Lindsay Forbes Brown & Micaela Burgess & Sarah Grace Goolden

The And-ness of Life:
An Interview with Melissa Broder

Melissa Broder’s latest collection of poetry, Superdoom, and novel, Milk Fed, explore elements of appetite, the intersections between shame and desire, and God. FOLIO spoke with Broder via Zoom and email to discuss the horror genre, the role of Mother, and the need to surrender control in art as in life.

Melissa Broder is the author of three novels: Death Valley (October 24, 2023), Milk Fed and The Pisces, the essay collection, So Sad Today, and five books of poems including Superdoom: Selected Poems. She lives in Los Angeles.

FOLIO: Our theme for this year’s issue is “Horror.” How do you feel your work contributes, upholds, or subverts this category of composition?

MELISSA BRODER: I’m a naturally fearful creature. I find the strangeness of existence so harrowing that I’m compelled to write. For me, the act of writing is often an attempt to find a foothold, or create context within the uncontrollable, contextless narratives of life and the mind. At times, I’ll use magical realism and archetype as a means of rendering, imagistically, the nebulous terrain of emotional experience. Where this all fits into the genre of “horror” is probably more for the reader to say than it is for me.

In the introduction of Superdoom, you express your love for the “mystery,” or the “space it makes for the unknown.” You dive into this idea in such a gorgeous way, naming it “a sphere of ambiguity, a celebration of negative capability, a field for beginner’s mind, a braid of darkness and light, a little fortress of sacred pause.” This is such a wonderful way to describe and honor the surreal subjectivity that belongs only to poetry, how it can resist certainty that is, in a way, more truthful. Is mystery a value you have always regarded poetry with or something you learned to welcome?

When I was a younger writer, I used to slap endings on poems too quickly—to get out while I could, with neatness and finality. But over time, I’ve learned to resist that impulse. Allowing a creation to breathe and stretch, to direct itself, requires faith. For me, that particular faith has come with experience. I’ve now seen plenty of poems find their way home in their own time. Sometimes, that home is a question. Sometimes, the best ending springboards us back into the poem. The same is also true of chapter endings, and the endings of novels. Having seen the work guide itself, I have more faith that it can happen again.

We are in awe of the wild leaps you make in your poems from seemingly unrelated ideas. You create such strange, fascinating, and somehow recognizable worlds with laws of their own that the reader must decide to trust. The title poem “Superdoom” is one of our favorites, partly for its ability to catalog these beautifully absurd declarations that hinge on each other in such small ways, like a shared “it” or a narrative sequence of nouns. Everything feels completely consequential, as if the only possible answer to the question, “How long have you been alive?” has no choice but to be anything other than “6 minutes.” Can you talk a little bit about this process of absurdity in narrative? How do you know what comes next in a poem as opposed to prose?

I use multiple techniques to get out of my conscious, controlling mind and let the work dictate itself—not only in the drafting process. Tools I use include: meditation, word banks, stichomancy, ekphrasis. I also employ these tools in the editing process when I feel stuck, or like I’m trying to “figure out” a line or scene or chapter and it isn’t working; sometimes I need to go slantwise instead.

The line you refer to came from a technique I call “life ekphrasis.” Traditional ekphrasis is to use a piece of art as inspiration. Sometimes I’ll employ an ekphrastic technique where I look at the world as it’s happening right around me, and grab something from there, to find the direction that the piece needs to go. In the case of this poem, the line “six minutes” came from an experience I had with a fellow sober person after I’d been sober for a number of years. I was struggling with anxiety, and this guy told me that he had found the “answer” to anxiety. That he’d “cured” himself and could “cure” me. I listened to him talk for a long time. I almost believed him. Then I asked, “How long have you been sober?” He said, “Six days.” I was like, oh honey, stick around. It’ll be back.

The speaker of the poem is occasionally constrained within a lack of agency, almost puppeteered by God or a maternal character or the universe, while other times, maybe more often, the speaker themself feels like the puppet master of these strange worlds. In “Big Tide,” you write “Nothing was made for me / I have to keep making it / Everything was made for me” and we are again reminded of the authority and capacity of the speaker. Is writing to you a form of or exercise in autonomy?

The “Nothing / Everything” expresses the and-ness of life. Not but. And. The but may arise depending on our perspective, but I think everything is always an and. Likewise, there is an and-ness to writing, in the sense that I often write to create context, or a feeling of control, within a world and mind over which I am powerless. At the same time, I must continually surrender control—again and again—in art as in life.

To end Superdoom with “That will lead us back to Earth,” gently closes the door on the journey you’ve brought us through. We thought, “No, we don’t want to go back!” But we must! How has poetry, the reading or the writing of it, affected how you see and exist in the world?

I know, I want to transcend too. For a long time, my vision of spirituality was, “Humanity is over here and I’m over there on a lotus on some really heroiny ecstasy.” I wanted nothing more than to be exempt from my humanity. I still want to be exempt from it a lot of the time! But over and over, I am returned to the realization that spirituality isn’t to be high or inhuman or exempt from pain. It’s not some ineffable state, immune from feeling. It comes in accepting my own humanity, right here, on planet Earth. And the act of writing is one way that I cope with this being human.

We’d like to talk about body horror and your corporeal descriptions, specifically in Milk Fed. You write into this subgenre so acutely, maintaining a balance that reaches the grotesque, yet is never overkill. In the novel, during sex with Miriam, Rachel says, “I smelled the faintest waft of shit coming up from underneath her. It smelled like heaven...it smelled good because it was her.” Rachel also describes Miriam’s breasts as, “magnificent, weighty pendulums...beneath her areolae were a network of veins, blue and purple, bringing forth the blood that sustained her.” By the same token, food is viewed horrifically, especially in the beginning. For instance, Rachel views arugula as a “slippery cadaver.” Where do you think this visceral part of your imagination comes from? Why are you drawn to body horror and how do you strike this balance so effortlessly?

I feel like my whole life is body horror. The discomfort of living in a body is its own fraught thing. There’s discomfort in having a brain, sensory experiences, and the strangeness of being alive.

In Milk Fed, we are struck by the images, figurative or literal, of having holes or filling them, of yearning to feel whole, and of emptiness. We find Rachel who, throughout the novel, searches for that which can fill her: low-cal yogurt, Ana, Miriam, Chinese food, and spirituality (or mysticism). A couple of these work, and others are sorry surrogates for the real thing. In the end, we find Rachel full and transformed—she is at her best, though her mother and the extent of their relationship remains a mystery—we never even “see” the mother for ourselves, a mother who is referred to as “the sun... and god herself!”

In a novel which time is (at first) designed around Day _ of Rachel’s Detox from her mother, we wondered if there was a specific reason why you refused to further explore that territory, that missing element which likewise could have “filled” Rachel, even if it was a flat-out rejection of her mother.

Yes, our parents are our first gods. At the same time, like the whale in Moby Dick, do we ever see the divine in its entirety? Or do we only see pieces, facets, expressions of a higher power? Likewise, are we able to see god clearly or objectively? Or do we see god, and interpret various liturgy, through our own minds and hearts? In this vein, the reader doesn’t see Rachel’s mother through the lens of an omniscient narrator. We see Rachel’s interpretations, memories, and communications with her mother. We see Rachel’s version of the mother-god. And this is the only version of the mother-god who matters to Rachel.

We further can’t help but wonder about Miriam’s ending. We felt sad for her and couldn’t help but feel frustrated at the same time, which we believe speaks to your craft and to how much we cared about your characters. In the Jewish and Christian faiths, Miriam is a prophetess, a true leader of women and protector of infants. Though a big ask, we wished for Miriam to have been able to act through her namesake, to defy tradition and her family and to become free to her truest desires. Was there ever a point in the revision process where you gifted her that freedom?

No. Miriam was never going to go against her family for Rachel. To go against her family would mean to lose her family. And Miriam loves her family infinitely. It is sad that Miriam is shamed for her desires. That her family could not accept her love for Rachel. At the same time, who among us is completely free? Who among us doesn’t make sacrifices? To keep her family, Miriam has to sacrifice Rachel. But to keep Rachel, Miriam would have to sacrifice her family. This, too, would be sad.

We were interested in the mystical elements in this novel which were illuminated through the burning pupu platter at the Golden Dragon, the clay golem, and the dreams with Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. These “high” elements were balanced with pursuing “lower” or earthly pleasures of near hedonistic sex and eating. Additional highs and lows in the novel are found through sex between Rachel and men vs. with Miriam, in disordered eating vs. Rachel’s meals with the Schwebels, etc. In real life, we are lucky if we can reach any of these “highs,” just as we are lucky if we can ever feel fully satiated. Realizing “fullness” is a fantasy for many and your book certainly emphasizes that yearning. Do you believe your book can teach or inspire those in need of self-actualization? Does it have to be through spiritual awakening or through sex?

It’s funny, I’m always a bit envious of my characters, because they get to disappear on the last page. I don’t think my books are prescriptive or self-help, and my arcs aren’t neat, but my protagonists do come to some kind of resolution with an issue. I feel like they are lucky. They get to have an arc. Not everything gets solved, but they have an arc and they get to die on the last page. Meanwhile, I’m out here flailing.

While Rachel detoxes from her mother, Ana is the only maternal figure she has available. Rachel is also sexually attracted to her. She has visions of breastfeeding Ana as the reader learns she was not breast- fed by her own mother as a baby. Rachel also masturbates to visions of being rocked by other women. You mention the “consuming mother” and Rachel’s fantasies could nearly verge on mentally distressing, yet we are thrilled you made that jump on the page—it felt Freudian in only the best way. What would you call this intersection you have found and articulated between pleasure and nurturing? How do you envision it to be read?

Ultimately, Milk Fed is a story of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and familial yearning, and the ways that we as humans—particularly as women—attempt to control and compartmentalize these interdependent instincts. But the instincts are interdependent. They cannot be separated. Our relationship to food is our relationship to god. Our relationship to our mothers is our relationship to our own pleasure, and how much we believe we are entitled to receive. The breastfeeding scene is a way of reifying this theme in a visual way.

Shame, or rather the exorcism of shame, served as a holy grail for both Rachel and Miriam in Milk Fed. At the end, Rachel’s feelings in how she viewed herself and her body were purged, while, if only for a short time, Miriam was able to find joy in her desire for Rachel. Ultimately, some women achieve self-love and worthiness, while others do not. What are your hopes for women today who are battling these same issues with desire, body image, and food?

I can only speak for myself and say that I don’t believe in arrivals. Okay-ness is a daily reprieve—a series of many arrivals, maybe—but no singular, big arrival. In the wellness industrial complex, self-love is marketed as a destination or object to be purchased. But this is not my experience. There’s no permanent tah-dah! This leaves the eternal journey. But what a journey it is.

Your next book, Death Valley, comes out this fall. Is there anything you can share with us about that project? Are there any new projects you are currently working on or excited about?

Death Valley is a humorous trip through the desert of grief, particularly anticipatory grief, and the rich oases we may find in that arid internal landscape. The novel was born out of my father’s six month stay in the ICU prior to his death, and my inability to escape the experience of being human on a stretch of Highway 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I’m currently working on a yearlong, themed journal project that may or may not see the light of day.