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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/truth-testimony-interview-meghan-ogieblyn/"></div>In <a href="https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/', '“Ghost in the Cloud,”');">“Ghost in the Cloud,”</a> a remarkable essay published in n+1 last year, Meghan O’Gieblyn thinks through the ways in which contemporary Transhumanist thought, despite its claims to have inherited the Enlightenment’s skeptical rationalism, can be seen as a “a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatalogy.” In this essay — which introduced me to O’Gieblyn’s work — as in many of the others that make up her debut collection Interior States, she displays a knack for noting the traces of the religious in the supposedly secular, as well as the inverse. Raised an evangelical Christian until she abandoned the faith as a student at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, O’Gieblyn maintains a deep appreciation for both realms, yet a critical distance from each. This position — combined with her canny prose, keen intellect, and expansive curiosity — makes her an essayist of uncommon vision.
Interior States, which contains essays ranging in focus from the rebranding of Hell to Mike Pence’s ascendance to the vice presidency, traces the interwoven themes of evangelical Chrstianity and the Midwest. O’Gieblyn’s relationship to these subjects has to do not only with the circumstances of her life, but also, as she writes in the preface, with her “abiding interest in loss, particularly the loss of direction that occurs after the decline of a doctrine, an economy, or an entire worldview.” The result is an inquiry into the very heart of contemporary American life.
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NATHAN GOLDMAN: The essays that comprise Interior States span a considerable period of time — the earliest was published in 2011; the latest, this year. The majority appeared sometime between 2016 and now, but even so, I was struck by the sheer variety of ways in which the essays address your central concerns. At what point in the composition of these pieces did you begin conceiving of them as a unified project? Does having this body of work now collected and presented as something singular change how you think about the essays?
MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN: When I first started writing essays, around 2011, I had a dim idea that I wanted to write a collection and was quickly informed, by practically everyone who seemed to know anything about publishing, that collections are impossible to sell, particularly for a first-time author. Several people advised me to try linking my essays together into something that might pass as a memoir, and I tried this for almost a year before giving up. Part of the problem was that a memoir would have required me to tell the definitive story of how I left Christianity. I dreaded that finality. What I love about essays is the way you can approach an experience from a very particular angle, and the fact that you can keep returning to it across different essays, taking different approaches. Essays allowed me to circle that experience, over and over again, much the way certain contemplative or mystical theologians try to capture the nature of God through a series of negative or positive comparisons, while avoiding direct statements about the Divine nature itself.
Because I’d been told it was impossible to sell collections, I didn’t think of these essays as a unified project until very late in the process — essentially until I was contacted by Gerry Howard at Anchor, who asked whether I had thought about collecting the pieces. And it was really his encouragement and enthusiasm for the project that made me realize it could be a book. Some of the subject matter that I’d considered discrete — I had several essays on the Midwest and several others on Christianity — were actually linked by similar concerns. For one thing, the form of evangelicalism I was writing about was very distinctive to the Midwest and grew out of the theology of Midwestern evangelists like D.L. Moody. I also realized that what I was writing about, across these essays, was the experience of loss, particularly the loss of telos. The directionless feeling that I felt after leaving my faith is analogous, in some sense, to what many people in the Midwest are feeling at a moment when the industries and ideas that built the region — manufacturing, the American dream — have begun to seem tenuous and uncertain. So there is, I think, an underlying unity to the book, but that unity is evidence of my own intellectual obsessions rather than any deliberate strategy.
I liked that, in addition to the note in the front of the book that mentions the publications in which the essays initially appeared, each original publication is listed — along with the year of publication — at the end of each piece. This practice helped me to understand the book as something heterogeneous as well as a whole. And, because it made clear that the essays are not arranged chronologically, I felt it freed me from mistakenly reading the book as structured around a temporal progression. Possibly I’m reading too much into this subtle choice, but: was that your decision? If so, what was the reasoning behind it?
Yeah, it was my decision to include those details. The essays do represent, as you mention, an evolution in my thinking, so I wanted to ensure that readers understood which ones were earlier and which were later. And because some of the essays are tied to cultural and political events, I felt it was important to signal what was happening when the piece was written. So much has changed in the Midwest, and in the country as a whole, over the past few years, so I wanted to announce, for example, whether an essay was written before or after the 2016 election. I’m not sure if the publications are as crucial for readers to know. That may have been a sentimental gesture on my part, since I really value the relationships I’ve developed with these magazines over the years. I feel very grateful that magazines like this one, like Boston Review, Guernica, and especially The Point (where three of the essays in the collection were published) provided a platform for my early essays, and that the editors at those venues allowed me to do work that was, in retrospect, fairly ambitious for a beginning writer.
In the preface, you link your project as an essayist to the evangelical tradition of “testimony,” which you contrast with another Christian lineage of “confession” associated with the personal essay. Do you see your use of your own life in your essays as at odds with that other, more confessional lineage?
Around the time I was pulling the collection together in manuscript form, there was a rash of criticism — several pieces that appeared within a month or so — on confessional writing, arguing that recent memoir and personal essays were gratuitous and self-indulgent. This happens every few years, and the complaint, of course, is a very old one. But as I was reading those arguments, I began thinking about confession as a religious term and a religious posture, and what struck me was that it was completely foreign to my experience as a protestant, evangelical Christian. We didn’t practice confession as a ritual. To be honest, I always thought it would be wonderful to be Catholic, to tell all your sins to the priest and be granted absolution. In Protestantism, there’s no easy assurance — this was basically Max Weber’s thesis: You can never be certain you’re right with God, and this creates an ongoing sense of anxiety. The way we assured ourselves of our salvation, as evangelicals, was by “giving testimony.” Unlike confession, this was a decidedly public form. It was also, implicitly, an argument. You stood in front of a congregation and told the story of your life, emphasizing how God’s grace changed you. Rather than receiving absolution from a religious authority, your story itself was evidence that you were saved.
As an essayist, I’m interested in the extent to which my life can be a form of evidence, or can lend authority to an argument. I suppose what separates my work from what gets grouped under “confessional” writing is that I’ve always been interested in making arguments, or unsettling existing ones, so my experience is not an end in itself but a means to support whatever point I’m trying to make. But it also goes both ways: I’m using those arguments to make sense of larger questions that are very personal to me. Writing is a way to lend meaning to my experience, by putting my life in conversation with larger debates. This can be very satisfying, but it’s slightly more complicated, I think, than mere catharsis. I never feel unburdened by the writing process. I suppose this is how the protestant work ethic ultimately drives my own productivity as a writer: the anxiety always returns and gets channeled into the next piece.
I was struck by the case the essays in Interior States seem to make — not directly, but through a cumulative effect — for “former believer” as a category of identity with separate characteristics from “believer” or “nonbeliever.” Do you think of it that way?
Yeah, maybe there should be some terminology to mark us as a distinct religious category. I often think about the way people in 12-step programs still identify as an alcoholic or an addict years after they’ve stopped using, because that experience has become such a crucial part of their identity. Even though they left that part of their lives behind, they find it useful to hold on to it, to keep telling the story. It’s difficult to explain the deconversion experience to people who haven’t themselves experienced a loss of faith. People sometimes act like it’s this very childish revelation, like finding out that Santa Claus isn’t real, but it’s really a primal existential and ontological disruption. Religions are totalizing narratives, so abandoning such a worldview amounts to realizing that life has no meaning. For several years, I was paralyzed: all I could think about was how ludicrous it was that nobody knew why we were on earth, or how we got here, or what our purpose was. And I still have moments when those feelings return, all these years later. It’s strange to me that former Christians are often sheepish about acknowledging that experience as trauma. I think many of us feel a little guilty about it, like we got duped and were idiots to have believed in the first place.
Of course, there are really valuable things about having this perspective as well. Once you’ve lived inside the headspace of belief, you can always reinhabit it. You never forget what it feels like. And it gives you a lot of insight into how ideology functions, particularly in terms of group psychology and social control. Things that other people find bewildering, like cults, or fascist political regimes, I find it very easy to understand, because I’ve lived inside a totalizing system myself.
A recurring theme in the book is your experience, as a former believer, of the many beauties of faith, from the loveliness of the gospel music and the mass baptism that you compare to a Bruegel painting in “Dispatch from Flyover Country” to your remark in “Ghost in the Cloud” that you still find “the fundamental promises of Christianity beautiful, particularly the notion that human existence ultimately resolves into harmony.” It seems as if the appeal of certain aspects of the faith became clearer to you once you left it — for instance, in “A Species of Origins,” you write that “it was only after [you] stopped believing in God [&#8230;] that [you] began to regard creationism as a deeply seductive belief system.” How has unbelief transformed your relationship to these aspects of Christianity?
When you’re a Christian — and particularly if you’re someone like me, who was born into it, rather than someone who came to it later in life — you never have cause to think about religion’s emotional appeal. It’s simply the Truth. It was only after I left the faith that I realized how solacing it was, for example, to be able to pray, or to belong to a community that shares a common objective, or to believe that history is authored and directional. And again, the thing that struck me hardest was realizing how much people benefit from — how much I had benefited from, without realizing it — the conviction that life has meaning. I always think of that Nietzsche line: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” It’s easy to dismiss faith as wishful thinking, the opiate of the masses, but it’s far more difficult to discount people’s need for meaning and telos. So, I guess the irony is that in leaving the faith, I became far more appreciative of how religion works to fulfill a very basic human need, its capacity to help people live.
I also became very interested in how other people fulfill those religious impulses. How do people who are atheists or agnostics find meaning in life? And I realized that many people seek religious experiences in seemingly mundane areas of life. Many of the essays I’ve written explore that idea from different angles. I write about how the Transhumanist movement and some of the more transcendent, speculative narratives about technology offer a secular version of the Christian redemption narrative. And I write about how narratives about motherhood often borrow the form of religious conversion narratives. One of the effects of us becoming an increasingly secular nation is that all these ostensibly non-religious areas of American life are becoming imbued with displaced religious energy.
One animating thread of Interior States seems to be the complicating of concepts (the Midwest, evangelical Christianity) that the American popular imagination tends to flatten. Was it ever on your mind to rethink the ways those things are often talked and written about? Or did that arise from the act of attentiveness to subjects that are often attended to carelessly if at all?
I think it would be fair to say that the starting point for every single essay in the collection was a desire to unsettle consensus. Each one grew out of the conviction that people were getting something wrong, or were talking about a subject in overly simplistic terms. I’d never considered writing essays about evangelicalism until I lived in a place — a progressive university town — where most of my friends and acquaintances were either atheist or agnostic, and where people often spoke of fundamentalists in a way that was very dismissive and one-dimensional. I didn’t necessarily disagree with their conclusions — obviously, I left the faith, so I shared a lot of their grievances — but I wanted to correct, or at least complicate, the premises, to show what was being left out. My writing on the Midwest grew out of a smiliar impulse. I began writing about that subject after the holidays one year, when a lot of my friends who’d moved to places like New York and California had come back to visit. They all had the same complaints about the Midwest; it was like they were reading the same script. Everyone kept griping about how boring it was here, how it was a cultural dead zone, how people in the Midwest were provincial and small-minded. Again, it wasn’t that I didn’t agree, in part, with that diagnosis. And it’s not like I set out to prove any of those ideas wrong in my essays or to reach a definitive conclusion myself. The point was to complicate the story and to make those conclusions feel a little less easy.
You’re also a fiction writer. How does your fiction-writing inform your essay-writing?
I was a fiction writer first. I started writing fiction around the time I left Bible school. I was reading a lot of Russian novels at the time, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and had zero familiarity with contemporary fiction, so I believed novels were a way to talk about these big philosophical and existential questions that obsessed me. I somehow got into an MFA program, and it was there that I realized it was impossible to tackle those kinds of ideas within the confines of psychological realism, which is what everyone was writing at the time. I couldn’t make the arguments I wanted to make in a direct way, so I tried to disguise them as “thematic” concerns, which ended up making my stories muddled and needlessly oblique. When I started writing personal essays, it was such a relief because I was finally able to say what I wanted to say directly. The ideas could take center stage. But I do think that fiction taught me some valuable skills that carry over into nonfiction: an attention to language, how to pace a story, how to build an emotional arc. And now, of course, fiction writers are doing such interesting things. I love the novels that Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Cusk have published over the past several years. Their fiction often feels like essays, or even philosophy. I’ve learned a lot as an essayist from reading their work, and I think if I ever go back to writing fiction, I’d likely want to do work in that vein.
What are you working on these days?
I’m working on a book-length project. Nonfiction. It’s the first time I’m writing something this long, and it’s still evolving, so I’m hesitant to say too much about it at this point, but it’s been exciting and a bit daunting to work on something of this scope.
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Truth and Testimony: An Interview with Meghan O’Gieblyn

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/sheila-hetis-talmudic-texts/"></div>The Talmud tells of a rabbinic dispute over the ritual purity of a particular type of oven, the oven of akhnai. All of the rabbis hold that the oven is impure — with the sole exception of Rabbi Eliezer, who does his best to convince his colleagues otherwise. Though the Talmud says he gives “all possible answers in the world to support his opinion,” the other rabbis remain unconvinced.
Rabbi Eliezer turns to the divine. At first, he does so obliquely. He declares, “If the halakha” — ritual law — “is in accordance with my opinion, this carob tree will prove it.” The carob tree is uprooted, but the rabbis object. “One does not cite halakhic proof from the carob tree,” they tell him. Fine. “If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion,” Rabbi Eliezer says, “this stream will prove it.” The stream begins to flow in reverse. But this does not convince the rabbis either. “One does not cite halakhic proof from a stream,” they say. All right. “If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion,” Rabbi Eliezer says, “the walls of the study hall will prove it.” The study hall walls begin to cave in, but Rabbi Yehoshua reprimands them: “If Torah scholars are contending with each other in matters of halakha, what is the nature of your involvement in this dispute?” Stuck between the two rabbis, the walls compromise; they neither collapse nor stand back up, but remain where they are, leaning. Rabbi Eliezer, surely frustrated, calls upon God more directly. “If the halakha is in accordance with my opinion,” he says, “heaven will prove it.” A divine voice descends from heaven. “Why,” it asks, “are you differing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the halakha is in accordance with his opinion in every place that he expresses an opinion?” The matter seems settled.
But no. Rabbi Yehoshua boldly cites God against God, quoting Deuteronomy 30:12: “It is not in heaven” — that is, it is not in heaven to decide what does or doesn’t accord with halakha. Rabbi Yirmeya adds, “Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice, as You already wrote at Mount Sinai, in the Torah: ‘After a majority to incline’ (Exodus 23:2).” The human majority, Rabbi Yirmeya contends, rules over the word of God. Years later, Rabbi Natan encounters the prophet Elijah and asks — as one does when one happens upon a prophet — what God thought of all this. Elijah reports, “The Holy One, Blessed be He, smiled and said: My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me.”
Something similar occurs in Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood (2018). The novel’s narrator (unnamed, except for her middle name, mentioned once: Magdalen), though she does not contend directly with God, does spend significant time interrogating a non-human authority. In a practice adapted from the I Ching, she asks a question and flips three coins. Two or three heads means yes, and two or more tails means no. Motherhood’s central subject is the question of whether or not the narrator should have a child with her boyfriend, Miles. Near the book’s middle, she poses this question to the coins directly:
Should I have a child with Miles? 
no 
Should I have a child at all? 
yes 
So then should I leave Miles? 
no 
Should I have an affair with another man while I’m with Miles, and raise the child as Miles’s own, deceiving him about the provenance of that child? 
yes 
I don’t think that’s a good idea.
As she hints here, the narrator will ultimately defy the coins’ authority: by the book’s end, she has chosen not to have a child at all. In a way similar to the Talmudic sages, she has already wrested the authority to disobey the coins from the coins themselves, in her first exchange with them:
This will be my stated purpose, my design or agenda, in writing this — to understand what it means, the soul of time, or to explain it to myself. Is that a good premise for this book? 
no 
Is it too narrow? 
yes 
Can the soul of time be involved? 
no 
Am I allowed to betray you? 
yes
As in the Talmudic encounter between the rabbis and God, the narrator disputes the coins’ authority on the basis of that very authority.
Like the Talmud, Motherhood is a Jewish text about struggling with questions. The novel’s Jewishness — and the Jewishness of its similarly inquisitive predecessor, How Should a Person Be? (2010) — have been widely ignored by critics (with the notable exception of Helen Batya Rubinstein, whose <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/review/not-another-holocaust-book" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://jewishcurrents.org/review/not-another-holocaust-book', 'piece in ');">piece in </a><a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/review/not-another-holocaust-book" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://jewishcurrents.org/review/not-another-holocaust-book', 'Jewish Currents');">Jewish Currents</a> considers Motherhood’s relationship to Holocaust literature). By and large, critics have opted to read the novels primarily through the organizing concept of “autofiction,” the blend of fiction and autobiography that each employs. But if we were to leave the question of the novels’ relations to the author’s life to the side and attend, instead, to their overlooked Jewish themes, we might come to a different understanding of the novels’ formal peculiarities.
Motherhood is rife with Jewish references. The narrator’s Jewishness provides one of the key frameworks through which she considers the question of whether she should become a mother. The references are sometimes personal, as when the narrator considers her “religious cousin,” who tells a story over Shabbat dinner about the way a certain method of cooking chicken has been passed down by the women in her family, despite the fact that the improved material conditions of their lives have made the method obsolete. The narrator compares this practice to childbearing and wonders whether the latter is also “a once-necessary sentimental gesture”; the anecdote’s religious source suggests, too, an identification between that empty sentimentality and religious observance. Yet in the next passage, the narrator, considering an abortion she has had, finds solace in Jewish law: “The Jewish religion says it’s not a child until it’s two-thirds out of the woman’s body — until the head has completely emerged.” The most striking and central of the novel’s personal Jewish elements is the way the memory of the Holocaust — the narrator’s grandmother, Magda, survived Auschwitz — haunts the narrator’s choices: “They wanted to wipe us from the earth, and we must never let them. Then how can I imagine not having children, and selfishly contribute to our dying out? Yet, I don’t really care if the human race dies out.”
Other key Jewish references arise not from the narrator’s own Jewish life, but from her engagement with Jewish texts. She reads a tale about the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, and his daughter, which brings her to the realization that “all [her] worrying about not being a mother came down to this history — this implication that a woman is not an end in herself.” She considers the Jewish painter R. B. Kitaj’s Auschwitz painting If Not, Not, and finds in its title a possible resolution of her indecision. “I don’t want ‘not a mother’ to be part of who I am — for my identity to be the negative of someone else’s positive identity,” she writes. “Then maybe instead of being ‘not a mother’ I could be not ‘not a mother.’ I could be not not.” The narrator’s interpretations of these Jewish texts aid in the development of her inquiry.
The Jewish narrative most central to Motherhood is the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, which she invokes in one of her conversations with the coins. “Am I just cursed by a demon, sort of randomly?” she asks them. The coins reply, yes. At the coins’ behest, the narrator visualizes the demon as a knife like one in her kitchen drawer. She wonders why the coins have identified a knife as the appropriate visualization:
Is it a knife because the demon wants to cut away what is hopeful and optimistic in me? 
yes 
Does it want to cut away my trust in the world? 
yes 
Does it have a good reason for doing this? 
yes 
Because it’s a servant of the devil? 
no 
Is it an angel, rather? 
yes 
Is it a situation like ‘Jacob Wrestling the Angel’? 
yes
The narrator relates a version of the Biblical story, in which she refers to the angel as “a creature.” (Though both Jewish and Christian traditions have come to interpret Jacob’s combatant as an angel, the Hebrew word used in Genesis means “man.”) The narrator parses the Biblical tale, searching for its significance to her situation. “The most important thing,” she muses, “is that Jacob continues to fight, even after he is injured, and instead of fear or anger towards the demon-angel, he asks to be blessed. I think that is the most moving part. That opens up something inside me.”
In a later encounter with the coins, the narrator returns to the story. “Jacob names his wrestling place Peniel,” she says. “Is he naming a personal taboo in doing this?” The coins answer, yes. She presses on:
Do we synthesize taboos by taking on a new name — as Jacob’s name became Israel? 
no 
Do we synthesize them by narrating them, by telling ourselves stories about our wrestling with them? 
yes 
Is the idea of being a mother a taboo for me, personally? 
yes 
Then must I synthesize this taboo with my life by telling a story about wrestling with it? 
yes 
But it takes a long time to tell a story, meaning that when we are done, we walk away hobbled — or older — but hopefully more spiritually invigorated. Jacob named his story ‘Peniel,’ which means, Here is where I stood face-to-face with God. What am I standing face-to-face with? The prospect of motherhood? 
yes 
In the story of Jacob, the angel blesses him there. Yet wait — what does it mean to be blessed? That the thing we are wrestling with wishes us well? 
no 
That our wrestling will take care of us forever? 
yes.
The subject returns again in the narrator’s final conversation with the coins, in which the narrator asks about the book she is writing: “Is this the book of the angel, or the angel’s book?” The coins say, yes. “Because,” the narrator asks, “I have been wrestling with an angel?” The coins, again: yes. The narrator eagerly embraces this interpretation, as she shows in the novel’s final line, which transforms the final line of Jacob’s fable — “Then Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, It is because here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared” — thus: “Then I named this wrestling place Motherhood, for here is where I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared.” The narrator invites us to understand the novel itself as an enactment of Jacob’s struggle.
We get a hint of Heti’s interest in this story in How Should a Person Be?. Jen, a friend of the protagonist (named Sheila), tells her about her favorite painting, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. (Which of the handful of famous paintings that bear this name she means, Jen does not say.) “From my point of view,” Jen tells Sheila, “when I am struggling, I always imagine I am struggling with a devil. But when I saw that painting I realized — no, it’s an angel. Now I always try to remember, when I am struggling, that I am struggling with an angel.” How Should a Person Be?, like Motherhood, is about a struggle to answer a single question — in this case, the titular one. As the novel opens, we find the narrator, Sheila, obsessing over it: “For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in my situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too.” Before the prologue ends, Sheila draws her first oblique comparison between her own unsettlement and the mythic rootlessness of her Biblical ancestors, who “left their routines as slaves in Egypt to follow Moses into the desert in search of the promised land.” In a lightly parodic turn, she imagines the ancient Israelites as manifesting their choice of how to be through their preferred methods of fashioning flour into food: some make matzo, while others prefer bagels.
Soon, Sheila begins toying with the idea of identifying with Moses. Reflecting on the play she has been commissioned to write by a feminist theater company, she muses that she “could just as easily lead the people out of bondage with words that came from a commissioned play” as she could by writing anything else. As she begins to despair of doing anything of value with the play, she voices that despair by exuberantly imagining herself as a feminized Moses:
Who among us will be asked to lead the people out of bondage, only to say, God, I have never been a good talker. Ask someone else. Ask my brother instead of me. There is no way to accomplish what I feel I must accomplish with this play. There is no way in heaven or on earth! I am the wrong person to do it. Look at the shitty red hoodie I am sitting here in. Look at my dirty running shoes. I have such small breasts. God, shouldn’t you call upon a woman with great big knockers, who the people will listen to? Why do you call on me, who doesn’t have the cleavage to capture the world’s attention? Ask my sister instead of me, whose big breasts are much more suited to doing your work.
As the novel goes on, Sheila becomes more and more comfortable identifying with Moses — not because she sees herself as rising to the level of his greatness, but because she increasingly understands his imperfections as linked to her own. Once she realizes that Moses killed an Egyptian man before he was called by God to liberate the Israelites, she asks herself, “If that is what my king is like, what can I expect for myself?” Relieved and reassured, she concludes, “I can be a bumbling murderous coward like the king of the Jews.” Sheila’s developing identification with Moses, who led the Israelites through 40 years of grueling wandering only to die before the exile came to its conclusion, suggests her growing comfort with the unresolvable wandering — and wondering — embodied in the novel’s animating question.
How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood each transport defining Jewish narratives — Moses leading the wandering Israelites and Jacob wrestling with the angel — into frameworks for their protagonists’ personal struggles. (Notably, in both instances, the novels’ narrators feminize the struggles of patriarchs.) But the Jewishness of both novels does not consist simply in Heti’s use of these Biblical narratives as thematic frameworks. Embedded in these narratives are distinctly Jewish understandings of inquiry that Heti’s texts enact. How Should a Person Be? sends Sheila wandering from place to place and interlocutor to interlocutor in search of answers to her question of how to be. (Many of the chapter titles winkingly acknowledge this structure: “They Wander in Miami,” “They Wander the City on Drugs,” “Sheila Wanders in New York,” “Sheila Wanders in the Copy Shop.”) Motherhood finds its narrator in a tormented struggle with herself — aided by the coins, which act both as an externalization of her own desires and as a form of external authority. Both novels take the form of the conceptions of Jewish inquiry they consider. Together, the novels model an understanding of textual inquiry — in the sense of both inquiry through texts and inquiry in text — as an ethical project; the textual wandering and wrestling become ways of raising questions about how one should live.
How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood are united not only in this project, but also in their method of marshaling various forms (narrative as well as philosophical, from fable to dialogue to Biblical exegesis to essay) and modes (comic, confessional, contemplative) to develop questions within the context of a life. The novels emerge from a Jewish textual tradition, dating back to the Talmud, of blending genres and modes in the service of unceasing inquiry in which the metaphysical and the mundane are inseparably interwoven. When we look at these novels as engaging with this tradition, we can begin to understand their blending of fiction and autobiography not as an end in itself, but rather as one way that they, following the Talmud, put texts and life into conversation in the service of questioning. These novels are not, as some critics have contended, merely lightly altered memoirs, but something stranger. Something subtler. Something far more ancient.
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Sheila Heti’s Talmudic Texts

relentless-picnic-final

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/audio-salve-relentless-picnic-podcast-power-real-conversation/"></div>In early 2017, like everyone else I knew, I was miserable. I was reeling from the election. It seemed impossible to focus on anything other than the news, which only brought more misery. I was struggling in other ways, too. I was 24, and, though I’d been living in Minneapolis with my then-fiancée (now-wife) for more than a year, I was having trouble making friends in a new city. (Nobody warns you just how hard it can be for adults to forge new, meaningful friendships in new places.) I’d left a job I’d found meaningful but had disliked for other reasons. Now I was at a job I found meaningless and disliked for that reason. The bleak days dragged on.
Around the same time, miles away from me, in Washington, DC, three friends — Adam, Erikk, and Nick — started a podcast called The Relentless Picnic. The show is not well-known, but its fans are devoted — it was once even cited in <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/17/contributor-picks-doomed-bohemians-death-masks/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/17/contributor-picks-doomed-bohemians-death-masks/', 'The Paris Review');">The Paris Review</a>, where one such fan, the poet and New York Review of Books senior editor Jana Prikryl, wrote, “their conversations cut at weird diagonals across the preening, pedagogical grain of standard podcast style.” Mira Gonzalez, a poet who lives in Los Angeles, told me it’s “like being in a class with three of the world’s best philosophy professors, except I’m the only student and we don’t have to follow any sort of curriculum.” Mark O’Connell, the Dublin-based author of To Be a Machine, praises the show for its “free-form” conversations and its “artful” construction, calling it “alive and volatile and open.” Ken Baumann, a writer and political organizer who runs the small publishing company Sator Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico, puts it like this: “The Relentless Picnic is the only podcast that makes me feel hope.”
The show’s genesis is inseparable from the election of Donald Trump. But the essential activity of the podcast — an expansive, irreverent style of joint inquiry — long preceded that cataclysm. The three friends met in college. Adam and Nick, who lived next door to one another, bonded over the experimental writings of David Markson and George Washington’s etiquette book. Erikk’s first recollection of Adam involved spotting his future friend nodding along with him while he had an impromptu debate with an outspoken Objectivist in the college coffee shop. Despite these early encounters, the three didn’t become close until years later, around 2008 or 2009. For much of the time between then and 2016, a central feature of their friendship was what Erikk called “doing the podcast without microphones”:
[S]itting around, having spiraling, freewheeling, big conversations, sometimes pinned to a media item, but very often not, going into comedy wormholes and exploring threads that seemed disparate and looking up words and places and going down internet wormholes together.
While Nick recalled telling Adam that he wished they had recorded certain conversations, like their discussions about Plato’s Cratylus and about Article Five of the United States Constitution, it was actually Erikk who suggested doing a podcast. The others responded enthusiastically. They felt that Trump’s election was a culmination of modernity’s worst ills and that it demanded a response, if only for the sake of their own sanity. “It suddenly felt,” Nick said, “like the amount of shit I was being asked to eat every day was quintupled overnight. And having a focused, dedicated place to metabolize that toxicity became pretty urgent to me.” The Relentless Picnic was born. They recorded, produced, and quietly released a <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/episode-0-the-basement" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/episode-0-the-basement', 'pilot episode');">pilot episode</a> on Pizzagate and the structure of conspiracy theories. During the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, they released four more episodes before they began publicizing the podcast later that January.
It was in the malaised, shit-eating haze of early 2017, shortly after The Relentless Picnic’s premiere, that I began listening. Mary Duffy, a Denver-based editor of interactive fiction for Choice of Games, introduced me to the podcast. She later described the show as &#8220;people whose minds I trust — the way I trust my own — honestly postulating about things together.&#8221; The early episodes are fascinating documents of what it was like to live through the early months of the Trump presidency. The Picnickers chewed through it all, from Sean Spicer’s press conferences to Kellyanne Conway’s cable news appearances, with a mix of alacrity and despair that I wasn’t finding elsewhere. Take, for instance, the moment in <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/episode-8-fight-song" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/episode-8-fight-song', 'one episode');">one episode</a> in which Nick prophesies the endpoint of Paul Ryan’s alliance with Trump:
I see Donald Trump careening over the guardrail into illegality, into authoritarianism, into totalitarian dictatorship, just so that Paul Ryan is dragged over the cliff with him, and Donald Trump gets to smirk into his disgusting, cheese-eating Wisconsin rat face once before they both splatter on the ground at the floor of the valley of history.
These words fade into Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” the famously inept soundtrack of the 2016 Democratic Party. I couldn’t stop laughing. It felt like undergoing an exorcism. But the Picnickers go beyond the explicitly political sphere. They ridicule the technocratic liberalism embodied by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and take aim at titans of center-left audio media — the very shows against which The Relentless Picnic defines itself. They excoriate <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/the-slaughterhouse-of-shallow-contentment-episode-075-side-a-121816" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/the-slaughterhouse-of-shallow-contentment-episode-075-side-a-121816', 'Radiolab');">Radiolab</a> as a “slaughterhouse of shallow contentment” and decry <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-26-this-is-marketplace" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-26-this-is-marketplace', 'NPR&#8217;s ');">NPR&#8217;s </a><a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-26-this-is-marketplace" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-26-this-is-marketplace', 'Marketplace');">Marketplace</a> as a propagator of neoliberal truisms in the guise of serious economic journalism.
For me, The Relentless Picnic was a balm. In a media landscape where everything else felt numb, a genuine conversation amongst long-time friends nourished my lonely spirit and offered me solace. If the show had been just that, it would have been enough. But it grew into something more.
“We started out trying to digest the toxicity of the news of the day,” Adam said, “but as we’ve gotten deeper into it, I feel like we’ve looked at other approaches. We’ve tried to find ways of getting at that bigger problem.” Erikk explained the bigger problem they want to address:
In a certain way the world became so infatuated with that way of thinking, in the Trump administration, that it really did feel like just responding to the state of the world — responding simply, in some more direct way, like we definitely do for many episodes — became part of the problem — or at least a schematized role in the problematic structures. So, rising above it in a way that sometimes obliquely deals with the goings-on of the world and sometimes straight-up avoids American politics felt to me more like a re-accessing of something important that was being threatened.
Thus came episodes on more idiosyncratic subjects. In <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-15-his-favorite-child" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-15-his-favorite-child', 'one');">one</a>, the Picnickers analyze Redditors’ accounts of paranormal experiences (and, along the way, some of the pathologies of contemporary masculinity). In <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-19-get-in" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-19-get-in', 'another');">another</a>, they ask what the decline of hitchhiking in America suggests about the state of our democracy (spoiler: it’s not good). <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-22-shanksville" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-22-shanksville', 'They even take the show on the road ');">They even take the show on the road </a>— to Shanksville, PA, the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 — to reckon with the memorialization of 9/11. Increasingly, the episodes unify seemingly disparate threads: for example, reactionary “prepper” culture, the ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe, and the story of Kaylee Muthart, the young woman who clawed her own eyes out during a religious experience while high on meth, are threaded together into a meditation on American eschatology in an episode titled <a href="https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-28-ragnarok" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://soundcloud.com/relentless-picnic/ep-28-ragnarok', '“Ragnarok.”');">“Ragnarok.”</a>
While the episodes’ subject matter and mode vary, they all illustrate conversation as a serious, subtle pursuit. Often, when we speak of “conversation,” we mean it in a superficial sense: people speaking in close proximity — the utilitarian expressions of “small talk” and “networking,” the kinds of “conversations” I was usually reduced to in my attempts to make friends in Minneapolis. It&#8217;s no accident that The Relentless Picnic&#8216;s “lost episodes” (conversations pre-microphones) included a discussion about a Platonic dialogue, a form that embodies conversation as a serious philosophical project. In certain conversations, what’s said emerges not from the participants as separate beings, but from what happens between them. This is not our ordinary mode of interacting with one another. Social media amplifies the most reductive aspect of conversation — we focus on expressing ourselves at the expense of listening to someone else. But a listener of The Relentless Picnic, like the reader of a dialogue, is not only able to consider each speaker’s point in turn but is also able to linger in that contemplative space between speech acts, where the real, generative drama of conversation unfolds.
Part of The Relentless Picnic’s pleasure is that it encourages this thoughtful participation just as much through editing as it does through speaking. An episode’s unifying theme is not often immediately clear. It requires the listeners’ interpretive effort to work out. For this reason, The Relentless Picnic rewards repeated listens in a way that most audio content does not. “Podcasts,” Erikk said, “tend to be disposable slices of conversation.” But The Relentless Picnic aims not to be disposable. “We try not to just give people digestible bits that make it easy, make it quick, make it simple,” Adam said. The conversations are unscripted, but each episode is edited meticulously, with an ear toward how moments in conversations resonate with one another. Nothing is rushed; the podcast doesn’t operate on a strict schedule. When the Picnickers produce something they’re happy with, they release it. In between full episodes, they release “treats” on their Patreon, which range from material cut from episodes, to interviews with friends of the show, to heavily annotated recipes (for instance, a recipe for jerk chicken doubles as an essay on the origins of barbecue).
The podcast arises from a deep friendship between these three men, and by inviting their intimate dialogue into my eardrums, I came to feel as though I knew them. Of course, I don’t know them — at least not well. I do, however, follow them on Twitter. All three are active online and, as one might expect, open to conversations with fans. However, they are more private about their personal lives. They all preferred that I omit their last names. Adam and Erikk allowed me to include that they are in their 30s, but Nick wouldn’t reveal his age or his real first name. They’re open about the fact that the podcast is based in Washington, DC, but the three prefer to keep their professions unknown.
“The problem with getting into professions,” Adam said:
is that I take it as an essential aspect to our whole project that we are not coming at you like credentialed people, and I don’t want it to make a difference whether or not I have a PhD in being articulate and brilliant, or if I work at a donut shop. We’re trying to leave that realm, you know?
“The great joy of doing this,” Nick said, “is that you’re judged on your merits and not on anything else.”
I admire this. The democratic promise of social media has generally given way to a reality as credential-obsessed as the one that preceded it. Everyone obsesses over blue check marks, tallies of followers and faves, the names of legacy publications and well-endowed universities in their quippy bios. The Relentless Picnic aims at something different.
“What we really are talking about,” Erikk said, “is an ethics of thinking, going forward.” This language — about ethics, about thinking, about how to live — recurs frequently in the Picnickers’ response to my questions. That response, by the way, took the form of a recorded hour-long conversation, an unorthodox interview method that Erikk suggested. On the recording, they joke that they’re basically making a private episode for my ears only, and it’s true: what they send me is a discussion as riveting as any episode of The Relentless Picnic. Like the show, it’s rich enough to listen to over and over again — which I do, marveling at the consolation a simple act of dialogue between friends can make possible.
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Audio Salve: The Relentless Picnic Podcast and the Power of a Real Conversation

tonya

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/theres-one-tonya-debating-sufjan-stevenss-two-renditions-tonya-harding/"></div>Earlier this month, indie darling Sufjan Stevens <a href="http://asthmatickitty.com/tonya-harding/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://asthmatickitty.com/tonya-harding/', 'released');">released</a> two versions of “Tonya Harding,” an ode to the disgraced Olympic figure skater and recent subject of the Margot Robbie-starring I, Tonya. (The filmmakers reportedly passed on the song.)
Much has been made of Stevens’s recasting of the divisive Harding as a heroic underdog and American icon, but so far the two versions — which differ not only in key, but also in pace, orchestration, and emotional register — have largely been treated as one song. Below, Stevens fans Chris Stedman and Nathan Goldman debate the merits of each. Stedman has chosen D Major, Goldman Eb Major.
In Defense of D Major
Look, there really aren’t two versions of “Tonya Harding.” There’s one song — “Tonya Harding (In D Major)” — and an alternate take that follows it. Both are lovely, but only one of them is a fully-realized song worthy of its complicated subject.
It’s actually not all that fair to Eb Major to compare the two because D Major is perfect. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. The song is that good. Released just a few weeks before the end of the year, D Major is a stirring last-minute bid for song of the year. Like the haunting “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” before it, Stevens uses the song to humanize a notorious and oft-demonized public figure in the way only he can. It is lovingly honest and empathetic, turning a caricature into a queen. Last month, I had no opinion on Harding. Now, the tragedies and triumphs of her life are all I can think about.
The production of D Major is an inextricable part of why this song works so well. With assists from Helado Negro and Doveman, Stevens fashions an intricate web of piano, twinkling synths, and modulated drum machine beats. Throughout the song, both the tempo and Stevens’s layered, ethereal vocals are steady as a sea of oscillating synths and handclaps ebb and flow, the sound panning from left to right like Harding cutting across the ice. The beautifully busy production mirrors the chaos of Harding’s dynamic life, while Stevens’s voice and the percussion are stable forces guiding her on.
D Major builds into a gorgeous crescendo of intricate synths and wordless vocals before dropping out almost completely at the three and a half minute mark, leaving just a piano and Stevens’s hushed voice. The contrast between the swell of sound that precedes it and this quiet moment gives heft to Stevens’s words of consolation: “Tonya Harding, my friend / Well this world is a bitch, girl / Don’t end up in a ditch, girl / I’ll be watching you close to the end.” In this moment Harding is transformed from a villain or a star into a friend, someone you want to protect from a world that is so often cold and cruel.
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If you still don’t believe me that this is the version of the song, watch how perfectly it is set to Harding’s 1991 U.S. National Championship program in the song’s official video. Frequently criticized as being overly mechanical — a robotic and technical skater who valued perfection over feeling — Harding and her routine are imbued with new emotion when set to D Major. The song also takes on an even greater weight with the visual; you can feel how much she wants to win, to prove her worth, and how much Stevens wants it for her, too. As she skates, Stevens is the compassionate voice of encouragement she didn’t seem to have in her husband or mother.
Harding has described herself as being surrounded by people who loved her because of how their proximity to her skill could benefit them, and in D Major’s cacophonous instrumentation you can almost feel them pulling at her as she tries to evade their exploitative grasps. Watching her twirl, spin, and victoriously raise her arms in the air in the video to D Major, it’s hard not to think that perhaps, if she’d had a champion like Stevens in her corner who loved her not in spite of but because of her humanness, things might have turned out differently. And it’s impossible to imagine her skating that program to anything else now.
The delicate Eb Major, on the other hand — while lovely in its sparseness — feels a bit underdeveloped, like Harding’s 1994 Winter Olympics routine, where she only attempted a single axel jump instead of the planned triple. The warm synth opening in Eb Major is a red herring, quickly giving way to a simple, waltzy piano ballad that sounds more like a demo than a finished product. On its own Eb Major is pretty and tender, but immediately following the emotional richness of D Major, it feels, well, flat.
Ultimately Eb Major is probably best enjoyed immediately following D Major (or, in my case, as a buffer between repeats), serving as a kind of extended outro for an emotionally wrenching and lavishly produced song that requires a less demanding cooldown.
In the early ‘90s you were either Team Harding or Team Kerrigan. Once again we’re being asked to pick a side, but this time the choice couldn’t be clearer: D Major, a song as complex, thorny, and convention-shattering as the rebel it reveres.
In Exultation of Eb Major
In <a href="http://asthmatickitty.com/tonya-harding/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://asthmatickitty.com/tonya-harding/', 'a short essay');">a short essay</a> released along with the two versions of “Harding,” Stevens describes Harding as “an unlikely skating star.” So it’s no surprise that, in the battle between the two songs chronicling the life of this underdog, the obvious victor is the B-side. But as with Harding herself, to see this clearly, you have to be willing to put aside some assumptions.
Like the “flamboyant outfits” that Stevens describes Harding as wearing — because, unlike her competitors, she “couldn’t afford Vera Wang” — Eb Major might seem unsophisticated on first listen. It’s understandable that <a href="http://variety.com/2017/music/news/sufjan-stevens-tonya-harding-1202635093/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://variety.com/2017/music/news/sufjan-stevens-tonya-harding-1202635093/', 'Variety');">Variety</a>’s Chris Willman would describe it as “peppier” and “more palatable” than D Major and as “something you can imagine at, say, the end of a movie.” The pace is certainly accelerated — between the tempo change and the clipping of instrumental flourishes, it comes in at more than a minute under the runtime of D Major — and the arrangement is far more restrained. There’s also a seemingly naive brightness in Eb Major’s twinkling pianos that Stevens mirrors in his vocal performance. The austerity of the spare arrangement gives the song a kind of flatness, a feeling of safety or even coziness.
But just because Eb Major doesn’t wear its complexity on the surface doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Unlike an anesthetized Disney version of a once-grotesque fairy tale, the delicate simplicity of Eb Major stands in quiet tension with the lyrics’ straightforward retelling of Harding’s fraught life and career. It sounds like a lullaby compared to the languorous sprawl of D Major, but the nearly unchanged lyrics bring out a darkness that beautifully complicates Eb Major’s apparent plainness. When, in the second verse, Stevens sings, “Just some Portland white trash / You confronted your sorrow / Like there was no tomorrow / While the rest of the world only laughed,” pity mixes with admiration to create a devastating storm of emotion. In the last two lines, Stevens’s voice rushes ahead of the music, tripping over itself to deliver the first words of the final line over the last words of the preceding line. This move — which Stevens repeats in the third, 10th, and 11th verses — creates a wrenching sense of awkwardness fitting for his inscrutable star.
The song reaches its emotional apex in the desperate yearning of the melody Stevens sings in the first line of the fourth verse — “Are your laces untied?” — and repeats several more times, most devastatingly in the line, “Are you lonely at night?” Here the song achieves the most concentrated form of the melancholy that otherwise lurks beneath its surface.
Where D Major foregrounds the grandeur and desolation of Harding’s life, Eb Major more gracefully captures the lyrics’ mix of camp and gravity. The repetitive swirl of the piano melody recalls Harding herself spinning on the ice. But the arrangement’s simplicity and lightness don’t evoke Harding in the flesh so much as a snow-globe facsimile, skating in circles as swirls of faux-snow glitter to the tune of a tinny music box melody summoned by the turn of a key. This is appropriate for a song equally concerned with Harding the human being and Harding the icon. Stevens disrupts the looping verses only twice, with short, pleasantly feedback-filled interludes: just enough to briefly break the song’s charming spell and to gesture toward the darkness and despair of Harding’s tale that the song otherwise sublimates and holds at bay.
To the untrained ear, the songs’ final 20 seconds — in which Stevens repeats “You’re my shining American star” over a chord resolution that puts one in mind of a musical finale — close out the song on a note of cheesy triumph. But the attentive listener will hear the wry irony in Stevens’s voice as he bestows the title, as the song rises into the realm of self-parody. This is the magic that Eb Major offers: a subtle cynicism and charm laced with despair.
Every incredible B-side benefits from being paired with an excellent A-side. Eb Major is lucky to have D Major to grab listeners’ attention and to remind them of Stevens’s skills for maximalist production. And after the bombast of D Major has died down and the ringing has faded from your ears, Eb Major will be there to open your heart to the irreducible complexity of Tonya Harding.
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There&#8217;s Only One Tonya: Debating Sufjan Stevens&#8217;s Two Renditions of &#8220;Tonya Harding&#8221;

Kafka and Noise

Nathan Goldman is a writer living in Minneapolis. His work has appeared in&nbsp;The Nation,&nbsp;Literary Hub,&nbsp;The New Inquiry, and other publications. He is a blog editor for&nbsp;Full Stop. Find him online @nathangoldman and at&nbsp;nathangoldman.com.

Nathan Goldman

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Nathan Goldman is a writer living in Minneapolis. His work has appeared in&nbsp;The Nation,&nbsp;Literary Hub,&nbsp;The New Inquiry, and other publications. He is a blog editor for&nbsp;Full Stop. Find him online @nathangoldman and at&nbsp;nathangoldman.com.