Edy Poppy Talks Sex, Love, and Boredom with Siri Hustvedt

EP: The simple fact that I was writing about myself—as does the character Vår, she also writes about herself—makes us become both acting and observing beings in our own lives. The writing gives me courage, it makes me braver, because I can always write about whatever I experience afterwards. When I created my alter ego Vår, I gave her the same courage, also being the result of the fact that she can write about her experiences. A big part of Anatomy. Monotony. is about the struggle of trying to write an autofiction-novel, to use your terms, but it’s also a lot about a married couple living in an open relationship, experimenting with love, just like I did with my French ex-husband.

I was often pathetic and jealous and I didn’t really see myself clearly. But through my writing I could analyze my situation and somehow write my fictional alter ego out of it. Or get her deeper into trouble. Depending on what the text needed. I would say that writing makes me smarter, even though I don’t want to be a clever writer. I’m smarter afterwards, not before or while I’m writing.

SH: I think this brings us naturally to the role of humor and irony in the text, dry but omnipresent. Because this is not a text—how shall I put it—because this is not a naked text. A naked text—we’ve all read them—well, maybe in Norway they haven’t read as many, but a naked text has no irony. It is a confession from the guts. There are parts of Knausgaard’s huge novel that are naked. But your book is always moving into forms of irony about the narrator.

EP: I actually never attempted to make a funny book. But whenever I read in Anatomy. Monotony., I always laugh. I think I laugh because the narrator is putting herself in weird, unpleasant situations in order to research love and grow as a person. Situations that are often in her disfavor. It’s a form of self-sabotaging that has to do with irony. Another thing is the directness of the narrator’s voice, her way of observing…Vår has a quirky way of looking at the world, obsessing about certain details… So, to my great surprise and happiness, I think my novel has a lot of humor.

SH: It does. Well, it’s not that I was rolling on the floor, but rather that I was continually smiling. And it may be that as an aging person, I recognize in this book the experimentations of youth, that sense of living out ideas. I was fascinated by the text Lou, the husband, keeps reading, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is, of course, Nietzsche’s—I’m putting this in quotes—“comedy.” I wondered if that was a running subtext for the whole novel.

EP: There is this level that the characters are taking everything very seriously. The husband, Lou, for instance, is using Thus Spake Zarathustra almost like a bible. And that in itself is…

SH: …funny.

EP: Exactly. It’s very interesting how people are reacting so differently to Anatomy. Monotony. I’m very happy you seem to have gotten this very positive energy and humor from it. Because that’s how I perceived it and that’s also mostly how I lived it. But some people think it’s very dark and wonder why these characters want to hurt each other so much. For me, more than wanting to hurt each other, they are just trying out things. Maybe they are a bit naïve, and maybe that also adds to the humor… But for me, this is a book that wants life. I think it’s also a relationship that wants love.

SH: As perhaps my parting remark, I would like to say that I truly admired the ending. For those of you who haven’t yet read the book, it turns out that very close to the end of the novel, Vår discovers that her husband has also been writing a book, a book she knows nothing about. She’s the writer. She’s been writing hard the whole time, and she asks him, So where are you in this book that I didn’t know about? And he says, It’s finished. And that’s the end. It’s so witty, but it’s also profound. It’s wonderful.