That Is the Saddest Story I’ve Ever Heard

Vivian Medithi interviews Lauren Cook about his new collection, “Sex Goblin.”

By Vivian MedithiAugust 10, 2024

• Poetry

• Memoir & Essay

WHEN I ASK Lauren Cook about the sex in Sex Goblin (2024), his latest confessional collection, he focuses on its axiomatic mechanics. “I’m obviously interested in fables and aphorisms and truisms: ‘everything’s always like this,’” he explains. “You can convey a lot by using sex to build a fable.” These poems, occasionally blue but wide-eyed and open-hearted, are vulnerable to the point of stupidity: it can be hard to decide if the lovable freaks who populate these crimson pages are born-yesterday naïfs or poised to exit samsara. “There’s some sort of insatiable need that has to get met,” Cook tells me on a video call near the end of May. “And that’s sort of the naivete or the childlikeness or the stupidity that I’m actually interested in, as someone who’s really sincerely trying to get their needs met.”

Like its predecessor, Cook’s 2019 chapbook I Love Shopping, Sex Goblin offers a refreshingly nonjudgmental portrait of modern life, preferring curiosity to critique. Where the vernacular feed of shopping scrolled from one bite-size poem to the next, his latest meanders through the lives of paranoids, queers, spiders, and hikers, luxuriating in the minutiae. “It took me a while to realize I could just tell full stories—for some reason, I felt like that was either too difficult or not something I was interested in,” Cook says.

Cook is a secular Jewish “transsexual naturalist” who was raised in Upstate New York “before Amazon.” “You’re so isolated that there’s kind of nothing to do. Obviously you can be socialized well if you live in a rural area, but I wasn’t.” The yearning in his work can scan as meekness or vulnerability, but Sex Goblin is acutely aware of intimacy’s sharper edges—these poems swerve past easy digestion towards something much stranger, even as they maintain the friendly tone of a conversation at the bar. Where other poets are satisfied with showing their emotional viscera, Lauren Cook reaches in to poke and prod at the entrails.

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VIVIAN MEDITHI: One poem that really stuck with me in this book was the one where you say that, “contrary to popular belief,” living a good life will get you reincarnated as a bug. Have you always loved bugs?

LAUREN COOK: One of my earliest memories is being asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and I was like, “Oh I really want to be an entomologist or a fashion designer.” I think a lot of that had to do with my grandpa, my mom’s dad—he had all these vintage books, the ones that are just butterflies, and you open it up and it’s just pages of the flats of them. I also really liked ladybugs a lot. I actually really don’t know why, but they’re such a symbol though. And I do love symbols. I feel like that was the first symbol I really loved.

What does the ladybug symbolize? And why did you like that symbol so much?

They’re just so graphic and flat, but I do feel like they’re girly. And that was also during the Bug’s Life era, where the ladybug was a boy, but also so cunt [laughs]. And they symbolize luck, but also a lot of times you’re involved in their life cycle, if you grew up somewhere rural, because they live and hibernate in houses. So you kind of always see them. It’s interesting to think about what kids are into because it’s like, “What do they give kids the opportunity to be into?”

In I Love Shopping, there are a few different literary styles: a scientific paper, chat logs, screenshots, and more. Here, in Sex Goblin, that same kaleidoscopic approach is rendered in a more … I won’t say unified, it’s still very polyvocal, but you’re not playing with form in the same fashion. I’m curious what got you into poetry and how your writing process developed through these books.

So it’s unfortunately informed by blogging, because that’s, like, where I went to school. I was actually thinking of it recently, because it’s been 10 years since I really started in 2014, which was a peak Tumblr year for me. I was looking at pictures from that the other day, but I really feel that is where the fragmentation and the the anecdotal aspect of it comes from, microblogging.

What kind of blogs were you reading back in the day?

It was really people just being like, “This is what happened to me today.” And you can kind of play with and explore that way of communicating—a lot of the anecdotal story aspects of Sex Goblin that are sort of true, or somewhat like autofiction, that style all comes from that school of thought, personal blogging from seven to 10 years ago. People still do it now, but it’s just a different vibe.

People being people as opposed to people being brands, right?

Yeah. And like now, I feel people still do that, but they’re either incredibly anonymous or something else. But the idea of being like, “Oh, I’m a person, you can contact me, there’s an open channel to me,” sort of before the commodification of that. Seemingly to the point where you’re like, “How does this even benefit you to tell these people so much about your life?”

Your poetic voice has this really direct quality without necessarily being colloquial. And so I’m curious how you balance this very conversational approach with all of these other elements, whether it’s scientific jargon or whatever. You’ll wrap a really big idea in accessible language, and sometimes I feel as though a lot of writers, myself included, do the opposite, wrapping simple ideas in really complex language.

When I read about nature, there’s so little information available. Truthfully, people really don’t know what’s going on. And that is on purpose, obviously—we have a trashed educational system. But also, I really don’t think there’s any benefit, in larger, structural ways, for people to know about the natural world. And the things that they do teach people are really intense absolutes: things are always like this, or things are always like that. And usually, there’s so much more nuance. They’re like, “This is what photosynthesis is,” when there are actually a few different types of photosynthesis.

I’m just, like, damn. Either nobody knows shit because they just weren’t taught because of where they grew up, or it’s just never been told to them in a way like, “Here’s an example and here’s how it affects our lives.” A lot of times, I just really want people to know what I know, as simple as that, especially because I know that so many people struggle with science. And I don’t think the things I’m interested in are necessarily super complicated—I’m not a super big “Woman in STEM,” there’re limits.

But there are parts of Sex Goblin too, like the poem about poppers. I was so obsessed, I was learning about poppers myself, and I was like, “Oh my god, nobody knows this shit.” And it’s true, most poppers really are counterfeit.

Some shit in Sex Goblin really is just made up and a lie, and some of it is real, those types of pieces, because I didn’t want to lie about anything in that way. In a lot of ways, it makes me sympathize with public health initiatives or people who are just trying to educate a larger sort of public, especially about the natural world, because there’s so much every day that disproves a lot of really intense human beliefs we have, that I think would give a lot of people hope and inspire them.

What should people be hopeful about?

Climate change is so bad. That’s such a funny sentence, but you know what I mean—things are bad. A couple years ago, I was getting really into geology for the first time, like, “I should learn more about minerals,” because that dictates what plants are growing in different areas and shit like that. And when you learn about geological time, and think about mass extinction events or different things like that, life really does persevere and it will always persevere, and that is kind of corny and spiritual. But we do have so much in common, the desire to be alive and whatever biological processes are activated by your genes and environment.

And I just think there’s so much more. The world is so trash and ass, and humans have wasted so much of that potential because of the structure of the systems we have in place. And you can see that in the natural world, but you could also look at a mole or a tiny little animal and think about all these mammals who are able to survive and create new lineages. All of these incredible functions have coevolved over centuries and millennia to create everything we have. It’s such a delicate system, and it’s an incredible miracle that will keep presenting itself. Even if there’s nothing to gain from that, it is something worth resonating with.

We’ve talked about your interest in relaying something true. I’m curious about the competing interest to expand beyond what is true, where you create obviously fictitious scientific discoveries or relate facts that seem perhaps half-true.

There’s this common thread between those two things, where it’s about the way we teach children about things, or the regurgitation of basic concepts. It feels so random sometimes, and I feel like the commonality is the narrator being a specific person, if that makes sense. Obviously, with things of that nature, I do want it to feel over-the-top when it is made up, so you can kind of clock it a little bit easier. But I feel like that goes side by side, because with the Darwin’s spider thing, it’s telling someone something that is factual, but it’s also laced with subjective meaning. And the specific voice to that ends up landing the same as something that’s totally made-up, which you could take more easily as made-up because you’re like, “That doesn’t make sense.”

It is kind of interesting, what is believable to different people based on what baseline information they have going into something, and how that’s always a different place. I tend to forget that too, like, “Oh, everybody knows this because it’s basic knowledge.” The poppers thing really compensates for that by having a really specific voice where it’s still sort of anecdotal and colloquial. It feels like the person telling you the story; it’s not necessarily about the information 100 percent either.

One thing that really unites all of the different voices in your work is their extremely candid vulnerability, being very plainspoken about things that people are normally very cloistered about. How do you get into that headspace and find that entry point to the intimate center of these characters?

I get really inspired by myself when I’m stupid or by stupid people in general. I don’t mean uneducated, just like ditzy or air-headed or naive. Or childlike, which is sort of our choice to explain it. A lot of that tone is really inspired by influencers, the contemporary aesthetic of a comment on social media, that type of vibe. And I really like that voice as a way to convey information because sometimes it feels way better to have someone say something and then project meaning in between. It’s like when a wrong clock is right twice a day, sometimes that wrong clock being right twice a day is a lot more effective than a source that is always right.

When I was writing Sex Goblin, I was really inspired by different people in my life that I was meeting who I felt, because of how I move through space, were too stupid or naive to understand that certain things should have been kept a secret or something. Which is not true in general, but there’s just something when somebody’s telling you too much information, like revealing too much by accident or sort of oversharing, this overindulgence of information that feels almost unsafe or incriminating. I think, because of my own relationship to shame, I just get so inspired or enamored by that kind of voice.

Again, a lot of it, too, is inspired by this voice that developed online. So someone will be like, “Get ready with me in my house,” and I’ll be like, “Damn, I can find this on Google Maps right now.” It’s so funny to be this person and to present information through the lens of this person.

There are a number of different poems or stories in this book that are about sexual encounters, but I wouldn’t classify them as erotica, even though they can be somewhat titillating at times. They feel much more like—and I’m saying this in the absolute least derogatory way I can possibly say this—personal essays in The Cut in miniature, if those were good as opposed to sucking. When you’re writing about sex, and you write about a lot of different types of sex, what’s interesting to you?

When I wrote Sex Goblin, I was getting into erotica for the first time. Most people’s association with erotica is basically fan fiction, which is dope but wasn’t necessarily my experience. I would definitely consume some stuff like that, but as an adult, I got into—especially living in the Bay Area, which has so much autoerotica, or like Bolerium Books—these bookstores that sell really old pulp for cheap. There was this press in the ’90s called Bad Boy Press in New York that doesn’t exist anymore, but it published a lot of these anonymous authors.

I was reading a lot of that stuff for the first time and being like, “Oh, wow, it’s so amazing what you can convey this way.” And then, secondarily, how attached you can have someone to this story because there’s the underbelly of being vaguely horny. It’s kind of enticing even if you’re disgusted by it or not resonating with it. There’s this thing where it keeps you wanting to look.

I’m obviously so interested in fables and aphorisms and truisms: “Everything’s always like this.” You can really convey a lot using sex as a way to build a fable. This was also during a period of time in which I worked at a sex store in the Bay for a couple of months, which honestly was so crazy. And taught me a lot. A lot of really incredible things happened at that job. I only lasted 90 days there and it was awful to work there.

I ended up quitting because a lady threw a vibrator at my head, but it was honestly really funny. Her husband looked like Keith Urban [laughs]. It’s so crazy to get yelled at by a lady while her husband next to her is silent, but he has highlights and the flipped-out hair. It just added a lot to it.

But I had so many conversations there that changed my relationship to sex. I just became so desensitized to incredibly insane stories about sexuality and incredibly insane beliefs that people have and that they are willing to say to someone they’ve never met before. I mean, I met so many women who were 60 years old, who were like, “I’ve never had an orgasm before.” And I’m like, “I didn’t even know that was real.”

Or just crazy belief systems people have about their partners or their sexuality. There are certain things that have happened to me there that I think about a lot. There was one time this guy called me over to the butt plug section, and he was with his girlfriend, and he says, “I have a question for you.” And I was like, “Okay,” and he was like, “We bought this one last week. And people are always talking about how if you put a plug in your butt, it’ll make you nut instantly, the best you’ve ever nut. And it didn’t feel like anything. It went in so easy, and it didn’t feel like anything.” And I was like, “Damn.” It was just crazy. And I’m like, “Okay, well maybe you need to buy a bigger one.”

Just constantly having these kinds of conversations all day where you’re either like, “That is the saddest story I’ve ever heard” or “That is the funniest story I’ve ever heard.”

I was actually given stories like that every day where I was like, “Oh, I wish I wrote this. I actually wish I fabricated this story because I can’t even believe it’s real.” And so sex was such a big part of my life without even having to engage in it, just the culture of sex. Being in the break room and reading the adult-industry magazines that announce the launch of new products and it’s like, “Tekashi69 has a dildo coming out in the shape of his penis.”

There’s a one-line poem in the book that reads, “sometimes you sexually assault yourself.” Obviously, that’s an intentionally incendiary statement, but when you’re talking about the beliefs you want people to question, how are you hoping people will engage with it?

In a lot of ways, that’s what I mean by being so fascinated with stupid people, because I’ve made so many decisions like this in my life too. And when I’m trying to talk about gay men, or working at the sex store and learning about people’s sexuality, the positions that we put ourselves in sometimes to get some sort of need met, where you essentially are putting yourself in so much danger, or putting yourself in a terrible situation, that is like an intrinsic part of human nature under this system. And I just really resonate with characters like that.

Obviously, it is such an overly reductive way to say that. But a lot of it also has to do with reframing, this fascination with people who can—at the store, meeting a lot of people where I’m like, “Oh, that’s actually a terrible thing that happened to you” in my mind, but you’re not processing it that way. Like, it doesn’t turn into what I believe it would in my mind. And there’s something really unifying, sort of a commonality between these demographics of people. There’re a few situations in that book where there are characters putting themselves in a situation where there’s potentially danger. Like, there is potentially danger in sucking off a guy you met at the gym, but there’s some sort of insatiable need that has to get met. That I really believe in.

That’s sort of the naiveness or the childlikeness or the sort of stupidity that I’m actually interested in as someone who’s really sincerely trying to get their needs met. The internet is a lot like that too. Someone will post a video of someone tripping and falling and people will be like, “Why didn’t you catch him?” And it’s like, “Well, actually, there’s this intrinsic part of being alive where things just go wrong. Does that mean you never skip and run because you could trip?”

And I feel the demographics of people who put themselves in danger—in this gay-boy way, in this Lana Del Rey way, whatever it is—it creates this really interesting thing that is so rife for misunderstanding in our culture where I’m like, “I totally get that.” I totally get wanting potentially to be really hurt; I understand putting yourself in a position to sexually assault yourself because of this thing you need so bad.

Thinking about your quasi-erotic poems, these are stories that are interesting in their premises, but what is the thing beyond the premise that you’re interested in? When you’re walking around in the dark, what are the things you want to shine that flashlight on?

That’s why it’s not true erotica, because it’s really about what’s going on in someone’s brain and their sensory experience. A lot of it is fixated on the sensory, the actual physical actions of it, before setting a scene or a time or a place. I want to illuminate the thought process of someone in a situation, even if there’s no conclusion that is drawn from it: “Who is the person engaging in this?” In the frat one, it’s used to escape that situation, and in other ones, it’s an attempt to be more like that person, to be more present. But either way, it’s less about the action itself and more a recounting of events from my point of view, not necessarily about capturing the sexual experience. The Maximilian one is really a story about a woman who is very young and immature, just someone who doesn’t have a lot of life experience. And it’s about what it feels like to not have a lot of life experience. The action itself is a noncommentary, everything that happens is. And it’s just important for it to feel like, even if you’re shocked by the action itself happening, you can really resonate with this incredibly sincere naive voice that is just, like, “This is happening to me,” to be like, “Oh, well, this happens. This could happen to anybody. This does happen to anybody. This is what it means to be here.”