SW: Fantastic. Why did you think of that poem?

EM: Because I am literally working on the novel section about this person and that relationship. And wrote this poem when I was lovers with them.

SW: It’s a fantastic poem. I remember the first time I read it, but I forget which physical book it is in.

EM: Well, I have a hard time figuring that out too. But I think it’s in School of Fish (1997) … Yeah, it is. It’s not discreet. Often, I’ll finish a book, and I’m also ending a relationship. Still, sometimes, there are two relationships in a book, and it’s not clear who the book is about, you know, energetically.

SW: Has anyone ever said anything to you about having written about them?

EM: Not so much. I only hear things indirectly. Like the woman in Chelsea Girls was fine with the book until somebody else said to her: ‘How do you feel about Eileen writing about you, aren’t you pissed?’ And then she became quite mad. We’re not in touch, but they were quite angry at me for years. So, I don’t know, I’ll hear people talk about being in a bookstore with somebody who led them to one of my books to show them what was written about them. I hear shit like that more than anybody ever talks to me, you know? But it’s an issue in different ways. It’s going to be an issue in a lot of ways in this new book. There could be a class action suit. Like, all my exes get together, and all my loves sue me.

SW: Sounds horrible.

EM: Yeah, it sounds awful. It’s true.

SW: And when you’re writing, are you ever scared of publishing something?

EM: No, because somewhere, I think they’re separate things. When I’m writing, I don’t know if this is the good part or not … My feelings about writing are not always born out of the writing itself, you know? Sometimes, what feels great while writing is not so great. So, I separate the two practices. Writing has to be a place of liberation where you can say anything you want,

SW: You think … anything?

EM: Absolutely. I just don’t think that you should necessarily publish it for a lot of reasons.

SW: How was Chelsea Girls (1994) received in France?

EM: Oh, great. I mean, I got a big book award for Best Foreign Novel of the Year. It was great. I had more interesting conversations with reviewers and interviewers there than I’ve ever had. Because all these things, the combination of being from a non-middle-class background and using different Englishes, being an experimental writer, and I don’t know what else … I think all the things that I am as a writer somehow tend to make the writing be described as kind of ‘Bukowski-esque.’ I’ll be like they’re the ‘dyke Bukowski’ when I’m like I’m writing a complicated art novel, you know?

SW: Do they say that in France or the States?

EM: More in the States. France was more interested in the writing and in the thinking. Whereas in the States, I think this is just a way of marketing people because I know how hard it was to publish the book in the first place – in the nineties. I wanted to publish it with a mainstream publisher. And they were like, ‘These stories don’t have an arc,’ that kind of capitalist arc that stories are supposed to have. And so, it’s great that I published it with Black Sparrow, and they were fantastic, but it had to do with the world of writing I’m in, as opposed to the mainstream world. I think Bukowski was their cash cow, and they anticipated me being received in the same way. And I wasn’t. So, France was a breath of fresh air because they treated it like a literary book, which I think it is. But I’m very used to it being treated like a memoir of the East Village in the seventies. The thing that I probably shouldn’t talk about again is that it gets compared to Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Okay, and that’s crazy – I wrote it like 20 years before. And they’re such different books, so the comparison is just dumb.

SW: I’ve never read Just Kids, so I can’t even …

EM: Well, it has a different purpose and was constructed differently for a different audience.

SW: I don’t know if you’ve read Interview Magazine. They’ll do ‘eight minutes with so and so,’ like an eight-minute cigarette with someone, and they ask rapid-fire questions while smoking a cigarette at a party or something. And I can’t tell what’s easier, doing something like that or having a sit-down conversation.

EM: I did that with them. And yeah. I think it was good.

SW: No cigarettes were had.

EM: Exactly. I don’t smoke, do you smoke?

SW: I do.

EM: I have. I love cigarettes, but I don’t smoke anymore.

SW: When was the last time you smoked?

EM: Uh, a long time. Probably 20 years.

SW: Do you ever feel like one or no?

EM: Oh yeah … of all the habits, it’s the one that I most would love to return to, but I absolutely know what I’m like, and if I smoked, I would be smoking.