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![LT: It was a very heady, weird time—traumatic—after all those assassinations. It was extremely disturbing sometimes. PN: The motifs of travel, movement, the journey, the quest have a central place in your work. I was reminded of the way travel also figures in Jane Bowles’s fiction. She describes it as ‘a sensation that lay between suffering and enjoyment’ and she adds that for her character Lila, ‘it had a direct connection with her brother’s lies’— it’s as if the ambivalent feelings occasioned by travel have some fundamental relation to fiction. LT: In a way writing, like travel, is uncomfortable. Even if you get pleasure from it, and I do, the desire to do it also probably comes from tremendous frustration and a peculiar kind of displacement that you want to pin down. I don’t actually find travelling that enjoyable, but on the other hand I have a greater fear of stasis. I mean I have a real fear that if I sit in my apartment, for a very long time, I’ll lose any kind of perspective I have, that I really won’t be able to see my thoughts at all. They’ll simply be the wallpaper everything else is and I’ll just accept everything. My fear is that I’ll just accept all the ways in which I’m limited because I won’t any more see them as limits. You begin to recognize your limits when you’re up against the unfamiliar. PN: In Motion Sickness, you use a quotation from Julia Kristeva as an epigraph: ‘The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.’ Why is that notion so suggestive for you? LT: Because of issues around alienation…and the alien nation within. I was trying to turn a so-called anti-anti-travel novel [sic] into something that’s really about the place you’re in. Turning it on its head. I wanted to turn it all around and say, OK, here’s this travel business, but you can think about this differently. You can think that where you are is also not a secure place to be, and that you’re maybe feeling as uprooted as somebody who’s not in their own country. I mean, think about all the different populations in America who aren’t exactly served by that system. PN: You remember Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the whale’ on Henry Miller. He argues that expatriates always have a superficial sense of what’s going on, a limited perception of the place they’re in. LT: In England I cringe when they talk about something I’ve done as ‘expatriate’. I think Oh my God I’ve written an expat novel. There’s something really hideous about that. I think part of why I’ve done what I’ve done is an in-your-face thing. There’s a real distrust in the States of people who choose to live somewhere else. They’re losers, they can’t make it. Whatever the Romantic](https://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/crclarge/978041512/9780415123822.jpg "LT: It was a very heady, weird time—traumatic—after all those assassinations. It was extremely disturbing sometimes. PN: The motifs of travel, movement, the journey, the quest have a central place in your work. I was reminded of the way travel also figures in Jane Bowles’s fiction. She describes it as ‘a sensation that lay between suffering and enjoyment’ and she adds that for her character Lila, ‘it had a direct connection with her brother’s lies’— it’s as if the ambivalent feelings occasioned by travel have some fundamental relation to fiction. LT: In a way writing, like travel, is uncomfortable. Even if you get pleasure from it, and I do, the desire to do it also probably comes from tremendous frustration and a peculiar kind of displacement that you want to pin down. I don’t actually find travelling that enjoyable, but on the other hand I have a greater fear of stasis. I mean I have a real fear that if I sit in my apartment, for a very long time, I’ll lose any kind of perspective I have, that I really won’t be able to see my thoughts at all. They’ll simply be the wallpaper everything else is and I’ll just accept everything. My fear is that I’ll just accept all the ways in which I’m limited because I won’t any more see them as limits. You begin to recognize your limits when you’re up against the unfamiliar. PN: In Motion Sickness, you use a quotation from Julia Kristeva as an epigraph: ‘The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.’ Why is that notion so suggestive for you? LT: Because of issues around alienation…and the alien nation within. I was trying to turn a so-called anti-anti-travel novel [sic] into something that’s really about the place you’re in. Turning it on its head. I wanted to turn it all around and say, OK, here’s this travel business, but you can think about this differently. You can think that where you are is also not a secure place to be, and that you’re maybe feeling as uprooted as somebody who’s not in their own country. I mean, think about all the different populations in America who aren’t exactly served by that system. PN: You remember Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the whale’ on Henry Miller. He argues that expatriates always have a superficial sense of what’s going on, a limited perception of the place they’re in. LT: In England I cringe when they talk about something I’ve done as ‘expatriate’. I think Oh my God I’ve written an expat novel. There’s something really hideous about that. I think part of why I’ve done what I’ve done is an in-your-face thing. There’s a real distrust in the States of people who choose to live somewhere else. They’re losers, they can’t make it. Whatever the Romantic")
Chapter
LT: It was a very heady, weird time—traumatic—after all those assassinations. It was extremely disturbing sometimes. PN: The motifs of travel, movement, the journey, the quest have a central place in your work. I was reminded of the way travel also figures in Jane Bowles’s fiction. She describes it as ‘a sensation that lay between suffering and enjoyment’ and she adds that for her character Lila, ‘it had a direct connection with her brother’s lies’— it’s as if the ambivalent feelings occasioned by travel have some fundamental relation to fiction. LT: In a way writing, like travel, is uncomfortable. Even if you get pleasure from it, and I do, the desire to do it also probably comes from tremendous frustration and a peculiar kind of displacement that you want to pin down. I don’t actually find travelling that enjoyable, but on the other hand I have a greater fear of stasis. I mean I have a real fear that if I sit in my apartment, for a very long time, I’ll lose any kind of perspective I have, that I really won’t be able to see my thoughts at all. They’ll simply be the wallpaper everything else is and I’ll just accept everything. My fear is that I’ll just accept all the ways in which I’m limited because I won’t any more see them as limits. You begin to recognize your limits when you’re up against the unfamiliar. PN: In Motion Sickness, you use a quotation from Julia Kristeva as an epigraph: ‘The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.’ Why is that notion so suggestive for you? LT: Because of issues around alienation…and the alien nation within. I was trying to turn a so-called anti-anti-travel novel [sic] into something that’s really about the place you’re in. Turning it on its head. I wanted to turn it all around and say, OK, here’s this travel business, but you can think about this differently. You can think that where you are is also not a secure place to be, and that you’re maybe feeling as uprooted as somebody who’s not in their own country. I mean, think about all the different populations in America who aren’t exactly served by that system. PN: You remember Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the whale’ on Henry Miller. He argues that expatriates always have a superficial sense of what’s going on, a limited perception of the place they’re in. LT: In England I cringe when they talk about something I’ve done as ‘expatriate’. I think Oh my God I’ve written an expat novel. There’s something really hideous about that. I think part of why I’ve done what I’ve done is an in-your-face thing. There’s a real distrust in the States of people who choose to live somewhere else. They’re losers, they can’t make it. Whatever the Romantic
DOI link for LT: It was a very heady, weird time—traumatic—after all those assassinations. It was extremely disturbing sometimes. PN: The motifs of travel, movement, the journey, the quest have a central place in your work. I was reminded of the way travel also figures in Jane Bowles’s fiction. She describes it as ‘a sensation that lay between suffering and enjoyment’ and she adds that for her character Lila, ‘it had a direct connection with her brother’s lies’— it’s as if the ambivalent feelings occasioned by travel have some fundamental relation to fiction. LT: In a way writing, like travel, is uncomfortable. Even if you get pleasure from it, and I do, the desire to do it also probably comes from tremendous frustration and a peculiar kind of displacement that you want to pin down. I don’t actually find travelling that enjoyable, but on the other hand I have a greater fear of stasis. I mean I have a real fear that if I sit in my apartment, for a very long time, I’ll lose any kind of perspective I have, that I really won’t be able to see my thoughts at all. They’ll simply be the wallpaper everything else is and I’ll just accept everything. My fear is that I’ll just accept all the ways in which I’m limited because I won’t any more see them as limits. You begin to recognize your limits when you’re up against the unfamiliar. PN: In Motion Sickness, you use a quotation from Julia Kristeva as an epigraph: ‘The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.’ Why is that notion so suggestive for you? LT: Because of issues around alienation…and the alien nation within. I was trying to turn a so-called anti-anti-travel novel [sic] into something that’s really about the place you’re in. Turning it on its head. I wanted to turn it all around and say, OK, here’s this travel business, but you can think about this differently. You can think that where you are is also not a secure place to be, and that you’re maybe feeling as uprooted as somebody who’s not in their own country. I mean, think about all the different populations in America who aren’t exactly served by that system. PN: You remember Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the whale’ on Henry Miller. He argues that expatriates always have a superficial sense of what’s going on, a limited perception of the place they’re in. LT: In England I cringe when they talk about something I’ve done as ‘expatriate’. I think Oh my God I’ve written an expat novel. There’s something really hideous about that. I think part of why I’ve done what I’ve done is an in-your-face thing. There’s a real distrust in the States of people who choose to live somewhere else. They’re losers, they can’t make it. Whatever the Romantic
LT: It was a very heady, weird time—traumatic—after all those assassinations. It was extremely disturbing sometimes. PN: The motifs of travel, movement, the journey, the quest have a central place in your work. I was reminded of the way travel also figures in Jane Bowles’s fiction. She describes it as ‘a sensation that lay between suffering and enjoyment’ and she adds that for her character Lila, ‘it had a direct connection with her brother’s lies’— it’s as if the ambivalent feelings occasioned by travel have some fundamental relation to fiction. LT: In a way writing, like travel, is uncomfortable. Even if you get pleasure from it, and I do, the desire to do it also probably comes from tremendous frustration and a peculiar kind of displacement that you want to pin down. I don’t actually find travelling that enjoyable, but on the other hand I have a greater fear of stasis. I mean I have a real fear that if I sit in my apartment, for a very long time, I’ll lose any kind of perspective I have, that I really won’t be able to see my thoughts at all. They’ll simply be the wallpaper everything else is and I’ll just accept everything. My fear is that I’ll just accept all the ways in which I’m limited because I won’t any more see them as limits. You begin to recognize your limits when you’re up against the unfamiliar. PN: In Motion Sickness, you use a quotation from Julia Kristeva as an epigraph: ‘The expatriate represents, in fact, the normal state of an average citizen in this last part of the 20th century.’ Why is that notion so suggestive for you? LT: Because of issues around alienation…and the alien nation within. I was trying to turn a so-called anti-anti-travel novel [sic] into something that’s really about the place you’re in. Turning it on its head. I wanted to turn it all around and say, OK, here’s this travel business, but you can think about this differently. You can think that where you are is also not a secure place to be, and that you’re maybe feeling as uprooted as somebody who’s not in their own country. I mean, think about all the different populations in America who aren’t exactly served by that system. PN: You remember Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the whale’ on Henry Miller. He argues that expatriates always have a superficial sense of what’s going on, a limited perception of the place they’re in. LT: In England I cringe when they talk about something I’ve done as ‘expatriate’. I think Oh my God I’ve written an expat novel. There’s something really hideous about that. I think part of why I’ve done what I’ve done is an in-your-face thing. There’s a real distrust in the States of people who choose to live somewhere else. They’re losers, they can’t make it. Whatever the Romantic
ABSTRACT
LT: It was a very heady, weird time-traumatic-after all those assassinations. It was extremely disturbing sometimes.
