Author Photo, Part Three
In the recent series of photographs taken on the occasion of her new novel, the famous novelist looks different. It’s been several years since the last book came out, so naturally she looks older. She is, after all, no longer the gamine writing about being a young woman. Then, she was in her thirties, writing about being in her twenties. Now, she is forty, writing about her late thirties. There is always a lag in publishing books about one’s life. The hope is of course her passionate readers will follow her. Also, she appears to be growing out her distinctive bangs. She was so recognizable before. She is still recognizable, although slightly less recognizable. As she grows out her hair, will she continue to become less and less recognizable? Her book has gotten wonderful reviews. Once again reinventing the form, et cetera.
Elena Ferrante
My mother-in-law identifies as a big reader. She loves romances and family dramas. They cannot be, however, too dark. She did not like, for instance, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. She especially did not like the depiction of the character of the mother in that book. I also dislike the work of Jonathan Franzen, for a variety of reasons, but really I like to think this is where the similarities between our reading habits end. When we visited her in the Detroit suburbs the summer that I was pregnant, I recommended that she read Elena Ferrante. The only Elena Ferrante I had read was The Days of Abandonment, which I read while sitting on the porch during a hot summer a few years earlier. I inhaled the book, which I heard happens when you read Elena Ferrante—the books are just that good. I remember there’s a moment where the narrator, completely unraveling after her husband leaves her for another woman, trapped alone in her apartment with two small children, writes in her notebook about Jane Eyre while sitting on a park bench. I liked that moment the best. Also when the glass shatters in the pasta sauce, because it reminds me of my family. This, I do not say to my mother-in-law, as she would not understand. I tell her to read the Neapolitan Novels, which I haven’t read, only because I get annoyed by books that get too much attention and find myself allergic to them. When I go into a bookstore, everyone tells me to read Elena Ferrante, and instead I go read something else. Also people always ask me what I think about Elena Ferrante. Perhaps because I’ve spoken in interviews about not being on social media anymore, which is also a lie. I am not social on social media anymore, but I still ghost social media. I still look at different accounts and look to see when I’m mentioned. Many of my friends who are writers talk to me often about Elena Ferrante. When we complain about publishing and expected publicity, we say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be Elena Ferrante?” Or: “Elena Ferrante really has it figured out.” But what does that mean? Elena Ferrante has figured out how to write commercially successful, critically revered international bestsellers but doesn’t have to have people in her life know that she wrote them, or doesn’t have to have her picture taken. The publishing industry loves Elena Ferrante—there’s no one the publishing industry loves more than Elena Ferrante. They would not love Elena Ferrante’s disappearance, or appearance of disappearance, if she did not also write commercial bestsellers that are widely seen as brilliant as well. Let’s be real here! It’s not that she writes under a pseudonym. She’s like Batman, Elena Ferrante. People wouldn’t love Batman for his costumed anonymity unless he saved the people of Gotham from villains. People wouldn’t love just the costume. The costume is an effect of mystery. But anyway, I had not seen my mother-in-law for some time. I guess you could say we’ve been estranged, especially since the election. We have only seen them once, since then, when the baby was born and they came to New York, and I recommended they go to Magnolia Bakery, because of Sex and the City, because I thought she’d enjoy it, which she did. I recommended Magnolia Bakery like I recommended Elena Ferrante. Both I thought she’d enjoy, and I was right. My mother-in-law had never heard of Elena Ferrante, and so she was immediately suspicious, how I had heard of Elena Ferrante. I was sitting there in her easy chair in her living room, huge in the heat, despite only being six months pregnant, I looked at term, and I was drinking water, and she asked me for reading recommendations. I never know how to respond when people ask me how I hear of writers. And after all, Elena Ferrante is pretty mainstream. I’m sure her books are sold at your Barnes & Noble, I then said to my mother-in-law, which turned out to be true. But how did you know of her, she kept on asking me. Well, I am a writer, I said to her, then, and she still looked perplexed, because my in-laws don’t think of me as a writer. I think they think of me as a teacher who can’t get a full-time job, which is I think how my father thinks of me as well. This used to bother me, but now this invisibility is its own comfort. I don’t have to worry about them reading my writing, so I can write whatever I want. It reminds me of my childhood and adolescence and life, really, so it reminds me why I am a writer in the first place. Although do I write as a form of disappearance, or as a reaction against disappearance? Sometimes I do wonder what level of material success would make my family members or in-laws acknowledge that I’m a real writer, whatever that is. What fellowship or award? But not getting fellowships or awards, it’s hard to say. Sometimes I think they have a stake in thinking of me as invisible. This has been helped greatly by having a child and turning forty, because it has allowed me to become even more invisible. Now, they only see and talk about the child, or me in relation to the child. I think that Elena Ferrante became Elena Ferrante so she could write from her life without embarrassing her family or those she loved. Maybe, also, so she didn’t have to go through publicity, this ideal of letting the work speak for itself. She didn’t have to be an author photo, or to have this author photo scrutinized as she aged. She could truly be faceless. Elena Ferrante could disappear into this name, and this work, so she could have her own name in her life. Names always get in the way, my friend M. said to me. In the way of literature, I think is what she meant. It is not lost on me the irony that publishing insists on making their authors become brands, their photographs taken in style sections and countless interviews, my god all the interviews, and all the essays, and keeping up on Twitter, and being constantly witty and profound, and the events, but they love their Elena Ferrante. Although Elena Ferrante has a column for the Guardian now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Clarice Lispector had a column too, her cronicas, which I love. I’m sure my publishers wish I wrote a column somewhere, or did more interviews, or anything anymore, and the truth is I do a little, probably more than some, and get too exhausted or sick of myself speaking, or writing answers, and then stop. It’s not that I think I’m so pure; it’s that I get too tired. We can only do, I suppose, what we’re capable of. I would like not to even have my photograph taken anymore, or use any author photo in the back of any books, or do any events, or anything more than writing books, so maybe if I put that here, maybe that will help make my point. I can’t do that, I will say. It’s in the book! Maybe I can just say I’m being like Elena Ferrante, and that this lack of publicity is actually a form of publicity, and they’ll buy that somehow. Although, again, without writing books that a lot of people want to read, that probably won’t work. After reminding my mother-in-law that I was a writer, and that in fact I taught writing, I also told her that Elena Ferrante’s works are widely reviewed, in places like the New York Times, which she regarded with even more suspicion. Then I told her that bookstores sold her books on the front table, and that she appeared to accept. If you were wondering, my mother-in-law loved the books. She went through all of them, and gave them to her mother and everyone she knew, who also read them and loved them. Everyone, it seems, loves Elena Ferrante. When people ask me about Elena Ferrante, I usually respond that I prefer Elsa Morante, who is Elena Ferrante’s favorite writer, and the inspiration for her pseudonym, although in truth I have only read Aracoeli, which I did love, but not any more than I loved The Days of Abandonment. This is what I really think when I think about Elena Ferrante. I think of this story my father told me a couple years ago,
about an aunt who was Neapolitan, and how she finally threw a butcher knife at her cheating abusive husband, and it landed in the door. For some time she left the knife in there, and even after she removed it, she kept the mark that it had created in the door, as a reminder.
The Barbizon Hotel for Women
A few years back the sign from the local storage company on the Q train read “You’re Not Little Edie, and This Isn’t Grey Gardens.” Something about this sign, one of those quippy and ubiquitous signs from that company, bothered me. I didn’t know exactly what it meant. It felt like a slight at Little Edie, who so longed to move back to New York City, to be by herself, to try to have a chance at “making it.” Little Edie who just wanted to go back to the Barbizon. “All I want is a little room . . . Any little rat’s nest in New York City . . .” (I’m copying this line from Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory.) Why did Big Edie make her leave the Barbizon? Her mother replied that she thought she’d been in New York long enough . . . She was getting lines on her face. But she didn’t want to leave! Edie was at the Barbizon Hotel for Women from 1947 to 1952, right before Sylvia Plath got there for her internship at Mademoiselle. The Barbizon becomes the Amazon in The Bell Jar. When I had my own magazine internship and nervous breakdown, I stayed at the Webster Apartments in midtown, which was the less famous hotel for women.
I had one friend at the Webster, a girl on a costume fellowship at Juilliard. She got me free tickets to see plays like The Duchess of Malfi. I was writing a bad play in my little room. I would stay in every night and write my bad little play and on the weekends walk downtown to Washington Square Park and sit there and read and watch everything. I was so happy and miserable at the same time. I was supposed to room with the costume designer in Astoria once I graduated, but since I didn’t move back to New York for fifteen years, it didn’t happen.
Reply All
You receive another email from your department head that a tenured faculty member at the college has won a prestigious award. It is one of many awards this writer has won this season. All day your inbox is filled with other faculty, all writers, expressing their congratulations, competing in exclamations. You wonder all day, again, whether a writer is ever truly happy for another writer who wins an award.
Screen Tests
I woke up and watched a video series on the website of a literary magazine that was about writers and their first published books. Each short video portrait was approximately six minutes long, and framed the writer from the torso up. The interviews were intercut with photographs of the writers when they were young and moony, as many of the writers published their first books when they were in their twenties. They were filmed in their living spaces, often against their bookshelves. Often these writers spoke of “making it,” or this longing to “make it.” (What is “it,” exactly? I always want to know.) I was nervous because the camera crew was coming by later in the month to film me, about my first book, which came out on a very small press. I was mostly concerned about where I would sit, and what I would wear, and how I would hold myself to render myself into a talking head. Later, when the filmmakers came, I found it difficult to sit still and look straight ahead at the person interviewing me, and not at the camera. I wore a black silk dress, and asked if they would shoot me closer up, as I was still nursing and wearing a nursing bra. In a photograph I saw of the film shoot, I look like Liza Minnelli. Not, I should add, Liza Minnelli then, but Liza Minnelli now. Yes, exactly like her. I never knew until I moved here that women writers were expected to be photogenic. I thought this was one of the reasons I became a writer, so that I could be ugly and folded over and inside my head all the time. I didn’t realize my jawline had disappeared—it must have happened in the past year. This morning I watch a video for facial yoga. I read the horrible news. Then, in order to calm down, I watch some of Warhol’s Screen Tests. The Screen Tests each took three minutes to shoot but then Warhol slowed them to four minutes. The subject was asked to be still for the duration of the reel, but it wasn’t possible, to just be their own image. They blink, they breathe, they smoke, they drink a Coke (Lou Reed). The dots that explode after each one at the end of the hundred-foot Bolex reel. Warhol had the idea perhaps he would sell them as living portrait boxes, playing in individual homes. The filmmakers interviewed me for several hours, but they will cut that down into only six minutes, they said. I think I often moved around on my chair, even though I was supposed to stay still, and was probably too animated with my mouth and my gestures. Warhol’s favorite Screen Test was apparently Ann Buchanan, the one who cries a single tear. I’ve watched this one many times, as unlike most of them it’s been uploaded online. She looks so contemporary, in her long thick dark hair and thick eyebrows. How can she be so still, despite all the commotion about her, the people filming, watching? She gazes at you and you gaze back. The bare movement of her breathing. The performance of such intensity. What a beautiful face, someone wrote in the comments. Now she should have made it, someone else wrote. Was it a trick she could perform, that single tear falling?
Edie Film
Edie Sedgwick met Andy Warhol at a birthday party for Tennessee Williams. She grew up on a California ranch. Her father was an artist who wanted his children to call him Fuzzy. When Warhol met Edie, her hair was in a beehive and her leg was in a cast. She had already been in psych wards on the East Coast. She studied art at Cambridge and spent a year making a sculpture of a horse. She was twenty-one years old. She had just received her trust fund. The year earlier two of her brothers had committed suicide. They were suicidal heirs, like the Wittgensteins, but from Massachusetts. Soon she made her hair a helmet like Warhol’s, with silver spray. When he invited her to Paris, she wore a white mink and packed a suitcase with another white mink. Edie Sedgwick made ten movies with Andy Warhol in 1965, ending with 1966’s Lupe, apparently inspired by Kenneth Anger’s account of the suicide of Lupe Vélez. Warhol wanted to make a movie where Edie commits suicide at the end. Apparently he also wondered out loud whether Edie would in fact commit suicide someday, and if so, if she would let Warhol film it. After breaking up with Andy, Edie lived at the Chelsea Hotel with Bob Dylan, then was in and out of institutions for the rest of the 1960s, and finally overdosed on barbiturates. Lupe Vélez also overdosed, as did Marilyn Monroe. Was Warhol drawn to Edie because she was his Marilyn, or was Warhol his own Marilyn? I have read reviews of the Edie films and read about them in Douglas Crimp’s book and watched minute-long clips, which are these out-of-focus corners of nothingness. It’s almost impossible to find a Warhol film online—you have to catch a screening somewhere. In Lupe, like the other Edie films, Warhol films Edie smoking and hanging around her apartment, not as Lupe but as Edie Sedgwick. Warhol’s Edie films were about Edie Sedgwick. They were portraits, like his paintings, but with time added. There’s nothing Edie does to impersonate someone else. She only impersonates Edie Sedgwick.
Nico in the Kitchen Cutting Her Bangs
Could I write this text rendered in split screen, with the sound only on one side, like in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls? The beginning of the film, on the right, Nico is in the kitchen cutting her bangs. So often there’s haircutting in Warhol movies. Factory photographer Billy Name was the son of a Poughkeepsie barber. He starred in Haircut 1, 2, and 3. He also cuts Edie Sedgwick’s hair in Lupe. It was Ray Johnson who brought Andy Warhol to one of Billy Name’s haircut parties—that’s how they met. The walls were covered in silver foil. Can you, Warhol asked, do that for my loft?
Meg Ryan Vehicle
When I was in college in the late ’90s, I was obsessed with the movie Addicted to Love starring Meg Ryan. It is a lesser-known 1997 Meg Ryan vehicle, with some resemblance in story structure to French Kiss, which came out two years earlier, although the gender roles are somewhat reversed. Amazing to realize that Addicted to Love came out just a year before You’ve Got Mail. Both of these Meg Ryan movies helped form my conception of New York, but Meg Ryan is Upper West Side in You’ve Got Mail, and more bourge
ois and seemingly older. She’s only in her mid-thirties in both of these films. The style however is totally different. In You’ve Got Mail, she is the classic turtleneck-and-sweater-set Meg Ryan. I remember watching You’ve Got Mail and not knowing how anyone could have her life together enough to wear such a series of prim stone-colored knits and linens. In Addicted to Love, which is named after the Robert Palmer song, Meg Ryan is still Meg Ryan, and still has the classic shaggy bob, but she is a more downtown Meg Ryan. I was obsessed with Meg Ryan’s style in this movie. Her bleached bob with skunk roots that Sally Hershberger would hack pieces out of in a just-so way, where she looks like an extremely expensive and glamorous wreck. I read a partial chapter online on Meg Ryan’s hair in Addicted to Love in a book on the films of Meg Ryan. Meg Ryan needed Hershberger on set, because not anyone could hack into that Meg Ryan hair. It actually took a lot of work, for the Meg Ryan bob to be deconstructed in such a specific way. I think that Addicted to Love was Meg Ryan’s first role where she tried to not be so Meg Ryan. Watching it, now, I feel even then she wanted to break out somehow of the Meg Ryan character. I probably watch the movie once a year. It’s my favorite bad film. Matthew Broderick plays a small-town astronomer with a daily noon ritual of watching his schoolteacher fiancée, played by a sundressed Kelly Preston, from his telescope, which is supposed to be romantic. When she leaves him and moves to Manhattan, he cashes out his life savings to, basically, stalk her, squatting in an abandoned building across the way from the apartment of her new lover, a sexy French chef. Broderick’s character creates a camera obscura so that he can monitor and watch all of their goings-on as projected on a screen like a real-time film. Now, watching the movie, I recognize the Wooster Street address in Soho where the French chef and the Kelly Preston character live as the beautiful cast-iron building that in real life houses the Drawing Center. Meg Ryan plays the vaguely Diane Arbus–like photographer (she alludes to taking photographs of freakish types, but also makes collages on a wall that badly approximate Barbara Kruger exclamations). She rides around on a motorcycle at the beginning of the film, like a Fury seeking vengeance on the French chef who married her just for the green card. Eventually, she crashes Matthew Broderick’s pad, and collaborates with him on ruining the chef’s life. And in the process, of course, they fall in love. At the beginning of the film Meg Ryan tries to not be Meg Ryan; she skulks around, all sullen rage, her bleached hair and raccoon smoky eyes. When I watched this film in college, I thought all of the outfits she wore were the epitome of cool. Recently, when watching it on my laptop, I took pictures of all of her looks on my phone. The motorcycle goggles and maroon leather jacket with shearling collar, that blue-green feather boa (I got one in college to look just like it), the red tank dress underneath. The quilted patterned robe with the belt. The burgundy tank with yellow stripes and a black miniskirt. The red velvet smoking blazer paired with leopard print. That red velvet blazer now with a leather bandanna, as she takes photographs in Washington Square Park. (Meg Ryan isn’t really the one taking the photographs, the camera is actually gazing at her, we are looking at her.) I think a more sophisticated version of this film could have been a commentary on watching, and the gaze, and moviemaking itself, but it doesn’t get there. All of these shots I take on my phone remind me of Edie Sedgwick’s Screen Test, how there’s magnetism to her even though she’s just looking. The vibrato to her breathing. When Meg Ryan was preparing for Addicted to Love, she was thinking about Edie Sedgwick as well, studying a book about her to think at least about the style elements, but the film is not boring in an interesting way like an Andy Warhol movie, or dark like Edie Sedgwick’s story. It is ultimately conventional. The movie begins in one way, but by the end becomes a Meg Ryan vehicle, if a less successful Meg Ryan vehicle because she tamps down her Meg Ryan exuberance for most of the film. People want to see Meg Ryan cranky, but cranky in a quirky way. Toward the end, she loosens up and becomes cuddly again, in that Meg Ryan way. She still has that Meg Ryan smile. She’s not so tough after all, despite her smoky eyes and leather jacket. It’s like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club—the scowl comes with the makeup, but there’s softness underneath. There’s Meg Ryan laughing. There’s Meg Ryan looking at Matthew Broderick with that Meg Ryan look. She’s lit so well. Meg Ryan and that quirk of her nose, the range of its expressiveness. Meg Ryan hurt. Meg Ryan in love. Meg Ryan pining. Meg Ryan hurt again. Meg Ryan annoyed. Meg Ryan sad. Meg Ryan thoughtful. Meg Ryan kissing Matthew Broderick with an open mouth. No one kisses like ’90s-era Meg Ryan, so totally open and going for it, like she’s going to eat his face. The day I started rewatching this film Meg Ryan was in the news again. A producer accused Harvey Weinstein of jacking off in front of her in a theater while they were screening a nude Meg Ryan scene from In the Cut. Her string of failures after these hits in the ’90s. Meg Ryan trying to step out of being Meg Ryan. Addicted to Love was also a failure. People want Meg Ryan’s face to do Meg Ryan things. And now, Meg Ryan has done something to her face. What has Meg Ryan done to her face? You can watch many slideshows online, about Meg Ryan’s changing face. Meg Ryan is not Meg Ryan anymore. Meg Ryan is still alive, but she is not frozen in time. Meg Ryan is supposed to stay Meg Ryan, that Meg Ryan, no, that Meg Ryan.
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