INTERVIEW : Stephanie Grant by Lauren C. Johnson
Disgust
Stephanie Grant
Scuppernong Editions
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
When I was an incoming student at American University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, the second- and third-year students offered the same advice: “No matter what, you must take Stephanie Grant’s workshop.”
I can remember walking up the steps of the College of Arts and Sciences Building, sometime in my first month of classes, and running into Grant and author Richard McCann, who was also a professor at AU. It was September 2014, and though I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to study with either author, I remember thinking—in the rather giddy, fangirl way I’m prone to—that I was in the presence of literary giants.
And I was right. In addition to her new book, Disgust: A Memoir (Scuppernong Editions, November 2021), Grant is the author of two novels: The Passion of Alice (Houghton Mifflin 1995), and Map of Ireland (Scribner 2008). The Passion of Alice was nominated for Britain's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. Grant has also written numerous short stories and essays, with pieces published in The New York Time’s Modern Love Column, The New Yorker, and Lithub, to name a few.
In Grant’s fiction workshop, I truly began to appreciate the power of well-crafted sentences. Grant taught me to think more deliberately about structure and sound; I added words like “plosives” and “sibilance” to my literary lexicon. On the first day of workshop, Grant told her students she was “as serious as a heart attack” about our writing, and in kind, she expected us to treat our work with the same level of commitment.
Grant’s commitment to precise, deliberate writing is evident in her memoir, Disgust. Told through a series of connected, prose poem-like essays, Disgust explores intergenerational trauma, mental illness, and female self-disgust in a world that’s hostile toward women—especially queer women and femmes. Through sharing her lived experiences, as well as meticulous academic research, Grant asks readers to consider all that might provoke our personal and collective disgust. And what might we learn by pondering disgust’s opposite?
Ultimately, Grant’s memoir is about so much more than disgust itself. As author Jacqueline Woodson writes, Disgust is “a deep and brilliant gaze into all it truly means to feel, to be human, to love.” I couldn’t agree more with this assessment. Eager to talk to Grant about her new book, I reached out for an email interview. Here is our conversation in full.
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Lauren C. Johnson: You are the author of two beautiful novels: The Passion of Alice and Map of Ireland. When you set out to write an exploration of disgust, how did you know memoir was the right form for this work? I write both fiction and nonfiction, too, so I’m always interested in hearing about the decisions an author makes when choosing how to tell a story.
Stephanie Grant: I think I have spent the last two decades going in and out of a crisis of faith about fiction. This might simply be me coming to grips with the fact that the novel is an incredibly demanding form, and I’m not quite up to the challenge. It’s also true that years ago I heard either David Shields or Philip Lopate discuss “the groaning contrivance of fiction,” on an AWP panel, and I have not been able to shake the revelation tucked into that expression. It’s also true that when cataclysmic political events take place— say, 9/11 and the Trump election in 2016—fiction begins to look like the long way around; the world is ending, and so I must be direct. Non-fiction offers that directness.
I think that when I was younger, novel-writing was appealing because novels weren’t arguments—I didn’t have to stake out a position. Novels are invitations to engage, emotionally and intellectually, with a host of issues at once. I remember when I was struggling with Map of Ireland, which took ten years to write, I complained to a writer friend that I wished I could just say what I had to say directly. Not invent a world from which readers could draw their own conclusions. She said—this was the writer Pearl Abraham who writes essays as well as fiction and has a very big brain—she said, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea, why don’t you write an essay about what you’re trying to say in the novel?’ And I was mortified into the realization that I was afraid to be that direct. I was writing about race and what we now call white fragility, and I was terrified.
Now as I approach 60, I’m more willing to take responsibility for what I think. Disgust isn’t an argument, but it makes claims, and I feel good about those claims. They were hard won.
LCJ: Admittedly, by asking the above question, I’m also trying to get at another question that feels rather basic: what was the impetus for writing this book?
SG: I started immediately after Trump got elected. What I say in the book’s opening is precisely true: I’d tried to eliminate disgust from my feeling life, and then I was overcome with disgust for Trump and the collective, national expression of racism and misogyny that swept him into office. And then he made use of disgust as an organizing tool during (and before) his presidency: he very publicly shared (and stoked) his followers’ disgust. His footprint is relatively small now—I excised him from the book as other issues—including female self-disgust—took over. And of course, who wants to read another word about him?
LCJ: Disgust: A Memoir is raw, intimate, and unflinching and that’s what I admire most about this book (in addition to the precise language.) Were there any parts in particular that you resisted writing because a.) you were concerned about overwhelming—even disgusting—the reader? Or b.) you found them overwhelming—even disgusting—to write? If so, how did you overcome this resistance?
SG: Well, I ended up cutting most of the Trump material for precisely this reason: many (exhausted) readers would have turned away from his presence. But also: I grew up in a household where we didn’t talk about—let me search for a euphemism—bathroom behavior. Because of this, “the universal disgust object” has always been a challenge for me. Writing the book has shifted that. All the reading and thinking about disgust has helped dilute its power. For instance, when I learned that the January 6th insurrectionists pooped in the Halls of Congress, I was so excited to write about it! This little-reported fact felt like a gift!
LCJ: Back to that point about precise language—I admire the labor each word does to connect each vignette, fragment, and chapter. The word “collusion,” for example, jumped out at me. It felt intentional to place a vignette about 45’s presidency—riddled with scandals and collusions—next to a vignette about a kind of intimate collusion. Could you share something about your process for finding the right language to stitch these vignettes or fragments together?
SG: More than any book I’ve written, Disgust draws on my own personal lexicon—collusion was taught to me by my therapist with whom I did a lite version of psychoanalysis (yes, a couch; but only once a week). That process—maybe 14 years?— has been foundational to the way I think about our feeling lives. And of course, Catholicism and its own lexicon is in there, and politics, and feminism, and literary study.
I did spend an enormous amount of time moving the pieces around, trying out various juxtapositions. I’m following in the footsteps of some brilliant essayists who use this method or one like it—Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso. Eula Biss really broke open the world for me when I first read her. But, if I can say from the experience of putting this book together, it looks easier to find the right juxtapositions than it is to do! The book took four years to write, and it takes a minute to read. So, lots of trial and error and listening to the way the sound of the words resonated, but also to meanings. Certainly, meanings appeared as I wrote and rewrote; meanings that I had not at first seen or even intended. Which has been insanely pleasurable, the discoveries.
LCJ: Back to that point about the word “collusion.” Would you say it’s unavoidable for the political to touch, in some way, all our personal relationships?
SG: I would agree whole-heartedly with that statement. We live and love and have sex and make families and establish friendships in the world. Of course, we are affected by the ways power gets enacted in that world. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can create a relationship or family that political realities don’t touch.
LCJ: In my copy of the book, I’ve underlined (and drawn hearts around) this statement:
“...perhaps because we are female, perhaps because we are, each of the four, daughters of flawed mothers; and perhaps because, against all reason, we have persisted in these bodies, whose contagion of meaning appears to be without end.”
In which particular ways to do you feel that female and femme bodies are intimate with disgust?
SG: You know my editor, the brilliant and warm and funny Steve Mitchell, suggested we end the book with the “Guardian of the Mouth” essay, and so that line is now the book’s final sentence. That was a great call he made. I’m glad you like that sentence—the pile up of fricatives and plosives!—I like it too.
I’m kind of stunned by the ongoing intensity of misogyny directed at female and femme bodies. I remember one night when I was teaching, I returned late to my office. It was exam time (pre-Covid) and students were all over the building, studying together. Two young women were working at a table they’d dragged into the hallway. While I was fussing with my keys to open the door to my office, I overheard one of them say softly to the other, ‘Why do they hate us so much?’ And I just slid my eyes in their direction, and we all three just looked at one another.
Which is to say, it’s very hard for women and femmes to avoid self-disgust in this culture. Part of the argument of the book is that disgust helps sustain categories of opposition, and I think female bodies and femmes are greeted with disgust BOTH when they inhabit and sustain the male/female opposition and when they depart from it— when they challenge it. So, lose, lose.
LCJ: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out how your memoir is quite humorous in a lovely, understated kind of way, from the horror of finding a possum underneath the dining room table —“How did that freaking thing enter our house, our lives”— to the virtual fling with The Spy: a conservative war veteran with an unfortunate phobia of kissing and aversion to conventional sexual language. These lines in particular feel humorous in their relatability:
“...It turns out that I am not good at 1.) taking suggestions; 2.) postponing desire; 3.) taking suggestions about postponing desire.”
Do you think there’s a relationship between humor and disgust? Do you think humor makes disgust more palatable?
SG: I think humor makes our lives livable. It feels necessary in these times. My sister and I are very close—she is the one who started calling the spy The Spy. And she’s very funny, but also loves to laugh. When we get together, we laugh until we weep, fall over, pee on ourselves. (Which some of your readers might be disgusted by—my mentioning that.) We both have big, booming, Irish laughs that mortify our children. I think humor makes pain livable; we are often laughing about our past selves and various ridiculous things we’ve done and lived through.
I’m not sure that disgust invites humor as much as our efforts to avoid disgusting things. Trying to get dog poop off the bottom of my shoe, for instance. This might not be entirely your question, but I think it’s very important to laugh at ourselves. It’s life-affirming. And it’s a way to embrace the truth of ourselves, including especially painful truths.
LCJ: Throughout this memoir, the narrator explores the meaning of disgust and disgust’s opposites. In the final chapter, the narrator states, “disgust and love are not incompatible.” Then she argues, “there is no intimacy without disgust.”
Would you even say that disgust is an intrinsic—or perhaps better said, inevitable—part of the process of loving someone? Do you believe it’s possible for someone to “eliminate disgust from their repertoire of emotions”—as the narrator tried to do in the past—and live fully?
SG: I do think disgust is an inevitable part of loving someone. Often it comes as a result of real intimacy and maybe signals the need for space, for a boundary. But that space is always being negotiated. Overwhelming disgust is also, I think, a product of trauma. And who among us is not traumatized? I know that sounds flip or perhaps disrespectful of what I think of as Big T, Trauma—namely physical violence, including state violence. But I’ve come to see that most of us suffer from one form or another of Little T, trauma, growing up in a family. Again, it sounds like I’m being flippant, but I’m not. Zadie Smith has a great essay about this called, “The Bathroom.” The family is “always” an “event of some violence,” she says. She’s talking of emotional violence primarily. I think the mistake I’ve made as a parent was thinking that, if I did things “right,” my kids wouldn’t experience the family that way.
LCJ: Now that this book is in the world, do you think you’ll continue to read and write about disgust? In other words, I’d love to hear what you’re reading and thinking about now. :)
SG: In terms of writing, I’m working in a similar way. Small sections—prose poem-like if not actual prose poems. The subject matter is one of the subjects of Disgust: mental illness in the family. I’ve started playing with pseudonyms, each family member gets a bunch of pseudonyms —some more like nicknames—and they are accumulating in interesting ways. They both conceal the characters, but also, as they continue to pile up, reveal them. Pseudonym as metaphor! Lol. It’s a character flaw that I laugh at my own jokes as much as I do.
Right now, it’s called The Feeling Wheel, which is a reference to a visual aid that therapists sometimes use, think about a color wheel with every shade of feeling chronicled. I’ve friends who are like, Shame! That’s your next book! Now you’ve done Disgust, you must turn to Shame! But, of course, I already have.
Stephanie Grant is the author of two novels, The Passion of Alice (Houghton Mifflin) and Map of Ireland (Scribner). Her first work of nonfiction, Disgust: A Memoir, was published in October 2021 by Scuppernong Editions.
Grant’s writing has been nominated for Great Britain’s Orange Prize, the Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Fiction, and the Massachusetts Book Award. She’s received fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffee Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Revson Fellows Program for the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. Currently, she directs the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.
Her new memoir–Disgust: A Memoir–is available for purchase now.
Lauren C. Johnson is a writer living in San Francisco.
