Our next interview is with Stephen Elliott, the author of four novels including
A Life Without Consequences and
Happy Baby.
The New York Times called
Happy Baby “the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and drugs.”
This interview took place in San Francisco -- in a taxi, a bar, several diners, and the Hotel Triton. At times, Rita wore a nurse costume. At times, Stephen was tied up. You can visit him at
stephenelliott.com. [photo by Jeremiah Johnson]
RITA: Do you know the date of your last tetanus shot?
STEPHEN: Yeah, I got a tetanus shot three months ago. I had to get my vaccinations for Uganda.
RITA: I see. Well, I may have to administer some other vaccinations. Are you sexually active with others at all?
STEPHEN: No, not really.
RITA: Mr. Elliott, are you going to answer these questions honestly? I think you’re lying. I may have to force you to answer. It might come to that.
* * *
RITA: I see you have Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory tattooed on your left thigh. What’s the story behind that?
STEPHEN: I was hanging out with a tattoo artist in college, a gun lover, and I saw the painting and thought it was kind of interesting and said, “You should do that on my leg.” I had a burn there anyway.
RITA: What did you like about the painting?
STEPHEN: I liked the idea of memory and memory transformed. How the past shapes you, but the past also changes when you shape the past. I have a strange relationship with that. I believe very strongly in the subjectivity of the past: how every person experiences it differently and their interpretation of the experience is the truth. I think people rarely intentionally lie about the past despite their failure to distinguish what may or may not have happened. It comes up a lot when you’re a ward of the court. When the state takes custody of you and there’s battles over child abuse, they’re keeping a log on the different children. The state has one story, the parents another, and the child a third. Usually nobody is intentionally lying, they're just different interpretations of the same events. Though only the child can know the emotional truth of abuse.
RITA: I was wondering about that and how in A Life Without Consequences, everyone is reading Paul’s file. What is the difference between having everyone read your file and writing semi-autobiographical novels that allow readers to know a whole lot about your life?
STEPHEN: The thing about Paul and the thing about being a ward of the state [Stephen left home at age thirteen and the state took custody when he was fourteen after a year sleeping on the streets] is that people are reading your records, but you’re not writing them. They’re writing your story and they’re in control of it. And then when you write your story--you fictionalize it--you’re really going through your experience, what happened to you. It’s actually funny about the records that people keep because I just got the records from the state a few months ago, and it was surprisingly accurate! That psychological test that I wrote about in A Life Without Consequences that they gave Paul--that they gave me and they wouldn’t let me see--I finally just got it a few months ago, and it was dead on, I thought! They understood me much better than I thought they did at the time. I was so resentful at them for keeping all these records on me and not letting me read them. I felt so misunderstood, but I don’t think I was that misunderstood. I think they understood me. It was powerful to see the records. In a strange way, it made me much more sympathetic to the guardians, and the court, and the people who are in the child welfare system, the social workers who are trying to do well against massive odds. I disliked them so much as a kid.
RITA: When I finished reading A Life Without Consequences, I cried and cried, although I think there’s something uplifting as well. I think Happy Baby ends in an uplifting way, too.
STEPHEN: I think A Life Without Consequences has a really happy ending. In the end, Paul learns to accept that he’s a group home kid, and that group homes are a major part of who he is, and he’ll always be a group home kid, and he can work within a framework of his own. Most of the time in A Life Without Consequences, he’s trying to deny that he’s a messed up kid. He won’t accept the reality of the situation. I think people are happier when they know their limitations and then they can push them and work within them, as opposed to denying them. You have to know who you are first and that’s why he turns away from Jessica who is a really nice well-adjusted middle class girl, but who doesn’t need him the way Tanya needs him. Now, with Happy Baby, the actual ending is on page sixteen and it is a happy ending but no one knows it’s the ending. That’s the furthest point in the narrative, a guy who’s ready to start over. He’s not going back. He’s going to run away one more time. So, it’s actually a happy ending, but it’s on page sixteen.
RITA: (giggling like a schoolgirl) Wow, I like it when you talk about your books. What do you teach students who are interested in fiction?
STEPHEN: I try to brainwash them with my aesthetic. I try to make them like the things that I like. And then I try to break their own style so that it conforms more to the things I want to read.
RITA: They must adore you for that.
STEPHEN: (laughing) Yeah, totally. People want to know what’s good and what’s not good, so I tell them.
RITA: Are there any topics you could give people advice on for our sex advice column?
STEPHEN: I don’t even know my own sexuality. Though, writing Happy Baby was like coming out of the closet for me. It made me immensely more comfortable about my desires. Now I can’t write about sex anymore because I don’t have the same shame associated with it. I mean, without the shame and the conflict, why write about it? I kind of miss that a little bit. I don’t have that feeling of like, “I’ve got to write something, there’s something personal that I have to get out.”
RITA: Maybe you have a sex advice question for me…?
STEPHEN: I was going to ask you about a woman I met in San Jose last week. She was really mean but I like that. It’s an unfortunate condition on my part. It was one of the best scenes I’ve ever had. She was in control from the moment I walked in. I’m going to try not to fall in love with her…I can tell she’s an awful person. My question is: will I ever be able to have a healthy relationship with someone I’m attracted to?
RITA: I don’t think you should worry about whether you’ll fall in love with her. I think your attraction to mean woman will find a way to work itself out. I can think of three ways this might happen. The first possibility is that you find a woman who's been through therapy and wants to have a healthy relationship, and she also craves an outlet for her sadistic side, so the two of you will figure out how to make it work. The second possibility is that you meet a wonderful friend and partner, perhaps a submissive, who is not sadistic but is open-minded enough to let you see mean dommes "on the side." And the third possibility is that you enter into a relationship with a genuinely mean woman, but this time your eyes are open and you set certain boundaries to take care of yourself, and you call upon your friends and therapist and other support to help you adhere to those boundaries. Sure, these are all unusual relationships, but that's your life, pal.
* * *
RITA: When you get interviewed, is there a question that you always wish they’d ask you?
STEPHEN: It's funny because Happy Baby is a very sexual book but it's also a very language driven book. I thought when it came out people would want to talk more about sex, but they didn't. They often want to talk about child abuse and state facilities for children, which is fine. I want to talk about that. It's really important to me. Sex is kind of a scary topic. They don’t want to talk about it. I remember the first interviewer to ask me, she asked, “Are you a submissive?” I was in a taxi talking to her on the phone. Happy Baby had been out six months already and nobody had asked me that. I turned beet red. It totally freaked me out. I couldn’t really talk. But I was also so totally turned on. I developed a large attraction to this person because she asked me this question.
RITA: Have you had sex workers or people in the sex industry contact you after reading your books?
STEPHEN: Not too much. A lot of the people who contact me tend to be abused children. That’s the number one group of people who contact me. “I was also abused, I really related to your story and to the books.” They find a connection in that. That would the main group. Then, the people who read Happy Baby: a lot of people write who are submissive. Never has a dominant written to me after reading Happy Baby. It’s always submissive, which is really unfortunate because I kind of thought that after Happy Baby all these dominant women would contact me and say, “I want to tie you up and hurt you,” and instead it’s people saying, “I also want to be hurt,” and I’m like, “Why are you contacting me? We can’t do anything for each other, you know?” (laughing) Still, it’s nice when people contact you. When people don’t read your books it’s really painful, not because you don’t make any money but because you’ve tried to say something and nobody has heard you or read it. Whenever you get a letter from somebody--it doesn’t matter what their motives are--it affirms to you that someone heard what you’re saying.
RITA: What’s your next novel going to be about?
STEPHEN: I have different ideas everyday. It’ll probably be set in Las Vegas…gambling, sex, violence.
RITA: My dad gambles. He’s an engineer, so I think he counts cards.
STEPHEN: The first time I was in Vegas I spent three days in jail. I was a runaway, fourteen years old.
RITA: You wrote about that.
STEPHEN: All those things in that book are true! They put me on a Trailways bus back to Chicago with four dollars!
RITA: What else have you done in Vegas?
STEPHEN: One time I was there and I won fifteen thousand dollars. My publisher left me at a craps table with a stake, a little over a thousand on the felt. He told me to play it out, he was going to bed. He just left me there. All of a sudden, my streets were burning, as they say. I won fifteen thousand dollars. I had women on my arms. I was like a pimp or something. It was the most amazing feeling, even though I gave him the money back. It felt so good to stand there and be a high roller, five hundred dollars for every square, a crowd of people watching.
RITA: How did you know when to stop?
STEPHEN: I don’t know why I stopped. It was a good eight or ten hours. It wasn’t like I sat down for twenty minutes and then stopped. The only time that publisher ever made money off me was that one night in Vegas. Got questions for Nina and Rita? Need sex advice? Send your questions anonymously using this
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