When Rachel Kushner accepted the “Easy Chair” column at Harper’s magazine, she made it clear that she would write only about “cold-button” issues.She’s not interested in writing about things other people have already shared strong opinions about.
“Bypulling back and writing about niche subjects, I feel like I have more control over what I’m doing, and the things that I’m producing as nonfiction seem more like me. They’re more like of a piece with who I am as a fiction writer,” Kushner toldThe Chronicle over Zoom from Ukiah, where she was spending Thanksgiving week with family.
从她memoiric散文,小说如“The Flamethrowers” and “The Mars Room,”finalists for the National Book Award and Booker Prize, respectively, Kushner is known for her mesmerizing, fact-infused storytelling. Essays from her 2021 collection “The Hard Crowd” delve into classic cars and helpful truckers, literary inspirations and music legends.
In her 2018 Vogue article “Not With the Band,” Kushner writes about watching PJ Harvey play an all-night set at the Hotel Utah, afterplaying a full set atthe Warfield. She describes Harvey as looking joyous, not at all tired, and “Like a person in a church, filling her soul with Holy Spirit as she sang.” The message of that night to Kushner was formative: “(T)o be truly good at something is the very highest joy,” she writes. “And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin or even not related at all.”
Kushner wrote about that career-pivoting moment nearly 20 years after it happened, all the while playing catch-up, as she says (she published her first novel at age 38). When it came time for Kushner to write the screenplay adaptation for“The Mars Room,”she thought: “Why would I try to learn something as a complete beginner rather than focus on writing novels, which is hard enough?”
So she contacted a friend: the writer Ottessa Moshfegh. “There’s this almost spiritual drive and self-confidence that she has that I absolutely adore,” Kushnersaid of Moshfegh. “It’s like a fire that you can kind of sit next to. It just has its own energy to it.”
Moshfegh had done some other adaptations of novels into film, but they had all been for her own work.
“Working on ‘The Mars Room’ was like learning a new language,” Moshfeghsaid over Zoom from her home in Pasadena. “It’s such a rich book, and one thing that I think is so distinctive about Rachel — it just feels like a phenomenon to me — is how many stories she can tell at once, and how she weaves them all in.”
A several-days-long slumber/work party, both writers said, helped to strengthen their friendship.
“Her mind is really fun,” Kushnersaid of Moshfegh. “She’s a really serious person who has a kind of modest approach. She’ll work really hard, andif somebody says, ‘I think you could try that from another angle,’ she doesn’t push back like, ‘No, I think my way is the right way.’… Excellence never comes from arrogance. It always comes from curiosity and drive and pursuit.”
“I find it to be so special that I haven’t really tried to put it into words yet,” Moshfeghsaid of working with Kushner. “It’s not as though she has no ego. It’s just that I can tell she has such respect for the process and the artwork that I sense she’s sort of liberated from a need to impose herself on a vision.
“She also is extremely open,” Moghfeghadded after a thoughtful pause. “And her openness and my openness had a meeting that felt so beautiful. It felt like it really cemented our friendship as, you know, these two people who care about storytelling.”
“The Mars Room” adaptation is now in search of the right director.
来到新Moshfegh闻名,uncomfortable places. Her books, including the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning “Eileen,” have stepped onto drunken boats, into frigid 1960s New England, to an abandoned Girl Scout camp. In her latest novel, “Lapvona,” Moshfegh went medieval.
She didn’t expect to write “Lapvona,” Moshfegh said, but as the word “plague” came to mind during the pandemic — and having spent most of her lockdown time in a house with a cold, monastic feel — the Middle Ages were in her consciousness.
As her sense of time got pandemically skewed, Moshfegh started thinking about the scale of time in human history, and had an epiphany: “I was like, wait, why do I think that people in the late Middle Ages had a consciousness that was that much different from mine? Well, that’s silly. … So I was like,well, let me try to tell a story in which a cast of characters is each coming up against their own faith, and challenging their own faith.”
Whether it’s teaching herself how to write screenplays or researching new cultural landscapes and eras, the unfamiliar is an important fuel to Moshfegh’s fire. “I hate not feeling safe, but I always seem to go to a place that feels dangerous, because that’s where you start running. And I need to be running.”
About her next novel, Moshfegh willonly reveal that it takes place in the 1990s and involves some less-explored mental health themes. As for Kushner’s forthcoming novel (expected out in early 2024), there will be a prehistoric component. She doesn’t share much either, except to say that the book “allowed me to ask what is underneath the place where people declare that they have politics and ethics — like, what’s under that?”
The Mars Room
By Rachel Kushner
(Scribner; 338 pages; $27)
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020
By Rachel Kushner
(Simon and Schuster, 288 pages, $17.99)
Lapvona: A Novel
By Ottessa Moshfegh
(Penguin Press, 320 pages, $27)
City Arts & Lectures presents Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh:7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 17. $36. Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St., S.F.www.cityarts.net