"Love Is the Drug": A Review

By Margot Kahn Case

On February 15, 2008, the night after Valentine's Day, at the third event in the Hugo Literary Series, Rick Moody took apart love and longing in a vividly dark, neurotic deconstruction of feeling and observation that was almost like a list poem, almost like a song. His story, �Modern Lovers,� comprised a series of stream of consciousness soliloquies in a he-said-she-said contrapuntal. Though he read just the �she said,� at the event, it left me breathless. What is modern love, he made me ask, if not a collection of loves, a deep sea of loneliness and the obnoxious hum of an electric toothbrush?

The evening's other authors, Monica Drake and David Wagoner, turned my flywheel, too. Drake's hilarious, heartbreaking story of a middle-aged mortgage adjuster who comes across an old flame in a morning's newspaper article got me thinking about how we track our lives through love and memory, through visceral experience in time. And Wagoner taught me to listen again�to Auden and Yeats and Donne in particular�with his lifelong view of love poetry (and poets in love).

Each in their own way tracked time carefully: Drake in classic linear style, Wagoner through the ages and Moody through the early days of a new relationship in a string of disconnected monologues.

I'm a one-thing-at-a-time kind of girl; I like to read a story from beginning to end. It's the linear narrative that settles in under my sternum: Homer and Cervantes, Henry James and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Sure, I love Didion; I love Joyce and Woolf for what they did to time; I love the feeling I get when I read nonlinear narrative. But what really makes me think is a good, long story, the kind that gives me the time to sink in slowly, almost without thought, so that the feeling and the thinking come together later, in the middle of the night, in dream and recollection. I want to hold story like I hold childhood, as something that is mine and not mine, something lived and remembered all at once.

Drake took this formal linear route, and it was intense and brilliant. But Moody's story was as stellar, taking apart everything solid and laying it out in pieces so carefully we could have put it back together with a small wordless pamphlet and an Allen wrench. How, I wondered, did he manage to formally deconstruct everything�how two people do and don't see each other, how language can and can't hold�and yet leave so much intact?

A week after Moody read at Hugo House, his story was accepted for publication in The American Scholar. Drake was still working on hers, now a novel-in-progress. And Wagoner had come back to work meeting with members in the Hugo House library to talk about poetry and prose. I followed up with each of them to ask them about the process of writing about love. I wanted to know what it felt like to read such exposing words, how the crowd's response influenced the newly created work, and what Moody thought his structural deconstruction said about love in the modern age. I had forgotten that it's not always possible or even desirable to deconstruct your own work, especially when it's so fresh, and some of Moody's responses in particular left me feeling shallow. But a few days later I read the 1972 Paris Review interview with Eudora Welty, in which Linda Kuehl asks her, �Can you talk objectively about your language, perhaps about your use of metaphor?� Welty says:

�I don't know how to because I think of the actual writing as having existence only in the story. When I think of something, I put it into a narrative form, not in analytical form, and so anything I say would be artificial. � And to go to the ridiculous and yet the sublime, there's W.C. Fields, who read an analysis of how he juggled. He couldn't juggle for six years afterward. He'd never known that was how it was done. He'd just thrown up the balls and juggled.�

This, I thought, is just like love. This is all just like love. What is whole and what is in pieces is never really quite clear. Why you do what you do�and when, and how�may make sense only if you knew the whole time line of time. In love you go by instinct and trust, one word after another.


Q&A with Rick Moody

Q: What was the experience like, reading your story to us? The feel of the room? The act of reading such new work? And, what are you thinking about the story now?

RM: I enjoyed the reading and I really enjoyed the warmth and enthusiasm of Hugo House itself. I didn't think I was at the top of my game, because I was a little nervous about the story and about having to cut it in half, so as to avoid going on endlessly. Because of these things, I think I gave an adequate reading. Not quite as good as Monica's, which was quite stellar. I think the piece is not bad. The reading enabled me to make a couple of cuts, which I did. I then gave it to an editor friend, and it was accepted (today!) for publication, so that is good news. I think it's one of two good stories I wrote in the last year. It's nice to write a good story now and then.

Q: Someone at the House mentioned that you weren't initially excited about writing to a prompt, but you took the assignment anyway. What was your process in getting started? Would you take another assignment from us in the future?

RM: The problem in this case was not the fact of the prompt. I almost always love assignments. Assignments, to slaughter the Robert Frost line, are like tennis with the net up. I actually have trouble writing without prompts. The problem in this case was the substance of the prompt itself. �Love Is The Drug.� In general, I think love leads directly to sentimentality. Most fiction that I associate with love is banal, sentimental, bad. A good friend of mine recently edited an anthology of �love stories,� and I have actually avoided it because I don't want to think that my friend would make a book that was uniformly nauseating. Accordingly, I didn't think I had anything useful to say about love. Love just leads people to say stupid things. I like that line of William Gass' (from �In the Heart of the Heart of the Country�), though: �And I am in retirement from love.� And I like the Roxy Music song from which the assignment was filched.

I can't remember how I got started on �Modern Lovers� exactly, except that I resolved to break the assignment into little component pieces. I further resolved to work on the pieces without looking back at what I'd done before. As if I could write something about love by tricking myself a little bit. I would take another assignment in the future, sure. As long as it's not about love.

Q: You wrote about the intersection of love and loneliness. Had you been thinking about this, or did the prompt invite it?

RM: The prompt invited it. But this is what I think about most people: that they suffer with loneliness to one degree or another. Love is the lie that papers over the loneliness that is known to all men (and women). I knew the story would end in this way, with loneliness. I just didn't know how I'd get to the ending.

Q: Do you think your structure and process were saying something about the state of relationships, or how we conceive of them, in the modern age? Or were the structure and process really just the result of your not wanting to write about love?

RM: The title didn't come to me until the composition was all but ended, and it has something to do with my love of the band of the same name. But in general the contemporary moment is about fragmentation, right? I mean that is the spirit of the age. This is one reason I resist the well made short story, because I think its linearity doesn't bear that much resemblance to life lived, not as I understand it. Most of the popular contemporary media have fragmentation built into them in some way: hip hop, television, painting, conceptual art, etc. Literature is the one place where we cling to this traditional narrative structure. I'm not always sure why. The same is true in mainstream Hollywood cinema, which is one reason that television seems to me to be the more interesting medium these days. I didn't intend the structure to be a commentary on relationships in a premeditated way, but I can certainly accept that this is a likely way to interpret it.

Q: I loved this line: �If you have to feel this much of a thing, it should be self-inflicted.� I think you were talking about loneliness, and also about love. Would you say the same about writing?

RM: To agree to your proposal, I would have to do a bit of philosophical convolution and reflexivity that I am not ready to do. But one thing I like about writing in general is the fact that it is given away to readers to be completed, and readers, in the act of completion, can interpret the work in any way that suits their purposes. You have just done so. I applaud the way you exercise your liberty.


Q&A with David Wagoner

Q: What did you think when you got the prompt �Love Is the Drug�? How did you go about beginning?

DW: It is a tough assignment to write about love. Almost everything you can say about it is true. The same is true of poetry�both are very complicated matters. But, since there is so much to say, I knew I couldn't go wrong. I went through the poems I know by heart in my mind and half a dozen occurred to me immediately, and I wouldn't have remembered them if they weren't well written. That gave me a kind of ground bed. I tried to choose poems about different aspects�falling into and out of love, being awed by the power of love, etc.

Q: You chose not to read any of your own poems. Why?

DW: I considered it and decided not to. Like many poets, I have found it very difficult to write about love. There is some fear attached to it�that though you may write accurately about the various emotions, it might embarrass you later on. John Donne regretted his love poems when he became a prominent religious man.

Q: How about the last two poems you read. I'm guessing you didn't know those two by heart. Where did you find them?

DW: The last poem, �Prayer to Turn the Sperm-dam Down,� by Charles Harper Webb, was first published in 2004. It was a kind of tour de force of a poem. I think it's a fine poem, one of his best. I'd never read it out loud before and a number of people asked me about it afterwards.

Q: How did you feel reading those poems? They were pretty racy and fresh.

DW: I followed Monica's story, which was a very good story, very strong, tough-minded and fearless. It must have taken some courage. And it made me feel better about the last two poems. She warmed the audience up for me. For my part, I've been very restrained in my work. I've only used three swears in all of my poems. I don't feel I can understand their power to bother people, but I hesitate to use them at all for fear they'll disrupt everything. The bedroom scene in fiction is difficult�it's been done so badly and so humorously�I can't think of many novels where it's really meaningful. But every writer has to decide his or her relationship with the inner censor.

Q: I'm curious about your thoughts on structure and form, and on the current trend of free-form, collage and nonlinear narrative. It seems our attention span has shortened somehow in love and literature.

DW: This is the time of the breaking of forms. There is no longer any difference between poetry and prose�it can be a mess. Often a new literary movement is the result of making something look easy�the Beatniks did that. Eliot fastidiously broke up formal poetry��The Wasteland� is made up of fragments�but in his later years he was called a formalist. If you can think up a rule, someone will be very grateful to you for the opportunity to break it. This may presage a more formal movement; it often has. But it shows no sign of happening yet.

Q: So you say it's difficult to write about love accurately, it's difficult to write about it well, and even if we manage it we might regret it later. What's a writer to do?

DW: I certainly wouldn't say don't write about it. Powerful emotions are often unwieldy. They fight back against language. We're taught to control our emotions, but how do you fight back against love? The answer is you don't. Not if it's real.


Q&A with Monica Drake

Q: When you got the prompt for �Love Is the Drug,� were you tempted to write a memoir piece or something in the first person? What was your process of getting started?

MD: My first impulse was to work on something I had in progress, to make it fit the theme. But what I had in hand didn't seem like the right thing to read aloud, to offer an audience. I put that one aside and started a new piece, and it's the new work that I read at Hugo House. I wrote something I never would have written if it weren't for this prompt. I wrote something I thought would be fun to read aloud, and I tried to tailor it for what I imagined to be a Hugo House audience, though I'd never been to Hugo House before, so that part was a gamble.

Q: Your novel �Clown Girl� was a quirky, lucid look at the creative process. Was the story you read at our Literary Series a logical extension of that idea, or was it a complete departure?

MD: The story I read was a complete departure. It's turned out to be the first chapter in a new novel. I'm about seven chapters in so far. It's a comedy, and in that way it's similar to �Clown Girl,� but really it takes place in a very different world, maybe closer to the world most of us live in. We're not in Baloneytown [a reference to her book, �Clown Girl�] anymore.

Q: The story you read�about memory and the way we want to remember things, the way we want to be remembered�was devastating, unbearably embarrassing and hopeful all at once. When you got up to read it aloud, what were you hoping we, the audience, were going to remember?

MD: I hoped to make an impact, to offer an element of surprise, and to let people laugh even when the story is ultimately kind of sad.

Q: What have you been thinking about your story since you read it to us? Did the experience of reading new work to a new crowd change you or your idea about the story in any surprising ways? Would you do it all over again?

MD: It was affirming to read new work in front of a room full of mostly strangers, and to hear people laugh at all the right places. People were so generous, and enthusiastic. I'm ready to get moving, get writing, and move ahead on what I see as a novel. I'd do it again, any time. It was wonderful.