Our Once and Future Selves: An Interview with Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s fourth novel, “My Education,” was published by Viking and came out in paperback this May. Photo by Adrian Kinloch. Cover art courtesy of susanchoi.com.

On Flatbrush Avenue in Brooklyn there’s a rather shabby-looking building which towards the beginning of the last century used to be a bank. Or at any rate that’s what we’re led to believe from the old-fashioned lettering on its façade and the after-hours deposit box on its outer wall. But if you look closer the deposit box is welded shut and the lettering above it is in anachronistic plastic type — and indeed a neighborhood myth about the place says that it was only ever a set for a bank in some long-forgotten Hollywood film. The desolate, claustrophobic, tenement-like character of its interior would seem to confirm this. The building is owned by an eccentric landlord who leases it out to various artists, among other oddballs. If you take the elevator at the rear of the building’s main hallway and input a special code, you will arrive at the sort of subterranean space which is not unusual in places like Brooklyn and Portland: a refurbished and concrete-floored warehouse decorated with vaguely antique furniture, some indie bric-a-brac, and diverse piles of intellectually or artistically inclined books and magazines. The chamber on the left appears to be inhabited by some sort of skate shop; the rest is home to a co-operative organization of writers who use it as a quiet working space, hermetically sealed from the toils and snares of the outside world.

It’s here that the Nassau Literary Review caught up with Susan Choi. She says the space appeals to people like her — “middle-aged moms who want to write,” she quips, only half-joking. (Choi herself, though recently middle-aged, speaks and acts with the speed and intensity of someone fresh out of college.) There was a time when she could write at home — indeed she wrote her first novel in a series of extremely disciplined marathon sessions over the course of a year in her New York apartment, though she supposes “it was because I was desperate to get a book out and prove I hadn’t thrown my life away.” In any event the advent of marriage and especially children meant that Choi became a self-proclaimed “laptop hobo,” and for a writer who has unsuccessfully attempted to colonize libraries, houses, cafés, and other spaces for her craft, the co-op presents an elegant solution to a perpetual dilemma. “It’s mostly pretty utopian,” she says. After a pause, she corrects herself: “No, ‘utopian’ is the wrong word — it’s just idyllic, I think.”

Born in 1969 to a Korean immigrant father and a Russian Jewish mother, Choi has gained renown as a fiction-writer of unusually wide range and extraordinary technical talent. Her first novel, The Foreign Student (1998), is a lightly fictionalized account of her father’s immigrant experience and love story. But very soon she revealed an interest in histories of a different and rather more political sort: American Woman (2003) is a fictionalization of the Patty Hearst kidnapping and a thoughtful meditation on the complicated relationship between radical politics and violence, while A Person of Interest (2008) is a sort of intellectual thriller depicting the experience of a professor falsely suspected of being a domestic terrorist based on the Unabomber. Her most recent offering, My Education (2013), begins as the story of a 1990s graduate student’s infatuation with a superstar professor but quickly dovetails into an account of her affair with his beautiful and wickedly intelligent wife Martha, a woman nearly twice her age who teaches her certain lessons about life, love, marriage, and disappointment by breaking her heart.

Choi herself has been a writer of stories since she was a child, but by the time she got to Yale as an undergraduate in the 1980s she had begun to see it as a “useless hobby.” Instead she dabbled in various subjects of interest — film, art, graphic design, American Studies — before settling for a degree in literature, which at that time meant an intense study of the sort of poststructuralist literary theory Yale professors such as Paul de Man had spearheaded. These studies left her unsatisfied and she quickly turned from literary theory to literary practice: after graduating from Cornell’s MFA program, she worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker through the 1990s and lived in a small apartment in New York with various roommates until she finished her first novel. “Under the pressure of supporting myself, I discovered what kind of writer I really was,” she says.

Despite teaching Creative Writing at Princeton, Choi appears somewhat skeptical of the culture surrounding academic programs for creative writing. It was in this vein that we began our wide-ranging conversation.

***

INTERVIEWER

It’s very interesting that as someone who has written primarily novels, you teach Creative Writing — since the culture of that particular academic department is geared much more towards the writing of short fiction. Do you see any sort of sharp contrast there?

SUSAN CHOI

It’s true! I stopped writing short fiction early on — I was never really good at it and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and that’s one of the reasons I started teaching a course on novel-writing at Princeton. Because I asked myself, “Why are we always teaching these courses that push so hard towards the short form when that isn’t everybody’s specialty?” And obviously there’s a reason for that: the short form is ideal for bringing into class and talking about. It’s really hard to workshop a novel, especially within the confines of a twelve-week semester. In fact it’s sort of insane, when you think about it!

INTERVIEWER

You said before that it was only when you were a writer in New York that you discovered the sort of writer you really were. Is that in contrast to support you received in graduate school?

CHOI

Especially financial support, yes. Graduate school is a really supportive environment; but in a way it was only when that support vanished that I flourished.

INTERVIEWER

That really reminds me of the recent essay collection edited by Chad Harbrach, MFA vs. NYC, which talks about what it sees as the two contemporary cultures of writing in the US — one of them in the academy, the other outside it. As you were talking about your experience I couldn’t help but try to place you in one category or the other. Obviously it’s much more fraught and a much blurrier division than that — but how have you negotiated those two cultures, and how useful a framework is that for discussing American literature in the age of The Program Era?

CHOI

I think that — without offending anybody involved in that collection — it’s really gimmicky to call it MFA vs. NYC. Certainly it sounds good, but I think as someone who moved literally from MFA to NYC that breaking it up into that dichotomy is really misleading. There’s got to be some other way of talking about whether or not MFA programs have any utility to literary culture and to writers, which I feel is what that book is really supposed to be about. But the NYC half I object to a little bit, because the romantic idea of coming to New York and being a writer is really in need of reexamination. The city has become so hostile to writers and artists in so many ways.

INTERVIEWER

How, in particular?

CHOI

To keep it as simple as possible, I think it’s really hostile because the cost of living has become prohibitive. All sorts of creative communities are withering in New York because it’s too hard to live here. It’s ridiculous how expensive it is. And all of this sounds strange coming from me, I guess, because I was just talking about how the financial pressure of having to make it here was an incredibly useful and productive process for me — but I don’t know if that would be the same if I were a young writer writing here today. I got to New York almost twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995. You could find the numbers, but I’m pretty sure the ratio between starting wages for someone in the culture industry — a publishing assistant, a fact-checker at the New Yorker, a bartender, whatever it is people in the city do to get by in their early years — and the cost of living here is psychotic today, and it wasn’t like that when I first got here. It was possible to live here on a shoestring — it might not be grand and it might not be all you dreamed of, but I think…I suppose I found the New York that E.B. White talks about in “Here Is New York.” I can’t remember the exact line, but I believe it’s something like, “New York gives you the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

And I think that beautifully captures what New York still was to me back then. I lived in an apartment in Morningside Heights that was essentially a collection of illegal subletters subletting from other illegal subletters subletting from even more illegal subletters so that in the end you couldn’t find Tenant Zero, you know, the person with the actual lease. But we rented an apartment that was large enough and inspiring enough that I had a space for loneliness and solitude — and it was $400 a month. I wasn’t rich, my job didn’t pay that much: I lived off tuna fish and tofu I bought from a grocery store at the corner of 110th and Broadway.

I don’t know if people live that way anymore. I feel as if the number of housemates you have to have, the number of hours you have to work…maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve gone soft. But it seems to me that there’s something today in the economics of this city that is really hostile to creativity, and that people who don’t want to spend all their time and mental energy making money aren’t finding a congenial atmosphere here.

I guess MFA vs. Non-MFA wouldn’t have been as catchy, but that’s really more what I like to explore: this question of whether MFAs are actually helpful or not to writers. Maybe they should have called it MFA vs. Portland, Oregon — why not, right?

INTERVIEWER

But in defense of the anthology, “NYC” does sort of stand in not only for the literal New York City of the New York Intellectuals of the 50s or the artistic vanguard of the 70s or whatever period, but also more broadly for the existence of a space outside of the academy for public intellectualism and the appreciation of art. Conversely, do you think that the fiction that’s coming from our MFA programs, by virtue of its being an environment which is hermetically sealed from everyday life, produce a sort of MFA fiction identifiable by certain tropes and clichés?

CHOI

Oh absolutely. I mean, I’m not going to identify what any of those tropes are, but you hear this sort of thing all the time — people who read a book and say, “My God, that’s so MFA-y,” although they can’t quite put their finger on whatever that might mean. Although perhaps they can; I’m just not sure that I’d feel prepared to tell you exactly what I mean. But I could go to a book store and come out with books which just look to me like they came out of the MFA culture.

And I’m not exactly hostile to the MFA culture. But I do think it needs to be examined, because I think a lot of it is — let’s face it — an economy to keep writers like me afloat. Why are there so many MFA programs now? Is it because people really need this sort of degree, this credential? Or is it that they’ve been made to need it by this alternate economy which we’ve created for ourselves that’s completely self-perpetuating? I mean, people joke about MFA programs sometimes as if they’re some sort of pyramid scheme, but they are a pyramid scheme! MFA programs make writers who can’t support themselves publishing and thus need to get jobs teaching in MFA programs, who themselves need new writers…etc. We all knew that going in; or rather, everyone in MFA programs needs to admit to that reality.

When I enrolled in an MFA program I did it for the money in a much more immediate way — I didn’t want to get a job. I think that writers are doing it for the money in a much more long-term way — in other words, they recognize that the vast majority of writers in this country can’t really commit themselves to publishing in the long run and have to get jobs in MFA programs. And to add to that, when I started out there were two ways to end up teaching in an MFA program: find some success as a published writer, or get the MFA credential and some significantly more minor success and you could do the same thing. Now it seems that you really need the credential no matter what, which I find interesting because that doesn’t need to be true.

INTERVIEWER

Would you encourage writers, then, to get that credential, or to try to make it without going to grad school? Because there is, for instance, an indie scene out there which has produced writers such as Tao Lin and Marie Calloway.

CHOI

I think the credential is really suspect. I don’t think that the credential itself contributed much to my success, such as it is — I think my books did. Nor do I think that the MFA program contributed much to the production of my books. That’s just me. But again, it’s a really different climate now than it was twenty years ago when I was first facing this question. So I always tell my students: look, don’t go into debt to get the MFA credential — but maybe you might need it at some point? I really don’t know anymore.

INTERVIEWER

Changing gears a bit: you’ve mentioned before that one of your major regrets is not having traveled enough. I was wondering whether you could elaborate upon that a bit.

CHOI

I just think about it constantly. I chalk it up to something like my personal conservatism — not political or social conservatism, just a tendency to play it safe. I was the daughter of an immigrant, raised to feel that I needed to get excellent, flawless grades and a full scholarship and a graduate degree and a good job — all the stepping stones to conventional success. And I was really chicken to travel after college, not because I was terribly afraid of foreign lands — to the contrary, I think that I was much braver then because the more you advance into middle age the more you think about all the things that could go wrong in the world, and in my early twenties I didn’t worry about that kind of thing at all. Instead I worried about how to pay off my debts and how to get a job. I always felt like, “Oh, I’ll travel after I’ve done this, I’ll travel after I’ve done that” — but the snares of a complicated life set themselves up really early. Before I knew it I was in a situation that felt too complicated to dismantle so that I could just go abroad. Now I feel that traveling has become a thing I can only do in the grown-up, bourgeois guise of, you know, “Expatriating to a lovely foreign city for a few weeks, like New York — only not New York!”

INTERVIEWER

Complicated how, though?

CHOI

Most obviously, it’s been complicated by the fact I’ve had children I’m still raising who aren’t going to depart for college for at least eight years. Eight and ten years, respectively. So I can’t just drop everything and go backpacking in Nepal! I mean I could, but it would make me a terrible mother — so I’m not seriously considering that, nor am I seriously considering taking my kids to Nepal, since precisely the same sort of stair-step mentality which afflicted me when I first got to New York is afflicting me again with regards to their education.

INTERVIEWER

A “stair-stepping mentality?”

CHOI

The stair-step mentality of saying to yourself, “Well, I’m on step number three, and if I ever jump off the staircase I’ll have to start all over again.”

It just gets really complicated in the same way that it got complicated in my early twenties, when I got a decent job and a decent apartment, and I was like, “Oh, well now I have this nice apartment and this nice job, so I can’t give that up until I’ve paid off my loans”; then later it was, “Well, I’ve paid off my loans but now I’m in this serious relationship so I’ve got to keep it up,”; and eventually it was, “Well, now I’m married and about to have kids.” So there was always a combination of things which were simply too complicated to put into storage for a few years, and I was scared of going off those steps. I’ve always admired people who just go off and do things; I’m always fascinated by them, and sort of jealous.

INTERVIEWER

I can’t help but notice that what you just described seems incredibly similar to what Regina goes through in the course of My Education.

CHOI

Oh of course. There’s a lot of me in her. That whole novel came out of my self-reflective thoughts about the difference between me in my forties and me in my twenties. The sexual relationship between the two women was secondary to comparing the lives of these two women at two very different emotional stages. A young woman who thinks she’s really mature, and an older woman who that young woman can’t imagine she’s one day going to turn into.

INTERVIEWER

And she already begins to at the end of the novel. Especially after she’s gone through a sort of progression: she begins as the student of the star professor, jumps to becoming the paramour in this hot love affair, then jumps right from that into independent twenty-something life with a job, to the same thing in New York, to marriage, to children. There’s a certain provinciality to the spaces she’s inhabited, isn’t there? First the little college town, then Manhattan.

CHOI

Oh yeah! You know that’s what I kept thinking about when I first started thinking about this book: the ideas of being a grown-up and the realities of being a grown up; the snares and traps of being a grown-up.

The reason Martha became so important to the story, even before it became clear that the story was going to be about a love relationship between the two, was because she is this person who’s already walked up the staircase and done all those incremental steps toward success brilliantly. She has a husband, she has a child, she has a great job and a great house, she’s admired — and she hates it. She absolutely hates it and she kind of goes nuts. She can’t stand her marriage, she doesn’t really like being a mother. Regina visits her house and notices how impersonal the house is — it’s like this big house that looks like nobody ever chose an item of furniture in it. She’s sort of struck by how it seems like a standard-issue beautiful home that Martha couldn’t care less about. And in the end it’s Martha who rejects that to some extent, and Regina who’s sort of embraced it. Martha even says to her when they speak on the phone all those years later, “Oh, you have a husband and a little kid now, just like me!” And it’s totally true.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned once in a seminar the idea of…I believe you called it “perch.” If I recall correctly, it meant that narration is never neutral — that oftentimes, even in the third person, it’s given from a certain point of view which is looking back upon the events described which is inflected by the passage of time.

CHOI

That’s right — that it’s located, that narration is always located somewhere.

INTERVIEWER

How much of a role did that perch play in writing your novel?

CHOI

That was the whole idea, and it was really hard to achieve. I mean, some people call it the “point of telling” — so people will ask in a seminar, in a pretty dorky way, “Where is the point of telling?” By which they really mean, “Where is the narrator situated?” Usually that means that the narrator is situated somewhere in time…although sometimes it can also mean being situated in space. I actually love things that are written in such a way that the perch is physical as well as temporal.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example?

CHOI

There’s a story called “Jon” by George Saunders that I often use in my class. It turns out that Jon is writing the entire story while sitting and waiting around for the doctor to come and lobotomize him. I love that — I love the reveal, when you realize that not only is John writing the entire story at this specific moment, after he’s asked to get out but before he has his gargadisk[ref]INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: In the context of the Saunders story, a gargadisk is a sort of brain implant found in the heads of “assessors,” whose job is to do nothing except corporate product testing for their entire lives. The gargadisk can inject a drug called Aurabon, essentially an extremely powerful antidepressant, to prevent the assessors’ mood from shifting into anything except a maximally productive happiness. The only way it can be removed is via a lobotomy which leaves the patient a vegetable. Needless to say, the story is a dystopian one about the mass corporate culture of the ’90s; it is also hilarious.[/ref] removed, but that he’s also doing it on a piece of paper a nurse hands him at a particular moment, so that he even thanks her in a little dedication at the end.

Anyway, usually narration doesn’t have that component — but it mostly always has a temporal component. I owe that term to my friend Francisco Goldman, who was the first person I ever heard use the word “perch.” He was complaining about writing a book of his own and he said, “I just can’t figure out what the perch is.” And I said, “The what?” And he replied, “Perch, you know — like, where am I when I’m telling this story?”

The perch for Regina was very specific when I started writing it — and then I lost it. I told you that the book came out of thinking about myself in my forties versus myself in my twenties, and from my desire to write a book which explored those two ways of being — specifically for women, actually. So I wanted one woman who was in her early twenties and another who was older. I wanted to explore that difference in age, not only between two characters at different stages but also of one character at different points in her life. So when I started writing my first sense of Regina’s voice was that it was a retrospective voice looking back on her own youth. But in the course of writing the first draft I lost the introspection, lost the older Regina and her greater level of wisdom about her own actions. The older Regina narrating her past has to be narrating through that intervening difference and that lens of knowingness. I didn’t want her to be scornful of her past self, but I wanted her to have much more perspective on her past self than she’d previously had. And one of the major problems I had writing the book was that I kept losing that, kept reverting to the twenty-year-old Regina.

INTERVIEWER

So how did you pick up that thread?

CHOI

It was really hard. Sometimes the narrative voice of a book is only really locatable as a sort of quality or tone or sound that I have to tune into, like a radio station. It’s really hard to describe what specifically characterizes that voice. It’s not as if I say, “Well, this narrative voice uses certain compound adjectives that the narrator herself doesn’t actually know the definitions of.” I suppose some writers plan all that out, but it never really works for me — instead it’s really intuitive.

And I think that what happened to me with this book was that my attempt to relocate the Older Regina voice that I’d started with — and sort of lost track of — involved digging back into the places in the first draft where that voice still existed, just reminding myself what it sounded like, then going back and rewriting the whole book. I really did rewrite the whole book from start to finish more than once. But there was one final, huge revision which was all about voice and attitude. Because there were moments where you could hear it more clearly — usually the explicitly retrospective moments, the moments where the narrator would directly address you and rather than setting a scene would just talk to you. For example, there’s one moment right after Regina and Martha first kiss when Regina says, “Even now all these years later I stop at the brink.” She talks about how looking back, this affair — an affair the reader hasn’t even seen yet — was in many ways rather ludicrous, and how childish her behavior and Martha’s had been. And I remember when I wrote the first draft I wrote that passage where it currently occurs, and certain readers of mine — possibly my editor — told me to remove it. They asked me, “Why break up the action like this? Why not just get them into bed with each other?”

But in the final rewrite I put it back in because part of what that did was to keep the voice where I wanted it to be. And I think things that — just bringing that passage back, and remembering how it sounded — were how I found that voice again.

INTERVIEWER

I find it really interesting that you didn’t originally necessarily see the relationship between Regina and Martha as a sexual one.

CHOI

Not necessarily — but I didn’t necessarily not, either.

INTERVIEWER

Right! And that was sort of to my point, because one of the things that really struck me about the book as I was reading it was its view of sexuality. It was probably the first really unselfconscious, unconcerned depiction of two characters’ bisexuality that I’ve read. What I mean by that is that it’s rare to find a work — especially after the Sexual Revolution, where we established our current categories of sexual orientation — to have a work that fundamentally expresses the fluidity of human sexuality, as opposed to boxing us into one little category or another. And I was wondering what, if anything, drove you to write about sex and sexuality in this particular way.

CHOI

Hatred of identity politics? [Laughs.]

INTERVIEWER

In all forms?

CHOI

Well, I don’t want to say in all forms, because obviously identity politics are extremely important and I personally, indeed all of us are personally indebted to the progress that’s been made because of certain kinds of identity politics. So I suppose I’ll have to dial that statement back a bit and be politic — another thing I hate doing! — and explain what I mean.

You know, when you were talking about the fluidity of categories, my first thought was: “Well, isn’t that the point? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Sexual Revolution, and hasn’t that always been the whole point?” And one of the things that I’ve always found fascinating and repulsive about liberation movements that then morph into identity politics movements is that the liberation part of it, I feel, gets lost in a sort of self-policing and self-prescribing that seems really antithetical to what the point was in the first place. In college I struggled a lot with this in terms of feminism because I consider myself a feminist, and arrived in college considering myself a feminist, and was astonished to discover how much time and energy women who called themselves feminists at my college spent telling each other what to do — and not to do — and policing and prescribing each other in all sorts of respects. I think that happens in almost every movement, and I’m very interested in the ways that people can be almost unselfconscious in terms of all that.

For example, when my book was reviewed in the New York Times, one of the things that I most loathed about the reviewer’s take — I think she was an n+1 person — was that she scolded me for not being sufficiently political in my depiction of bisexuality. And I thought, “Really? Do I really have to go didactic in this book?” Because this book is political precisely inasmuch as it doesn’t do that. The idea that this book would, to be politically acceptable, have to go into some sort of politicized defense of Regina’s sexual choices is…I don’t know, maybe that’s not what this woman meant. But the fact that she scolded the book on that count struck me as incredibly naïve and incredibly exemplary of everything I’ve always deplored about the self-defeating elements of identity politics.

That’s what I’d like to say, I think. Identity politics are supremely important, but they engage in self-defeating behaviors and that’s what I can’t stand.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that perhaps the call for novelists to be more political is a sign of a renewed interest in politics among everyday people in the last few years?

CHOI

Not really. I think it’s more a sign of naïveté. It’s like, “Really? You’re going to tell me that I’m not political enough?” I actually think there’s more political stuff in my work than in a lot of other novels. That sounds rather pompous doesn’t it? I don’t know. I just think that for a reviewer to scold a book on those grounds betrayed some immaturity in her thinking.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of immaturity, you were recently nominated for the Bad Sex Award in the UK, although you lost, alas. Which I thought was really interesting because — well, you know there’s always a discussion about sex in fiction when those come out, and I find it odd that there’s this idea that if you write about sex in writing it’s somehow in bad taste. Whereas before a depiction of sex in a novel would have warranted government censorship and legal action against the author, now it’s seen almost as a bit tacky in some quarters. Why are we still so squeamish about sex?

CHOI

That’s a great question! I have no idea.

But what do you mean “still?” I think people are if anything more squeamish and more peevish than before.

INTERVIEWER

In what ways?

CHOI

One of the things that I loathe in contemporary writing is this weirdly precious, veiled, MFA-poetry sex writing. I could give damning examples but I won’t. And this is by some of the most acclaimed writers of our day, and I just don’t understand it. I was reading a book recently for instance — I won’t identify the author — which contained the phrase, “the occult power of his lovemaking,” or something like that. Something absurdly euphemistic and embarrassing. Because it was embarrassing that this person who’s a grown-up would write such a badly euphemistic sex scene — and not just that it was euphemistic, but that the euphemisms would be so squeamish and insane.

I feel vindicated that I lost that prize because I think the sex writing in my book is good, and the confusion between bad sex writing and explicit sex writing is made a lot. Again I’ll have to reference my friend Francisco Goldman — whom I feel taught me everything I ever learned, or everything which was positive anyway — when he said, “Don’t be squeamish, but do be funny if possible. Or just don’t do it.”

But this weird number of flower metaphors, for instance. I’m amazed by the number of flower metaphors you’ll find in sex scenes in contemporary writing which are actually sincere! To bring up Gatsby again: there’s a line where Fitzgerald describes Daisy as “opening to Gatsby like a flower,” you know, clearly a vagina metaphor. But in the context of the book, Fitzgerald is mocking Gatsby’s own self-aggrandizing purple prose, because that passage — which is in free indirect discourse — is Nick relating the way Gatsby related the story of himself and Daisy to Nick. And then the next paragraph, which is back in Nick’s own voice, refers to Gatsby’s “appalling sentimentality.” So Fitzgerald is making fun of the way people talk about sex when he uses that line. But the number of writers who actually use lines like that today boggles the mind.

INTERVIEWER

But it isn’t just sex that you write about — it’s also love in general. And again, in my estimation, American novelists typically have a treatment of marriage and love affairs which falls into one of two categories. You either have this really dreary, suburban, melodramatic sentimentalism — you know, “Oh my God, he cheated on me and destroyed my life and the lives of the children, and suddenly the whole family has been destroyed and we’re all going to be thrown into bourgeois ruin” — or you have the Updikean approach, rooted in this ’60s idea of the defiance of marriage in favor of sexual liberation, which ends up being monomaniacally obsessed with the sex itself, to the detriment of everything else.

However in thinking about your approach, what came to mind was that it seemed very French. It was this rather cheerily pessimistic take on marriage and the long-term prospect of love affairs, but it also celebrated love and sex as fleeting but meaningful beauties. Would that be a good description?

CHOI

I love that description! In particular being called French is extremely flattering, since I’m a minor Francophile. I would never dare to self-consciously attempt to be French, but being characterized that way makes me very happy. The best I can do is try to wear a scarf every now and then tied in a somewhat attractive way, I guess.

But one of the things I wanted to try to talk about in this book is how complicated marriage actually is, and how weird people are about marriage. Being married and knowing a lot of married people, I’m extremely fascinated by how conservative we still are — I don’t know if it’s in this country or in general, so I’ll just speak about my milieu — about our marriages. And I don’t mean conservative in the way it used to be, where no one would even dream of getting divorced. But one example would be how people, in my experience, do not talk about how hard it is to be married. In my opinion marriage by definition is an extremely difficult enterprise, and I don’t think that it’s a big reveal. I think our parents knew; everyone really knows that the enterprise of two adult people deciding to live together, raise children in common, own property, and do this for an extended period of time (if not the rest of their lives on earth) — I think that’s extremely difficult, frankly, and I’m surprised at how reluctant people I encounter are to talk about the difficulty.

Instead, at least in my world, there’s a real fetishism of the happy marriage. People really want everyone to know how happily married they are, how perfect they are, how fabulous their lives together are. They like to talk about how wonderful their vacation was, the great school their kids are going to, the really attentive and thoughtful thing that their spouse did for them or vice versa. You’ll hear about the surprise birthday that someone’s throwing for their spouse with no regard to expense. But I think there’s a lot of shame among married people I know about the lack of perfection in their marriages. And that’s really weird to me, because I don’t think anyone has a perfect marriage.

Marriages are hard, and they’re great, but there’s a lot of inconclusive stuff that happens in all marriages. I think the pressure of the novel to have a narrative arc affects the depiction of marriage we see in the novel. If somebody cheats, then the marriage has to end — because the novel needs a narrative arc, and actions need consequences. And of course in real life it’s not as simple as that. I know people who have been on the brink of divorce, and then they reconcile, and then it’s great, and then it’s bad, and then someone cheats, and then they both kind of forget about it — the stories of how people live their lives aren’t as streamlined as the movies and the novels are. And marriage is one of the most frequently misrepresented situations in our popular culture. It’s always very artificial.

I had people respond to my book and tell me about “Regina’s miserable marriage” at the end, which struck me as pretty strange. I think she has a pretty great marriage! They irritate each other, occasionally differ, support each other. The sexual fireworks once happened but don’t happen as much anymore. They get along, and then they don’t get along.

INTERVIEWER

But there’s still an ambivalence there, isn’t there? For instance I’m remembering this really ambiguous scene where she leaves the little dinner party with Dutra and his wife to tuck in her baby, and the baby sort of grabs her and says, “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me” with this unusual intensity. And there’s this really strange absence of the usual intrusive monological voice there. We get her thoughts, but she circles around what that was. I found that moment really telling in a lot of ways.

CHOI

Of what?

INTERVIEWER

[A pause.] I suppose…of her ambivalence towards her new life, and the way that her marriage fits into the logical and seemingly inevitable trajectory which her life has taken.

CHOI

I think that ambivalence is more usual than not. I remember that scene, because one of the things I like about that moment is that she thinks about the fact that even though she’s sort of besotted with her child, one of the things she really admires about her child is how independent he is — and as soon as he clings, she’s like, “Oh, I don’t know how into this I’d be if it were always like this.” Which is I think something that most parents feel, but not everyone wants to admit.

INTERVIEWER

When I started reading the book, I actually thought in the first third that it was going to turn into a sort of attack on marriage, given the depiction of how dysfunctional the Brodeurs were and so on. A sort of Jude the Obscure style take — that being a very anti-marriage book, one which is concerned with the way the institution regulates sexuality to the point of destroying Sue, this strong and independent free-thinking woman, and how it traps women into having children (especially before the invention of contraception) and so on.

Instead I feel the direction you took was much more ambiguous, and in a way much more telling — for its lack of radicalism — of our moment. We accept marriage as a reality, and we talk about it as if it were something we were happy about, but we quietly suffer from this deep unease towards it.

CHOI

I’m really glad you took your reading in that direction. In the end Regina feels unease and ambivalence because she lives through this odd polarity between a sustainable relationship that isn’t explosive and crazy and all-fireworks-all-the-time, and this love affair which in fact is all-fireworks-all-the-time which simply isn’t sustainable. And I think she wonders — I meant for her to wonder — why that seems like the only two choices.

Martha of course leaves her marriage. But in the end she’s very alone. And why is that? I didn’t want Martha to seem triumphant, because I wanted there to seem like there was something deeply ambiguous in her situation as well. I mean she’s gone all the way to the edge — almost literally, she’s crossed from the East Coast to the far West Coast, as far as you can go without leaving the North American landmass. Regina arrives to discover Martha’s little self-created utopia, and Martha basically says to her, “You know, I’m this old woman whose dogs sleep in her bed.” And she’s kind of joking, but she’s not entirely joking. She is this older woman who sleeps with a couple of dogs far more than she sleeps with anyone or anything else.

INTERVIEWER

But she does have her son Joachim. And it’s very interesting, in many ways, to see this baby character — who in the early part of the novel is a rather marginal character who’ll briefly appear in the back of the car, or in a crib — to see him all grown up. How did Joachim become that person we meet at the end of the novel?

CHOI

Joachim was in a way the whole point of this book.

INTERVIEWER

Really? He seems more like a side character.

CHOI

He is! He’s not the central character by far, but what you just said about his transformation is in many ways the point of I was trying to make. Or rather, it was the point I started with. When I first had the idea for this book, the reason I had this idea was most specifically because of Joachim. I’ve already talked about how the book was inspired by the difference between myself at twenty and myself at forty. But that gap, to me, seemed best exemplified by children.

I was living — and it’s funny, because all my thoughts about this book are tied to the place where I was living at the time — in a rental. My family was undergoing this somewhat traumatic move: we were moving from a house to a rental to another house, but we stayed in the rental for like six months, and I was really depressed because I had no home, and I was very interested in how dislocated I was, how unhappy I was to be in a state of flux. Yet all of the flux was self-inflicted, because our kids were getting bigger and we needed to move to a bigger place. So that whole situation got me thinking about the enormous impact my kids were having on my life, and how unimaginable all of this would have been to my past self. The adult that I was when I was, you know, your age. And of course I thought of myself as an adult, and I was an adult, capable of making adult decisions and so on. I was living independently and supporting myself. But the extent to which kids and my love for them and preoccupation with them and total absorption in them would come to rule most of my life in ways that, though very positive, were also very draining, was unimaginable to me.

I didn’t even notice at that time that kids existed on the planet, you know, as a large group. I mean, there’s a very substantial number of kids on Earth at any given moment, and I had nearly no awareness of them or interest in them. My apartment where I lived for years in Brooklyn was across the street from one of the most acclaimed elementary schools in the borough. The kids played in the little yard across the street from my window, and I just didn’t notice or care. I thought kids were fine, but I didn’t give them much thought. Becoming a parent totally changed that. Not only do I think about my kids, but I think a lot about kids in general.

So I was in this rental, in this flux, a flux created by my having these kids, and I thought: my God, this is so weird, because once upon a time kids were invisible to me. And I thought about the children I had known at the time, but they were a total blur. I doted on them in my own way, I even babysat — it wasn’t like I was against kids — but they really did not make a dent on my consciousness. Whereas now, I feel like they form my consciousness almost completely. And it was that contrast, more than any other, that I wanted to explore — which is why I said Joachim was kind of the point of the book. The baby version of Joachim was…well he reminded me of a cartoon by Kate Beaton about the Great Gatsby, where the baby is like a potted plant you find in the corner of the room. That’s what Joachim is in the first part of the book: this “thing” Regina keeps forgetting exists. Regina’s just fallen in love with this woman who, by the way, has just had a baby! And the baby is sort of this cumbersome piece of furniture who keeps to the background. It’s only really later in that section that Regina even notices he exists, when she has to babysit him and she says to herself, “Oh, this is a baby.” And she sort of drives around with him in the back, you know, not knowing what to do with him.

That’s when I really knew — before I even knew what the book was going to be about plotwise — that I wanted this baby to rematerialize later, as a full-blown human being to shock Regina with his abiding humanity. Because he always was a human, and he always had made an impact on her life, even if it was only now that she noticed it. When she meets him at the end of the novel, she realizes that he’s not only a human but one that she quite likes talking to.

INTERVIEWER

I want to talk a bit about the book’s setting, and in particular the way you write about it. Something interesting I noticed about your style is that it feels very rooted in a particular time and place. Whereas a lot of fiction written nowadays feels very indistinct in its setting — a vague sense of a college or a city, but without history or periodization or the progression of time between eras (unless it’s explicitly a pre-1970 historical novel) — your book feels very rooted in the American liberal arts college of the 1990s in the period of High Theory and Cultural Studies[ref]INTERVIEWER’S NOTE: The term “Theory,” thus capitalized, tends to denote a trend in the intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth century towards an interdisciplinary and radical critique of their own traditions and conventions. In literary theory, this critique is often carried out through an examination of what it truly means to read or write. Theory’s most important component is poststructuralism, a tendency in French linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy to question, reverse, or otherwise subvert the binary oppositions we use to make sense of the world (e.g. “Self/Other,” “male/female,” “First World/Third World,” “spoken/written”), for example by pointing out how the terms are always reliant upon one another for meaning and that we thus cannot privilege one over the other (as in Derrida’s deconstruction) or by tracing the development of the terms and the ways they’ve been shaped by institutions of power through the course of history (as in Foucault’s discourse analysis). In addition to poststructuralism, “Theory” includes a wide a range of approaches, such as Marxist and Marxist-influenced political economy and cultural criticism, postcolonialism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, women’s studies and queer theory, hermeneutics, and critical race theory, among others; it has affected not only the discipline of literary criticism and theory but also history, the study of art, continental philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and many other fields. Its heyday was from the ’80s to approximately the early ’90s, when Choi’s novel is set.[/ref], with all the particular references that entails. What motivated you to write about that time?

CHOI

That’s so weird — your point about contemporary fiction, I mean. I think you’re right, but I’m not sure why that is.

As for myself the answer, which is not a particularly interesting answer, is that I lived through that time, and was deeply imprinted by it for better and for worse. Also, I think it’s a rule of thumb — if not for fiction in general then certainly for me — that fifteen years is just about exactly the time it takes to start getting perspective on something. I’d wanted to write about that period and that way of thinking, and the way I experienced it, for a very long time — but it didn’t become a period, didn’t coalesce and get edges and feel like the past, until about the fifteen-year mark.

The early ’90s in many ways were an extension of the late ’80s on college campuses. My experiences as an undergraduate and as a grad student have a lot of continuity. There was a lot of commonality in thinking and speaking; the intellectual trends seemed fairly consistent. I think things are really different now, by contrast, and it takes a while for that to happen — for a part of your life, a part of yourself, to start feeling like a part of the past. That whole period of overheated liberal arts started feeling like the past for me right around the time I finished my third book and started thinking about what to write next. And all of a sudden this period of my life, which had felt like my life in the present tense, suddenly looked only like a period of my life.

INTERVIEWER

Well, to speak to differences: one of the immediate things which will strike a young reader about the college campus in this particular book is the near-total absence of what is somewhat misleadingly called “meritocracy.” Which is to say, there’s a kind of hamster-wheel that certain segments of the population based in certain neighborhoods in affluent suburbs and cities are put on from literally birth which takes them, if not inevitably, then almost certainly along a path where they will end up at a university like this as a step along a pre-set career ladder. And the way you see this reflected in campus culture is through the careerism, the sense of an undergraduate education as certification for a future career in consulting, investment banking, and so on.

The lack of all that in the book was really striking, at least to me, because it’s set in such a recent past. Have you yourself have seen, from the point of view of a professor, any change in the climate on college campuses from the way you depicted it in My Education?

CHOI

I feel like I’ve seen so much change, but I don’t know how much of it dovetails with what you’re saying — I see it through different eyes, after all. The one thing that seems so clearly different to me is (and I’m not sure I’m seeing it clearly, or if it isn’t just a consequence of my limited perspective) the relative social conservatism and fiscal preoccupation of students today. It’s stunning to me.

When I was a student, both an undergrad and a grad student, there was a very “Us vs. Them” feeling, at least in my experience. The “Us” — not just the people studying in the humanities with me, but the guy who studied Bio, say, or the people who worked in the dining halls — was very progressive, kind of arty, interested in pursuing some form of service or community activism, teach English in Prague or in the inner city, become a painter. And it was very narcissistic, obviously. There was a lot of preoccupation with self-expression. But self-expression seemed to coincide with artistic pursuits or pursuits for the greater good in a way that I don’t really feel anymore. And “Them,” at least on my campuses, always seemed like this small and inexplicable element of fraternity-joining, investment bank-pursuing, usually white guys who’d gone to prep school and didn’t demonstrate against the CIA when they came to campus to recruit, and indeed might secretly talk to a CIA recruiter. Whereas “Us” would deplore the very presence of the CIA on campus and march around with signs yelling “CIA, go away!” and so on.

Which all makes the campus atmosphere seem like an extension of the Vietnam Era, I suppose; and maybe it was! Well into the late ’80s and early ’90s it was still the ’70s in a way. What was cool was to move to New York and starve and try to make it as an artist; what was cool was going to live in Paris and hang out; what was cool was to live in a group house where everyone worked for Teach for America and taught at an elementary school in Harlem where they got mugged on their very first day. What was uncool was to work for Morgan Stanley, or work for the CIA, or otherwise act like one of those white guys whose oil-painted portraits were on the walls at Yale. Whereas now I feel like it’s generally understood that what everybody’s really interested in is just making a lot of money. The idea of going to work at a hedge fund or whatever, to go to New York and make six figures upon graduation and live in a high rise — that seems all of a sudden like the default, and everyone wants to do that. It not only didn’t strike me to do any of that as a student, I found it repulsive — we found those people repulsive!

Maybe in the end my “Us” was narrower than I thought. But it really did seem like most of the kids I encountered felt that way.

INTERVIEWER

I’m reminded of another difference: for a novel set in a university, it’s remarkable that in My Education we hardly see any academic work get done. And in particular, given that we’re in a particular kind of university which perhaps no longer exists — as you said, the “overheated” liberal arts university dominated by the kind of poststructuralist literary theory which first came to prominence in the ’70s and its intellectual descendent Cultural Studies — I’m fascinated by the novel’s approach to those ideas. On the one hand, Baudrillard gets namechecked and Slavoj Žižek makes a cameo appearance as a guest at a dinner party; but on the other hand, there’s almost no engagement with the actual ideas involved. What was your relationship to that culture, and how did it affect your depiction of it in the book?

CHOI

The fact that no one in the book engages in substantive discussion or classwork is a criticism. I didn’t think ahead of time how I wanted to depict it all, of course, but there were never moments where I felt I needed to go back and tell myself, “OK, insert a long discussion of Lacan in there, or talk about how Žižek influenced Regina’s future,” because in fact he didn’t. For me, in my experience — and this was part of the reason I was so fascinated by this period when it became a period in my mind, withdrew into this thing I could examine from a distance — is that it was in many ways all about name-dropping. It was completely disconnected from the reality of our lived lives, at least in my experience.

One of the things I really deplored about the way Yale taught literary criticism when I was on campus was that it was so completely decontextualized that I never had any idea where these ideas had arisen or why. We didn’t even read the works of literature these essays were about. We would read Paul de Man on Shelley and never read the Shelley! It was as if the literature itself were somehow trivial or dirty, and people who thought the literature mattered in any way were dupes. They didn’t know about sign and signifier; it was almost the way you would regard the religious back then. “Oh, the religious are dupes of a system — and we know better.”

And yet the stuff that our attention was redirected to was so abstract that I couldn’t make a connection between it and anything else. So there was a way that the stuff you talked about in class would just sort of evanesce when you stepped out of class. You would speak in this strange code-language, coin phrases in it, and when you would leave and it would all blow away. It’s so irresponsible — intellectually irresponsible — that this was the way things were taught.

INTERVIEWER

You’re certainly not the only one who feels that way. Lots of novelists in your generation — I’m thinking here of Franzen, Eugenides, Egan, Cole — have written about literary theory in a way which seems ambivalent at best and outright hostile at worst, and they repeatedly say the same sort of things about how it was taught. And James Wood out-and-out attacked Theory in his review of a Terry Eagleton book as ultimately deleterious to the humanities.

CHOI

Right! And at the end of the day I feel like it was such a waste of students’ time. I really wish I’d studied something else — something like History, or Economics, or something. I wish I’d actually learned something about the world. The stuff I spent hours upon hours reading didn’t give me any of the information I want now as an adult; it didn’t explain or illuminate anything.

INTERVIEWER

But I wonder if this isn’t a generational thing, and if it might not be changing.

CHOI

How so?

INTERVIEWER

Well, I’m skeptical of how much anyone can speak for a generation, but my experience has been different. For me, that whole intellectual history — not only of poststructuralist literary theory but postcolonialism, Marxist and critical theory, critiques of economics and political economy, all that — was something that had been suppressed or brushed off as nonsense for my entire life and which I had to rediscover more or less on my own. And perhaps some of the very texts which were shoved down your throat without context have been, to me and some other people my age in my intellectual milieu, a sort of antidote. For those of us fed nothing but the mainline narratives in economics or history or literary criticism or whatever, who dug up a whole intellectual history of alternatives, we could reclaim from all that stuff which was presented to you as dogma a way of making sense of the pack of lies we’ve been fed.

But like I said, I can’t speak for everyone. A lot of it depends on your politics. I’m sure plenty of folks disagree.

CHOI

But I’m not sure I do, come to think of it. I feel like I should say one thing: when you said that you felt as if you were able to take different brands of theory and make sense of the lies that you’ve been fed, it reminded me of my own positive experience with Theory. I don’t want to broadly sweep it all aside, because I had at least one life-transforming experience with Theory that I definitely don’t regret. It’s a telling contrast to the other stuff we’ve been talking about. I’m referring to my experience of Women’s Studies.

All the theory that I read with reference to gender has been life-changing to this day, because it was all really rooted in reality and everyday life. I read this stuff as an undergraduate and it was revelatory because it explained so much that we took for granted. I remember reading Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, for instance, any number of these books even, and saying, “Oh my God!” It did exactly what it was supposed to do — demystify, deconstruct. And it did so because the stuff under discussion was stuff we knew because we lived it. And I also think it was taught in a much more systematic way, alongside the history of the women’s movement and gender and sexism.

That intellectual history work was something that never happened on the literary side of things, in part because people never read literature.

INTERVIEWER

So what do you think the dividing line or bridge between fiction — a novel, say, a movie, a poem — and ideas, politics, the world, life? Are novels essentially about love, marriage plots, unrequited longings, that sort of thing; or are they essentially about politics, culture, ideas, the things that shape the world we live in?

CHOI

I don’t think novels are “essentially” about either thing. And anyway the problem with novels being “about” politics is that novels can be political, but they’re usually about something else.

One of the things I really like about the novel form — and one reason that I think it will survive, even despite the massive constriction in reading we appear to be going through — is that it comes out of all these different literary traditions. It’s expansive, hard to define; you can do as many things with it as you can think of to do. I don’t think there are that many rules, or that its purview is narrow.

I mean, think about what a novel is! It’s just a story that takes a little while to get through which hopefully engages somebody’s interest. If those are your parameters, you can do just about anything. I mean, why not? Nobody’s going to fine you for a violation of the rules.