Rebekah Frumkin’s fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and criticism have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other places. Their novel, The Comedown, was published by Henry Holt in 2018. They live in Illinois, where they are an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Southern Illinois University. We are so pleased to welcome them here at Occhi.
What is The Comedown about?
The Comedown is about a lot of things – money, addiction, the deadly scourge of American anti-Blackness, the failure of capitalism, the failure of the nuclear family, fatherhood, queerness – but I’ll just settle and say it’s about a missing suitcase.
Would The Comedown make a good feature film? Who would you cast for the lead parts?
I think The Comedown would actually make a great HBO series. I’m a big fan of all the HBO dramas – Succession, Euphoria, The Sopranos – and I really do believe my book is explosive and character-driven enough for that world. Man, I’ve got an ego on me, don’t I? Anyway, I’d probably cast Ed Norton or Sam Rockwell as Leland Sr. and Hunter Schafer as a post-transition Tweety. But honestly, I’m not really good at stuff like this; I’d end up leaving the rest to the casting director.
You write basically everything: novels, short stories, essays, journalistic articles, literary criticism… Do you have a favorite?
Fiction built and furnished my literary home. I would be nowhere without it. Everything else exists to buttress the fiction.
What appears to be consistent in your writing is a high level of exuberance, even when you are describing painful experiences. Do you feel that? Exuberant? And if yes, does the exuberance belong to your writing/researching process, or is it that you are essentially an exuberant person?
That’s funny and really great, actually. I have no idea how I appear to other people, especially in writing, and to hear that I appear exuberant makes me happy. I do feel exuberant, yes. I am someone who has to believe I can always put one foot in front of the other to get out of a bad situation. I’ve been privileged enough not to be in a lot of very bad situations in my life, but I would qualify COVID specifically and 2020 in general as bad situations we’re all in. If I let myself get sad about a bad situation, I begin to panic, I begin to give in to some really negative tendencies. But if I approach things with energy and the need to be optimistic, I feel better. Maybe that’s where that exuberance comes from. I can’t function if I’m not striving towards optimism. Like I can’t get up in the morning and eat breakfast and walk my dog if I’m not striving towards optimism. Some people can doomsay and get away with it: given my history, I really can’t afford to.
Your essay “American Maniac” beautifully describes your perception of yourself and the world around you when you are in the manic stage of manic depression, the depressive stage of manic depression, and, later, on meds and sort of balanced neatly between the two. Your descriptions play out against your concerns about the best ways to resist the corruption going on in our current political environment. Do you think these concerns—where some acts feel too aggressive and others feel close to useless—are universal? Any tips for how we can get past them in order to act?
This I think goes back to the idea of putting one foot in front of the other and treating any action, no matter how small, as a method of self-preservation. Despair is a sickness we’ve got to excise from our bodies to keep living. I really profoundly dislike having bipolar, but I have been lucky in that those little upticks in mood have given me the desire to act immediately and the self-confidence to believe in the efficaciousness of my actions. Of course, mania isn’t sustainable, and one shouldn’t rely on it to bolster one’s self-confidence, but the conviction I’ve inherited from mania that taking action in whatever way I can is a worthwhile project (provided I’ve put aside my ego) really does keep me from despairing. I think the key to this as well is acting quietly. Do something productive that benefits someone else and irons out the despair-wrinkles and then don’t tell anyone else about it. Always works like a charm.
For one of your journalistic pieces, published by The Paris Review, you interviewed Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) scientists who study black holes to ask them, among many other things, about their reading habits and how their book choices influence their research. What do you like to read, and do your choices influence your work? And if not, what do you feel it is that drives your writing?
This is a great double-whammy of a question, though I’ll admit it’s always challenging to talk about what I like to read, broadly speaking. I can talk about what I’ve been reading lately: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo was hilarious and surprising and revelatory (and much better than anything by any white male postmodernist); Fran Ross’s Oreo left me in awe, and few books leave me in awe anymore; Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn inspired me to bake some mystery and thriller elements into my latest project (I know I’m just a tad late to the Lethem party). I’m a fan and friend of Andrew Ridker – The Altruists was breathtakingly funny – and am in the midst of reading and enjoying Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black.
I think there was a time when I read to learn how to write, and I am certainly still doing that, though only to a degree. Now I primarily read to learn how to live. It’s been good to have Mary Karr to accompany me through getting sober, Dostoevsky through feeling like a perpetual dork, and Toni Morrison and Angela Davis through the setting aside of white ego. I think this same desire to learn how to live is what drives me to write as well. I want to feel better in my own skin, I want to spend the rest of my life undertaking the project of becoming myself, and reading and writing are two ways to go about doing those things.
In addition to writing, you are an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University. One of your graduate-level classes is called The Digital Novella and in it, you introduce students to using methods such as Twine, Twitter, memes, geocaching, podcasting, and even PowerPoint to complete their novellas. Can you provide an example of say, how a writer would use Twitter to complete a novella?
The best example I can give of this is Jennifer Egan’s tremendous short story “Black Box,” which is told in a series of tweets. This was way back when there was still the 240 character limit, back before even quote-tweeting, I think. (I hate that I can remember Twitter history.) I love the idea of writing a novella and then tweeting it out, or else creating a Twitter profile for a character in a novella and tweeting in their voice. I wouldn’t think of a tweet thread as “completing” a novella so much as augmenting to it – providing a new kind of text, in other words, that’s playful and weird and self-interrogative. It’s been fun teaching students that a book can be so much more than words on paper.
Another course you teach is Advanced Fiction Writing: Characters Behaving Badly. Who is your personal favorite bad character? Why?
I would have to say Kendall Roy in Succession. He’s a petty, bird-looking one-percenter with a powerful father and a Martin Shkreli-like love of hip-hop. He’s also a drug addict with very little self-confidence and less business acumen than he thinks. He’s the typical white male TV antihero but he’s way more compelling than all the rest because, I think, he’s more brittle and pathetic and universally relatable. This character should be so inaccessible to so many people and yet he isn’t. That’s a really beautiful feat of fiction writing.
Do you work on several writing projects at once? Can you tell us what you are working on now?
I do, actually, though not in the same genre. I’m working on a novel now to distract myself from the fact that my short story collection is out on submission. Since it’s 2020, opportunities for trenchant/panicked/mindful nonfiction abound, so I’m sure I’ll be cranking out some more essays, too.
Where can Occhi readers learn more about you?
Visit my website! (rfrumkin.com) Also, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram and whichever other social media app survives Trump’s autocracy: @jeansvaljeans.
Images, courtesy of Rebekah Frumkin
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