Monique Truong: Peak Desperation

Writer Monique Truong describes her love of showering when it's raining outside. Neil realizes he is bad in a crisis.

ABOUT THE GUEST Monique Truong is the Vietnamese American author of the bestselling, award-winning novels, The Book of Salt, Bitter in the Mouth, and The Sweetest Fruits. She's also a former refugee, essayist, avid eater, lyricist/librettist, and intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order).

ABOUT THE HOST Neil Goldberg is an artist in NYC who makes work that The New York Times has described as "tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny." His work is in the permanent collection of MoMA, he's a Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches at the Yale School of Art. More information at neilgoldberg.com.

ABOUT THE TITLE SHE'S A TALKER was the name of Neil's first video project. "One night in the early 90s I was combing my roommate's cat and found myself saying the words 'She's a talker.' I wondered how many other gay men in NYC might be doing the exact same thing at that very moment. With that, I set out on a project in which I videotaped over 80 gay men in their living room all over NYC, combing their cats and saying 'She's a talker.'" A similar spirit of NYC-centric curiosity and absurdity animates the podcast.

CREDITS This series is made possible with generous support from Stillpoint Fund, Western Bridge, and the David Shaw and Beth Kobliner Family Fund Producer: Devon Guinn Creative Consultants: Aaron Dalton, Molly Donahue Mixer: Andrew Litton Visuals and Sounds: Joshua Graver Theme Song: Jeff Hiller Website: Itai Almor & Jesse Kimotho Social Media: Lourdes Rohan Digital Strategy: Ziv Steinberg Thanks: Jennifer Callahan, Larry Krone, Tod Lippy, Sue Simon, Jonathan Taylor

TRANSCRIPTION

NEIL: I'm so happy, Monique Truong, to have you on SHE'S A TALKER. Thank you for joining. You mentioned that you were teaching up until now. I actually don't know where you teach.

MONIQUE: Oh, well, it was the first time that I was teaching at Columbia at the school of the arts? Yes. School of arts. I don't know if there's an article.

NEIL: It doesn't matter. It feels very important.

MONIQUE: Yes.

NEIL: Which would you prefer it to be?

MONIQUE: The.

NEIL: Yes. Exactly.

MONIQUE: That sounds even more important.

NEIL: Yeah. Yeah.

MONIQUE: Yeah. I was teaching a fiction workshop. I had taught undergraduate fiction writing classes before, but never to graduate students and so that was interesting.

NEIL: Interesting can contain so much.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: Would you care to unpack interesting for us?

MONIQUE: Well, okay. Let's begin here. I had heard from my friends who are women of color, who teach at the graduate level, that respect and authority was often an issue. Specifically, the lack thereof. Their suggestions to me was that really, even though the others professors would say to the students, "Please, call me Neil," that for me, it probably won't work out very well if I did that. I know you teach Neil and so you can imagine it's a small workshop. It ended up being nine students.

NEIL: Okay.

MONIQUE: Yeah. Yeah. It was really great in that way, and so I said, "Look, I'm going to ask you to call me Professor Truong as opposed to Monique. As soon as this workshop is over, we can see each other on the street and please feel free to call me Monique. For the rest of the semester, it's going to be a professor." They were really, I think, frankly horrified. I do think that it's a mistake to actually encourage your graduate school students to call you by your first name, because it assumes a non-hierarchical relationship.

MONIQUE: That's actually a disservice to the students because if the lines are blurry and then let's say we, professor, act in some way inappropriately, it's the student, I feel, who will have the most to pay, will be at the disadvantage.

NEIL: It reminds me of ... Maybe it's different, but those therapists who talk a lot about themselves or who do a lot of the talking versus those therapists who withhold that and in a way that can feel to some people ungenerous or something. To me, it actually feels like a form of caretaking maybe for the very reasons that you're talking about. It's establishing a type of care relationship. Not that I feel very, very strongly that as a teacher you're not a therapist, but in terms of certain boundaries setting, I do feel like some of the same ground rules apply.

NEIL: I mean, the race and gender dynamic of it has got to be so powerful. It's interesting. I do say, "Call me Neil." In fact, one of my cards says when students call me professor, feels like when a kindergartner calls the teacher, mommy." I feel like that's contingent on a certain type of benefit of the doubt that attaches to gender privilege, white privilege and I think it's actually true on the other end. There are certain students that are only comfortable using professor.

NEIL: For a while I was not insisting, but you know, feeding back to them like that, "You can call me Neil." Now, I just say once at the beginning of class, "You can call me Neil." If they call me professor from that point on, I don't correct them because that actually feels like a form of that doesn't feel fair to them in a certain way, or that feels like assertion of a type of casualness that may not serve them. A question I like to ask everybody is, if you're meeting a stranger, how do you succinctly describe what it is you do?

MONIQUE: Novelist.

NEIL: Period.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: I like that. I don't know what the mortality situation is in your life, but are your parents still alive?

MONIQUE: My mom is.

NEIL: How does she describe what it is you do to let's say her friends?

MONIQUE: Oh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure because I don't know if she would begin by saying that I was a lawyer. You know?

NEIL: Right. Brace yourself, or just bear in mind.

MONIQUE: That I was once respectable and had a way to make a living. I don't ... Yeah. Maybe she would just call me a writer. My mother is retired now, but when she was working, she was a registered nurse and she was an ICU nurse actually.

NEIL: Low stress. Low stress job.

MONIQUE: Right. The nurses and the doctors who worked with her, some of them were great avid readers of fiction. They would tell her that they've read one of my novels. I think that was always very surprising to her. You know?

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: Every time another feedback in that way would come to her, it would solidify the fact that I indeed wrote books.

NEIL: That makes total sense.

MONIQUE: Right? Yeah.

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: Well, shall we move to some cards?

MONIQUE: Oh yes.

NEIL: Okay. First card. I occasionally identify with the food in the pressure cooker and feel bad for it.

MONIQUE: I would take out pressure cooker and for me, it's the food that ends up on our airline food tray.

NEIL: Aha.

MONIQUE: I mean, that is the most degraded thing to happen to a carrot. You know?

NEIL: Right.

MONIQUE: Or a piece of chicken. I mean, what? What? What?

NEIL: Yeah. Yeah.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: I might disagree with you on that. I mean, I think absolutely there's all kinds of degradation, but it's like what Andy Warhol said about how a can of Coke is 50 cents for everybody? I just like how everything gets leveled to, "Okay. There's this part of the tray, there's this on the ..." It's like the classic TV dinner thing. I find something reassuring about everything becoming compartmentalized, but you're talking about, if I hear you correctly, are you talking about the preparation or the presentation?

MONIQUE: The preparation. Just what it becomes.

NEIL: Aha, right.

MONIQUE: Because I just can't believe what happens to food after all the processing and after all the horrors that we put it through.

NEIL: See, but I think it goes to invisibility, this I think connects to factory farming. For me, when I'm cooking with the pressure cooker, I'm in proximity to it and I'm like, "Oh God, what must it be like in there?" Whereas with the airline food, it's like often hidden. It's often the institutional kitchen that thankfully we don't have to see. I'm spared the indignity and just get that the end result. Actually, I think airline food usually looks better than anything that comes out of a pressure cooker. I think-

MONIQUE: Oh, well, okay. Well, this is the thing. I should admit that I have never cooked with a pressure cooker, so all of this is theoretical to me. Clearly I have not experienced the horror of this device.

NEIL: Well, I can feel it about the oven too, by the way.

MONIQUE: Really?

NEIL: Yeah. That could just be my Jewish heritage or something.

MONIQUE: Oh my God, Neil. Oh my God. Yes. It might be.

NEIL: Yeah.

MONIQUE: Yeah.

NEIL: You don't identify with the food that is enduring when you cook? I just have to believe you cook just given the way that you talk about food. Am I correct? I mean, if-

MONIQUE: Yes.

NEIL: Okay.

MONIQUE: Yes.

NEIL: Because there's such intimacy. When you're cooking, you're not necessarily identifying with like, "Ah, okay. What this is going to have to go through."

MONIQUE: Right. No. No.

NEIL: That's probably for the better. I think that might be some primal animism that is left in me. I mean, I also feel that way about ... Do you have a dishwasher?

MONIQUE: Yes.

NEIL: I love the dishwasher and I have approximately a million cards about the dishwasher, but I often think about, "Oh God." Putting the dishes in there and thinking what they're going to go through in there.

MONIQUE: Wow.

NEIL: Do you ever have that?

MONIQUE: No. No. I'm j