Stephanie LaCava’s latest novel comes with a merch line that features a box of matches. When you don’t just like the book, she reasons, you’ll be able to burn it. That wicked humour is something you’ll be able to guarantee from LaCava, whose work performs surgery on pain, desire and youth as they play out inside the culture industries – often as commodities. At the center of her narratives you’ll typically discover a jeune fille; a young woman who’s in desperate search of herself, but ultimately stays caught in a neverending swirl of withholding lovers, absent parents, and psycho-sexual tendencies as mapped onto her by others.

Within the case of LaCava’s first book, 2020’s The Superrationals, the protagonist is Mathilde – a gallery employee who follows her best friend to Paris, where she processes losing each of her parents as a teenager while critically surveying the high-end art world that reveres – after which exploits – her blank slate beauty. In I Fear My Pain Interests You, out next month via Verso, our lead is Margot – the young daughter of two famous musicians who, she discovers after crashing her bike and being rushed to hospital by a person known only as “Graves”, cannot feel physical pain. In each cases, the young girl is a product and a vessel. And though a lot hinges on flesh-and-blood, veering into Cronenbergian body horror in some instances, in the long run, LaCava’s concern is more often with fantasy and projection – things that aren’t there.

On the identical note, Margot and Graves change into “a thing” and mostly spend their time fucking and watching movies, particularly the features that might have been shown on the 1968 edition of Cannes, which was cancelled amid controversy surrounding the Langlois Affair against a backdrop of general discontent in France. The presence of popular culture in IFMPIY basically gestures towards lots of LaCava’s own touchstones, which include French 60s writers like Françoise Sagan and Marguerite Duras, whose protagonists reconcile their desires for freedom with the supposed rules of convention. While a well-recognized streak runs through LaCava’s work, it comes from a spot of private affinity. When LaCava was a baby her family was expatriated from Boston to France through her father’s job, and he or she grew up in Le Vésinet – a small, quiet town about an hour outside Paris, near the Palais Rose. “It wasn’t exactly a spot where you imagine meeting young other friends on the street, for instance, let alone when you’re American,” she tells me. “So it was very lonely.”

Unable to be out on this planet, books became LaCava’s constructing blocks. “You may have no control over anything as a baby, not even the bedspread,” she says. “You’re in another person’s world, each emotionally and physically – except if you’re reading.” This tendency towards imagination and escape has shaped her writing, which regularly aestheticises its surroundings, plays fast and loose with time and place, and presents reality as something apart from what’s happening directly in front of you. All these forces underpin I Fear My Pain Interests You, which uses the ‘poor little wealthy girl’ not as a well for sympathetic indulgence, but as a mirror for the darkness and violence round her.

The themes of the book – pain, relationships, family – are very loaded when you think about them outside of a fictional context, but in I Fear My Pain… they change into almost numb on the surface. Pain is defined by its absence, and the identical goes for her ex-boyfriends and members of the family. There’s a disconnect between physicality and feeling throughout. Could you tell me a bit concerning the genesis of the thought for the book? Was emotional pain, and present it, a giant a part of your considering on the time?

Stephanie LaCava: The unique seed was a clipping from a study about congenital analgesia, the disorder of not feeling pain, that was done on the Salk Institute nearly ten years ago. I printed it out and kept it folded in my bag. It must be somewhere in my notebooks. I can still see the image of the featured girl.

In order that was the initial [spark], but I don’t think it’s very me to be direct. My work is all the time about what’s not there. I’m at the purpose where I need to disown my first book now, but there was one critique about it that stood out to me. Someone said ‘probably the most remarkable thing about this ‘memoir’ is that it comprises so little of Stephanie herself’ – and I feel like that twisted absence is something that goes through all my writing.

The best way you write is interesting. You don’t dance around things in any respect, but you do create this gap for people to project their very own feelings into.

Stephanie LaCava: I’d love to say that it’s intentional, however it’s mostly intuitive. I also think it happens because a lot of my writing is concerning the psychology of what goes on inside relationships, and between people. Projection and fantasy. Often the events that inform our decisions are things we don’t actually witness or see, which is an interesting thing to take into consideration.

“The world at large is filled with landmines. Living, being, existing: it sucks. So, why not make it pretty to take a look at? I’m joking but… ” – Stephanie LaCava

There’s quite a bit in your writing that jogs my memory of French 60s novels too. There’s quite a bit about youth, beauty, pleasure and subjugation. Françoise Sagan’s female protagonists are all the time getting themselves in doomed romantic entanglements but at the identical time they’ve such romantic notions of their very own lives – the whole lot ought to be fun! an adventure! – that you just rarely see them lament anything too deeply. I feel like Margot has a rather more bitter, millennial tackle that. Could you talk a bit concerning the role of irreverence in your personal work?

Stephanie LaCava: People have said that to me before, about Françoise Sagan. These [protagonists] are young women, and there’s an adolescent naivete concerning the way they inhabit the world – which I believe I even have too, although I probably shouldn’t. 

I believe it also speaks to my interest in circling the thought of the young woman getting used to sell things – even her angst is a component of [her marketability]. We have now a complete school of singers now who play on that ‘sad girl’ style, for instance. Or I believe of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s All the pieces I Need, I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Web as We Know It.

Perhaps it’s a survival mechanism for teenage confusion too – this honing of an aesthetic, a type of control of 1’s surroundings before you might be totally independent. Cut to the mythic first book mentioned above. The world at large is filled with landmines. Living, being, existing: it sucks. So, why not make it pretty to take a look at? I’m joking but…

That’s where it starts to overlap with the ‘dissociative feminism’ trend, perhaps.

Stephanie LaCava: I don’t wish to be a component of that trend, but I do need to say – and folks have told me this – that in all of my writing the characters appear to be disassociating to a point. There’s a level of distance, perhaps, is a greater word. Again, it’s not intentional, it’s intuitive, and it’s probably since it’s the alternative of how I live my life. As a substitute, I try to do this inside the characters: keep a distance and remain aloof outside the story.

Margot is largely a ‘nepo baby’ in probably the most unlucky way, in that she’s inherited her parents’ dysfunctions versus their fame. The ‘poor little wealthy girl’ trope rears its head slightly here and there, but how did you discover attempting to weave that into Margot’s character without leaning into it an excessive amount of? Was that trope something you were wary of avoiding?

Stephanie LaCava: It’s a subject that actually interests me based on things I’ve observed and worlds I’ve passed through, and pertains to the reply to the query just above.

I used to be thinking about exploring ‘the daughter-of’ idea and the way that informs romantic entanglements. Do some men and girls date the kid of who they wish to be, so to talk? Needless to say. Perhaps a component of it’s wanting access to their connections. Perhaps a component of it’s wanting to have this fusion with the physical becoming of the thing the person created. It’s dark regardless of which way you have a look at it.

But the purpose of me doing that was not because I used to be like ‘here’s one other book concerning the ‘pretty little wealthy girl’. Again, there’s nothing more dangerous or sale-able than a young woman, and it plays out in a lot of alternative ways. Someone once said to me that my last book was type of like ‘having the ‘muse’ speak and lay bare the transactional mechanics of the culture scene’. This one too, but we moved from art to film and music [laughs]. I hope it’s seen more as that inversion than a gratuitous use of privilege and petty drama. There are lots of things I need to reveal and switch around.

With Margot, what were the belongings you were most thinking about looking through her position?

Stephanie LaCava: I used to be very inquisitive about this concept of coolness and success in subcultures, and the way or in the event that they might be maintained if [someone] reaches ‘success’ when it comes to mass appeal. It links back to the daughter-of idea and hitching oneself to a certain legacy in either direction. These are ideas I wanted to take a look at through Margot’s parents, after which through her.

In contrast, ‘Graves’ has no identity in any respect really.

Stephanie LaCava: And neither does The Director and that was on purpose. It’s a bit allegorical, too – putting this blanket name to the thing you do.

This sort of nomenclature also spills into gossip. How often do you hear someone referred to by their Instagram handle, for instance. Sometimes fake names are used whether it’s because you should keep a secret or can’t keep track of who everyone seems to be dating, in order that they change into ‘the banker’ or whatever. That, to me, is interesting.

Also this concept of Margot wanting to be an Actor. I feel such as you’d be hard pressed to search out a young woman of a certain generation who at one point didn’t think they desired to change into an actress. There’s lots of cultural reasons for that. It serves to take a look at the privileges surrounding certain sectors of the culture industry, and what it means to have ‘access’…

“A theme that comes up in my work is that it sometimes makes people uncomfortable for various reasons – physically even. Someone said to me, ‘you already know how they’ve feel-good books? You write feel-bad books – but that doesn’t make you not wish to read them’” – Stephanie LaCava

It seems like a really modern phenomenon to be confronted with that type of subject material and immediately interpret it as an endorsement, just by virtue of putting it in front of individuals. 

Stephanie LaCava: I’m not setting out to ascertain all of the boxes of things that ought to be written about. I’m thinking about highlighting the contradictions, and spotlighting an inability to take distance – to see these items accurately. To take a look at it at a surface level is totally missing the purpose. These [frameworks] are there for a reason. Even that it’s bothersome that they’re endorsed is worthy of writing about.

A theme that comes up in my work is that it sometimes makes people uncomfortable for various reasons – physically even. Someone said to me, ‘you already know how they’ve feel-good books? You write feel-bad books – but that doesn’t make you not wish to read them.’

But even after I sit in a room, my goal isn’t to make people feel comfortable, which, in fact, has its pitfalls. It’s hard for me to be chill, and you’ll be able to feel that within the in-between of the cold writing.

It seems like a refreshing antidote to the dominant ‘relatability’ narrative of the last decade.

Stephanie LaCava: Oh my god, there’s definitely none of that! I mean, I’ll make you laugh – but I’ll also make you vomit. 

The presence of popular culture within the book is interesting – Margot and Graves watch 60s movies together, her parents’ musical legacy follows her all over the place. Somewhat than being something latest, popular culture is all the time something from the past reaching forward. It makes the book quite hard to put in a selected time, however it also seems like a really current phenomenon – to be haunted by the past, each personally and culturally. How would you describe Margot’s relationship to popular culture?

Stephanie LaCava: Setting a book without signifiers has all the time been a giant thing for me, however it’s funny I didn’t think concerning the nostalgia aspect until now. I believe this book is a small exploration of culture industries across many years and generations, perhaps.

Was there something concerning the themes of French 60s cinema specifically that you just felt mirrored the facility dynamic between Margot and Graves?

Stephanie LaCava: I used to be more thinking about the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival of 1968. I used to be thinking about the festival being shut down in solidarity with what was happening in Paris. And – typical – [laughs] the movies that weren’t shown! Back to what you were saying before, I used to be like, let’s write about what wasn’t shown. Also, the politics of the book were essential to me to get in sideways through that. There are little fun things in it, like [anarchist political activist and writer] Emma Goldman’s address is the address where Margot lives in Latest York. There are all types of jokes and nods to things that I care about or wish to take into consideration throughout the book.

Could you talk a bit more concerning the role of dark humour within the book?

Stephanie LaCava: Dark humour and play may be very essential in all my work. The crazy thing about this book is it’s about pain, yes, but really about no pain, as you said. I really like the easy and complex absurdity of that. The name Graves is that this, as well. In French, it means severe, violent, serious. Margot meets this man in a graveyard. Graves is the name she puts in her phone, because she never gets a solution as to what his real name is.

Irreverence is a coping mechanism for me. Why blow something up little by little when you’ll be able to set it on fire? I’m not self-serious. Yes, I care about these anarchical leanings, and I actually wanted to focus on the emphasis on individualism in creating culture nowadays.

But, I also want there to be a type of levity to all of it, because we want levity.

“This book may be very violent. There’s lots of body fluids. It’s, to a point, body horror, but silently so” – Stephanie LaCava

The book made me think quite a bit about voyeurism, and our cultural fascination with women in pain in the primary place – especially when their narratives are romanticised or aestheticised. What do you’re thinking that it’s about these sorts of stories that appeals to people from a reader’s perspective?

Stephanie LaCava: Writing it to create a type of haptic response for any individual is initiating a type of voyeurism. It’s leaving a reader to a spot she or he would never get to otherwise, inside another person. I believe that’s where writing on the page of a book is different to filmmaking. I can explain these items without you watching them, and the voyeurism of that’s inside out moderately than outside in. This book may be very violent. There’s lots of body fluids. It’s, to a point, body horror, but silently so.

Yes, there’s a strangeness to the character of this book that feels very Cronenberg, very erotic.

Stephanie LaCava: Totally. Eroticism is the mystery, the unseen, the un-filled in, which is all of the things that my books are about. Hopefully, the erotic view from way up above where you’ll be able to’t even read the words, something about them on page is actively erotic, because so little is given.

Do you see fiction as an art form where pain might be examined and understood in ways in which aren’t possible through memoir or autofiction?

Stephanie LaCava: A part of my processing of the world has all the time been very evidence-based. Like, I don’t necessarily consider a) that I’m going to be OK and b) that what I’m seeing is accurate. I suppose some people do, however it’s not like that for me. I search for validation probably in all of the improper ways, as well.

It’s like when someone sends you a text and it says something affirming, you screenshot it, since you’re like ‘I am OK – look, there’s evidence!’ It’s on paper or it’s typed out, so now I do know.

It’s a really human thing I’m thinking about. Through fiction and storytelling you’ll be able to incite empathy and recognition, and I believe that’s essential. Whatever might be done to make us look closer at care.

I Fear My Pain Interests You might be released through Verso on 27 September. You possibly can pre-order it here