Karim Kazemi: I was surprised by the way that this new book, the revised edition of If You’re a Girl, is organized—with the material from the original volume interspersed in between the new pieces.
Ann Rower: That was my idea. When we talked about putting it together, I just thought it would work well, because it didn’t seem to me that the old and the new material were that different.
KK: I remember reading, when I bought a used copy of If You’re A Girl online, this phrase “Timothy Leary’s babysitter.” I thought it was funny to see it repeated in the publicity language for the republished version. It creates this expectation, the way it makes it sound like you babysat him.
AR: Oh, yes. But it was actually the children, and then actually it wasn’t the children, because they hardly ever even appeared. I ended up being, like, William Burroughs’ babysitter, and Allen Watts’ babysitter, and all of these other grownups who came to Tim’s house just so they could get the drug, which Tim didn’t even realize. He just thought they were coming for the “experiment,” somehow. He wasn’t so aware of the drug culture. So the joke, in a way, is that I wasn’t Timothy Leary’s babysitter, but I was William Burroughs’s babysitter.
Burroughs disapproved of America’s anti-drug policies and anti-drug attitudes, so he exiled himself to Tangiers. But when he heard about Tim getting psilocybin, he came back to America, and the night he came, he was coming straight to Tim’s house, but Tim wasn’t going to be around. Tim was moving that night, so he called me and my then-husband Robert, and he asked me—because we did things like that for him—he called and asked if we could pick Bill Burroughs up at the airport and sort of “babysit” him, and that is what we did.
KK: It’s interesting that you call it “babysitting.” In today’s drug culture, there’s a word for this. When people take hallucinogens there’ll be one person, they’ll call him the “trip-sitter,” the person who doesn’t take anything and is—
AR: —is straight? A “trip-sitter?” I didn’t know that. That’s good.
Yeah, well, Tim sort of believed in that, actually. He always thought there should be someone there that wasn’t tripping or whatever. He had this whole setup that was sort of academic, for the “experiment,” and that was supposed to be a part of it. I mean, obviously that is a good idea. It didn’t really happen that way, but that was the plan.
KK: Where were his children?
AR: Upstairs.
KK: They didn’t need you?
AR: It was night usually, and they were asleep… or whatever they were doing.
I didn’t really have any of this background, but somebody told me, and I know there are all of these books about it—about Tim and the kids and all—and in one of the books, when the younger one, the son, was twelve, he talked about how they were tripping too, or somebody talked about that. The funny part about it was that sometimes we would stay up all night, just roaming around, and then in the morning the kids would come downstairs, and Susan, the girl, who was a couple of years older than her brother, I think, used to say, “You have these funny eyes.” That was her expression for it, that we were high, which was sort of a sweet thing to say. So it wasn’t clear, to me, who was high and who wasn’t, or who was tripping or who wasn’t, necessarily. I mean, we weren’t even really being analytical about it, but Susan said it that way. She said, “You have these funny eyes.” So I knew that she knew that we were.
KK: She knew that something was going on, even if she couldn’t put her finger on it.
AR: But maybe she could, because maybe she was also getting high. I don’t really know whether she was or not. I only read that in one of the books about Tim—that the kids were high all the time. I don’t really know. It probably might not be true.
KK: A couple of weeks ago, I read this Philip K. Dick novel called Valis, about a man who thinks he’s getting closer and closer to working out the truth of the whole universe, but he’s really just losing his mind. The narrator’s quest is tipped off by the suicide of a close friend: “Gloria was gentle and civilized, but she dropped a lot of acid. It was obvious that the acid, since he had last heard from her six months ago, had wrecked her mind.” He names Leary at one point, actually, sarcastically, thanking him for his “promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.” It reads, at times, like a postmortem of a whole generation that has been done in by their use of psychedelics. Some people got out clean, but then for some people it sort of precipitated their decline into insanity.
AR: I think that might be true. I knew a number of people who fell apart with psychedelics.
I was teaching at art school, and so I was around a lot of people who were younger than me—like ten, twenty years younger than me. It wasn’t just because of teaching. It was also because the people I was attracted to were usually younger.
But also I wasn’t that old. Maybe I was in my late thirties, maybe a little before. I always felt—and I did think about it a bit—that because I was older than a lot of the people that were taking them, I came through it okay. I didn’t try to fly or walk out a window or anything like that.
KK: I love this part at the end of “LSD (...Just the High Points...),” one of the pieces that deal with that experience, where you write: “...it was a party in a way. It just wasn’t a wild party. It was a sort of very internal party. There was all of this stuff going on inside everybody’s head and all. I think everyone was like maybe having a party separately.”
AR: I like that part, too.
KK: I think about it all the time. I know this is nothing new, but I reread this passage on the train up here, and I looked up to see how almost everyone around me had headphones in, or was staring at his or her phone, even during the parts between stations where there’s no signal. I kept thinking: “I think everyone was like maybe having a party separately.” I think that what you observed back then is, now, how almost everyone I know lives a lot of their lives.
AR: I don’t do as much technology as a lot of people I know. Even now, although I write on the computer, I still scribble in my journals. I don’t have an iPod, and I just learned how to text last year.
I love texting, especially because I have trouble walking lately. I have these “mobility issues,” as they say, and maybe it started with COVID, with staying inside a lot more, but that’s also just been my life—my life as a writer. Even though I did go out to teach, I stayed home and wrote a lot.
The texting is sort of a recent thing. After Val died, I had no partner or anything like that. I use it a little bit as a sort of seduction prop.
KK: In this new edition of If You’re a Girl, you write a lot about the pandemic, which was a difficult time for nearly everyone who is currently alive. And yet, across many genres of writing, and especially the kind that you do, nobody is really writing about it.
AR: I didn’t really think that I wrote that much about the pandemic, about COVID, but I do think it changed everything, and I do think about it a lot.
I just realized, in this conversation just now, that one of the reasons it affected me so much was because I was with Val, and Val died in June of 2020, which was right, sort of, in the middle. She got sicker and sicker, and it wasn’t COVID; it was other things. She had terrible diabetes. I guess she got very depressed. She gained a lot of weight, and a lot of things were happening. And so I think maybe my experience of COVID was also a little different because I was going through it with this person that I loved, who was losing it, even though it didn’t seem that way quite at the time. So it probably hit me in an even more intense way, that was also harder to let go of or to forget about.
KK: Apart from all of the people who died of COVID, it also felt like a lot of people were just dying—especially people who were already very old, who took measures to protect themselves against the virus, who isolated themselves out of an abundance of caution, and then ended up just getting really depressed when it felt like there was no end in sight. It felt like a lot of very old people, in general, were like: I’m out.
AR: Yeah, that’s true. Yes, that’s right—and it’s just so interesting that you’re talking about this because I do think that it’s something that people don’t talk about.
I mean, how old are you?
KK: I just turned 28.
AR: You’re that perfect age—my two physical therapists were beautiful gay boys that I had big crushes on—they were 27 and 28.
Did you ever have COVID?
KK: Oh, yeah—I think at least three times.
AR: I never had it.
KK: Never?
AR: Never. I mean, I’m probably going to at some point. Or maybe not.
So how old—I’m trying to figure it out—how old were you then?
KK: I was 23 or 24. Actually, I don’t remember exactly. Sometimes I think that maybe this might be one of the underexplored effects of the virus itself, that it makes your memories of the time when you had it hazy, and maybe that’s why people don’t talk about it.
AR: I especially don’t hear about younger people talking about it that much. I’ve never heard anybody young talk about it, actually, in my life. It’s just very strange to me that you walked in here and that’s what we’re talking about, because it does feel like it’s something that is very much a part of me, and, as I say: I think maybe some of it had to do with how I just always ended up falling in love with people that were basically crazy, or that were going to have breakdowns or whatever, because that’s what happened to Heather [Lewis], who was, I mean, I don’t know. The end of that sentence is fine.
And I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s just fascinating to me that we’re talking about this, because I never talk to people about this. Is it something that you sort of, I mean, feel like you obsess about a little bit?
KK: Well, yes. But in some ways I think I was tremendously lucky, because when I was in high school, which was before COVID, things were so bad between me and my parents—like, crisis-level bad—that if I hadn’t had the school day to get away from them, if I’d had to be stuck with them all the time, someone might have, would have probably, died. I think a lot about how lucky I was that I was not somebody’s dependent, and also that I didn’t have dependents—that I didn’t have kids. So I do obsess over it, but I can’t imagine how I might obsess over it now if it had really messed my life up, like if my life had been set up differently at the time when COVID arrived.
AR: It’s funny, in a way, that it’s like you got saved from it because you were too young, and I always felt like I sort of got saved from it because I was too old. It’s very interesting. I—really, I was coming from a different generation, and I was sort of more conventional and grounded. I mean, I wasn’t really, personally, exactly. I could never find the word for it because I was too late to be a bohemian, and I was too young to be a hippie, so I was in this funny place that didn’t have a definition, exactly. The bohemian culture was also the same time as a more conventional culture. In a way, I came from both, but I felt that that maybe saved me, in a way.
I was very comfortable staying home and being alone. I wasn’t really alone most of the time. For a lot of that I had—I don’t really like the word “partner,” but whatever. I had a “girlfriend.” Or I had a “boyfriend,” or whatever. I had moved around in that world, “boyfriend world,” a bit—or a lot.
The isolation that I lived in was also the isolation of two artists, living together at home. That’s how we lived. And it was OK, almost. I remember feeling a lot, thinking that it’s funny that everyone’s talking about how isolated they are and sort of thinking, that’s just how I live! I don’t know what else to say about it. I mean, again, I don’t know what we’re really talking about—whether some people are just psychotic and some people aren’t? Whether some people are just schizophrenic and some people aren’t? I don’t know why I’m not. And who knows what will happen, you know?
I don’t know, I just think it’s very interesting that we’re having this conversation.
KK: About COVID?
AR: About everything. Yeah, about COVID and hallucinogens and Tim Leary and all that. I mean, it’s really interesting to me that you’re so interested in it, because I feel sort of isolated in my interest in it.
I mean, do you feel that way? Or do the people that you know talk about it a lot too? Do you talk about it a lot with them?
KK: I definitely talk about drugs a lot with the people I know, COVID to a somewhat lesser extent. It’s funny: in the days before I came to New York, I had a really nasty cold, and I was texting my mom about it. She was very concerned that it was COVID, and I wanted to tell her, in the way of reassuring her that it probably wasn’t COVID, that I was fairly certain it was just the common cold, which is a very familiar feeling, and that it didn’t feel at all like having COVID, which feels a bit like being on drugs. I realized that might not be the most useful comparison for her, someone who probably has no experience doing drugs—or at least not the kinds that I was referring to.
AR: You know, knowing what drugs someone is on, it’s not always the easiest thing. When I was speeding, I was always good at hiding it, and when I didn’t hide it, I was by myself, and so nobody knew that I had passed out on the floor in a bunch of broken glass… until I wrote about it.
KK: Until you came clean. In one of the new pieces, you refer to this as “saying the quiet part out loud.”
AR: That’s a somewhat new expression—you know, I didn’t make it up.
KK: I know, but I like how you use it, along with another phrase that I think also has its roots in the workplace jargon of the last decade or so: to “circle back.” I was thinking about this, how both phrases are like code words for two very contemporary neuroses, which I think, in my own experience, seem to go hand-in-hand: to tell on oneself and to dwell on the past.
AR: It’s interesting that you’re using that word, too, the whole “dwelling” part—and the lockdown. It’s sort of an interesting coupling, and I never thought about that before.
KK: “Dwelling” as in, like, you’re in your home?
AR: Yeah, you’re in your dwelling.
I was talking to my friend. Do you know who Richard Hell is? We knew each other a long time ago, and because I asked him to be part of my book launch, we sort of came back. We were talking about writing, about how I have this tendency, when it comes to the past, to not really respect it. Writing from the past requires just remembering things—not inventing them or making them up or anything, but just sort of retelling. When you used the word “dwelling,” I thought about the idea that writing from memory isn’t good enough somehow.
KK: Because you have to embellish?
AR: I guess so. It was just this idea that writing from the past is like cheating, sort of, because you’re not doing anything. And maybe you’re not. Maybe it just comes out—because you live it again or something.
This—I mean, I’m sorry to say—it’s sort of so interesting that we’re right here and that you are the person that wanted to talk to me about my work. First of all, because I haven’t done that very much—ever—before this new book. And I haven’t thought about it very much, because I never really did until this moment in my life have this—I don’t know how to even put it—“career” as a writer or whatever. I’m not a person that has talked about my work. I just sort of did it, and that may have something to do with the drugs, as well. You know, if you’re just speeding, taking speed and writing...
KK: What do you mean by “speeding?” What do you mean by “speed?”
AR: Well, I mean a lot of different kinds of speed. I mean the real speed, which was not at all like the speed that ruins your teeth. I mean methamphetamine, and I mean amphetamine, and I mean diet pills. And, I mean, it started with the diet pills—when I was a teenager, because everyone in my suburb, in my town, went to the diet doctor, and I immediately sort of got hooked on them, partly because I liked the way they let me write, or made me write, or whatever—and that’s sort of the story of my life, in a way. I mean, that was my drug, always.
KK: In one of the new pieces toward the beginning of the book, you write about how your mom gave you the diet pills because she couldn’t tolerate them, because they would make her spend hours straightening her dresser drawer. Ironically, she discovered you might be gay when you were quite young, when she went snooping through your dresser drawer, where she finds a stash of love letters between you and your girlfriend Margot. You write, about how you lied to your mom that there would be no “funny business” during Margot’s next visit, that “maybe that’s where the lying began, or maybe it’s the diet pills.” What do you mean by that?
AR: Well, I think speeding sort of criminalizes you a little bit. You steal, you lie.
I lied about a lot of things, mostly, probably, my drug use—and at a certain point, maybe about liking girls. I never felt like I was a compulsive liar, because I don’t think I was. I had a reason to lie, because of my parents and my culture and because of what wasn’t accepted at the time.
I’m not sure how that works—the science of that, the criminal element—but is that one of your drugs? Speed?
KK: Oh, yeah. I love speed.
AR: And you never felt that it made you lie or become a kleptomaniac or anything?
KK: It’s funny that I was telling you about this thought exercise I sometimes do about what would’ve happened if COVID had happened at various other times in my life, and about how disastrous it would have been, because the disaster of my last year of high school was sort of inaugurated by my parents going into my dresser drawer and finding pills—for me it was Adderall—that I wasn’t prescribed. I never really thought about it, but I used to buy them from a boy who worked as a bagger at a grocery store, and I would buy them from him in the parking lot of the grocery store where he worked, and I would take a pill immediately and then follow him back into the grocery store and then immediately start to steal. But I really wasn’t addicted to it—
AR: —and why do you say you weren’t addicted to it?
KK: Oh my God. Talk about telling on myself. I say that because they were almost thrilled when they found them , because they were like “Oh, he needs to be put in a center”—a rehabilitation center—because they were looking for ways to send me away.
AR: And did you do that? I was going to ask you before if you were hospitalized.
KK: Before as in when we were talking about COVID? Was I hospitalized then?
AR: Just in general.
KK: No. I mean, I think I was for a while when I was a very little kid.
AR: I see. Well, as far as speed goes, do you do anything now?
KK: I do ritalin. I love ritalin. I do a lot of ritalin.
AR: When I was, you know, sort of a hardcore speed freak, I was going through somebody’s medicine cabinet, as we all do, because I thought it was something else that looked like it, and I thought: “What is this? This is nothing!” However, subsequently, I have discovered that it is a nice drug.
KK: I love “speeding”—making a verb of it. I usually call it “being on stims.”
AR: “Stims” is good. Speeding is sort of old-fashioned. I like it, though.
KK: I like it, too. I’ll bring it back.
AR: Are you speeding now?
KK: No. I am not.
AR: Are you lying now?
KK: I am not lying now. But… when you narrate going dancing with Heather and Eileen Myles, when you and Heather flop down on a couch together and you discover that she’s a very good kisser—even though she’s a terrible dancer—you write that Eileen came up to you and said, “So, Ann, are you gay now?” And then you write, a bit later, about going to Heather’s rental on Fire Island that she’s blowing her book advance on, when she pours herself a drink, that your friend Amy Scholder says to her, “So are you drinking now?”—that they were both uttered in the same way, sort of like, “Are you lying now?” Sort of like what you just said. How is your relationship to being closeted like an addict’s experience of abstinence, of almost, in a way, being either on or off the wagon?
AR: I don’t know what to say about that. I never felt like that exactly—maybe, in part, because I started with girls. And then I had a long married life. I mean, I married two times, and both times I married men that I wasn’t really in love with. And then I just dated men and went out with men, you know, for quite a while. And then I was with Vito [Ricci] for, like, 22 years, and most of it was really nice.
KK: Were you married to him?
AR: No.
KK: Wait, really? Who were the men you married?
AR: The men I married were just, you know, impossible.
KK: They don’t show up anywhere in your work.
AR: Well, they weren’t—they aren’t—really part of it. I didn’t write about them, that’s true. Again, it feels like a generational thing. I sort of got married to please my parents. I do think I came out of a very funny time—and maybe that’s also something that people don’t talk about, that accident of birth, because I’m older than a lot of the people I know and love.
KK: What were they like, your husbands?
AR: Robert was a poet. He never had a job. He didn’t know how to sustain himself. I guess his parents gave him money, and I gave him money, and he never had a job. But he was a poet! I mean—not “but”—but he was not a great poet. My second husband Ron was an academic, and his favorite period was the 18th century, which couldn’t be more conventional. Matthew Prior—who is probably the most conventional poet ever—was what he wrote his dissertation on. They were sort of on the fringes in a certain way, but then they were also very conventional.
KK: You were also an academic, another thing you hardly ever mention in your work.
AR: I went to the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Columbia. I have all of my degrees.
KK: What did you study?
AR: Well, I wouldn’t really call it studying. I would call it speeding, again.
I didn’t have to do anything for Harvard, because at Harvard they think once you get into Harvard, they’ll just give you a master’s.
When I was getting my Ph.D. at Columbia, it was on a book of Faulkner’s called The Wild Palms. It was when the students took over the administration building and everything, so the teachers were terrified of us, so they just gave you your degree. Crazy.
KK: And then you worked at the School of Visual Art for a very long time, where you taught writing?
AR: I taught Journal, the course that Chris [Kraus] and I invented and taught to kids one summer upstate. It was no work. The students came in, we all wrote, including me, took a break, and then we read what we wrote, including me. And that was the secret of it. I really had it figured out.
KK: There was no syllabus?
AR: No.
KK: It was just Journal.
AR: We just made it up.
KK: I chatted with someone who came to your book launch, a former student of yours, and I asked him what you were like as a teacher, and he said, “Wildly inappropriate!”—and this made me think about how your work is “line-crossing” or might be seen as transgressive by some people. I’ve been thinking a lot about how crossing the lines of what’s considered to be in good taste reminds us of where those lines are, and how compulsive rule-breakers, as much as compulsive rule-followers, are sometimes these very dedicated students of, and memorizers of, the rules. Sometimes they have no choice, like when you write about your uncle, the Hollywood studio composer Leo Robin, who would try his luck and fall afoul of Hays Code-era prudishness.
AR: Right. The line, “That weekend in Niagara when we never saw the falls.” They made him change it to be: “we hardly saw the falls.”
KK: But then there’s this other, much rarer thing—and you have it—when an artist breaks rules because they actually have no regard for them, no idea what they are. I’m thinking about the story in which you read something Chris Kraus had thought to be “appropriate for Lake George High adolescents” at the end of one of your workshops for high schoolers, but it mentioned the diet pills...
AR: Yes, it did, and they kicked us out.
KK: I guess I’m thinking of your Uncle Leo again, how when he was rewriting “Thanks for the Memory” for Frank Sinatra, he got in trouble for this one line which was “so dirty” that, in his advanced age, “he hadn’t even realized it”: “Our romance has too much heart and not enough head.”
AR: Yeah, that I made up.
KK: Really?
AR: Yeah. But it’s fine, because I do the same thing.
Yesterday, I was explaining this to someone—I was talking about using the word “blue.” Have you ever heard that expression? When they say, like they used to talk about it with comic writers, “He works ‘blue’?” Do you know what that means? It means that he works dirty.
I don’t know how that happens in people. Some people have that impulse and some people don’t. I obviously have it. I don’t know where it comes from, particularly, this sort of pull to make a dirty joke, but I have it—and Leo had it, too. That’s all.
KK: You have no idea how much I love the piece about your Uncle Leo, the way it ends.
AR: It’s one of my favorite things I ever wrote. I didn’t know it was going to happen, but it happened so nicely. I love when that happens.
KK: When something comes out like that?
AR: It all came out like that, even the new stuff. I don’t really edit. I don’t edit, really, at all. It all sort of comes out, and that might have something to do with the drugs. But not all of it—when I wrote “Thanks for the Memory,” I wasn’t speeding.
I was going to write a book about Leo. That’s sort of how a lot of this writing started.
KK: But isn’t Armed Response about Leo?
AR: I had a really good friend—Robert Jones, who died—who was the head of Harcourt Brace, and he loved my story “Thanks for the Memory,” and when he heard that I was writing a book about Leo, he wanted to see it. I had a draft of it and I showed it to him, and he said, “Don’t spend the next ten years of your life writing this book.”
It just wasn’t me. It wasn’t my voice. I interviewed a lot of very old people, remembering Leo in his very young years, and it was just very dull. It was just these old people talking about young people. Anyway, it was terrible, and he actually said, “This is terrible. Don’t write this book,” so I started writing the way I write now, and the way I wrote then. Armed Response is the book that came out of trying to write a book about Leo.
KK: You also wanted to write a book about Heather.
AR: And that didn’t happen either, but this new book is the book about Heather. I think that sideways is the way I do it, and that sideways might be the way to do it, maybe, like this interview. I think it’s going to be a very interesting interview, not exactly your normal interview. Seems sort of strange to me—in a good way. I’m not sure how or why, but this is a good match.
KK: I feel the same way. You know, when I really admire a writer, like when someone’s really famous to me, hardly ever do I want to meet them because I think it’ll ruin it.
AR: I’m not really famous, so that’s why.
KK: I know, but there are a lot of people who aren’t famous who are famous to me.
AR: I know what you mean. Me too.
You understand that I have never met anyone who has—like, really—read my work, all my work, the way you have. There may be other people, and I’m now starting to think that there are—but I never met them. I don’t know what it means, but I don’t think at this point in my life I want to be… but maybe this is the time in my life where I would like to be famous. I never thought about that much. I guess it would be a nice way to end up.