The Ecstatic, Violent Joy of Susan Choi’s
to it. Not just the word choice but how it’s arranged. There’s a speed to the rhythm of the sentences that intensifies the violence. It’s not just the image of drowning, the idea of being totally out of control, but the way those images are pressed right up against survival. It works partly because a more traditional way to talk about two women coming together is for the language to be soft, maybe even maternal.
When I write sex, I refuse to pan away to the curtains. It is important to me to show, as Susan Choi does here, the moments that are, traditionally at least, unsexy. The blisters. The mummy— that’s a death image. But part of great sex writing is the inclination to talk about the blisters and the mummy.
There’s a beautiful use of hyperbole throughout. There’s florid academic language, and there’s also the really frank language of “her face in my cunt.” That’s a beautiful whiplash. Like, She’s going all caps! I love that commitment.
I’m drawn to the ecstasy of emptiness, of being emptied and exhausted and dissected and torn apart—Regina as a doll, Martha sucking the joints. The imagery of emptiness and the imagery of being made new. There’s a clear power dynamic here, and it’s unbalanced; in
Luster, I tried to write toward that imbalance too.
In starting to talk about my book, I’ve found it challenging to articulate the dynamics of my protagonist Edie’s desires. I think this is because of Edie’s identity— there’s something more fraught about what it means, as a Black woman, to invite a subjugation. It’s so tricky to talk about because there’s a fair conversation to be had about what it means to inflict violence into the body of a Black woman. Because we do live in a culture that is indifferent, specifically, to Black women’s pain and their softness. But If I’m honest, when I’m actually writing,
I’m not thinking about the political ramifications of what I’m writing. I’m thinking about what feels good and what feels true. More than anything, when I sat down to write, I wanted to write a Black woman being led around by id. I haven’t found many portrayals of Black women like that in literature. I wanted to see the freedom of that on the page.