Rachel Kushner Once Threw a Bret Easton Ellis Novel Across Her Room (and Other Tidbits)

Rachel Kushner’s novel, Creation Lake, is available now from Scribner, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, organizing books, and more.

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Who do you most wish would read your book?

Just yesterday I went to UPS to mail a copy of my new novel to Michèle Bernstein, who was a member of the Situationist International and married to its founder, Guy Debord. She is now ninety-two, and apparently as ravishing as she ever was, according to Greil Marcus, who saw her recently in Paris, and was the one who gave me an address for her, and suggested I should send her Creation Lake, which has a bit about Debord and the SI in it.

Will she read it? We shall see. But the very process of sending it felt like some kind of rite. Even the price to send it—forty-seven dollars—was part of this rite. Anything less, and it would have seemed too easy to attempt to reach this very grand person, a living embodiment of twentieth-century radical history.

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How do you tackle writers block?

The block and the tackle work best together, to lift something very heavy.

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What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you (made you laugh, cry, be angry)?

When I read Less than Zero, as a teenager, I threw the book across the room the moment I read the final line, so disgusted was I by the bleakness of world and the depravity of the final scene. But now, I revere that novel, and will be writing an introduction to a fortieth anniversary edition!

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Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?

I can’t imagine life without the movies. I live without tv quite happily and by choice. Music has been a bonus, because my son is a musician.

Just went to look at a friend’s paintings, the artist James Hayward, and especially appreciated his “tondos,” which he paints with his toes, but again, it’s the movies that are my spiritual nourishment among the arts you name.

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How do you organize your bookshelves?

Downstairs in a shared library with my husband it’s all alphabetical. In my office, there are shelves for each recent novel of mine that I’ve written, where I keep books I read “to help my cause.”

In my reading nook, in the corner of my office, I have four little shelves that are each dedicated to a particular writer, almost like ritual displays: Top is Marguerite Duras (even as there is a whole library of her work downstairs); middle is Clarice Lispector; next, Pasolini; finally, Natalia Ginzburg.

I also have two shelves that are only New Directions, titles I’ve either already read, or plan to. There are stacks of books on a side-bureau that are obligatory reading for professional reasons, and stacks of books on the floor I plan to give away, because I don’t keep a single book I do not plan to reread.

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If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?

Conceptual artist. Serious racket. More money in it, too….

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Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is available via Scribner.