Surrealist movement, how difficult it was for them. ‘Madame Realism’ was a retort to Surrealism. It really doesn’t have to do with realism. PN: Going back to Haunted Houses, the three female characters seem almost permeable with each other. The reader finds it hard to pull them apart. LT: That’s what Paul Bowles said too. He said it was like a Russian novel, that he couldn’t keep them apart, but that he liked that. It was deliberate. In so many novels characters were pitched against each other, to represent so many different ideas, and then there would be a clash. Lawrence is the perfect example of that. I was interested in the social as well as the psychological, how these interpenetrated. I thought if you took a particular moment you could find girls being turned into girls and there would be a lot of similarities, questions about virginity, their mothers, their fathers. So, yes, they would be as much like each other as unlike each other—maybe more so. It was so confusing to me I had to make a chart to remember the characteristics I had given to Emily, Jane or Grace. PN: There’s something similar about character in Motion Sickness… LT: Yes, in the ‘I’ being unnamed, but I wanted to do the opposite there, which was to go from characters who never met each other, as in Haunted Houses, to ones who constantly meet. I wanted to play with that happening and see if I could get away with it. PN: One major theme of the book seems to be summed up in a quotation you give from Simone de Beauvoir: ‘It is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity.’ That awkward passage from self to other seems to provide one of the main dynamics in your narratives. LT: I think I’m more comfortable with ‘identity’ than with ‘self’. There’s something historically about ‘self’ that assumes one owns it. With ‘identity’ or ‘subjectivity’ you have the sense that it’s shot through with others already. There’s something very painful about Haunted Houses and not painful about Motion Sickness. There is the anxiety of recognizing how really unstable your identity is in Motion Sickness. When you meet others on the road, your relation to yourself can change. Haunted Houses is more painful because the girls are trying to achieve some identity, as if they’ll be able to. By the time I wrote Motion Sickness, my sense was that there was no use in trying. You’re not going to achieve a stable existence, but that’s not so terrible in a way. It might make you sick, though, once in a while, because of that motion.

DOI link for Surrealist movement, how difficult it was for them. ‘Madame Realism’ was a retort to Surrealism. It really doesn’t have to do with realism. PN: Going back to Haunted Houses, the three female characters seem almost permeable with each other. The reader finds it hard to pull them apart. LT: That’s what Paul Bowles said too. He said it was like a Russian novel, that he couldn’t keep them apart, but that he liked that. It was deliberate. In so many novels characters were pitched against each other, to represent so many different ideas, and then there would be a clash. Lawrence is the perfect example of that. I was interested in the social as well as the psychological, how these interpenetrated. I thought if you took a particular moment you could find girls being turned into girls and there would be a lot of similarities, questions about virginity, their mothers, their fathers. So, yes, they would be as much like each other as unlike each other—maybe more so. It was so confusing to me I had to make a chart to remember the characteristics I had given to Emily, Jane or Grace. PN: There’s something similar about character in Motion Sickness… LT: Yes, in the ‘I’ being unnamed, but I wanted to do the opposite there, which was to go from characters who never met each other, as in Haunted Houses, to ones who constantly meet. I wanted to play with that happening and see if I could get away with it. PN: One major theme of the book seems to be summed up in a quotation you give from Simone de Beauvoir: ‘It is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity.’ That awkward passage from self to other seems to provide one of the main dynamics in your narratives. LT: I think I’m more comfortable with ‘identity’ than with ‘self’. There’s something historically about ‘self’ that assumes one owns it. With ‘identity’ or ‘subjectivity’ you have the sense that it’s shot through with others already. There’s something very painful about Haunted Houses and not painful about Motion Sickness. There is the anxiety of recognizing how really unstable your identity is in Motion Sickness. When you meet others on the road, your relation to yourself can change. Haunted Houses is more painful because the girls are trying to achieve some identity, as if they’ll be able to. By the time I wrote Motion Sickness, my sense was that there was no use in trying. You’re not going to achieve a stable existence, but that’s not so terrible in a way. It might make you sick, though, once in a while, because of that motion.

Surrealist movement, how difficult it was for them. ‘Madame Realism’ was a retort to Surrealism. It really doesn’t have to do with realism. PN: Going back to Haunted Houses, the three female characters seem almost permeable with each other. The reader finds it hard to pull them apart. LT: That’s what Paul Bowles said too. He said it was like a Russian novel, that he couldn’t keep them apart, but that he liked that. It was deliberate. In so many novels characters were pitched against each other, to represent so many different ideas, and then there would be a clash. Lawrence is the perfect example of that. I was interested in the social as well as the psychological, how these interpenetrated. I thought if you took a particular moment you could find girls being turned into girls and there would be a lot of similarities, questions about virginity, their mothers, their fathers. So, yes, they would be as much like each other as unlike each other—maybe more so. It was so confusing to me I had to make a chart to remember the characteristics I had given to Emily, Jane or Grace. PN: There’s something similar about character in Motion Sickness… LT: Yes, in the ‘I’ being unnamed, but I wanted to do the opposite there, which was to go from characters who never met each other, as in Haunted Houses, to ones who constantly meet. I wanted to play with that happening and see if I could get away with it. PN: One major theme of the book seems to be summed up in a quotation you give from Simone de Beauvoir: ‘It is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity.’ That awkward passage from self to other seems to provide one of the main dynamics in your narratives. LT: I think I’m more comfortable with ‘identity’ than with ‘self’. There’s something historically about ‘self’ that assumes one owns it. With ‘identity’ or ‘subjectivity’ you have the sense that it’s shot through with others already. There’s something very painful about Haunted Houses and not painful about Motion Sickness. There is the anxiety of recognizing how really unstable your identity is in Motion Sickness. When you meet others on the road, your relation to yourself can change. Haunted Houses is more painful because the girls are trying to achieve some identity, as if they’ll be able to. By the time I wrote Motion Sickness, my sense was that there was no use in trying. You’re not going to achieve a stable existence, but that’s not so terrible in a way. It might make you sick, though, once in a while, because of that motion.