Carlene Bauer is the author of the memoir Not That Kind of Girl, which is one of the better books I have read in a while, if for no other reason than I found a lot of similarities between Carlene’s life of being raised in evangelical Christianity and my own. Every now and then I write her and tell her how great I think she is and she humors me with a kind response.
Why did you decide to write a memoir?
Had this been 1994 or 1985 I would have done what many people before me had done and written a thinly veiled, autobiographical coming-of-age novel. But I felt that would be kind of a cop-out. Memoir, to me, seemed like Prozac Nation or The Glass Castle – books I would never read. And I thought, “What if I could try and write a book that would read more like a novel?”
And I also wanted to write a book that could engage the reader not because of the salacious details but because of the strength of myself as a character and the writing. I didn’t think of the book as a memoir but I knew the publishing house would have to call it that because that’s what happens now. I just saw my book as a very long personal essay.
Have you ever read someone’s memoir and then met them?
Yes. One person I was just getting to be friendly with, so I knew about her before I read her book. I also just recently interviewed Joyce Carol Oates and she’s publishing a memoir about losing her husband.
When you met them, how were they different than what you expected based on reading their memoirs?
With Joyce Carol Oates, she’s small and has a soft speaking voice and a shy demeanor, but the writing can pummel you. So that was the disconnect. With the other woman I’m thinking of there was pretty much a one-to-one correlation between her writing and her person. I think with memoir it’s easier to find the one-to-one correlation but with fiction it’s much easier to find a disparity with a voice on the page and the voice of the person. I think most people who are ferocious in any art form are going to be ferocious in person.
Have you ever had a muse that has influenced your writing or do you currently have one?
*laughs* Karl Lagerfeld is my muse.
Who’s that?
He’s this crazy, German fashion designer. He designs Chanel. But I do like his outrageousness. But hmm…I don’t know. I mean, Jesus?
*laughs*
For serious. You know, when I wrote the book I had lots of people in mind. But now I would say lots of people from the 19th century. Currently I would even include Neko Case because the book I’m writing is a love story and it’s very hard for me to say emotional things and I think that happens more often in music so I’m trying to do something that most people do in music – make something emotional without being sentimental or saccharine. So I’ll think a lot of her songs.
With the first book, I think it was predictably Sylvia Plath as a muse. I know it’s unfashionable and stupid, but nobody talks about what a good writer she is. She had a lot of control and whatever she did she did on purpose. I think nowadays our writing gets bigger and bigger and bigger and we don’t try and make every sentence count. You know who else –
Jesus?
You know, even though I don’t know what I believe I do think often of him. I guess in some way I have a religious project and I would like to think he’s hovering somewhere in the background.
Even though you don’t believe in him?
Yeah. It’s like trying to reclaim some sort of religious act from the Right.
What is the book you’re working on right now?
It’s an epistolary novel. It’s told entirely through letters. It’s set in the early 60s and it’s about a poet and fiction writer who become friends and then fall in love but can’t quite make it work. He suffers from manic depression and she is repressed. They’re both Catholic and he eventually becomes lapsed and this creates conflict and the novel follows their ins and outs.
It’s based loosely on Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor who were friends but never fell in love (that we know of). I thought it would be interesting to create a story where you have a male character who is very effusive, generous, passionate and sort of delusional and the woman is colder and reticent and have those people be in conflict all the time.
Are there certain subjects you get embarrassed talking about in front of your parents?
Not embarrassed but I’ve learned not to talk to them about politics. I’ve learned through the last two elections that it is just not worth it.
But you can talk about things such as your sex life in front of them?
I have. They’re actually very sympathetic and compassionate so I lucked out there.
If you had to ever kill someone, could you do it?
*gasp* You know I‘ve actually thought about that.
Worst segue ever.
No. Best segue ever. I like to think I’d be able to. But I hope I don’t ever have to find out.
Dogs or cats or both and –
Dogs. Dogs. Dogs.
Why?
Because they’re more emotionally available. I like the space they take up and I like their faces. I’ve had to cat sit a couple of times and the litter box thing is terrible and they’re temperamental and they don’t really need you.
What was your favorite trip overseas?
There was one I took with an ex-boyfriend to Barcelona and London that was really lovely. But I don’t know. I can’t pick! When I graduated from graduate school and my sister graduated from college we took ourselves abroad in the grand manner. We went to London, Paris, Florence and Rome for two and a half weeks and that was great because I’d never done it. Oxford had this weird summer program and I did that about ten years ago, so I stayed there for a month and then went to Paris with a friend.
Do you have a favorite out of those?
Well, I’m an anglophile, so I’ve loved whatever time I’ve spent in London. I saw Sleater-Kinney play in London five years ago. There were these Bob Hoskins types standing in the back in this club in Camden drinking Foster’s tall boys. And I said to my boyfriend at the time, “What the hell are these guys doing here?” but they were into it and they approved. I forgot – I went to see Belle & Sebastian in 1999 or 2000 at a festival in the South of England and I saw them and Teenage Fanclub and Sleater-Kinney. But the thing about Sleater-Kinney when they played abroad – I felt that we were exporting this and people were just eating it up. It was a complete rock show. It had nothing to do with who they were as women although I admit I took great pleasure that they were girls kicking ass.
Barcelona is beautiful and I had read Homage to Catalonia before I went and – Oh! George Orwell! He’s often a muse. Anyway, that city is very old in ways that New York and Paris isn’t sometimes. It felt medieval and dusty and untamed and also very alive.
Without giving the obvious answer, what’s something you used to believe that you don’t believe in anymore?
I should say New York. I should have had that beaten the hell out of me by now.
You still believe in it?
Yeah. I feel ashamed. There are too many people with money coming in cleaning everything up and then people want to raze Coney Island to the ground. It’s total liberal arts major complaints that are totally unoriginal but still deeply held about money and history.
Hmm. Also, I might not believe in certain bands anymore.
Such as?
It was Belle & Sebastian a couple years ago.
And maybe I don’t believe in the gym right now. I have gone a lot in my life and I find it useful but the thought of it is kind of soul crushing.
What was the last good film you saw in the theater?
I did like “The Social Network.” I thought it was well done and Jesse Eisenberg did a good job. That might have been the last thing I saw in the theater. That’s kind of embarrassing.
Eh, not really. I only go when I can pull the double feature so it’s not too often for me either.
Okay.
What pops into your mind when I mention the word “Mormons?”
Oh, lots of things. White shirts, ties, and nameplates. Upstate New York.
Why upstate New York?
Joseph Smith was living in upstate New York when he had his visions.
Oh right.
Preparedness – what do they call those kits they make for the impending apocalypse? It’s got a lot of freeze-dried food, too. I wrote a piece on Mormon comedy for the NY Times Magazine a long time ago. So I did a lot of research into Mormons. I actually have sympathy for them in a weird way. I understand the problems and the weirdness and all that. When talking to them I felt that sometimes they were misunderstood. There’s a lot of sexism in Mormonism. They may even be more sexist than evangelicals but it also seems they may also be a little less uptight than evangelicals.
What kind of influence has Soren Kierkegaard had on your life?
Oh. A lot, because he was a depressed person who was a Christian. I knew who he was but I didn’t read up on him until I moved to New York. The line on him is that he’s a poet but he’s also a philosopher. So there’s logic and poetry. There’s a tendency to preach while also trying to purport logic and poetry so as an act of writing I find this incredibly compelling.
It’s beautiful but it also clears the way for existentialism and very clear directives, which I think if you’re depressed, it can be helpful to have. Like the idea that if you despair, despairing over something is worse than despairing of something. So these small shifts with just a preposition shift you into a whole other category of despair and the idea that you move from the aesthetical to the ethical to the religious – that there is a forward motion and a hierarchy of modes – I find this really great. It’s exciting. Just the grappling with faith constantly. And also the fact that you can’t prove it, you just have to believe it. That idea is incredibly helpful. You can’t prove it; you have to just have faith. But this is also hard at times to believe. Like, “That’s it?”
I love his explanation of Abraham and Isaac and how that doesn’t make any sense at all. Abraham goes through this absurd, immoral, illogical thing that breaks all the norms of what we’re taught to believe and THAT gets credited to him as faith and the faith becomes righteousness and the righteousness gets him into heaven. So you have to do something that goes against everything you’ve ever been taught – and that gets you into heaven?
Does that bother you?
I think it used to but now I don’t really give a shit.
Did it bother you because you felt as though it was going to legitimize acts of violence?
No, not that, but that it was promoting the idea that you can’t have a logical basis for your faith. And if you can’t have a logical basis for your faith, how do you defend it against “secular America” or secular society? And then you can’t and you don’t.
But if you just come at it and admit it doesn’t make any sense and it’s not supposed to make sense then it just ends up becoming this thing where you personally believe that this person was right and it’s strictly a matter of faith. I see that with the Christian Scientists I know. It makes no sense but you just accept the idea that this woman received a divine inspiration from God. And that’s totally weird to me because the evidence points otherwise.
Yeah. Thinking about the Mormons it’s the same thing. The only difference between Joseph Smith and Jesus is that Jesus has two thousand years on him. In some ways there might not be a difference. I mean, there is, but there isn’t.
Yeah, totally. So my last question: what is one of the most important things you’ve learned from living in New York City?
There is no meritocracy. Poor me. I’ve learned that.
This is sort of trite but I am often surprised how kind New Yorkers are. I think people don’t realize that. You hear things about New York – “it’ll be a teeming crack den of iniquity and caviar and heroin!” But I was really surprised how easy it was to find friends that are good people.
