Decoding a Language, Part Two: An Interview with Andrea Scrima about Her New Novel “Like Lips, Like Skins”

by Andrea Scrima

In her second novel Like Lips, Like Skins (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl, 2021) Andrea Scrima unpacks a family story of strong emotional ties. When the first-person narrator Felice finds her deceased father’s diaries, she combs them for clues to a past riddled with blind spots. She abandons a drawing series because she’s afraid she’s no longer able to tell the difference between reality and abstraction; years later she wonders if she studied art to make good on her father’s unfulfilled childhood ambition. In Like Lips, Like Skins, Scrima transplants her own works of art into fictional settings. Artistic perception permeates everyday life and speaks a formal language that, much like the first-person narrator’s recurring dreams and the symptoms of her trauma, lends itself to interpretation.

Part One of this interview was published December 20, 2021 on Three Quarks Daily.
For Part Two, which focuses on the function and presence of art in Like Lips, Like Skins, Ally Klein corresponded with the author over the course of several weeks via email; the following is an edited version of a talk the two gave on December 11, 2021 at Lettrétage in Berlin. Read more »



Monday, December 20, 2021

Decoding A Language: An Interview With Andrea Scrima About Her New Novel “Like Lips, Like Skins”

Like Lips, Like Skins, Andrea Scrima’s second novel (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl 2021), is a diptych; the first half of the book is dedicated to the first-person narrator’s mother, the second half to her late father. We meet Felice in the early eighties as a young art student in New York and as a newcomer to West Berlin before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall; ten years later, she returns to New York to install an exhibition of her work. Another fifteen years pass and we encounter her as a single mother poring over her father’s journals in search of her family’s past. Like Lips, Like Skins is about art, memory, and the repetitions of trauma. The first chapter was published in issue 232 of the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte; English-language excerpts have appeared in Trafika Europe, StatORec, and Zyzzyva. The German version of this interview appeared in issue 234 of manuskripte. Ally Klein interviewed the author over the course of several weeks via email.

Ally Klein: There’s a scene in Like Lips, Like Skins in which the first-person narrator, Felice, recalls studying the Sunday comics as a child. She buries her nose in the newsprint; when she fetches a magnifying glass to get closer, she discovers an “accumulation of tiny dots.” Individually, they’re no more than “lopsided splotch[es],” but together give rise to a bigger picture. I see a parallel here to the way the novel is stylistically conceived. Memories pop up seemingly at random, and in the end, they produce an image that works intuitively. The book eludes a stringent retelling, but leaves the reader with a sense of understanding something that can’t be expressed in terms of an idea or concept. The discoveries, if that’s what they can be called, are situated elsewhere.

Andrea Scrima: As a child, Felice doesn’t yet know that the interaction between the eye and brain fills in the gaps, the missing information between disparate points; for her, it’s just magic. I use language to create imagery that can exist outside of description or symbolism. In literature, images often have a function, they’re there to convey a certain idea. But some images are irreducible, they’re not all that easy to explain. And these are the ones that interest me most: they’re autonomous, they have a life of their own. Sometimes they’re a bit uncanny.

I’m interested in literature’s resilience, its ability to find a formal language for phenomena that can’t be easily captured in words. A language the reader somehow perceives as “true,” even if they can’t necessarily say how or why. Read more »

Monday, September 13, 2021

Scavenging Science: On John Horgan and Tao Lin

by David Kordahl

Covers of Pay Attention and Leave Society

From the moment we’re born into bright hospital lights until that last day when we’re topped off with embalming fluid, it’s hard to escape the human world. By the “human world,” here, I mean the world that we have built for ourselves, a world where, whether or not you know the specific secrets of bridge struts or brain imagers, you can be sure that someone out there knows. Most questions, here, have their straightforward answers. So many, in truth, that you can easily lose sight of the mystery, the “human” part of this world, hidden like a pilot light inside the machine.

John Horgan and Tao Lin are two writers who are each interested in both the “human” and the “world” parts of this, and each has recently written a new autofiction. Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science describes a day in the life of Eamon Toole, Horgan’s stand-in, an aging, recently-divorced professor who ruminates on free will as he looks forward to meeting his girlfriend. Leave Society, starring Li as a stand-in for Tao Lin, chronicles Li’s attempts to cure himself from society-induced sicknesses. By the end of the book, getting a girlfriend seems to do the trick.

It’s a little glib to compare these books just because they both involve sad guys who are grateful for their girlfriends. But Pay Attention and Leave Society also rhyme in more significant ways. Both are essentially about the shortcomings of traditional science in capturing the world. Horgan never pushes this idea very far, while Lin pushes it into the realm of pseudo-science. Yet it’s not obvious which book is ultimately more rational. Read more »