Interview: Larissa Pham in conversation with Kelly McMasters

Larissa Pham is the author of Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy and the novella Fantasian. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Guernica, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Hofstra’s Great Writers, Great Readings series hosted Pham in conversation with Kelly McMasters, Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies. The following conversation is adapted from that event.

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Kelly McMasters: I thought we could start by getting a sense of your new book, Pop Song, as a whole, because it’s a little different than a typical memoir or book of essays. Could you give us an introduction to the work?

Larissa Pham: Pop Song is not really a book with a core argument, which I think puts it in contrast to a lot of big nonfiction books that aim to tell you: This is the history of Western civilization. It’s not that. But it is kind of like a meandering and very curious journey through a certain chronology of my own life set against this backdrop of various inquiries into art history, culture, and music. There is a chronology to it, but it’s also just a book about a lot of things that I really cared about, and I somehow got away with writing about them.  

KM: I know in the flap copy this is called “a memoir in essays” and I’ve heard you call these pieces chapters or essays. I want to understand how this book came together and how you chose the pieces to include. As an essayist, you published some pieces, for example, in The Paris Review Daily. How did you know it wanted to be a book, which parts wanted to be in the book, and how to put them in order?

LP: There’s actually an essay in this book that kind of talks about this process. The book itself is very meta; I had a reviewer mention, very kindly I thought, that I seem to be grappling with the impossibility of language to say the things that I wanted to say which is why I’m always turning towards other forms like art and music. The book originally started as an investigation of contemporary or modern intimacy. I was really interested in what those moments in a relationship are where two people are drawing close to each other. What does that feel like? What is there, what is that substance? And then along the way it turned into a book about love, and it being a book about love meant that it was also a book about trauma or all the things that that love uprooted. Once I had figured out what the book was about, it became a little bit easier to think, “Oh, I really want to write about what it means to sit in silence with someone.” There’s a chapter about that. Or, “I really want to write about what it means to chase intimacy with someone or many people through taking their picture,” so it began to coalesce around that. The book is also structured in a sense of getting to know the narrator and the narrator getting to know herself, the narrator being me a couple years back. There is this deepening sense also of self-knowledge and closeness with the storyline itself, so that also contributed to how I was organizing things in very general terms.

KM: In a lot of the pieces there is this “you” on the page, this use of second person. Can you talk a little bit about the presence of “you” and the different ways you used that pronoun in this book? 

LP: Yes, I think the book is addressed to a central figure who is like the figure of a lover, which is very Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, or also very Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. There is a legacy of this kind of address, and you see it a lot in poetry. My friend, Tony Tulathimutte, recently told me that it’s called a complaint when you use the “you.” 

It was definitely a book where I didn’t want the figure of this lover—this person that I was in love with who, spoiler alert, we end up parting ways at the end of the book—to be a character. I didn’t want it to be this person who’s constructed out of words; that didn’t feel like the right model for what I was trying to accomplish. Instead, it seemed better to almost write it like a letter, like a love letter, but also in doing so, know that it was going to have an audience much larger than this one person. I think when you write something to a person, the person reading it isn’t thinking about the author’s person, they’re thinking about someone in their life who might also be that person. That’s the beauty of a pop song. When Justin Bieber is singing about a “you,” we’re not thinking Hailey Bieber, we’re thinking the person that we love. I think I was also very much in dialogue with that. 

KM:  I like that idea of the complaint. That “you” often feels like a finger pointed into someone’s chest, which can be deployed in a really successful way, but with this “you” there was an intimacy. Sometimes it felt like me, sometimes it felt like someone I knew. When you say “a character made of words” do you mean the choice to not build that character on the page and use a name, or something else? 

LP: I think when you name a character you create a little skeleton of a person on the page for your reader to interact with, and I was okay doing that with myself. I’m okay doing it in small parts in the book with, I think most notably, Robert the professor. He was a real person, Robert Reed, may he rest in peace. He was someone who really meant a lot to me and writing him as a character felt like something that I could do, but for other more complicated relationships, it didn’t feel fair to try to do that. It is something that one navigates when writing about real people. 

KM: I like that question of fair, what is fair, because writers who have sat on this stage have come to land across all points of the spectrum. I think that’s true for nonfiction writers; it’s what you’re personally comfortable with. So many times, as an author writing tricky nonfiction, people will tell them just to make it fiction. I am curious, because I know you wrote fiction in the past and you are writing fiction now, why the mode of nonfiction for this particular project? 

LP: I think with creative nonfiction there is this premise that what you’re saying is true, that it’s coming from life, so then your work as an author or as a writer is to reckon with the uncertainty that is life. We can all go home and write in our journals a different memory of tonight and we would all be right, but the distilled thing that we are experiencing right now can’t be experienced again. Nonfiction’s whole premise is that it did happen, so I think the questions that it brings up are more about memory, recall, language, and articulation, which are the questions that I was interested in for this book. I wanted to write about these almost meta questions that surround nonfiction, whereas in fiction projects that I’ve worked on, you’re also building a world, but you’re building it line by line, so you have a different kind of faith in the sentences because your whole job is to convince someone to care about these characters. 

KM: And believe in them in a different way.

LP: Yeah, exactly! You’re writing towards truth, but in very different ways. I think it’s suited for different projects.  

KM: I think in many places you seem to write almost against truth, purposefully looking away from something, or looking away until you have to look at it on the page. I’m thinking particularly of your piece The Art of the Bruise where there are these two really beautiful strands of the art and your own body, and then only at the end, when they come together, do we understand why the art is helping you understand your own body, your bruises, and your relationship with pain. You can’t look at it too soon because it seemed like the narrator needed the art to look through to experience her own pain. 

LP: There’s nothing new under the sun. Everyone has done everything before, and what we are feeling is not particularly novel, but that’s so reassuring because then when you’re feeling something, there’s usually a piece of art that will relate to that impulse. That bruise essay, which first appeared in The Paris Review, is really interesting in particular because my narrator is moving through time and reconciling with things that I had thought were true or things that I had thought I had believed, and then writing from the seat of a little bit more knowledge. That balance is what I think you are referring to as well: coming to an understanding of something as opposed to arriving at something knowing what it means already. I feel like much of the book is not like that. It’s more: I’m going to figure this out and you’re going to come with me, and we’re going to figure it out together.

KM: And that feels so alive on the page, we feel that in the sentences. Last semester we had Jia Tolentino here, another power essayist. She said that when she sits down and knows that she wants to write an essay, the question that goes through her mind is “what is the first time that somebody asked this question?” Then she tries to go back into history and let that question dictate her research for how far back she goes into, say, Victorian wedding dresses, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or whatever it is that is her subject. I was wondering about the chicken and the egg phenomenon in your work, whether there was a piece of art that inspired you and then you wrote, or did you have the idea of the subject and then you searched for work to then enter into the writing?

LP: I think it’s both. I think my equivalent to Jia’s question might be “how has this been said in other ways before?” because I’m usually interested in describing a phenomenon, and then I look for things like that. In the photography essay, I’m drawing upon my own experience of being an amateur photographer and going around with my little film camera trying to basically force people into these really intimate positions with me so that I could feel like I had captured some kind of closeness with them that I actually didn’t have. I knew of some photographers that fit that mode of working, for example Nan Goldin, and then, while I was conceiving of these ideas, I ended up seeing a Peter Hujar show at the Morgan Library. A lot of the work in this piece is drawn from shows that I did see and had a response to. I would see something, and it would resonate with me, so it kind of feeds itself. DeCarava is in this book because a photographer friend introduced me to his work. He said his work is all about shadows, the idea that there is information in the shadows, and that was so in dialogue with these images of the interior that I was thinking about. I thought this was a perfect person for me to research and write about, and I ended up being drawn to one photograph in particular. So, it is kind of a chicken or the egg situation, but I think, for me, it does come down to having an authentic experience with something. 

KM: And probably being open to seeing in a different way and activating your senses to be aware that “oh, I’m thinking about this thing and that relates to it.” Whereas, so often we go through life with our heads down, we’re just getting to the next place, we’re not staying open as artists to the world. Especially coming out of a pandemic where so many of us were just stuck in a room, we’ve almost forgotten how to be in the world and how to interact. Interaction is scary suddenly, and so is the fact that there is an entire Earth to be in dialogue with. I’m so excited to see art shows and go to concerts again and feel that. Reading for me was the lifeline, but it’s different when it’s another art form. And you, being a painter as well, I like that idea of the same things being expressed differently, trying to filter and metabolize what that means, and the universality of certain ideas. 

One of the many strengths of your work is that universality where you say something and we think, “Wow, I can’t believe this narrator just said that on the page!” And then a second later, the reader thinks, “Oh gosh, I feel that same way, but I’ve never said it out loud, or I would never want to say it out loud.” There’s this intimacy and bravery on the page. I’ve seen you in interviews refer to the narrator as “she,” and I wanted to ask you about the vulnerability necessary to go to some of the intimate places that you do in this book and on the page. How do you protect yourself? Is that different when you’re writing as opposed to publishing? What is that relationship like on the page with your narrator? 

LP: I think as a writer of creative nonfiction, it’s important for me to enter into a contract with the reader like it’s a matter of trust. There are things in this book that I haven’t really talked about in any other capacity, and I was able to do that because I thought, alright, it’s a book. The pages are next to each other; you can’t scroll and screenshot. It’s like a package you have to pay twenty-six dollars to get. When I put something into this book, I’m entering into a contract with the reader assuming that they’re going to receive it with good faith; and therefore, I can tell them things about myself, or my thoughts or my experiences, knowing that they will be safe in this format, knowing that a book allows you to do certain things. But also knowing that, as a writer, my responsibility is that I can’t write something knowing that I’m going to jerk the reader around or say things I don’t mean and then make the reader feel bad because they believed it in the first page. People do that and they’re very good at it, but I’m just not a writer like that. The vulnerability that I ask of my readers, and the trust that I ask of my readers, is such that I can’t jerk people around, so I don’t want to. Thinking about where my narrator is coming from, where I am writing from, was beneficial. I think having a buffer of time was really helpful. I wasn’t writing an op-ed, I wasn’t saying “today, I believe this.” I was setting it up to have a little distance, and I think that allowed me to have clarity around what I was thinking and give space for that thinking to evolve. 

KM: Do you use things like journals or photographs to build in that critical distance to sort of see that “she” as separate? 

LP: Yes, a little. I don’t really keep a journal these days, I wish I did. I do use photos, but, strangely enough, the chronology of this spans about ten years from when I was about seventeen to twenty-seven, and I’m turning twenty-nine soon, so there is a little bit of distance from where the end point of my narrator is. I think the biggest distancing mechanism was actually compassion. At points in the book, I am very young and I’m writing from enough distance that I have a real compassion for this person who I no longer see as me, even though she’s clearly still me, and I think that is helpful. 

KM: I think it also allows you to deliver that person in full color in a way that feels very honest to a reader because you achieve that critical distance, and we believe it. There’s that narrator on the page, the person writing, as well as that character, and I felt that compassion. It actually made me have compassion for myself in many ways, so thank you. I’m glad you brought up your age because that is something that I wanted to talk about. One of the reasons I wanted to bring you here is that I think so often new writers or young writers, especially when they come to nonfiction, say, “Well, what could I possibly say? I have nothing to say. I don’t have enough experience.” And this is such a gorgeous answer to that; it is point of view, not age. 

Speaking of age, I also wanted to talk about social media. How does social media affect your decision about publishing personal work? 

LP: That’s such an important question. When I was starting out, I definitely wrote things that maybe exposed me more than I needed to. I attributed this to the blog culture of the early 2010s, especially coming from a more political background. It was the era where everyone was writing for Gawker or Jezebel, and they were writing about privilege. They were explaining what privilege was to people who were just encountering this kind of language for the first time and it was just a completely different era. I think we don’t need that era of journalism anymore; we’ve evolved past it because it did the work that it needed to do. So, when I think now about writing something personal, I think: Gosh, well you really better mean it. Do I want to say this, do I want to have this on the record? Things disappear on the internet all the time, but things are also preserved on the internet all the time. 

The most important thing for me recently has been that I want to write things that I am proud of and that I believe in. I think something that’s interesting about publishing in general is that you can do it an any point. Even if you have a day job or you’re still a student or whatever circumstance, you don’t have to be a full-time writer in order to publish. That also means that if you are not a full-time writer, then you have the luxury of being able to decide what you put out and I think that is very important. Sometimes there’s this rush to want to put something out, but I think it’s important to make sure that it is something that you are really proud of and that you believe. That has really stayed with me. I’ve written a lot of content in my life, but in terms of thinking about very serious literary creative nonfiction, it’s just good to keep in mind.

For the second part of your question in terms of social media, it’s not as essential as I think people say it is. I think people think it’s a huge deal especially in publishing circles, but it really doesn’t matter. 

KM: Personally, I find I go through swings with social media. When I’m in the depths of writing, I can’t do the quick hits of social media. There’s this impulse to post your thought before you’ve actually processed it, and I think that’s good for cataloguing in a way. But it’s very different than a book, for example, and having these years to think about something even if you’re not thinking about it in terms of writing a draft and then redrafting years later. It’s percolating and these are things that you always think about, and then you arrive to the page with years of thoughts. So, I’m glad to hear you say that social media is not as important as some people might think. 

LP: Great tweets are great, but tweeting is not writing and there’s a big difference. I have friends in media who I will get drinks with, and they say, “Oh my gosh, did you see so-and-so retweeted so-and-so?” and I’m like “No, I didn’t!” and then I think about going back into my mind palace. 

For what it is, I think social media is important, but I think there are many ways of thinking through something, and I think preserving space for yourself to think outside of fast-paced conversations that are frequently designed to make people angry is really important. Something that was crucial to me while writing this, and is still crucial to me now as I hang out in this MFA program, is that surrounding myself with things that are already made and are already good is really important. If there’s a book that’s been around for ten or twelve years and is a classic that you’ve been meaning to read, just read it. It’s going to be so much more valuable than scrolling.

KM: Before we end, I’m going to ask another question based on what you just talked about, the idea of having another job. I know you’ve done a lot of trauma work, and I wondered about that in relation to the past semesters of the pandemic. When I asked my students to write personal stories, I worried that I would be pushing them during a time that maybe was dangerous to push them, and yet I was shocked, having taught nearly fifteen years, that the work was as amazing as it was and that the students were just incredible. I wonder if you could talk about the element of self-care that is important when you come to the page whether the topic is traumatic or the time that you’re writing in is traumatic. Do you have suggestions for ways to protect yourself either on the page or in real life while you’re working on these stories? 

LP: I think writing in a hectic or traumatic time will require different things depending on who you are and what is going on for you. Maybe you are the kind of person where writing becomes this oasis. It’s your own space, you need a lot of solitude to be a writer, and when you can carve that out for yourself that can be really amazing. Or maybe your life is super busy and really chaotic, and you can’t find that space and you’re frustrated when you can’t do that, then you need to practice forgiveness. You’re still a writer when you’re not writing because you’re thinking, and you’re always going to think. When you write, regardless of genre, your mind is the thing that holds your work together. 

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Transcribed by Olivia Kuch