Having and Being Had & Hungry Ghosts The Kill Your Darlings Podcast

This month the KYD team are discussing Eula Biss’s latest genre defying work ‘Having and Being Had’, a series of linked essays in which Biss explores her lived experience of capitalism, along with SBS’s new supernatural drama ‘Hungry Ghosts‘, in which vengeful spirits haunt the Vietnamese-Australian community in Melbourne during the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival.
Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’. This episode was produced by Hayley May Bracken.
Further Reading and Culture Picks:
‘Avoiding the trap of the Self-Aware Writer’, The Cut
ContraPoints, ‘Opulence’ (YouTube)
Rabbit Hole podcast
The Cut podcast, ‘Are We the Virus?’
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TRANSCRIPT
(MUSIC)
Hayley May Bracken: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. I’m Hayley May Bracken, joined by Kill Your Darlings’ own Alan and Alice…
Alice Cottrell: Hello!
Alan Vaarwerk: Hey!
HMB: We’re all recording from the safety of our own homes. Today will be discussing Eula Biss’ latest genre-defying work, Having and Being Had, and also the four-part SBS miniseries Hungry Ghosts. Eula Biss is a New York Times bestseller, her most recent book is On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the Top 10 best books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and she’s also written Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Circle Award for criticism, and her work has appeared in Harpers, the New York Times, Believer, and elsewhere. Having and Being Had, Biss herself has said, was a record of the moves that she made within a fixed set of rules. It’s also a record of her discomfort with those rules and with the game itself, the game being capitalism.
AC: So I think the book came out of a diary that she kept when she bought her first house, about the experience of buying into the American dream and the feelings of discomfort that she had in moving to a particular position in the social hierarchy.
HMB: And she had some rules for herself, when she constructed this work as well, to be explicit and write down figures of how much her house cost, how much her income was, rather than deal in vagaries.
AV: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that she sort of set up these rules for herself, but also that she told us as the reader what the rules were that she was establishing for the writing of the book. Short essays, a couple of pages at most, they all start in the first person, they all are based around a conversation that she had with a friend or a family member. Sometimes she says she bent the rules a little bit in order to talk about a book that she’s reading, rather than a conversation. The fact that talking about money and actually putting dollar figures to her discussions of class and capitalism and things like that, the fact that that can be a taboo.
HMB: Mmm. I also loved how she was transparent about the way that, in her private life, she was deliberately ambiguous about the cost of her house. When she spoke to her sister, and she was saying that her life is divided into time before owning a washing machine and after, and that she could say that purchase of a home was a $400,000 container for her washing machine, and then she wrote ‘it’s actually closer to $500,000, but I wasn’t comfortable saying that.’ The little disavowals.
AC: That bit struck me too, Hayley, I thought yeah, it was sort of a really interesting interrogation of the lies that we tell ourselves to make ourselves comfortable as well, and I read an interview with Eula where she was saying basically that people use other people being more rich than them as a comparison to make themselves feel better, but the reality is in a country like America there’s always going to be someone who’s more rich than you, and there’s a section in the book wh