“Really Hard Questions”: Chelsea Martin in Conversation with Colin Winnette

Chelsea Martin is tough. She’s also funny as hell. That’s a tension at the heart of her first book-length work of nonfiction, Caca Dolce, and something I encountered when interviewing her at East Bay Booksellers in Oakland. It’s something she captures in an exchange from a later essay in the book—a boyfriend asks a teenaged Chelsea if she thinks the band The Darkness is joking or totally serious, and her answer is something along the lines of a shrug and, “I don’t know. Probably both.” Dismissive, a little manipulative, joking, and right fucking on.

It’s tempting to call Martin’s work ironic, or detached, and I’m not saying it’s not those things, but it’s also kind of not those things at all. She writes about her relationship with her estranged father with honesty, sincerity, and longing—all the while grinning, maybe just a little bit. She writes about her resistance to a diagnosis of OCD and Tourette’s with quiet rage, dissatisfaction, curiosity, and pure humor. Every insight she offers into her early life—into what it’s like being a broke teenager in a verbally abusive household, what it’s like to experiment with drugs and discover your own power only to feel it becoming a weapon that can be used against you—feels both universal and extremely specific to who she is, to what she’s been through. That’s the brilliant success of this book—it facilitates a connection with another person, someone we hardly know going in, and it starts to feel more like a memory than sympathy extended, or even empathy.

Chelsea Martin and I met live at East Bay Booksellers in Oakland on September 26, 2017 to talk about her book. This interview is from the transcription, which has been shortened/edited for publication. All long pauses and awkward laughter has been removed.

—Colin Winnette

COLIN WINNETTE: This is sold as a collection of essays, but it covers the span of your early life, your upbringing, coming of age, and so I wonder: why is this a collection of essays instead of a memoir?

CHELSEA MARTIN: I consider that a marketing thing. I didn’t really have a major role in how it was described. I wanted it to be a collection of essays where each storyline could be contained.

CW: They still accumulate, but in a more interesting way than just telling a straightforward story. The different Chelseas resonate with one another, they create an atmosphere, and in a way that feels natural, less forced for the sake of the book.

CM: Yeah. I don’t do the like, “This led to this, and this was why this happened.” That doesn’t feel real and isn’t how I experience...