(Left, Kate Zambreno; Right, Tamara Faith Berger)

I met Kate Zambreno in New York at Whole Foods, upstairs, where we ate healthy food before the fire alarm went off. I was in from Toronto and Kate flew in for the night from Carrboro to participate in a loosely-planned, shame-themed, launch-like event for my book Maidenhead. I had just read all of Kate’s books, including the devastating Heroines, and so meeting her felt intimate, shorthand. I am someone who equates the author with their text and no one can really tell me otherwise.

Kate and I walked together from Whole Foods to an animal-smelling pad where we picked up a young poet that Kate met online, and onward to Bluestockings, the activist bookstore in the Bowery. I was anxious about the prospect of launching my book in New York, being a Canadian small-press writer that nobody had ever heard of. But it turned out that New York wasn’t such a big deal because Bluestockings was a lot like the scene on Commercial Drive in Vancouver – crafty and queer, full of earnest workers.

During our talk for the forty or so people present, Kate was dramatic and penetrating and so amazingly kind even though I tried to shut us down out of nerves after five minutes. The nerves were there because even though I felt at home, I got this strangulating embarrassment at being watched. Anyway, I think that conversation-type events instead of readings might be a better way of approaching the intimidating launch of a book. Then at least we can all laugh in public together.

– Tamara Faith Berger

I. TEEN LIBERTINES

HOST: Tonight [September 13, 2012], we have Tamara Faith Berger. She’s launching Maidenhead in the U.S., a novel following the sexual awakening of a 16-year-old girl, which has been described as a “mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault. It’s a thrilling, enlightening and really hot place to be.” Berger is joined by Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl and O Fallen Angel. The two authors will follow short readings of their incendiary novels with a conversation about literary heroines, sex and language.

[The readings occur.]

KZ: Maidenhead is such an interesting work. It’s both this gritty, erotic novel that’s set half in Key West and half in Toronto, and also this really brilliant meditation on desire and power. This character of ‘the girl’ seems to be repeated in both of our fictions. Why do you think the landscape of ‘the girl’ is such an interesting space to write from, philosophically?

TFB: I think that it’s a space that there...