Fiona Alison Duncan on 'Exquisite Mariposa,' success, and not being an asshole:
"I'm interested in whether you can be successful and not an asshole," Fiona Alison Duncan told me, as we sat drinking coffee and talking about her new book, Exquisite Mariposa.
At what point did you start writing and realize that you wanted to write this story as a book? I am really interested in its framework: the very distinct chapters, the fact that it takes place during this specific period of life, the Saturn Return, but within that specificity, there's also room for so much, not chaos exactly, but roaming around. It's very provocative, the way it rolls and folds in on itself.
What's difficult is knowing if it's okay and that's, I think, another question of the book: the ethics of making work based on your life—because I love doing it. If I could just write about my life uncensored, I'd be delighted. That comes very naturally and is very exciting to me and I think it's a nice way to connect, especially if you write something and send it to them and get their feedback and then you can use that as a medium to intimacy, if you have intimacy issues.
Wanting to do journalism or something like that was very practical. I don't think I let myself, when I was younger, ever think that most things were accessible to me. I wouldn't have been like, I could write fiction, even though I had some teachers when I was young notice terms or phrases or something when you're like, 12 or 13, and try to encourage to continue in the process.
The realization [I had] while writing Mariposa was like, If I'm not going to get paid or treated well within this job, I might as well do it exactly as I want to do it and not try to service someone else's interests for $200.
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