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

“Edy Poppy’s Anatomy, Monotony. is a devilish hybrid. Part autofiction, part literary, cinematic, and musical dance of allusions, and part chronicle of the mute body’s aches and pains and lusts and needs, the novel deftly hits its notes, high and low, to create a symphonic work of tragicomedy.”

–Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt: Before we begin, I want to say as your interviewer that I truly admire this novel, your debut. My first question is about your title: Anatomy. Monotony. It clearly resonates with Robert Burton’s 17th-century tome: The Anatomy of Melancholy, that vast compendium of just about everything. It’s a book I am deeply fond of. Monotony is not melancholy but a form of dull repetitiousness. At the same time the “anatomy” of the title seems to refer both to the living body and to a mode of dissecting and articulating it in a literary form. How did you come upon it?

Edy Poppy: I didn’t know about Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy until after I had published Anatomy. Monotony. But when I discovered it, I related very closely to it; like a long lost twin. What did inspire me for my title, though, was a rejection letter from one of Norway’s leading publishing houses.

I had sent them an early version of the novel, then called: Speculations About What Once Was, But That I Can Now Only Remember. In return I got a big analysis of my work and a refusal. One criticism was regarding the marriage of my main protagonists, a Norwegian wannabe writer called Vår and her French husband and mentor Lou. It was that the couple’s constant love experimentation was resulting in an unexpected form of monotony. Of repetition. And even though it was meant negatively, I thought, well, that’s very interesting; I want to explore that more, not less! I understood many things about my writing through this rejection.

I decided to take the critique into my title—and into the whole text. I underlined the word monotony in the letter, added a capital M, and I was on my way to a new path. The other half of the title, the anatomy part, came from all the levels of anatomy you can find in my novel. The most direct level is that the narrator Vår, apart from trying to write her first novel, is working as a life model for painters. Through their professional gaze on her naked body, her anatomy becomes only forms, measurements, numbers. She almost ceases to be human. She is an object to study, not an obscure object of desire… In other parts of the novel though, the anatomy of sexuality is very present. Then there is the anatomy of a relationship, of love. And the anatomy of writing. But more than anything, I felt the word Anatomy and the word Monotony were attracted to one another, like magnets. They found one another, just as much as I found them.

SH: I am interested in all the embodied aspects of your book: blisters, pee, art modeling, but also the emotional states of the narrator’s body.

EP: It’s a text where the physical is very important. I have always liked to study the body. I wish I could be a child again and stare at people without inhibition. I find them so interesting. But since I can’t do that, I study myself a lot. Like many painters end up doing. Vår’s blisters are a red thread throughout the novel. She is often wearing her mother’s yellow high-heeled shoes, and they don’t really fit. Still, she cannot stop wearing them. It’s very concrete, and at the same time a metaphor. The neurotic peeing has some of the same effect. I am attracted to what you call the emotional states of the body. Its ways of giving us signs on the outside for what is happening inside. That’s maybe more the norm in visual art forms like cinema. But I like to adapt that strategy into my writing. I love getting that close to my characters, emotionally but also physically. To smell them, share my ache with them, to recognize secret things about myself in them.

SH: At one point in the novel, your narrator claims that she has become more “masculine” in her relation to her sexual desire. I am interested in how you conceive masculinity and femininity within the terms of the novel.

EP: Growing up in Norway in the mid 70s, I didn’t have any clear ideas about gender until I moved to the south of France at the age of 17. Suddenly I discovered that I was a woman, feminine. Or rather, other people made me aware of it: they defined me through more or less standardized forms. If I planned to go home to Norway on holiday, for example and my ex-husband remained in France, other women asked me worriedly how I dared leave him alone… This gave meaning to my action: that I was not afraid that he would betray me. No one asked him how he dared let me travel alone. (This was before our open marriage).

I remember feeling very annoyed because of this masculine focus. I was equally worried of what I might do… But no one else seemed to be. Had I moved to the 1950s instead of the south of France? Even the French language wanted to categorize me, giving me feminine endings to use about myself when I spoke. Of course all languages I know are gendered in one way or another, but the French language, like Latin languages in general, is gendered in so many more ways than I was used to. I rebelled against this. Refused to speak like a woman. Cut my hair short and tried to develop a sort of androgynous persona. I became interested in the feminine in the masculine and the masculine in the feminine.

My artist name Edy Poppy is a result of this experimentation. The name Edy is close to the masculine Eddy. But the missing d makes it almost ungendered. Vår is also attracted to the androgynous. She wants to be a tomboy, boy-girl, la garçonne. For instance: she likes to dress up as a man when she meets random lovers. But it’s no random men’s clothing. It’s her husband’s clothes. And they make her feel safe. So at the same time as I make Vår brave, experimental, “masculine,” meeting lovers, I also make her soft, vulnerable, “feminine,” seeking some kind of protection from her husband. Categories are very hard to escape. But I think, it’s important to try. And Vår tries a lot.

In my dream world no qualities would be masculine or feminine, they would just be qualities. In the beginning of the novel Lou is the stronger part, the one who comes up with a game for them to play. Vår is a good player, but she is playing his game. This changes throughout the novel, though. Vår gets more and more power. (A word I wish I would not associate with masculinity.) By the end of Anatomy. Monotony. there is this scene, which I think is the one you are referring to, where Vår and her husband Lou are having a conversation whilst they’re having sex:

“I’ve noticed something terrible,” I suddenly say.

“What, darling?”

“ Egotism, Lou, egotism . . .”

“What do you mean, Vår?”

“Orgasm, Lou, orgasm.”

“I don’t understand . . .”

“Me neither, but now I see it so clearly.”

“What?”

We change position. Lou prefers that I’m on top.

“I’ve become more and more masculine. Have you noticed?” I ask.

“Masculine?”

“Yes, I’m no longer satisfied unless I come. Like a man who hasn’t had an orgasm, I’m first and foremost seeking my own pleasure. Now and then I forget my partner, just like you.”

SH: I think of Anatomy. Monotony. as a kind of Bildungsroman. When I wrote my first novel, The Blindfold, I thought of it as a female sentimental education. Your novel strikes me as another version of this venerable genre. Were you thinking of your heroine’s emotional growth or change or folly as part of the book’s movement?

EP: I started writing this novel in my early twenties and only finished it when I reached thirty. Maybe it took me so long to finish Anatomy. Monotony. because this movement, this growth, this folly that you talk about, well, it had to happen to me first, before it could happen to my heroine. A big part of writing this book, was not writing this book, but leaving it alone in a drawer or a folder in my computer, giving my life, the unwritten story, time to happen, to mature, so that I could fulfill the written one.

There is definitely something Bildungsromanish about Anatomy.Monotony. It has the classic [shape]: home, away, home. Though the last home in my story is not the end of Vår’s life. She’s only in the middle of it. I’m pretty sure she will go away again …

In many ways I think of Anatomy. Monotony. as a sister book to The Blindfold. My alter ego Vår (it means spring, and I am born in spring) and your alter ego Iris (Siri) could almost be the same character, only written by two different women. I remember reading your debut novel in the early 90s and relating to it very much. Inspired too! And even though I didn’t think about it when I wrote my own in the late 90s, I’m sure my subconscious did.

SH: I discovered on the Internet that your narrator’s assertion about truth-telling seems to be accurate, that the fire described in the novel actually took place at your family house, for example.

EP: I loved that house, I wanted to spend my whole life there. So, for my growth, for my personal real-life-bildungsroman, it was maybe good that it burned down. My father, like the father in my novel, took pictures during the fire and later placed them in our photo album next to pictures of my upcoming eighth birthday. I looked at that album throughout my youth. It was such a strong symbol. Seeing the fire did something to me, I would almost say something poetic. Whereas my parents worried about electrical failures afterwards, I worried about literature; since my material world had collapsed with the disappearance of my childhood home, I started to look inwards, looking for words that could describe what had happened to me. I took the burning very personally. I made my house into a story, something immaterial. So it could stay with me forever on a mental place. Now it also exists in Anatomy. Monotony.  In retrospect I think the fire was the starting point for me being a writer.

SH: My next question is about the novel’s coy P.S: “Everything I’ve written is true apart from what I’ve invented.” It reminds me of something Samuel Beckett said about his work: “No symbols where none intended.” I find that very funny. I have been interested for some time in the idea of autofiction. Because you lived in France, I suspect that you are also familiar with the term. To what degree do you think of this novel as a work of autofiction? You are playing with the idea of truth and fiction throughout the text, so I’m curious to know how you think about it.

EP: If you mean how I think about Anatomy. Monotony. in the sense of truth, I can tell you that I had a sort of awakening at some point. I was writing a diary, it was the diary to become my novel. But as I was rereading it, I discovered that my diary was not telling the truth. I didn’t recognize my life in the text I had written, even if it was a diary about myself. I realized that the factual truth could miss the point of the emotional truth. I discovered that sometimes I had to lie in order to get closer to reality. I had to invent.

Everything in Anatomy. Monotony. is emotionally one hundred percent true, some things are also one hundred percent factually true. It’s a mix, like I say in my P.S. And this mixing, this rearrangement of life, of events, of impressions and experiences, that’s how I create my literature. In life you meet so many people and you have so many experiences, if you would write about all of them it would be too messy to read. You have to simplify literature in order for it to be perceived as complex.

SH: I totally agree. I’ve actually written about what I call “emotional truth” in fiction. In a couple of scholarly papers I’ve published, I attack the idea put forward by some Anglo-American analytical philosophers that when people read novels and are moved by them, they are experiencing “quasi-emotions” because it is clearly irrational to respond to a fictional character with genuine feeling. This debate began with an essay called, “How Can We Be Moved By Anna Karenina?” I think quasi-emotions are hogwash. The text may be a fiction, but the emotions a reader experiences are always real.

EP: That resonates with me! To find my emotional truth I mostly start with something rooted in reality. It could be a memory, something I’ve just experienced, places I’ve been, people I’ve met, friends, my French ex-husband, or it could just be my birth name, Ragnhild, which I use in my novel. I realized that when I add these biographical elements to the text something exciting happens to my writing, something that wouldn’t happen if I just wrote about imaginary people or a random place I’d researched on the Internet. In order to write my kind of fiction, I need to know what I’m writing about, to have been there, physically or emotionally. I have to know the places. The rain. The wind. The dirt in the streets. The smells of rotten meat, tainted love, unsatisfactory sex… or the appearance of my boyfriend giving me an orgasm… So even if I often have to go through some lying to get to the truth, I also have to go through some truth in order to lie, in order to imagine.

SH: There is a long tradition in philosophy that connects memory and imagination. For Vico, the two were one and the same faculty. There’s neuroscientific evidence for this, actually. People who have injuries to their hippocampus, a part of the brain that has been linked to memory, not only have impaired memories, they imagine badly. Ancient artificial memory systems were all about walking through the rooms of a house. Like you, I cannot write a work of fiction without having a place securely in mind. My places are almost always real. What happens in them is very often fictive, but I think we are having a conversation about the role of memory in literary art.

EP: It’s fascinating how memory works. When I wrote Anatomy. Monotony., I discovered that I, for instance could write very well about Bø, my quiet, rural birthplace in the county of Telemark, Norway when I was in wild, overcrowded, loud London. It was like an image. I looked at the negative and through it the positive appeared. Far away I saw the forms, the big lines. The big lies, also. I remembered better. It was a good perspective to write my novel from. The actual distance created the emotional distance I needed for my story to evolve.

In Bø, I could also write very well about London, another main location in my novel, and a place where I lived for seven years. So it worked both ways. But other times I needed to be in Bø for real while I was writing about it in order to remember it. Even if what I was writing about only happened in my head. I needed the small picture. I needed something very concrete to look at in order to imagine what I couldn’t see.

SH: I’m interested in the novel inside the novel, not as a mirror of experience but as a form of retelling.

EP: The novel within the novel is written by Vår. She writes about her life, so everyone in Anatomy. Monotony, gets a second, “literary” name. Vår herself becomes Ragnhild, my original name. I wanted to explore how one transforms reality into fiction, or if you want, autofiction. The novel within the novel begins in Ragnhild’s childhood in Bø. Whereas my novel starts in the middle of Vår and Lou’s open relationship in London. Slowly but surely the story in Vår’s novel from the past moves closer towards Vår’s actual present in my invented novel, until the reader no longer knows what happens “for real” and what happens “in fiction.”

SH: I would like to ask you about some of the references in the book to other books and films and how they function in the text and how ideas about and images of fictive lives influence the way we live our lives. They may create a distance from the self that can turn living into a game. I actually made a list of some of the references because I thought they were interesting, and they open up lots of questions about the book as a whole. The novel begins with the words, “Fade in” and ends with the words, “Fade out,” cinematic terms.

Looking at the small chapter titles, I found they were often titles of books and films—I found Godard, Céline, DeLillo, My Life as a Dog [Lasse Hallstrom]—I can’t remember who that filmmaker is—Jim Jarmusch, Bataille, Réage, Lars von Trier, the Marquis de Sade. Here’s another Jim Jarmusch. Let’s see, we have Hamsun, Fellini, Beckett, Strindberg. I bet there are more. Those were ones I came up with at the top of my head. So, my question to you is not that you’ve used these references but rather how you are playing with these two registers—living and watching lives being lived—in cinema, literature, and sometimes in song lyrics. I’m bad at song lyrics, but it seems you’re good at them…

EP: Yes, there are lots of song lyrics there…

SH: I think I found a Jacques Brel line…

EP: Yes, absolutely.

SH: Good, I got that one… So the game that’s being played here—the game between husband and wife, which includes other people as well—is strongly related to what I call reflective self consciousness, the human ability to watch ourselves while we are living. But there is also another register of being, an embodied reality connected to sexuality and I think to boredom—the monotony part of life. I want to know to what degree you planned this back and forth between the two levels. The husband is French, and it strikes me as very French to watch himself live…

EP: So the question is to which degree I was aware of this when I wrote Anatomy. Monotony.?

SH: Let me put it this way, things happen while writing—I am often surprised by what I write—but I also have thoughts in mind about form. I’m curious about how you negotiated the two levels of experience.

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.