Melissa Broder photo by Lord Byron / Chelsea Hodson photo by Ryan Lowry
Melissa Broder and Chelsea Hodson
"As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it,” Andy Warhol famously quipped. But for many of us, it’s not the getting that’s the essential component of desire, but the endless want.
Two books by authors coming to San Diego—as part of the new literary and reading series Last Exit [full disclosure: Last Exit is curated by CityBeat contributor Julia Dixon Evans]—explore desire in very different ways. Melissa Broder is a poet, essayist and Twitter sensation, but her novel The Pisces is her first formal foray into fiction.
The Pisces is a love story between a woman in her thirties and a much older man. It’s impossible to know exactly by how much, because he’s a mythical sea creature. Lucy meets Theo down by the rocks at Venice Beach while house sitting for her sister. After mistaking him for a young, fit swimmer, she discovers he is a merman who is really into her.
“Did it take a mythological deformity to find a gorgeous man who was as needy as I was?” Lucy marvels.
The Pisces has made a splash because of its graphic sex scenes, of which there are several. The book’s central problem, however, does not concern the physical romance between Lucy and Theo, who is endowed with the genitals of a human, but with her reckless desire for what she can’t have.
Broder tackles the question of why we want what we know is bad for us. The result is a book that is strangely more honest and real than many novels that take a more realist approach to romance. Broder told me she wanted to understand “why a love that is healthy and present and abundant can sometimes feel not as real as a love that is a fantasy.”
Inspired by the novel The Professor and the Siren by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Broder set out to explore this paradox of desire with classic themes, but it was important to Broder to locate the novel in a modern setting.
“There was a lot more I wanted to say about the addictive nature of sex and love, Broder said. “I wanted Tinder to be a part of this book.”
Broder moved to Los Angeles from New York five years ago where she composed her poetry on the train. When she traded the subway for a car she started dictating prose, which led to expand on many of the ideas generated in her enormously popular Twitter feed @sosadtoday, which is dedicated to addiction, anxiety and depression. This resulted in an essay collection of the same name and columns for Vice, Lenny Letter and Elle.com.
Now she is at work on two new novels. Broder says she enjoys the novel form because she feels it’s where “poetry and nonfiction intersect.”
Chelsea Hodson, on the other hand, is interested in intersections. Her book Tonight I’m Someone Else is a collection of essays. The impossible-to-pin down selection, “Pity the Animal,” documents the collision of culture and capitalism and was previously published as a chapbook. Early excerpts of two other essays were published in small literary journals, but the majority of the book has never been published before now.
“I think of the book as one long essay,” Hodson said. “I felt strongly that once the book was done it would read better as a collection rather than individual essays out in the world. I didn’t really have the desire to publish them one by one… I liked the idea of it living on my computer with very few readers. Then it could continue to morph and change as I kept working on it.”
This is an interesting choice for the creator of “Inventory,” a project where Hodson documented everything she owned by describing one item per day, every day.
“‘Inventory’ was a way to focus my writing. I felt like I wasn’t writing enough, day-to-day. I wanted something that had the possibility of having an audience… Even if it was one paragraph, which it often was, that was what I produced every day.”
She started with approximately 10 followers and it grew from there. 657 days and more than 40,000 words later, the project was complete. A live performance of “Inventory” lasted over seven hours and was documented by the Marina Abramovic Institute.
Hodson’s willingness to experiment and be fearlessly open with her life are two hallmarks of her writing. She is drawn to guidelines and restraints. In this way she is like a performance artist whose medium is words.
“I do think of the book as an art object,” she said.
Hodson has a background in zine culture and for her, “doing zines comes from that anxiety of having your voice heard and being part of something whether that be art or music or writing.”
But after being so public she had a strong impulse to be private, a period that she refers to as “an incubation stage.”
In Tonight I’m Someone Else, Hodson reflects on how her desires put her at odds with society. For instance, her desire for gainful employment was often reduced to an ongoing conversation with herself about what she was and wasn’t willing to do with her body. Her desire for the affection of a pop singer was compromised by the adulation of thousands of other fans. Hodson has a gift for putting the reader in these moments of keenly felt observation.
“For me, it’s much more visceral and focused in on something like a filmmaker. I’m really interested in isolating things and creating an atmosphere.”
In trying to understand why we want what we want, Broder and Hodson arrive at essential truths about the human condition—even if sometimes what we want is a merman with a penis.