‘The past vanishes but remains’
Kushner’s collection of 19 essays written between 2000 and 2020, spans cultural criticism and memoir
Did you conceive as a way to look back at the distant city of your youth — Sunset, San Francisco — as one of the survivors of its “wild crowd”? The Hard Crowd
To me, it’s a single book divided into chapters, rather than an anthology. At the end, with the title essay, The Hard Crowd, there’s a kind of accounting of certain aspects of my adolescence and young adulthood, and the distance between me and some of the people I used to know, including people who burned bright and died prematurely. Only one friend went to prison, but maybe even just one can stay with you, shape you. Anyone’s past is laid waste in the sense that it vanishes but remains, both at once, which is the strange magic of life, that the mind is populated by scenes and people who are gone.
The essays in the collection give us a sense of the evolution of your writing. What have you learnt from New Journalism and its practitioners like Joan Didion and Hunter S Thompson?
I did notice there was a review in The Guardian by Olivia Liang where she suggests I’m taking up the mantle or tradition of New Journalism. Honestly, it had not occurred to me. Perhaps in part because I think of myself as a novelist, and not a journalist, but then again, I am interested in the world around me, as evidenced in some of the pieces in the book, and I’ve certainly learned from many of the writers considered part of New Journalism, and especially Didion, who is a serious writer, obviously, of both essays and of novels
(Democracy (1984), for me, is a favourite). She often takes a distance from her non-fiction subjects. There’s a coldness, even a bit of arrogance, and it’s infectious: the reader takes it on, wants to share that perspective. She gives the sense that she has ideas about what’s right and proper and what’s vulgar and compromised. That’s not true of my own outlook or tone. I mostly write about worlds in which I participate — with some notable exceptions — instead of this gonzo Hunter S approach, where you live it temporarily to immerse yourself.
Nawaid Anjum is a poet and translator. He lives in New Delhi
What are you working on? Has the new normal in the wake of the pandemic had an impact on your writing regimen?
I’m writing a novel. I was just in Wyoming working on it, and having so much fun. But then I was on the east coast sorting through my family’s personal effects, in the wake of the death of two family members — my aunt died of Covid, and my uncle, her older brother, died Covid-related. He was afraid to go to the emergency room, because he didn’t want to catch Covid, and died on account of that reluctance.
If this is a new normal, yes, it certainly impacted my writing regimen. But now, hopefully, we in the US are moving into a post-pandemic situation, even as my father has now lost both of his siblings.