Lan Samantha Chang on the Risks and Rewards of Literary Personas

Acclaimed novelist and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Lan Samantha Chang joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the role that literary personas may–or may not–have played in recent revelations about Alice Munro, Neil Gaiman, and Cormac McCarthy. Chang discusses how writers often develop literary personas as their public profiles grow. Chang also discusses how personas can be both protective and damaging when they no longer align with the writer’s true self, the impact of personas on writers’ privacy and the industry’s role in shaping and maintaining these personas. She reads from her novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.

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From the episode:

Lan Samantha Chang: I think many successful writers develop literary personas as their lives become more public. So from where I sit, I’ve watched it as it happens, a writer that I’ve worked with when they were in the MFA program will come back to Iowa City to read at Prairie Lights after earning their MFA, and I’ll be fascinated to see that they’ve developed a new voice, like, literally, a new reading voice, or a new look. You know, they color their hair, or they wear these new, interesting shoes that I’ve never seen, and then they become known by that hair and those shoes. I remember one literary author who carried to all readings, for one of his books, a taxidermied animal.

Whitney Terrell: What was that signaling, do you think?

LSC: It was, ‘hey, look, I relate to animals. I am not a highfalutin literary person like you people in the audience here.’ I mean, it’s interesting to see how frequently writers repeat themselves on tour and in the media, and they can be like political candidates making the same stump speech in 20 different cities. You know?

WT: That is true. I mean, the author’s talk becomes something that you do repeat. But I think that personas can be protective in some ways, and they can also be damaging. All of us create a brand for ourselves, for lack of a better term, for who we are as writers. And sometimes those brands are imposed upon us, but I’m a Midwestern writer. I write about that area of the country and about race. Even when I’m writing about war, you know, I’m essentially writing about those things, and so I’m fine with that. That’s who I would self define as, but what would cause that self definition to verge into persona? Or you can tell me if it already has.

LSC: I think a persona accomplishes a few things for the writer. For one, it simplifies the writer so that people can identify and define them. So in that way, it allows readers to project upon them, and that is important for readers. For example, you had mentioned that you thought Alice Monroe was tough, you thought of her as a tough writer. I don’t think Alice Monroe was actually a tough writer. I think we wanted her to be tough.

LSC: Yeah, yes, yes. I want to read from something real quick that I actually pulled for— we’ll shift into her— that I pulled from this New Yorker article that was written about her after the revelations of what happened with her daughter came out. And this is from the article: “I also often spoke about how she had a real life which was hidden in another life in which she was pretending to be what people wanted me to be.”

LSC: Yeah. I mean, I also think that this persona can do something for a writer that a writer needs, and it protects the writer’s privacy, right? Writers are very private people. They spend most of their time working alone, and then all of a sudden, when their book comes out, they’re expected to be super public. And so the persona, I think of it in some ways, as a kind of protective shell. I also think that in some cases, the persona can be a version of the writer that they feel the most comfortable with, even after they’ve outlived it or they’ve outgrown it. So I think there’s a certain amount of self deception in personas.

I remember once I went to an awards ceremony and I was meeting a very iconic older nonfiction writer with this really elaborate hair and this super, super beautiful, subtle, expensive-looking outfit and it was very sophisticated. It was a very posh award ceremony, and I remember saying that she must be accustomed to the fancy things with which we were being treated, and she was outraged. She just sort of bridled and told the table at large, who had heard me say this, just in case they’d heard me say this, that she was a poor girl, that she was from a disadvantaged rural background, etc. I felt like I knew instantly I had said the wrong thing, because she didn’t want to be seen as what she was, which was a sophisticated older woman, you know, with a lot of privilege. She wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night because I apparently made it super too clear that she was now living this life, that she was very different from the persona of the poor girl with no advantages. And I guess what I feel is, what becomes toxic in personas is when the persona’s maintained, to some extent, because of the writer’s self-deception.

WT: That’s what I feel like. I mean, I think that I’ve had friends who had very strong personas, and I always assumed that they knew, and that I could tease them underneath it, you know, when we were alone, and when I knew that it was trouble was when that was the end of the friendship, right? If you adopt the persona so fully that no one can question it, then you can’t be honest with yourself about who you really are, and then you move into the toxic author persona stage, in my view.

LSC: I mean, part of it is that, I think that we are taught to talk about where we’re from when we publish books,  like what is our background, which immediately focuses on our origins and our past, when, in actuality, as a writer becomes more, sort of, grown up, they change. But nobody really wants to know that part of them.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: That was what I was wondering as I was listening to the two of you talk about this. How much are writers allowed to change their writerly personas? Are you allowed to be someone different at the age of 28 than you are at the age of 48, 68, etc. Have you seen anyone change their writerly persona?

LSC: I mean, this is so interesting, because I don’t think that people are thrilled at the idea that writers do become 68. They want us to be youthful.

VVG: I’m planning to become 68 everyone.

LSC: No, totally, me too, not too long from now. But I think we’re supposed to be youthful. So it’s all a little bit sort of like smoke and mirrors, I don’t know.

VVG:  I think that there’s this version of me that relatively early in my career, I had this funny conversation with someone in my family who advised me, tongue in cheek, but also not to– he was like, now you should develop a persona. And I was like, what persona should I develop? And he had, like, a whole vision for me, none of which I have done. And every once in a while we revisit this, and he’s like, ‘wouldn’t your life be easier if you had done everything I had said? Are you going to do it now?’ So there are these sort of check-ins where he’s like, ‘have you planned, yet, to become this old?’

LSC: I have to ask you what these things were.

WT: Yes, come on.

VVG: I believe his phrase for this was ethnic diva, and he was like big, chunky jewelry, drapey clothing. He’s like, you could totally pull it off. And I was like, but‒

WT: I’m a preppy from Maryland.

VVG: That’s like, I was raised at the mall, I don’t know what to say. There’s an academic version of this as well, particularly like in South Asian studies, where I sometimes am, where there’s the person who wears kind of what we would refer to as the, like, Indo-western clothing and I just, I don’t know. I don’t think I own a single piece of chunky jewelry. I like how it looks on other people, and I just wasn’t gonna perform myself in that way.

I think I’ve always really resented the notion that I should have to make a version of myself like this. As a little kid, I just read, and I didn’t really want to know anything about the author and so I never thought about how would I present myself as an author? Because that wasn’t the appealing part of the writing for me. I mean, that wasn’t the appealing part of the career. And then to sort of think about it in this way is so like– Whitney has even invented personas for us for the show, like, I’m supposed to be the pessimist and he’s supposed to be the optimist. And my former teacher, Sam Friedman, came on the show and Whitney had written persona stuff for us, and Sam was like, ‘Sugi is not a pessimist.’ It was really this moment of rupture where it was like, the truth comes out. But like, I don’t know, did you think at all about, like, when you were little, or when you kind of dreamed of being a writer, was this like a problem you thought of? And I mean, how can you even plan this?.

LSC: I’m incapable of— first of all, I’m just really bad material for a literary persona. One, I can’t repeat myself. Like, I have a terrible time repeating the same thing. And then two, it’s really hard for me not to answer a question sincerely, like, I just can’t bullshit. So I’ve never tried, and I often think that’s probably why I have not been a particular success, you know, I just don’t map on to that.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. 

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Lan Samantha Chang

The Family Chao • Hunger • Inheritance • All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost • Writers, Protect Your Inner Life |Lit Hub|August 7, 2017

Others:

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway • Erasure by Percival Everett • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 40: “In Memory of Cormac McCarthy: Oscar Villalon on an Iconic Writer’s Life, Work, and Legacy” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7 Episode 19: “Jacinda Townsend and James Bernard Short on American Fiction”  • James Alan McPherson • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7 Episode 35: “Jonny Diamond on His Mother and Alice Munro”  • The Dark Secrets Behind the Neil Gaiman Abuse Accusations|Vulture | January 13, 2025