Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Animals Eat Each Other
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://yourgirlelle.com/
CITY:
STATE: AR
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: one daughter.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Witch Craft Magazine, founding editor; Hobart Pulp, fiction editor. Also, reads tarot cards occasionally.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including Cosmopolitan, Fanzine, Elle, Enclave, Offing, and Volume 1 Brooklyn.
SIDELIGHTS
Elle Nash is a writer and editor. She is one of the founder of Witch Craft Magazine and has worked as a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp.
In 2017, Nash released her first book, Animals Eat Each Other. The unnamed narrator of the volume, who is nineteen, becomes involved in a sexual relationship with a couple, Matt and Frankie. Matt calls the narrator Lilith. The relationship between the three becomes increasingly complicated. Meanwhile, Lilith abuses painkillers and deals with romantic advances from other men.
In an interview with Rob Hart, contributor to the Lit Reactor website, Nash discussed her reasons for writing the book. She stated: “I really wanted to analyze non-traditional relationships, with an eye on what manipulation can do to people, how we manipulate others in our lives, and how quickly friendships between women can become intimate and then caustic. I also wanted to create a book with a bisexual main character, and the struggle with sex and identity, as I don’t really see bisexuals represented in fiction or media that often.” Nash told Nicholas Rys, writer on the Fanzine website: “I wanted to keep the narrator unnamed because her identity really was dependent on how other people saw her. Having Frankie name her was the way she took on the identity Frankie wanted her to have. She doesn’t know herself yet, she doesn’t have good boundaries, and so in this way she allows people to project their own fantasies on her because having them structure the world for her is easier than figuring it out for herself.”
A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked: “The work as a whole is overshadowed by Lilith’s unrelenting narcissism, which prevents the reader from forming any empathy with her point of view.” The critic described the volume as “a self-indulgent novel about a self-indulgent character in which titillation trumps insight.” Other assessments were more favorable. Katharine Coldiron, reviewer on the 3AM website, suggested: “This is a slender novel, not even 150 pages, but its emotional territory is enormous and largely unmapped. Karolina Waclawiak’s How to Get Into the Twin Palms is comparable in its claustrophobic focus on a woman sinking instead of rising into young adulthood, but Nash’s insight is superior. Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl offers the reader an equal level of existential self-hatred, the same hole where an identity should be, but its urban setting renders foreign to many readers what’s familiar in Nash’s novel.” “This is a complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire,” asserted a writer on the Publishers Weekly website.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Animals Eat Each Other.
ONLINE
3AM, http://www.3ammagazine.com/ (March 28, 2018), Katharine Coldiron, review of Animals Eat Each Other.
Brooklyn Rail, https://brooklynrail.org/ (June 5, 2018 ), John Domini, review of Animals Eat Each Other.
Fanzine Online, http://thefanzine.com/ (March 27, 2018), Nicholas Rys, author interview.
Hobart Pulp Online, http://www.hobartpulp.com/ (March 8, 2018), Lauren Grabowski, author interview.
Lit Reactor, https://litreactor.com/ (April 3, 2018), Rob Hart, author interview.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com (January 8, 2018), review of Animals Eat Each Other.
ELLE NASH is the author of Animals Eat Each Other. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at Hobart Pulp. Her work has been featured in Volume 1 Brooklyn, The Fanzine, Cosmopolitan, Elle, The Offing, Enclave, and other places. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, daughter and their dog. Occasionally she reads tarot in exchange for money.
March 8, 2018 Interview
The Places That Hurt: An Interview with Elle Nash
Lauren Grabowski
Last year I created a friendship with Elle Nash in my head after discovering her writing and looking at pictures I saw of her online. She looked like the kind of girl I’d hoped to befriend in high school, the mysterious gypsy that nobody really knew, the loner who cut gym class to smoke under the bleachers. Elle’s writing is stark, provocative, and primal— which is how I fantasized she would be in person.
I read her debut novel, Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc, April 2018) last month. I’d recently moved past a break up that ruined my entire summer. Elle’s novel sucked me back in time, causing me to relive the self-inflicted torture I was trying to forget— disguising sex as love and being clueless about it, and the initial choice, and then agony, of being “the other woman.” The novel’s 19-year old unnamed narrator works at a Radio Shack where she is sleeping with her boss during her shifts when she meets Matt and Frances. The three begin a sexual relationship, and the affair becomes complicated once the narrator, now referred to as Lilith, tests the boundaries of the relationship with Matt and starts to break the rules imposed by Frances. The book is set in the late 90’s, but there is a timeless feel to Animals Eat Each Other. Desire, daddy issues, obsession and jealousy are hardly assigned to decades.
Last week I spoke to Elle to discuss her writing and spirituality, among other things.
In your fiction story Me and The Flies, which was published this past September in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, you wrote about bulimia in such graphic detail that I felt queasy dry heaving as I read your story. Then I read Animals Eat Each Other and the inaugural sentence describes a sex scene where a knife gets held against the protagonist Lilith’s face, and again my reaction was visceral. I identify with both subjects from personal experience and have held back on writing about them. I admire the dark places you go with your writing. How do you feel about women being labeled “brave” in our current cultural landscape?
Thank you, I really appreciate all the nice things you’ve said about my writing. Some of the best writers I know write about topics that others would approach as having courage to discuss, and I very much appreciate the work they put into the world. I would just hate to see that same work commodified on the sole basis of being brave— there’s more to it than that, what Lidia Yuknavitch calls “art doing it’s verb thing,” afflicting people the way it’s supposed to. In some ways, storytelling is very much remolding the stories that have been handed to us… at the same time, storytelling is an exorcism, and both forms need to be out in the world.
Is there anything you consider too personal to write about? As both a fiction and nonfiction writer, do you prefer one genre over another? Do you use one over the other to write about specifics topics?
I feel the writer has the freedom to write about whatever they want. There’s a lot of discussion in nonfiction concerning writing about people in one’s life and whether or not it is ethical to do so without telling said person, for example— something that could be too personal. In fiction you make things whatever you want them to be. So there really is nothing that’s too personal for me in that realm. I definitely prefer writing fiction, where there is more freedom— I also don’t have a very good memory, so writing non-fiction is a little difficult, especially since non-fiction adheres so concretely to more traditional formats of storytelling. Fiction gives me a chance to be more experimental in form and prose. Subject wise, I have written a lot about the body and eating disorders and beauty in non-fiction. In my fiction writing, I tend to explore relationships between people and what that looks like in its worst form. Lately I’ve been trying to marry the two—that’s kind of what Me and The Flies was about. I was trying to push my writing on the body to a more creative and personal place. I like writing that makes me go to the places that hurt.
In Animals Eat Each Other, Lilith is a teenager with an unfaltering self-awareness from the very beginning of the novel, and the clarity about what motivates her resonates throughout the story. Regarding her tattoos, you wrote, “After a while, I began to enjoy the dry, dull pain and the way each tattoo forced me to confront my own commitment to be hurt over and over again.” Lilith knows who she is, and her choices bring her both physical and emotional pain. Tell me about how you created Lilith as a character.
I have spent a lot of time examining nontraditional relationships and the mechanisms of manipulation within those and heteronormative relationships as well. I’m fascinated by the ways in which women’s friendships can become intimately vulnerable so quickly and also turn incredibly toxic and painful so quickly. Lilith is roughly nineteen and feels like she has no idea what she is doing, either, without much guidance. When I was nineteen, I also didn’t have a lot of direction with what I was doing with my life. I wanted Lilith to speak to that time when you’re feeling self-aware but not really knowing where to go with it.
I recently read an old NY Times article written by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love, and in the piece she confessed to being addicted to seducing men who were unavailable. She writes, “That’s what I was after: the telekinesis-like sensation of steadily dragging somebody’s fullest attention toward me and only me. My guilt about the other woman was no match for the intoxicating knowledge that — somewhere on the other side of town — somebody couldn’t sleep that night because he was thinking about me.” It reminded me immediately of Lilith’s determination of ‘winning’ Matt away from Frances and also my own experiences with having an affair. Affairs cause so much emotional turbulence but I now see I wanted the drama and chaos as a means to avoid facing myself and working on whatever issues. Why do you think the chaos of an affair can be so alluring to someone?
I think from Lilith’s perspective a huge part of it is her lack of self-worth and her lack of belief in herself that she deserves someone’s full attention. With Lilith for example, she posited that her needs weren’t important—what was important were the needs of the person she was trying to seduce, the emotionally unavailable man, because his significant other already had needs and she wanted to be the “chill” girl, the solution to his relationship problems that was uncomplicated and easy, the living fantasy. She ignored her wants and needs because she felt it made a person unattractive. The story of the other woman is that she has needs and wants she ignores because she has no way of knowing how, or doesn’t feel that she deserves to ask for them to be fulfilled. I feel like that’s something that women are never really taught growing up. Most times, we’re really only taught how to serve others.
I loved the late 90’s landscape of Animals Eat Each Other. I graduated high school in 1997 and I remember devouring Marilyn Manson’s autobiography a year later, which you mention in the novel. I knew nothing about Satanism until I read Manson’s book and I found the parts about Satanism to be spiritual, self-reflective, and completely fascinating. Would you consider yourself a religious or spiritual person?
I think that I’m religious. I don’t follow an organized religion, but for me to say that I’m religious that means that I believe in the process of rituals in terms of spiritual development. As far as what those practices look like, it’s really changed a lot for me over the years but I love learning about religions, studying them, seeing the role that ritual has in the development of the self. Lately I have been reading a lot about different forms of Buddhism, which I'd started exploring when I was first in college and then kind of forgot about. I'm really getting into the analysis of the self and consciousness, and enjoying learning about pureland Buddhism which I'd never heard of until recently.
Tell me about your experience with learning the tarot & reading cards.
When I was twelve or thirteen my grandmother gave me a book by art historian and occultist Fred Gettings about the tarot. My grandmother really helped foster my imagination about magic. Later, when I was around eighteen one of my best friends from high school bought me a tarot deck. We would sit in Barnes & Noble and do tarot for each other. We ended up living together in college and that was one of our favorite things to do. We would just drink, and read tarot, and we still ask each other for readings. It was a very long process for me to learn the meanings of each card without referring to a book and learning to trust my intuition on the symbols without referring to someone else’s knowledge base. That took quite a while, almost ten years. Only last summer I felt confident enough in my intuition to read tarot for money professionally.
In Animals Eat Each Other, Lilith receives a text message from a guy named Patrick that reads “I really like you.” Matt, the guy Lilith is sleeping with, tells her the same thing the night before. Patrick’s text has almost no effect on Lilith, and I couldn’t help but think about Elijah Woods’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (also named Patrick) and how he mimics Joel’s sentiments to Clementine to try to win her over, and it doesn’t work in the slightest. What are your thoughts on chemistry? What do you think makes two people who start off as strangers click instantly?
I definitely think chemistry exists but I don’t even know where to begin answering that question! I think some of it comes down to fate and the ways our fates are interwoven. I am not sure if free will is real, for example, when we love or become obsessed with certain types of people.
I was listening to the WTF podcast with Marc Maron and he was interviewing author Neil Strauss, who has just written a book about intimacy. And Neil Strauss said something along the lines of when two people meet one another and instantly connect and infatuation happens immediately it is as though they’re really just attracted to each other’s baggage.
Yeah, I definitely think that’s true. Especially because I think one thing in relationships that people don’t really consider is that it’s just two people learning how to work out their crazy together. I believe in fate, and like I said, I question whether or not I believe in free will. I don’t know what makes two people click. Sometimes they just do. Or sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I meet friends and we really get along and it’s easy and other times there are people I meet and I become aware that I am forcing something, or I am aware of how weird I am. I don’t know what makes that happen, whether it’s internal frequencies or just like pheromones or if it is old past lives in which your consciousness or whatever it is recognizes other people that you’ve known before.
In the novel Animals Eat Each Other when Lilith is sleeping with her boss Sam, she compares him to Matt, another guy she is in a sexual relationship with. While looking at Sam undress Lilith thinks “I didn’t make eye contact. Eye contact made things too real.” Last week I asked a friend of mine what he thought about eye contact during sex and he seemed thrown off that I even asked him that, like his response was too intimate to even discuss with a platonic friend. So now I am going to ask you the same question. What are your thoughts on eye contact during sex?
Eye contact during sex is pretty hot. I think eye contact is really hard for people in general. I think to be able to make eye contact during a really vulnerable moment like that would just makes things a lot better.
How comfortable are you with crying? Do you cry a lot? Do you cry in public?
I used to not be. When I was growing up my parents would say “I’ll give you something to cry about” and so for a long time I would repress my feelings. Now that I’m older I’d be more comfortable crying in front of others. I’m definitely comfortable crying in my relationship, and I cry a lot, both at good things and bad. I cry because of books I’m reading all the time. I’m a sensitive person and I’ve learned to like it. I don’t want to change that. It’s one of the first things you do when you’re born, even before— babies cry in utero. In a way, crying is the first form of language, it’s the first way humans learn to express their discordance with the world before anything else.
In Animals Eat Each Other you wrote about Lilith wanting closure: “I thought if he hated me, this meant it was all over. It meant no more waiting. It meant no more purgatory. I was free to leave, to get the fuck out of Colorado Springs without him shaping my life for the first time in months.” This struck a vibration in me after I read it, it reminded me of how in past relationships I just wanted my guy at the time to get the torture over with just end it, I’d want him to hate me so I would have an alleged guarantee they’d never contact me again and I would have permission to move on. Lilith ultimately gets her wish. Why’d she get so lucky? I can name at least a half a dozen guys I wish had done this for me. What do you think about when someone has awareness that a relationship has no future and they would be okay if it ended but ultimately they don’t want to do the work to end it?
I can definitely relate to being in relationships and wanting the person to end things for me. It’s a process of not wanting to do the work, or, maybe not realizing that low self-worth is a factor. I think it’s easier for people to push others away in relationships when they think their partner could be with someone better. In a way they are making the decision for the other person without letting them decide for themselves what they want or what they’re willing to put up with. But I also believe closure is a myth. I think it is something that has to be made for yourself.
Lauren Grabowski is a writer living in Montclair, New Jersey.
QUOTED: "I wanted to keep the narrator unnamed because her identity really was dependent on how other people saw her. Having Frankie name her was the way she took on the identity Frankie wanted her to have. She doesn’t know herself yet, she doesn’t have good boundaries, and so in this way she allows people to project their own fantasies on her because having them structure the world for her is easier than figuring it out for herself."
Sometimes Humiliation Feels Good: A Conversation with Elle Nash
Nicholas Rys
27.03.18
Elle Nash’s debut novel Animals Eat Each Other is a mélange of sex and violence and drug use and teenage ennui. It’s a devastating first book. In it, Nash eschews traditional teenage sentimentality for a kind of hyper-realist and psychosexual brutality—rendering a landscape and text that feels both hyper-realistic and dream-like. Nash explores her characters with both delicacy and a surgical precision, exploring their psychological complexity without giving away too much on the page.
Let me put this in perspective for you. I was reading three books at the same time before Animals Eat Each Other arrived in the mail. I am still reading those three books. I finished Nash’s in two days.
Nash was kind enough to respond to some of my questions about the book, Marilyn Manson, and what books were great in 2017.
Nicolas Rys: Can you talk about the choice to keep the narrator unnamed? I mean, we know the name Frankie gives her, Lilith. Can you talk about that, too? The story of Lilith.
Elle Nash: I wanted to keep the narrator unnamed because her identity really was dependent on how other people saw her. Having Frankie name her was the way she took on the identity Frankie wanted her to have. She doesn’t know herself yet, she doesn’t have good boundaries, and so in this way she allows people to project their own fantasies on her because having them structure the world for her is easier than figuring it out for herself. I chose the story of Lilith in part because depending on one’s perspective Lilith can be evil— an eater of babies, someone who corrupts men—or she can be a figure of liberation, since, in the context of Judeo-Christian mythos, she is the first woman and also was created independently of Adam in the image and likeness of God the same way he was, she acted independently of Adam instead of in service to him, and as a result was punished for her desire for equal standing.
Can you talk about the chapter titles—the stylistic choice to have titles and not use numbers or just space breaks.
At first, I wanted each chapter title to be one of the nine Satanic Statements from LaVeyan Satanism, but it wasn’t really working with the structure of the book, so I just thought that some of the titles would be a good set up for the scene. I think at the time of writing the book I also felt inspired by Crappalachia by Scott McClanahan and Something To Do with Self-Hate by Brian Alan Ellis; I think both books also have chapter titles without using numbers or space breaks.
I wanted to ask you kind of a boring question. How much of the narrator’s behavior do you think is explained by or correlated to her prescription drug addiction? I wrote this question in the margins of the first half of this book, but after reading the ending chapter, I decided I wanted to ask, because I think the reader is invited into a private moment in that last chapter, where we see the narrator steal her mother’s pills, crush them up, and snort them with a straw.
I don’t think her behavior is explained per se by her prescription drug use, but that it is co-morbid. Lilith describes sex with Matt and Frankie as existing in a world that is outside of earth, and so in that way she is looking for an escape from her day to day, an experience that makes her current reality more special than it currently is. Essentially both the pills and the people are her living skinner box, she’s not ready to consider other alternatives to living or structuring her life.
Part of me thought of Frances and Matt like a cult or a fraternity. The scene where she puts the narrator on a leash and walks her through the Walmart really felt like some sort of deranged hazing technique. Can you talk to the attraction to Frankie that the narrator has, in spite of or perhaps because of her demanding and humiliating nature? The narrator tells us “Frankie was in charge. She dreamt up the world and the world complied. I liked it.” Is she attracted to the control?
The control is part of it, but it’s also that Frankie seems so sure of herself and that is really attractive to her. She’s on the precipice of being an “adult,” which requires a person to structure and order their own lives. This is something parents should be preparing their children for, and something with her mother didn’t provide, given the loss of structure in her life after her father dies. Frances has an astonishing sense of confidence that the narrator lacks. Because she believes so fully in her own self, the narrator clings to that confidence as a ballast, even if it means her own humiliation, which in some sense that she enjoys because she believes she deserves it. Sometimes humiliation feels good— it validates for her what she knows to be true about herself, and so it’s satisfying to her.
There’s this devastating scene where the narrator simply rolls a basketball over to Frankie and Matt’s young child. She’s just hanging out at their apartment. It’s rough because the reader can really see how badly the narrator wants to be part of a family—any family. She wants to be needed, to be integral. I know this isn’t really a question, but I was wondering if you could talk about this scene.
Oh, yeah. I mean, loneliness is hard. Some people are better at it than others. And it’s hard when a person feels damaged by family, but at the same time, still desperately wants family. We’re social, it’s how we survive, so I think on a bigger level, that drive (to not be alone) will always be there for people.
As the book progresses, we begin to see the way the narrator herself manipulates the people around her: of Sam, her boss, who she uses for attention and sex, of Patrick, another friend in a relationship with a child who she uses for attention and information on Matt, and the way she purposefully wedges between Matt and Frankie. I wonder how much of this kind of behavior was already in the narrator, and how much was appropriated from her time with Matt and Frankie? Was she already a manipulative person, or did she become this way, due to her relationship with Matt and Frankie?
Manipulation is a survival tactic for people who feel powerless, so probably a mix of both having that skill set already and having it reinforced/refined by her relationship with them.
Something I really loved about the way this book ended was how the narrator doesn’t change at all. She doesn’t appear to come out of this fucked up relationship learning anything about herself at all. In fact, by the end, we see her doing drugs for (I think?) the very first time. We see the ritual of it, a private, personal action that is only alluded to a few times throughout the text. In many ways your book is like an anti-bildungsroman. She doesn’t change at all. She’s still doing drugs. She’s still calling her friend Jenny who she knows will come over. Could you talk about your reasons for ending it that way? Did you ever think of writing it differently? With her learning something about herself or life or did you always know the outcome for this character?
A lot of people don’t change or want to better themselves spiritually or otherwise, as much as you might want them to. They do the same things over and over again, they don’t self reflect, they blame the external world for the mishaps that befall them without looking at their role in things. Their addictions (or behaviors) cause black holes in the lives of the people around them. Many people never get real closure and those wounds can stay open forever. I wanted to write something that was realistic, which I worried about because I think that tends to be unsatisfying for people (even though some of my favorite stories are like that!)
You talk a bit about Marilyn Manson in the book, but the ways you talk about him and his work, I can tell you’re a real fan. Do you still listen to him? Did you like the new album? What do you like about Manson?
I do still listen to Manson! I’ll probably always be an angry teenager on the inside. I really loved the Pale Emperor and I haven’t listened to all of Heaven Upside Down yet admittedly, but that’s mostly because of being a new mom I just kind of have forgotten pop culture exists for the last four months, haha. At the time that the band was really getting big, besides them being a poster child for shock rock, Manson’s style really questioned the mainstream (which was big for me, my adolescence was spent in a heavily religious town), some of his lyrics are also really complex and deal a lot with family alienation, religious punishment and iconoclasm, empty consumerism, feeling like there is a bad thing in you that can’t be fixed, hypocrisy of society, etc. etc… just a lot of themes I relate to. Also the music just sounds good, and the band’s aesthetic vision from their live performances to their music videos have been profound, in my opinion.
Are you reading anything right now? What were your favorite books from 2017?
I’m reading:
–Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin
–Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill
–Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Books I loved from 2017 were:
–Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen
–Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller
–Sea-Witch v1 and v2 by Never North
–The Day We Lost Pet by Chuck Young and Aniela Sobeski
–The Original Face by Guillaume Morissete
–Homesick for Another World by Otessa Moshfegh
–Adorable Monsters by Brent Reichenberger
–Plot by Claudia Rankine
–Something To Do With Self-Hate by Brian Alan Ellis
–Dust Bunny City by Bud Smith and Rae Buleri
QUOTED: "I really wanted to analyze non-traditional relationships, with an eye on what manipulation can do to people, how we manipulate others in our lives, and how quickly friendships between women can become intimate and then caustic. I also wanted to create a book with a bisexual main character, and the struggle with sex and identity, as I don't really see bisexuals represented in fiction or media that often."
Elle Nash On Writing As A Parent, Tom Spanbauer's Basement, and Her New Novel 'Animals Eat Each Other'
Interview by Rob Hart April 3, 2018
In: Elle Nash Interview Tom Spanbauer
The first page of Animals Eat Each Other knocked me on my ass. I was not surprised, as this was not the first time Elle Nash had knocked me on my ass.
We met around five years ago now, in Tom Spanbauer's basement in Portland. We were both there for his Dangerous Writing workshop (alums include Chuck Palahniuk, Suzy Vitello, and Monica Drake). The session was led by Tom and his partner Sage Ricci. We were each given the assignment to write three pages about a moment, after which we were different. And then we spent the weekend workshopping those pieces.
I sat between Elle and Tom. We were all so nervous. Everyone around the table—you could tell. Because we were all fans of Tom, but also, we were there to share something intimate and personal, and then dig even deeper into it, to find the beating pulse of the emotions underneath. We started by taking turns reading our pieces out loud and I was so enraptured by Elle's. I mean, everyone in the class brought it that weekend, but I remember thinking: I am lucky to be sitting next to her.
And now her debut novel is out and it is just excellent. The way she writes is like she's examining you, the reader. Publishers Weekly saw how good it was, bestowing a star upon it. Elle writes with an incredible amount of intensity and emotional honesty and, damn it, just read this book. I mean, read the interview first. But then: go.
So, we met, years ago, in Tom Spanbauer's basement. Which, for me, was a very special weekend, but can you tell me a bit about it from your perspective?
I feel like that weekend changed the course of my life. Before Tom's class, I had this goal of writing a science fiction novel, but I didn't have the skill set to do it. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know the first thing about writing, really, other than it was something that was important to me. I wrote my piece for class, and on the first day we all read them to each other. I remember feeling moved by your essay. I was so nervous. I had never really workshopped anything in my life before, and I looked up to Tom and Sage. Everyone in the class wrote so well. I remember going back to the place I was staying that first night, thinking about how terrible my essay was. It was so bad. I seriously considered that perhaps I was not made to be a writer, that I couldn't do it. That I should give up and quit writing forever. I cried for a while and then began to rewrite my essay, keeping in mind some of the things we'd discussed in class. I learned so much. I think that weekend was when I realized that you could also publish stories in literary magazines. I just didn't know anything about the publishing world, that people ran their own magazines, that people went to school to get fine arts degrees related to writing, that you could start your own magazine. It was the introduction of that life to me.
What attracted you to Tom's style, and Dangerous Writing in general?
I didn't know people could write this way—about feelings, people, relationships. About every day interactions.
Like most people I had first heard about him from Chuck Palahniuk. I remember obsessively researching everything I could about Tom on the net. Back then I felt like I couldn't find much, but there was an email you could contact about his Dangerous Writing class. I sent an email inquiring about the class, but never heard back. I bought his book In The City of Shy Hunters. Like most of his books, they are able to elicit such an intense emotional response from me. He has a way of slowing down time that feels painful, but in a good way. I didn't know people could write this way—about feelings, people, relationships. About every day interactions. I love science fiction, but as a writer, world-building also felt so daunting, and what I really loved about writing was this emotional aspect, was examining how people interrelate. Tom's writing revealed that world for me. I read I Loved You More when I got home from class. Man, I bawled through the last forty pages of that book. I still think about his short story "Sea Animals" on a weekly basis. It's been like five years!
The story that you shared there, did you ever try to get it published or develop it further? I tried with mine but it almost feels too intimate to that space. I kind of want to leave it there.
I did, but I kind of wish I'd waited. I sent it to a place called Exterminating Angels. I remember back then thinking "This is so good now," but when I go back to read it, I don't like it. I should have given myself more time to develop it further, to develop my skill set further, to give the subject of the essay more depth.
What was the nexus point for Animals Eat Each Other? Where did it come from? For a work of fiction it feels incredibly intimate.
I was in a six-month online writing workshop lead by Rae Gouriand and wrote this short story there. Everything about the story kept asking me to expand it, and I just sort of realized that I wouldn't be able to tell it in just a few pages. I really wanted to analyze non-traditional relationships, with an eye on what manipulation can do to people, how we manipulate others in our lives, and how quickly friendships between women can become intimate and then caustic. I also wanted to create a book with a bisexual main character, and the struggle with sex and identity, as I don't really see bisexuals represented in fiction or media that often.
How did it feel when you got your PW star?
Oh my god, at first, I was like, "What does this mean?" and my friend Amanda and I googled it, trying to figure it out. I honestly didn't know. I'm so bad at this. I have a hard time receiving praise. I got nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year and got the letter in the mail, and at first I swear I thought it was spam. I knew what the Pushcart was, but I guess I didn't know why they would be mailing me. I was like, "Why are they asking me to send them things I've written? This is so confusing." When I figured out that a starred review is really special it felt validating in a way, but I still can't believe it. I'm really glad the book is resonating!
You had a kid recently—how has that changed you as a writer, from process to perspective?
My process has changed in that I write frantically now while the baby naps. I am forced to slow down a lot now, to be patient, and more mindful, which I appreciate. I don't get long stretches of time anymore to get into my work. That will change one day, which is fine, it just takes time. One difference I can't shake is that I feel like my ability to think really deeply has totally changed due to constant sleep deprivation and residual hormones or stress or from breastfeeding. I am not sure why, but I do think it's from exhaustion. All that is just transitory stuff though, it's not a big deal to me. It's just been interesting!
What's next?
I'm working on another book! And hopefully some short stories in the interim. That might take a while.
QUOTED: "The work as a whole is overshadowed by Lilith's unrelenting narcissism, which prevents the reader from forming any empathy with her point of view."
"a self-indulgent novel about a self-indulgent character in which titillation trumps insight."
Nash, Elle: ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Nash, Elle ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER Dzanc (Adult Fiction) $16.95 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-938604-43-0
Nash's debut novel explores the territory between attraction and obsession with a healthy dose of apathy thrown in for good measure.
Lilith is a poster child for disaffected youth growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Colorado Springs in the early 2000s. A recent high school graduate, she lives in a dilapidated trailer park with her clinically depressed mother and, in between her shifts at RadioShack, spends her time drinking Robitussin and stealing her mother's Vicodin. A bitterly precise observer of the monoculture that surrounds her, Lilith is committed to whiling away her young adulthood in a haze of drugs, sex, late '90s shock rock, and plaintive tattoos until she meets Matt and Frankie, young parents in search of something new to spice up their relationship. What follows is an escalating series of encounters in which characters get tattoos, do drugs, have increasingly violent sex, and explore the boundaries of possession as Lilith tries to fill the "daddy-shaped hole" left by her father's death. Lilith's name is given to her by Frankie as a symbol of her "wild demon woman" nature, and, as the relationships among the trio deepen, the symbolism of this identity as an anti-Eve is played upon. Lilith is attracted to Frankie's poise and wants to possess her friendship; she is obsessed with Matt's eros and wants to possess his love; she is in turn both the dominant and the submissive in a series of sexually manipulative encounters with her friend Jenny; her RadioShack boss, Sam; her unnamed high school boyfriend; and Matt's friend Patrick. In short, she "[makes] a chaotic mess" of both her life and the lives of everyone around her. As the novel progresses, the characters' predictable changes of heart and the power dynamics that drive the plot become muddled by Nash's insistent return to Lilith's mantra of low self-esteem and a kind of hot-topic Satanism that stands in for a philosophical investigation into Lilith's inner life. While Nash's choice of the first-person narrator gives us a believable and at times engaging window into a specific subset of the early 21st century's version of corporate nihilism, the work as a whole is overshadowed by Lilith's unrelenting narcissism, which prevents the reader from forming any empathy with her point of view or sympathy for her eventual vulnerability.
A self-indulgent novel about a self-indulgent character in which titillation trumps insight.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nash, Elle: ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248201/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e86db51. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248201
QUOTED: "This is a slender novel, not even 150 pages, but its emotional territory is enormous and largely unmapped. Karolina Waclawiak’s How to Get Into the Twin Palms is comparable in its claustrophobic focus on a woman sinking instead of rising into young adulthood, but Nash’s insight is superior. Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl offers the reader an equal level of existential self-hatred, the same hole where an identity should be, but its urban setting renders foreign to many readers what’s familiar in Nash’s novel."
Appetite for self-destruction: Elle Nash’s Animals Eat Each Other
By Katharine Coldiron.
Elle Nash, Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books, 2018)
What separates a diary from a chronicle? Is it a feeling of intimacy? The presence of shortcuts taken by the writer, who knows her own life and does not require explanations of familiar people or places? Is it a mood? Or could it be that reflection and analysis, an ability to process the events, is missing from a diary but present in a chronicle?
I puzzled over this distinction many times as I read Elle Nash’s novel, Animals Eat Each Other, as I marvelled at its odd, wry chapter titles and the economy of its language, as I fretted over its obsession with obsession and the avoidable mistakes the narrator kept making. Nash is the author of a handful of chapbooks and an editor at Witch Craft Magazine and Hobart, but this is her first novel. The book feels like a diary, told as it is with a kind of assumed affinity between the reader and the narrator: as if the narrator knows that the reader will understand and forgive her, no matter what she reveals. But the narrator also performs a great deal of psychological and practical analysis of the novel’s events, which keeps the narrative from meandering. This dimensional analysis recalls Auster at his best, but it accompanies a hair-raising tale of sex and drugs and self-harm and self-hatred well outside the safe boundaries of New York Lit.
The story of the novel is simple: over the course of a summer in Colorado, a young woman meets and becomes sexually involved with a couple, Matt and Frankie (Frances), until various instabilities end the relationship. While the narrator pursues sex, submission, and home tattooing with Matt and Frankie, she also sleeps with her male manager and her female co-worker and tries to wangle information and attention from the husband of another couple. She becomes obsessed with Matt, eventually meeting with him alone, thus violating the rules of the arrangement she and Matt and Frankie have. After the truth comes out, Frankie and Matt both reject her (separately).
The narrator is nameless aside from the name Frankie bestows on her: Lilith. The first wife, the first fornicator. Made of her own stuff, not a man’s. This reference is meaningful, but it stands mostly alone in a novel tied more strongly to the real details of life than to myths or symbols.
Matt and Frankie took me on a ride up to Gold Camp Road in Matt’s brand new Chevy Malibu. We stopped at a gas station first and grabbed snacks, bottles of diet Mountain Dew and ropes of beef jerky. I got ranch-flavored sunflower seeds even though, after a few dozen, the ranch dust flavor started to taste like vomit. I would eat them until the tip of my tongue split with tiny blisters.
At every turn, “Lilith” finds opportunities to harm herself. Her diet is poor, she drinks and does drugs with frightening frequency and volume. She uses cough syrup to go to sleep. She picks at her skin and the pickings scab over and she picks at the scabs. It’s not clear what has led her to the psychological state that nudges her into Matt and Frankie’s lives—that is, what has caused her to harbour such self-loathing, so many unhealthy physical and emotional behaviours—but her self-analysis is crystalline and unemotional.
I took another drink of the shochu, bitter like rubbing alcohol, and wondered if I might go blind, before putting my cigarette out on my forearm.
The pain was sharp and I breathed it in, like lighting illuminating a dark landscape. It was exciting to forget I hated myself so much.
Rarely has self-harm been described with such clarity, but the tone is, let us say, not uplifting. Animals Eat Each Other is a carefully constructed book, a story that performs twists and offers detailed scenes that seem random nonlinear, but are not. The more I revisited the book, the more I admired its care and intention. However, it’s hardly a book for everyone. The events and actions depicted in this novel are almost universally unpleasant, even repellent, and some readers may have difficulty feeling sympathy for Lilith’s self-sabotaging behaviour. For other readers, none of this will be a problem, especially when the narrator’s insights are so exceptional: “What I did then is what I continued to do for years. I chose sex. I chose validation, attention, over any actual chance at love from friends or even boyfriends.”
In fact, something else I began to wonder as I got deeper into the diary/chronicle of this novel is whether a dependency exists between its ugly aspects and its insights. It has plenty to say about the sexual expectations that burden women, the difficulty of making sense of female desire when a woman spends her whole life being told how she’s supposed to look and feel in order to be desirable—not desired, not desiring—during sex. These truths are ugly, but necessary.
I was never taught that women were inherently weaker than men. I had learned it through sex, through Matt’s fist at my neck. Men are taught to manipulate the world around them. Women are taught to manipulate men.
Is it possible that without destabilising two separate marriages, Lilith would not have learned to say this, outright, what so many women feel but cannot verbalise? Would she understand how physical self-harm helps a girl feel better without having harmed herself, without describing it to the reader so viscerally? Perhaps the ugliness of Lilith’s life and the beauty of her insight are two sides of the same coin.
Near the end of the novel, Lilith finally gets what she wants: she has sex with Matt alone, in his car. I read this passage again and again, unsure of its objective meaning, aside from what it meant to me, how I would individually interpret the scene if I were analysing it in a literature class. The condom they are using breaks, and suddenly everything is different. “Matt was still the same person. But there was something that finally felt cold in me, a shutdown.” What they are doing with each other seems less like a game and, suddenly, the obsession and the excitement drain away, leaving behind the possibility that Matt will have knocked up a girl he doesn’t love. Somehow, choking Lilith nearly to unconsciousness, fucking her until she bleeds, provoking Frankie until she is carted off to jail for domestic violence—none of that has the capacity to make them stop or think or behave rationally. But a broken condom does.
This passage reminded me of all the messy sexual encounters in my own life: the unresolved sexual affair with my best friend’s ex-boyfriend; the night I suspect a drunk high school friend might have raped me if I hadn’t smiled, joked, and pushed him ever-so-lightly away; the time I was in bed with a woman and discovered we were being watched through my window by her boyfriend, who was her absent father’s age. The strange, awkward, incredibly painful end of Lilith’s encounter with Matt and Frankie felt much sloppier than a novel’s conclusion theoretically should, and I think that’s why it felt so brilliant, so true. Its lack of resolution felt real enough to get under my skin, not just into my brain.
Perhaps it’s the messiness of this ending that gives me the sense of a shadow story on the other side of this novel. It reminds me of the feeling I had when reading Thicker Than Water, the novel Kathryn Harrison released five years before her memoir The Kiss. Both books cover the same territory (an incestuous affair between a father and daughter), but one is “fiction” and the other nonfiction. Initially, it seems, Harrison needed the scrim of a novel to tell her terrible story, but eventually she found the strength to tell it truly. I wonder if Nash will do the same. I have no proof or personal knowledge that Animals Eat Each Other is the same kind of scrim as Thicker Than Water, but the feeling of a ghost life, a true story moving along beside this novel as it unfolds, is very strong.
This is a slender novel, not even 150 pages, but its emotional territory is enormous and largely unmapped. Karolina Waclawiak’s How to Get Into the Twin Palms is comparable in its claustrophobic focus on a woman sinking instead of rising into young adulthood, but Nash’s insight is superior. Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl offers the reader an equal level of existential self-hatred, the same hole where an identity should be, but its urban setting renders foreign to many readers what’s familiar in Nash’s novel. The approach of quarter-life for Millennial women turned out a lot of horrifying stories in the late nineties and early two-thousands (I can tell you a few myself), and these are just beginning to be tapped for literary inspiration. The diaries/chronicles of those stories are finally being written. I can’t wait to read more of them, especially if they’re as expertly written as Animals Eat Each Other.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., The Guardian, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator. Full disclosure at kcoldiron.com.
Elle Nash's Animals Eat Each Other
by John Domini
Elle Nash
Animals Eat Each Other
(Dzanc Books, 2018)
In her debut novel, Animals Eat Each Other, Elle Nash has no interest in testing boundaries; instead, she crashes right through:
The one who tied me to the coffee table was his girlfriend, Frances. Her hand was on my thigh, small and smooth and birdlike, occasionally caressing back and forth across my leg as I lay on my back, pressed into the living-room carpet. Frances was naked.
A later scene:
Frankie moved her hand to reach inside of me. The sharp point of her fingers was uncomfortable at first. After that. . . I seemed to pour into her hands. . . I focused on the parts that did feel good, like Frankie’s lips against mine at the same time that Matt’s hands enveloped my body.
To appreciate Animals Eat Each Other, a reader had better bring an appetite—pun intended. Sex is set out on a platter, front and center, and is the book’s overriding concern (“I’m pretty sure,” the narrator muses, “the meaning of life is about sex”), which makes the text rather a rarity these days: characters dripping with unapologetic want, and repeatedly pursuing that want, and all of this in a book that the folks in “marketing” would have no choice but to term “literary.”
Which is another way of saying that the fucking in this book never lacks for mind-fucking. If Elle Nash were simply doing porn, she’d omit the detail that before the orgy gets underway, Frankie and Matt’s baby is asleep just down the hall. Also the scene features an insight that’s pretty much a buzz-kill: “The sex became an absurd echo in which I was a caricature of myself.” Full of such subtle awareness, the rutting in Animals has only one recent comparison I can think of: Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016). For others, I go back to early Mary Gaitskill, and then to Kundera and other brainy celebrants of the ’60s sexual revolution.
What’s more, what drives Nash’s plot is the same as what drives Proust’s, namely, obsession. Her unnamed narrator whips herself into a frenzy over married Matt. After he dubs her a “wild demon woman,” she tries to live up to the role, even playing sexy dress-up with his wife. Still, she knows herself better, just 93 pounds, still testing her limits with tattoos in sensitive spots; indeed, her 18th birthday provides an early plot-point, since it allows for trysts with her supervisor at Radio Shack. But her first visit to Matt and Frankie’s tiny place leaves her feeling like “a whole new thing;” she gets fresh tattoos, plus certain benefits, and earns a significant name: “Lilith.” This mythic creature, however, goes on to wreak her worst havoc internally. The narrator can’t control her surging infatuation, and Matt likewise confesses (shouting in her face, at a rave) “STRONG FEELINGS,” and in time “there was nothing I didn’t want to give him.” Meantime, though, the wife remains “in charge. . . the center of the mandala,” and so the husband and his Lilith get little more than brushes with intimacy.
The situation feels so unsettling that, about halfway along, the girl seeks the counsel of her best friend Jenny. Sex with Matt, she worries, feels “so intense. . . I could fuck him forever.” But Jenny dismisses the concern perfectly, given the context: “So? I could fuck you forever.”
A fine quip between another pair of animals eating each other. Also, the supervisor at Radio Shack has had both girls, and that trois may yet arrange a ménage. Nonetheless Nash, while entirely clear about who’s zoomin’ who, and when and where, continues to strike an admirable rhetorical balance. She falls into neither the euphemisms of erotica nor the posturing of porn, and she keeps tossing in playful fillips. Occasionally she gives a laugh-line to other characters, like Jenny, but one way or another things steer clear of gravitas, one of the great pitfalls of writing about sex.
I did wince at a moment or two of ersatz Beat transcendence: “I’m in Jenny’s basement, tongue deep in all that is holy about her.” Nevertheless, I found myself swept up in the hothouse atmosphere—all the more intriguing for how few folks were in it.
The most impressive thing about this debut, the gambit that holds the most promise for the future, is the tight rein Nash keeps on her drama. There’s the narrator and her obsession, the fuck-buddy and a few others—and that’s it. “Lilith” shares a trailer with her widowed mom, and she acknowledges towards the end that the death of her other parent left a bad wound, a “daddy-shaped hole.” Crucially, however, this glimmer of self-awareness changes nothing. The parents remain offstage, the mother either at work or in a Percocet haze, and the novel shares likewise little about its setting, Colorado Springs. The place seems all threadbare fringes, battered malls in which the players—with the help of X or vodka or, showing off nasty tattoos, some chat about Satanism—either tantalize each other or hook up. The text’s narrow social spectrum, I’m sure, would nettle another sort of critic, the kind who wonders why we should care about a few pretty white teenagers too drugged-up and sex-crazed to realize they’re nothing but fresh meat on Big Capital’s chopping block.
But that’s precisely the point, the tragedy. Even the narrator’s moments of sorry self-knowledge—more and more as things go on—risk getting smothered under the scuzzy milieu. You don’t want to know about Matt’s and Frankie’s kitchen, and as for anything more uplifting, for instance the nearby Garden of the Gods—uh, I think we had, like, a field trip. . .
As the original Lilith was cast out of Eden, this one has been banned from the American cornucopia (come to think, wasn’t Colorado Springs a gold-rush town?). What she wants from Matt, ultimately, isn’t just to fuck forever; rather her craving is for something more sustaining, for being “part of a young nuclear family,” and not just “a girl who lived in her mom’s trailer and snorted her mom’s Vicodin.” Thus while the story ends with the narrator booted out of her surrogate family, the novel opens outward triumphantly, for it proves this girl somehow escaped her dead-end rounds of groping and snogging. Starting early on, she has flash-forwards to the present, “years later,” when social media allows her to spy on Matt and Frankie. Online, the couple claims undiluted “matrimonial bliss,” with no trace of a demon woman, so who can blame this one for writing the truth? To that end, considering the narrator’s escape from her neediness and mess, I do think Animals Eat Each Other could’ve used some hint of a helping hand. Some decent adult connection deserved mention, perhaps a friend who worked in the library, someone to offer a more stable counterpoint to all the rudderless rutting. But that’s enough about what this book doesn’t have. Animals Eat Each Other is a swift, stealthy, ticklish, and altogether satisfying piece of work.
QUOTED: "This is a complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire."
Animals Eat Each Other
Elle Nash. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-938604-43-0
Nash’s brilliant and visceral debut novel follows a young woman’s increasingly complicated relationship with a young couple. The 19-year-old narrator, unnamed at first, has just finished high school and is working at a RadioShack in Colorado Springs. She has no plans for the future and lives with her largely absent mother, from whom she steals painkillers. One day at work, she meets Matt and Frankie, and the three bond over tattoos and metal music. From there, the relationship progresses quickly: Frankie names the narrator Lilith, and Matt and Lilith begin having sex while Frankie watches. Lilith simultaneously feels a sense of belonging and a sense of disembodiment: “I started to be it, started to be Lilith, whoever she was. Something about me slipped away, a letting go.... I could only see him and Frankie, myself an object to bring them pleasure. Benign neglect, how peonies thrive.” But the same recklessness that draws the three together eventually forges cracks in their shared relationship; Frankie is controlling, and Lilith’s forceful desire fuels the fire: “I wanted to know what it would be like to carry a bad habit all the way through.” Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith’s volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. This is a complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire that gives new meaning to the famous quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 01/08/2018
Release date: 04/03/2018
Hardcover - 978-1-945814-07-5