Interview: Heidi Julavits
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Julia Severn, the protagonist of Heidi Julavits’s latest novel, The Vanishers, is not doing too well. Her symptoms and prescriptions number in the double digits, and yet no doctor has been able to confirm the origin — or even the nature — of her illness. It turns out, Julia’s affliction is an occupational hazard: As a talented initiate at the Workshop, a prestigious graduate program for psychics, she’s made herself vulnerable to the competitive ire of Madame Ackerman, a superstar psychic on the wane. Specifically, she is being psychically attacked. Julia’s attempts at shaking her attacker put her in contact with ambassadors from an obscure cultural practice that straddles the line between suicide and performance art.
eMusic’s Jess Sauer spoke with Julavits about the skeptic spectrum, what writers and mediums have in common, and what never to do when toting expensive vodka.
In another interview, you mentioned a book by Dion Fortune about defending oneself from psychic attacks. Did you decide to write about psychics and start doing research, or did reading books about psychics inspire you to write about them?
It was a totally accidental discovery. I’m pretty sure that I was researching Madame Helena Blavatsky, who was a famous medium. I wasn’t even interested in her mediumship; I was interested in theosophy, which is a spiritual movement. To be honest, I just wasn’t smart enough to quite get my head around what theosophy was. I kept reading and reading and reading. I think the problem was that I went to source texts. Madame Helena Blavatsky wrote this book called The Secret Doctrine, and I just couldn’t figure out what it was about. I was Googling around to figure out if somebody had written something like “Theosophy is this” in a very clarified paragraph, and somehow through doing that I landed on Dion Fortune. She sounded like an interesting person, so I clicked on her, and pretty soon discovered that she’d written this book, and the notion of psychic attacks sounded really interesting to me. I ordered it, and that was it. I was so taken with the idea. Not only that, but Dion Fortune writes in the beginning of the book that the reason she was interested in writing about psychic attacks was because she was psychically attacked by her mentor when she was an initiate at one of these occult lodges. So, I was not just attracted to the idea, but I felt like, “Oh my God, I was just given the beginning of my book.” I was given the entry point. So yeah, I owe a lot to Dion Fortune, and in fact I did go to a psychic after the book was done and asked her to contact Dion Fortune to find out if she approved of my use of her story, because you can be psychically attacked from beyond the grave. So I figured it’d probably be a good idea to get her approval.
What was the verdict?
I got it. She said that she thought the whole thing was very funny.
There are a number of novels about the power dynamics between teachers and students, but it seems like adding the psychic element gives you a really concrete way of examining them.
Right, there’s something literal about it. It’s a literal attack, instead of these stealthy manipulations that happen under the surface.
“Instead of just destroying your ego, I’m going to give you an actual rash.”
Yeah, exactly. I think I’m always interested in the prickly dynamics that are fostered by smaller communities, and academia is a well-trodden territory in literature. There are a lot of books about it. I think that’s why the psychic attack lens appealed to me. It gave me a skewed, more unusual entry point to a world that otherwise would be a challenge for me to write about in any original way. Other people are more crafty than I am, but I’m not crafty enough.
There’s a parallel between creative writing MFA programs and the Workshop, the psychic grad program in your book, because while these programs are going to learn technique and craft, giftedness is also essential. In your book, if you’re not psychically gifted, they call you a “mortgage payment,” because your tuition is basically all you’re bringing to the program.
Yeah, you’re a mortgage payment, which interestingly enough I stole. I don’t even know that I told him I stole it, but that is what a friend of mine when I was in grad school atColumbiaused to call the people he perceived as being hopelessly untalented. So yeah, I borrowed that. No, I just stole it. I stole it. I think there’s so much overlap with the creative writing process. I was really struck when I went to see that psychic who talked to Dion Fortune. It was really interesting for me to watch her make contact. When you write fiction, you’re also making contact with another being. In some ways, I don’t know how different those two activities are.
By the same token, obviously in the psychic community these things are meant very literally, but at the same time, the idea of someone else making you sick requires no leap of faith if you think of it metaphorically. Everyone you know, you have some version of in your mind, and your idea of that person can affect you regardless of whether the actual person is doing something.
It’s true. You hear their voices; you hear the things they say to you. I was writing to somebody about this the other day. We were talking about different kinds of laughs, and I was saying how, years ago, 2003, somebody interviewed me for The Believer, because The Believer had just been published. They described my laughter as “nervous,” and I can’t get that description out of my head. That person has permanently taken residence in my head.
It’s like a mini clone of them that exists inside you.
It’s really true. And, also, not to sound all hocus-pocusy, but I really do feel that people emanate different energies. There are people — and it’s not because I don’t like them or that I think there’s something bad or ill-intentioned about them — who just give off a certain energy that makes me feel endangered. I mean, sometimes these people are just sad or depressed, but they somehow make me feel at-risk when I’m around them, and I just have to get away. Again, psychic attack was a way to literalize that sensation that we talk about in our culture. In our language we refer to people’s personalities, or something about them, this ineffable thing that people give off, we’ll say that person is “toxic,” or “that guy makes me sick,” or something like that. I don’t think that it’s a huge leap to be talking about how people impact other people in these ways.
That leads nicely into something else I was wondering. Where do you fall on the skeptic spectrum with regard to parapsychology in general?
I guess I would either describe myself as a skeptical believer or a believing skeptic. I think there’s no denying we all have really uncanny things happen to us. I’m thinking about Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” He admits that he’s not the person to be writing about this because he doesn’t feel trained or suitable or open to this kind of thing, not in a belief sense, but more of an intellectual sense. Even he says there are these experiences, such as walking down a street you’ve never been down before, and you just feel this sense of familiarity, that you’ve been here before. It’s something inside of you, not even a memory, but a part of you you can’t explain. He’s trying to get his head around that. What is it, how do you explain that. I think we’ve all had experiences like that, that I think would make most people exist between these two places of believing and not believing.
I have had a sense of superstition my whole life, which maybe comes from growing up in a thoroughly religious-less household. It wasn’t even agnostic, or like anything was being rejected. It didn’t exist. It hadn’t existed on either side of my family for a very long time. There was just no residue of any kind of belief system. So, as a kid — and I really think this persisted far longer into my adulthood than it should have — I was superstitious, even about really clichéd superstitions, like “See a penny, pick it up.” I had this really funny thing happen to me the other day, which I feel was beating me over the head, saying, “You have to stop thinking this way.” I saw a penny on the street, and I walked past it, and then I was like, “You know what? You gotta pick that penny up!” So I turned back around, and I leaned down into the middle of the street to pick this penny up, and this very expensive bottle of vodka that I’d just bought for my husband — he’d just come home a trip, and we were going to have greyhounds together — this expensive bottle swung over my shoulder and just smashed on the street. While I was picking up my lucky penny. So yeah, maybe that’s the universe telling me not to be superstitious…which is another form of superstition, but whatever. I’m just replacing one with another.
In addition to the psychic element of your novel, there’s also a plotline involving this very transgressive form of performance art. What or who inspired that idea?
The artist who was the most inspiring figure for me was Sophie Calle, who’s a French artist who does these transgressive things, though she’s hardly as sinister as the performance-artist character I fashioned from her baseline. I’m really interested in these acts that can be construed as meaning totally opposite things. So, for example, in some of the performance-art pieces in the book, there’s the notion of being a “surgical impersonator”: taking on somebody else’s face, going to the house of the family of this person who died whose face you now have, and trying to alleviate their grief by being this person, bringing this person back from the dead kind of. That’s both the most selfless act, like you’re literally sacrificing yourself in order to fill a gap that these loved ones are experiencing, and it’s also just the creepiest, most invasive, disrespectful thing you could ever do. So I’m fascinated by acts that can be both of those things at the same time, and you can’t really tease it out. I think a lot of times, with the whole performance-art thread in particular, I’m expressing a desire to be another form of artist that I know I’ll never be. This is the only place I get to be one, in my own novel.
At the same time, writers do have enormous potential to affect people literally. You can write a biography of a dead person that reanimates them in the same false way these surgical impersonators do. It’s probably one of the artistic genres in which people are hurt most often.
I never thought of that, but of course that’s so true. Even if you use fiction as a way to deactivate that potential hurt, that isn’t enough. I just received an essay by Francisco Goldman, who wrote a novel about the death of his wife. She was killed in a surfing accident in Mexico. He wrote a novel about her death, his grieving process, her childhood. It was sort of this eulogy or homage to her life, and critics kind of didn’t know what to do with this thing. Some people accused him of being cowardly for not just writing it as a memoir. People still got mad about the portrayal, even though the portrayal was supposedly fictional. It’s very interesting territory: Is writing about real people in a fictional context more respectful, or less brave?
The fictional context also gives you latitude to be libelous without being libelous.
It’s true. This is so in the air, too, with the whole John D’Agata kerfuffle. Creative nonfiction is another boundary that’s become increasingly porous. Culturally, I think we’re having a hard time getting our heads around this porousness, and for good reason. Sometimes it does seem to be violating some kind of contract you come to rely upon, and then other times it can seem so churlish to be patrolling that boundary. This is another one of those situations that is both really freeing and wonderful and potentially really dangerous and deceitful. So, I love that. Two sides, two very different sides.
So rest assured, you can be a writer and still mess with people like Sophie Calle.
Yes, someday us writers will get to be the artists we never thought we could be. You get to dress better, too! That’s kind of what the jealousy is. There’s not a long line of sartorially talented writers, although that’s changing. Maybe because writers are becoming more public, they’ve realized they’ve got to knock it up a notch in the fashion department. But, you know, artists have always looked really good. I guess I’m envious of that, too!
