Can you tell us about where you grew up and what you ate? [Editor’s note: This has been my go-to first question for a first-time interview since my first podcast in 2018 but now it does make me feel like Bella Freud hosting ‘Fashion Neurosis’ and asking “What are you wearing and why did you choose it?”]

In your books, food is recognized—it’s present and necessary, rather than besides the point. Foam begins, “The first meal was breakfast…” Is food here as part of domestic labor, the never-ending maintenance labor, or does its presence mean more about the ways in which care is provided for or expected from mothers?

The books I was considering most closely in relationship to Foam are To Write As If Already Dead, The Light Room, and Animal Stories. All look at similar circumstances of mothering, working, dealing with apartments, and the pandemic but in extremely different ways using different tones. What is the relationship you have to your narrators and does it shift from book to book?

A lot of the writers that your work engages with do not write in English: Guibert, Kafka, Lispector, Tsushima, to name just a few. The Light Room begins with a kids’ Spanish class and the first section is called “Otoño.” In To Write As If Already Dead, Sofia in correspondence mentions the confidence of European autofiction authors; you often mention the “I-novels” of Japan; a German translation of Foam has come out simultaneously. —FOAM PAGE 33— What draws you to work in translation and do you think the reception of this kind of work in other countries has something to do with their social and economic conditions?

I often discuss embedded discourse when talking about recipes—how they have to name their references and inspirations, and historically were the way for women to situate themselves within communities and as having a voice. Your books are filled with correspondence with other writers and active engagement with artworks. But I’ve also read you say that sometimes people read you as if looking for a bibliography, and “book culture” online is so much about the quantitative, how many books one has read, and an aesthetic of bookishness versus really reading. Is this a conscious choice or is it part of how you “think through” and “think with,” which seems to be so much of how you work?

A lot of your writing deals with notebooks, diaries, lists, and often has the feeling of handwriting, to me. In Foam’s epigraph, “loosened structures” are mentioned; your work often brings together reports, essays, lectures, stories. How do you pursue these loosened structures of form? Basically, how does a book come together as a whole for you and what makes one or another a “novel,” a term that seems to get people riled up?

Environmental writing is part of your work and your teaching. The Light Room deals with this most closely, as does Animal Stories, but the relationship of the person to seasons, weather, and animal-being is present throughout Foam as well. —FOAM PAGE 9— when did it become part of your practice to engage with nature and ecology?

Visual art, whether photography, painting, or sculpture, are so present in your books, and so is fashion, which seems at times to be part of the “performance” of the writer as well as a desire to project a certain self. But I’d love to hear how your relationship to the visual manifests, do you think, in your writing—from a practical as well as creative perspective.

Academic precarity as a guest lecturer and adjunct are major parts of these last four books, and making that so clear and visible seems to be very bold in a field where you’re supposed to just have it all figured out and mentioning money is gauche. —FOAM PAGE 29— Now you’re studying for a PhD. What is “success” for a writer nowadays, and is it even possible?

“Performance” and “duration” are words that come up a lot in the books and are part of your PhD research—can you talk about these concepts and why they’re significant to your work?

You obviously co-wrote Tone with Sofia Samatar, and all the four books I focused on today have very different tones and were published with different presses—has who is publishing your work affected how you approach it? I noticed the paperback edition of The Light Room that came out from Transit Books lost the subtitle “On Art and Care.” 

The lack of boundaries between life and work in the domestic spaces comes up often —FOAM pages 25 and 34— and that is very obvious in your lectures on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in Animal Stories, where you write of acting out your talk to a series of black boxes on Zoom with a poor connection, and the ways in which like Gregor Samsa, capitalism’s demands are basically knocking at the bedroom door always. There’s such a humor in your work that I’ve noticed that I don’t think is noted enough, and I think there’s some humor even in the atmosphere of terror that arises in Foam. It’s silly to discuss the way other people read work as a writer, I acknowledge this, but because you’ve published so many books over a long period, does the way you’re read and sort of publicly understood affect your self-understanding as a writer?