“Once in a while, somebody is interested in what I might have to say. This somebody says, ‘I want to hear you out. I want to hear you out until there’s nothing left. I want you to tell me everything about yourself except the information. I want you to leave the information out. Can you do it like that? It will do us both a world of good.’”

           —Garielle Lutz

 

In March of 2024, Short Flight/Long Drive released Backwardness, a 932-page compendium of selections from the journals and correspondence of Garielle Lutz. The book represents a marked change in form and style from the author’s several previous collections of short fiction—published up until 2021’s Worsted under the name Gary Lutz. Arranged into large filing-bin sections that cover overlapping periods of years, Backwardness contains mostly autobiographical writings spanning from the nineteen-seventies to the almost-present, which detail the “arcane banalities” of the author’s solitary existence—long walks, strange occurrences in parking lots, professional frustrations, the consumption of countless hamburgers. Veering back and forth across the decades, she examines (and then sometimes re-examines) childhood memories, dreams, and the frustrated pinings of her oddball heart. The effect is not quite memoir; it’s more like having her entire life put in a blender and then dumped over your head. Throughout it all, her eye for the absurd and clinically hilarious voice link these disparate elements into something that is more than the sum of its parts—both a howl of alienation and an extended meditation on the strangeness and sadness of a life lived at the margins. Lutz was gracious enough to speak with me about the work, via email, in September 2024.

…

What’s your favorite Lou Reed record? Music has obviously been important to you, and he’s the most consistently-mentioned artist in Backwardness.

I’ve drifted away from the music of Lou Reed, though for a long time it was central to my life. (I eventually fell for the Smiths.) I still occasionally listen to the first and third Velvet Underground albums (and the 1969 and Max’s Kansas City live recordings), but as far as the solo work goes, I can’t imagine ever again wanting to hear anything on, say, Rock and Roll Heart, Growing Up in Public, and Mistrial, which, to me, are among his most disappointing. I think the first song on New York is terrific and the second one extraordinary, but the rest of that album sounds like bloat to me. It’s like junior-varsity talk radio with John Mellencamp on guitar. I adore a few of his things on Songs for Drella. The only records of his on which I still swoon over at least two-thirds of the songs are the first three (to me, the first record, the self-titled one, is an underappreciated masterwork),  and I still crave about half of Street Hassle. Ecstasy is the first of his albums I never even bought. But this is probably all my fault; maybe I am just too enamored of VU and Reed’s early work to recognize the significance of his later albums. I still believe Lou Reed was one of rock’s greatest greats. I feel the same way about Morrissey. But both eventually bored me. I also regret what has happened to Belle and Sebastian. My favorite rock song of all time remains the Grateful Dead’s Europe ‘72 version of “Morning Dew.”
 

“I also regret what has happened to Belle and Sebastian.” Ha, I feel this. Their decline has been mysterious to me, because it seems like all the same elements are there, and I just can’t pinpoint what or where it went wrong. 

I remember reading somewhere—I can’t remember where, but I believe it had to do with Salinger—that artists typically are at their peak for nine years, and then the work often turns toward mannerism or self-parody. Belle and Sebastian were the last band I fell in love with (their early EPs, in particular, were so fresh and vital that I’d greet each new release as excitedly as I greeted new Beatles singles in the 1960s), but they started sounding glib and perfunctory to me on much of Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Their musicianship improved, sure, but it’s obvious that they’re unlikely to ever again come up with something like the lo-fi buskeresque sublimity of the instrumental passage midway through “This Is Just a Modern Rock Song.” Write about Love was the last of their albums I bought, and I didn’t care for a single thing on it, but I thought some of the songs on Stuart Murdoch’s 2014 side project, God Help the Girl (the album, not the versions in the film), were among his finest. I’ve listened to all of their later stuff on YouTube but never felt tempted to hear any of it a second time. These days, when I want to listen to Belle and Sebastian, I head straight to YouTube for the Black Sessions recordings (from 1998, in Paris), which I find entrancing, even unearthly.

 

A primary question I had while reading Backwardness was: how should this book be read? Is it a collection of fragments, or a unified narrative? As a reader, the temptation throughout is to see this as a kind of massive lifelong memoir, because the early and late sections are autobiographical in nature. There are anchoring events (the first romance with S, grad school, marriage, the deaths of your parents) the book circles around, which allow the reader to construct a timeline. But this sense of memoir/narrative is undercut a bit in the section also titled “Backwardness”, which seems to include fragments of something like fiction. Sketches of characters, narrators whose life details don’t match yours. The voice feels different in these fragments.

To what extent did you feel compelled to create/subvert/eschew a sense of narrative?

When you were assembling the book, did you think much about form? Backwardness seems to me to defy category in some senses. It could just as easily be a novel (a kind of bildungsroman that takes a lifetime to unfold), or a memoir, or a collection. It’s slippery. As a writer, I was incredibly curious about the process of gathering, ordering, and editing this material. Obviously the writing has been accumulating throughout your life, but when and how did the sense develop that this was a book. And how did that project evolve?

A couple of summers before the start of the pandemic, I decided to start typing up excerpts from thousands of pages of printouts of unfinished stuff going back to the early 1990s and also typewritten pages going back all the way to the 1970s. All of it had been long ago crammed into boxes and forgotten, but I now decided to have a look inside to see whether I should just throw everything into a paper-recycling dumpster. I ended up assembling some of the material into the stories that were published in 2021 in my collection called Worsted, but then I decided to keep going and type up more excerpts, and that is when the idea for Backwardness (though I didn’t yet have that title) started taking shape. I imagined a collection of isolated paragraphs or little runs of paragraphs that could maybe form some sort of record of my twenties, thirties, and early forties, because it turns out that even though I always feel as if I have barely ever written anything, I’d apparently spent a lot of time typing nightly accounts of walks, despondencies, fraught visits to fast-food places and supermarkets and discount stores, tribulations in the classroom, the heart-wearying commotions of friendship and romance, apartment-house turbulences, maladjustments to early adulthood and middle age—dire data of dailihood, in short, typed just to put an end to an evening or an unease. And then a year or so into the pandemic, two old friends decided to send me nearly complete accumulations of the letters, often very long, that I had written to them over a few decades, and I started typing up excerpts from those, too. I left out a lot—I was trying to choose only passages I found revelatory or funny or alarming in some way. I started to think of the results as something to be self-published on an Amazon platform, an e-book to whose existence I would never call attention.

I never thought about form beyond a need to divide the book into sections. A friend who later read the book wondered why I hadn’t simply arranged all the material into chronological order, rather than having section titles like “Letters to One Person,” “Letters to Another Person,” “Excerpts from Notebooks,” etc., which means that a reader goes through my undergrad years and grad-school years and vocational years at least three times, and I see the friend’s point, but my life has never felt as if there was all that much “before” and “after” to it anyway, nor all that much cause and effect; every day felt like a durational mishmash of any other day, no matter the year, just with differently freaked details, and so many entries felt as if they could have been written in practically any of my decades, because aren’t we all just wrecks from the time we’re little kids and every passing day is just a fresh manifestation of just how much we’ve been demolished? Metrics like shoe sizes and waist sizes change, of course, and there’s an accumulation of regrets and Social Security contributions, but let’s not kid ourselves about growth.  I didn’t see much point in arranging things to suggest that there has been some sort of progression in life, other than the lateral move from birth to death.

From the outset, I considered the project to be a gallimaufry, just a jumble of stuff that would otherwise never be preserved and never have a chance of ending up on a reader’s lap. I never thought of it as a memoir, because memoirs typically have a restricted thematic range, scenes and details carefully selected to develop that theme, a narrative arc of sorts, and a self-reflective narrator who reaches a resolution. Writing a memoir would require something from me that I am incapable of giving: a global view of a life. I have always been a “can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of person. I don’t see the big picture. So the book, as I have regarded it all along, is a miscellany of fragments, prose shards, anecdotes and descriptions. I never expected it to add up to anything other than a series of glimpses into what my life has been like.   

The “Backwardness” section is a little different.  It is a chronicle of some things that did happen to me and many others that might as well have happened to me, so a lot of that section should count as fiction and is often pitched in the sorts of voices I have used in my fiction. I guess I could have tossed much of this section into a book of its own and passed it off as a short-story collection, but when I was working on Backwardness, I almost always felt it would be the last book I’d ever work on (it still feels that way to me), so I decided to throw into it as much as I’d decided to recover from the reams of material I’d stored away. The final section, “Sixtier,” is the only section of entirely new material, things written expressly for the book. It ranges achronologically over my seven decades and is grounded mostly in the three years of the pandemic. 

 

I disagree with your friend’s suggestion that everything could have just been chronological—I see in the back-and-forth memory chaos of the book the emergence of what you mention, the “durational mishmash” of life. There is a cumulative effect there that would be lost if it was chronological. And moreso, the observer is different. Even when recounting the same time periods and events, the nature and angle of your reflections has shifted. 

Your idea of the book as a jumble of stuff to preserve, without meaning or development, isn’t quite how it struck me as a reader. By the time I reached the final section, “Sixtier”, I did have a sense that I was enmeshed in a narrative, a kind of extended wrestling match with the mundanity of life.

I guess I can see how the book-length chronological stacking of paragraphs and longer segments might begin to suggest an ongoing story, but life just never seems that way to me. I just keep letting myself get jarred from one hour to the next in the loosening years. I have never once felt any sense of any ground being gained. 

I remember coming across the term weak central coherence in some academic article about autism, and that jumped out at me, because it begins to explain how I see details but not the larger context. I’m not sure I can discern any progression in the book other than that of basic aging.

 

Your comment about “weak central coherence” makes me think of the passage in “Sixtier” where you discuss your fraught relationship with film, and reflect that maybe you aren’t “set up” to understand narrative. Perhaps I see narrative in Backwardness only because that's the way my brain configures the world. I’ve always seen narrative everywhere—even the wood grain of my closet doors as a child seemed to imply characters, and a continuity of events. What were your feelings about being diagnosed with autism later in life? Was it a revelation? Has it changed the way you view yourself or made it any easier to navigate in the world, having this confirmation that you’re set up a bit differently? 

I wasn’t diagnosed until my late fifties, but the diagnosis went a long way to explain some of my weirdnesses—the extreme need for repetition (eating the same thing for lunch at Burger King for years and years; taking very long walks in Pittsburgh that always follow the exact same route; listening to the same song over and over and over; watching certain movies as many as a hundred times); shutting down for hours or even days on end after overstimulation; narrow and obsessive interests, such as in grammar and punctuation.

Maybe talking a little about how I read—specifically, how I used to read issues of The New Yorker magazine during the final years of the legendary editorial reign of William Shawn—might serve as an example of what autism can be like. I was obsessed with The New Yorker, and very often, when reading, I realized that I would start feeling overwhelmed and recognize that what I was actually reading was just the syntax and the grammar. (Reading that magazine is how I learned the intricacies and subtleties of grammar. It was the perfect school.) And then, for months, I realized that what I was reading was just the commas, particularly in patterns that often do not appear in other periodicals or in most books. Then, after studying with Gordon Lish, I realized I was often reading the sounds, the phonemes—and the way one word sonically furthers itself into the next word, a procedure that Lish calls consecution. And there was a time, in my mid-forties, when I was reading just the hyphenation. The New Yorker is the only magazine in existence that seems to have ever taken hyphenation to the extreme of practically making an art of it. I was determined to figure out the secrets of the magazine’s hyphenic virtuosity. I don’t mean simple, obvious hyphenation, as in ten-dollar salad or reader-response criticism, or in the line-ending division of words into syllables. Instead, I was focused on phrasing in which adjectival compounds modifying a noun are preceded by one or more adverbs not ending in -ly. An example is a not altogether satisfactory plot. What both fascinated and puzzled me was that, in The New Yorker, such phrasing sometimes includes hyphens and sometimes does not. I ended up covering hundreds upon hundreds of index cards with examples of that sort of phrasing, with and without hyphens.

For example (in what follows, I’ve used New Yorker phrasing as models but inserted grammatically equivalent words of my own), hyphens appear in a long-drawn-out response, the next-to-impossible task, the not-quite-dead lobster, a near-legendary performance, and a once-famous actor; but no hyphens are used in the as yet untitled song, our ever more regrettable inclinations, her far from miraculous performance, a good enough specimen of her work, her more than generous contribution, the most nearly complete collection, a not very successful attempt, and the single most helpful piece of advice.

I ended up making an enormous chart of the many patterns I had discerned, with entries like the following:

all too+adjective+noun: not hyphenated (an all too wonderful offer)

even+adverb+adjective+noun: not hyphenated (even halfway great performances)

halfway+adjective+noun: not hyphenated (a halfway decent meal)

long+participle+adverbial particle+noun: hyphenated (the long-drawn-out explanation)

most+participle+adverbial particle+noun: hyphenated (the most sought-after designer)

none too+adjective+noun: not hyphenated (none too welcome glimpses into her private life)

not yet+adverb+participle+noun: not hyphenated (the not yet successfully marketed replacement)

single+best+participle+noun: hyphenated (her single best-known painting)

too+adverb+participle+noun: not hyphenated (her too little known poems)

The trouble, though, is that New Yorker editors sometimes insert hyphens and sometimes do not insert them in phrasing that is exactly identical. Examples include better[-]than[-]average salaries, the ever[-]dependable employee, an ever[-]so[-]pale complexion, a much[-]admired novel, and a not[-]so[-]young model. Patterns like these required special entries in the chart.  

I mentioned earlier that I can’t see the forest for the trees. So maybe there is a simpler, overarching explanation for why some of that phrasing in my chart is hyphenated and why some of it isn’t. But even if there is, it will probably be next to impossible for me to ever grasp it. All I see are the patternings I’ve cataloged. That seems to be a typical autistic orientation to the world. 

 

One fascinating thing I notice here is that what feels neurodivergent to me (with the New Yorker hyphenation examples) is not quite what you perceive it to be...you focus on the inability to recognize overarching patterns as the telling quality, though I’m sure I wouldn’t find a pattern here either (even with access to your index-carded examples). What strikes me as different from my way of thinking is the extremely close attention being paid to what, for most, would be a marginal grammatical convention, and the obsessive search for meaning within it. I think most people wouldn’t notice the variation in the first place, and if they did they would just assume there were loose grammatical rules at play which authors applied differently. 

I see what you mean, and I realize that, more broadly, a lot of people out there seem to think that punctuation is just some sort of typographical decoration added to a sentence, often arbitrarily, in hopes of pleasing a teacher or some other fusspot. But maybe I should back up. For many decades The New Yorker was a significant and treasurable cultural institution (I can’t speak to the present-day New Yorker; I rarely read it) with a thrillingly distinctive house style whose purpose was to ensure absolute clarity in the prose. When pieces were edited, punctuation was inserted consistently in accordance with that style, and it is a style so aesthetically and intellectually satisfying—and emotionally soothing—that I became obsessed with it. Take commas, for instance. For some years I taught an advanced-grammar course in which one of the assignments required students to read a few longish articles in The New Yorker and in New York magazine and then contrast the punctuational practice (with an emphasis on commas and hyphens) on exhibit in those two magazines. Some of the students began to discern profound differences. E. B. White once remarked, “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” In his book Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing, Ved Mehta recalls that after going over the proofs of his first piece for the magazine, he decided to strike out loads of commas that, to his exasperation, had been inserted with seeming promiscuity into his sentences. Shawn’s response to Mehta was “I’m afraid that we are going to have comma trouble.” He then patiently explained to Mehta that commas in the magazine are inserted “for meaning.” Here’s a simple example I used even in freshman classes: What does the sentence She spent the evening relaxing at her home in Boston literally mean? It literally means that the woman has at least two homes, and the one in Boston is being differentiated from at least one other home. But when most magazines, newspapers, and book publishers print a sentence like that, the intended meaning is usually that the person owns only one home. So how should the sentence then be punctuated if that’s the intended meaning? The New Yorker would print it like this: She spent the evening relaxing at her home, in Boston. Similarly, the magazine would never publish a sentence like She lived in Brooklyn until her death in 2009, because the sentence is nonsensically telling the reader that the woman died at least twice. The editors would insert a comma after death. Punctuation these days, though, tends to be disappointing even at the Big Five book publishers. Here’s a sentence that appears in the Knopf biography of the writer Charles Jackson, who wrote the novel The Lost Weekend (the sentence concerns a book by Robert Nathan entitled Bridgit: A Story for the Screen, another Knopf book):  “When I searched for the book on Worldcat.org (‘the World’s Largest Library Catalogue’) I found a single copy at Yale.” What can readers take away from that sentence other than the sense that the writer must have somehow expected the Yale library to have more than one copy? (Readers might also be thinking that there surely must be copies of that book at other libraries.) But if you consult Worldcat.org, you’ll discover that the copy in the Yale library is in fact, weirdly enough, the only copy in any library anywhere. The sentence would clearly communicate the intended meaning if the writer inserted a comma after copy. (It would of course also be a good idea to insert a comma after the closing parenthesis.)

 

I can sense this deep love of language in your writing. In addition to your grammatical mastery, I was struck by the sheer verbal novelty of your work, which feels celebratory, and playful. On nearly every one of Backwardness’ 900+ pages, there are combinations of words I’ve never imagined, newly-coined terms (I really liked “affectionated”), random anachronisms. Could you speak a bit about your relationship with language more broadly?

I was borderline nonverbal as a kid. I grew up in verbal poverty, not hearing any but the most utilitarian vocabulary at home and not poking around enough in books. When I opened my mouth, I often mispronounced or misused the words, or, more often, I mumbled, in hopes that the listener would hear something more seemly than what I was actually saying. The words I was using always seemed to be in the way of other, phantom words. There were clouds and hazes in my speech. Explaining myself, answering people’s questions, has always felt unnatural to me.  The language has never felt as if it were my own. I was an outsider; English was something I had to force myself into. Eighth grade was a turning point, because I began to recognize my deficiency, even though I wasn’t sure what to do about it, other than to keep rereading whatever was assigned to us, as if I could somehow siphon off the words and get them inside of me. I guess I became a memorizer, but I memorized without seeming to understand anything. The summer after I graduated from high school, I started reading Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and I was drawn mostly to the weirder words, often the most monstrous-looking of them, or the ones with the funniest assembly of letters. These words came into my fingers as definite, palpable little things, collectibles, and the dictionary was like a novelty shop. So my vocabulary grew, but I wasn’t glomming onto the words that would have let me blend in with other people; all I had done was find a new way to isolate myself. Much, much later, in my early forties, I was spending a lot of time in chatrooms on America Online, and a woman who claimed to be a comparative-lit prof at Columbia started initiating Instant Message conversations with me. At one point she said, “You always speak in such a highly formal register. Can’t you speak casually?” I forget how I responded. By then, I had already long become besotted with S. J. Perelman’s early books, when he was at his dizzying best at reviving obscurate slang and breathing new life into the kinds of marvelries you can find at the foot of just about every page of the second, unabridged edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary (1934), where the editors segregated the words considered too archaic to be admitted into the primary columns. And I still have that old edition of the Collegiate dictionary I frequented in the summer after high school. The thing of course lost its covers a long time ago. It’s a broken-backed thing now. The pages are marked up, colored, highlighted, even spattered in places. It felt like a handbook at the time, a manual for life, but it didn’t make anything easier for me. When Emerson wrote that “books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst,” he might have had someone like me in mind, hunched over a dictionary with coloring pencils and a magnifying glass.  With aging, though, I have forgotten most of the words I courted back then, and I still haven’t learned most of the words that could probably help me in small talk. Whatever I write still comes out sounding off-kilter or mistranslated. I always feel as if I am living out of turn.

Some months ago, I found myself sitting among a few people—they were all a little younger than I am—who were especially lively and hilarious talkers, and one was extraordinarily fluent, so I was surprised to hear this person say, when recounting an experience as a community-college student required to take an introductory English-composition course, “The prof expected us to write essays, and I told him point-blank that my response to each assignment would be exactly one sentence and nothing more.” I had to admire that. A good decade and a half earlier, in a remedial-comp class of my own, I had used a word—I forget what it was, but it was something pretty simple, maybe nocturnal or auxiliary—and a student, a bluff-limbed young fellow in a tank top, asked me to define it. I did so, and then the student said, “Wow, that’s wild. I thought I knew all the words there were.” 

 

Something that’s related to your desire to collect and preserve the material in Backwardness: a moment that really touched me was your reflection concerning your mother’s lack of a written footprint in the world. You write, “My mother left almost no legacy of words on paper. She had long ago told me that in elementary school she wrote a short story that impressed her teacher, but the story was copied from a library book. She wrote grocery-shopping lists, and she wrote a few letters to me just about every year after I moved away. Most of the letters I still have. They were always signed ‘Mom.’ The quotation marks were hers. I hope she had no inkling of what the quotation marks meant.” While I was reading that, I considered how the book I was holding represented such a massive compendium of preserved moments from your life. And I also saw that the desire to preserve touches other areas of your life—your saving of newspapers and magazines in which you’d made grammatical corrections, for instance. Backwardness is the longest work you’ve ever released by a large margin, and you’ve indicated that you feel like it may be your final work. Where does this desire to record and preserve come from? And how important is a person’s written legacy?

First, I had this enormous, impedimental stash of material that I felt uneasy about trashing, not only because I’d spent considerable time on it (I was surprised to find how many drafts of single paragraphs I’d often made, even when I never once had a definite, eventual reader in mind and was typing just to unburden myself of the day behind), but also because I was a child of parents who were kids during the Great Depression, and they grew up with a disinclination to throw anything away (about fifteen years ago, my parents told me to finally get rid of a few boxes of junk I’d long been storing in their garage [and this was absolute junk, absolute refuse: inch-long pencil stubs and misshapen paper clips and eyeglasses with one lens missing and suchlike, nothing Goodwill or Salvation Army would accept], so during a visit, I dutifully carried everything out to the curb on Trash Collection Eve, and the next day, around noon, I awoke to find that my parents had lugged everything back into the garage, because all of it was “still good”). So I did want to preserve some of this voluminous mass of paperage, if only by loading some of its contents into an ailing laptop. Second (though this was of much less importance), I wanted there to be some sort of accurate record of my life, because I’d discovered that there apparently are some people who not only read my fiction but also right away take for granted that it is autobiographical and that I am a composite of all of the overpeculiarized, weirdo first-person narrators of my stories. (There was even a big-shot reviewer who fell for that and claimed that I’ve left multiple marriages and divorces in my wake.)  But if I were to say that Backwardness is a life-document that I expect will outlast me, all I would mean is that it could very well be around, in one form or another, for maybe a couple of decades. I can’t expect to import myself into the future any further than that. But I appreciate that so many other life-records, such as published diaries and collections of letters, have survived for us and tell us how other people, obscuratoes like me, lived and flailed and got flustered by others, wandered without eye contact through the disaggrandized commercial districts of second-tier cities, treaded water in small towns and lusterless county seats, with their diminutive streets misnamed as avenues, boulevards. People have most interested me in their scathingly self-examinational moments alone, and you often get that in diaries and in letters never meant to be mailed. Maybe I have now added a little something to that tradition.

I am not hopeful, but the great books of course survive, and their authors continue to keep us company. I feel closer to someone like Jean Rhys than to most people I’ve encountered in my laggard and unflorid waking hours.

 

Speaking of second-tier cities, landscape seems very important to the book. In a way, this book is an exploration of a forgotten (or at least sidelined) landscape in literature: the strip-malls, fast food restaurants, and crummy apartments that most of us spend our lives among. I was excited, as a fellow Pennsylvanian, to see places like Allentown, Bethlehem, and all the other mid-sized post-industrial cities that persist in our state. Pittsburgh has also become a home to you for many years, and figures prominently in the book. Can you speak a bit about the influence of these landscapes on your writing? And you mentioned before we started the interview that you recently took a trip back to Allentown for the first time since your parents died. What was that like? Does it still feel like home?

I guess most of us think that the place where we grew up looks exactly the way the world is supposed to look. Every time I return to the urban reaches of eastern Pennsylvania, if only for a day or two, I feel as if the world has resumed its rightness, its intended splendor. I’m never home for more than a few minutes before I’m already thinking, “I must find a way to live here again. This is the only place on earth for me.” Yet the tone on the streets and in the marts and eateries just gets harsher and harsher (my hometown, Allentown, has been subsumed into the Northeastern megalopolis), and prices of even a legacy shriveled hot dog and a flat Diet Coke are through the roof, and there isn’t a trace of Pennsylvania Dutch to be heard anywhere anymore (except now and then in the beer-hour persiflage of hipster ironists growing long in the tooth), and the shopping centers are all anchored by interchangeable chain stores, and the beloved discount dumps like King’s Department Store (in whose meager, grubby aisles, as a child and teen prowler, I learned just about everything that counted in working-class life) have been gone for decades, and the outlying towns and villages that once were out-and-out hicksville are now suburbs for the supercilious (relocators from metropolitan Philly and New York, mostly) who kick up a fuss when pickles are served on a chip-steak sandwich, and the traffic is pandemonical (and there are “fulfillment centers” looming low-risingly everywhere in the outskirts)—the Allentown I love, the Allentown where I learned how the years will beautifully thwart every last one of us, is almost entirely kaput.

Metropolitan Pittsburgh is a lot different. It’s so far away from other cities, for one thing. Almost nothing out here is patinated the way things tend to be in the East. There’s an unquestioned ugliness to the way most things look. The cost of living is lower. Life itself can be hard to pin down. There are robust arguments about whether or not this might actually be Appalachia. The print edition of the lone Pittsburgh newspaper comes out only twice a week and is ignorable even then. (It’s written by scabs anyway.) The local sandwich that people—mostly tourists, I guess—tend to talk about comes with the fries and the slaw right there in the bun with the meat. I once ate one of those things, but I’d ordered it suchwise that the fries and the slaw were set down, untouching, on a side plate.  (I didn’t go anywhere near the slaw anyway.) It was heartbreakingly unprepossessing, like a Wendy’s burger. I have never found a decent hot dog out here. The best approximation I’ve found of an Eastern-Pennsylvanian steak sandwich was at a gas station. Yet I have easily learned ways to love most of everything out here. It’s a paradise for long walks. It has the feel and the look of a much larger city. There are lively, lovely, thriving districts. Pittsburgh’s population is not even three times that of Allentown, yet the downtown is huge and beautiful and mostly old and welcoming and exciting. (I would not have lasted out here without it.) I don’t think any of this region has ever seeped into my fiction, though, other than the twin doors at the end of the very first story in my very first book, which are straight out of the men’s restroom at a long-gone deli on Sixth Street in downtown Pittsburgh.
 

As I know you’re a longtime devotee of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, I wanted to ask: do you believe we’re being visited by extraterrestrials? Have you followed any of the past few years’ developments, like the government disclosures on the subject?

Yes, I very much believe that we’re being surveilled and that aliens have been dropping in on us and poking around. Back in the 1990s, I was pinning my hopes on being abducted and probed, but the aliens would probably have found me unrepresentative of the earthling ethos anyway. I stopped listening to Coast to Coast after George Noory commandeered the mothership. He makes flying saucers sound as irrelevant as multivitamins and oil changes. But I still follow the unidentified-anomalous-phenomena bulletins in the New York Times and New York magazine and do hope that the aliens have something deserved in store for us.

 

I noticed a deep sense of alienation in Backwardness; and throughout the work, your alienation from the queer community seems as complete as your alienation from the straight world. A reader encounters you first as a nearly asexual gay young man and follows your oft-thwarted attempts to fit in with the gay and transgender communities, and then ultimately your transition to living as a woman. You comment at one point on the existence of a sophisticated urban gay culture which you were never quite absorbed by.

As an introverted, pimplous, self-distrusting, affection-starved small-city teenage beanpole trying to shuck off Pennsylvania Dutch locutions and provinciality in the 1970s (the last decade when, to me, the world promised to be comfortingly solid and experienceable at full strength), I was obsessed with the weirdward silvery hedonisms of Andy Warhol’s factory, the bitchy yet hospitable urbanity depicted in Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, and the mincing-femme twinkle of the song “New York Telephone Conversation” on Lou Reed’s Transformer album.  I assumed that those were all representative of the wider gay world—a reachable sphere of witty banter, artistic accomplishment, camp sensibility, weary elegance, emotional delicacies, and suchlike. I never did find my way into an approximation of that world, and I know it’s entirely my fault. I was timid, homely, inarticulate, “slow.” All I eventually found was a same-sex version of the straight world I’d grown up in. I never felt I was a part of anything anywhere anyhow.  It’s my loss—I know.


Much of Backwardness takes place in transit to or from fast food restaurants, and you catalogue many meals you’ve experienced in minute detail. I had the thought while reading that it may in fact contain the most hamburgers eaten in a single work of literature. That seems like a milestone of human culture that should not pass unrecognized. Is Elizabeth Ellen looking into this? Is there any official body that would record such things? What is it about fast food that has drawn you to writing about it throughout your life?

(My own allegiance has to be to McDonald’s, because at some point, as a cost-cutting measure, BK started placing only one slice of cheese on a double cheeseburger, which outraged me. They may have since reversed this policy, but I still feel incensed that they would even consider such a thing. McDonald’s still places two slices of cheese on a double cheeseburger, though they too offer the “McDouble”, a double cheeseburger with only one slice of cheese, and I have flummoxed drive-through attendants by refusing to change my order to a McDouble despite the money-saving nature of the deal. It’s inconceivable to them that I wouldn’t sacrifice a slice of cheese to save a dollar.)

And what do you have against cheese, anyway?

Yes, I am keenly aware of the recent changes in value-burger cheese-slice policy at McDonald’s and Burger King, and although I too showed my teeth at first, it doesn’t affect me, because I can’t eat cheese (stomachal indispositions and the like) and wouldn’t eat it even if I could (I’m put off as much by the gooeyness and the coloration as by the taste). I was a McD regular until I aged out of their infantilizing menu and vibe midway through my thirties, and then frumpish, dimmer BK became the only place for a melancholiac in the first creaks of middle age. I’ve lately had to scale back my visits to BK (doctors’ orders [I see many a doctor these days]), but it’s just as well, because at least in the region where I live, BK has discontinued its coupons (a big, bountiful sheet of them would arrive very brightly in the mail at least once a month, and the deals were generous and life-lifting [two Whopper Juniors and two medium fries for $3.99, for instance, though as the pandemic wore on, this deal increased in price by fifty-cent increments until topping out at $5.99]), and then they raised the fee for a Rodeo Burger, always a bracing supplement to a value meal, from a dollar to $1.99. Now of course there’s the Your Way deal of four items (petite sandwich, smattering of fries, four hard-barked chicken nuggets, miniature drink) bundled together handsomely for five dollars, but it barely suffices as even an appetizer. I order it, though, and refill the tiny cup with Diet Coke as many as ten times during a visit (the counterpersonnel, even when they’re watching intently, don’t seem to care), because I like to pass an hour or so in the dining room and loaf and invite my soul. BK is one of the few places where I’ve always felt at home, or at least felt tolerated.

 

Your alternating visits to “the good Burger King” and “the bad Burger King” for hundreds of pages had me in stitches.

The “bad” Burger King later became the “good” Burger King after the “good” one was shut down (it became a plus-size men’s store, with a submarine-sandwich outlet to its side), and then a BK about ten miles from where I live became a satellite “good” one until it was demolished a year ago (it was grungy, sure [and from no point in the main dining area could you evade the stink of the restroom-maintenance chemicals], but it was a homey place to sit in simulations of solitude for an hour, the staff were serious [none of them ever looked young], and the orders were unfailingly accurate) and replaced by a cramping, contempo, coffeehouse-style “bad” BK, and now the same thing is happening to another “good,” cozily shabby BK ten miles in the opposite direction, which was shut down abruptly just a couple of weeks ago with not even a sign on the door to warn regulars that all would not be lost forever (I had to consult Facebook for consoling clarifications).  

 

I wanted to tell you that while reading Backwardness, I had an incredibly vivid and pleasing dream about eating a massive amount of Tastykake chocolate cupcakes, one after another.

I love Tastykakes, though there have been only two varieties I've been eating all of my life. The first are the all-chocolate cupcakes that come three to a pack. The other ones I love are the chocolate cupcakes with some sort of cream filling and white buttercream frosting with a narrow chocolate stripe; those used to come two to a pack, but now, in Dollar Tree and in some supermarkets, I see them in packs of three. It depresses me that Tastykake introduced cupcakes that sort of look like Hostess cupcakes. I've eaten Hostess cupcakes only (I think) twice in my life, and they were way too sweet for me and tasted too much like chemicals. I always eat Tastykakes chilled. I don't think I've eaten a room-temperature Tastykake cupcake since I was a kid. My heart sinks when I look at Little Debbie stuff, but I guess it is only children who eat that. I've never once been tempted to try any of it. Supermarket-bakery cupcakes around here are trash, though I occasionally buy them from a "reduced for quick sale" rack. 

I've never eaten more than six Tastykake cupcakes at one go; I'm not sure what might have stopped me from going further. They seem smaller than they were when I was young. They always look squashed these days. And for at least a couple of decades there have been complaints that the recipe has changed, but I still love Tastykakes. I remember when expensive gourmet cupcakes were the rage. I bought some and was always disappointed.