Suicide Blonde

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Image: I want to ask you another question related to that same desire to see and exist more expansively. In the book you detail your fascination with orca whales, and describe a trip you made to Washington State’s San Juan Islands to see the Southern Resident orcas who live in the Salish Sea. You write, “Whales are like God […] Not seeing them is just as important as seeing them.” You then quote Alan Watts as writing, “Here is the great difficulty […] in passing from the symbol and the idea of God and into God himself. It is that God is pure life, and we are terrified of such life because we cannot hold it or possess it, and we will not know what it will do to us.” How has this not seeing—this recognition of what cannot be held—altered or affected your way of being in the world? The diary of a death wish . . . Suicide Blonde doles out some bitter, valuable lessons.--- New Yorker My face, as I age, has become less interesting to men. This is what women mean when they say that they feel invisible. The feeling is not that different from wearing a Covid-19 mask. People on the street don’t look at me, don’t register my face. Among colleagues, friends, sometimes even family, I am less funny, less animated, somehow blander and less interesting. My face, as I age, has become less interesting to men. This is what women mean when they say that they feel invisible. If you come to this novel after reading other of Steinke's work, as I have, it'll seem like pretty tame stuff. This is not a criticism, as this is a very fine novel, but Up Through the Water is a sea change from some of Steinke's other novels, such as Suicide Blonde and Jesus Saves, gut-wrenching works awash in suffering and salvation. I wrote Suicide Blonde when I was in my late ‘20s and my mother was a complicated and negative presence in my life then. She pushed me to marry a rich man, but she also wanted me to be a lawyer. The messages I got from her were confused, wounded, chaotic. She felt her life had gone wrong but she did not really know why.

My face, while a body part, is much more than a hand or a foot—it stands in for my whole body, my whole self.

Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts". EMP Museum. Archived from the original on November 17, 2011 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. DS: As a younger person, I felt sort of obsessed with being appealing, with being a physical force. That was a false self, though. I think of Thomas Merton’s idea of a true self/false self here. Menopause was a wake-up call, a chipping away of the false self. I felt conscious that time had gone by and that moving in the world so focused on my physical self wasn’t working anymore—and frankly hadn’t ever worked.

Even so, Ginger deeply loves her father, or more precisely, empathizes with him. Like her, he is haunted by the death of his wife from cancer, and the father-daughter bond is solidified by their mutual sense of alienation. The minister's church has long been in decline, housed in a banal suburban box-like structure after being forced to move from a beautiful old downtown cathedral due to the socio-economic decline of the neighborhood and subsequent white flight. Evolutionary biology traces the emotive face from a time before language and links it to the growing complexity of our early social groups. The better early humans were at conveying feelings, the more successful they were at the co-operations that pushed civilization forward. Some scientists have suggested that homo-sapiens greater facility for facial expression is what allowed us to overtake the less facially dexterous Neanderthals. I'd read another of Steinke's more popular books, Suicide Blonde last year, but this one is much more substantial on every level. A rewarding experience for those with patience. For those concerned about the title, be aware that this novel -- which I find to be a grand achievement in fiction -- has other things in mind; it's an ambitious examination of contemporary America...Rail: It’s so great you mentioned your daughter, because I was so interested in the passage in Suicide Blonde where Madam Pig asks Jesse “who told you that you have to do what you don’t want? [...] Your mother?” I don’t have a daughter, but I’ve been obsessed with the idea of having one for a few years now, and I am obsessed with writing about my own mother and her family. The motif of a complicated mother-daughter relationship is so common in literature written by women. It is empowering in the way that writing about female companionship is, in that it creates a semi-separate world where women are exerting such tremendous influence on each other and supporting each other against a greater (usually patriarchal) force or pulling each other down further. Why do you think we write so intensely about these semi-separate worlds and our relationships with our mothers and other women? Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role model preferred by the attendees of her father's suburban church, where he ministers to an aging, ever-dwindling congregation. Rail: It’s interesting that you say that Jess doesn’t realize exactly what’s happening in her own relationship with her mother and its effects on her. It reminds me of something you used to say with regards to the more confusing parts of my memoir: “embrace the ambiguity” and “embrace the dark.” It’s such a relief, as a person first and then as a writer, to embrace both ambiguity in our relationships and their complexity and in our lives in general and our opinions about things and how things like our ideas of religiosity and spirituality should play out. In that vein, I want to talk about Jesse’s relationship to religion and God in the book. She says that the point of Jesus (or God), she thinks, might be just to know everything about us and accept us anyway. I love this idea, but it is so human-centric too. Could you talk a little bit more about that conception of God—why do you think Jesse (or anyone) would feel this way about God? And as a larger question what, to you, is the “point” of religion? Inara Verzemnieks's Among the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe By Kerri Arsenault

A Talk about Music: Joey Agresta's Let's Not Talk About Music & Viewfound's Memorate By Daniel Wilson It comes off as easy, but I doubt it is—writing well isn’t easy for anyone—but Steinke’s writing has been marked by a kind of languid sureness from the start. Like so many naturals with a singular vision and an unyielding gift, Steinke wrote a perfect book nearly right out of the gate, one which both emanates from its time and will last the test of time. I’m glad, on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, for Suicide Blonde to come around again, to show us how it’s done. Levinas’s philosophy of the face began while he was a prisoner in a German camp during World War II. There his humanity was negated. “Our coming and going, our sorrow and laughter, illness and distraction, the work of our hands and the anguish of our eyes, all that passed in parenthesis.” It was a face, the face of an animal, that finally restores the camp to ethical health. “We called him Bobby…he would appear at morning assembly and would wait for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight.” A dog’s face affirms Levinas’s human one. “For him there was no doubt that we were men.” During the 17th century doctors wore bird masks to protect themselves from the miasma which they thought carried the plague. The characters though, didn't made me feel for them. Yes their lives are hard, but nothing that happened really made me hope for or suffer with them.I do think Jesse in Suicide Blonde is in the haze of her mother’s chaotic, unlived life. She does not understand that is part of her acting out, but it is what drives her, just as much as sexual desire, the unfulfilled inchoate desires of her mother haunting her and moving through her. Hallucinatory, dystopian . . . a disturbing, poisonous fable of the dire consequences of derailed passion."-- New York Times Sandy uses her childhood stuffed animals and the flying horses and unicorns in her fantasy novels to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, these characters come to life. They are as real as her kidnapper. As real as Jesus. Sandy’s ordeal is brutal. Or said another way, it is realistic. The violence is not gratuitous or titillating. It is devastating. Steinke: When I wrote Suicide Blonde I was living with the aftermath of my parents’ divorce. My mother never got over the divorce, she scrambled to make money and find her way after being a housewife for twenty-five years. She grew each year more depressed. She was in that generation of women that really got screwed. The last of their kind. Raised to be a wife and mother, then thrust into the work force without any education or work experience. She struggled financially. Often around the poverty line. I found myself wondering if any new relationship my father’s or any divorced person could have, founded as it would be on the unhappiness of someone else, could be lasting or satisfying.