Dana Spiotta’s novel Eat the Document takes self-invention to extremes. Its protagonist, Mary, is forced underground after a botched political action turns deadly, and she remakes herself in a hotel room. What do you need to scrape together an identity at the moment you’ve been forced to leave one behind? Should Mary pick a new name that sounds like a cheerleader? Should she become the kind of person who doesn’t drink coffee? How much can you remake yourself? Mary is modeled on Katherine Ann Power, a political radical who surrendered to authorities after successfully spending twenty-three years underground, while safely but unhappily reassimilating into society.

Spiotta meditates on how it feels to be underground, how it feels for Mary to become Caroline Sherman. She weaves together a present-day story line that includes Caroline’s son, the denizens of a political bookstore in Seattle, and a man who has Agent Orange-esque symptoms despite never having been in combat. In this textured novel of ideas, Spiotta asks us to rethink the bomb-throwing radicals of the ’70s as well as their very different counterparts in contemporary counterculture. She asks us to consider identity and politics and commodities, and even to wonder whether the Beach Boys were counterrevolutionary.

In the immediate post-grunge mid-’90s, I had been motivated by the media spectacle surrounding Power’s surrender to make the video Good Sister/Bad Sister, about Power, her psychotherapist, and the therapist’s daughter, Courtney Love. In 2002, Spiotta traded me a copy of her first book, Lightning Field, for a copy of my movie. We met again in March 2006, when this interview took place.

— Liza Johnson

THE BELIEVER: When I was working on a film about Katherine Ann Power in the 1990s, there was a lot of mockery on the occasion of her surrender. It was the same time that Newt Gingrich was coming to power by calling Bill Clinton a countercultural McGovernik. The press was making fun of Bobby Seale, for example, for publishing a barbecue cookbook, as if that fact is proof that radicalism was always ridiculous. The ’90s were about making that countercultural moment of the late ’60s and early ’70s less legible, and making all the radicals seem like freaky loners or bizarre oedipal rebels, and making it impossible to imagine a context in which their actions could make any sense at all. How do you make that period and context legible to the present?

DANA SPIOTTA: Getting the historical context right was extremely important to me. And I think actually it’s easier to understand the context now than it was five or ten years ago. I think the war...