Behind the Essay: Audrey Wollen

On feminism, writing from the underglow, and taking the scenic route

Audrey Wollen’s essays move easily among theory, fiction, film, and fashion, carrying a style at once playful and exacting. In a piece for our spring issue, she writes about the handbag and the feminized labor of care, which she also spoke about on a recent radio program. In our fall issue, she turns to Claire-Louise Bennett’s latest book, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, tracing its textures and digressions with the same idiosyncratic attention. We spoke with Audrey about how an essay takes shape for her, what guides her critical voice, and why she thinks of language as a found object.

—The Editors

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The Yale Review: Where does an essay begin for you—how does it crystallize from thought to form?

Audrey Wollen: A hunch, usually based on a glimmering coincidence inside a text, or a joke buried deep within myself, a joke I would struggle to explain to anyone else, which means it’s not really a joke at all, more like a secret internal wink, almost a glitch, which quickly transforms into a hungry, obsessive enthusiasm—this stage involves a lot of reading—which then tips over into panic!!!!, which again trips over itself and falls headfirst into a great slough of despond, and I have to live there for a bit, just wallowing in my inadequacy, until I manage to crawl out of the swamp, usually tugged helpfully by the rope of a deadline, and slowly, on my hands and knees, still muddy with childhood insecurities, damp with effort and shame, slowly I drag myself over to a sentence.

You say—half seriously—that the epistolary novel should be the “dominant form of our historical moment.” This feels instinctively true as an idea, both obvious and startling. Where did it come from?

I really appreciate you saying that the idea is both half serious and instinctively true—I try hard to strike that balance. I love when something feels correct in an amorphous way, like it can expand past the kernel of correctness into its own wobbly outer aura, which is usually a more playful place. A teacher once told me that some writers set their sights on a thesis and inch toward it, building up a stairway with steps of research and evidence, but that I skip ahead and just throw my writing very high into the sky, and once I’m up there, I have to figure out how to get back down again. I don’t think they meant it as a compliment, exactly . . . but it helped me understand myself more—and the kind of writing I enjoy.

Obviously, our historical moment is looping in the thrall of the short, disjointed moving image. At first glance, the eighteenth-century-style epistolary novel is so clearly not the dominant form that to propose it as such, even as a hypothetical “should,” is like throwing the bouncy ball of your mind really high and looking around quickly before you plunge back down. I think I was pulling from my memories of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, which argues that the addiction at the core of our internet use is really an addiction to writing—constant, unceasing language production. This, for me, put the internet a lot closer to the doorstopper novels of previous centuries. Is the internet just everyone writing their own personal Tristram Shandy? And if the internet is one great communal novel, how do we then novelize the experience of being surrounded by it? And you can reverse this line of inquiry: What about the traditional epistolary mode, the extended syncopation of letters to and from different characters, is similar to scrolling through truncated snippets of beseeching videos, or the tip-tappity endlessness of the group chat? What have we carried with us, across these different types of narratives and media—what kinds of rhythms or desires are they all reaching toward?

In your previous essay for the TYR, “A Unified Theory of the Handbag,” you write: “We can revalue dependency, neediness, and the feminized labor of care as generative rather than limiting.” And in your new review essay about the work of Claire-Louise Bennett, you valorize a feminine way of thinking. Would you say there is a strand of feminism running through your work? How would you define it?

Yes. More than a single strand—it’s the whole loom, honestly. On a purely intellectual level, I think feminism, as we know it, is one of the most exciting ideas of the last 250 years. It is a relatively young nexus of thought with such huge, rolling waves of transformative implications that will take many more lifetimes to materialize fully. Obviously, we’re still in the messy, painful years of confusion and contradiction and wrongdoing. “Prerevolution” is a useful way for me to think about it, although I think feminism also asks us to reconsider what the ultimate shape of the revolution will be. But it is a privilege to be writing and thinking at the very beginning of a concept so massive, the beginning of a new way to be alive together.

One thing that’s really important to me is that I try to work from the premise that, despite and within great duress, femininity was invented, with agency and creativity, by its practitioners. And continues to be, every day. A lot of what is culturally or historically feminized has been written off (many times by feminists!) as, like, a tragic by-product of dehumanization, or a symptom of mass derangement, or evidence of ingrained passivity, or an elaborate tactic of the patriarchy to keep us down. Which, of course, gives the system of patriarchs all the credit for so much that is fun, beautiful, or profound in our lives, and simultaneously lets them off the hook for actual tactics that are much more gruesome and difficult to take in: constant war, constant rape, reproductive coercion and control, the ubiquity of domestic violence and police brutality, combined with limited access to health care, economic independence, public life, fair labor, and so on and so on. We spend ages arguing about whether or not this or that granular detail of women’s behavior or presentation is actually harmful to women. My whole life changed when I decided to assume that, generally speaking, girls do their version of girlness on purpose, for meaningful, perceptive, and intelligible reasons. Femininity is this bewildering communal archive, this endless technical library of survival, subversion, insight, and wit that has been passed through generations. So I try to write from that speculative position: What is this thing (like the handbag, care work, certain kinds of novels), and why did the practitioners of femininity invent it?

What’s a popular piece of writing advice that you don’t agree with? What’s a piece of writing advice that you stand by?

“Write every day.” It’s a nice idea! But it’s kind of the writing-advice equivalent of your mother shouting “Be good!” from the car window. You have to walk up to your gaggle of friends blushing. She means well. But the unscheduled day is the group of friends, you know? Bad in a good way. Impulsive, sweet, snickering, unmothered. The primary consequence of “Be good!” is that when you inevitably do the “bad” thing, you know you are supposed to feel guilty and maybe lie about it later when you get home. “Write every day” makes you feel like you have to lie to other writers about how much you write, and also like you should not be hanging out with the dangerous girl gang of free time. I’m picturing empty afternoons as a pack of smoking teenage girls in matching sateen jackets that have THE EMPTY AFTERNOONS embroidered in cursive on the back. They are the geniuses of life! You are lucky to be their friend! Avoid easy moralism that can be shouted from a still-moving car.

I think the most effective advice for me has been “Encourage the eccentricities of your own mind.” Our brains are really adept pattern-recognition machines, and we can reproduce patterns of thought really easily, and unfortunately, that is almost entirely what we are taught to do in school—and don’t get me wrong, there are great pleasures in patterned thought, long hallways tiled with perfectly fitted hexagons of thought—but it means, when writing, that we are often falling into pre-dug furrows. I try to practice the self-trust necessary to incorporate my own inner strangeness, sensory associations, sense of humor, and sense of despair into my writing, especially critical writing. Say I’m reviewing a novel and I read a chapter and for some reason it’s glowing pink for me, the whole section has a weird underglow of pink, or it reminds me of a scene in Buffy that I memorized when I was twelve, or a big cry I had a month ago, or a really witty thing a friend said to me last week, or there’s a guttural, gloppy, glyph-y gulf of g or u sounds that I keep falling into. The pleasure is trying to squeeze those eccentricities—that sometimes seem, on the level of argument, almost meaningless and hyperspecific to me—into the inherited pattern-machine of the sentence. Metaphor helps. Often, the most astute analysis can be found inside that underglow feeling.

Your writing moves easily among theory, nonfiction, film, classical fiction, TV, fashion. And it all seems very natural. Could you tell us a bit about your approach? How do you think about bringing such disparate sources into conversation with one another?

I think I benefited from a wayward path through higher education, particularly going to art school but not becoming an artist. I wouldn’t call myself an autodidact in literary criticism, but I try my hardest to mimic one. It doesn’t feel like it when it’s happening, of course, because there’s a lot of cultural pressure to have your career or your calling figured out right away, but taking the long way around made my world a lot bigger. I still try to find the scenic route, professionally speaking.

I think the true source of my ranginess is my dad, Peter Wollen. He always approached the popular, kitsch, folk, or “cult” object with great intellectual reverence while also being very invested in high theory, for lack of a better term. He started developing early-onset Alzheimer’s disease when I was about ten years old, so I didn’t get a lot of time with him, but the world he presented to me in our decade together was vast and curious and nonhierarchical. It was clear he felt great joy in leaping from discourse to discourse, field to field, and putting unexpected things next to each other. He diligently prioritized being an outsider and an enthusiast. This chimed with being a child, when you are automatically a newcomer to the entire world—it felt like we could access each other’s methodology very easily. I try to honor his memory by being as nomadic as possible in my frame of reference. It’s nice to think about all the different habits people have cultivated in their writing, all their quirks and concerns, as little altars for their dead, candles lit inside unsuspecting paragraphs.

There’s an image that recurs, somewhat transformed, in both of your recent TYR essays: a pebble turned over in the pocket of an old jacket, and a scavenged potato, picked up astray in a field. What is the appeal of a found object, and what do you think this has to do with essay writing?

I think of language itself as a kind of found object, a scavenged thing. We pass it among ourselves, across time and space, and no one owns it as an entirety. We can only buy and sell flecks of it—and even that ownership is a little silly, a little imaginative, because it really couldn’t be easier to steal. It’s wonderfully unsecured. It’s part of the commons. I think if you’re lucky, that part of writing can feel very palpable, almost physical. When you are working on something, you can actually feel being part of a larger, reticulated body of knowledge, and you can feel the thrill of finding something and taking it without having taken it from anybody, because it already belongs to whoever needs it. Borrowing in order to share. It’s a state of nourishing, untethered indebtedness. A lot more of life should feel like that.