ADULT interview with Katherine Faw from 2015
I have been digging around my Google Drive and I found this interview I did with Katherine Faw for this short-lived but excellent website called Adult. It had a sexy layout and interesting articles and it was very sad when it ceased to exist. RIP Adult.
Katherine Faw is one of the greatest writers alive and I also just think she’s so so cool. Both of her books are classics.
I was so so thrilled when I got to be interviewed by such by such a cool writer at such a cool publication and it’s one of my fav interviews I ever did. I also love my very-2015 beauty recommendations. RIP to Too Faced’s old packaging for that primer. Nothing gold can stay. I refuse to buy it since they changed from a tube to this dumb-as-shit cylinder and the closest dupe I’ve found is Milani which is only $8.
also it’s cute that I say it is a great time to be alive… RIP/nothing gold can stay to the innocence of 2015. If only we could see into the future. 2015, the last reasonable year.
(side note: byline kind of reminds me of the 2024 version of Adult, and this interview with Katherine by
made me think that even more… Cora does these great reviews of various San Diego-related topics, among other cool stuff.)I keep saying “cool” but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ADULT x Juliet Escoria x Katherine Faw Morris
KATHERINE FAW MORRIS: Juliet, I have to confess that I first became aware of you by narcissistically Googling myself. You said you had read my book Young God and you didn’t want to like it because you thought I was copping your style but then you did. Which made me like you. I wasn’t sure what style I was copping but now that I’ve read your book Black Cloud I must admit there are some eerie similarities. With my actual life. I mean like baking ketamine in casserole dishes and boyfriends who fed previously frozen baby mice to their exotic pets and having a childhood that felt exactly like this: “I do remember the pliancy of things, how nothing ever felt like it was happening at the right time or would stay standing up.” Reading your book felt personal to me. It was weird. And compulsive. I guess this is not a question.
This is a question. Do you hate when people tell you how fast they read your book? Do people tell you that? I think we could have a competition you versus me, who had the fewest words in her book, and I’m not sure who would win, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t take forever. It just feels so consumable. This thing I spent years on can just be eaten. Do you feel that way? Does the consumption of your book give you anxiety?
JULIET ESCORIA: LOL. I was thinking right before I posted that, “What if she reads this?” But then I figured that if someone wrote that about me I would probably like it, so I decided it was OK. And yeah, the “style copping” was what you were talking about but also the way you answered interviews. I remember one you did with Elizabeth Ellen at Hobart – she’s a friend of mine, and we were talking about how much we loved your book. I read the answers and felt like you answered them in a way similar to how I would have. It was, like you said, weird.
When people tell me how fast they read my book, part of me wants to nastily say, “That’s because it’s only 15,000 words.”
The other part of me is pleased. I have a special talent of being able to turn almost anything into a compulsion. My favorite books are ones that I read compulsively, in a way that is almost painful, with me thinking, “I just have to finish it so it goes away and then I won’t have to obsess over it anymore.” (I do this with TV series, too.) Most of these books have short sections or chapters. The compulsive part of my brain can whisper, “I’ll just read one more section and then I’ll go to bed,” and, of course, it never stops with just one more. There is something pleasing about making up rules for yourself and then breaking them, although I doubt it’s the kind of thing that is pleasing if you aren’t some sort of addict or masochist.
I don’t know where we get this idea that a book has to be long to have any merit. Let’s blame it on the bible.
KFM: I was reading Black Cloud and thinking of Jesus’ Son. You do this thing that Denis Johnson does that is both the same and psychologically opposite. Stories in Jesus’ Son like “The Other Man” when two sad drunks are sadly and drunkenly making out and then all of a sudden, and in one or two sentences, he expands up and out of them to something universal, almost sentimental. You know, something about love. But you go the other way. You burrow down deeper into your characters. You trap them more fully inside their own heads. Like after the girl feeds the mice to the puffer fish: “By then I could see the change in their eyes: no longer flat and empty, now charged with the thick beat of a new electricity. They’d consumed something living, and suddenly their tiny world was no longer closed in by glass walls.” But they are never getting out of that tank. I mean, none of us are. Do you agree that you do this thing?
JE: I think I share an “emotional philosophy,” if you will, that adheres more to Mary Gaitskill rather than Denis Johnson. In Jesus’ Son, Johnson is able to elevate the terrible into the sublime. Mary Gaitskill, on the other hand, finds beauty in the terrible. In “A Romantic Weekend,” for instance – there’s this couple involved in a D/s-type of relationship. They don’t seem to really like each other, and their romantic weekend doesn’t go as either of them had planned. Both of the characters have a lot of ugliness in them, a lot of emptiness. But by the end of the story, they have kind of resigned themselves to this ugliness, emptiness, lack of love – and in that resignation, there is something tender and beautiful.
KFM: I think I was deciding for myself what your influences are when actually I have no idea. Tell me.
JE: Jesus’ Son and Mary Gaitskill, of course. I think reading Amy Hempel and Grace Paley really changed the way I handled things on a sentence level. So those are the books that influenced me most directly.
But there’s movies and music, too. I think watching River’s Edge affected my writing just as much as reading Jesus’ Son did. And when I’m writing—a lot of the times I will try and create a story that mirrors something I feel when I listen to a song. When I was writing Black Cloud, I was listening to a lot of aggressive music at a super loud volume. (Here is a playlist I was listening to a lot.) I think that musical aggression really wound itself into the writing.
KFM: As a deeply OCD person structure makes me happy. And your book is highly structured. Each story not only has a title but a heading and a photo. I was trying to figure out the headings. They are like the 12 steps of shitty emotions. “Resentment,” “Guilt,” “Revenge.” And the last step is “Shame,” so it’s like 12 steps to nowhere, which is so true. But it feels organized. What was your system?
JE: I do think the organization had a lot to do with my OCD tendencies. I’m working on a poetry book now and I’m overly concerned with the number of poems, and the number of sections, and the number of poems in each section. Which is stupid, but numbers are unfortunately something that I fixate on. Twelve seemed like a good number—twelve steps, twelve apostles, twelve months in the year.
The emotions were something Halimah Marcus, who is a writer and an editor as well as a friend of mine, suggested jokingly. I had told her I was writing a story out of spite, and she said I should write a book where each story corresponded with an emotion. I liked that idea. It gave me a kind of structure to work toward to that pleased me.
And the pictures – I like books with pictures, so therefore I wanted mine to have pictures.
KFM: You made videos for a lot of the stories, too. In the one for “Fuck California” you and a girl who looks like you spit fake blood on each other in a bathtub. That made me laugh. They are like short-story art videos. You’re not filming the narrative at all but you are definitely creating a mood. Still, is it strange to manifest visuals for your writing? To make concrete something so imaginary?
JE: I think it would be weird to write a book and then have someone take it and turn it into a movie. But this was different because, like you said, it wasn’t enacting the plot, but building on the mood of the story. I hadn’t really seen anyone do a project like that one, and it seemed like it would be a fun thing to try out. I’ve always had creative urges that were both verbal and visual, so this was a way for me to blend the two.
It’s not just the visual element that seemed appealing to me, though – I really love technology and computers and design/editing software. I love that I – someone who has no professional equipment or experience – could make a bunch of videos and have them turn out OK. People bemoan today and claim that social media and our cell phones are killing our brains and souls, but I think it’s a really neat time to be alive.
KFM: You’re in most of the videos and you’re on the cover of your book and the subject of a lot of the photos inside. I like it. But I know from experience that it freaks people out. There is definitely the idea that, unlike other artists, writers should not cultivate a physical persona. Or you can but the only acceptable one is the professional professor look and any deviation from that is unseemly. Is that something you are trying to confront or is your style just your style, fuck the haters?
JE: I was really worried about receiving backlash from doing that. There is very much a part of my personality that is like “Fuck the haters” but that part is protecting a very sensitive little underbelly. But no one said anything, at least not to my face or where I could find it online. I’m sure it would have happened if I was on a bigger press.
I do think that some of my urge to plaster myself all over that book is confrontational. I’ve always had a problem with being too honest, with oversharing to the point that it’s a defense mechanism, me trying to disarm or distance people. If you’re vulnerable to an extreme degree, it becomes almost an aggressive or protective act.
KFM: You grew up in San Diego. You did not love the sun. But now you live in West Virginia. That is a drastic change, Juliet! You’re with your husband so I’m sure that makes it wonderful. But going back to Appalachia is a fear that haunts me. You didn’t grow up there so it’s different. It’s like the guy in “Fuck California” who wakes up thinking every morning is beautiful because he came from somewhere else. If you don’t bring your shit with you any place can be beautiful. I’m sure that it is. Is it?
JE: It is beautiful, and it was something I wanted to do—live somewhere more remote. It also appealed to me precisely because it is such a drastic change. Part of the reason why I did a bunch of drugs and other self-destructive behavior was because I like extremes. Now that I’m sober and actively trying to not destroy myself, I have to get a lot more creative in my ways of being extreme. (Not that this was the only reason why I moved here -- I wanted to be with my husband and he has two small children tying him to the area, and I had no such ties in California -- the extremity of the change was just an added bonus.)
This is a strange, strange place to me. One of the things that has struck me is that places like this are really limited in terms of options. There’s not too many choices in terms of professions, or shopping, or doctors, or things to do, etc. It’s interesting to see what happens when options are limited. Sometimes the results are depressing, and sometimes they’re really admirable.
KFM: Disillusion me if I’m wrong but Black Cloud is autobiographical fiction. I mean, in so many ways it is impossible not to write about yourself. Who else do you really know? But is what you’re working on now as close to you? What are you working on now? I want to know.
JE: I’m still writing about myself. The poetry book I’m working on is in some ways more personal than Black Cloud, because the experiences I’m writing about are more immediate, and in Black Cloud I was writing mostly about things that had happened years ago. I’m also working on a novel, which is sort of an origin story for the version of myself that I created with Black Cloud. And my husband and I are also working on a diary of our first year of marriage, which is something that spun out of this series of blogs we did for Htmlgiant (RIP).
Once I get sick of writing about myself, I think it would be really fun to do a book of profiles, similar to what Truman Capote did on Mae West, Picasso, Chanel, etc.
KFM: I now have a great desire to make this an Into the Gloss interview. How about you? What’s your eyeliner?
JE: I love this question. I would probably have a hell of a more difficult time with being a woman if it wasn’t for makeup and cute clothes.
I use multiple types of eyeliner at once. On the top lid: First I put on a gel. I’m using Bobbi Brown right now but I like Benefit’s Lash Liner better. Then I use Urban Decay 24/7 to make sure the line made it all the way down into my lashes and smooth it out a little. Finally, I use a liquid to wing it out. I haven’t found a liquid I like enough to commit to yet. Last time I just bought Revlon. It’s OK.
If I put eyeliner on my bottom lid, I’ll use the gel and then smoke out and set the line using black or dark brown eyeshadow.
If I had to recommend three beauty products, I would say a Clarisonic face brush, Too Faced eyeshadow primer -- the Candlelit blends really nice, but the original lasts longer -- and dry shampoo.
Here is the link and a screencap from The Wayback Machine
here is what the old homepage looked like
RIP to 2015 culture NOTHING GOLD CAN STAYYYYYYYYYY