“I am pretty committed to trying not to live any weird, secret life beyond the life of writing, which is weird and secret enough.”
The Last Three Shows Amy Fusselman Saw in New York City:
Beth Henley’s 12-Hour Reading Festival
The Book of Mormon
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Amy Fusselman’s books seem to work their way into reader’s hands by way of an inexhaustible evangelism. To have not yet read her is quickly forgiven in the light of one’s future redemption, and the ministers of her staggering gospels are waiting, carrying the names of her books on their tongues, sending links, lending copies, and posting their own underlined and starred to those without and in need.
Or at least this was how I came to read Amy Fusselman, a copy of 8 thrust into my possession by a seasoned devotee and gifter of her books. I read it straight through while walking home, and when I was done felt a compulsion, a duty, a calling to tell everyone I knew of its existence. This has held true in my encounters with each of her four books—The Pharmacist’s Mate, Savage Park, and, from Coffee House Press, the newly published Idiophone.
Each of these books resembles one another in certain superficial and significant ways—they are short in length, fragmentary in presentation, lyrical in construction, and broad in their arenas of investigation; within each of them is the sort of love afforded by an attention, and diligence, and care often absent, one that can be felt in both what is stationary and what is in motion—and they are, each, by my account, canonical and foundational texts in the genre of essay-memoir, memoir-essay.
Idiophone is about The Nutcracker, alcoholism, parenthood, adult childhood, frustration, meaning making, queerness, writing, two mice in a VW bug and a drunk cockroach, dying, luck, accidents, and laughter, to name only some of what it touches upon, but it is also about the simultaneous and permanent irreconcilable difficulty of being a world within the world. I have had in my head, since I first started the book, a line from the French poet Paul Eluard: Il y a un autre monde mais il est dans celui-ci. There is another world but it is inside this one. This is the land Idiophone calls home.
Amy and I got to know each other over some art and lunch one day in June, and the interview below took place by email in the following weeks.
—Luc Rioual
I. About Anything
THE BELIEVER: I know you received an MFA in poetry. Was writing the...
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