While many SuicideGirls members and models may not realize it there was once a time in the world when fantasy became reality very easily and that nearly everyone would have sex with anyone. Lisa Dierbeck writes about this time, the 1970's, extensively in her book One Pill Makes You Smaller. This is not a documentary book but rather compares Manhattan of the 1970's metaphorically to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
Alice Duncan is an eleven-year-old girl who has a condition that makes her look like a grown woman therefore she attracts the attention of adult men. Alice and her sixteen year old Aunt Esme live on their own in an Upper East Side townhouse, entertaining teenage boys, shoplifting at department stores, and dining on cookies and pizza--until Esme decides to fly off to L.A. Alice, left to her own devices, travels by bus to North Carolina to attend the Balthus Institute, a shadowy art school for gifted children. While Alice is being groomed to become an artist, she meets a charming, sinister character known only as "J.D." A hedonistic drug dealer who is equal parts criminal and prankster.
There has been a great discussion on SuicideGirls message boards recently about how some members may not be sexually knowledgably about certain things and one member wished they had grown up in the 1970's. But a book like One Pill Makes You Smaller makes you realize that a lot of what people experienced in the 1970's may have run the gamut from rape to sexual abuse. But because there were no stringent rules against those crimes many people may have glossed over the fact that it was wrong.
Lisa Dierbeck studied philosophy at Wesleyan University and for a long time was attracted to men like J.D. reckless, amoral, and dangerous but she's so over it now.
Check out the website for One Pill Makes you Smaller.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How autobiographical is the book?
Lisa Dierbeck: That's a difficult question. It is a work of fiction and at the same time like all novelists and fiction writers I am very much inspired by elements of my own life. It's certainly not a memoir but it has parallels some of the things I experienced growing up in the 70's. I grew up in the same time, place and atmosphere so I also share some of the similar experiences as the protagonist.
DRE: Is this a real condition she has?
LD: Well yes. The notion of early puberty is understood much better today than it was then and it is a growing phenomenon. More and more girls are entering puberty at younger ages statistically. That's been on the rise for several decades. Like my character Alice I matured physically very early so by the age of eight I had already developed breasts, which really makes you feel like a freak. It's weird at that age because you are starting to notice that you look different from all the other kids. I went to elementary school with the actress Phoebe Cates and I remember sitting in her living room with her and her mother who was a fashion model. They were all pointing at me and her mother said that my breasts were bigger than anyone's in her family. She really meant it in a complimentary way but it made me terribly self conscious and mortified. As I grew older I discovered it was a phenomenon that was on the rise. The strange thing from the perspective of a girl at that age is that you don't feel you don't fit in with your peers at school.
DRE: What's funny about that is that Phoebe Cates has two of the most famous breasts in the world because of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
LD: She didn't have them yet.
But you don't feel that you don't belong to your peer group but neither do you fit in with older teenagers. I was even ridiculed within my peer group as I grew taller and looked like a young woman in elementary school. Boys at that age don't appreciate your presence on the scene. It often happens that you join up with a crowd of older teenagers like they do in the film Thirteen. That part is reflective of my own experiences.
DRE: You must have also gotten leers from older men all the time.
LD: Yeah. The values and morals of the 70's were very different from today. In some ways I wanted the book to kind of remind us all of a kind of cultural amnesia we've had of the attitudes we had in the 70's. Yes like the character in the book I got a lot of male attention and I was too young to understand the implications of that attention. You just think "Oh somebody likes me." In a strange way that was truer then than it is today. But there are really a lot of parallels between girls growing up then and girls growing up today.
DRE: The idea of taking a fairy tale and using it in this fashion is not a new idea. Did you ever see Freeway?
LD: No what's that?
DRE: It was with Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, it's basically Little Red Riding Hood but with a white trash girl fighting off a serial killer.
What made you want to use the story Alice in Wonderland?
LD: I guess two different reasons. I'm very intrigued by fairy tales and children's literature. Alice in Wonderland was a very important book to me as a child but I was also frightened of it too. What really scared me were the illustrations of Alice growing and growing until she looks like a freaky giant with a long neck. The sense of going out of control was alarming to me as a little girl because it wasn't very different from what was happening to me. My book is not meant to be a work of strict realism. I wanted the elements of the surreal and the absurd to create a mythology which I think is done so well by children's literature. I was inspired by that as a backdrop.
DRE: To play devil's advocate, did you ever feel that falling back on the Alice in Wonderland was a crutch for when you got stuck in your writing?
LD: I don't really because I think if I had changed the main characters from Alice to Lois or Alana I don't know if anyone would pick on the way I played with the Alice in Wonderland story. It's really a distinct story with its own set of characters and drama. In fact I wrote most of the book not leaning or even thinking about Alice in Wonderland in any way. It was something that came in later, new layers that come in to add complexity and ambiguity to your work. It was one of many layers.
DRE: Is Alice in Wonderland the perfect metaphor for the 70's somehow because Jefferson Airplane used it as a metaphor for the 60's?
LD: I think the 60's and the 70's are very much interlinked. In a sense the 70's mainstream began to reflect some of the attitudes and behaviors that the counter culture kind of initiated in the 1960's. I do think there are many similarities between the eras. It felt like the perfect metaphor because it was a time when children behaved like adults and vice versa. Half of our parents were bombed out on drugs and there was a childlike attitude of adults who were trying to rediscover the spontaneity of childhood. This put children in the strange situation of trying to grow up really fast. However strangely some of those things operate today. I don't think its unique to the 70's though I worked to capture the feeling of that era.
DRE: Once a book publisher picked the book up you must have realized it would be somewhat controversial because it's about sex and children.
LD: I guess it is controversial. Underage sex is something people talk, discuss and write about a lot. I wanted to write about it and really do it justice in a sense. I didn't want it to be a five page section in this character's life. This is really a defining moment for the protagonist and that is worthy of my full attention as the writer and the reader's full attention.
I didn't want to shy away from what happens in the two character's encounters and its implications.
DRE: Were you inspired by real tales of Lewis Carroll at all? I know he was a pedophile priest.
LD: That was certainly a factor. Again I'm sort of puzzled by what I feel is sort of a cultural hypocrisy whereas if an ordinary citizen like the gentleman in Capturing the Friedmans is accused of child molestation he is sent to jail for 30 to 40 years whether they can find definitive evidence or not. But a different attitude seems to set in when referring to the kind of person I refer to in the book called The Great Man. When we have certain figures in our culture that we regard as great men, Lewis Carroll is one of them, we don't scrutinize their behavior in quite the same way. That is true of artists, pop musicians and writers. There have been these disturbing rumors about Lewis Carroll forever and yet it doesn't fully enter the public consciousness somehow. It doesn't seem to prevent people from reading his works.
DRE: Was it tough to put a rape down on paper?
LD: No because the characters were so alive to me that I was really just writing down what they were saying and the events as they unfolded. It was certainly disturbing and I experienced all the different emotions that the character underwent. It was an intense experience to write them particularly in the second half of the book. At the same time there is something very dynamic and vital about capturing a situation. The whole experience of writing the book was intense and rewarding.
DRE: Much like Wonderland, Manhattan is a character in the book. Could this book have been set in post-Giuliani Manhattan?
LD: I don't really know the answer to that question. At the time when I wrote I was convinced I was capturing a very particular era, time and place. But as time goes on I see more and more similarities between today and the 70's. I really thought it was a unique and weird time period but I think you could tell a similar story in a contemporary setting.
DRE: What parallels do you see between now and then?
LD: Again what got me thinking about that is this movie Thirteen. The trials and struggles of growing up as a girl in America are very similar today as to what they were in the 70's. In terms of how you comport yourself, what your attitude is toward sexuality. Whether you try to preserve the innocence of childhood or whether you allow yourself to become an erotic object to try to gain the upper hand in that power dynamic. These are very real issues that girls growing up grapple with in every decade. There are similarities between the signals that we got in the 70's to what girls are getting today. In the 70's we had Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby playing an 11 year old prostitute then we had Brooke Shields wearing her Calvins without underwear.
DRE: So it's Brooke Shields fault.
LD: [laughs] No but all that was in the atmosphere. Children and teenagers are really influenced by the culture around them and by the attitudes of adults and society. Often people will wring their hands over something that children are doing without really taking stock of what they are doing and teaching their kids.
DRE: Were you sexually abused as a child?
LD: That's a fair question. As I said I had similar experiences to those of the character. I had a very different personality than Alice. Alice is shy, timid and frightened, I was bold, aggressive and fearless as a child. I matured very early and was very adventuresome. On more than one occasion I got myself into situations that in retrospect were unwise and dangerous. I identified myself as 16 year old and I did that because I felt and looked like a 16 year old. I felt more comfortable in that costume of an older teenager.
DRE: So you put yourself in adult situations because that's how you felt?
LD: Yes I did. At that time I felt permission from the culture to behave in those ways. Children were not monitored or supervised like they are today. We weren't getting the message that sexuality is potentially harmful. On the contrary we were getting the message that morality is suspect. It was a very amoral era and unlike my character of Alice who is a critical thinker I was a creature of my time and I really absorbed the messages that were around me. So it came to me as shock fifteen years later when I was in therapy and my therapist pointed out to me that according to the definitions of the current time I had been sexually abused. But I had never regarded myself as a victim of sexual abuse.
DRE: I definitely see how they sexualize young girls like Hilary Duff and Amanda Bynes today. Was it as commercially prominent in the 70's?
LD: In the 70's it was coming from the counter culture. They were testing sexual boundaries and again the notion of morality was suspect. The common enemy was defined as repression. For example I have a good friend that I have maintained since elementary school. She was one of these inspirations for what I call the Fineman girls. They were a group of girls that grew very rapidly and looked like much older teenagers at age 11. We remember being 12 years old and it was our teachers who would leer at us and make suggestive comments. That couldn't get a person fired back then the way it could today. When I attended high school there were a group of teachers who were sleeping with their students. It was an open secret.
DRE: Was it not as frowned upon or was it just kept it quieter?
LD: I don't know how it happened. I imagine that none of the students reported it and that none of the teacher identified what they were doing as something that was wrong or harmful. So in the 1970's I think we had ways in which society was eroticizing young women but not so much from corporate America.
Now the corporate aesthetic ideal for what a woman should look like looks disturbingly similar to what a 13 year old looks like now. 90 pounds and long legs. The whole image is dubious at best.
DRE: Were drugs ever a part of your life?
LD: Oh yes very much so. It was just part of growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was all around. This one girl that I have in the book carried around a bag full of loose cocaine. She was real and one of my best friends. We used to walk around in plain open daylight and snort pieces of cocaine. It's hard to believe what we did back then.
DRE: I don't know people like that but I wish I did.
LD: It was huge load of cocaine that must have been worth a fortune.
DRE: Your father passed away just a few years ago. Was that part of you starting to write the book?
LD: There may be in some mysterious way. The book does draw on my childhood and you get a new perspective on your childhood when a parent dies.
DRE: How did his work influence you?
LD: In some ways very much. He was a documentary filmmaker so we watched a lot of movies growing up and I think it helped me to get a visual vocabulary which I use as a writer. In some ways he was the role model for me as a writer. He would often do that thing that writers do of staying up really late being tormented over a particular piece, crinkling up paper and throwing them across the room. He was a fascinating person so I may have wanted to emulate him.
DRE: This won't make you happy but do you know what the Bagl Bulletin is?
LD: What's that?
DRE: Apparently there is this Bagl bulletin which goes out to the pedophile community and they mention your book. How does that strike you?
LD: I think that's certainly disturbing and alarming. In no way do I mean for the book to be condoning pedophilia and yet you cannot affect how any work is interpreted. That's the scary part of being a writer. People are going to interpret your work in many different ways.
DRE: Was I tough to step back and not judge your characters?
LD: Absolutely. That was the biggest challenge of the book. That was what I wanted to do with the book. To catapult the reader to a different time and era with different values and catapult myself to a younger consciousness. The drama of the book is that the main character doesn't know any of the stuff that an adult knows about dangerous the situations are.
DRE: Do you have tattoos?
LD: I am tattoo-less. This is largely due a sort of vanity. I would have liked to be the first person on my block to get one, when it was still eyebrow-raising, and if I did it now I'd be the last.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Alice Duncan is an eleven-year-old girl who has a condition that makes her look like a grown woman therefore she attracts the attention of adult men. Alice and her sixteen year old Aunt Esme live on their own in an Upper East Side townhouse, entertaining teenage boys, shoplifting at department stores, and dining on cookies and pizza--until Esme decides to fly off to L.A. Alice, left to her own devices, travels by bus to North Carolina to attend the Balthus Institute, a shadowy art school for gifted children. While Alice is being groomed to become an artist, she meets a charming, sinister character known only as "J.D." A hedonistic drug dealer who is equal parts criminal and prankster.
There has been a great discussion on SuicideGirls message boards recently about how some members may not be sexually knowledgably about certain things and one member wished they had grown up in the 1970's. But a book like One Pill Makes You Smaller makes you realize that a lot of what people experienced in the 1970's may have run the gamut from rape to sexual abuse. But because there were no stringent rules against those crimes many people may have glossed over the fact that it was wrong.
Lisa Dierbeck studied philosophy at Wesleyan University and for a long time was attracted to men like J.D. reckless, amoral, and dangerous but she's so over it now.
Check out the website for One Pill Makes you Smaller.
Daniel Robert Epstein: How autobiographical is the book?
Lisa Dierbeck: That's a difficult question. It is a work of fiction and at the same time like all novelists and fiction writers I am very much inspired by elements of my own life. It's certainly not a memoir but it has parallels some of the things I experienced growing up in the 70's. I grew up in the same time, place and atmosphere so I also share some of the similar experiences as the protagonist.
DRE: Is this a real condition she has?
LD: Well yes. The notion of early puberty is understood much better today than it was then and it is a growing phenomenon. More and more girls are entering puberty at younger ages statistically. That's been on the rise for several decades. Like my character Alice I matured physically very early so by the age of eight I had already developed breasts, which really makes you feel like a freak. It's weird at that age because you are starting to notice that you look different from all the other kids. I went to elementary school with the actress Phoebe Cates and I remember sitting in her living room with her and her mother who was a fashion model. They were all pointing at me and her mother said that my breasts were bigger than anyone's in her family. She really meant it in a complimentary way but it made me terribly self conscious and mortified. As I grew older I discovered it was a phenomenon that was on the rise. The strange thing from the perspective of a girl at that age is that you don't feel you don't fit in with your peers at school.
DRE: What's funny about that is that Phoebe Cates has two of the most famous breasts in the world because of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
LD: She didn't have them yet.
But you don't feel that you don't belong to your peer group but neither do you fit in with older teenagers. I was even ridiculed within my peer group as I grew taller and looked like a young woman in elementary school. Boys at that age don't appreciate your presence on the scene. It often happens that you join up with a crowd of older teenagers like they do in the film Thirteen. That part is reflective of my own experiences.
DRE: You must have also gotten leers from older men all the time.
LD: Yeah. The values and morals of the 70's were very different from today. In some ways I wanted the book to kind of remind us all of a kind of cultural amnesia we've had of the attitudes we had in the 70's. Yes like the character in the book I got a lot of male attention and I was too young to understand the implications of that attention. You just think "Oh somebody likes me." In a strange way that was truer then than it is today. But there are really a lot of parallels between girls growing up then and girls growing up today.
DRE: The idea of taking a fairy tale and using it in this fashion is not a new idea. Did you ever see Freeway?
LD: No what's that?
DRE: It was with Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, it's basically Little Red Riding Hood but with a white trash girl fighting off a serial killer.
What made you want to use the story Alice in Wonderland?
LD: I guess two different reasons. I'm very intrigued by fairy tales and children's literature. Alice in Wonderland was a very important book to me as a child but I was also frightened of it too. What really scared me were the illustrations of Alice growing and growing until she looks like a freaky giant with a long neck. The sense of going out of control was alarming to me as a little girl because it wasn't very different from what was happening to me. My book is not meant to be a work of strict realism. I wanted the elements of the surreal and the absurd to create a mythology which I think is done so well by children's literature. I was inspired by that as a backdrop.
DRE: To play devil's advocate, did you ever feel that falling back on the Alice in Wonderland was a crutch for when you got stuck in your writing?
LD: I don't really because I think if I had changed the main characters from Alice to Lois or Alana I don't know if anyone would pick on the way I played with the Alice in Wonderland story. It's really a distinct story with its own set of characters and drama. In fact I wrote most of the book not leaning or even thinking about Alice in Wonderland in any way. It was something that came in later, new layers that come in to add complexity and ambiguity to your work. It was one of many layers.
DRE: Is Alice in Wonderland the perfect metaphor for the 70's somehow because Jefferson Airplane used it as a metaphor for the 60's?
LD: I think the 60's and the 70's are very much interlinked. In a sense the 70's mainstream began to reflect some of the attitudes and behaviors that the counter culture kind of initiated in the 1960's. I do think there are many similarities between the eras. It felt like the perfect metaphor because it was a time when children behaved like adults and vice versa. Half of our parents were bombed out on drugs and there was a childlike attitude of adults who were trying to rediscover the spontaneity of childhood. This put children in the strange situation of trying to grow up really fast. However strangely some of those things operate today. I don't think its unique to the 70's though I worked to capture the feeling of that era.
DRE: Once a book publisher picked the book up you must have realized it would be somewhat controversial because it's about sex and children.
LD: I guess it is controversial. Underage sex is something people talk, discuss and write about a lot. I wanted to write about it and really do it justice in a sense. I didn't want it to be a five page section in this character's life. This is really a defining moment for the protagonist and that is worthy of my full attention as the writer and the reader's full attention.
I didn't want to shy away from what happens in the two character's encounters and its implications.
DRE: Were you inspired by real tales of Lewis Carroll at all? I know he was a pedophile priest.
LD: That was certainly a factor. Again I'm sort of puzzled by what I feel is sort of a cultural hypocrisy whereas if an ordinary citizen like the gentleman in Capturing the Friedmans is accused of child molestation he is sent to jail for 30 to 40 years whether they can find definitive evidence or not. But a different attitude seems to set in when referring to the kind of person I refer to in the book called The Great Man. When we have certain figures in our culture that we regard as great men, Lewis Carroll is one of them, we don't scrutinize their behavior in quite the same way. That is true of artists, pop musicians and writers. There have been these disturbing rumors about Lewis Carroll forever and yet it doesn't fully enter the public consciousness somehow. It doesn't seem to prevent people from reading his works.
DRE: Was it tough to put a rape down on paper?
LD: No because the characters were so alive to me that I was really just writing down what they were saying and the events as they unfolded. It was certainly disturbing and I experienced all the different emotions that the character underwent. It was an intense experience to write them particularly in the second half of the book. At the same time there is something very dynamic and vital about capturing a situation. The whole experience of writing the book was intense and rewarding.
DRE: Much like Wonderland, Manhattan is a character in the book. Could this book have been set in post-Giuliani Manhattan?
LD: I don't really know the answer to that question. At the time when I wrote I was convinced I was capturing a very particular era, time and place. But as time goes on I see more and more similarities between today and the 70's. I really thought it was a unique and weird time period but I think you could tell a similar story in a contemporary setting.
DRE: What parallels do you see between now and then?
LD: Again what got me thinking about that is this movie Thirteen. The trials and struggles of growing up as a girl in America are very similar today as to what they were in the 70's. In terms of how you comport yourself, what your attitude is toward sexuality. Whether you try to preserve the innocence of childhood or whether you allow yourself to become an erotic object to try to gain the upper hand in that power dynamic. These are very real issues that girls growing up grapple with in every decade. There are similarities between the signals that we got in the 70's to what girls are getting today. In the 70's we had Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby playing an 11 year old prostitute then we had Brooke Shields wearing her Calvins without underwear.
DRE: So it's Brooke Shields fault.
LD: [laughs] No but all that was in the atmosphere. Children and teenagers are really influenced by the culture around them and by the attitudes of adults and society. Often people will wring their hands over something that children are doing without really taking stock of what they are doing and teaching their kids.
DRE: Were you sexually abused as a child?
LD: That's a fair question. As I said I had similar experiences to those of the character. I had a very different personality than Alice. Alice is shy, timid and frightened, I was bold, aggressive and fearless as a child. I matured very early and was very adventuresome. On more than one occasion I got myself into situations that in retrospect were unwise and dangerous. I identified myself as 16 year old and I did that because I felt and looked like a 16 year old. I felt more comfortable in that costume of an older teenager.
DRE: So you put yourself in adult situations because that's how you felt?
LD: Yes I did. At that time I felt permission from the culture to behave in those ways. Children were not monitored or supervised like they are today. We weren't getting the message that sexuality is potentially harmful. On the contrary we were getting the message that morality is suspect. It was a very amoral era and unlike my character of Alice who is a critical thinker I was a creature of my time and I really absorbed the messages that were around me. So it came to me as shock fifteen years later when I was in therapy and my therapist pointed out to me that according to the definitions of the current time I had been sexually abused. But I had never regarded myself as a victim of sexual abuse.
DRE: I definitely see how they sexualize young girls like Hilary Duff and Amanda Bynes today. Was it as commercially prominent in the 70's?
LD: In the 70's it was coming from the counter culture. They were testing sexual boundaries and again the notion of morality was suspect. The common enemy was defined as repression. For example I have a good friend that I have maintained since elementary school. She was one of these inspirations for what I call the Fineman girls. They were a group of girls that grew very rapidly and looked like much older teenagers at age 11. We remember being 12 years old and it was our teachers who would leer at us and make suggestive comments. That couldn't get a person fired back then the way it could today. When I attended high school there were a group of teachers who were sleeping with their students. It was an open secret.
DRE: Was it not as frowned upon or was it just kept it quieter?
LD: I don't know how it happened. I imagine that none of the students reported it and that none of the teacher identified what they were doing as something that was wrong or harmful. So in the 1970's I think we had ways in which society was eroticizing young women but not so much from corporate America.
Now the corporate aesthetic ideal for what a woman should look like looks disturbingly similar to what a 13 year old looks like now. 90 pounds and long legs. The whole image is dubious at best.
DRE: Were drugs ever a part of your life?
LD: Oh yes very much so. It was just part of growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was all around. This one girl that I have in the book carried around a bag full of loose cocaine. She was real and one of my best friends. We used to walk around in plain open daylight and snort pieces of cocaine. It's hard to believe what we did back then.
DRE: I don't know people like that but I wish I did.
LD: It was huge load of cocaine that must have been worth a fortune.
DRE: Your father passed away just a few years ago. Was that part of you starting to write the book?
LD: There may be in some mysterious way. The book does draw on my childhood and you get a new perspective on your childhood when a parent dies.
DRE: How did his work influence you?
LD: In some ways very much. He was a documentary filmmaker so we watched a lot of movies growing up and I think it helped me to get a visual vocabulary which I use as a writer. In some ways he was the role model for me as a writer. He would often do that thing that writers do of staying up really late being tormented over a particular piece, crinkling up paper and throwing them across the room. He was a fascinating person so I may have wanted to emulate him.
DRE: This won't make you happy but do you know what the Bagl Bulletin is?
LD: What's that?
DRE: Apparently there is this Bagl bulletin which goes out to the pedophile community and they mention your book. How does that strike you?
LD: I think that's certainly disturbing and alarming. In no way do I mean for the book to be condoning pedophilia and yet you cannot affect how any work is interpreted. That's the scary part of being a writer. People are going to interpret your work in many different ways.
DRE: Was I tough to step back and not judge your characters?
LD: Absolutely. That was the biggest challenge of the book. That was what I wanted to do with the book. To catapult the reader to a different time and era with different values and catapult myself to a younger consciousness. The drama of the book is that the main character doesn't know any of the stuff that an adult knows about dangerous the situations are.
DRE: Do you have tattoos?
LD: I am tattoo-less. This is largely due a sort of vanity. I would have liked to be the first person on my block to get one, when it was still eyebrow-raising, and if I did it now I'd be the last.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
missy:
While many SuicideGirls members and models may not realize it there was once a time in the world when fantasy became reality very easily and that nearly everyone would have sex with anyone. Lisa Dierbeck writes about this time, the 1970's, extensively in her book One Pill Makes You Smaller. This is...