Zoe Flavin
Interview with Alyssa Songsiridej
I have a confession to make. I avoided Alyssa Songsiridej’s debut novel Little Rabbit when it first came out. The novel, set in Boston, follows a young bisexual writer who meets an older choreographer at an artist’s residency. She’s initially disgusted by him until they develop an erotic relationship that threatens to reshape the unnamed narrator’s fledgling definitions of herself. I’m a young bisexual writer from Boston. As of late, I find myself avoiding narratives where the main character is a writer. In my reading time, I like to take a little break from my writing life and go somewhere else.
My partner brought Little Rabbit on our first trip together to Sayulita, Mexico. She unabashedly reads any book Carmen Maria Machado blurbs and Machado’s blurb for Little Rabbit was particularly good. “A love letter to bottoming and being an artist and following yourself.” It was my partner’s first time in Mexico and on our first day of the trip, she ate and drank fearlessly—frozen margaritas from a man selling drinks out of a cooler with a broken lid, raw tuna that was ominously a highlighter pink. While she was laid up with food poisoning for the next two days, I read her Little Rabbit in its entirety.
This novel reminded me why I read. Not to be distracted but to find words, to be more present in the experience of my life. It’s an addictive, honest exploration of questions I think about regularly—how does romantic love rearrange perceptions of oneself? How does one wrestle with conformist pressures, especially when they come from surprising places? The narrator’s exploration of these questions gave me new words to express things I’ve only ever thought about in a shapeless, mercurial way. I was so excited to find that interviewing Songsiridej offered a similar experience.
Alyssa Songsiridej is the author of Little Rabbit, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award. A 2022 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, she lives in Philadelphia.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: What was the seed of Little Rabbit initially? What was the first thing that came to you?
ALYSSA SONGSIRIDEJ: I always sort of knew I wanted to write something that was really focused on a woman’s internal experience of desire. When a lot of books talk about sex and desire, the focus is on—do people want her? Not, what is it like for her to want? The idea of writing about dance, specifically, and including a choreographer character came to me when I went to a residency in upstate New York where there was a choreographer who was working with two dancers and I got to see it up close.
WSR: Was Little Rabbit your first novel project or did you have others?
AS: I have had plenty of others [laughs]. I have a lot of very bad intergenerational family novel projects I wrote when I was in grad school. I had a weird experimental novel about being an adjunct that I wrote when I was an adjunct, which was just too much processing of my life in real time. I found all these novels actually torturous to write, and Little Rabbit was the first one where I didn’t feel tortured to write, which I think is a big part of why I was able to finish it, revise it, and see it through.
WSR: Could you talk a little bit more about going from writing “serious” things that were a bit torturous to writing what had a sense of urgency and really flowed?
AS: In my early twenties, I was just like, this is what a serious writer does. A serious writer writes about capitalism. How can I write about anything besides the horrors of the contingent labor force in this day and age? [laughs]. I was a very serious twenty-something-year-old. I also lived in a very serious social justice-y neighborhood and milieu, so I was like, well, my writing has to have a purpose. A mission that I can map on it. It made the writing process not fun and made the writing itself not very pleasurable to read. When I started writing Little Rabbit, I thought the world was sort of over. It was the early part of the pandemic, and things seemed really catastrophic. I was like, okay, I’m not going to think about the future. I’m just going to write something that I find pleasurable to write at the moment. It created a very different writing experience for me—something more immersive that I felt I could come back to again and again with much more ease. At the same time, all the things I was thinking about with my “serious” writing are still present in this book: What does it mean to be an artist under capitalism? What does it mean to be someone who is trying to make art and understand the world when you also have bills to pay, and there’s a material reality that can feel very limiting? How do your relationships play into that? There’s this idea that love and relationships and even your friendships, are separate from the material realm and there’s no contamination. I think it’s much more complicated than that. The ability to afford things or not afford things affects our relationships much more than we acknowledge. That’s something I wanted to talk about in this book as well.
WSR: I kept returning to this idea of patronage while I was reading the book. The narrator really struggles with the choreographer being her patron, and the choreographer is like why do you struggle with this so much? Take my money.
AS: It’s always complicated where you get your money from. I feel like it’s almost never straightforward. In the case of the narrator taking the choreographer’s money, there are obviously big alarm bells because you don’t want to end up in a position where you’re dependent completely on a partner. But there are plenty of relationships where the partner does end up becoming the breadwinner. There’s an ebb and flow of dependence. I was interested in this question of how it’s different that Annie, the main character’s best friend in the novel, gets money from her parents or that she’s sort of grown up in this life of extreme privilege. Who gets to feel like their art is pure, and who gets to feel like they are not contaminated by money? What are the invisible structures that have gone into place to let that person feel that way or think that way? I think about that a lot because I’ve always worked in fundraising, especially for the arts. It’s a struggle. You always have to think about where the money is coming from.
WSR: You’ve talked about being paid to edit erotica ebooks. Do you think that had any influence on your journey with sex writing?
AS: First of all, there’s a lot of really bad sex writing. The problem with a lot of erotica is the sex writing doesn’t quite work. When I was editing, it was a never-ending supply of these ebooks that were being sent to me and I would edit them for like sixteen Australian dollars an hour. I realized, oh, there’s a demand for this. There are people who take desire really seriously and want a lot of it in writing. Then, I was like, why is it relegated to this genre of the Kindle single-erotic ebook? I think things are changing. There’s a lot of literary writing that’s centering the internal bodily experience of women and desire. I just saw that the Melissa Febos advanced review copies are coming out for Dry Season. The erotic ebooks I was editing typically centered around a high-powered woman who needed to let go. I don’t know what the process was like for creating these narratives, but it was interesting to me that money was always an equation in the relationship. It was always part of the attraction, so I didn’t want to ignore that when writing Little Rabbit. There’s something to stuff that gets us.
WSR: And by stuff do you mean financial considerations or—?
AS: Yeah, exactly, like the glamour of having an apartment with windows. What does that do to your experience of a relationship when you encounter someone who has these things and is promising to give them to you? I wanted to take that seriously in the book.
WSR: What sex writing influences you?
AS: I love Garth Greenwell, so I’m very jealous that you’re taking his class right now [laughs]. I was just thinking about this with Small Rain. The level of attention to the present moment, the internal experience of being a body, which isn’t just specific to sex writing but really good writing period. I think he’s kind of unparalleled in doing that. I was thinking, weirdly, about the novel Rebecca, written by Daphne Du Maurier. It’s sort of a wild book about the nature of desire, but the desire is not located where you think it would be. It’s not in the central relationship. It’s with the dead wife. It’s in the house. It’s all the things around the relationship that charge it with this eroticism.
WSR: Speaking of Garth, he recently had us read Parul Sehgal’s essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” I was putting it in conversation with your novel and your choice to have the narrator’s family be super secure and not have her desire come from a place of trauma. Could you talk about that choice?
AS: I didn’t want to make a stereotypical story of a girl who had a traumatic backstory driving her interest in kink. I was really interested in pushing against the common narrative of how kink works. I didn’t want to go to a flashback of her being spanked in fourth grade or whatever to explain her interest in kink. I wanted it to feel like it was a more organic, natural, discovery process that felt very specific to this character. I wanted her to have a full understanding of her own power in order to give it in these moments of play.
WSR: Often the pressures that were applied to this character came from surprising places. Like the queer community or her very loving stable family that wanted her to conform to their idea of a liberated young woman. I found it to be a really interesting exploration of resisting conformist pressures wherever they arise.
AS: I was thinking about—what if this relationship that we have a lot of assumptions about (younger woman with older wealthier man) doesn’t meet those assumptions? What if her experience of the relationship is different than everyone is telling her it should be? What happens then? This book became interesting to me when I realized the choreographer wasn’t going to be bad and she was going to have to deal with all these internal contradictions. What do you do when the people you would assume you would agree with (queer friends, stable family), you disagree with?
WSR: This isn’t a spoiler, but on the second to last page, the narrator says some- thing like, “I don’t have the formal words to talk about dance.” Then goes on to describe dance beautifully. When you go to write about another art form, do you spend a lot of time formally studying it or do you just sort of jump in and describe it in a way that feels right to the character?
AS: In this novel, I wanted to get a sense of her reactions rather than getting caught up in what was happening specifically on the stage. It was kind of the same way I approached writing the sex scenes. I wanted to think about what their movement was doing to her internal landscape. It was a little bit of a cheat to make her a writer so she wouldn’t have to know all the dance jargon. Jargon can work like a wall between the reader and the experience. I also find that dance tends to be the most mysterious art form to put into words. It’s so interesting to hear dancers talk about how they make a movement. It feels almost like the opposite of writing. Dance is contained in a temporal instance. You have to be in the room watching someone to experience the dance. Writing is all mediated. You’re never with the writer. If it’s working, the writer is ideally not present at all.
WSR: When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer?
AS: I started writing when I was a kid, in a way of wanting to entertain my friends by writing bad Harry Potter fan fiction with my friends as characters. As I’ve grown older it has always been the way I process the world. I grew up in Iowa, so being a teen in the middle of Iowa feeling very moody—it was a way to process my experience and help me make sense of what I was going through. I was very stubborn. I was like, I’m not going to entertain any more sensible career paths. I was hard-core taking creative writing classes as an undergrad, which I think is good in some cases, and in other ways, I maybe closed myself off to other experiences by being so determined so early on. I just didn’t find any other way to be in the world that was more satisfying than through reading and writing.
WSR: Do you have any advice for emerging writers or people going through an MFA program?
AS: Learn about the logistics of publishing, but don’t take them too seriously because that can really stifle you. Try not to get too stuck in the idea of the writer you think you’re supposed to be. I think this applies for all writers no matter what stage you’re in or what age you’re at. Don’t be afraid to change, adapt, or revise your vision of what your work is or who you are. And don’t adjunct, which no one listens to. I love teaching, but, specifically, when you’re an adjunct, you work so hard and your labor is so devalued. It kills your spirit a little bit. Try to be nice when giving feedback. When you get feedback you don’t like, try not to hate the person giving it to you so much. It’s really hard because there can be a lot of drama between creative personalities, but try to understand what drama is fruitful and what drama is not fruitful.