7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)

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What’s the truth and what’s a lie? What’s a memoir, what’s a novel, and what if both are just a series of “prose blocks”? This conversation between Sarah Manguso and Tess McNulty takes up questions of writing and veracity, trauma and memory. Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including three memoirs. Her first novel, Very Cold People, was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and her second novel, Liars, is forthcoming. Tess and Sarah discuss how the threshold between truth and fiction is often used to minimize writing by women and how characters can achieve escape velocity against the pull of violence and abuse. We learn that Sarah doesn’t imagine an audience when she writes—instead, writing articulates something felt in the body, something that remains “uncomfortable until it is so articulated.” From the Yankee thrift of book design and the writing of front matter, acknowledgements, and Sarah’s brilliant titles, we move to 70s-era typography and wordplay with the answer to Season 7’s signature question.

Mentioned in this episode:

By Sarah Manguso: Very Cold People, 300 Arguments, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape in One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in A Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers
Hilary Mantel
Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad,” from an 1821 letter published in Volume 8 of Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand.
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

Listen and Read:

Audio: Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)

Transcript: 7.6 Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)

10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) – Novel Dialogue

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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