This Woman’s Work – An Interview With Lynne Tillman
Ulrika Lindqvist: You first released Weird Fucks in the magazine Bikini Girl in 1980. How has the response, both critically and from readers, shaped your perception of the novel over time? Lynne Tillman: In 1980, “Weird Fucks” was published in a pink magazine called BIKINI GIRL, edited by Lisa Baumgardner. Lisa and Bikini Girl were associated with Club 57, a punk place. Weird Fucks, in manuscript was 62 pp in manuscript but it was printed in 7 pt type on very wide pages, so it almost disappeared in the mag. Very disappointing. It didn’t circulate well, maybe 500 or 1,000 copies. No one really saw it. So I’d say it wasn’t published, in a way. I gave readings from it, so if people knew about it, that’s how, and not from reading it themselves. Other people did artist or limited editions, I’d call them; Jim Haynes did one from Paris. Again, no visibility or distribution in the usual sense. In New Her- ring Press (2014), a small, indie press, published it in its correct form, that is, with a few changes I made. Artist Amy Sillman did the amazing cover and all the illustra- tions – a beautiful book, but again in a limited edition. So, there was little to no response to Weird Fucks until Peninsula Press published it in 2022. Oddly, it became a bestseller, which amazed me. Then responses came, reviews, social media, emails, the lot of it. Artist Hilary Harkness’s cover, based on her Stein/Toklas series of paintings were also amazingly helpful to the book. Wild and fascinating and gorgeous. So, responses, yes, finally. I had little perception, in the way you mean, before then. I believed it could appeal to contemporary readers. I wrote it with an eye to univer- sals, and by that I mean, things and events that happen again and again in people’s lives. In 1980, maybe, maybe fewer guys would have read it. Now, it’s a novel that has crossed over that arbitrary, highly gendered border. Thankfully. UL: What a journey Weird Fucks has had! Also,the cover is really amazing. I think Weird Fucks is very contemporary, it aligns with authors like Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline, but you wrote it so long before. Maybe that tells of the timeless troubles of being a young woman? Or just a young human? LT: Of being human, and young, and a young woman, and a man who has sex with a woman, maybe one he’s just met, etc. Sex is universal. There are different ways to do it, and queer women and men also relate to Weird Fucks, because the weird is the situations and conditions of encounters around sex. What’s most important, I think, is the style of Weird Fucks. It took me two years to write it, my first longish thing, and every word was considered closely. Style was very important. I wanted it to be tough and also lyrical. I mostly left room for readers. UL: Now that Weird Fucks is being translated and reaching entirely new audiences more than 50 years after its original release, what is it like to witness the novel take on this second life? LT: It’s really having its first life. UL: And finally, that is! You have written several other novels – No Lease on Life was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Have these other novels started living their first lives earlier, and how does that experience differ from the one with Weird Fucks? LT: Let’s see, I’ve written six other novels, starting with Haunted Houses and, most recently, Men and Appari- tions, which is very much about young men. Peninsula Press is giving them life in the UK, and I hope other foreign presses will consider them. And they all had first lives in the US, and a few were published in the UK in the early 1990s, but they had a very small impact, very few readers. Weird Fucks became a bestseller. None of the others have…yet. photography Craig Mod UL: What was the inspiration behind Weird Fucks? Did any particular events, ideas, or themes inspire you more during the writing process? LT: The sexual revolution, the pill, feminism, questioning gendered roles, these were changing — and still are — and I didn’t see fiction that, to my mind, took on what was happening, how girls, women, boys, men were being affected. The novels that did represent young women’s lives were, for me, not interesting formally, as writing, and were usually too sentimental, and too much about women as victims of the changes. The birth control pill was revolutionary, when you realise that over millennia, women couldn’t control their pregnancies. Having unwanted babies enslaved women to their bodies. We couldn’t talk at all about gender without the pill allowing women this very urgent freedom. UL: That’s really a big change for women, in society as well as in personal lives. Do you have any artists or authors whose work inspire you? LT: Oh, too many to mention, really. In fiction, most important, Jane Bowles, her stories and her one and only novel, Two Serious Ladies. Reading it openedup a uniquely written world in which her girls and women characters stretched the bounds of female representation. Her writing is stark, unsentimental, and often hilarious. Bowles is very smart, very different — her dialogue, no one writes anything close to its unusual brilliance. Bowles’ mind, her language, her way of seeing human beings… Kafka, Thomas Mann, Colette, Jean Rhys, Joseph Roth, Flaubert, again, too many. Visual artists, four going back into history, Caravaggio, Velázquez, Courbet, and Matisse. dead contemporary painters: Peter Dreher, Susan Rothenberg… I’ll leave it there. And there’s installation and sculpture and video…. Photography: Diane Arbus, Robert Frank; Pictures Generation, including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, Stephen Shore, and newer photographers, etc. Film: Ozu, Hitchcock, Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, Fassbinder, Suzanne Bier, many others. I haven’t even mentioned doc filmmakers. Warhol radically
