Lillian Fishman on Sex, Self-Knowledge and Psychoanalysis
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In the final chapter of Acts of Service, you write ‘we love what disturbs us […] if it tells us that we matter’. Is this something you’re considerate of when choosing a subject to write about?
Without quite knowing it I think I defined the crux of my interest in life in that line. It would make just as much sense in the final chapter of my new book as it does in Acts of Service. As I’ve started to write criticism, I notice I’m always interested in why we’re attracted to what we consider suspicious or corrupt. I’m not interested at all in critiquing what’s wrong in our culture. I’m interested in what attracts us to its seedier elements. And attraction in general. In a way this is a classically psychoanalytic orientation.
Do you feel like you have a writing style? If so, how has that style developed since you first started to write?
I’m interested in playing with narrative time and interior time in the way only literature can. I think you can feel this a bit in the philosophical bent of Acts of Service. In my new novel it has more to do with moving between scenes and across time very quickly. Among my favourites are a lot of writers who move across vast sweeps of time on a single page, across memory and flights into the future, as the minds of the characters dictate – these are writers like Philip Roth, John Updike, Emmanuel Carrère, Rachel Cusk, Claudia Dey. Fiction that isn’t cinematic or visual, exactly, but more associative.
Both art and sex reach us where we’re most porous, and there’s a profound opportunity in both.
You published your first novel not long after completing your MFA at NYU. How long were the ideas for the text permeating in your head before you committed to the act of writing it?
These were ideas I’d been working through since I was a teenager – probably eight years or a decade. I think that’s how long a novel takes to marinate.
Is there an urgency to your practice, given that the things you write about are at once so socially, culturally and politically topical?
There’s an urgency to expression, but not to a whole book coming together, I don’t think. A book takes so long to write and so long, once you finish it, to be published, and of course it’s intended to be read for a long time. You can’t have the sense that it needs to arrive soon to make sense to people. If I’m writing about sex, lifestyle, ideology, self-concept, the world of dating norms, these things seem topical, but the world is actually moving through and around these subjects very slowly. We’re organising ourselves in relationship to these subjects on the scale of decades and responding to their long histories all the time.
I think I work very slowly. It seems important to think and write through the same thing four, five, eight, ten times.
In the novel, one of your protagonists, Olivia, seems incapable of separating her understanding of sex from her understanding of art. Do you think that such concepts are inherently linked?
For me art is most often a solitary experience. I relish talking to other people about art or seeing movies with them, but I think there’s a reason that my deepest experiences involve reading in total solitude. The art and books that matter to me feel like the product of a prolonged, often solitary thought process, of an enormous effort of vision and craft. And I see sex as the opposite – a place constituted by and for real-time, absolute, unflinching connection. It can be artful, but it’s fundamentally spontaneous and ephemeral and shared.
But I think both art and sex can reach us where we’re most porous, and there’s a similar kind of profound opportunity in both.
You recently wrote a short story for The New Yorker called ‘Travesty’, about an illicit relationship between a student and their tutor. The university, as you then describe it, is a ‘petri dish’ for intense questioning of sexual politics and complicated power dynamics. Have you been disillusioned by the university system in the time since you studied there?
I grew up in a family of disillusioned hippies with very few commitments to communities, institutions, anything. And I think, even if I hadn’t, the experience of growing up in my generation – though perhaps in every generation, at least in the last century or so – is one of dawning disillusionment with every institution. When I was in college, disgust and disillusionment with our university was almost a required orientation for queer students and students who were really interested in the humanities.
The book that ‘Travesty’ comes out of is in a sense about the desperate desire to belong to a community, to an institution, despite knowing that it’s imperfect, and that it will probably fail and betray you, and that it probably already has. That’s a very familiar feeling for me and is deeply connected to that sentiment you pointed out from the final pages of Acts of Service – ‘we love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter.’
‘Travesty’ is part of a larger working project. Was the exercise of distilling its themes for a short story useful to the process of creating the book itself?
Yes, extremely. I was writing the novel from Heiss’s perspective, and I decided to try a single chapter in Prima’s perspective, and that chapter was ‘Travesty’. So I wanted to describe a very brief window in Prima’s life and yet cover a lot of psychological ground with it. After I had finished that draft, and after I’d sent out that chapter as an excerpt, I decided to rewrite the book from Prima’s perspective, with a single chapter following Heiss – the inverse of what I’d originally planned. So ‘Travesty’ existed on its own, as the first complete vision I had of Prima, and then I ended up building her experience out a lot more. Prima turned out to be the foundation of this book, which is going to be called Women & Children.
Psychoanalytic terms made both the pursuit of self-knowledge and the total absurdity of it articulable to me.
You write a lot about the seeking of self-knowledge. Do you find that writing is a way of getting closer to this ideal?
I’m not writing in a pursuit or valorisation of self-knowledge so much as writing about a world in which self-knowledge is a high value. When I first encountered psychoanalysis, I couldn’t believe that this was a paradigm that people thought was bizarre or perverted or extreme: I immediately recognised it as a fantastic description of the way I had inadvertently been raised and educated to conceive of the world. Psychoanalytic terms made both the pursuit of self-knowledge and the total absurdity of it articulable to me. I suppose, at bottom, I have a very traditional idea about fiction: I think it’s as much – or more – about being curious about other people, trying to come up against them, get close to them, imagine them, as it is about exploring the self.
Eve Babitz is quoted in Acts of Service. Was she, or any of her peers who wrote with gumption about women’s sexuality, an influence on your work?
I love reading Eve Babitz. But I think the writers who influenced my thinking about sexuality are the really bold, stylish American writers of the 50s and 60s – Mary McCarthy, Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth, John Updike. These writers and their peers wrote sex scenes at such length, scenes that were physically explicit but emotionally so nuanced, so associative, so attentive to how we organise our identities in intimate relationships. I don’t think they’re much in fashion anymore, but they’re the writers I care about most.
‘Eve’ is also the name of the protagonist in your text. Is this a nod to her [Babitz], or even the ‘original’ woman?
Yes, to both, a bit. In a lot of ways Acts of Service is more a symbolic novel than a realistic novel. Eve is a person, but she’s also representing an archetype, just as Nathan is.
Queerness becomes a kind of faith in Acts of Service, a way of seeing the world and understanding someone’s place within it. How does your own understanding of sexuality bleed into the beliefs of these characters, and what a reader might take away from the book?
In Acts of Service queerness as a faith and sexuality as a real experience are placed at odds. Queerness, in Eve’s experience, has slowly become divorced from sexuality – it’s become a way of describing a set of ideological values and a lifestyle. Whereas sexuality itself is just ungovernable and exists as a kind of rebuke to ideology. This is a contradiction I spent my early twenties really grappling with and coming up against, like Eve does. Trying to reconcile these two forces – or to describe how they might be irreconcilable – is the subject of the book.
Are there any topics you have yet to explore in your writing that you are excited to tackle?
The subject of family felt pretty absent in Acts of Service, and a lot of people mentioned to me how unusual that was for a first novel. As a young person I was so obsessed with becoming an adult, and with the richness of adult subjects, that to write about family repulsed me as a kind of lingering in childhood. Family plays much more of a role in my new book, though it’s still in the background in a way. But I’m becoming more and more interested in family, and even in childhood – in the family romance and all its complications.
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Lillian Fishman received her MFA from NYU, where she was a Jill Davis Fellow (2020). She lives in New York. Her new novel, Women & Children, is forthcoming in 2027 from Riverhead & Faber.
Emmeline Armitage is a writer and musician originally from West Yorkshire, now living in London. She graduated from The University of Oxford before completing her Masters in Literary Non-Fiction from Royal Holloway, and her work has since been featured in The Bedford Review, The Line of Best Fit and Wonderland, as well as on stage at Hay-On-Wye and Out-Spoken. She is signed to indie hip-hop label Lewis Recordings, most recently having opened-up for The Streets on tour, played the global music festival SXSW in Austin, Texas, and being named by the Guardian as ‘One to Watch’.
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