When I first found Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, I desperately needed it: I was deeply mired in a Zelda Fitzgerald phase, a dangerous fixation for a girl who cries easily and talks too much. I’d found my grandmother’s worn copy of Save Me the Waltz buried under scrapbooks and suitcases in her attic, decades after her death. Like Zelda, she was a woman who was called crazy and forced to turn cocktail party hosting into a creative outlet, a lambent, wry gossip sipping Mickey Finns at humid garden parties. Heroines hit me like a strong drink or a passed note, leaving me euphoric, spinning, staggered, and as much as I hate to say it, ‘seen.’ But a touch of cringe is key when we’re talking about the mad wives of modernism, sliding through the well-greased pipeline from “committal to committed,” as Zambreno puts it in one of the book’s many moments of wordplay, typos turned dybbuks of prose that re-wired my own writing: hag-iography, obliterature. Kate Zambreno was the first person to tell me my nervous, earnest essays about my grandmother and other glamorous, ingenious, maligned wayward women were worth working on. I was lucky enough to learn from them a few years ago, and a few months ago I was even luckier to talk to them about this March’s reissue of Heroines, ventriloquism, absurdity, psychiatry, a genre we’re calling debate club prose, and more. 

EC 

Hi Kate, it's amazing to be here with you today. I wanted to start by asking about the existential experience of seeing Heroines reissued over a decade after it was first published? I’m especially intrigued to hear your thoughts on this given the book’s concerns around a very constrictive and censorious canon that we've supposedly seen open up in the years since you first published it, but which I think maybe hasn’t actually been broken open to the extent the publishing industry wants us to think it has?

KZ 

It's really cool to think of my book coming out at the same time as Dead Weight, of Heroines being reissued with Dead Weight, because I think that both our books are part of this larger conversation of trying to philosophize voice and agency on the internet, and trying to also philosophize anger and ugly feelings and, you know, making writing the body political and writing the excessive body and the misbehaving body. I actually feel we live in a more conservative time, thinking of writing. You know, I had this whole conversation with my graduate students at Sarah Lawrence yesterday where they were told by this very prestigious essayist who was mentoring them never to use I. 

EC 

Never to use I? 

KZ

Never to use I. And I was like, how do I even talk about this? Don't say I think. Don't say I feel. Don't use I. If you're looking out the window, you don't say I'm looking out the window; you just describe the landscape. So we're really in this time of beauty, still, and centering the beautiful sentence. I feel like both of our works as well as the writers we celebrate, even if they don't view themselves as authors, were I think exploring anger and ugliness and writing in a raw way which I think is still very demonized. 

EC 

Totally, and I wanted to talk to you about tone for that exact reason. Part of the project of my book was an attempt to mimic or channel and ventriloquize both my own anger and the rage, sorrow, and pain of all of these girls I found on internet forums, and in fiction and memoir, who had been completely forgotten or silenced. So many of the writers that we both write towards, around, and about had so many intellectual points to make that were completely obscured by the media’s obsession instead with talking about either their “emotional” or “excessive” tone. 

Or the abjection and narcissism assumed to be inherent in the repetitive ‘I’ that is in fact reaching towards truth.

KZ

The repetitive I is so feared as bad writing. 

EC 

But the movies and books I'm most obsessed with employ versions of that, and end up condescendingly dismissed in really oversimplifying, fetishizing ways, for simply admitting that they’re coming at an issue from a particular perspective, which I’d actually argue makes an argument more trustworthy. Jennifer's Body and Bachelorette are two movies that were really criticized for their tone, that were called catty and narcissistic and pulpy. So in my book I tried to write in that same perhaps post-purge, raspy voice, a starved out scream, while still very overtly making an argument in order to convey that actually, it doesn't negate the concept of making an intellectual point to also be having an emotion. I do still think our notions of genre create really slim silos around where and how you’re allowed to make a point vs. express an emotion, and any emotional honesty leads a text to be misunderstood as memoir. Heroines obviously has memoiristic parts, but to me, it's far more clearly a socio-political theory, a literary history, and a group biography. 

KZ

Even The Light Room is only read in terms of memoir, and I don't even think of it as memoir but as art criticism, as poetic essay. I think so often, and this was something I hammered home in Heroines, which I wrote 12-15 years ago, the first person is often quite dismissed if it's not delivered in a “proper” tone. I consider it the tone of writers who were on the debate team, who learn to argue something in a certain way. I feel very distanced from even the category of  memoir. A lot of memoir doesn't engage in social critique––and I think the question becomes are you writing memoir that is about making sense of yourself or are you trying to write a rigorous social critique that understands the self as part of the society under observation.

EC

I think Heroines and Dead Weight are both very much drawing on the first person in order to convey these moments of collective epiphany around social structures, saying this is how I realized I was a pawn to all these forces that I don't believe in and would like to break down, while also taking a compassionate stance that recognizes and respects the array of coping mechanisms, which are often also diseases, that women develop under the weight (pardon the pun) of those social structures, even if they are unwittingly entrenching the very forces harming them. Which brings me back to a specific phrase you use in Heroines, this idea of ‘dis-ease’ with the hyphen, because there are so many ways, whether it's an eating disorder or a BPD diagnosis or whatever, that a girl struggling in a world designed against her is immediately slotted into a clinical box that individualizes her issue when the issue is, in fact, structural. It’s this medically condoned gaslighting, which you call wallpapering in Heroines (another term I love) after Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. 

KZ 

The depression is never viewed as political. To individualize it the way you’re describing is what capitalism wants, and what the patriarchy wants because it doesn't allow for the collective. And I think both of us were attempting a sort of writing that's also a collective voice. Like, how to write the cacophony of the voices, the liveliness of them. And so it's interesting that we're supposed to be talking about the first person, because I think both of our works complicate the first person. 

EC 

Definitely. One of the myriad reasons, for me, to reach for that ‘we’ narratorial voice was that the diagnostic paradigms for eating disorders pit people against each other, and teach us to believe that speaking honestly to another woman about your shared pain might trigger you or make you sicker, so girls in these psychiatric spaces are trained to distrust each other, out of a fear of being locked into their diagnosis forever. But if we can recognize our shared struggles it can in fact be way more cathartic than a CBT exercise that is attempting to convince me I misunderstood a situation I actually lived. 

KZ

I mean I think one of the main things I'm writing through now is still capitalism, precarity, and even thinking about the phrase ‘health care.’ I think so much of what you're engaging with is the toxic rhetoric of care of the individual self that obscures any attempt at solidarity, but that's what patriarchy and capitalism want.  

EC

They don't want us to realize that actually caring for someone else is often the best way to care for yourself, because it can open the door to political motivations for actions you might not be able to  manage out of pure self-love, especially in the throes of sickness. In Heroines you write about feeling so much responsibility towards the silenced women whose work you loved, and that struck such a chord with me because I felt that way so deeply about both forgotten women writers as well as so many girls on tumblr and pro-eating disorder blogs. These people who are writing so eloquently and honestly and beautifully about their experience that aren't listened to at all. Their stories are online, but then in these medical spaces they’re forced to rewrite them. I spoke to one woman who had been through decades of different treatments, who said once, a member of an outpatient therapy group left temporarily for an inpatient center, and when she came back, she was no longer speaking in specific about her own life, but rather describing herself entirely in DSM terms. And she said that treatment taught her not to endure society without resorting to self-harm, but to tell a new story about herself.  

KZ

It changes the language. 

EC

Yeah, the psychiatric narratives force you to understand yourself as this kind of perma-patient, which I also think both of us are really interested in, the way that ‘patient’ has been one of the careers or life paths open to women for so long. I wanted to talk to you about the moment in Heroines when you are about to take an internship at the Village Voice but instead become a psychiatric patient. 

KZ 

You asked before about the existential experience of having Heroines come out, and after Heroines I published Book of Mutter, which dealt a lot with my mother being institutionalized before her death. I'm realizing I'm still trying to write the specific suburbs I'm from, and think about claustrophobia and the possibilities of escape. I don't think there was any way for that girl to actually have taken that internship at the Village Voice. What avenue besides the hospital did she have as any way to escape? 

EC

I remember when I was first in your class and I thought I wanted to write about female hysteria, and I do think these issues are all related, this amorphous pain that manifests in the disorderly body, whether it's through a seizing fit in the Victorian era or through starving yourself or purging now, where women end up expressing their pain in the psychiatric language that has been made available to us, right? 

KZ

You see this with Woolf, with even the language of psychoanalysis, and Hermione Lee in her chapter on illness, which I write about in Heroines, saying, I don't actually want to use Woolf's language at these times, when she’s mimicking the language of the doctors. She stopped actually thinking in her language, and I think language and rhetoric becomes such an important coercive tool through history. So one of the things I think you're doing is trying to take that language back. 

EC 

Definitely, and one of the things I love so much about Heroines is the way you invent certain new terms, trick mirror versions of existing, often demeaning, terms, to not just reclaim them but genuinely reorient them. So I wanted to ask you about two of them: “hag-iography” and “obliterature.” How you came up with those? 

KZ 

There was actually an essay that won this big MLA award by Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde who are English professors, and they wrote about the concept of obliterature in Heroines and  linked it to Woolf's Three Guineas ,talking about an amateur literature. I was doing so much wordplay at the time. I was really obsessed with Kathy Acker. So puns and the jokes were part of my process. I remember I was reading all these biographies and I wanted to write about feelings of containment. I'm still really interested in what happens when history delves into domestic encounters, where we become these ghosts. So I really wanted to conjure that through fictional devices. I used ventriloquism as you were saying. and I began to use puns, I think also because Eliot's Wasteland really haunted me. And I thought of myself as doing something that was almost a parody of The Wasteland. I was being very playful with voices, but it wasn't something I theorized, like “I'm writing an obliterature.” 

EC

There's a moment where you say “obliterature” was at first a typo. And I had a perhaps parallel typo experience, when I was writing Dead Weight––whenever I meant to write self-presentation, I accidentally wrote self-preservation. And I think that there's something about these slippages that is perhaps a subliminal, kind of Adrienne Rich ‘this is the oppressor’s language but I need it to talk to you’ inspired protest joke, almost. Maybe we are trying to–– 

KZ

break the language. When I wrote Heroines, it was around the same time as I was writing O Fallen Angel and Green Girl. And my background was really theater and performance art. So I think a lot of it was also jokes. And the fact that I felt like I was impersonating or ventriloquizing these voices, but one of the things that I felt was the most disconcerting for me when Heroines first came out, and Jamie Hood deals with this in her brilliant intro, is that people did not find it funny. They did not realize- 

EC

That it was ironic? That’s so shocking to me, the book is hysterical (pun intended) in so many ways. 

KZ 

Completely. The absurdity. It's really funny. Even though I see Heroines as an early work, I can't deny that I'm still really obsessed with these ideas of silencing and claustrophobia. I'm still interested in irony and absurdity with tragedy. I'd say a lot of the reviewers took it so boringly. 

EC

Well, I think that that probably has to do with the fact that both of our writing is inspired by or fertilized in these online spaces that understand the sort of tragicomedy of femininity. On a pro eating disorder forum people are making insanely iconic, ironic jokes, and you speak in this shorthand. And I also felt like some of those made up terms in both of our works are related to spending time in the fan fiction forms you wrote about, with this code that appears at first childish, but is actually very ingenious and is funny and is ‘immature’ in an absurdist way. So I also wanted to ask you––I feel like a lot of the internet spaces that I used to frequent don't really exist in the same way anymore. So the tone that is capable of holding both a scream and a sob and a gallows laugh is not platformed. And I wonder if you find that to be true? I’d also love to hear you talk about your blog and your decision to stop writing there? 

KZ

What you're saying reminded me that Eileen Myles once came to a reading of Green Girl that had like five people in the audience at St. Mark's. And they came up to me afterwards, and said,  oh, I get it. Your work is drag. And I think that with Heroines and Green Girl, I think that's often missed. That there is a theatrical sort of self-narrativization, which is something you're such a trenchant critic of in your book too, that this is a way of narrativizing the self and the inanities of the self online. So you know there's so many writers I know who came up through these blog spaces and I think we all miss it because we live in a pretty professionalized writing world where everything is so deadly serious.I'm always trying to find things that feel alive and fun and amateur. To me that's where writing is interesting. 

EC

That reminds me of your beautiful meditations on the notebook form. I think that notebook form is so related to what these online spaces used to be, where things could be in process and collaborative and I think both of us tried to replicate that mode, creating a sort of choral narrative or a collage, an aim chat transcript or as you put it in Heroines, a toilet bowl or a field hospital. 

KZ

I don't really find many spaces these days where you can do that. And I think we can put next to this conversation Jackie Wang’s blog, zines, and the collection that Semiotext(e) just published of her brilliant early writing, essays that are excessive in the same vein as Dodie Bellamy was writing in with Barf Manifesto. So there are all these writers who had this time online, and I think are still seeking those spaces. For me, I felt very clearly that once I became an author I was supposed to act professionally online, and it was very paralyzing for me. So everything went to my notebooks. But then I still do things like collaborate with Sofia Samatar––we just published a very weird book on tone, there’s a whole chapter in it about hoarding and Bellamy and that collaboration feels like the blog.  And when my friends write me, the friends who I really write emails with, our letters feel a bit like that space. But most of online media is monetized, it's homogenized, it's about getting as many people as possible while these were spaces that were pretty anti-capitalist. That’s why I’ve been saying that we need to go back to zines and chapbooks. And not everything's about promotion. And it has to be about community. 

EC

Right, these communities that are so often censored––that’s why I was trying to write my book as a project of amplification and attention, attending to anonymous, ingenious people writing into the ether of these forums, reddit threads, and eating disorder boards. I was really interested in the way you discuss the diagnoses used to dismiss the artistic and intellectual work of women by pathologizing them, and in turn hiding them away and silencing them. But you also talk about the ways that even those mental patients are pitted against each other. I was interested in the BPD hysteric versus nervous, neurasthenic binary you investigate because I really found in my research that anorexia and bulimia were pitted against each other in a strikingly similar way, where the anorexic is sort of the girl who just does femininity too well. So it’s the perfectionist versus the bulimic who is cast as the spoiled brat kind of BPD girl, wanting too much, overemotional, weepy and screamy. And I was just wondering how you first came to that dichotomy, which felt really related to the hag versus young woman binary you also explore, the way these figures are imagined as enemies rather than understood as future and former selves. 

KZ

Yeah, I think that it was really Chris Kraus who wanted me to bring in BPD. That was something that was like one of her main edits when I met with her. She was like, what about the ways in which BPD is used as this very demonizing diagnosis? And I think we can also connect this to schizophrenia now, and people's lack of empathy towards sick and unsheltered people. What is it about people who act in ways that people view as ugly? And our impulse isn't to be like, this person is suffering and needs help, regardless of whether or not they're acting politely. We see this so much, you know, in New York City every day, and I'm not trying to make too big of a leap, this is just something that's been really obsessing me, is how little empathy is shown towards unsheltered and unhoused people. And there's always this idea like, oh, they're full of rage, or oh, that person is full of anger. It's like, yeah, they're full of rage. Well, of course.

EC

And I think part of that resistance is because if we actually take them seriously, their rage is really rational, the way they are acting is a rational response to the messages they are receiving from their society, which is that it doesn’t care if they have somewhere to sleep. In a way this is honestly somewhat parallel to the way people with eating disorders are responding rationally to a society that is making it clear it wants them to do whatever it takes to be thin. Yet in both cases we insist the person coming up with a coping mechanism is insane, rather than noticing that this culture is in fact what is insane.  

KZ

So it's that individual demonizing that happens so much, and meanwhile our healthcare system, our mental health system is in complete disarray. We don't use institutionalization anymore. But there's nothing we've replaced it with. There's no notion of community care. And I think Marsha Linehan, even though she was working with more privileged people, women, girls at the McLean hospital, she was saying, you know, even if this is the patient that's viewed as the most repulsive and the most unliked, one should still regard them with kindness and actually what's needed is for them to be kind to themselves and to actually teach true tenderness. And I think that to me that was just really profound. And I'm still thinking through how much we moralize people in despair and expect people in despair not to act with rage when sometimes rage is the appropriate response to the situation that they're in. And so, you know, this is something I think that you're dealing with as well. I didn't answer it. It's something I was trying to bite off a corner of. But we still live in a time where we treat people with mental illness absolutely horribly. 

EC 

In Heroines, you cite that Virginia Woolf quote about how “the young girls are so fearfully depressed” and you write that you still see that with your students. And I think we see despair that could be read politically in both privileged spaces and among the most marginalized people, but in both cases the societal impulse is to individualize that pain in order to avoid rendering its political content legible. So there is an active effort not to recognize that these mental illnesses are rational responses to the society we're in and no effort to create a mental health infrastructure to treat them, nor any effort to create a societal infrastructure that would not foster these mental illnesses. PE Moskowitz writes so brilliantly about this on their substack.

KZ

Because that wouldn’t make money. I was just actually reading about psychiatric beds and how much less money the healthcare industry and big pharma makes from psychiatric beds than medication. They just want to sell us medicine. I think it's very telling and I know you deal with advertising of psychotropic with eating disorders in your book but eating disorders and BPD are two diagnoses that resist medication. 

EC

Yes, and I think I think that's part of why there's so much less research on these diseases, because they’re simply not treatable via a pay to play pill. There’s a line in Heroines when you talk about about how we demonize these expressions of girl pain via re-conceptualizing them as psychiatric symptoms, rather than expressions pf a politicized pain. And because this has been going on for so long, this language of symptoms becomes, as we talked about earlier when you mentioned escape routes, one that is accessible to her, one she can learn. I think you wrote that perhaps she's trying to wedge herself into the cultural conversation in the only way she knows how. And I think that that was a really compassionate stance that I tried to take in my book as well. Like even my most “toxic” role models, the ones I learned self-harming behaviors from, they were only trying to express their pain, and they’d probably just watched the same movies I had, or the prior generation’s version. It's a human yearning to have your pain be seen, right? And so, why are we demonizing each other for the ways that we're manifesting this pain instead of unpacking the structures that taught us to express the pain this way? And I think that the rage of people that have very severe mental illness is often a version of the same phenomenon, they’re trying to communicate an extremely dire sort of pain that this culture just pathologizes instead of trying to decode that scream, which actually doesn't even take that much decoding.

KZ

Yeah. I got into a philosophical conversation with my Annie Ernaux graduate seminar at Columbia because she kind of toggles often between her individual self and that she's writing to avenge her people, which I think we're both kind of attempting. The idea is that through language she has transcended her class and she can write about it. And there is this kind of philosophical conversation where you know some of the students were saying well as writers, I do think I feel more deeply than other people do and I was like, no you don't.

EC

Oh my god, this is why people hate writers and grad students.

KZ 

Yeah, I was like, you do not feel more deeply. 

EC

You've just been trained to express your feelings in a way that the culture metabolizes easily.  

KZ 

And that's a huge responsibility. It’s a huge ethical responsibility that we survived and lived to be able to become writers, that we survived our periods of silence. 

EC

The word avenge is really sparking the memory of a particular line in Heroines for me–– you quote Elizabeth Hardwick saying people only ever write out of desperation or revenge. I deeply related to that, because I felt like I was trying to get revenge on this culture that has killed so many people, and I was so desperate to hear my friends’ voices in the canon, and the voices of so many people who came before us, but I couldn’t find them. So I tried to channel them loudly enough to drown out the ones that have been hammering in these horrifically constrictive narratives about women and mental illness. But there were so many of those and they were so loud, that I kind of had to scream––which brings me back to tone, and the willingness to be abrasive and abject and risk getting called excessive or whatever for doing so. But anyway, back to the question of revenge, did you feel any sort of revenge-y catharsis upon the first publication of Heroines, and do you foresee with this publication feeling any of that? 

KZ

That's a good question. I've been thinking a lot about revenge, which is maybe not the most popular reason to write. But it's real. We live in such a bourgeois moral wave of non-fiction, one is supposed to be the sage and have understood everything and explained. But I think a lot about hostility and resentment. It's still a really powerful impetus for me. And I think even in the Light Room or when I’m trying to write about postpartum spaces or early motherhood, I'm still trying to write anger in these spaces where women usually have no time to write. So I recognize my position that I can write of feeling oppressed. I can write of claustrophobia; I actually can write and that people will read it. But I've given up, given up thinking that my work is going to be understood in the larger culture and it's been really creatively freeing for me. But I do think it's surprised me how many people have told me how much Heroines changed their way of thinking or made them feel less alone or less crazy, which we could always use. 

EC 

It definitely did that for me. 

KZ

But it was reviewed by such humorless Ivy League people. And I'm beginning to realize that usually happens. Even with my newer work. Drifts was also reviewed by the ruling class, which I will always be an outsider to economically. And for people to tell me that Heroines or Drifts means something to them, I'm always surprised, because we never really know which works touch people or what they really like. Because that whole first period of being reviewed has nothing to do with how your people live in the world. You have to ask, who were you writing it for? And hopefully those people will get the book. 

EC 

It’s so galvanizing and cathartic to hear you say that, as I’m going through that process for the first time now. And it’s so centering to remember that the people I wrote the book for are very unlikely to be the people on whose desks reveiw galleys may be at the moment. 

KZ

Also, there's been a real chill in reviewing cultures. There's so much less book reviews. And with my past three books I've written, so many brilliant women critics have not been able to write about them. But these white men review everything, even the women's beats. They review all the women's beats. 

EC

I know, and then I read those reviews, and i’m like ok king, you just wrote a book report not a review––

KZ

Yeah. Like it's like a summary. I wanna read Jamie Hood, no, or I wanna read––

EC

Grace Byron, or Philippa Snow or Harmony Holiday––

KZ

I don't wanna read like the same dudes who have that debate team voice.

EC

I was hoping we would somehow loop back to debate because a fabulous fact I think is really relevant to this conversation is that I was bullied off of my high school debate team. 

KZ 

That's perfect. 

EC

I was getting anonymous messages through this horrible facebook platform called honesty box. It was probably partially because they were like, we can't square the vocal fry in the points that you're making––in my one and only 360 review at my one and only corporate job, I got the same feedback, my boss literally told me that my points were really smart but my voices sounded dumb, so could I work on that? And like... 

KZ 

When someone at The Paris Review asks you for a bio, you should put ‘Emmeline Clein was kicked off her debate team for vocal fry.’ 

EC 

Not explicitly, I’ll admit, but I know, I would love it to be. But I also think, in my experience being your student and also your reader, you really give people who do not speak, think, or write in that hyper-rational tone so much permission to write outside the bounds of genre that I'd been made to understand were the only options. And I think it's so relevant to our earlier conversation about capitalism, because capitalism wants us to believe that life is just a choose your own adventure from this very limited, constrictive, and ultimately depressing set of plots. Many of which for women end in doom. Especially if the woman is going to get any attention, which it’s natural to want, for her to be looked at, listened to, or read, it often has to end in doom. And so genre and medical diagnosis act as these parallel forces that serve to censor stories and individualize various issues. Which is why I care so much about Heroines being read by a new generation, and why I care so much more about my book reaching the people who are in a position I was once in with disordered eating, or some diagonal or alternate dimension version of that position, just being in so much pain and thinking the pain was my fault, like I wasn’t good enough at feminism or something to pull myself out of it. And I so badly want to tell those people that it is not their fault, that they’re not crazy, that they’re being used as pawns. 

KZ

I think your book will save lives. I really hope it does reach as many of the girls in pain that you want to. Because like how many books are looking with real social rigor at eating disorders? Not many.

EC 

And one of the few I did find, Caroline Knapp, is so under-read, I think for the exact reasons we've been talking about. She wrote a book called Appetites about eating disorders as part of a larger class of feminized mental illnesses. And she was studying them alongside shopping addiction and all these other feminized manifestations of pain and doing some personal writing, but also doing interviews. And people didn't understand it because they, we, so deeply want to silo eating disorders in either the self -help genre or the memoir genre so they can remain individual issues. 

KZ 

What is your book being coded under? 

EC

When it first became available for preorder, I saw that it was coded as self-help, and I literally freaked out (laughs) and forced them to change it. I was like, the entire point of this book is that eating disorders have been stuck on the self help shelf when this is a collective problem, a political, social, and economic crisis. Anyway, it was never going to get categorized “accurately,” if any book even can be, but it’s being put in ‘women’s biography,’ ‘memoir,’ and ‘feminist theory’ I believe. But I was happy with that because it is a kind of group biography, a collective memoir of a feminized disease class. 

KZ

I'm so excited for you. You really did it. 

EC

Well, I truly couldn't have done it without someone I so deeply admired telling me that it was worth continuing. 

KZ 

Well I think that's the only thing I can offer as my adjunct role at these places is telling people, you have a book. 

EC

Yes, I think in our culture in general we need to be listening to people who are not speaking in the most easily metabolizable forms far more often than we are, and often those forms are in-process projects like a feed or blog.

KZ 

Because the people who are speaking in the most easily understandable forms are the voice of the power structure most often. And I'm beginning to realize that a lot of my work that has not been published that I'm working on now is thinking through class which is so complicated and contradictory and nebulous, but realizing like my ways of writing or speaking that might be viewed as rougher or cleaner is also class. But I also reject the beautiful sentence. Of course, I find certain sentences beautiful but often it's because of their tone, their energy or the feel of the repetition or the sense of force they're coming from. But that other kind of beautiful sentence is related to the dominant mode of personal essay form that has to be so eloquent from top to  bottom. It doesn't interest me. 

EC 

It's such a closed circle, right? With a tidy plot or moral or whatever. 

KZ 

An epiphany at the end. Like not the thinking through on the page, but I figured it all out, and I'm giving it to you now. My wisdom of the individual self. 
EC 

Right, right, and it's like, well, I don't know about you, but I live in a society. And I'm much more interested in the wisdom of the hive mind––maybe, I'm halfway to figuring something out, and I actually need someone else to read it, and then I want to hear what they have to say. 

KZ 

Do they call us memoirists because they're trying to take away that we're thinkers? I think probably. The attempt to demonize the self as narcissistic, it's resisting the fact that no, we are actually actively thinking through the conditions of life.