“Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley,”
by Jonathan Yardley (Random
House)

“Cary Grant: A Class Apart,”
by Graham McCann (Columbia University Press)

“Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood,”
by Todd McCarthy
(HarperCollins)

“The Hitler of History,”
by John Lukacs (Knopf)

“American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,”
by Joseph J. Ellis
(Knopf)

“Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life,”
by James H. Jones (Norton)

“Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now,”
by Barry Miles (Henry Holt)

“Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood,”
by Eileen Whitfield (University
Press of Kentucky)

“Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra,”
by John F. Szwed
(Pantheon)

“Walt Whitman: A Gay Life,”
by Gary Schmidgall (Dutton)

“Virginia Woolf,”
by Hermione Lee (Knopf

How did you come to the decision to write this book?

The book impelled its own writing. While Larry was alive, I really did not think about writing a memoir at all. I wish that I had thought about it a little more, because I would have kept more careful notes. But it was on the plane back from France, Larry had died in Paris and his parents did not want a memorial service, I’m not sure why, but I couldn’t imagine someone passing from the world whom I loved without remarking upon that in some way or another. And so I persuaded them to have a memorial service in Los Angeles, and once I did that I felt that I had to be the centerpiece of that service, that they were going to be so overwhelmed with grief that they couldn’t do it. So I wrote a eulogy on the plane on the way home, and as I was writing that eulogy I realized that this was the beginning of a book.

Did you have any qualms about going from a fictional mode to an autobiographical mode?

“Qualms” isn’t the right word. It was more an aesthetic challenge. Writing covers a spectrum, and at one end of the spectrum is the 750-word piece on the front of the New York Times, and at the other end of the spectrum is a wildly experimental work, but it’s all fiction. It is all observations that we make of the world and then interpret for someone else. And the challenge here was to go from a medium — story-telling, novel-writing — with one set of conventions, to a different medium, memoir-writing, with a very different set of conventions.

When I say that all writing is fiction people say, “That means you must have made up things that happened in the book,” and the answer to that is absolutely not. I mean, the convention of the memoir is that at least the facts that you report correspond to the best construction you are able to make of the literal facts of the event. But there’s still a measure of observations, analysis, construction of a narrative line. It’s a story that has to be told, and as anyone knows, nothing would be more boring than a three-year verbatim rendition of that time together. I had to make choices about what to put in the book, what to leave out, how much emphasis to put on something, and all of those are artistic choices.

Your book, obviously, addresses the issue of death. How did it feel to deal with that issue in your writing?

We have a culture that is relentlessly optimistic, and as a result of that we have no place for illness and death and dying in our culture. But I think of American culture as coming to a kind of maturation, and part of that maturation is that for the first time in modern history, I think we’re really beginning to deal significantly with issues of grief and loss and death. There are a lot of reasons for this, one of which is the fact that the baby boom generation is aging and as it ages, our parents are dying, some of our own peers are beginning to die, and all of us are gaining an acute sense of mortality as we progress into our ’40s and ’50s.

But I also like to think that there’s some kind of wisdom that is accruing which recognizes that death is not ugly and bad, and life is not necessarily beautiful and good, that these are a continuum, each a part of the other, and one cannot be said to have a healthy attitude about life unless one also has a healthy attitude about death. I think that I have been brought to some kind of wisdom around it by Larry’s death and by the illness and death of so many people whom I know.
And I think that is also something of note, that gay men have often been at the cutting edge of culture. I think the degree to which gay men are at the cutting edge of culture is almost always underestimated or deliberately ignored by the culture at large. In a very sad and unfortunate way, I think we are once again at the cutting edge of culture here, because we have been forced to confront and experience illness and death in such a profound way.

Part of what I was getting at when I asked you that question about dealing with the topic of death in your writing, is that I know that when I try to write about a past experience, especially with a lot of strong emotional content, it tends to come flooding back.

Yeah. Well, I’d written enough fiction to know that when you have a weak story, your task is to figure out how to pump it up into a good story. When you have a powerful story, a story that’s inherently powerful, your task as a writer is to get out of the way, and to let the story tell itself as much as possible. And I resolved from the moment that I wrote the first word of this, from the moment I was writing the eulogy on the plane, that I could not overtly set out to convey my emotion to the reader, because that would immediately overpower the story.
That was my task throughout the writing of this book, and it was a very hard task whose cost to me as a person — whose cost and, I have to say, whose benefit to me as a person, I’m only now beginning to realize.

What do you mean?

The cost was that I have lived with Larry much longer and more intensely than I think I would have done otherwise. I know that that’s the case. I mean, for a number of years, my task every day was to get up and think and relive this relationship as thoroughly and carefully as I could, and as truthfully as I could, and that definitely slowed the process of moving on, of incorporating that grief in my life and moving on to the future. I feel a kind of independence and a kind of joy in my life these days that I haven’t felt in a long time, and I think that it’s because this book has been hanging over my head.
However, the gift that I have been given as a result of that discipline — and discipline is exactly the right word, it took an enormous amount of self-control to get up every day and not to allow myself to just pour it out onto the page — is that I think I have a much greater understanding of the workings of grief in myself and in other people, and the ability to write about that in a way that I previously did not have.

Would you say that there is some particular connection between the act of writing and the experience of loss or of realizing your own mortality?

Well, that’s a profound and wonderful question. Why do we have art? Why do people make art? And surely the answer to that question is that it is a statement of birth and life in the face of death and mortality. It is saying that I’m here and I’m making my mark in the world, even as anybody who has any understanding of the workings of the world knows that that mark is impermanent, and the most permanent of human marks is impermanent. The memoir is the most emphatic statement of that kind that a writer can make, because it is an artistic rendering of the memory of someone else. I would say that remembering lies at the heart of writing, because writing is about contemplation and then rendering of contemplation into prose.

Now that you’ve had the experience you write about in your book, in what way do things look different to you?
Well, I use butter in cooking. That’s a fact. And I have dessert after almost every meal. There are many ways that Larry changed my life, and those are metaphors, you know? They do represent larger things. I live much more in the moment than I did prior to knowing Larry. Sometimes in a way that’s a little terrifying for people whom I encounter, who haven’t had that experience.

Can you give me an example?

Well, in dating men, which I have done occasionally since Larry died, I certainly have noticed that there’s a dramatic difference between those who have had the experience of losing a lover and those who have not. There’s a dramatic difference between the men whom I know who are HIV-positive and the men who are not. It’s interesting to talk to men who are HIV-negative who have lost lovers, and I’ve had very profound conversations with such men, because we kind of occupy an intervening space. We’re not as completely and totally immersed in the moment as HIV-positive men often are, and yet we are not as cheerfully oblivious as HIV-negative men often are.

I would also say that I think oblivion as a state of being is allowed mostly to men in general and straight white men in particular, because it’s only if you’re in power that you’re allowed the luxury of obliviousness.

Obliviousness to the consequences of things?

Obliviousness to the existence of death and sorrow and uncertainty in life. One of the things that underscored gay men’s outrage in the mid-1980s was the government’s absolutely reprehensible refusal to act in the face of this health crisis, and I hope that Ronald Reagan’s reputation is forever stained in history by his deliberate choosing to be ignorant about this phenomenon that was happening in the nation that he was supposedly leading.

On the other hand, there was another aspect of that rage, and that was the fact that people who had been really raised to think of themselves as immortal, white men, were having to confront death. It was as if we were living in a kind of paradise, and all of a sudden somebody said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a catch. You die.” Men in power have obliviousness as a state of being that is allowed to them, and even white gay men are allowed that measure of obliviousness that is not allowed to people of color or to women.

Any examples?

Here’s one. One of the friends of a group of close friends died, a long-term partner of someone in this group, and the rest of us got together for a picnic, coincidentally, two, three, four weeks later. And one of the friends who I think of as, what can I say, the most “Californian” of the crowd, we were having a conversation and the name of the dead person happened to come up, and this friend said, “Oh gee, I never sent you a condolence note. Oh well. I’m sorry.” And that was the end of it. And I thought, boy, you know? Can’t you recognize that this was someone who was in this other person’s life for 20 years, and you’re treating this so casually, you know? First of all, why didn’t you send a condolence note, and secondly, how can you be so cavalier about it now?

Or just have the shame not to say anything about it, rather than acting as if your apology is sufficient.

Right. And also to apologize in such a cursory way. Now partly that’s because we don’t have ritual in this culture, and so what gay men — and not just gay men but all of us, we’ve all been robbed of ritual by a complex interaction of factors, including mobility, Hollywood, whatever — are doing is trying to re-create those rituals on our own. And the rituals are not complicated and difficult. I think most people are overwhelmed by the fact that they think that the rituals surrounding death must be something complex and it has to involve going out to Mount Tamalpais at dawn and dressing in sackcloth and ashes and building a fire with 13 stones that faces west and blah blah blah. You know, making a pot of chicken soup and dropping it by somebody’s house is what I’m talking about. Very few people did that for me when Larry died, and I think it was because it was relatively early, and people had not figured out that this is a ritual that needs to be done.

And it can be a small gesture. Little things that people do really do mean a lot.

And it is also the very realistic fact, that I can testify to from personal experience, that for the first month or so following a loss of such magnitude, it’s really hard just to get the basics together. It’s really hard to put one foot in front of the other. It is hard to worry about food. You can say, “Oh, it’s a big city, you can order out.” But you don’t even want to deal with that. You’re trying to pick up the pieces and put them back together again, and for someone to bring over this quintessential statement of life and plop it on your table and say, “Here, I’m going to keep you alive for another couple of days,” because that’s what it boils down to, is a really wonderful and necessary thing.

I want to ask you about the role of Larry in your life, how you think of him. You wrote in the book that you don’t dream of him, and that makes you sad. Is that still true?

It is still true. I’m sure it will change, but it seems obvious to me that he’s so thoroughly permeated my conscious life that my subconscious is not particularly concerned with him. And I’m sure that after a period of time passes that will change.

Sometimes when people lose someone that they were close to, they often feel almost as if that person was still there, in a certain way. Do you feel that way?

Larry is present in my life every day, in all of the choices and decisions that I make. But it’s been so long since he died, at this point I even forget — I call his mother still, regularly. We have conversations that last two or three minutes and that’s all. I call her a couple times a week, you know, that’s no big deal. I don’t think that I would have done that prior to Larry’s death, and now I have a quite different attitude about it. So it’s ten minutes a week out of your life and two dollars. I mean, come on, give me a break, you know? That brings some happiness into her life and thereby into mine. It’s well worth any minimal expenditure of time and effort.

Oh, I know what story I was telling. I called his mother on Larry’s birthday and she said, “Oh, you’re so thoughtful to call on his birthday this year,” and I thought, “Is it Larry’s birthday?” And I was happy that I had forgotten that fact, I thought it was a good sign. It doesn’t mean that I have put him out of my life, it’s just a sign of moving on.

Friday spoke with Salon during her nation-wide book tour for “The Power of Beauty.”

In your book, you seem dismayed by Germaine Greer’s evolution. I’m wondering where you think her current angry, crone-like persona came from. Because as you say in the book, she was once a symbol of a very open and free and powerful female sexuality.

She feels invisible. It seems to me that when you are a woman and you are out there and you write brilliantly and get on the stage and perform brilliantly as Germaine did, nonetheless, you realize the power of your beauty, and all these other things feed into it. And when you lose that youthful sexual beauty — not enough time has gone by for women to realize that there are other stages of beauty. In this country, in our culture, we don’t yet understand it. I think in certain foreign countries they do understand it.

Maybe there will come a time where older women have economic power. We haven’t been through that yet. But money is powerful enough to attract a gorgeous 23-year-old woman to a shriveled old man who has millions. I mean, I wouldn’t fall into bed with a shriveled old man for all the millions in the world — it just isn’t worth it! But not only do women do it, but everybody else seems to understand why they do it. Well, if [economic] power is that attractive, why wouldn’t it work for rich women, too? It’ll be slow, but it will happen. And if it doesn’t work for women, why not? Is it the mother [issue], is it the hag, is it the witch of the nursery? I think we’re all a little bit terrified of the witch of the nursery.

And Germaine Greer, as you write, has embraced it in that recent photo session for Harper’s Bazaar.

Sitting with these saggy breasts hanging down to her knees, holding her cat, naked in her kitchen on a wooden chair.
I was sorry to see that witchy picture of Germaine, and in reading her book, “The Change,” I went back and forth and back and forth. The old Germaine would suddenly leap forward in a few pages, and she was to me such a hero. I mean, if anybody could take on [Norman] Mailer, it was Germaine, and she was twitching her ass and flashing those long legs and swinging those breasts and she loved all that!

You see, I think that’s what she misses. She’s got a voice that’s strong as ever, but she hasn’t got the sexual beauty.

Greer has also written that our culture has become so drenched with sexuality that people feel compelled to be youthful and erotic even as they get older and don’t feel quite as energetic in that area. And she feels that becomes a kind of tyranny.

I think there’s a lot of rightness in that. Advertising has really caught on to the fact that not only does sex sell, but envy sells, and people envy nothing so much as they envy sexual beauty in others. And ours has become an extraordinarily envious culture. You buy your new car, your new suit, your new house and you have a moment of feeling good about it until you turn on the TV and they’re telling you if you don’t have this car, or if you don’t live in this part of the country and if you aren’t traveling to this place and if you aren’t wearing these clothes and if you aren’t eating this food and if you aren’t going out with this particular model, your life is shit. We’re wired for that, you don’t have to go to an advertising company, it’s built into the species. It is a world-wide culture of envy and unhappiness, and we’re clearly going to have more of it as electronics manages to get into the mattress and attack us even as we’re dreaming. We’ll never get away from it!

Feminists like Naomi Wolf would say that women in particular are brainwashed by that advertising machine — one that’s controlled by men.

They’re not brainwashed by the men! If they’re brainwashed by anything, they’re brainwashed by evolution, by nature. There’s one thing we all respond to, and that is the natural desire, the natural attraction, to youthful beauty, which was laid on us to supposedly propagate.

It’s what we live on, that golden beam, that being taken in. Especially in a day when you can manufacture beauty, when women go in and they look at things on the screen and say, “Oh, I want that nose, those ears, that forehead…”

What do you think of that? We’ve made advances in plastic surgery, and it’s also getting cheaper, so it’s not just the preserve of the rich anymore. Isn’t that a viable option?

Well, the plastic surgery figures for both men and women are soaring. It’s getting less and less expensive — the Wall Street Journal had a front page story on penile implants. I think men are more competitive than women, not genetically but because they’ve had practice in it since they were boys. I think men walk into beauty, which is highly competitive, far better schooled than we women have been who have no education in competition.

There is a women’s fear of being outstripped by another woman. No one girl can have more than all the other girls. No one girl can disagree, because a women’s world holds together in this kind of sameness, and keeping envy in check, keeping competition in check is what it’s all about, because we don’t know how to handle those emotions. That affects everything. That affects the woman’s reluctance, for instance, to have surgery, because then she comes out and she looks and feels great, but she knows the other women are going to come round and she’s going to see them whispering.

I think the best exercise women are getting now is women’s sports. The point of the game is to try as hard as possible. Women’s high morality says that girls lock arms and walk away from the game rather than argue over it. But then why play the game? The point of the game is to win or to lose!
I’m sure it’s why I’m such an odd duck in my feminist generation, because I’ve always been equally fair to men. I like the company of men. I’ve never been welcome in those groups, but then I would no more go to a consciousness-raising group and talk about my intimate life with my husband than fly to the moon. I never understood all that.

But a lot of people do, almost to excess. We don’t seem to have a sense of discretion anymore. What impact do you think that’s had?

I think the thing I miss most in our age is our manners. It sounds so old-fashioned in a way. But even bad people had good manners in the old days, and manners hold a community together and manners hold a family together, in a way they hold the world together.

Do you think that your books on erotic fantasies are partly to blame for this culture of exhibitionism?

I wrote “My Secret Garden” because I thought I was right in step with the times, I thought I was with it. I thought, “Hey, I’ve never read a book about sexual fantasies,” and I’d been involved in “Hair,” and there I was living in London, and everything was wild and wonderful. When it came out I called this friend of mine, who was one of the beginning people at Ms. magazine, and her answer was it for the next 20 years. She said, “Nancy, Ms. will decide what women’s sexual fantasies are.”

But I’m always torn between being a nice girl who comes from a very nice girl background, and stepping outside that and doing things like questioning the beatific perfectness of the mother/daughter relationship. I’ve always been on the outside of feminism, and when I did “Women on Top” I was really on the outside.

Because your fantasies weren’t always politically correct.

Oh, God, no. “Women on Top” was reviewed in Time magazine by a woman who said something like “What has it come to? Where are the clean sheets?” Where are the clean sheets? What does that mean? Does she elevate when she has sex? It was the strangest comment to make. So they set themselves up as nice girls, the feminists do. By being anti-sex and anti-men.

So you were in opposition not only to conventional morality, but also to feminist morality.

Right. Exactly.

Do you still have those voices inside that say, “Hmm, maybe I went too far, or maybe I was a bad girl, or maybe I shouldn’t have done this, and we should have manners in our society”?

Oh, but I don’t feel myself wavering back and forth between two hemispheres when I crave manners. I feel sex and manners can very easily co-exist. I feel wild, delicious, wonderful sex and good manners can co-exist. Not necessarily at the same moment in bed — “Excuse me, dear, while I move my right leg across your precious buttocks” — but I think that absolutely they co-exist. I’m glad I have my split. I think my good girl/bad girl split is two sticks rubbing together that create the fire. I think it’s what gives my books whatever they have.
But when I wrote the opening sentence of my new book, “I am a woman who needs to be seen,’” I thought, “That is so over the top, so embarrassing to say.” I thought I couldn’t even leave it on the paper for three minutes. But I kept writing, and I never changed it.

You say that there is an obvious natural hierarchy of beauty in the world — physical attributes aren’t evenly divided, biology isn’t democratic. And yet there is this feminist/democratic ideology that rages against that. We don’t want to acknowledge this, and we certainly don’t want to pay it any kind of homage.

Women’s behavior in handling beauty, even before feminism, was to deny they had any. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

Gloria Steinem certainly had to deal with that, and I’m sure you have, too.

Gloria was brilliant! I mean, to have that beauty, and to be the leader of that band of women, was extraordinary. Extraordinary!

But I’m not playing “Oh, who me?” Whatever looks I have, I really enjoy. And when I walk into rooms I love being looked at. But it isn’t why I wrote the book. Because of my own early childhood, I cannot use it in any way because I’m so unsure of it. That’s why when I go into rooms I never see my friends and why people say I’m haughty and arrogant when I’m not at all, I am so unsure. Besides, I don’t have that kind of beauty. When I get myself together for an evening, I can do something, but it terrifies me. And, at the same moment, it’s like forbidden sex. I’m very high, and I don’t dare look at anyone. And it’s so scary.

What’s the fear?

That I’ve gone too far. Grandiosity. I think envy is a large component in me. My sister when I was young was the beautiful one and so was my mother, and I didn’t get any looks at all until my late adolescence. I was very envious of that, and we envious people are either Rockefeller or we’re on welfare. There is no safe middle ground. In writing these books I’ve learned a lot about it.