Tan Lin Interviews Lucy Ives at BOMB
Tan Lin and Lucy Ives have been in conversation ever since Ives edited Lin's novella, The Patio and the Index, while it made its way to publication at Triple Canopy. At BOMB, Lin touches base with Ives about her latest, greatest, Impossible Views of the World, and encourages her to pick up a tennis racquet. [Huh?] Lin writes, "Although we met up to talk about Lucy's new novel, Impossible Views of the World, which deals with New York City and the art world, I also had a secret agenda: to get her to pick up a racquet again. She told me she had played as a child." From there:
TAN LIN Are you doing anything autobiographical in Impossible Views of the World?
LUCY IVES Less and less. More and more, I have no life and have to make things up. I've found that to be a good solution to the problem of being a writer. (laughter)
TL I find that life sometimes offers itself up as one long description, rather than one long story, and it's sometimes useful, in fiction, to allow the idea of narrative to subside and description to take over. That's sometimes called the realm of "nonfiction" and it's associated, at least for me, with the use of a documentary apparatus or the bibliographic. How would you describe the relation between fictional and nonfictional elements in your novel?
LI Well, I'm not sure about "nonfiction." For me, nonfiction might not even exist. But that doesn't mean fiction exists in opposition or contrast to so-called real life. Fiction is a way of seeing around corners. It's a system of mirrors that isn't designed to catch my own image, but rather images of what I'm not able or permitted to see in my actual life. I'm not exactly sure how it is you can know something that you don't know, but fiction works like that for me. It's a device for collecting information.
TL What were you trying to collect or see exactly with this latest work?
LI I don't experience life as a narrative structure, so I was curious about that.
TL Life is amorphous and lacks such structure. On the other hand, it's extremely chronological. Can you comment on the distinction as you see it?
LI People talk all the time about the story of their lives, and I thought it might be useful to try to write such a story—except I didn't want to write about my own life, at least not in a straightforward way. I wanted to do something weirder. But, truly, my novel is about relationships. It's often difficult to see the limits of relationships when you're in them, so the book is a way to test those limits and learn more about what it means to exist with others, to be related to them, to be needed by them.
Read on at BOMB.