Leigh Stein has written a novel (The Fallback Plan), a volume of poetry (Dispatch from the Future) and now she’s written a memoir. Land of Enchantment is the story of her relationship with Jason. Her first relationships and her first love, the two moved to New Mexico for a romantic adventure, which quickly became something more violent. Years later, having seen Jason just a few weeks previous, Leigh received a call that Jason had been killed in a motorcycle accident, days after being arrested for stabbing a man.
In her memoir Stein, who now runs the nonprofit Out of the Binders, writes about the process of what the relationship meant and how to grieve over what happened. What it means to love someone despite the neglect and abuse, what it means to obsess over someone and the way that relationship can define us. We spoke about therapy, gaining perspective on our younger selves, The Virgin Suicides, what it means to think like a poet, and what she found in Sylvia Plath's work. And most importantly, what it means to move on.
ALEX DUEBEN: When did you know that you had to write this book, or that you could start to write this book?
LEIGH STEIN: I was maybe a third or a half done with a second novel when I was invited to read at this reading series in New York called Free Range Nonfiction. I wasn’t really a nonfiction writer but I wrote an essay which is a later chapter in the book. It’s the chapter about my college classmate who died in Afghanistan and mourning on facebook. I wrote an essay about that that I read at this reading in the summer of 2012 and the response that I got was so overwhelming. I thought, is this the book I have to write? For a year I went around telling people it was about mourning on the internet. That’s what I thought my book would be about. That’s how it started and I just kept writing. It took me a while to realize that I was writing about our relationship. I didn’t realize at first that’s what the book was actually about. I was trying to get around it by saying I was writing a grief book.
AD: Reading the book it felt like you were coming to terms with what happened but it was also about you trying to understand yourself. He was your first relationship, your first love, and that person doesn’t define us, but I think that experience helps us to define ourselves.
LS: Right. I wrote a novel when I was with him, I wrote a book of poems that were poems to him about how he should stop dating the other girl and date me, and now I’ve written this memoir about his death. This is the trilogy of my twenties. My twenties were defined by this person who was just totally intoxicating. It was an overwhelming, overpowering obsession. Now that I’m older I can look back and be like, oh, not every relationship is like that. At the time I was like, this is true love. This is what people talk about in movies. This is it. This is the one.
AD: You write about depression and how you started therapy and being on medication at 13 and I started a little later, but I remember adolescence being fraught and painful and then as an adult realizing that it wasn’t so bad, or at least others had it worse.
LS: I don’t know if I think it wasn’t so bad, but now I know how many others were suffering, too. It was so lonely. I made friends on the internet, but I didn’t know other young people at school who had depression. I was such a weirdo and that was really isolating. Jason was a weirdo in his own way, and it was like, we must be a match because we both feel different from the people around us. One of the most moving things that happened is that after I wrote The Fallback Plan I got this facebook message from a dad who said that he read my novel and it made him understand his son’s depression. Esther in The Fallback Plan has depression but it wasn’t a central thing I thought about when I was writing the book. The fact that I was able to communicate something about the experience made me glad.
AD: The Fallback Plan is the book you were writing in New Mexico. Looking back, how much of the novel do you think was shaped by Jason and those events?
LS: It was my escape. It was the thing I could spend the day doing that took me out of my life. It was also a race. On the one hand Jason was super supportive. He was the person that saw me as a writer when other people rolled their eyes or smiled at me politely. People in the diner would ask, what are you doing in New Mexico and I would say I’m writing a novel and they’d go, oh. I felt patronized and underestimated all the time. Jason believed in me. Then towards the end he was like I can’t believe we’ve lived here for six months and you didn’t even finish the novel. It just took a while to finish it and then finally publish it. Of course it had nothing to do with New Mexico. It’s set in my hometown in Illinois.
AD: You have a line in the book that jumped out at me–“that’s what memory does: lets you shape a raw experience into a story you can tell yourself later.” Having written a memoir, what does that line mean to you?
LS: What’s really strange is that now that I’ve written the scenes and put them down, I’ve forgotten them. When I reread them, it brings it all back so vividly, but it’s like someone’s reminding me of it. It’s like I transferred all these memories that I kept replaying in my mind over and over and over into this other thing. I’ve uploaded them to the cloud. [laughs] I had all these stories and it was really complicated to share with people what our relationship was like. If I wanted people to understand that I missed this guy, I couldn’t tell them about the bad parts because it would be like, why do you miss this asshole? I was always trying to tell a version of the story so that people would understand me, but I would tell this part and leave out that part. I would say we had this romantic adventure and went to New Mexico. Or I would say my ex-boyfriend died but I wouldn’t tell the whole story. It was never the full story until I wrote the book. The book was a place to put everything–the good and the bad.
AD: You talk about that idea of contradictions a lot. Do you think writing the book helped you understand him and your relationship in a way you didn’t before?
LS: I’m resistant to anything like, was this book healing or therapeutic? I’m so resistant to that because to me it’s so different from what therapy is actually like. I’m a poet at heart and I remember on a very micro level. I have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. I fuss over a sentence before I move on. When I got the proofs I read the whole thing front to back and I was like, oh, that’s why I dated him. I felt I understood it after I’d written every little piece–I had editors and feedback–and I had put it in an order that makes sense. So I do think putting it into a narrative helped me understand what happened. A lot of that has to do with the beginning. The beginning was the hardest. Those first chapters were excruciating. I had to keep revising them and it was really complicated for me to explain who I was when this person came into my life and why I would go off with him. People didn’t understand. They were like, your mom’s a therapist why did she let you? Well, I was an adult. You were living at home so you were a slacker? Well, it’s a little more complicated than just slacker millennial living at home.
AD: I can imagine that writing a memoir is very different from therapy but therapy does force you to externalize your thoughts and feelings, which writing a memoir does.
LS: Also, the connective thread. This to me is what’s so useful about having a workshop. I think this is another poet thing. I would just put sections together and I intuitively knew they went together, but I wasn’t able to say why. My workshop would be like, is it here because this is connected to that? They helped me figure out why I was intuitively putting things together. I think a therapist does that, too.
AD: Do you workshop all your writing?
LS: Yes. I think I was workshopping chapters from this for a year or two and then towards the end I had one or two readers I gave the whole thing to.
AD: A little while back you wrote a piece for Bookfroum about Coming of Age books and you cited Sylvia Plath, you cited The Virgin Suicides and you write about that line from The Virgin Suicides in Land of Enchantment.
LS: It’s such a good line.
AD: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl” is a great line, but as you point out, it’s not something a depressed teenager would say after trying to commit suicide. I’m curious why you think the novel is a good portrait of youth and depression in spite of this.
LS: I know from my experience that having depression is so boring. It’s excruciatingly boring! It’s hours and hours of thinking, I should take a shower, and then six hours later it’s like, I should have taken a shower. It’s so undramatic, un-beautiful. Maybe I’m drawn to Sylvia Plath or Jeffrey Eugenides in the way that they make depression and suicidal thoughts interesting and dramatic.
Sylvia just had this voice. I read her poetry when I was young and I had no idea what her poetry meant. I didn’t understand them intellectually, but I understood them emotionally. I just knew there was something in her voice that was the same as something in my voice. Reading The Virgin Suicides, these boys are looking at these girls who are beautiful and sad. It was this idealization of depression that was different from what it was like every day. I guess I thought some day my depression will make me beautiful, too. The reality is, no, it’s really hard to live with a depressed person. It’s repetitive and tedious. Now that I’m an adult, when I feel it coming on, I notice it pretty quickly and I know I have to get to a doctor and get back on medication because I know what’s going to happen.
AD: You said before that you’re poet at heart. What does that mean to you?
LS: I just think through feeling. That’s my personality, but also I think why I was drawn to poetry at a young age. I respond to things through emotion, I decide what to do through emotion. I write so slow. [laughs] I’m so slow and tedious. I’m so jealous of the writers who are like I wrote 100,000 words and then I’ll cut it later. Both of my books are relatively short and each took like three years to write and there isn’t hundreds of page son the cutting floor. I think I just work in juxtaposition, thinking about what can I put up against something else. I found that in poetry.
AD: You talk in the book about resisting a happy ending, but it does have a happy ending. You make sense of things, you move on. How did you know that you had worked out the end or how to frame the ending?
LS: Maybe a year into writing it I was like, oh, I need to go back to New Mexico. I thought that that could be a way to find closure. There was all this expectation. I’m going to go back to New Mexico and what? He’s going to come to me in a dream? It was so loaded with expectation and I didn’t see any signs. That was the closure to me, I’m just going to keep going on. For me the closure is not, oh I changed as a person, I healed, I’m whole again. It’s more like, that happened to me and now it’s a part of me forever and here’s what happened.
AD: It happened to you but it doesn’t define you.
LS: Right. I tried to bring that back too in the epilogue. I kept trying to not put my mom in the book at all and people kept saying what about your mom? We’re just so different. She’s so positive and optimistic. She loves reading self help books. She’s a very pro-active therapist. If she can help you in one session, she’ll help you in one session and never see you again. She’s very results oriented and I’m such a wallower. There’s also this tension between us in the book that I tried to bring out a little bit. She’s just a fixer and I just don’t buy that we can just fix our lives.
AD: Can you say a little about Out of the Binders and BinderCon?
LS: In 2014 another woman started this secret facebook group for writers that she named after Mitt Romney saying he had binders full of us. She thought 20 people would join but within a couple weeks there were 20,000. I loved this group. You can tell from the book that I have a history of making friends on the internet. I love socializing online. I was obsessed with this group. I had the idea to start a conference and the conference became a nonprofit organization called Out of the Binders. Our mission is to advance the careers of women and non-binary writers so that we can really change gender equality in writing industries. Especially in Hollywood, TV and film writing is dominated by white men. Even in the literary and publishing world, literary prizes are likely to go to men–or books by women about male characters. We do two conferences a year, one in LA and one in New York. We also maintain this private facebook group, we do speed pitching with agents and editors. We want to to really give people the connections they need to climb the ladder.
AD: The book is coming out, but have you started thinking about what you want to write next?
LS: I would love to write another novel. I’ve been writing so many essays related to my book that a part of me is like, I just want to write a poem! Like a child inside of me that’s throwing a tantrum and wants to go back to writing poems. I have achieved my dream of writing professionally, which is what I wanted to do, and there’s a part of me that misses just writing for writing without any kind of expectation. I do think a novel would be a fun break. To make things up again.
AD: Because you wrote about this in a later chapter, I have to ask: did you get a tattoo?
LS: [laughs] No. I wrote the book instead. The tattoo I was going to get was this Georgia O’Keeffe watercolor. The first draft of the cover art [of Land of Enchantment] was a white cover with a cactus on it. I was like, no, and I sent them the watercolor that I would have gotten the tattoo of. The current cover is what they came back with. I got goosebumps. I was like, this is it.
The tattoo is related to what we were talking about earlier where I had all these stories that I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t figure out how to tell them. I thought, if I have a tattoo people will always want to hear the story and I’ll get to tell it over and over again. But maybe that’s what a book is.