Suicide Blonde

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The diary of a death wish . . . Suicide Blonde doles out some bitter, valuable lessons.--- New Yorker

It’s never been possible in my life as an adult to go to church, in part because of those early years. I judge the sermons. I’m just really judgmental. And if the pastor voices any mixed feelings about gay marriage, etc., I can’t stay. Lost and Found Animals Part 11: N-Escolia Wilawispia Transitoria [NEWT] (Periscopia Microcosmica Gershgorniana) By Sid GershgorenSteinke: I like this provocation. Yes, it’s true. If I wear something designed by Calvin Klein or Yves Saint Laurent or (more likely) a designer influenced by them... How is this different than other (religious) designs made by men for women? I think you are right really. And the idea of how much or how little of the body to show, does that come from a female point of view or a male point of view... whether we are talking about modesty or showing skin. So touché. You are right! Daniel Kehlmann's Realism, Horror, Multiverse, and Unreliable Narration: You Should Have Left By Diego Gerard I’d also like to write something about my family history. As we’ve discussed, on my father’s side, I’m Lutheran; however, on my mother’s side I’m a direct descendent of William Miller, who was the founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. My grandfather was actually born in the Miller church. That history is on my mind right now. I’d like to write about people who are world builders—artists, writers, the better theologians—versus people who are world destroyers. Those two forces are so dominant. We’re in a moment when it seems possible that so many people will be given more rights and more justice, and that’s exciting. But we also have this very destructive and dark killing force in the world happening at the same time. I’d like to write about that. It’s what I’m thinking about. Contemporary artists and writers from Jennie C. Jones to Teju Cole consider Agnes Martin's influence and legacy

This is a coarse and disturbing novel. It is a hair shirt. But you put it on and wear it, because even though the novel makes you uncomfortable you want to find out what happens. DS: Apophatic theology, or negative theology—seeing God through darkness—has always been the theology in which I’ve been the most comfortable. This is the theology of St. John of the Cross, which considers God through what cannot be known about God. As I said earlier, my dad has been a chaplain for thirty years, and his model of ministering to dying people has been formative to me. It’s a model that says you should minister to the dying with respect to their fears about the unknowns of death. You shouldn’t tell them that everything’s going to be okay; instead, you should listen to their anger and their sorrow. That’s been a strong influence on where my faith is centered. Unknowing is the best way to approach the problem of God. I just think there’s so much spiritual energy in doubt. I can’t believe that anyone gets behind spiritual certainty, actually. That kind of certainty seems so dangerous to me. It goes so wrong when people believe they are sure about what God wants. Dismantling the things you think you know about God and yourself and other people seems to me a better way to be theologically engaged. To question your beliefs. To question what you think you know about the way God moves in the world. For me the only way I can have a relationship with divinity is through the unknown, through mystery. If your idea of divinity is leaning into the mystery, you’re more likely to find grace in a variety of places. In my fiction I have tried to make traditionally ugly places beautiful and filled with grace—garbage dumps, malls. I’ve always had that impulse to try to see things not the way the world sees them, but to see the spark of movement and divinity in what is considered to be darkness, ugliness. That makes the most spiritual sense to me. I'd read another of Steinke's more popular books, Suicide Blonde last year, but this one is much more substantial on every level. A rewarding experience for those with patience. Having said that, it’s not helpful to go around being angry all the time. You need to be responsible for it. The point of understanding your anger is to have less of it. For me, thinking about that and working to understand my anger led to a more expansive sense of myself and my own power. People call this book pretentious, over-the-top and self-conscious. Well they can go do that, but I liked the book. I'm not going to describe the events in the book because the review above did so already..., but I'll tell you why I liked it.Steinke: I do think the culture is still mainly interested in women in their run up to marriage and in their procreative capacity. This is true in regular life and in fiction. In their fifties and sixties men are seen to be in their prime, whereas women are already old. No one suggests that women should not menstruate, but menopause is seen as a problem that should be cut off and stopped. It’s just really sexist. Women are encouraged to stop growth in the first or second stage of adulthood and sort of freeze. I feel this pressure though I try to fight it off! Steinke: In my generation, most women were cut off from their mothers. In part because our mothers had lead lives that were limited because of what was possible for women at the time they came of age, and what was possible for my generation was more. And we resented our mothers for accepting limitations. I see this as wrong now, of course. I just read my mother’s journals—she has been dead for five years—and in one way they are the sad writings of a divorced women who blamed her problems on everyone else, but in another important way they are like The Handmaid’s Tale, a story of a woman beaten down by patriarchy. A Wished-For House With a Hideaway Nook". The New York Times. May 13, 2007 . Retrieved July 14, 2012. She is a graduate of Cave Spring High School, Goucher College, and the University of Virginia, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. [10] Steinke completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. [10] Career [ edit ] Writing [ edit ]

Jesse is young in Suicide Blonde, but you were also very young when you wrote it, so do you think there are times for exploration and experimenta- tion, and that there is a sliding set of guidelines that come to form as you grow as a person in a complex relationship with religion and parents and different cities or settings?Darcey Steinke is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. She grew up in upstate New York; Connecticut; Philadelphia; and Roanoke, Virginia. She is a graduate of Cave Spring High School, Goucher College, and the University of Virginia, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. She also completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Image: There’s a closeness to the church for clergy children that breeds both familiarity and an inclination to question, I hear you saying. I wrote Suicide Blonde when I was in my late ‘20s and my mother was a complicated and negative presence in my life then. She pushed me to marry a rich man, but she also wanted me to be a lawyer. The messages I got from her were confused, wounded, chaotic. She felt her life had gone wrong but she did not really know why. My own mother was so conflicted about work, and marriage, and what it was to be a female that she offered up a confusing array of hopes for me. She wanted me to work but then thought women should stay home with their children. She wanted me to be financially independent but then she wanted me to find a rich husband to take care of me. Image: I want to ask you another question related to that same desire to see and exist more expansively. In the book you detail your fascination with orca whales, and describe a trip you made to Washington State’s San Juan Islands to see the Southern Resident orcas who live in the Salish Sea. You write, “Whales are like God […] Not seeing them is just as important as seeing them.” You then quote Alan Watts as writing, “Here is the great difficulty […] in passing from the symbol and the idea of God and into God himself. It is that God is pure life, and we are terrified of such life because we cannot hold it or possess it, and we will not know what it will do to us.” How has this not seeing—this recognition of what cannot be held—altered or affected your way of being in the world?

a b c "Darcey Steinke". The Media Briefing. Archived from the original on February 4, 2013 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. Steinke teaches creative writing at Princeton University, the American University of Paris, and in the graduate programs at New School University and Columbia University. She previously taught at the University of Mississippi, where she was a writer-in-residence, and at Barnard College. Steinke lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the investigative journalist Michael Hudson, and her daught Darcey Steinke is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. She grew up in upstate New York; Connecticut; Philadelphia; and Roanoke, Virginia. She is a graduate of Cave Spring High School, Goucher College, and the University of Virginia, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. She also completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. At the zoom funeral for my uncle, my father’s brother, I watch my 85-year-old father. He is one of 30 relatives on the screen, each in their small rectangular box but it is his face, as the service progresses, that most compels me. He, along with my mother, were my first faces. Faces I struggled to understand and connect with as a tiny baby, even before my own memory began to unfurl. Since that time, I, myself, experienced a divorce and I saw how, by hard emotional work, it can be ok not just for the children of divorce, but for the partners as well. I mean divorce, as hard as it is, is not a problem, it’s actually a solution to a problem. So I don’t agree with Jesse anymore on this. I think divorce can lead to growth and healing, not only calcified pain. I mean everyone is always coming apart but everyone is also always coming together. Contributor Steinke: I think when I wrote Suicide Blonde , at twenty-eight, I was disappointed in love. We are raised as women to feel like love is going to be this huge thing that will make us completely happy and change our life for the better, forever. From the time we are teenagers romantic love is held up to us as an ideal. We diet, dye our hair, get waxed all so we can fall in love and start our life. Relationships are hard though, and complicated and messy. I was beginning to feel romantic love was bullshit when I wrote Suicide Blonde. Now I’d say love is a lovely thing, but that there is much too much pressure on romantic love for women, it’s seen as more important than anything else, meaningful work, friendships, and I think that’s wrong. It’s like femininity in general, it’s not implicitly bad, but there is just too much pressure on it and not enough other options. The love I am speaking of is love for the world, for the Earth and for all sorts of people, even ones we don’t know. Romantic love is not radical, but the kind of love I am hoping to move into and beam out, is.Sandy uses her childhood stuffed animals and the flying horses and unicorns in her fantasy novels to cope with the trauma of her kidnapping. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, these characters come to life. They are as real as her kidnapper. As real as Jesus. Sandy’s ordeal is brutal. Or said another way, it is realistic. The violence is not gratuitous or titillating. It is devastating. a b c d e f "Darcey Steinke, Michael Hudson". The New York Times. June 21, 2009 . Retrieved July 14, 2012. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.