Anna Moschovakis Discusses the Social Intimacies of Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love

Anna Moschovakis talks to Jennifer Kabat for BOMB about her first novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018). "Unsurprisingly, social intimacy is a thread," writes Kabat, after illuminating many of Moschovakis's collective projects. An excerpt:

JK In the novel there’s a critic; his name is Aidan. And then there’s the author character, the first-person I, who is not Anna Moschovakis. I remember when you added in the critic—do you want to talk about why you did that?

AM I always assumed that if I were to write fiction it would be a slim little book. Once I’d written the first two thirds of Eleanor’s story, I thought that was going to be my little hundred-page, international fiction–influenced novella that I would never publish. But I was enjoying working out questions about fiction and particularity, trying to write something that made me feel the way certain novels I love do. Short ones! Like Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks or Forever Valley by Marie Redonnet or Clarice Lispector’s novels. Eleanor’s story felt like a picaresque, which at first I’d liked, but something about it became unsatisfying. I shared those pages with people, yourself included. And I was making my own marginal notes. I do this with poetry too: a brutal takedown of my own piece, where I’ll write down everything the meanest critic might say. Then I sleep on it, cry. And in the morning decide whether those are legitimate critiques, and if they are, whether I want to resist them—because I disagree, or because they serve as openings to conversation—or if they need to be addressed. At the same time I was getting these astute notes back from the people I’d given the manuscript. I did a couple revisions based on the comments, and it occurred to me that this process of resistance and integration was as interesting to me as what was going on in Eleanor’s story. So I thought, What if I invent an interlocutor and put these interactions and arguments in the book? It brought up a lot, but was also freeing. And it created another problem: any thought I had about the book could be pretty easily folded into it, via a conversation with the critic or a question in the author character’s head. I had to decide where to stop.

Read on at BOMB.