“I’m most interested in intimacy, and sometimes that’s about sex and sometimes it’s not. I feel the weight of that history too, and though I write about sex, it’s not really explicit and doesn’t go on for long.”

Potential ways to solve personal problems:
LSD
Ride a train cross-country
Read all of Dana Spiotta’s books

I first met Kimberly King Parsons at a bar on the east side of Portland that’s across the street from Powell’s Bookstore. Neither of us had lived in the city long enough to know where to go drinking and neither of us went drinking anymore anyway, as parents of young children, so we picked a nerdy landmark, a bookstore, and found a place nearby. I’d just moved from Los Angeles a few weeks prior. She had relocated from New York the year before. She was the first person I asked on a friend-date, knowing nothing more about her than what I found on Twitter. She had gone to Columbia for an MFA and had two books coming out from Vintage/Knopf in 2019 and 2020. Though one of the stories from Black Light was just published in The Paris Review, at the time of our meeting, a year and a half ago, I couldn’t find her work online. I’m glad about that now. I might have been intimidated by her prowess, and embarrassed by the strength of my feelings for her work. 

It was December, and I was colder than I’d been in a decade. We drank whiskey and immediately felt as though we were old friends. We talked about being queer women married to men, desire, the psychedelic potential of natural childbirth, and about so-called “extended nursing.” My memoir was just about to come out, and I felt the same 3rd trimester anticipation I’d felt at the threshold of motherhood. And though Kim hadn’t yet published her books, she knew a lot more about it than I did. She was my publication doula in a sense, and my first real writer friend. She offered to interview me about my book and pitch it to a variety of publications. In the intervening weeks, and initial throes of friendship, we tried not to blow our interview wad and talk about all the things she was planning to ask me. That restraint was a good exercise. 

I find that the interview is a great way to give yourself permission to ask your friends the questions you want to ask, but don’t. Once I finally got to read Kim’s work, I was desperate to know how she does it. Her prose, even in the darkest corners, sparkles. Her characters are full...