Gwyneth Paltrow has everything–a charmed upbringing, beautiful blonde perfect movie star with a rock star husband–and still she’d rather be an influencer. I think everybody was shocked by that at the time she made the decision but now it’s become stupid if you’re not doing that.

TESS POLLOK: Your new book, Artless, is a collection of short stories and essays concerned with “the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding.” I’m interested in what draws you to these themes of commodity and the manufacture of personhood.

NATASHA STAGG: I think everybody’s thinking about those things these days, it’s just a sad fact. “The state of things.” [Artless] is very much a book about now, which is something I’m still wavering about. I think it can be obnoxious to write a book about now because you end up just spitting back what everybody’s seeing on their social feeds, but there’s a middle ground that I’m aiming for. I’ve been obsessed with the monetization of the self for a long time and I just can’t stop thinking about it, apparently. When I was younger, I used to think to myself, “I’ve got to get a job and it has to be the right one for the rest of my life.” Now people have the option of thinking that or just creating something about their lives that can make them money. In a way it’s an easier perspective on life.

POLLOK: It’s definitely a Zoomer friendly book. As a Zoomer, the territory felt totally familiar to me. I’ve been thinking lately about how jobs have become more conglomerated; me and my friends all have the same job, even though we don’t on paper. I work as a social media manager, one friend of mine is an editorial assistant, another is a journalist, but we all end up doing mostly the same thing, which is copywriting. To me, work has changed in multiple ways, not only in the sense that you no longer have to get a career job like you used to, but also in the sense that individual jobs are less different from one another and more homogenized.

STAGG: Exactly. They’ve all morphed into content creation and branding. Every brand has a magazine and every magazine has a brand. Even if you work at a movie theater, you might end up writing website copy for them. I wanted to work at a movie theater as a kid because I thought it meant I would get to watch a lot of movies, but I don’t think those are the aspirations kids have now. I mean, libraries are basically homeless shelters now, and movie theaters aren’t that alluring unless they are these niche content creation factories. I’ve had really boring jobs–I worked at a liquor store, I worked at my uncle’s office where I was basically shredding paper all day, I worked at a nursing home. These were all random things that happened to be close by. Now that everything’s from home and there’s no geographic limit on things, the type of work we imagine ourselves limited to doing is different.

POLLOK: I graduated in 2019 so I only had about six months in the workforce before the pandemic, so…I don’t know. You can’t miss what you never had. But what was your life like before then? Your childhood?

STAGG: I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. My parents divorced when I was 14 and my mom moved us out to where her siblings live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’m still stuck on the fact that they all lived there. Every time I ask my aunts and uncles why they all moved to Grand Rapids they tell me it’s because we’re Dutch and it’s a Dutch place.

POLLOK: They weren’t from Grand Rapids originally?

STAGG: No. None of them are from there. They all moved there.

POLLOK: Are you Dutch?

STAGG: Yes, but our family doesn’t have any culture or traditions based on that fact. My extended family went to churches that I think had something to do with being Dutch, but they were just regular Protestants. It’s just such a funny thing to realize after the fact. But my parents were both from New York–my dad grew up in Washington Heights and my mom grew up in New Jersey and Long Island. My mom never lived in the city but my dad did and he was all about it, he was a cab driver, he went to LaGuardia, he wanted to be in musicals.

POLLOK: Real New York shit.

STAGG: He was a real New York guy. His whole identity revolved around being a New Yorker, but he never went back. He moved when he was young, went into the army, and then just started moving around. He’s much older than most of my friends’ dads–he’s lived a lot of lives. He ended up in Tucson just because he thought it was a cool kind of hippie place in the ‘70s, which is where he met my mom. They had both done the same thing. She’d traveled all over the country as a painter; he wanted to work in theater. They ended up working together at a theater company in Tucson and designing sets together. Very romantic. And they were together for almost 20 years.

POLLOK: Did they ever remarry?

STAGG: No. My mom died when I was 17 and my dad has never remarried, which is kind of bizarre, but he was married twice before he met my mom.

POLLOK: How do you feel about “old dad” as a socialization category? It’s definitely a personality type. I’d put it into the “youngest child-middle child-oldest child” matrix, for sure.

STAGG: Oh, totally. I have this conversation with other people with old dads all the time. He’s not your grandfather, but he kind of is. He’s a little removed from your upbringing. He takes a backseat. My mom raised me and my twin sister.

POLLOK: Old dad and a twin. There’s a lot to unpack.

STAGG: There’s so much.

POLLOK: When did you move to New York? New York figures largely in your work, geographically and psychically.

STAGG: I’ve lived here, almost ironically, for the past twelve years. I grew up hearing about New York and thought it sounded corny, then my sister moved here, and I dumped all of my stuff at her apartment on my way to a writing program in Prague. When I got back, there was an empty room in her building that she’d moved all my stuff into, so I just ended up staying there with her boyfriend. I think that’s a big part of why I ended up staying here, because I never had real struggles with housing. My first room here was $500 a month. I think the more you think about what New York is, the more it just becomes a pastiche. It’s not really about the physical palace because the physical place is horrifying. It’s not a nice place. When people talk to me about the architecture I’m, like, “Have you been to Europe?” Everything in New York is falling apart or it’s brand new and ugly. I think of life in New York as living up against the idea that it wants you to hate it. It’s an abusive relationship. It’s spiteful, in a way, in a strange and ancestral way–it spat out my parents so I’m back to stake my claim.

POLLOK: I was talking to a friend the other day about what Manhattan will look like in a post-climate change future and we thought it would look like a kind of apocalyptic favella.

STAGG: That’s why they’re rebuilding the East Village Park, because the sea level’s rising.

POLLOK: Really? I remember people protesting when they tore down the amphitheater.

STAGG: Yeah. I was reading about it and it felt so insane and apocalyptic that people were protesting. I was, like, “You’re gonna protest the water rising?” I don’t understand what that protest was about.

POLLOK: That’s why I’m so confused to hear you say that they’re rebuilding it because I remember the protest and I thought it was because they were tearing down a beloved historic monument to build, I don’t know, a parking lot or something.

STAGG: Why would they get rid of it? They literally just finished it.

POLLOK: This is blowing my mind. You could have derailed an entire movement with this single piece of information.

STAGG: New York’s going to end up like Waterworld.

POLLOK: What’s Waterworld?

STAGG: It’s a movie from the ‘90s I haven’t seen that predicted–well, not predicted, because we’ve always known–that the ice caps were melting. But ever since anybody started talking about saving the planet or the endangered frogs or whatever the fuck, we’ve always known. When I was a kid, we had the exact same conversations. It’s really disorienting to talk to people my age or older who are, like, “It’s good that the kids really care about this stuff.” I’m, like, “Didn’t we care?” We used to have all these t-shirts with rainforests on them that said: these are my friends! We were all told as children that it was our responsibility to save the rainforest and pandas and whales. It was so ‘90s to be into pandas, whales, and tree frogs and that’s why. It came from these t-shirts we would get from selling candy door-to-door for WWF.

POLLOK: My generation’s version of that was UNICEF. At school they used to give us trick or treating donation boxes and we would go door-to-door asking for donations to save the children.

STAGG: Our was saving the animals. I guess we kind of succeeded. We still have pandas.

POLLOK: I wanted to ask you about the place of Artless in the greater landscape of autofiction and metafiction. That style of narrative is definitely having a moment right now, from Stephanie LaCava and Sean Thor Conroe in contemporary literature to Nathan Fielder in TV and so on. Do you feel like this is a unique moment for writing? In Artless, you mention a conversation with Elizabeth Wurtzel, who wrote Prozac Nation–do you consider that the predecessor?

STAGG: Elizabeth Wurtzel was telling me that when she wrote Prozac Nation people were telling her to write it as a novel and she resisted that because she thought it was more interesting as a memoir that demonstrated the state of being a teenager at the time. I don’t know if she was right about that. I think autofiction has become a hot topic because no one knows what to do with it. To me, if you let stories inform your work but don’t give in to the idea that it all has to be perfectly true or false, then you’re just writing. You’re just writing a good story, hopefully. You’re letting truth inform the story, which is something every writer does anyways.

POLLOK: I completely agree. I think, to some extent, all fiction is composed of the same essential elements in different measures, and autofiction just has a higher variable composition of the truth. I was reading about how William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist after he read about an exorcism in the newspaper and it made me realize that even stories that are totally fantastical and divorced from reality are in some way derived from true stories. It’s always been that way with writers, part of the work has always been drawing on these details and stories you hear from others, bits and pieces of other people’s lives. Autofiction is just telling that truth. But some people have a very hostile reaction to it.

STAGG: [The conflict surrounding autofiction] is funny to me because it’s been happening since the beginning of literature. Autofiction isn’t new in any sense. Most things that I read in school that were taught as classics turned out to be about the artists’ lives. It just seems like people didn’t necessarily always have the means to see it that way, to look into the similarities and differences that we can observe now with time and research. We can see now that James Joyce was writing about himself, for example. “A Portrait of the Artist?” That’s very meta. Proust was also writing about himself. All of these people rearranged details from their lives to create stories without people interrogating them about whether certain things really happened because we trusted that they were doing it for a reason that made sense to them and that it was in service to the story. That seems like it should be a given. I’m not mad that conversations are being had about autofiction but it’s interesting that we can’t land on a definition for it.

POLLOK: I find people’s disgust and contempt for autofiction to be kind of stifling, but I admit I can sometimes feel the same way. I have to read a lot of autofiction for Animal Blood and sometimes I do start to feel exhausted by it–the observations being made can become really stale if people’s lives are really similar, and they often are. So, sometimes I understand why people are nauseated by the autofiction-industrial complex. But I also think that the nausea I’m feeling has to do with the fact that most art in general is bad, and that’s not autofiction’s fault.

STAGG: I don’t read much contemporary literature. When I do, I get overwhelmed by that same type of nausea you described, the impulse to read all of it to understand what it is.

I’ve been obsessed with the monetization of the self for a long time and I just can’t stop thinking about it…some of my peers have written four or ten books by this time, but they’ve never had to work.

POLLOK: Who are the biggest influences on you as a writer?

STAGG: Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick…Renata Adler.

POLLOK: You mentioned in a conversation with Brooklyn Rail that writing teachers warned you not to date your work and that you rebelled against that by including so many references to time and place, filling it up to the brim with highly specific details that tangibly ground your work in a time and place. You’ve also emphasized name-dropping in your work. What’s the instinct behind that?

STAGG: I don’t know where that comes from. I’ve always been interested in work and what work is, I think because I’ve always had to work. It made me interested in the creation of the online persona, which is fundamentally like sex work or entertainment industry work; it’s a version of a selling of the self that isn’t actually yourself and the type of work that goes into creating that. That comment was made by professors in my MFA program while I was working on my first novel, Surveys. I was deliberately vague about the characters and what they were like and what their work was. The first part is this character working at an unnamed market research facility and the second part is her becoming somehow famous in this ill-defined way and that fame paying for her life–and her thinking about what that all means.

POLLOK: Do you think the average person’s relationship to their job is healthier now?

STAGG: I think everyone’s relationship to their jobs is an extension of themselves more than it used to be. The culture has gone in waves back and forth about this. At some point, you were supposed to have your job be an extension of yourself in more of a patriotic way, you were supposed to take pride in the effort of your work. [Gen X thinking] responded with, “Well, that’s bullshit, nobody actually likes working. Be a slacker. Phone it in.” I decided to be a writer and I became one and I’m proud of that fact, but now I have to push that in directions that will get me more, always. The expectation is to be constantly making the most of things and to say to other people, “Here’s how I did it, and here’s how you can do it, and here’s what products you can use.” Everyone has this same issue eventually and that’s a part of the dystopian future we live in. Having your dream job is no longer enough because if you’re not becoming an influencer in that field then you’re not making the most of your success.

POLLOK: The ideas that inform Artless seem prevalent across all of your work. Was writing Artless at all similar to writing Sleeveless, your previous book?

STAGG: Yeah, very similar. They’re both composed of things I wrote for press releases and friends’ art shows, as well as some personal writing. Stories/whatever they are. I like letting each thing have two lives. I think that because I have to work I sometimes think about my peers who have written four or even ten novels by this time, but, again, they don’t have to work. I don’t think I’ve been embraced by the literary system–not trying to be Lana del Rey about it–but I think the literary world has been a little dismissive of me because I have a job and do other work. They think of me as a fashion writer or someone who works at a magazine, and they won’t let the two things connect. It feels a little frustrating because it feels like they’re saying you’re not allowed, as a writer, to have a day job.

POLLOK: That is really insane. But it relates to what you’re talking about with branding–in their eyes, you’re polluting your brand as a writer by having another job. It’s also prohibitive and prejudiced, since most people have to have a job. Did you write any original work for Artless, or was it all sourced from work?

STAGG: I wrote some original work for the book, mostly fiction. I’ve been meaning to write more fiction but it’s not what’s being asked of me at the moment.

POLLOK: Goop is really fascinating for reasons that relate to your work. Are you interested in goop at all, do you read it or watch any of the shows?

STAGG: No, but that’s a perfect example. Gwyneth Paltrow has everything–a charmed upbringing, beautiful blonde perfect movie star with a rock star husband–and still she’d rather be an influencer. I think everybody was shocked by that at the time she made the decision but now it’s become you’re stupid if you’re not doing that.

POLLOK: The goop shows have bizarre intros. There’s one where she’s sitting in all-white room and she just says, “All I want is to optimize human life,” and then it cuts to this absurd montage of, like, multiracial people hugging on a beach, a hummingbird drinking from a flower, a sunrise. I thought it was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen. You would love the sex show that goop does. She popularized pelvic floor therapists–women who will finger you to release muscles in your pelvic floor and help with your stress.

STAGG: Really?

POLLOK: Yeah, and they don’t use gloves or anything, you have to sign a waiver to say you’re okay with it. It’s for people who have anxiety or are dealing with sexual trauma or related issues.

STAGG: That’s not gonna re-traumatize them? Does it help?

POLLOK: I don’t know. It confuses me. The woman she has doing it on the show is this ‘90s lesbian with a hardcore riot girl vibe who loves women’s empowerment. Looking at it, I just couldn’t understand if it was weird or not. But a lot of what she puts out on that show has percolated through society and become very mainstream.

STAGG: I was researching sex toys for one of the jobs I had writing press releases and I was thinking about how hard it was to translate the language of that world into something I would want to read. It’s one of the last spaces where people haven’t mastered advertising language. The language around goop and all these sexual wellness products is so funny to me because we’re talking about a subject that is just so antithetical to branded language.

POLLOK: As in, sex is antithetical to branded language?

STAGG: Yeah. Also, the language around sexual wellness products is in direct opposition with the language around porn websites, which everybody looks at. We have the numbers and those are the most visited sites in the world. If you look at that language, it’s not politically correct, it’s not about bettering oneself–it’s about degrading oneself, usually. I wonder if those polar extremes will ever meet.

POLLOK: That’s so fascinating. Our two options in the late capitalist sex economy are porn, which is loosely connected to sex trafficking and violence, and then the sexual wellness industry, which is the most sexless and neutered thing.

STAGG: Exactly. And sexual wellness products these days are bizarre, they’ll look like a purple spatula, or they’re mint green. It’s not anywhere near skin tones anymore. We’re done with the era of threatening, veiny dildos. Now you can float through life like you’re in a cartoon with your new purple toy.

Natasha Stagg is a writer and the author of three books, including Surveys (2016) and Sleeveless (2019). Her most recent book, Artless, is out now from Semiotext(e).

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.