The Naked Truth
© David Shankbone
Lynne Tillman
United States
Monday October 15th 2012 / Theresa Lang Center, The New School
The Author
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Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fiction includes the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Tillman’s art and literary criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Bomb, and The New York Times Book Review. She has written stories for a variety of contemporary artists’ books and catalogues, including those of Kiki Smith, Juan Munoz, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Kruger, Roni Horn, and Vik Muniz.
Haunted Houses (Righ Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail 1987 ; 2nd ed. Red Lemonade, 2011)
Bibliography
Reviews
Someday This Will be Funny (Red Lemonade, 2011) American Genius, A Comedy (Soft Skull, 2006) This Is Not It (Distributed Art Publishers, 2002) Bookstore : The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,1999) No Lease on Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998) The Broad Picture (Serpent’s Tail,1997) The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967 with photographs by Stephen Shore (Pavilion,1995) Cast in Doubt (Poseidon Press,1992 ; 2nd ed. Red Lemonade, 2011) The Madame Realism Complex (Semiotext(e), 1992) Absence Makes the Heart (Serpent’s Tail,1990) Motion Sickness (Serpent’s Tail, 1991 ; 2nd ed. Simon & Schuster 2010) Haunted Houses (Righ Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail 1987 ; 2nd ed. Red Lemonade, 2011)
«In Haunted Houses, Lynne Tillman chronicles the loneliness of childhood and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship, and the neurotic chain that binds perpetually needy daughters to their perpetually self-absorbed parents. . . . Her style is spare and compelling, the effect of clinical authenticity.» New York Times Book Review «Ms. Tillman’s characters are rigorously drawn , with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives . . . this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times . . . Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here.» LA Weekly «This complex and skillfully constructed novel has three separate storylines following the lives of three girls growing up in New York, maturing in a world of baffling freedoms and uncertainties.... Childhood fears, passionate friendships, sexual explorations, and the uncomfortable interdependency of parents and children are depicted with intelligence, honesty, and dark humor. But if you are looking for comfort and consolation, you must look elsewhere: Tillman writes about life as it is, not as we might wish it to be.» Sunday Times «Lynne Tillman’s writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring... To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today.» John Zorn
In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman wries of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.
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Someday This Will be Funny (Red Lemonade, 2011)
American Genius, A Comedy (Soft Skull, 2006)
This Is Not It (Distributed Art Publishers, 2002)
Bookstore : The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,1999)
The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators – by turn infamous and nameless – shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention – stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.
This is what we’d get if Jane Austen were writing in 21st century America – a book that expands the possibilities of the national novel and of the female protagonist. Tillman brings into being a microcosm of American democracy, a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod, in which competing values – rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor – compete with one another through a hilarious narrative, cycling through skin disease, chair design, Manifest Destiny – folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating, in Wagnerian fashion, in a supernatural event, offering escape, transcendence, or perhaps nothing…
In This Is Not It, Lynne Tillman’s collection of 20 years’ worth of important and compelling short stories and novellas, the protagonists seduce you into their lives and thoughts. Engaging, funny, elegant, and ironic, Tillman takes the reader to new heights of wit and meaning through staccato phrases, grammatical twists, and sensuous language. Familiar worlds of honesty, deceit, dark humor, pleasure, pain, confusion, dependence, love, and lust each play decisive roles in her believable fictions. In Come and Go, three characters and an author collide. In Pleasure Isn’t A Pretty Picture, the reader is treated to a he/she meditation on the one-night stand. And Dead Sleep is truly an insomniac’s worst nightmare. A twin act on a double bill, This Is Not It is a collection of innovative and stand-alone writing that also engages and matches wits with the some of the best contemporary art: work by Kiki Smith, Jane Dickson, Jessica Stockholder, Diller & Scofidio, Laura Letinsky, Peter Dreher, Roni Horn, Stephen Ellis, Juan Munoz, Vik Muniz, Silvia Kolbowski, Jeff Koons, James Welling, Aura Rosenberg, Barbara Ess, Barbara Kruger, Dolo res Marat, Haim Steinbach, Gary Schneider, Marco Breuer, Stephen Prina and Linder Sterling. Since 1982, acclaimed novelist Tillman has created these unique narratives that are a parallel universe to the contemporary art world. Maybe they’re analogues or dialogues, maybe fictions inspired by art, maybe reflections, or meditations--but whatever they’re called, like Borges’s fictions, they are their own worlds, too. Tillman has marked out terrain of her own, which this collection celebrates. Full of life and art, This Is Not It is illuminating, bold, subtle and riotous.
For twenty years, from 1977 to 1997, Books & Co. was one of the premier independent bookstores in the country. Stocking a wide range of quality fiction and nonfiction, Books & Co. was the kind of bookstore writers and readers dream about: a place where reading was an adventure, where interesting works would always be available, where writers would congregate to share ideas and discuss their writing. Its closing, in a rent dispute with the Whitney Museum of Art, caused a media sensation as readers and book lovers decried the end of a cultural icon. In Bookstore, Lynne Tillman tells the story of this legendary store and its determined founder, Jeannette Watson, with help from the voices of Brendan Gill, Roy Blount Jr., Fran Lebowitz, Calvin Trillin, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Simon Schama, Lyn Chase, Susan Cheever, Leila Hadley, J.D. McClatchy, Richard Howard, and many more. And the story goes beyond the walls of the store itself to explore the state of publishing and bookselling in a time when the very landscape of the book world has shifted radically. A fascinating account of business, books, and writerly aspiration, Bookstore is a vital window into a world so many have fantasized about.
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No Lease on Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998)
Cast in Doubt (Poseidon Press,1992 ; 2nd ed. Red Lemonade, 2011)
The Madame Realism Complex (Semiotext(e), 1992)
Absence Makes the Heart (Serpent’s Tail,1990)
The New York of Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the mean-spirited landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights on for normalcy and sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the “morons” she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman’s spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America’s toughest, hottest melting pot.
While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a pulp novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end. That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious — in short, she becomes his absolute obsession. But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.
An irreverent and lucid sojourn through the facetious, twisted burps we call sophisticated society, captured by the camera-quick and ruthless eye of the ever-vigilant third person, Madame Realism. Each fiction has a terse analytical agenda, surgically dissecting the mundane, forcing quotidian life off the canvas, out of the museum dioramas and into our laps.
Absence Makes the Heart is a selection of Lynne Tillman’s short fiction, written over a ten-year period. Understated and ironic, her work is as funny as it is disturbing as she coolly takes aim at art, sex, memory and death.
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Motion Sickness (Serpent’s Tail, 1991 ; 2nd ed. Simon & Schuster 2010)
For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour. Adrift in Europe, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she’s befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, or may or may not be stalking her. In Paris, she shacks up with Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas. In Amsterdam, she teams up with a Belgian friend, who is studying prostitutes, and she tours Italy with deeply mismatched English brothers. And, as with an epic journey, the true trajectory is inwards, ever inwards, into her own dreams and desires...
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