care. There’s things I can do, but you can see my bookshelf. Look at that. I can’t order things and I can’t put things into an orderly situation. I love my friends, in some ways I’m social, but I need a lot of time alone, a lot a lot of time alone, so I can’t imagine what it’d be like for me to have worked 10 hours a day in an office. I don’t know what I would have done. Honestly, it’s always sort of scared me.

So why don’t you walk us through some of your novels. Which ones did you feel really clicked for you? Which ones were harder to write?

I think I got into a groove at a certain point where I started writing about ‘now.’ I think maybe that started with A Day at the Beach and then This Beautiful Life where I was so overwhelmed by now that I just started writing these time capsules about now and in a way I was writing historical fiction. I ended up looking at big earthquakes in the culture through the lens of the individual or a couple or a family and how it affected a real life. There was a writer named Jerry Badanes, he’s dead a long time now and he was older than me and I really admired him, and he wrote about the Holocaust but he wrote about a family that was really fucked up and it wasn’t like all these beautiful girls with minky ponytails at Shabbat when the stormtroopers come, it was like this incestuous sister and brother and all these things — it was called The Final Opus of Leon Solomon — and I was like ‘he’s writing about real life in a time of crisis, I want to do that’ because history doesn’t sanctify real life, it doesn’t make it perfect, it interrupts it, it can destroy it, but it’s still a mess and that’s kind of interesting, so I guess those books came out of that. One thing that’s really great about my job at the New School is that I always get to pick a research assistant and it’s been amazing and a lot of them have gone on to do incredible things. I would say to them like, ‘I’m really interested in, oh, Fukushima,’ but at the same time I was thinking about multiverses and I was always thinking about how hard it was to be a girl and then I started reading all this physics, so to my research assistant I was like ‘just keep giving me anything you can on Fukushima and anything you can on Silicon Valley’ and then I just started writing and that was Come With Me because I had this idea that I could use multiverse theory, so it was a story about a family but it was also about how much the internet and machines were going to take over our lives and what was happening to print and all of that.

The transition that you talk about in terms of writing in the now, writing a little bit more messily about people’s lives, what phase of your life are you in?

My first novel was a collection of stories that were interconnected and I don’t even know if it was a novel but we called it that, and then I wrote The Revisionist, which had to do with a man who became obsessed with a Holocaust denier but he was in denial of his whole life, the obsessed person. And that took seven years to write and I never really cracked it, I don’t think, though I did finally publish it. But I went in having no idea how to get out, it was like Vietnam. And then after that I wrote P.S., which was just really like a sexual revenge comedy that came out of a short story. I wrote a short story and I was like ‘I don’t know what to write next’ and someone said, ‘Helen why don’t you turn P.S. into a novel,’ and I was like ‘okay,’ and then it became a movie.

What tends to be the process for a Helen Scuhlman novel? It sounds like you often get this kind of big data dump basically of research.

That’s what i’ve done with the last bunch of them. Like my kids were little and they were in the private school arena — we were like the poor church mice — when a mom stopped me on the street and said ‘did you hear what happened at Horace Mann?’ And I said ‘what happened at Horace Mann?’ And there was a story of this video that had gone wild that this girl had taken of herself masturbating to give to a boy and I was like ‘holy shit that’s it’ because all I had been thinking about was how did I end up in this microcosm of this really gentrified wealthy world of private schools and the mothers that I knew were really accomplished women, I mean some of them were doctors and they were lawyers, they had Ph.Ds, but many of them had elected to stay home and not work even though they had all this money, and for me it was the beginning of the huge income disparity so I was thinking about all of that, and I was also thinking about the hyper-sexualization of young girls — I grew up as a ‘70s feminist and of course we wanted to look cute and stuff but we didn’t dress like prostitutes — but when I entered that world, trying to find my daughter a dress to go to a bat mitzvah took forever because we couldn’t find anything that wasn’t like so sexy for a 12-year-old and it’s not like I wanted her in a burka or anything. So I was thinking about all this stuff and I thought ‘oh okay I can write a story about this,’ so then I made it up, but the germ of it, as Henry James would say, came from this mother stopping me and saying ‘did you hear about this video?’

One thing I noticed about it is how vividly you’re describing exactly what the technology is in 2003, which I had to really go back and be like ‘oh yeah I guess that’s what email was like then’ — so is that how you would do it, you would go to your researcher and say ‘I need to know everything about how Kazaa worked at this time or, whatever, mp3s’ and then you get a bunch of information and then you’re able to world-build out of the research?

I’m sorry, I’m a little bit of a sand mandala person, as soon as the book’s done I never look at it again, but I can tell you what I told you about Come With Me, I had these two streams, and when I did Lucky Dogs my head was blown off by #MeToo, I don’t know why, but just the power cabal of men all over the world helping each other rape women is just — this is pre us knowing about Jeffrey Epstein — and so I was researching that when it was happening but I also was really afraid of civil war in the United States and I had a friend whose family had lived through the siege of Sarajevo, so I was researching that, and then I’m Jewish so I was always worried about Israel, so I was all over the place on that and then I read an article by Ronan Farrow about how David Boies, the very very famous lawyer who helped us establish gay marriage, was Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer and The New York Times’ lawyer, and he went to Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, to find ex-Mossad agents to help Harvey Weinstein smear the women he had raped, and then I was like ‘oh wow god likes me because here is everything I’m thinking about and it’s in one tight story and it’s true,’ so that’s when I wrote Lucky Dogs.

So if you were introducing Helen Schulman to readers or you were evaluating yourself as a writer what would you tend to say are strengths, weaknesses, things that come more easily to you, things that you find yourself challenged with as you’re working on a book?

I mean all my books are so different, I think that’s been an issue in the publishing world, not that they don’t get great reviews because they do, but it’s not like you’re going to get the same thing when you come back to another Helen Schulman book that you got in the last one per se. I think I’m funny and I think that that also may be one of the problems and benefits of how I write because I make people laugh when things are really terrible and some people really like that and some people don’t. And also because people will say ‘oh this book is so funny’ and then people say ‘this is so sad, this is the saddest book I ever read, why are they saying it’s so funny?’ But even you wrote to me ‘I’m laughing out loud on the train’ —

Yeah, to clarify that was from the the beginning of the book. Let’s talk about ‘how hard it is being a girl.’ I was very taken with the end of Lucky Dogs and then the afterward you wrote for it is very powerful — what’s her name the Rose McGowan character —

Merry —

Who kind of turns into a wolverine. That’s the image in the last line, of which she says, “I love that shot.” Can you talk about where you got to over the course of writing that book?

She’s Jake LaMotta, the old prizefighter. You kick her, she kicks back harder. It’s self-destructive and she’s a mess and she’s a narcissist and she was unparented and she was raped twice, more than twice by two different men, and she’s commodified at 15, she was cursed by beauty, but she fights and she fights back and she doesn’t just let you roll all over her and that’s why I loved her, and by the end of the book she has shown love for someone else, she’s taking care of someone else when nobody ever took care of her and I think a lot of my books talk about the healing power of love so that happened for her, but she’s totally fucked, I mean everyone’s out to get her.

Just in terms of what’s kind of churning for you as you’re writing the book, I was wondering if it felt like a radical feminist sort of position that you were getting to — that the social contract for women is broken, like you sort of have to break this and turn into something else. Is that kind of the political dimension you were going for?

Yeah, but I feel that every day of my life. It’s not changed. I’m 64. When I was 14 I felt that way. Nothing’s gotten better, it’s all gotten worse in a way. I mean you could say ‘oh there are some women who are like CEOs for five minutes or whatnot,’ but I mean, even with Jeffrey Epstein, the only person in jail is Ghislaine Maxwell. All those men are walking around. And Harvey’s the only one still in jail from that whole big #MeToo. The rest of them, maybe they’re not on Good Morning America anymore but they’re fine they have money, they’re free. These women who protested and fought for their lives and were so brave, what did they end up with? I think about all the times students would come to me at school about something and I would go to human resources and how long it took and how nothing came from it and then finally I’m just at the point, I wrote letters to teens and stuff, ‘I’m 48, I’m 56, I’m still writing this letter I’m 62,’ I don’t think it’s gotten better —

You’re talking about sexual harassment or date rape — ?

Yeah, they’re always protecting the boy. And I’m really not an extremist, I’m not like ‘believe every woman because she says it’ kind of person, I’m just saying they really bend over backwards to protect the boys and it’s still true, and now it’s Cesar Chavez, my mother is rolling in her grave — I mean we didn’t eat grapes our whole childhood because of Cesar Chavez. I’m very very pessimistic about that, why didn’t Hillary win, why didn’t Kamala win, how did this country, after living through Trump I, bring him back?

So for people who haven’t read your work is there is there a book that you would suggest they start with?

Well that’s a nice question. Probably the most user-friendly one is this new book Fools for Love because it’s not as politically charged. I think Lucky Dogs is my best book. I love A Day at the Beach, but it’s hard for people to read that book. I also really like Come With Me, I think it’s very unique.

So there are a few features that I really notice. One is of characters who end up being sort of betrayed by everybody around them. There’s a distinctive moment, I think especially in Lucky Dogs, the way that this whole support system that Merry thinks is building her up as an actress suddenly turns out to be, first of all, everybody enabling the Weinstein figure and then everybody gaslighting her, and there’s a feeling of the world collapsing on a character, they seem to get to this place of real isolation at some point. Is that something that you notice or think about?

No, but I did definitely with Lucky Dogs because that’s what Harvey did. He ruined their careers if they said no. If they complained he went out to kill them basically. There were people who never could work again, so he destroyed them emotionally and he destroyed them in terms of their careers and monetarily. It’s terrible. And everybody knew, it was an open secret, but everybody was too afraid of him. That’s what Trump is, it’s an open secret. We all know who he is, we know what he does, and yet people treat him with deference, they push each other out of the way to suck his dick, so I do believe that we live in a really cruel time period, not that there are so many better ones. I don’t know, maybe it’s just human nature, I don’t know, but I’m a naive person who thought it would be better than this.

What do you think it is? Something that you’re obviously thinking about is just the way that — I think you call it the new “moneyed century,” the way that finance basically takes over everything — but in terms of what the thing is that basically dashed the hopes of your youth. Is it the trajectory going from Reagan to Trump or is it something deeper in human nature, what do you think?

I graduated in ‘83, so it was the Reagan years, so I lot of the kids I went to school with did not go into service, they went into banking, they didn’t go to politics. They wanted to make money, they saw, ‘oh i can make a lot of money fast and I can get rich.’ So I grew up in a home where all four of my grandparents were refugees, my father’s mother really couldn’t read and write in any language, my father became a doctor, my mother was a social worker, we were taught ‘you have to do the work of the world,’ but there wasn’t a whole lot of that in 1983, so yes I think that the deregulation of everything led to this incredible money craze and now it’s at such monstrous proportions that it doesn’t even make any sense because these people are so rich that you could take away billions of dollars and they wouldn’t feel it and yet they want to get richer and richer and richer. What is that? I don’t know, something wrong with the human being? It’s sad.

So a couple things in micro-craft. You said you’re kind of maximalist but it feels like there’s something you do where you’re trying to cram a lot into individual sentences. As an example:“All this clucking and coaxing back and forth between Liz and seen-it-all-Jane — they sounded like a dovecote of cooing birds, a scripted dovecote — plus Liz’s feeble attempts at being smart and funny and supportive in front of a discerning audience and trying to appear publicly and sufficiently horrified by her daughter’s behavior when she secretly found it sort of funny, were enervating.” It feels like there’s a lot of intelligence that you’re just trying to kind of pack in and it also feels like there’s a certain tension between wanting to just say a lot about the world and also trying to keep the narrative engine moving forward. How does that all feel to you on the inside as you’re writing?

I mean there’s a lot in my head at once. I think the lines tend to be long because I hear humming in the background like there’s music and I need the right beats for the lines to work and that just comes from writing and rewriting and rewriting. I love language, I love the English language, I’m crazy about it. I mean it’s sort of amazing to me how it can change so much in different contexts and what you can get out of words and how people talk, but as I say it’s like Coney Island in my head all day long, there’s just so much going on, and so I guess it gets into the books.

And then I think everybody notices this, but it feels like a lot of your books are this exercise in empathy where you’re maybe deliberately moving from character to character and really trying to see things from everybody’s perspective.

I feel like it’s really hard to meet people who, once you hear their story, you don’t have some feeling for them. I mean I can name some politicians I have no feelings for, but most people have a story. Merry’s just trying to live, and Nina, she saw her mother being raped when she was four, she grew up in a basement. Now not everybody who’s had that experience ends up being a sociopath, I mean there are many many people who have suffered terrible things who are not, but for her the only thing she really cares about is her mother —

It’s very interesting where you get to with her. There’s this line right at the end: “Nina was bombed out, a vacant building. Had she ever been there? It was as if Nina was a person who could attach and love and feel the pain of someone else, but in her core she was empty.” And it felt to me like that was a difficult place for you to get to with a character because you seem to work so hard to empathize with everybody and then at some level you’re kind of throwing up your hands there and saying, ‘you know what, there are depths to evil or to trauma that are hard to get into.’ You obviously do a lot of work to see where she is coming from, but it does feel like you run into some pretty deep barrier with her.

Sometimes being empathetic is a curse. Sometimes you excuse things in other people that are inexcusable. I can’t excuse her. I mean I feel sorry for her. She’s just broken. I don’t know how to fix her.

So what about other writers you’re kind of metaphorically talking to as you’re writing? Do you feel like like there’s a peer group who are in your head or who you’re internally speaking with as you work?

Jennifer Egan is an old friend of mine and she asked me that question in front of an audience and I went completely blank. I definitely feel like I’ve learned from so many writers and I probably steal tricks from them and all of that, but I don’t feel like I’m in conversation with anybody. I really feel like it’s me and my brain and it’s just the same thing as like ‘why are you writing?’ I don’t know, it’s like nobody’s sitting there going ‘oh my god I can’t wait till your next book comes out.’ I just do it and I can’t say I enjoy it but it keeps me together. I’m sorry that’s so myopic but it’s narrow for me.

If it’s the truth it’s the truth. So just a little bit about your career. When was the point where you were able to make a living as a writer?

Never.

But it seems like you do with the combination of teaching and writing?

But that’s teaching. Teaching is not writing. Teaching is teaching.

When were you able to quit jobs you didn’t want to do to write?

Never. I’m always scrambling. I mean I’m tenured at the New School, which I thought was going to take me to the end of my days, but now the New School’s contracting and collapsing so I’m not sure. But I always taught other places. I mean we had two kids, and I wrote non-fiction and I wrote screenplays. I stopped writing screenplays a while ago but I still write non-fiction and I still write book reviews and stuff. You don’t get rich doing it but it’s a pair of boots. My husband was a magazine editor for most of his career and he’s a writer, but when the magazines collapsed there went his jobs, so it’s been my teaching that’s kept us going, and there were years I taught 11 classes because I would pick things up in the summer, I would do low residencies, I’d do things in the interstitials.

How did the relationship with the New School come about?

Robert Polito hired me. I started adjuncting there in 2003 so it’s 23 years at the New School. Mostly I’ve loved it. It’s a crazy place and we have great students and they’re really nice students, they work hard to be there, they’re from all over the world, they’re every age, they’re every ethnicity, they’re every gender, and they’re really game and they’re nice to each other. And they publish and they start presses and they start podcasts and they do all sorts of cool stuff and it’s like the world is full of your nieces and nephews, it’s nice. But I did have to do other things to keep us going, it wasn’t enough that salary.

You said you do a ton of revising. What tends to happen for you from draft to draft?

Well, I revise every day, so that’s why I write very slowly because I always start at page one until I get to about page 30 or 40 and then I’ll start at page 10. So it’s very painstaking. But then at the end I’ll have a manuscript and my husband is an editor as well and I’ll say ‘will you read it for me but lie to me because I can’t take it’ and I can’t be crushed by him. So he does: he lies to me, he’s very good about it, and then I go off and work on it again, and I’ll show it to him again, and I may wear out my welcome showing it to him before I show it to Sloan Harris who’s my agent and he’s really tough, but once he likes it then I feel like ‘oh it’s done,’ but of course it’s not done, then you have to get it to an editor and hopefully it will always be Jennifer Barth, and then she and I will go at it a few rounds. By the time it’s finally published I don’t even know what’s in it anymore, so there’s a lot of revision. I’m not afraid of revision, I really love revision. I don’t like first drafts, they terrify me, but I really love working on the language and trying to make it all work.

So what do you think happens to you as as you’re revising? Is it archaeological, about getting to deeper layers? Is it more about clarity?

And also sometimes you get new ideas, you can even get a new character. The ending can become the beginning.

How do you feel about your career? Do you feel like you’ve written the body of work that that you’re happy with? Do you feel like you have novels that you wish you’d written that got away from you? Do you feel like you’ve gotten the recognition that you feel like you deserve?

You know, I really try not to count in life. I don’t like to count, so I don’t count number of books. I don’t usually count the years between them. I just try to write them. There are books I’m proud of. I feel very grateful that I got to live a literary life, which is what I wanted and needed. Some I thought would do better than they did, some surprised me. But I’m private. I don’t have websites and I don’t make videos of myself. I’ll go anywhere that people ask me to come to read and speak but I’m not a businesswoman, I’m a writer. I try to do my best with each book. I hope to keep writing till I die. I don’t know how else to think about it.

So when you look around it kind of literary landscape right now what do you get excited about maybe in terms of younger writers or whatever? What do you despair of?

Everything’s changing so rapidly but it really has always been hard to be a writer in different ways. Now people say publishing is such a mess but people always said publishing was a mess. It used to be you couldn’t make any money as a writer and then you could so I benefited from some of that. I’m happy where I am right now. If I could work with Jennifer for the rest of my life, and Sloan, I’d be thrilled. I love that people like to read. I just came from Tucson and at that festival there were like a hundred thousand people there and it’s everything from romantasy to baseball books to political books. I don’t care, I’m happy people are reading. I wish that more people read literary fiction and I do worry about AI somewhat, not because I think that they’ll take away what we do but they’ll take away people’s hunger for what we do, that it’ll be fine without being inventive and surprising and individualistic, and people will be fine about fine like the way they are about fast food. But I love literature.

-Interview conducted by Sam Kahn as a Zoom call. (The interview is somewhat condensed for publication.)