Out of Language Comes Nothing and Everything

Jennifer Kabat writes on Lynne Tillman and her new collection, “Thrilled to Death.”

By Jennifer KabatAugust 21, 2025

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

“TEN TEN WINS, ten ten on your dial, the news never stops, the news all the time.” That is the opening of an unpublished Lynne Tillman story from the early nineties, also maybe the opening of my life as a writer. In the story “Bad News,” a woman named Elizabeth overidentifies with the coverage on all-news radio. It begins with a report of someone raped and thrown off a roof. The ensuing narrative is imbued with news of a city—news rendered sensationalist to satisfy audiences, ever moving, never stopping, always on to the next thrilling headline. The station’s strapline kicks in, and something strange and comedic happens: Elizabeth has conversations in her head, planning what she might say to an attacker, as though her dad were a famous mobster.

Picture me: 21, 22, in a railroad apartment on the Lower East Side, the radio’s refrain like water, like waves, like air itself as I am trying to write, trying to be. I also needed the radio’s hum to hold me, to keep me from the isolation of my thoughts. The AM station’s tinny intonations repeated: “You give us twenty-two minutes, we'll give you the world.” The sheer hubris of claiming to contain the world between ad breaks: a cockiness from another era. Yet the way Tillman captures fear and news as intertwined—as terrifying and electrifying, a pulse underlying everything—feels contemporary. “Bad News,” with its inner monologue extending to baroque imaginings, reads like an essay on being a woman in an era of 24-hour media.

This revelation of consciousness is a Lynne Tillman hallmark. So too: Humor, jabs and japes, lists, puns, and a deadpan near-flatness; detail is kept spare and sparse. I adore her short work—fiction, essays, I don’t discriminate. They’re not bound to some puritanical ideas of plot or progress. They don’t work toward easy resolution. Yet in them all, she is saying something larger about a moment—and while she has been writing since the 1980s, that moment is always now.

There I am, a PhD dropout in art history. That person is excruciating for me to see, so porous to the news and the world it describes that she is literally disappearing as she—I—starve myself, tense and taut, keeping lists of what I eat as if that might provide some stable border between me and everything else. (In a Lynne Tillman story, this would be funny, and it is … in retrospect.) Desperate as I was for boundaries, I was also searching for a new way of writing outward, to the world and the objects and people in it.

For me and my porous, permeable, nervous self, Tillman arrived like an epiphany. Take how she recently described her thinking in Granta:

I don’t know if I can see, separate from my gender, the ideas I have unconsciously absorbed. I don’t think I’m a woman. Consciousness awakens one to inherited or educated biases. That is my hope. I might be able to see as a queer woman or straight man, say. Or, I might be caged in my own room of yellow wallpaper. I can’t claim a clean sweep of that room’s indoctrinations, my early education, can’t say it’s been done thoroughly or completely. Making formal analyses helps me, I think, see other ways than subjectively to see, but still …

I suppose I want to find a coherent narrative, and know I will not.

That feels like everything: the impossibility of coherent narrative, the desire for it nonetheless, the sense of inseparability I was living and trying to capture. This is the realm that is always, ever, in her work. So, there I was, and in came Lynne Tillman, her stories, essays, and characters smoking and striding into my world. Here she is now with Thrilled to Death, her own selection of stories published this spring.

The last decade has produced three collections of Tillman’s shorter works: first her essays and criticism in What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2013); then The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016); and this year, a book of conversations and interviews (with Taylor Lewandowski), The Mystery of Perception; plus (and star this, start here!) Thrilled to Death. In them, in the latest especially, we can locate central ideas throughout her career—interiority, the self and the world, inner conversations and outer manifestations—as well as the mutability of form itself, that fiction and nonfiction can cross over or seem indistinguishable. In the introduction to What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, Colm Tóibín writes: “Creating space for your own work involves creating space for the work that made a difference to you.” There is Tóibín, carving out space for his writing by writing on Lynne Tillman, and here I am writing on her too, she who has been with me in all my spaces and rooms, shifting selves, and multiple bookshelves.

Tillman and I talked as I was working on this. She is generous with others, generous to writers. She said she’d never seen herself as a short story writer, at least not until she started to pull this book together, digging into the files. It is hard, reading them, not to amass a kind of collection myself.

Laura Bush, LBJ, and Lincoln walk into a room

Thrilled to Death opens with “Come and Go,” which begins as what we’d identify as a story. Characters intersect in a hospital, and then in life. Two date and another is dropped off at rehab. Yet it closes with a meditation on story itself, as if an invocation. The collection likewise ends with dying, with the eponymous “Thrilled to Death.” This seems particularly meaningful, not just for a final story, but also for Tillman herself. She is now 78, and as much as I hate to think it, to write it (I type and delete this sentence again and again), she is approaching it. Of course, we all are, but her mortality may feel more pressing.

In “Thrilled,” characters converge at a carnival. There’s a shooting, a fire, sex; four different characters partner up. Years intervene, and one woman thinks about that day again and again throughout her life, the memory indelible. As the woman is dying, she holds “the thrill close, like an old friend.” One should read that story for its epigraphs alone, quotes from Mikhail Bakhtin, Bill Clinton, and Colette, not to mention the subheads: “Once upon a Time,” “The Omnipresent Tense,” “The Imperfect Pretense,” “Present Imperfect,” “The Past Is Tense.”

I remember an early moment back in that Lower East Side apartment, reading Madame Realism. A recurring character Tillman created in 1984, Mme R felt like the answer for me, crossing between fiction and criticism, suggesting that criticism can be fiction (and vice versa). She appeared in the pages of Art in America, artists’ books, and catalog essays. In “Madame Realism Asks: What’s Natural About Painting,” Tillman reviews a Renoir exhibit from 1986 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The story is stream of consciousness, threaded with overheard conversations about Frank Sinatra, women discussing the women’s weight in Renoir’s paintings, and how Mme R grew up thinking Renoir’s portraits were of her family tree. (His prints hung in her home as a kid; mine too.) The story ends with Mme R buying gift shop postcards and thinking “the paintings looked better in reproduction.” It is hilarious, and true. I scoured the stacks of the art library for this issue of Art in America. The way Tillman and Mme R blurred the boundaries of media (radio, TV, conversations, film), muddying the waters and opening my mind, gave me the courage to drop out of grad school.

Thrilled includes “Madame Realism’s Conscience,” composed of thought bubbles on politics and power, including an imagined aside to Laura Bush, musings on Lincoln and séances, plus jokes. Ann Coulter is the butt of one, and LBJ’s exposed ass another. (He would sit on the john with the bathroom door open and insist on shitting while holding conversations with his staff and others.) Turning characters’ inner worlds into the world of the story is a through line in the collection. One woman sees her neighborhood Rear Window–style: everyone on her block is a character from a different movie. (There’s no crime though, not really.) The analogy extends to ever more ludicrous proportions as the links to the films layer up on one another, with neighbors from Blue Velvet, Alien, River’s Edge, Guys and Dolls, Desperately Seeking Susan, Death of a Salesman, St. Elmo’s Fire, and more. There are also appearances in stories by Clint Eastwood and the dead Marilyn Monroe. A woman sets a timer to think of sex every seven minutes after learning that this is how often men apparently contemplate it. Then there are the choral stories, told in the round, where the perspective shifts from character to character as they overlap in each other’s lives—sometimes without even realizing it—like the title story and “Come and Go.” In them all, even as we might be isolated in our own thoughts, we are porous to one another.

Sin Tax v. Syntax

Exhilarating wordplay can take over a story—or be the occasion for it. Paige Turner is another recurring character, her name itself a pun. “To Find Words” in The Complete Madame Realism (which also includes the complete Paige Turner stories) has Paige trying “to find words, to find words from all the possible words. It’s a game, like Stick the Tail on the Donkey or Treasure Hunt. The hunt may or may not offer a reward at its conclusion. The game cannot be Monopoly”—I love that the game isn’t about Trumpy real estate dominance—“You know that. To find words and place them in sentences in a certain order. Syntax.”

This is followed, in the next paragraph, by a long quote on “sin tax” in the United States. Pause, sigh. Inhale. Also: LOL.

Tillman’s ideas slip between each other in a playful way that I wish I could emulate. Words repeat and double back, reinforcing and undermining each other. This can make her hard to quote; it’s impossible to isolate a fragment, or even a single sentence. Here she is in What Would Lynne Tillman Do? on Jane Bowles’s 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies:

[A] work of genius, unique, subversive. These terms are overused, and usually misused, but are true of this audacious, brilliantly written novel, this masquerade, comedy, tragedy, with its anarchic, singular views of sexuality, marriage, femininity, masculinity, American culture, exoticism. Jane Bowles ignored the worn lines between conscious and unconscious life; she beggared the realist novel with writing indifferent to prosaic notions of reality. Her dialogue is the most particular and idiosyncratic in American literature, as peculiar and condensed as speech in jokes and dreams.

The same could be said of Tillman herself. Her work is full of jokes and dreams and beggaring the realist novel with prosaic notions of reality.

Just like Tóibín and I write on Tillman, whose work “made a difference to [us],” Tillman writes on Bowles and Paula Fox. In an essay on Fox’s memoir Borrowed Finery (2001), she observes that “contemporary novels have become a repository for salvation; characters—and consequentially readers—are supposed to be saved at the end.” Tillman has no room for salvation in her work. There is no capital-P “Progress,” no new and better place for characters (or readers) to be delivered to. She wants, as she explained to Christine Smallwood, “to deny the idea of ‘progress,’” an idea Smallwood invokes in her glorious and witty introduction to Thrilled to Death. The collection is not chronological but thematic, which is the way Tillman’s mind works too, as ideas link up in ever stranger, more exciting ways. The book avoids mention of the dates or years the stories were written, though it’s possible to try to glean them from the style of clothes or the movies referenced.

On the phone with me, Tillman said she hates the idea of chronology, whether it’s applied to fiction or a career: “It assumes a writer gets better with time, but you just get—different.” Pause for that word, just as she did. Getting different is also the power of a joke, which connects two ideas, and promises not a resolution but a laugh. In Tillman’s writing, the jokes often land wrong intentionally, to underline their strangeness, their difference.

Doves and Pigeons

Back in that railroad apartment, I’d stare at a pair of mourning doves in the lone tree I could see from my window. I’d foist onto them my longing for love and stability. (Doves mate for life.) The projection was weird and Tillmanesque. Thrilled to Death includes a story about mourning doves (not the book’s only story of human-animal interactions). “That’s How Wrong My Love Is” is narrated by an “I” that one could easily mistake for Tillman herself, and reads like an essay on ethics with birds at the center. The wrongness of the narrator’s love extends to thinking toward and feeding the doves and then pigeons—whom she does not love—and then migratory birds. She feels guilt at leaving the birds when she is away, cycles through meditations on eating animals and love and the Donner Party and what she might do in a similar situation—suddenly, eating people is on the menu (in another of the collection’s stories, the author herself is a menu)—plus her own inner failings. Propelled by birds, “That’s How Wrong” is a wild ride in inner consciousness, and funny and sensitive to boot.

Crucially, Tillman’s birds are not made to function as a reflection of her character’s feelings. In most realist novels, they’d be used to that effect; instead, here and throughout her writing, Tillman pares down the details except where they bloom into entire motivations for story itself. Realist fiction only includes details that further plot and character, twisting these elements in a way that is supposed to seem “real” and represent a character’s inner life. I call this “sad pigeon syndrome,” where the pigeon on the fire escape somehow mirrors a character’s emotions—that sadness is projected, by the writer, onto the pigeon, so we understand the character is upset without the writer telling us this directly.

Stop here. That alone is bizarre, not to mention anthropocentric—and that it is taken as “natural”? In an essay for The New York Review of Books, the British novelist Daisy Hildyard called this dynamic an “ethos of annihilation.” Tillman trounces any such ethos, first by keeping details to a minimum, and then—like in “Bad News” or with Madame Realism, Clint Eastwood, or the pigeons and mourning doves here—by showing something weirder. In her hands, the detritus of the world becomes not the character but the character’s world.

Dead Dad Inhabitation

I’ve been thinking for a while about Robert Glück’s brilliant mid-nineties novel Margery Kempe, which dovetails the 15th-century Kempe (the first woman memoirist, who was mad for Jesus) with Glück’s own longings and love for “L.” Writing the book, Glück reportedly collected descriptions of physical sensations from friends and students. The novel’s copious sexual encounters feel like they were created collectively, collaboratively; as if we are not separate, individual bodies alone in isolation but a communal, physical self, diaphanous to each other. In Tillman’s writing too, the world bleeds into our lives in ways far more radical than most fiction or essays allow.

This approach hearkens back to an earlier time, the same one when Glück, too, started writing. If talking about history (I am a failed art historian and so prone to some historicizing), you could call this postmodernism, but that is too simple a phrase for how she takes the ambient realm—the detritus, dreams, jokes and headlines, movies, characters, TV, and people on the street we know in passing—and populates her stories with them.

In “The Undiagnosed,” for instance, Clint Eastwood appears at an elaborate costume party where the narrator is dressed as her dead father—in his old suit, no less. The story is comprised of the narrator’s unfiltered ruminations on masculinity: “I’d been raised as a woman. I didn’t feel I was one, and I didn’t care that I didn’t. I didn’t know how men felt.” After continuing for more than a page, the narrator’s list of men and their types could, she says, go “on and on. I won’t go on.” But she does. Until, of course, Clint—the real, actual Clint Eastwood, ur-symbol of US masculinity—arrives to explain: “Men want sex, settle for money, comfort, mostly everyone settles. What do you want to know?” Funny though the scene is, Eastwood is not actually mansplaining; he is generous and talks about his own dad. It all reminds me of Tillman’s quote in Granta. The two of them go on to talk about death and violence, and in the end, the narrator wants to leave to go see Eastwood’s old movies.

Endings

1. To Escape History

In Tillmanesque style, I want to give this essay three endings, three of Lynne Tillman’s, the first from Thrilled to Death’s opening story, “Come and Go.” In part three, a narrator, an “I,” appears for the first time, and writes about herself and the other characters. The story is now an essay on writing. It is fiction. There is an I. This I is a fiction, an assemblage. The shift is abrupt and startling, making it clear that no one needs to choose between fiction or criticism; that one can write both together in the same piece, the same place. I think this essay—this fiction—is from the early nineties. Junkies wear Armani suits and a white woman with money is on heroin. The I tells us she knows the heroine/heroin, and ends on these lines about story, history, that feel urgent now:

What Americans fear is the inability to have a world different from their father’s and mother’s. That’s why we move so much, to escape history.

Margaret Fuller said: I accept the universe.

I try to embrace it. But I will leave it to others to imagine the world in ways I can’t.

I leave it to others.

Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything. I know there will be stories. Certainly, there will always be stories.

This American “escape [of] history” reads like it could be today, in Trump’s America, but perhaps that is always the same America, which has designer-clad junkies (Elon Musk?), in which a New York real estate baron names his kid “Barron” and markets meme coins. But that line—“Out of nothing comes language and out of language comes nothing and everything”—contains the ideas in Tillman’s writing far better than I ever could.

Then there is the finish to “Bad News,” the piece from which my own self is constructed:

She wondered what reality was and who decided. But she kept that to herself. Elizabeth hated to think that her sympathies, and her fears, if held up to the harsh light of reality, would be found wanting and incomprehensible. She herself might be found wanting, insufficient. She hated that.

There I am, exposed on the page, with all my anxieties in my early twenties. And here we are, together in this moment, Elizabeths all, worried about being found insufficient. What I love is that Tillman offers no closure for Elizabeth—or me, or you. In leaving us without tidy resolution, she asks something more of us, something we can’t turn the page on.

And then there is what Tillman herself tells me, in an email, that she wants for her own work in this moment (bear in mind her stature, a figure of crucial importance in contemporary writing in her late seventies): “I hope to continue to hit against boundaries … challenge myself to do something else … I do write in opposition, esp., and more and more, to myself.” That last comma: She gets no closure either.

2. Two Elizabeths // 3. Fusion Candidates for a New Order

So here I am, the still-unpublished manuscript of “Bad News” on my desk. It is folded in half, Tillman’s name curiously concealed with Wite-Out (itself a relic of another era) at the top. I came into that story thanks to Chris Kraus. She gave it to me as Semiotext(e) was putting together its first collection of Tillman’s in 1992. There I was in Kraus’s living room: skinny, eager, and anxious. Here I am now, a writer who owes everything to both Kraus and Tillman, having held on to these pages, as if a talisman, all these years. The creased pages hold that simultaneity, collapsing time.

For years, the pages of “Bad News” were tucked into my copy of Tillman’s 1998 novel No Lease on Life, which is about another character named Elizabeth. (I keep thinking the Elizabeths are the same, or at least related.) The story bookmarked a page that is also dog-eared and marked in pencil. In the scene, Elizabeth is walking on the street downtown, and men tell off-color jokes without realizing they’re being overheard. Then, this luminous moment:

It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times. Comparisons were stupid. Reason was history.

Elizabeth breathed automatically. Her past and future gasped together. She exhaled a current of air, time. The atmosphere was a weight on everyone. Thick, wet air contained the city.

—If it’s the end, you might be relieved, one guy said to another.

This is not the ending of the novel but perhaps the ending of my piece, with the sheer beauty of the atmosphere and how it contains the city: the air itself and us all together, our outer experiences and inner dialogues, our jokes, communally inseparable. That feels like the wild transcendence Tillman is creating—which emerges, at once clearly and with new complexities, through the stories she has selected in Thrilled to Death. Lest I undercut her with my maudlin romanticism, maybe we should end on her own, prescient words in that scene: “They were walking in front of her, fusion candidates for a new order, a threat to the visible old order. They broke one mold, established another.”