This week, Nancy K. Miller, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY and author, most recently, of But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives and the co-edited collection, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, asks five questions of Terry Castle.

1. The Professor and Other Writings is getting a lot of enthusiastic attention from reviewers who can’t seem to believe that an English professor—which you are—could write a book that is both personal and witty. Did it feel like a leap to move from academic criticism to autobiography?

Yes, a leap that took 25 years! No, actually, it didn’t seem that much of a leap—I’d been working my way toward it all along. Retrospectively I can see (though probably no one else can) that already in my first scholarly books, which date from the 1980s, I managed to encrypt certain autobiographical themes. Both of my first two books on 18th century literature, Clarissa’s Ciphers and Masquerade and Civilization—"young" books I wrote in my 20s—had to do with my relationship with my parents; and in the case of the masquerade book, a then-mostly unintegrated wish that they had not divorced when I was seven. "The carnivalesque brought alienated opposites together, overcame symbolic binaries, reconciled opposites, blah blah blah." Mummy! Daddy! With my third book, The Apparitional Lesbian, the autobiographical element started to reveal itself more openly—indeed, that book began with a short personal reminiscence of a freaky cross-dressing woman I used to see when I was a kid at the San Diego YWCA swimming pool in the 1960s—along with a certain comic attitude toward the subject of my own sexuality. I have always jibbed against the earnest, sometimes pompous, aspects of academic writing, especially its "theoretical" branches, and once I got tenure (!) I let the mischievous, even blaspheming, Terry-as-Imp-of-the-Perverse come out of the closet more and more. What a relief.

2. The professor in the title is not just you the writer, but the subject of the longest piece in the book, almost a book in itself, titled “The Professor.” You were a graduate student when you encountered this particular charismatic and seductive professor. I wonder whether you think relations between graduate students and professors have changed since in the 1970s, at the height of a second-wave feminism?

When I was involved with the Professor, no explicit or detailed sexual harassment policies, to my knowledge, existed at American colleges and universities—certainly not my own. One offshoot of the 1970s feminist revolution, of course, would turn out to be the demonization—indeed quasi-criminalization—of teacher/student sexual relationships at most educational institutions in the 1980s and (especially) 1990s. Pretty much everything is rigidly codified now: a matter for formal grievances, confidential committees, litigation (or the threat of), big bucks. Despite the crudeness with which such policies are sometimes applied, the fact that they now exist strikes me, on the whole, as a very good thing.

Still, I feel there’s more to say—at least historically—on the subject, especially regarding gay teacher/student romances. For one thing, I’ve always had the suspicion that the heterosexual and homosexual versions of the professor/student affairs of the past may have served somewhat different psychological and social ends for those involved. In "The Professor" I wonder aloud at one point whether, back in the Bad Old Days, relations between female teachers and female students, in particular, might not have had a kind of pedagogic or "socializing" influence for the younger woman. When homosexuality was almost entirely hidden and stigmatized—i.e. during the regime of the Closet— one wonders if there wasn’t sometimes a rite of passage aspect to such affairs. Whatever else they did, such relationships may have provided the younger partner with a sort of epistemological reassurance, some "proof" one wasn’t alone—indeed a sort of cross-generational saphhic history or genealogy. Maybe I’m hopelessly romanticizing things, but I continue to be astounded by how many lesbian women of my own age—in their 50s and 60s—had clandestine affairs with female teachers and view them in retrospect as having been, by turns, instructive, emotionally significant, ultimately worthwhile.

3. You write in the book hilariously about lots of things, including your own failings, but also about family members, particularly your mother. Memoirists have struggled with the ethics of writing about living relatives and friends—how have you resolved the issue for yourself? Are there things that you could not allow yourself to say? Or did you throw caution to the wind?

One struggles with the issue daily—without, alas, finding any once-and-for-all clarity. Perhaps because I am gay, perhaps because my childhood was full of repressed secrets (not to mention a kind of pervasively "English" emotional chilliness) my impulse has always been to reveal more and more—to hot up the atmosphere. Examining—even demystifying—various aspects of my own past has always seemed to me an urgent psychological imperative: the thing, as a writer, I must do. But of course such a process can be very painful for the people one loves—above all, one’s parents, friends, and close kin—who often see it all dramatically differently.

4. Do you have any thoughts about why since, say, the 1990s, we seem to be living in the age of the memoir? Is there anything new in the genre? Why the hunger for true stories?

Hmmm…. David Shields has just published an intriguing book on the last-mentioned subject: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. On the truth vs. fiction question, I’ve come to believe myself that for deep-seated cognitive reasons, human beings prefer supposedly ‘true’ stories to blatantly fictional ones. Stories we believe to be verifiable seem to offer us strategic information about the world of other human beings and to do so directly. Obvious "fictions" provide the same kind of information, but only in what appears to be kind of mediated, mimetic, parable-like way. (I’m oversimplifying the narrativizing impulse and human communication networks wildly, of course: seemingly "true," "accurate," or "reportorial" accounts can sometimes be quite drastically manipulated by those who produce them.) Still, an underlying human predilection for the apparently "true" over the blatantly "made-up" perhaps explains why in the late 17th and 18th centuries so many of the early British novelists (Aphra Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, et al.) presented their works to the world as "true relations" or "histories."

As for the memoir craze—is it really any more intense or encompassing than it ever was? I wonder. Tons of people—most of them entirely obscure now—wrote memoirs throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. We just don’t read them now—or hardly ever. They’ve become bibliographic relics. (I recently came across one such book: My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, by Lillian Rogers Parks, a White House housekeeper, published in 1961.)

What does seem new about the present day "memoir mania" is the consuming focus, it seems to me, on melodramatic (even grotesque) private sufferings, horrifying abuses, or degrading life problems miraculously surmounted. Earlier memoirists typically dealt with meaningful accomplishments—military or political achievements, scientific inventions, social innovations, exotic travels, athletic triumphs, involvement in some watershed historical event, or acquaintance with someone "great" and powerful (or notorious). But now what we see more of is a kind of ghoulish fascination with victim memoirs. (The authors are often victims of themselves, of course.) Audiences seem to crave stories of freakishly damaged people who, despite abuses suffered (or indeed delivered), manage to find some kind of worldly, if not spiritual, redemption. The memoir genre of today has become a sort of secular martyrology: one reads all about hideous indignities and injuries, the true soul-perversions endured, but somehow the martyr lives on to tell about it and—what…? Makes us feel better in comparison? The "pop" memoirs of today tend to be voyeuristic in impulse: sordid, shallow, at times deeply soiling. Think of all those political wives writing about their stupid philandering husbands. We seem to have lost interest in truly honorable, intelligent, or worthy individuals—those who try to resist the overwhelming cultural bathos, reductiveness, and bad faith.


5a. What memoir writers do you admire?

J.R. Ackerley, Cyril Connolly, Denton Welch, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Butts, Vera Brittain, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Colette, Violette Leduc, Janet Frame, Art Pepper, Samuel Delaney, Ned Rorem, Ed White, Quentin Crisp, J.M Coetzee.

5b. The gorgeous jacket cover—which is a vibrant, colorful collage—is also by you. When did you start working with collage and do you think it shares an aesthetic with your writing?

Both parents, my sister: all artistic. I started making art as a kid. But there was a long latency period when artwork took a back seat to writing and teaching and being an adult. I did mostly pastels and watercolors in the 1980s and 90s, though not a lot. Then I got a scanner and learned basic Photoshop in the late 90s. Ever since then: compulsive digital play resulting in artwork. Collage is an undemanding form—great for me, because I can’t draw! (I’m the original de-skiller!) I’m enormously interested in the history of collage—from 19th-century scrapbooks (which I collect) through Dada, Soviet graphic design, Hannah Hoch, Claude Cahun, through to later artists like Jess and John Evans. John Ashbery is a very interesting collage artist.

As for the relation of the writing to the art: At this point in my life, one of my main goals in both forms is simply to amuse myself. (And possibly other people, too.) Patching together incongruous "Exquisite Cadaver"-style juxtapositions is something I find especially enjoyable (and weirdly therapeutic) in the visual realm. The unconscious takes over and in my case I seem inevitably to favor playful or ludicrous imagery. Likewise, in my writing, unexpected comparisons and associations—usually teasing or satirical or burlesque ones—are something I’m always aiming for. Life is too grim and tedious otherwise.

My art blog is at http://terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com