Al Anderson: I read Wrongness as a work about sorrow; sorrow at the violent and emotionally unresolved dissolution of a relationship between two women, one in her 60s, one in her 20s. The younger woman treats her older partner contemptuously, before abandoning her. At the thematic centre of the book is estrangement; both in the demise of a relationship, brought about in a particularly ruthless way (a ghosting), but also the apparently insurmountable generational differences between the two women, as they process the world in radically different ways, leading to these immense failures of communication, and a failure to truly know one another; a failure of intimacy. Sorrow is anticipated, coded into the matrix of the love affair itself: ‘I’m just a love affair. You’ll forget me.’ But is this not true of all love stories, in some way? Were there a happy ending, there would probably be very little drive to write about it. Would you say this was an accurate summary of the project, here?
Ruth Novaczek: Contempt is really apt, I’m thinking of the film of Moravia’s novel, and the way the estrangement develops, it’s profoundly disturbing. I tend to make work when I’m unhappy, and writing the story allowed me to confront what you rightly describe as the brutality of ghosting and abandonment. It did start out as a love story, and ended as a terrible wrongness. Although the actual ending alludes to notions of endings in cinema. Hollywood optimism versus Russian pessimism. If it was a happy story it wouldn’t end, they weren’t going to live happily ever after, it would end with what, marriage? Death? No resolution?
AA: There’s this kind of emotional undulating throughout the narrative; yearning and sorrow are often interrupted by these flashes of anger, which are usually honed on the younger lover, and also her wealthy London family. The protagonist often lampoons their crypto-bourgeois anxieties (often disguised as something more righteous), which you frame as clinical and cowed by the notion of any real feeling; an ‘anti-romantic’ way of existing. You distill that derision into this great line: ‘your milieu isn’t romantic at all. You prefer the mean power of shutting people down.’ This anger isn’t distinct from eros of the text, in fact it is one of the ways it expresses it. Do you deliberately work love; eros; whatever you want to call it; into a mode of critique here?
AA: There’s this kind of emotional undulating throughout the narrative; yearning and sorrow are often interrupted by these flashes of anger, which are usually honed on the younger lover, and also her wealthy London family. The protagonist often lampoons their crypto-bourgeois anxieties (often disguised as something more righteous), which you frame as clinical and cowed by the notion of any real feeling; an ‘anti-romantic’ way of existing. You distill that derision into this great line: ‘your milieu isn’t romantic at all. You prefer the mean power of shutting people down.’ This anger isn’t distinct from eros of the text, in fact it is one of the ways it expresses it. Do you deliberately work love; eros; whatever you want to call it; into a mode of critique here?
RN: Yes because the whole scenario was volatile, lurching from exuberance into alienation. Did you read X’s family as wealthy? I meant that they were a kind of middle-class Jewish that kind of ridiculed romantic love, but also the generational difference, and a suspicion about love. I think X was someone starting out in the world, knowing that the affair with the protagonist wouldn’t be forever, but maybe, at first, going along with a kind of fairytale that wasn’t really serious. The protagonist’s love as a kind of scary thing, a demand for commitment. Perhaps the combat in the book are about these duelling intergenerational notions of love and desire. I thought a lot when writing, about the various notions of love in Greek; mania is one of them, and eros and mania combined are dangerous.
AA: The mid-century writer James Courage wrote in his diary that it was ‘only when I’m writing homosexual love that I am truly at home.’ And you write: ‘yearning is a very queer thing’, did you see your work here as formulated within a distinctly queer, or perhaps lesbian, tradition?
AA: The mid-century writer James Courage wrote in his diary that it was ‘only when I’m writing homosexual love that I am truly at home.’ And you write: ‘yearning is a very queer thing’, did you see your work here as formulated within a distinctly queer, or perhaps lesbian, tradition?
RN: I think love is love, but the queer world is structured differently to the straight world, perhaps yearning is part of that marginal place, or maybe it’s pathological. But for the protagonist it’s her personal psychology, her anxious attachment that brings an edge of doom to the story. As Ariana Reines describes it, it’s a kind of lesbian Death in Venice.
AA: I found this novel so interesting on a formal level. It’s an epistolary piece, but the letters are ensconced within these two chunks of narrative prose almost like the overture and finale to an opera, setting, and concluding the mood and ensconcing a sequence of songs. Did the text take on this form naturally, or did a blueprint for the work exist in your head before the time of writing?
AA: I found this novel so interesting on a formal level. It’s an epistolary piece, but the letters are ensconced within these two chunks of narrative prose almost like the overture and finale to an opera, setting, and concluding the mood and ensconcing a sequence of songs. Did the text take on this form naturally, or did a blueprint for the work exist in your head before the time of writing?
RN: I’ve always written poetry, and songs, and I tend to follow some voice that emerges on the page. It evolved fairly organically, from unsent letters which mapped out the grief, and then moves into a process that’s like a kind of detective story. Faced with the ghosting, the protagonist can only wander rather wildly in this ruined landscape looking for some kind of resolution. There was absolutely no plan or blueprint, it found its form.
AA: Going back to the question of identity: Jewishness and Jewish tradition are vital themes here. Reflections on ritual, diaspora and allusions to Rabbinic thought permeate the spiritual grammar of the text. Further to my question on whether or not this is a ‘lesbian novel’, is it also one written in a distinctly Jewish tradition?
AA: Going back to the question of identity: Jewishness and Jewish tradition are vital themes here. Reflections on ritual, diaspora and allusions to Rabbinic thought permeate the spiritual grammar of the text. Further to my question on whether or not this is a ‘lesbian novel’, is it also one written in a distinctly Jewish tradition?
RN: I don’t think my own queer and Jewish identities can be separated. It’s always been there in my work, the Jewish thread, I think it’s culturally important to express Jewishness and how it’s not only an ancient culture, older than Islam or Christianity, but also that it’s midrasnhic and tangential rather than pedantic. Years ago white lesbians would critique my Jewishness as a problem, that somehow I was expected to ditch it and throw myself in with them as if they could replace that culture. As if I had to disavow a part of myself to fit in. It hasn’t changed.
AA: ’The internet is a dodgy god,’ you write. The cultural theorist Dominic Pettman published a book recently called ‘Ghosting: On Disappearance’ which takes up this compelling interrogation of what is violently contemporary, post-digital phenomena: of getting ‘ghosted.’ Pettman notices, correctly, that we’ve got, in the experience of being ghosted, this uniquely contemporary form of agony (for the ghosted) and casual cruelty (on the part of the ghost.) There’s this spectrality to emotional life now, because of the digital, where it often feels hard to just ‘get over’ something, like a brief, intense relationship, because you can’t escape the traces of that person online; the very ancient human compulsions towards seeking out pain cannot resist the digital. It’s impossible to let go in the same way that it used to be, unless you adopt some sort of neo-luddist lifestyle (as more and more people are, in fact.) As someone who grew up in the 60s, came of age in the 70s how have romantic entanglements mutated with the coming of those dodgy gods, the internet, the smartphone, the app?
AA: ’The internet is a dodgy god,’ you write. The cultural theorist Dominic Pettman published a book recently called ‘Ghosting: On Disappearance’ which takes up this compelling interrogation of what is violently contemporary, post-digital phenomena: of getting ‘ghosted.’ Pettman notices, correctly, that we’ve got, in the experience of being ghosted, this uniquely contemporary form of agony (for the ghosted) and casual cruelty (on the part of the ghost.) There’s this spectrality to emotional life now, because of the digital, where it often feels hard to just ‘get over’ something, like a brief, intense relationship, because you can’t escape the traces of that person online; the very ancient human compulsions towards seeking out pain cannot resist the digital. It’s impossible to let go in the same way that it used to be, unless you adopt some sort of neo-luddist lifestyle (as more and more people are, in fact.) As someone who grew up in the 60s, came of age in the 70s how have romantic entanglements mutated with the coming of those dodgy gods, the internet, the smartphone, the app?
RN: There’s a horrible culture of erasure, of impermanence, a lack of loyalty that this portal that is and isn’t one has generated. In my teens there were the same cliques, the same meanness, bullying and all that. But we were face to face, we met in the park, we read the same books and watched the same TV shows, liked the same music, we had a cultural camaraderie. You can spend a day going down some internet rabbit-hole and emerge having garnered nothing memorable. Phones contain all sorts of secrets and deceptions. As Levinas noted, if you look someone in the eye you aren’t inclined to kill them. Ghosting is a form of assassination and you need to be very strong, if not shut down, to survive this era of trolls and erasure and ostracism. (Nb Luddite, I think)
AA: Going back to the spiritual DNA of the text: you write: ‘I’m learning stoicism but badly like a clown.’ This almost underpins the entire narrative. Stoicism is a recurring theme in the book. The protagonist is dealing not just with the aforementioned, intense and draining romantic relationship, but also receiving treatment for cancer; and these treatments are almost mentioned in passing, acting as a more minor element of the mise-en-scène, subordinated in their importance to heartbreak. Your protagonist comes across, in fact, as very stoical, despite her insistence that she’s learning it badly. In fact your book, with its aphoristic style, almost resembles some ancient stoic text. I’ve also become interested in stoicism over recent years, as a way of surviving this increasingly hostile and unforgiving moral intellectual climate that we’re currently living through, as well as helping me muddle through various personal crises. Is ‘the stoic’ an aesthetic-moral mode that you admire, and try to apply to your day to day life? How does it influence your writing, and your art more generally?
AA: Going back to the spiritual DNA of the text: you write: ‘I’m learning stoicism but badly like a clown.’ This almost underpins the entire narrative. Stoicism is a recurring theme in the book. The protagonist is dealing not just with the aforementioned, intense and draining romantic relationship, but also receiving treatment for cancer; and these treatments are almost mentioned in passing, acting as a more minor element of the mise-en-scène, subordinated in their importance to heartbreak. Your protagonist comes across, in fact, as very stoical, despite her insistence that she’s learning it badly. In fact your book, with its aphoristic style, almost resembles some ancient stoic text. I’ve also become interested in stoicism over recent years, as a way of surviving this increasingly hostile and unforgiving moral intellectual climate that we’re currently living through, as well as helping me muddle through various personal crises. Is ‘the stoic’ an aesthetic-moral mode that you admire, and try to apply to your day to day life? How does it influence your writing, and your art more generally?
RN: I think it’s important to stand back from a deluge of emotion and find some kind of footing. There’s a stoic character in the book who lacks empathy, I don’t think the protagonist lacks empathy, but she’s trying to stay afloat somehow. The cancer does punctuate the book but I didn’t want it to be about that entirely, it’s perhaps part of why the relationship collapsed, but not acknowledged. I think I was trying to create a stage for the characters ways of living in the world, to enable their ways of expressing themselves to stand at odds without knowing exactly why. There are a lot of moments with therapists in the book that illuminate the emotional turmoil. Love is always confusing, life-changing, challenging. So if I’m becoming stoic, well maybe that’s a result of humiliation and therapy.
AA: I hope you don’t mind me saying this because, obviously, you are primarily known for your work in film: but there’s this deeply cinematic feeling to the book; the way it is sectioned into this flow of scenes via a series of letters written by the protagonist to her estranged, younger lover. There’s a particular mode, I think, of ‘novels by filmmakers’ that often demonstrate similar aesthetic characteristics. Reading your novel I was reminded, perhaps predictably, of Marguerite Duras and to some extent Miranda July too; you, like her, and perhaps less like Duras, have these moments of really touching, human comedy. Of course, Chantal Ackerman, whose death opens your novel, was known for this particularly stirring form of prosaic cinema and also published several books, most notably the memoir Ma Mère Rit. These three artists, like you, are writers who use film rather than written text to express their narratives. Would you say that’s an accurate summation of Wrongness?
AA: I hope you don’t mind me saying this because, obviously, you are primarily known for your work in film: but there’s this deeply cinematic feeling to the book; the way it is sectioned into this flow of scenes via a series of letters written by the protagonist to her estranged, younger lover. There’s a particular mode, I think, of ‘novels by filmmakers’ that often demonstrate similar aesthetic characteristics. Reading your novel I was reminded, perhaps predictably, of Marguerite Duras and to some extent Miranda July too; you, like her, and perhaps less like Duras, have these moments of really touching, human comedy. Of course, Chantal Ackerman, whose death opens your novel, was known for this particularly stirring form of prosaic cinema and also published several books, most notably the memoir Ma Mère Rit. These three artists, like you, are writers who use film rather than written text to express their narratives. Would you say that’s an accurate summation of Wrongness?
RN: I really don’t mind you saying it, you nailed it. I learned to tell stories in film, if obliquely, or abstractly, and I think the two mediums inform each other. Akerman has been a kind of beacon for me since I first saw Je, Tu, Il, Elle back in the late 80s. Her writing too has taught me a lot about how to talk about atypical lives, there’s a freedom to her voice that I chime with. I still make films, and my writing finds its way into them and sometimes the images make their way into the writing. Duras’ writing and films also entertain this kind of cross-pollination, maybe the voice in the films is the same voice as the voice in the writing, they just code-switch somehow.
AA: 'The woman who ran the rental B&B thought I was your mother. We thought that was hilarious.’ Despite the sadness that permeates so much of the writing here, there’s a lot of comedy too, albeit a very dry kind. Some of the moments of real abjection and low self-esteem are presented in an almost comedic manner. Some of X’s cynical, endlessly anxious, political positions serve as comedic relief; or at least did to me. In some ways Wrongness could be read as a sort of black comedy. Is that a fair reading? Were there deliberate efforts in the comedy, here?
AA: 'The woman who ran the rental B&B thought I was your mother. We thought that was hilarious.’ Despite the sadness that permeates so much of the writing here, there’s a lot of comedy too, albeit a very dry kind. Some of the moments of real abjection and low self-esteem are presented in an almost comedic manner. Some of X’s cynical, endlessly anxious, political positions serve as comedic relief; or at least did to me. In some ways Wrongness could be read as a sort of black comedy. Is that a fair reading? Were there deliberate efforts in the comedy, here?
RN: Yes, I always like to include humour, and I also do performance art which has become much more like stand-up comedy. It’s also very Jewish, a self-deprecating, sometimes dark humour that emerges in the most tragic of settings. A friend read Wrongness and said ‘she’s a bitch but you’re an idiot’. I’m sort of miserable but find I can make a lot of jokes out of misery.
AA: One of the intellectual antecedents to this work, and its style, is Maggie Nelson, who is mentioned in it, in passing, alongside a whole host of brilliant writers and artists. I remember attending a talk of hers once at the Southbank Centre and someone asked her, perhaps inevitably, about how she deals with writing about her ‘trauma.’ Her response always stuck with me, she said: that writing about a problem doesn’t help resolve the problem, but it does help exhaust it. Did you find that by writing about this incident, excising it through text, that its sting was, if not removed, exhausted? Did you feel that the process of writing helped you heal, in some way?
AA: One of the intellectual antecedents to this work, and its style, is Maggie Nelson, who is mentioned in it, in passing, alongside a whole host of brilliant writers and artists. I remember attending a talk of hers once at the Southbank Centre and someone asked her, perhaps inevitably, about how she deals with writing about her ‘trauma.’ Her response always stuck with me, she said: that writing about a problem doesn’t help resolve the problem, but it does help exhaust it. Did you find that by writing about this incident, excising it through text, that its sting was, if not removed, exhausted? Did you feel that the process of writing helped you heal, in some way?
RN: Yes absolutely, exhausted, because trauma never goes away, you build around the holes it leaves and try to rein in your worst instincts. Maggie Nelson is an extraordinary writer and all the others I mention have been instrumental in finding my way to a language or voice that feels true to myself. I started writing to understand what had happened, because I was subsumed in the aftermath, it was almost like digging myself out of a dark place, looking for the cracks where the light gets in. But also finishing and publishing Wrongness freed up the space to think and write about other things, to grow into a more spacious inner world.
Wrongness by Ruth Novaczek, published by 020-DESK-ZERO, is available now, for direct purchase and trade orders.
Wrongness by Ruth Novaczek, published by 020-DESK-ZERO, is available now, for direct purchase and trade orders.
Al Anderson is a writer, critic and bookseller based in London.