Jamie Hood and Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:
JAMIE HOOD: Hello!
CHARLOTTE SHANE: Hi! You look gorgeous—make sure to put that in.
HOOD: Oh, I will. An Honest Woman (Simon & Schuster, $26) is a sort of origin story, about the boys you grew up with and the cultural milieu of your youth, as well as an erotic Bildungsroman that eventually traces your history in sex work. I’m curious where you began.
SHANE: I went back to earlier writing and found a lot that surprised me. You learn how unreliable you are as a narrator, even to yourself. The more I looked, the more I realized one story—of how I was this homely teenager with few romantic options—was wrong. I had several boys who confessed their love to me, and this really good-looking boyfriend, but the facts of your life are not always the most important. I was so invested in this idea of being unattractive, I had to live my life that way, to be like, “Any guy who’s interested in me is weird, there’s something really wrong with him.” That feels so feminine: considering yourself from an ambiguous male vantage point. You’re trying to satisfy an ideal, but because it’s not the ideal of a real person, it’s impossible to meet the requirements. You exist in an aspirational state of failure.
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When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted to settle permanently in the United States. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he began to rethink his calling as a poet, and, moreover, to reconsider the social role and function of poetry. (He also began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to embrace the Christian faith of his childhood.)
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Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from