patton_interview

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/shadows-conversation-patton-oswalt-michelle-mcnamaras-ill-gone-dark/"></div>The inside of a fridge in a brand new house in Irvine, CA, in 1981 “smelled like plastic.” In Goleta, the same year, “the smell of night-blossoming jasmine drifted in through open windows” and “the hippies weren’t young anymore. Up close, you could see that they’d weathered not just wind and sun but gradations of defeat that had turned the light off in their eyes.” Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is precise and atmospheric in chronicling the lives that the Golden State Killer interrupted. It’s also a layered story about obsession: the killer’s with his victims, and McNamara’s with tracking down the killer. Reading the book, one tends to get pulled in and obsessed oneself. A number one New York Times Best Seller, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was a best book of the year from Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and Esquire, among many others. On the occasion of its paperback release, I talked with Patton Oswalt about it at the Last Bookstore. I was ever-so-slightly starstruck, and he was generous and thoughtful and, even on this topic, funny.
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REBECCA SCHULTZ: What’s it been like seeing this book go out into the world?
PATTON OSWALT: It’s bittersweet. The book showcases what I always knew: that she’s a brilliant writer, and so it’s been gratifying to see the acclaim that the writing itself has received. It’s great to see who she’s inspired, too: the explosion of true crime podcasts; and, also, a lot of working homicide cops and detectives going, maybe some of these bloggers aren’t so kooky and bothersome as we thought, and actually using them as a resource. At the same time, at events like this there are always questions that I’m not equipped to answer. I’m not as intelligent and empathetic as she was. It’s like you’re sending out a rodeo clown to talk about someone who’s discovered cold fusion, and for some reason he’s the one who has to answer all the questions.
And then of course there’s the influence her work had on the investigation itself.
Right. One of the reasons that this guy got so much renewed attention was that she renamed him. It sounds awful to say but it’s branding. First, his name was the East Area Rapist, or E.A.R., and then a couple years later there was a reporter doing a story who misquoted a cop who said he’s like the original Night Stalker. So they added the O.N.S. So now he’s got a nickname that takes half an hour to explain, and it sounds like EAR-ONS. Like, wait, is he a Winnie-the-Pooh character? [Cold case investigator] Paul Holes was like, this sounds really creepy but: Zodiac, Night Stalker, Hillside Strangler. Great names. That focuses your attention. But EAR-ONS? When she gave him the name Golden State Killer he was like, thank God. That will help.
And Michelle knew that when she renamed him.
Definitely. I remember her trying to decide what she should name him. She had a whole list of possibilities. But she settled on Golden State Killer.  It’s got the word killer in it but then golden state — there’s something eerie and poetic to that.
You mention her empathy. That’s such a powerful force in the book, the way she connects with investigators and victims.
Yes. Usually in true crime narratives you have this tormented, faceless killer, and his victimized targets, and the cops that close the case. But in this case the cops are often even more tormented than the victims, because they’re carrying the weight of, why can’t we bring order and sanity to this world. That takes a psychological toll on people, and she really nails that.
And she felt that toll, too. She writes so beautifully about going down the “rabbit hole” of the investigation.
It’s like falling in love with someone. Investigators talk about it in those terms: they say things like, I’m really liking this guy. This guy’s looking really good. And then you hit a wall that totally exonerates him. I think one of the reasons that the investigators she spoke to respected her is that she would bring them solid theories, that she’d really worked out, and when they shot holes in them — not to be mean to her, they were just like, let me just stop you, these two pieces of information negate everything that you’ve done — she would accept that, brush herself off and keep going. There were mornings when she’d be weeping, so frustrated, and then get right back to work.
One of her favorite true crime books was Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac. She read it over and over. Like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, it’s a book about someone’s descent into a rabbit hole, but unlike Michelle, he isn’t aware that it’s happening. He’s not cognizant of what he’s revealing in his narrative.
Whereas Michelle is so self-aware. Was the hybrid genre that she’s working in — the way she uses memoir to incorporate her relationship to the investigation — built into the project from the start, or did she come upon that through the writing process?
It developed organically. There was a turning point for her when she was writing for her blog, “True Crime Diary,” about a couple shot on a beach in Jenner, California. If you look at the facts of the case, it looks like, a couple was camping on the beach and someone came out with a rifle and shot them. Okay. But Michelle went up to Jenner, and took a video camera with her down to the beach. It was a rocky beach, and it was difficult and dangerous to get down to. That totally changed the narrative for her. Walking the route that the killer would have taken, she realized that this was not a guy who just walked down to the beach. This was somebody who was very comfortable with the outdoors: he’d have to be, in order to get there, carrying a very heavy rifle, at night.  Her experience actually gave her more insight into what a possible solution could be.
She also needed to be self-aware about her own experience and perspective because she knew that, whether they want to admit it or not, an investigator’s values and preconceived notions are the prism with which they look at a crime. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is in a lot of ways a portrait of Northern California in the 1970s. There was a lot of misogyny, that of course did not feel like misogyny to the people thinking that way at the time. Michelle would look at police files and find notes about the promiscuity about some of the women who had been raped. Of course that affects how the crime was initially investigated.
Like the Janelle Cruz case, how they assumed that her killer had to have been one of the guys she’d dated.
Right. Those were the social norms of the time, which were of course butting up against the women’s liberation movement, the “me” generation, families fracturing all over the place.  Some of these investigators might have felt they were standing on unsteady ground, and trying to look at a case, while their own lives were getting disrupted.
And maybe that’s some of what the killer was reacting to, too.  
Yes. A friend of mine who read the book said, what’s really amazing is, these are people that are living in sunny California in the 1970s trying to build fun, happy lives. They should have been allowed to have fun, happy lives. That’s what life was all about back then. But there was somebody off in the shadows resenting this movement and warmth and sunshine. That’s really what it was, behind the murders and the rapes: this feeling of, I want to stain these lives somehow. Everything feels really sinister, after a while, when you read it. The way she describes the suburbs — nothing feels safe anymore.
That eeriness reminds me of this beautiful line, about why she wanted to pursue this investigation: “The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. His power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets.” I love the idea that he becomes&#8221;banal&#8221; when we can name him.  
That was another thing she was always talking to me about. When I was in my early twenties, my friends and I were all really into serial killers. It was a safe way to seem like a dangerous badass, to know all the statistics and everything. She was like, that’s a phase that people go through in their twenties, then you get older and you realize that the reason that these people are murderers is because they’re the blandest zilches on the planet. They try to paint themselves as these cold antiheroes. They’re given names like the Green River Killer and it’s like, oh my God, this guy must be like a combination between Dracula and Big Foot. Then they catch him and he looks like Mr. Roper from Three’s Company, and it’s like, of course that’s the reason he’s killing people: because he doesn’t take up any space in the world.
That’s why I love the title of her epilogue: “Letter to an Old Man.”
An old man. Yeah. She’s saying, if you’re alive you’re an old, frail, slower man and that’s what you always saw yourself as anyway, and now you actually are. And he is. He’s a seventy-three-year-old ex-cop named Joseph diAngelo. At a book event in Sacramento I met a lot of his surviving victims — his rape victims. They said the book, and the capture, didn’t give them closure. What’s actually helping them is, every time there’s a court hearing, they go and sit in the front row and stare at him, and he can’t meet their gaze.
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Off in the Shadows: A Conversation with Patton Oswalt about Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

Off in the Shadows: A Conversation with Patton Oswalt about Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

schultz-slimani

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/invisible-violence-conversation-leila-slimani/"></div>Leïla Slimani’s second novel, Chanson Douce, was awarded the 2016 Prix Goncourt in France, and was recently published in English as The Perfect Nanny. The story of a bourgeois Parisian family who hires a nanny so that the mother, Myriam, can go back to work, The Perfect Nanny begins at the end. We know from the start that the children will die and that the nanny, Louise, will be the one who kills them. What follows is my favorite kind of novel: a book where you want to linger over every sentence, but the sentences have a propulsive energy that won’t let you. I wanted to linger, reading The Perfect Nanny, because these sentences are precise, direct, and imagistic in their revelation of unsettling truths about bourgeois domestic life. I pressed on, though, because I wanted to know how it would happen that these truths — which felt like they could be my own secrets, or the secrets of half the families I know — doom this family in particular. We are, in fact, all doomed. This novel feels ancient as well as scarily contemporary: it makes the myth-like move of rendering literally, as action, a danger that’s real, but that usually lurks more quietly. Daphne is literally rooted to the ground, fleeing a man; Narcissus literally wastes away due to vanity; and the Massé children literally die at the invisible collision point of egotism and eros, race, gender, and class, where most contemporary, upper-middle-class, urban families raise their children. 
Slimani and I spoke at the Last Bookstore, when she visited Los Angeles in April on a book tour.
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REBECCA SCHULTZ: The inspiration for this novel was the murder of the Krim children on the Upper West Side in New York. What so interested you in that story?
LEÏLA SLIMANI: Actually, that was not the inspiration of the book. I was already writing the book when I discovered the case in New York. My idea, at first, was just to write a book about a nanny. A nanny is an interesting character for a novelist. She lives in a family where everyone acts as if she was a member of the family but everyone knows she’s not. She lives in a house and everyone tells her it’s her house, but everyone knows it’s not. And she raises children who are not her children. So she’s always in an ambiguous position. She shares the intimacy of a family but at the same time she’s always a stranger. I was raised by a nanny myself, in Morocco. She was like a mother to me, but I remember that even when I was seven or eight I knew that her position in the house was weird. I could feel that she was living in our home but that our home was not hers. I could feel that she was sad, that she was humiliated. I understood that there was a gap growing between her and me, because she couldn’t read and write, and I was learning to read and write at school.
And then I became a mother myself. I was working as a journalist and I needed a nanny to take care of my son, so I decided, like many Parisian parents, to do interviews with nannies. It was in the afternoon, in Paris, and many women came to our house. I was 30, I was mother to a little baby, and I felt like a baby myself. I knew nothing about life, and I met women coming from the Ivory Coast, women from the Philippines, women who were mothers themselves. They had to leave the children in their country. I felt it was strange that I was going to be the boss of one of these women. So I wanted to explore this uncomfortable position that I was in, and that the nanny is in.
So that was the idea. But when I started to write, I discovered quickly that my book was boring, because the life of a nanny is boring. It’s repetitive. It’s trivial. I wrote one chapter about her cooking, another about her going to the park. It was like, okay…and now what am I going to write? I needed something to put narrative tension in the book, and to help the reader want to turn the pages. I needed the reader to be active in this book. And when I discovered the New York case, I had the idea of beginning with a murder. I wanted to face the violence that exists in this relationship — a violence that’s invisible, because you don’t want to look at it. You don’t want even to think about it, when you are a mother or a father who hires a nanny. So it unlocked my inspiration. It helped me structure the book.
You have a line at the beginning, about Myriam, the mother: “She had always refused the idea that her children could be an impediment to her success, to her freedom.” It would be a simplistic, moralistic reading to say that the novel wants to punish her for wanting to be free in that way — that this invisible violence is her and her husband’s fault. Nonetheless, Myriam and Paul are engaged in some dangerous hypocrisies. 
I never judge my characters. I became a writer because I hate judging people and I hate feeling that people are judging me. When you are alone in your apartment — your children at school, your husband working — and you begin to write, you feel so free, because you can construct another world, and you can try just to understand another human being. You can stop judging him — stop saying he’s good, he’s bad, he’s like this, he’s like that. We never know other people. We know the surface. We can understand some things, but we don’t know who a person is. We know just little things — the rest is a mystery. As a writer, I like to explore this mystery. I’m not here to solve the problem. I’m not here to say, “Myriam is this,” or “Louise is that,” because I don’t know. Concerning the hypocrisies, I think that the main one is in the relationship between Myriam and Louise. Like many mothers, Myriam wants her children to love the nanny. She feels less guilty if her children love the nanny. But she doesn’t want to love her too much, because she is the mother.
The other strange thing about this relationship is that you are entrusting your children — what you cherish most in the world — to someone that you absolutely don’t know. I remember the first time that I left my house after saying goodbye to the nanny and to my son. I closed the door and I thought: this is weird. I don’t know this woman at all, and I’m leaving my son with her. You can’t understand the rationality of your decision, but you have to do it, or you can’t go outside to work.
And of course, when you’re dealing with intimacy between strangers, there’s going to be mutual projection, even fantasy. Louise is an asexual figure, to Myriam and Paul. She’s doll-like, child-like. And yet she wants something more from them: some of their intimacy. With other nannies — or, governesses, I guess — in literature, too, there’s this simultaneous spookiness and sexiness that comes with occupying this position in a family. I’m thinking of Jane Eyre, or The Turn of the Screw. 
Yeah, you’re right it’s spooky. I remember I spoke with a nanny, and she said I know that my boss is an alcoholic. I know where she hides the bottles. I know everything about her. I remember when I told my sister I was writing a book about a nanny, she said, you know what’s weird, my nanny knows when I have my period. It’s the most intimate thing that you can imagine. But she’s a stranger. So, of course it’s spooky. It’s sexy, potentially, for the same reason. But then, Louise is a perfect nanny because she is child-like and doll-like. Those qualities make her invisible. She belongs to the world of children, and that’s why she’s perfect. I heard a lot of parents who told me that a perfect nanny is a nanny that you don’t see: that won’t make you feel uncomfortable when you go back home, because you don’t see her — she’s with the children.
Which goes right into the heart of the violence here: that need to not see someone, to not relate to someone who makes your home function. Early on in the novel, we learn that Myriam “does not want to hire a North African to look after her children.” How does Myriam’s race affect her relationship with her nanny, and with her bourgeois world more largely? Similarly: how does Louise’s whiteness affect her identity: the way she sees and is seen? It strikes me that whiteness is dangerously implicit in the very concept of “the perfect nanny.”
You know, I don’t think about identity in my books, because obviously think that’s what I’m going to write. I don’t care about identity, I don’t really understand what it means. I’m not interested in what people are; I’m interested in what people do. So in my books I like to make plenty of references to identity, and often with an ironic tone, just to say that maybe identity is not the clue, and it can’t help the reader understand the character. But Myriam, she is probably from North Africa — we don’t really know where she comes from. And she doesn’t want to hire a North African nanny, because she doesn’t want to have this sort of complicity with her. She doesn’t want the nanny to speak with her in Arabic, and to speak with her about religion, and then to think that they suddenly belong to the same family, the same group. She wants to avoid this immigrant solidarity. For her it’s a way to put up boundaries, and to avoid any proximity. She thinks that being a good boss, a good employer, is to be somebody who is going to keep this boundary. But of course she will discover that’s impossible.
Literature is there to tell us that reality is much more complex than what we usually read or see on the media. Of course, when you think of a rich couple with a nanny, you think that the rich couple is white and that the nanny is from North Africa or from the Philippines. But I thought it was more interesting to say that today, in our society, some immigrants are rich, and they hire a nanny, and that some white people are poor. Louise is doing an immigrant job. Her husband is always making fun of her for doing an immigrant job. It’s demeaning for her. It was a way for me to emphasize her humiliation, and also her loneliness. When she goes to the park, she’s the only white nanny. She doesn’t belong to the group of African nannies, or Asian nannies. She’s sort of an anomaly. It’s important to the characterization of Louise, that she is someone who doesn’t belong. She doesn’t belong to the family, she doesn’t belong to the world of nannies. And she desperately wants to belong.
And her status as a white nanny is also what makes it so easy to project onto her, in some ways. She’s described as a Mary Poppins figure at one point. She seems to come from this old-world idea of a nanny. But then of course, the family’s wanting to see her that way is part of the violence here. 
What about Paul? You describe his buoyancy. There’s a certain joyful entitlement to the way he takes up space in a room. Of course, he doesn’t have the same “impediments to his freedom” that the world would put on Myriam.
Paul is cool. He’s sort of a hipster — what we call in France “les bobos”: bourgeois-bohème. They eat quinoa, they ride bikes, they drink green juice, they go with their children to the park. He’s also new generation of father who wants to be involved in raising their children. They play with them, they spend time with them. But at the same time he wants to be free and he’s afraid of losing his freedom because of his children. He’s afraid that the fact of being a father is going to make him get old quicker. He wants to stay young and he wants to stay cool. And he thinks in a certain way that he can have it all. Myriam, by contrast, feels she’s sure that she can’t have it all. She always feels guilty about something: when she’s at work she feels guilty for not being with her children, and vice versa; but Paul, he’s cool and he’s confident. He says to Myriam: we’re going to do it. We can be good parents and go out at night, and hear music, and we can be wild. We’re not old. He’s optimistic.
He also doesn’t get involved in the relationship between Myriam and Louise. When I began to write this book, I talked with friends, and I read books about nannies, and I discovered that men don’t really get involved in the relationship with the nanny, except when there are problems, or on the day where they decide to fire the nanny. In 90% of cases, it’s the man who fires the nanny. And in 90% of cases it’s the woman who hires the nanny. The woman is the one who decides who is going to play the role of the mother. But the father is the one who severs the relationship: who says, we’re not going to pay you anymore and you have to leave.
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An Invisible Violence: A Conversation with Leïla Slimani

lolita

Marissa

lolita-page

Humbert, or the Confession of a White Spinster Female: A Millennial’s Reading of Lolita

Humbert, or the Confession of a White Spinster Female: A Millennial’s Reading of Lolita

Sarahland

Rebecca Schultz is a writer and teacher who lives in Los Angeles.