If the genre of memoir endeavors to start at the beginning, Morgan Parker takes it one step further in her essay collection, You Get What You Pay For. For Parker, one cannot begin with childhood when examining racial consciousness in America: one must ask how the history of enslavement impacts the very idea of mental well-being for those Black individuals in America today.
The collection marks Parker’s stunning debut in nonfiction and features memorable vignettes that examine loneliness in an era of hyper-performance and hyper-stimulation.
From Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” music video to the portrayal of Black families during Hurricane Katrina and Kanye West’s famous line on national television, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” to her experiences of remarginalization in conversations with white therapists, Parker reveals how her isolation with depression began not with her but with her place in a world that never sought to include her.
Parker’s prose is dynamic: it weaves together an array of topics that touch upon what it means to be a Black woman in an America that ignores the impacts of its history. Through a collection whose creation spans over six years, she asks the reader to reflect on the illusionary nature of time and its failings when conveying the wide and encompassing effects of intergenerational trauma across centuries and poses the potentiality of therapy as reparations for generations of Black youth to come.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Parker is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her work has appeared widely, in such publications as The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Best American Poetry; a Broadway playbill; and two Common albums. Parker is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, a WGA member, and a Sagittarius. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Shirley.
Jennifer Nessel: First of all, thank you so much for your reading of “Plantations” last night. We spoke briefly earlier this week about your love of performance and sort of how it plays into your writing life. I’m interested in what elements of your work you feel are highlighted in reading it out loud.
Morgan Parker: Humor, because I’m able to hit certain notes. I think being able to control the pacing and slow down when it’s necessary to stay with the line allows me to emphasize what I want to. Obviously, I try to do that as much as I can in the text. With this book, it was funny, because people who knew me were like, “I can hear your tenor.” So I wanted it to be that, but when I’m reading that’s when readers who don’t know me can kind of put it together. And it’s been fun with this book for folks to have both experiences when they read it, and then they hear me, and they’re like, “Oh, that, you know, provides a different sort of experience.” I actually did the audiobook for this one, and I think that was useful also, especially because it’s first person, it’s nonfiction. So I think it’s useful for the readers to have humanity behind it.
JN: When I was hearing you read it through, it was, it was a different texture too because there’s a body involved and a voice and a cadence to it. As a follow-up, how do you feel that your poetry performance sort of plays into, in this case, your nonfiction performance?
MP: Yeah, I think it’s just comfort with confession and public, which is why I think [performance] is most important with nonfiction because it’s so different to hear, like, “I feel insufficient, and you have to look at me feeling that way,” versus just this idea of a Black American woman feeling insufficient. I think that can be jarring for folks because it’s contrasted with “Here I have all of your attention on a stage,” but like, this is actually how I feel. So I think there’s an additional texture of readers having to contend with who they think I am versus how I feel.
JN: This is something that you bring up a lot in You Get What You Pay For. The idea of celebrity frequently comes up in your work and in your essay. “Watch Her Rise and Reign,” you dive into the nuances of the white public’s perception and entitlement of Black creativity and success. And so what does the writing process do for the separation of your public and private self? Does it elucidate this distinction or muddle it and, over the course of your career, what tools have you built to create boundaries as like a public figure who’s sharing private elements of yourself?
MP: Yeah, I think, I’m still learning because it’s different for every book, and it’s different for every era of my own mental wellbeing. So it’s kind of a day-by-day thing in terms of, “How much am I willing to share right now?” Someone had mentioned me reading that “Rise and Reign” essay last night, and I was just like, you know, I don’t know if I feel like it. And there are times in my life where I would say, “Okay, I’m just gonna read this,” and I will start crying on stage. And sometimes that’s fine, but sometimes I’m like, “I can’t give it,” you know? So really trying to figure out when I can go there and when I have to read it, and maybe you don’t get that part from me right now. And also just realizing that I do have a self to protect and that I don’t have to be available in all parts of me to whatever public. But it’s hard because being a known figure is not something you expect as a writer. So you want to embrace it and engage in it. But you know, it’s not like Serena Williams or Beyonce or whomever, who have people screening emails, [and] who have all these systems in place for really protecting them. So, it’s really up to me to kind of build those boundaries. And that’s something that I’ve just had to learn.
I was talking to a student yesterday about how a lot of that is just—I talk about it in therapy, of how the capital M, Morgan Parker, the product of the book, versus me. And I guess for me, it’s just been really hard as a person who, the lowercase person feels very lonely, and then there’s this other perception of this, you know, totally self-fulfilled independent woman who’s totally fine. And another part of it is that when you’re talking about vulnerable things, and you’re talking about overcoming moments of depression, and depression is not something that can be overcome, I think that readers get a sense of, “Wow, you can talk about this so clearly and lucidly that you must be beyond it in a way.” So, there’s a little bit of thinking that I’m past [it] and so that it’s no big deal for me to talk about it, but I’m sharing in the moment, and I think that’s hard for readers to understand. We’re so used to getting a product that’s cleaned up for consumption only. Literature is for consumption, but it’s also for the author and the author’s community. It’s not all just [what is] cleaned up for the public. Yeah, so it’s really navigating what the expectations of readers are. That’s something we’re not clear on, even with athletes and musicians. Why are we asking them what their political opinions are? We don’t know, who cares? You know what I mean? They didn’t get a PhD. But I think that’s a little blurry now in this world where it’s like anyone could tweet at me, or, you know, where we have this different sort of expectation of accessibility to public figures.
JN: Definitely. You reflect on this very deeply in your essay, “Self Help,” this distinction between [how] others are seeing you as this very successful person, and then behind closed doors, you’re navigating what it means to be lonely, to be a person in this world. I’m interested in, as a person and an artist who’s tasked with this self-introspection and engaging in these very difficult and unspoken parts of yourself: can writing be isolating and challenging in that, and how do you navigate those feelings and how do you move beyond that and go find community?
MP: Well, that brings me back to the performance part. For me, this book took me six years, and it was introspective and lonely, and a lot of it, I couldn’t even really articulate and talk about with friends. And a lot, in the making of it, was still very nebulous, and I was just holding it and just sitting with my thoughts. I mean, it was during pandemic years, I had moved across the country, and was just like, “Okay, I’m here isolated with my deepest, darkest thoughts.” It was scary at first. It’s like, “Okay, I’ve just kept this to myself,” and it always is like that. The minute you send it to your editor, it’s like, “what are people gonna like? I thought it was good, until right now, what are people gonna think?” It’s happened five times, [for] every book. But with this one, I was so ready for that moment, because so much of this book is a conversation opener, and I’ve been having the conversation with myself over and over and over so the only thing left is to engage in a conversation. The only thing left is to be like, “What do you guys think you know?” And so for me, that moment of going on tour, I mean, it’s hell in its own ways, but it’s really essential to finish the book. You know, because a book, is an offering to the reader and a conversation. So without that last piece of the conversation, then it feels incomplete, like it’s still living in my head. Yeah, so it was really important for me to have a tour where people are coming up to me and saying, “Thank you for writing this,” “This hit me in this way,” and “Can I give you a hug?” I think that it’s important not only for the reader but for the writer to be able to say, “I see you and you see me.” And at least if there’s that, then there’s a little kernel of something that we didn’t have before.
JN: Yeah, definitely. And you talked about the people coming up to you and hugging you and telling you, “Thank you for sharing this.” It’s almost like it spurs you to write again, to go into the next project. Okay, here’s this person who needs me, who needs my work. And I feel, I find that really beautiful that you look at your audience and your reader that way, as a shared connection, rather than “Okay I’m on one half of this page.”
MP: Like, “I’m offering this to you.”
JN: Yeah, instead it’s a gift exchange in that sense. I loved what you said last night about linear time [being] fake. I want that everywhere, and in What You Get What You Pay For, this comes up a lot, this lack of linearity in time. We’ve talked about the performance aspect, the private aspect of this work. How does time work in moving from writing the book to publishing and then talking about it, do you view the work differently? Do you view yourself within it differently?
MP: What’s weird about books is that, and I knew this was how it was when I published my first book, but you don’t really realize it: it’s a timestamp, you know, it’s a timestamp of who you were at a time. Even when I look at my first book, which was reprinted in 2021. When it was reprinted, I was like, “Oh, my God, so much of this was because I was, you know, wanting to make these temporal, like very contemporary poems.” Like there’s Chat Roulette, there’s Four Loco, and those things don’t exist anymore, but that’s something that I’m into that this is what was going on at the time. And then, when you look, even though those references are different, the rest of it is the same. So, I’m interested in how the references and maybe the settings are different, but a lot of the emotions are similar, and a lot of the obsessions and questions and concerns are similar, and they follow through, but they grow and develop. So even looking at my work as a whole, it’s only now that I’m able to see that my first book felt very internal, my second book felt like I was looking kind of around a smaller community, and my third book felt like taking this wider, more historical view. So, I’m seeing the order in which I’m able to tackle certain things and seeing how that plays into what’s happening in America at that time has also been really crazy. When I look at There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, it feels super Obama-era. And it’s funny, even when I was reading those poems after the Obama presidency, I have that poem, “The President Has Never Said the Word Black.” And I have to be like, “P.S., I’m talking about the black president, you know what I mean, and the president’s wife,” you know? So, it’s interesting having to contextualize in a historical timeline, because, for me, the time collapses. But we have the sense of the American timeline that my work is always in conversation with.
JN: You push back against that timeline, and you talked last night about how the genre of memoir, kind of forces you to start at the beginning of your life. You were saying, “Well, my life doesn’t start with me, it starts before me, and it will go beyond me.” I really feel like you know, it’s something that needs to be said, and it needs to be continued to be said, that the conversation can’t just stop there and stagnate. And that’s why it was so invigorating to hear you read your work and then to have a conversation about your work.
Throughout the collection, there’s this echoing of theme, a sort of emergence and return. And what struck me the most, what I think you do really well is progressing the theme [of] therapy, and the central point of therapy as reparations. How did the themes of this collection reveal themselves? Did you start with this underlining image, or did you sort of collect it along the way?
MP: Yeah. I mean, this book is interesting because it has its origins in one essay that I wrote for The New York Times years ago. I think it was in 2015, and it was about therapy as reparations. So, it’s like one essay, and then I was like, “What if I really played this out?” In it, I mentioned one or two therapists. It’s thinking about being in this therapist’s office and also having all of these black deaths happen at the same time, and having to contend with that, put down my own like, “How do I get a date and deal with that in therapy?” And then thinking, like, “Wait, why am I spending my good money to talk about what is not my problem, you know?” So that was kind of the seed. And then, for me, the argument is about where has the most damage been done. If we’re thinking about reparations as a way to make up for those damages, then we really have to be honest about what those damages are. If it’s just an inequality of wealth, okay, but it’s not just that, and thinking about, obviously, the idea of, and I mentioned this, like not one-size-fits-all reparations, and thinking about how we each have been damaged in really personal ways and specific ways. For me, it’s psychological. Then, I was pushing that further and thinking about, well, if we did have a sort of psychological freedom and freedom from a lot of the negativity that we’ve internalized, at least for me, you know, I had a moment in therapy where I was like, “Oh my God. I thought I hated myself, but really it’s that I internalized this from a hatred that I felt.” And to be able to like, blink that true, I immediately felt sad for every black person that didn’t have that opportunity. And it’s really easy to see how internalizing a lot of this external hate can lead to so much bad behavior and abuse and drug addiction, like all of it. And so I started thinking like, “What if, you know, what if we were psychologically healed?”
But then it’s like, prisons aren’t as full. A lot of them, thinking about how many structures depend upon our unwellness and what the powers that be are keeping us from. So really thinking about, how can we get outside of that. One thing I say is yes, I’ll take the money, but if I were healed, I could make the money myself, and that’s more powerful. So that was kind of how that started, where I was like, “All right, I want to track my psychology.” And so that’s why maybe my beating heart began in 1987, but my psychology began at slavery. Thinking about what went into making my mind the way it is, and what went into planting the seeds that led to me being in this therapist’s office. So, really backtracking in that way and trying to see and almost providing the opportunity to look at my life without that.
Just thinking about, what are the stops along that journey, from going to therapy for the first time, when me and my parents were like, “What is this? This is not for us,” to trying to get a therapist in college, to having a white therapist who doesn’t know about Michael Brown, all of these different stages in my development of mental wellness, but also my understanding of how that interplays with my identity and America’s response to a Black American woman.
JN: What You Get What You Pay For is doing is pushing this representation and sort of broadening the conversation to allow others in and move the conversation forward. Mental illness and therapy still have stigmas. I’m thinking about our young population now, and sort of like the use of the Internet and how these conversations are being broadcast, but they’re rarely being connected. They’re kind of just shouted [into a void]. You’ve written a Young Adult novel, Who Put This Song On?, where you talked about the representation in that and writing it for young Morgan. What do you feel needs to be done for, like, the young population or the young black population in furthering this conversation? And what do you feel that your work is doing in connecting that conversation?
MP: I know this one is like, you’ll have to ask me again in five years. One thing is, the onus should not be on them. For me, I think a lot about how I’m just grateful that I had the personality and stomach to say, “I am not okay.” And not only that, but we have to do something, and I’ve heard of therapy, and we have to try it. I have a lot of thoughts of “what if I hadn’t?” A lot of kids don’t have that courage or comfort. I had a relationship with my parents where I could say that, and I think that’s just a lot to put on a teen, especially when we don’t always have language for mental illness. I mean, if I hadn’t been reading The Bell Jar, maybe I wouldn’t be, like, I have to [go], you know what I mean? I was 15, so it’s, like you’re a teenager, you know? Maybe it’s this, but maybe it’s hormones. Not putting the onus on the teenager to have to identify and articulate what is wrong with them and be able to look out for them and catch those things beforehand. And talking to them about it early. I think I was having depression and anxiety symptoms as early as 10. We have language for tantrums but we don’t have language for panic attacks at that age. So really, being able to look out and acknowledge that these symptoms exist. I think we shouldn’t wait until it becomes an emergency.
JN: Definitely. The disconcerting thing to see is that while the Internet can be so helpful in this [area] for young people to get the language of this, like you said, the onus is now on them, because they’re learning about it, and they’re stopping and they’re thinking, “oh my gosh, that sounds a lot like me.” The Internet is both a great, wonderful resource and also a very scary thing.
MP: It’s an abyss.
JN: It really is. And so you talk about the Internet in your work, and you’ve used social media. You said that you were very good at Twitter, now X. How do you feel we should use social media for its best benefit, because there are a lot of young people on social media, and it almost feels like you can’t get rid of the beast.
MP: I think the way that young people use it is so different than the way [I was]. The Internet only came into my life after I was already dealing with teenage things. And even then, you know, I had a Xanga and a Live Journal and a Facebook in my senior year, but it was because you had to have a college email to do it. So, my high school years weren’t mediated by that. We had digital cameras and we were using them but it wasn’t like we were posting them immediately. And it just was a different relationship to it, whereas now that’s seen as the primary versus the person being the secondary. And it’s funny, like, you meet these kids, you see their online presence, and then you meet them, and they have no personality. You know, it’s weird. They’re so much more comfortable being a personality on social media and then really not being in touch with themselves in public, which is really scary to me.
I’ve always been very forthcoming, and I only just learned that even all my peers are lying on there. But if I just saw this friend, why is he saying he’s doing this? He’s like, “Oh, that was a lie.” That really is where we need to focus our attention. The way we could use it is to be honest about what is behind the screens. But I fear that that’s gone, you know what I mean? And I worry even for me, as a teenager, I saw other kids who had their makeup more together, or whatever they pose longer, whatever it is, it’s like, “whoa, that’s how a teenager should look, and I’m over here doing this.” I just feel that now it’s to the extreme, and people don’t even know how to just be regular, like they’re using filters and stuff where it’s like, no one looks like that. No one can ever be airbrushed IRL. It just scares me that we have full-grown adults who were once totally secure, that are [now] like, “Oh no, should I be doing that?” It’s also coming to a place where it feels like you can’t not do it. And so that part is also something that has to be addressed. There has to be an option to not [do it].
JN: I was a teacher for a number of years, and some of my students were as young as 11 or 12. They’ve had an Instagram for so long. And I feel like COVID just exacerbated this to the nth degree, because we’re all already isolated, the only connection that we have is a screen. And as you mentioned, it’s a facade.
MP: And so it feels like all that matters is what people can see on that screen.
JN: Exactly. That was a really big question to throw at you but you took it in stride, which I appreciate! I was really interested when you brought this up earlier this week, your love of interior design. I notice that when you talk about your work, you think very spatially. And I’m really interested if you could dive a little deeper into how you think about your work spatially and aesthetically, and sort of how you hold those two ideas in tandem, and whether or not that sort of shifts from poetry to nonfiction or to fiction.
MP: I think for me, it obviously starts with language, but it requires other media. It requires a soundtrack. It requires portraits on the walls. When I’m thinking about crafting a poem or an essay, and this was kind of like a big practice in Magical Negro, where I would be like, “Okay, I’m thinking about this picture of Diana Ross, or I’m thinking about this particular song, and I’m thinking about this news story, and I know that these go together and I’m gonna use the poem to figure that out.” With the essays, it was similar, here’s a couple of scenes, here’s a couple of objects, here’s a song, here’s a movie. You know what I mean? Like, how are all of these related or pointing at the same thing? And so the essay becomes this container wherein I can connect all those things. So for me, then it becomes, “How am I walking the reader through the room?” First, you get an idea of the room you’re in, and then let’s look over here. And then we’re gonna go back to back in time a little bit, and then we’re back in the room, you know. So really thinking about it as a house tour.
JN: I love that. That’s not something I’ve heard from other writers before. So when you mentioned that, I was like, Oh, that’s so interesting.
MP: I mean, even just thinking about: what are the aesthetic artifacts and what are the pieces? And it helps me to get a little bit outside of language and bullet points, especially in an essay where [I’m] thinking about logic. Whereas poems, we’re used to images, and we’re used to having sound be part of it. So, for me, I had to push that into essays. I make a soundtrack for all of my books, and that is really useful for me. There’s usually one that I write to and then another one that’s for the final book. And that helps me to just be like, “I’m gonna live in this set of songs.” It just gives me something to bounce off of. And that’s how I write. Also, like, there’s a bunch of stuff on my walls. I made my apartment so that I can look anywhere and be sort of either inspired or reminded. Everything is my North Star. There’s art books and all kinds of things that I can reach for when I’m too in my head and too in words. It’s just useful for me in terms of trying to access different vocabularies.
JN: You mentioned the playlist. I heard that you make a playlist for your projects. I was curious about what works or artists were on your playlist for You Get What You Pay For.
MP: Yeah, so I have the “Big Pimpin’” song and the sample for it, [Hossam Ramzy’s] “Khusara Khusara.” And I have the Mary Tyler Moore theme song. Kendrick, “The Blacker the Berry.” There’s two Kanye. There might be three Kanye. Like beginning, middle, end, Kanye. Different eras of Kanye. Solange is on there. There’s a lot. There’s Pharoah Sanders and Charles Mingus, I think, on there. They’re pretty thematically linked, like the Pharaoh Sanders is “You’ve Got to Have Freedom.” And, Kanye’s “Spaceship,” which I mentioned, and I also mentioned “Flashing Lights” in the last essay. “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul,” by Gil Scott Heron. This song by Illingsworth that my brother sent to me, called, “Anxiety Rap (Why I Don’t Attend Parties).” It’s hilarious, and it’s just like, “I’m in the corner asking for the Wi-Fi password.”
JN: [Laughs] What is your brother trying to tell you?
MP: [Laughs] Right? He’s like, “I think you’ll get this.” But it was fun to get a lot of songs that I was listening to when I was making this. It was fun to then go back through the book and see the call outs that made it. I like thinking about the reading experience as being immersive, where you can refer back. I just want readers to be able to know the sounds that I’m talking about.
JN: Yeah, that’s great. There’s so much texture in your work. It feels like you’re constantly thinking about texture. I wanted to know if you have a similar reading list or if you cultivate any literary works, sort of how you cultivate your playlist.
MP: This one had a lot, and I talked to my publishers about trying to, like, make some social media stuff. I feel like we might have done it for a discussion questions [list] that goes to schools. But I was like, it feels like it should come with [a list]. I have citations. There’s a primary source list, including the “Big Pimpin’” video and The Lonely Island video, “I’m on a Boat.” [In] the primary sources, a clip of Kanye saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” You know, some Katrina footage. But also, Black Rage is a book that I reference a lot. It’s from 1968. The subtitle is two black psychiatrists talk[ing] about therapy for black people. That is an early text that I was looking a lot at, and it was a companion. So, a lot of the texts that I break down, I want people to be pointed back to. Franz Fanon, I would probably put on a primary list. June Jordan, I talk about [her] a lot. Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, which I mentioned even in the first chapter. Bob Jones, the speech he gave, “Is Segregation Scriptual?” I read that over and over and over and maybe even some Bible verses in relation to that.
I also watched a lot of videos, news videos. That took a long time. I would have to watch half, and then be like, “next week, I’ll watch the rest.” It’s rough, these dash cam videos. I spent a lot of time watching those. And you can kind of tell that I describe some of them, but I would behoove readers to watch them, because I can only put so much, and it’s kind of incredible. Yeah, so really thinking about primary sources as part of the book and part of what I’m in conversation with.
JN: I like hearing you explore the nature of how the music is speaking to the primary sources, is speaking to your work, is speaking to the art. You get this question a lot. I’m going to ask it anyway because I’m just interested in hearing it. You Get What You Pay For is your first nonfiction collection. How has the process of approaching nonfiction differed from poetry or fiction and how has this work, now that it’s published, sort of influenced how you’ll go about your next project?
MP: Honestly, writing nonfiction: I don’t know if it’s because my last book wasn’t poetry, but it felt closer to writing poetry than writing fiction because I wanted to have these thematic repetitions. I wanted it to be not solving anything but bringing up new questions. I didn’t want it to be a straight-through narrative arc. I was thinking about structure in a different way, and I wanted to write it as a poet. I wanted to use the essay form in a poetic way. We think of the essay form as being very structured and like having to synthesize and do all this very particular work, but I wanted to approach it as a poem, like having turns, or having a cadence, having that kind of repetition, either visually or sonically throughout the entire book, and thinking about the order of the book as a way to imbue meaning for the reader.
I wanted to use a lot of poetic techniques in the writing of the essays. And I think what’s happening now is I’m using a lot of the techniques of nonfiction and the essay form as I’m getting back into poems, which is really, really interesting. I also was writing a screenplay adaptation for Who Put This Song On? And having learned how to do that, I am [now] understanding fiction in a totally different way. I struggled in Who Put This Song On? with the rules of fiction. I was like, Are there roles? Like, what do I have to do? And you know, I kind of broke some of those rules in the book. And still was very, not sure about them, but having to think about it in a very basic Hollywood sense, where it’s like, on the nose, thinking about, “Oh, this is how to amp up drama.” I’m [now] finding fiction ideas are coming to me, yeah, because I’m more comfortable with the plot devices that I’m actually able to get excited about and plots and characters rather than being intimidated by the structure of it. So that’s kind of exciting.
And even just like thinking about the sentence in the poem. I knew I wanted to explore longer poems. I don’t know if it’s just that I moved to California, I have more room, so it’s like, “let’s see what it does to my poems.” And that’s partially it, but also having this experience of writing the essays and taking a kernel of an idea, many of which started as poems, and trying to push them as far as I can. I’m now interested in doing that with the poem, which so far I’m not really sure how that will go. It’s funny because I feel connected to an internal rhythm in the poem, and how it leads up to a last line. And I wrote a draft and I showed it to some friends, and they’re like, “oh, wow, that’s so great.” And I was like, “this is not ready yet. I think there’s more.” I don’t wanna quite stop yet. Even though I’m usually good at being like, “yep, that’s my ending.” I’m like, “what if I roll past that?” And just to see how far I can push it, you can always cut it back. I’ve done that with poems before, and broken them up or just cut. There’s one poem, and I think it’s in There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, that was like a page and a half, and it’s now three lines. So that’s that is a good practice for me, I think, in pushing in order to pull back. So I’m giving myself more permission to do that.
JN: We spoke briefly earlier this week about the line level. I’m interested, as someone who also thinks about things on the line level. Did you ever, in writing these essays get cornered by [having] a set number of lines that are working in tandem with one another? Did that like affect your editing process, having to cut and move around [lines]? I’m really interested in that.
MP: Yeah, that part was really hard, because there were, and I kind of spoke about this last night, but because, you know, there were so many repetitions. It was like, “okay, but where do I first introduce this idea?” There were little chunks that were in the ether, where I was like, “These go together, but I don’t know if they go in this essay or this one.” And so that was a challenge. Because I would [think] does the piece about white girls go in the piece about loneliness or the piece about. It was really hard, because everything really interacted. So, it was just a matter of choice, which is a lot of pressure. The work can’t make the choice for me. I can lead it, however, like I could put the white girl thing with white Christianity, or I could put it with loneliness. And that really makes a big difference in terms of what is the final point I want to put on these chapters. I really tried not to rush that part, which meant that the book was unfinished for a really long time, until it had to be finished. I had to force myself to rethink a lot of things, because there were times where I was like, “No, I’m pretty sure these all go together.” But then “No, maybe they don’t.” I had to separate myself from how they first kind of came out and think about the paragraph or even single sentence level. So there was a lot of floating things between essay and essay and conversations with my editor about those things. It was a challenge to move everything around. Because it felt like moving things around in a poem. I do that a lot, rearrange my poem lines, but doing it wasn’t even in one essay, it’s in a whole book. So, it was a lot of choice-making.
JN: Especially you talk about, sort of like, what you want your reader to feel coming away [from the work]. The reading experience in this collection, it feels like you’re getting all of these hints and these nuggets of these themes. And you’re in the process of exploration. And then you get to the final ending, everything is very tight, and it’s all speaking to one another. And I could tell, in reading it, that you took a lot of time to see these parts and how they’re in conversation with one another. And I think it makes a very cohesive collection that they’re all, you know, it was a painful process it sounds like, but it ultimately helps, because they’re all echoing one another.
MP: Exactly. I wanted it to be not just like, “well, here’s all these things,” but [that] they all echo each other and enhance each other. You understand one theme better, because you understand this theme. The way that they played off of each other was really important.
JN: What do you hope readers will come away with after reading You Get What You Pay For?
MP: Yeah, my answer to this is usually paying attention to other people. Empathy, I guess, would be the wild wish. That’s like a pie-in-the-sky wish. But the sense of considering others humanity, just a tad more. That’s the bare minimum that I hope that people are like, “Oh, that gives me a different view of this person that I just might even overlook.” So, really thinking about each other’s internal lives and how we affect each other’s internal lives, even in the smallest ways. Really reconsidering, even in the slightest, how we interact and how we show up for each other or acknowledge one another.
