KB

In the intro to Funny Weather, you’re looking at Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas on paranoid versus reparative reading, and applying them to our contemporary moment. Do you identify as a reparative writer, or feel your writing is in the lineage of reparative reading?

OL

The whole of The Garden Against Time is, I think, an enacted reparative reading. It is very much taking that position. Critique, on the other hand, tends to exist within that paranoid category. Paranoid reading has definitely become the dominant mode of the internet. Over the past decade I've lost faith in critique as helpful for producing change, and become more interested in reparative readings and reparative work, including thinking about other people's reparative work. The problem with critique-based, paranoia-based readings is that they have this blind faith that “the revelation” will bring change. You see it in the Barbie film. What changes everything in Barbie is critique—it just says, "This is what patriarchy does,” and then patriarchy dissolves. At this point in history I think we can say, "Well, hang on a minute, none of these things have dissolved.” Critique is a tool for understanding, but it's not the end of the process. You have to then think about what comes next. And so this book really comes out of a much longer book-by-book project that's trying to think about what comes next, and how we produce it together.

KB

Right. I came of age on Twitter and Tumblr, and so much of that internet discourse was—and continues to be—stuck in that negative feedback loop of simply identifying what's wrong.

OL

It’s completely recursive. But critique can be productive when you disengage from the paranoia factory of social media. You gather the information and then you step out. When you stay inside that critique-based world, all you're doing is producing more revelations that promise to undo something, but never do undo it. And then it just moves to the next set of revelations that promise to undo, but also never do undo. So it's finding what comes next. I think we probably know enough about what's bad in the world at this point without any more added information, but we have very little information and very little sense of what it is we want to move towards. That was the strange gap that I identified, or became aware of, and started becoming fascinated by. We produce all of these dystopias, we produce all of these fantasies about how things could be worse, but we really don't spend very much time asking, what actual world do we want to inhabit? What kind of political systems, what kind of care networks, what kind of financial structures? This has become much more interesting to me—that is, broadly speaking, reparative work. Political as well as artistic.

KB

And critical theory has also held such a dominance on both art and writing in the past 50 years or so, which hasn’t really changed since.

OL

It's 50 years and we still treat it like it's this great new tool. I mean, it was old when I was at university in the 1990s and we're decades on from there, and we're still wielding this tool with this innocent hope that it's going to produce the thing that it was promised to produce, which is a changed world. And it isn't going to do that, because it's step one of a process that's much larger.

KB

Are you a hopeful or optimistic person?

OL

I don't think that I'm naïve about the state that we're in. I'm very aware of the climate crisis, the shift to the right, and all of the threats that we face, but I've been through many cycles with this. I was involved in environmental activism in the 1990s, and part of the reason I experienced such burnout was this sense of absolutely conclusive despair. You can't be productive or functional in that state of despair. It actually isn't useful. So it's almost that I see having hope or having joyfulness as a necessary component to the work; I think that finding ways to inculcate that in oneself and in other people, giving people that sense of hopefulness and pleasure in the work of change is necessary. Otherwise we exhaust ourselves. Otherwise we're vanquished by numbness, despair, apathy, nihilism, all of those things that are bred out of despair. So I am hopeful, but also I persist with my hopefulness because I think it's a necessary thing.

KB

You’ve lived entire lifetimes before becoming a professional writer in your late 20s. You went to college for a year, and at 19 you dropped out to become an environmental road protester. What was your thought process like during that time? What was driving you?

OL

I was always environmentally aware, but also I suppose I'd had an intense political education very early on. My mom was gay, and she was outed in our village when we were small children, so we had to move away. My sister and I really came of age amidst the dual-threat situation of the AIDS crisis and Section 28, which was the law in Britain that explicitly outlawed the homosexual family as a non-family. So that sense of already being skeptical or dissident was very much embedded in my family. We were going to Pride events in the '80s and '90s at the height of the AIDS crisis, when they were both very angry and very joyful. The sense of being deeply at home in that world stayed with me, and then in the mid '90s there was this incredibly energetic upsurge, not just with road protests, but around all kinds of activisms—Reclaim the Streets was happening then, which was a proto-climate movement that took over motorways and turned them into community spaces for a day. It felt like a lot of creativity was happening in that world. And I wanted to be in it. I was a daytripper to road protests and I wanted to be a full-time resident, so I dropped out of university and I lived on a couple of different road protests. It was an amazing life. I was living in a tree house. I was climbing to my bed each night and living in an outdoor community, which was great and exhausting and demanding, but also increasingly cheek-by-jowl with despair.

The two campaigns that I was most involved in were both successful, so those woodlands were saved. But there was the sense that no one in the general public believed in climate change at that point. You couldn't have conversations about climate change, we were such outliers. It's crazy to remember that the science hasn't really changed in the decades since, it's just that now people can't help but accept that it's happening. But at that point, it was the most woo-woo, out-there idea. That feeling of not being able to cut through, of being the butt of jokes, and that you couldn't get people to grasp the dangers that were coming—that was quite a horrifying experience.

I was involved in a group called the Natty Trust that was setting up community gardens on derelict spaces. I ended up living entirely on my own in this dwelling that I built myself for a winter. I began to experience a burnout, a kind of breakdown. Then I started training as a herbalist and gradually moved more and more into a conventional life, by very slow degrees over a decade. But all of those experiences were foundational. It had really joyful elements and it gave me a strong sense of what was important, how powerful direct action can be, but also how demanding direct action can be and how exhausting it can be to live in a different way to the conventional. I think that really grinds you down as well.

KB

How old were you then?

OL

I was 20. It was amazing. I went into the woods and cut poles from some hazel trees, and I built the structure and put the roof over it, which is just a tarpaulin. I had a window that I got from a dump and my bed and wood burner were in there, and that was my life. It was a really empowering experience, but also it was very frightening. I had an ax under my pillow, I was completely on my own there and it was really isolating. I remember years later my mother and I were watching Into the Wild; I was reminded of that sense of how “out there” you can go as a young person. And living in the woods on my own, I really descended into quite a strange life. I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad I came back from it.

KB

You’ve since described this time as trying to disappear into yourself, or disappear into nature. When you were conceiving of The Lonely City, did you think back to that time, which is a very different kind of solitude than what’s in the book?

OL

It’s almost the flipside, isn't it? The Lonely City is about this very urban proximity and hyper-exposure to other people's eyes, while that first version of solitude was in incredibly rural isolation where nobody's eyes are on you at all, and there's a sense that you're dissolving back into nothingness. That was a really extreme experience. I actually think it was almost too frightening to reflect on much later. There were ways in which it was good and there were ways in which I really enjoyed myself, but there was something about it that was punitive, in a way. And that's what I mean about that kind of despair—part of that despair was just losing faith in humans’ ability to do anything that was good.

This is such a theme that lurks around the climate movement, where everything we as humans do is bad and the best thing we could do would be to simply stop acting altogether. It’s very nihilistic, and one of the things that was so genuinely hope-inducing about working on The Garden was realizing the many ways in which gardening represents the best of people. There are other aspects to it as well, but in a certain respect, there are ways in which we can enact our desire for beauty on the earth and it can have really beneficial effects for the rest of the planet. And writing that book really met some deep need in me to show a way we can participate that's benign.

KB

I want to hear more about your relationship to gardening and also the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, because I know the two are somewhat inextricably linked for you. There’s this passage from Funny Weather, where you write that “Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity.” And then you ask, "Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time, it depends what you think a seed does if it's tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it's worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises." I especially love that last bit.

OL

I do stand by that. I think that there's truth in that. For some people, gardening is escapism or it's simply making a private beauty as a way of avoiding the world, like in that JG Ballard story “The Garden Of Time”, which was the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala. The story is about this version of a garden where the rich can hide away from the masses, and that's never been the kind of gardening that I'm interested in. But there is another kind of garden that can be shared: a garden that can introduce you to a larger-than-human world and a larger-than-capitalist sense of time and purpose. We are so in need of that.

KB

I was recently reading about blue zones, those five areas of the earth where people live the longest. And across all of those places, most everyone gardens as a daily practice, well into their late 90s.

OL

Oh my god, really?

KB

Yeah, which is so fascinating—it's obviously beneficial in that it's a dynamic, physical activity, but it can also be social as well contemplative, which helps to regulate your nervous system and so on, and that all contributes towards increasing longevity. I found that so wonderful.

OL

That is totally fascinating and adds to my long list of all the ways gardens benefit our lives. There’s something as well about it being a pursuit that's about beauty, but it's a different kind of beauty to acquisitive beauty. It's a beauty that's about tending or it's a beauty that's about attention and I think that's something that we're really in need of as well.

KB

And it’s also about relinquishing control to something bigger than yourself. In an interview you did for The Spectator, you were talking about how gardening forces you to release yourself to circumstance because it's beyond your control—it’s so dependent on the day’s weather or the season.

OL

With the work one does as an artist or a writer, you're in total, dominating control. The page isn't resisting me. I can do what I like. And there's something about transferring that to being in a space where you have all these visions and dreams and you want to lay down your structure, and then it pushes back.

There's a sense of collaboration with nature, and realizing that there's a series of wills or energies that have their own autonomy. Plants want to grow in a particular way. Birds and worms and the mole that's currently digging up my garden have their own agenda, and the ways all of those agendas knit together is what makes it so interesting, I don't want to rule over that domain. I want to participate in that domain.

KB

How has Jarman figured into this project specifically?

OL

It's funny, because I didn't initially plan on putting him in the book. I know it all comes from Derek—for me, he's right at the beginning of my interest in gardens. Modern Nature is something I read when I was a teenager, so he's the root of the project. I probably wouldn't have become a herbalist if it hadn't been for Derek Jarman and his incredibly attractive spell of medieval language, which lured me into the fantasy that that was what herbal medicine would be like. It wasn’t. [Laughs.] But when I was starting The Garden, I felt like I'd already written about him so extensively that there wasn't really any more to say.

The reason he ended up coming in is because there had been all kinds of things going on with my family during the pandemic. I started thinking about trauma and gardening, and why on a deeper emotional level people are drawn to gardening and what the enactment of it does, day after day. I was also rereading Jarman’s biography by Tony Peake, and I'd forgotten about how much there was about Jarman's education, which was in really brutalizing public boarding schools. For him, as a person who'd experienced not just homophobia, but real emotional deprivation, a real lack of love and tenderness, the garden comes to be—even more than filmmaking—the space where he receives the kind of love and plenitude that was withheld from him. It's absolute reparative work for Derek. You really feel in Modern Nature that he's being fed and nourished by this interactive work, which is unlike filmmaking where he's got to raise money and it's a constant battle full of failure. The work of the garden is much more like this dance where there is failure and there is loss, but there's playfulness and there's a richness to it that I think nourished him very deeply, even as he was dying. And you can feel that in the pages of his diaries.

KB

Did it feel like you were modeling yourself after Jarman, how he healed this trauma through the space and practice of the garden?

OL

I'm not even sure that healed is the right word, because I don't think it ever gets fixed. It's more like gardening offers a way to live with yourself. It doesn’t change the narrative. It's more like it's a practice. There’s no end to gardening; you don't go through it and then you come out a different person. It's the dailiness of it, that offers a way of living. You come to the garden with whatever mood or whatever incident has happened and as you work, it works through you and you come out somewhere else. And I think that kind of processed-based relationship is really interesting and maybe therapeutic rather than healing or coming to a full solution.

KB

And it's something that is constantly rooted in the present.

OL

Yes, firmly planted. Everyday it's different. You come into the garden with whatever baggage you've brought to it, but you are confronted by the bounty of the present and it's always changing. So there's always something to be seduced by and caught up in, and it moves you from where you were to a new place. I'm sure to people who don't garden, the idea that a garden is an exciting place where things happen must seem very strange, but to the gardener it's a place of constant thrills and strangenesses.

KB

How did this change your thinking on theories about utopia?

OL

That utopia is very much not a fixed place. My idea of utopia is a place where it's constantly in production. It requires work, it requires attention, it requires listening, and it requires compromise. I think the garden makes this really beautiful model of what a utopia can be, because it's not a fixed paradise. It’s not this permanent state of static perfection. It's evolving, and it requires participation. That’s what utopia is.

KB

I feel like this relates to your novel, Crudo—how you approached that project was so different from all of your other books. There are similar questions around time, permanence, and relinquishing control to process. I’m curious how you landed upon that experimental form of allowing yourself to not edit anything, and having to write consistently, every day. You wrote it in seven weeks. What was that like?

OL

I think time is central to that project. It came out of a state of despair while I was trying to write Everybody. Brexit was happening, Trump had been elected. It felt like a time of mounting horrors. And with writing nonfiction, it requires a stable platform, where you have to believe in objective reality and truth. For a year or two, it felt like truth and reality were pretty much teetering in the wind. I didn't feel I could stand there, in that grotesque moment, and start to make these grand statements about freedom or rely on these liberal concepts that felt as if they'd just been fatally wounded.

I was in Italy that summer, in 2017. I was reading Chris Kraus’ biography After Kathy Acker, and it has this great description of Kathy Acker deliberately plagiarizing other writers, just lifting texts and putting in the first person, revivifying Don Quixote or Toulouse Lautrec or whoever in this strange piratical way. And I was like, "What if I just did exactly that? What if I just reported on the summer of 2017 in Kathy Acker's voice, as if I was just plagiarizing the summer of 2017?" As soon as I started writing it I realized that it was a voice that could speak into this moment, that it provided a way to communicate what that strange, chaotic year felt like. The Acker voice was fluid. It could switch back and forth between emotion and logic. There was a lot of range inside it.

At that point, I was still on Twitter. I was still living inside the internet world and the internet voice. And the Kathy Acker voice could completely take that in. It was unafraid of a world where the President of America was governing via repulsive tweets. But in terms of time, Crudo was also trying to capture that very internet-based feeling of an exploding present, where you're just constantly being faced by this unbroken, terrifying wave of new information that you have to respond to, but by the time you've responded there's new information. You're caught in this situation of constant eruptions of the present, some of them are very serious and some of them are very trivial, and there’s a switchbacking, sea-sick feeling to that. So what I was trying to do was find a form that could encompass that feeling. Then, once I found a form that I felt could encompass it, I left Twitter because I couldn't bear that onslaught for another minute.

It felt incredibly liberating and exciting to do. Something would happen on the news, and I could immediately write it down. It was certainly not digesting the information, because I don't think it's a book that really digests. I was just capturing it. It was like a fly in amber.

KB

Were you writing during your time as an activist or herbalist? Did you keep journals? Do you?

OL

I did. I'm looking at the box right now, actually—there’s about 25 diaries in there. They are so fucking boring! I don't think I was happy at all. They're very self-involved and miserable and therapy-based, navel-gazing. I was never writing down the stuff that was actually interesting, which is the minutiae of life, the clothes people were wearing or what we were eating, the ins and outs of people's relationships to each other. Now, if I teach writing students, I say, "You need to write down what the carpets look like in the room because you think you'll remember. But when you come to write up the scene, you'll remember the emotional stuff. But the carpets, the dynamics, the locating details. Those are important" These diaries have no locating detail whatsoever.

KB

With herbalism, did you have any background in that realm growing up? What led you to pursue that after leaving the road protests?

OL

Really it was very much to do with Derek Jarman. Modern Nature makes a very good case for the beauty of medieval herbals, and I got very interested. Actually, that is the thing that those old diaries are full of—loads and loads of plant lore and little watercolor drawings of plants. I was obsessed. It was surprising to go back and realize how interested I was in it. The clinical training was five years. Then I practiced for three or four more years. That’s almost a decade of my life that was dedicated to plants and bodies. And now, many years on, I'm still writing about plants and bodies. It's interesting. Those interests really do have long roots in my life.

KB

In an interview you did with Elizabeth Day on “How to Fail,” you said "I completely fucked up my 20s." Does this still stand true for you now?

OL

I think saying that pleased a lot of people in their 20s. [Laughs.] She told me once that every time men went on that podcast she'd ask "How have you failed?" And they'd be like, " I never have. Oh, but there was that time I lost a tennis match in 1985.” And then I was on it saying, "I failed at everything." I had a very ethically engaged 20s. But because I dropped out of school and society so conclusively, it was very hard to get back in again, which was especially clear in my late 20s when I was working as a herbalist. I knew probably halfway through my training that it wasn't really what I wanted to do long-term, but I wanted to finish because I didn’t want to drop out again.

When I was practicing, I felt like I'd made a wrong step and I didn't know how to get back on a better road. It was very difficult. Then I did a journalism training course and I had to do work experience, essentially an unpaid internship. That opened up this awesome stroke of luck. I went on to do work experience at The Observer. Their deputy literary editor got offered another job and there was this gap and I was there, so I got the position. Becoming the deputy literary editor leapfrogged me into almost exactly the same life that I would have had if I'd gone down a conventional route.

It was a total dream job, and it was a brilliant training ground. I talk about this with friends who are writers—those of us who came through journalism first, rather than, say, creative writing courses. Journalism grounds you in hitting your deadlines, hitting your word count, keeping your writing tight. You become very canny because you don't want your writing to be cut, so you make sure every line is working and doing double-duty.

Being at The Observer gave me a doorway into a literary world that I'd very much wanted to be in. But once I was there, I’d had totally different experiences from everybody else. Most people had come through very conventional pathways. They were Oxbridge-educated and I had done everything differently. There was a difficult period of feeling like I needed to conceal that. And once I came out the other side of it and started writing books, I realized these experiences gave me a really different perspective. The strangeness of my life gave me a completely different platform to write from.

KB

During this transitional period into journalism, did you feel like a writer? Did you feel an urge, or calling, to write?

OL

Yes, I definitely wanted to write very badly. I don't think I described myself as a writer though until I'd written about three books. I would say I was a journalist because identifying as a writer always sounded slightly like saying “I'm a fantasist.” It always seemed like I was saying, I'd like to be a writer, like a fake thing to be. I don't think that now because obviously it is definitely what I'm doing. I knew by my late 20s that being a writer was what I wanted to do, but that I had strayed far from the path where it was possible, and the path back was laborious and often very humiliating. Doing work experiences a decade older than the other people doing work experience was pretty mortifying, sitting and opening people's mail, carrying coffee into meetings that you're not allowed to speak in.

KB

As someone who has also entered into writing in a somewhat nontraditional route—I didn’t study literature, and started freelancing on the side while I was a student living in New York—I’m curious if you think writing can be taught, in a purely academic sense. In the US, so many young writers are pressured and expected to enter into the MFA system, and be legitimized through this structure to be taken seriously.

OL

Well, I think we're the lucky ones, really. Reading and having a good ear are the most important things, and then the other most important thing is life experience and the capacity to observe, the capacity to understand how situations and power structures work. You only get that by being in lots and lots of different worlds. I don't see what the benefit of creative writing MFAs are, apart from an almost homogenizing effect of producing a specific kind of sentence that's fashionable in a specific kind of writing program. So many people go from doing them to teaching them, and I think that's very concerning as well. They're not as dominating a force in the UK as they are in America. I don't think I have any American writer friends who haven't done one. But I'm very skeptical about them. I certainly think that the most useful things I've learned have been outside of that, but definitely what I learned as a journalist has stayed with me even when I'm not writing journalism. You just have to hit your deadlines—that’s the most useful skill for a writer, the capacity to write when you don't feel like writing because you have to hand something in at the end of the day.

KB

That directness is really apparent in your writing, especially in Funny Weather, with these condensed but very powerful artist biographies.

OL

Every sentence should count, every word in every sentence should count. If it's a 3,000 word commission, what can you do with those 3,000 words? I find the sense of confinement absolutely thrilling. What can I do with 60 words? What can I do with 4,000 words? That, to me, is part of the excitement in the same way that I'm talking about the pushback that you get from the garden, the pushback that you get from the constraint of a word count and then the excitement of how much you can manage to pack inside. That is the joy of writing.

KB

Is that what’s led you to continuously return to the biography structure as a form?

OL

I'm interested in investigating large subjects—addiction, loneliness, embodiment, creativity, struggle—but I don't want to be limited by my own experience. I want to be able to get around them from multiple angles, and I want to keep them grounded in the personal. I want to be able to utilize theory to think about the political and then to ground it in personal lives, to show how these things are lived out. So that's why I've needed to have these casts of characters.

With the subject of loneliness in The Lonely City, there was my personal story and I could have written a really boring memoir about me in New York. My struggle. But so much would’ve been left out, because I also wanted to think about how stigma and loneliness interact. So I needed David Wojnarowicz. I wanted to think about the extreme kinds of loneliness, so I needed Henry Darger. I wanted to talk about loneliness among people who are ultra-social, so I needed Warhol. I needed these people in order to map the territory. But also to embody that territory and to give you stories that make you, the reader, really grasp how something theoretical plays out in a life.

KB

I'm thinking particularly about your artist “love letters” in Funny Weather, but I feel like the tenor of much of your writing is akin to iterations of love letters. When you were reflecting on Wolfgang Tillmans’ work, you said he “bothers to see beauty, making beauty freely available…showing that beauty is unstable, coming and going, requiring effort. I mean political in the sense of how you choose to be in the world, what you are willing to look at, what keeps you alive.”  Do you also understand your work as a series of love letters, maybe to yourself, to these artists, to the world?

OL

Yeah, I think so. Everybody is a very austere, astringent, harsh book. There isn't really a character in it that's as soft as the most beloved characters of The Lonely City, or someone like Derek Jarman. It was much more about trying to make something that was as clear as possible, and that swept away a lot of lyricism and maybe tenderness. Those are the conditions it arose out of, that's the political climate we were in at the time that I was writing it. But love is a major motivating force in my work, in the same way that love was a major motivating force in my activism as a person in my 20s. It wasn't out of fury or despair; it was out of intense love for the world and the particular places that were imperiled. There’s that same sense of finding things beautiful or moving and wanting to convey that, wanting to capture that in language and pass it on and share that sense of beauty.

KB

I wonder too, if you feel that writing is an act of empathy?

OL

Absolutely, 100%. It doesn't make sense if it isn't. Writing is a way of closing the gap; it's a way of drawing you close to other people, including people that aren't alive anymore. I think writing at its best is a way of, not evacuating or losing yourself, but moving from yourself into somebody else's life, as close as you can come. And not just perceiving them objectively, whatever that means, but trying to understand what their world was from their own experience of it. That’s what I wanted to do with the artist's essays in Funny Weather. I wasn't interested in asking, "Is Hockney good or is Hockney bad?" I wanted to understand: “What is the problem that Hockney's solving with his work, what is he trying to convey with these works, how do these works fit into the arc of his life?” That remains a really intense preoccupation for me. These kinds of questions occur in all of my books.

KB

There’s a quote you included from Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, where he's talking about a cruising encounter he had at the Chelsea Piers. He says, "I saw him freeing me from the silences of interior life." I’m thinking about the mechanisms of The Lonely City, and what that was doing for you. Did writing that book, that entire experience, free you from fear of  vulnerability and your feelings of listlessness? Did that help free you from the silences of your interior life?

OL

I think that's really insightful. That quote is at the center of that book, actually, which is a book so much about silence and becoming trapped inside your own experience and not being able to make contact. The Lonely City is absolutely a reparative act because everything I discovered about those other people really took away, if not my own loneliness, the sense of shame that I was feeling. Because there were so many reasons that those people were lonely. There were so many components to their loneliness, and it was so evidently political and so evidently touching. There’s so much beauty in people's vulnerability. Alice Neel’s portrait of Andy Warhol really epitomizes that: the sense of total tenderness of somebody's longing for more than what they have. I remember doing an interview with an American radio station. The host was like, "Oh, it seems like you solved your loneliness by becoming friends with a load of dead guys." Chortle, chortle. [Laughs.] And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds hilarious. But actually, that's exactly what I did. And it worked. So screw you."

KB

How do you understand loneliness now?

OL

I still have this militant sense that it's okay to be lonely. I'm constantly seeing stuff about campaigns against loneliness and how to end loneliness. I think they're really well-intentioned but there's something slightly misguided about the constant stigmatization of loneliness as a state that you shouldn't be in. And shame is the most painful component of loneliness. There's something very unhelpful about it, endlessly talking about loneliness as a problem. We're all going to be lonely at some point in our lives and there's definitely things to do to alleviate people's unwanted isolation. But I think untethering that from the state of loneliness, and accepting that at some point loss and grief and longing are going to be our companions, and finding ways to be in a relationship with them, is crucial.

I remain really interested in loneliness and I'm aware that it's been almost a decade since that book came out. I've had years and years of doing book signings, where often really young people are coming up in tears saying, "I felt so ashamed." They’re not saying, "The isolation was unbearable," and I think that's the reason that that book sold so widely across the world. It says that the feelings you currently have are okay. I'm really glad I wrote that book. I sense I will always feel immense tenderness to all of those readers who continue to come, because it's like this island that almost everyone spends time on, and to be able to stop and say "There are some really beautiful things on this painful island”: I think that was worth doing.

KB

It’s interesting—going back to what we were talking about with gardening earlier, with this approach of acceptance. These feelings of shame or loneliness or isolation are seen as negatives, things that we want to cast out, but they're inevitable parts of being alive. In the same way that happiness and joy and thrilling experiences are equally a part of life, its acceptance of rooting oneself in the present and being receiving to that the ebb and flow, negative and positive, which all make being a person a little easier. I’m reminded of that Heraclitus adage: “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” This seems to be a recurring theme, or question, for you.

OL

The idea that emotional weather moves through us all the time, and the weather is not who we are—that remains really interesting to me, to witness it, but also to dislodge some of the narratives around good and bad feelings or toxic feelings. To allow feelings to be as they are,  and to be curious about difficult states is really fundamental to my work. There are elements about all states that are interesting, and I’m drawn to writing from those difficult places.

KB

In reflecting on the way time functions in your work, you once said "I find myself longing for deep time or cyclical time, and perhaps that's nostalgic about a kind of past that is gone." Is “deep time" what you're writing towards, or what you are creating?

OL

That was really one of the motivations for writing The Garden. To think about that kind of time, and to discover those other relationships with time. But all of my books arise out of a question that remains unanswered at the end of the last one. Crudo left questions about time, and Funny Weather certainly left questions about what reparative art would look like and what reparative thinking and action would look like. So both of those things fed into the desire to write The Garden.

KB

In lieu of identifying your writing as autofiction, you’ve described your writing—Crudo, specifically—as “biofiction.” Can you say more about this?

OL

Crudo certainly wasn't autofiction. I mean, yes, it was a splicing of auto- and biofiction, and the sense of using other people's lives as ways to get closer to reality, yes, that clearly is a constant in my work. While I supposedly wrote a novel, it was still very tethered to biography, even though the biographical elements about Kathy Acker are quite playful and are often spliced between her and me. This also comes back to what we were saying earlier about the anchoring or tethering detail. If you want to explore things that are conceptual, theoretical, political, or about larger philosophical questions, I don't think it works as a piece of writing unless it's anchored in the specific. By using biography, I have these bodily experiences that I can tether ideas to.

I think that makes it work much better for the reader. For example, in the experience of reading Everybody, the reader is going through these really difficult journeys about rape and sexual violence and what the meaning of freedom is. It really helps if that's grounded in people's actual lives and people's actual experiences, with locating detail. This situates it, but also makes it specific so that the thinking gets harder edges. I want to embody thought as much as I can, I want to ground it in my body and ground it in other people's bodily experience.

KB

In what ways does art shape your life now? Both within the context of writing, as well as outside of it—or are those inseparable?

OL

It remains central, but in some ways it's like saying to a mechanic, "How do cars shape your life?" Because it is my work—I still write about art, all my friends are artists. So it's both a force that I can speak about in abstract terms, but also the reality in which I exist. Which in some ways makes it almost impossible to talk about. If you'd asked me as a young person, art would've been this outside thing that I felt great desire to know about or participate in or understand. And now it feels more like the garden, the space in which I work. The thing I find most interesting about art now is its capacity for one to think through it or alongside it. The way in which art not only provides emotional succor, but also induces  productive thinking. The way it can operate as a counter to the dominating late capitalist, internet ways in which we're constantly being invited to think. That’s why it remains so exciting to me, that's why a painting or a film remains so thrilling. It represents a discrete universe that I can imaginatively enter, and in which a different kind of thought is possible.

KB

And how would you describe your writing practice, your creative life? Has your relationship to it over the course of your career changed? How so?

OL

There are two sides of it. There's the reality of production. There’s the very material, quotidian, ordinariness of making something each day. Lots of it is boring, a lot of logistics and admin. Then there’s this other side of it that’s like an infinite horizon of ideas. Both of these aspects actually really interest me.

And so when I write about artists, I want both to be present. I want that sense of what the concrete reality of art-making looks like. When I was reading the Cindy Carr biography of David Wojnarowicz, she pointed out how unusual it is in biographies for people to say how much money an artist has in their bank account. And she keeps giving that information, because Wojnarowicz was so particularly poor. I’m similarly interested in those nitty-gritty questions. I want to ask: what did this person eat? What was in their fridge? How did they organize their day? Those things to me seem really relevant. I don't like the division between art and life. I'm interested in the constant traffic back and forth. It feels to me like that's where the exciting stuff happens.

If you just write in the transcendent, I mean, you're screwed. That writing is just airy and hopeless, it has to land with a bang back in the very practical. But if you're just stuck in the practical, then that becomes relentless in its own way. So as a writer, it's working out the shifts back and forth to allow you to really find insight, not just leave it floating in a golden cloud. It has to come back to earth.

KB

As the reader, I really enjoy following this constant thread of discursive conversation in your work. You'll touch on an idea in one book that then becomes the entire thematic basis for another, like that essay on Jarman creating paradise in his home garden that would extend beyond his lifetime—which you then explore very fully, among other things, in The Garden. Do you understand your artistic world as a kind of conversation?

OL

Once I start writing a book, it's a year or two of archival research and then there's a period of very intense writing. And then when I sense that I’ve come to the end of a book, I tend to realize that something hasn't been answered by it. There's a stray line that's opened up a huge question that I couldn't possibly settle within that book, so I have to move on to the next one. That process is exciting. As I was finishing The Garden Against Time, it started to become clear that it was the conclusion of a trilogy, a kind of 21st century Divine Comedy. The Lonely City explores the purgatory of urban alienation and longing, Everybody descends into the inferno of bodily experience and especially bodily violence, and The Garden looks at paradise and its possibilities, but also its hidden inequities and exclusions. That’s quite a big project. So now I have a sense that I have come to the end of quite a long period of work, almost a decade of work. What does that mean for what happens next? I don't want to rush into the next project.

KB

In talking with writers, I'm always interested in hearing what they're trying to solve, what questions they obsessively return to. In the past, you’ve talked about this idea of using writing to “understand forces,” which I find to be really intriguing. Can you say more about this?

OL

I have an obsession with discovering ideas, radical ideas and possibilities that might have been lost or discarded along the way. For my generation, it’s  impossible to underestimate the effect of the AIDS crisis in the sense that so many of that generation were not just cut off in their prime, but also their archives and work were destroyed. That sense of passing on didn't happen. And I'm not at all alone in that sense of constantly feeling compelled to go back and turn those lives over again and see what I've missed in terms of a sense of how to live, how to survive. That’s one of my ongoing compulsions. And also looking at damage and repair, that is an ongoing theme of my work. A situation of damage and how to then repair it, make sense of it, confront it, move on from it, challenge it. That is certainly an ongoing preoccupation—with different inciting questions and in different styles and modes—which I'm constantly compelled to return to.

It's a strange life, to want to produce these very orderly structures that are books, to produce something that, aside from its content in terms of ideas, is an architectural structure that is very much designed and shaped. And then to do it again and again. The actual structuring and building part of it really fascinates me in ways I don't totally understand. A witness or observer might have a better sense of it than the person who is inside that compulsion. I think what motivates you or what you constantly return to is often invisible or inchoate in some way. It’s all quite a mysterious process. When I read writers who I really love, I can see preoccupations and I can see them returning to things that I'm sure they forgot they'd ever written about before. I’m sure they weren't aware of how revealing some things are. Not the conscious scenes of revelation, but deeper preoccupations. And that's as it should be. I don't think the writer should be too consciously aware of everything that's motivating them, and everything that they desire to solve by way of a book, because that's part of its secret mechanism and its secret power.