Deborah Eisenberg has been writing short stories and publishing collections of them for decades, but before last week she'd never read in Seattle. "I don't do book tours because frankly no one wants me to," she said to the crowd at Elliott Bay Book Company. In a review of her latest, Twilight of the Superheroes, for the New York Times, Ben Marcus called Eisenberg "one of the most important fiction writers now at work." Twilight's through line is death anxiety, set against the death of an empire. We talked before her reading, next to a bright window at her hotel. She wore all black.
I first discovered you in an anthology of fiction from the New Yorker. But you're not published in the New Yorker anymore.
No. Uh, I...
What the hell is wrong with them?
[Laughs] That's what I want to know. See if you can get it out of them. I wasn't published there. They wouldn't accept anything of mine. And then an editor named Gwyneth Cravens came. She responded to what I do, and she published everything I gave her, including all the things that had been rejected. Then she left, and nobody else there ever liked anything of mine again. So, that's my history with the New Yorker. But I think what I'm writing these days is a little complex, actually, for magazines.
What's the difference between what you're writing now and what you were writing in the '80s?
It's just a different kind of thing. I was just thinking today that getting older is really interesting. I encourage you to do it.
As a fiction writer who writes from other perspectives, I'm guessing the older you get, the more people you meet, the more you realize you don't know what you're talking about.
That's very accurate. You really don't know what you're talking about. And also, the more you learn about the world, the more your own concerns can seem almost arbitrary. But, you know, beneath this sort of warm and even ardent exterior beats a heart of pure Bakelite, I can tell you—
Of what?
Bakelite. You know that kind of plastic that was so fashionable in the '30s? Jewelry was made out of it. And radios used to be. But I'm not really, you know, nobody would say, "Oh, she's a very caring person," to use the—
No one would say that about you?
No one who knew me. [Laughs] But on the other hand I think that there's a kind of general and ongoing empathy that is really at the foundation of fiction writing. That's what it is, a sort of examination of experience.
Read the whole interview (with stuff about David Lynch, Joan Didion, "half-assed" reviewers, novels versus stories, etc.).
