SARA SLIGAR
Photo by Abbey Mackay
Sara Sligar is an author and academic based in Los Angeles, where she teaches English and creative writing as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in History from the University of Cambridge. Her writing has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, The Hairpin, and other outlets. Take Me Apart is her first novel.
Interview by Liam Kelsey
The novel features a number of explicit references to popular culture — Madam Secretary, Tinder, and the Frozen soundtrack, to name a few. What do these references add to the text? How is popular culture, in general, significant to your work?
I usually use pop culture references for world-building or characterization. Either they communicate something about the setting or they communicate something about the character. For example, I name-drop Kate’s aunt and uncle watching Madam Secretary every night because I think knowing that this is their favorite show helps the reader understand something about the characters. And with the Tinder reference, well, Kate is a 30-year-old single woman in New York City in 2017, so that detail emerged naturally when I was writing that dialogue.
That said, pop culture references can be overwhelming, so I try only to use them when they advance the characterization or emerge authentically. Like, I could have pushed a lot more ‘80s references into Miranda’s narration, but it would have been distracting and not realistic to her personality.
How has your work as an academic influenced your work as a novelist? How does your critical work relate to your creative work more generally?
My critical and creative work definitely inform each other. I’ve learned so much about form and structure from my academic work. And writing has made me a better critic because it has given me a different perspective on structure and craft, and it’s made me think about intention and collaboration differently. There are some parallels in terms of content, too, because my academic research focuses on criminal justice in twentieth-century fiction, film, and television. So I read a lot of crime fiction. It’s like an ongoing craft apprenticeship, in a way.
At the same time, it isn’t as if I boot up my computer and am like, “How can I apply this literary theory to what scene I’m writing today?” It’s much more organic than that. I think if I tried to press the connections too hard, the creative work would seem canned and the critical work would seem self-serving. So I do both halves as best I can, and since they’re coming out of one brain, they’re naturally engaged with similar topics, like evidence and power and violence.
Is there a real-life artist whose work resembles the work of Miranda Brand (the photographer at the center of Take me Apart)? Are there any other artists working in different mediums (such as painters) who may have also influenced the other artwork depicted in the novel?
Miranda’s photographs are not based on specific existing photographs, and her life is not based on a specific photographer’s life. I understand the fascination with the “based on a real person” idea, and that’s part of what I wanted to explore in the book — this desire to appropriate female artists’ biographies, or the belief that we can know the “real” version of someone else’s life.
But in terms of inventing Miranda’s “work,” I wanted to imagine an artist whose work resonated with the concerns and trends of other artists from the time. So I think her work, as I imagined it, is in dialogue with artists such as Nan Goldin, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, and Marina Abramović. I wanted her art to raise similar issues of authenticity, self-portraiture, and self-harm, and to belong to a particular kind of feminist discourse. So I tried to imagine photographs that would address those issues in the same kind of technical way as some of those real artists, and that would also make sense taken together as a body of art that one artist might produce over the course of two decades — series of photographs that are congruent but believably inconsistent.
Take Me Apart, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
The novel contains a few references to contemporary electoral politics, as well as a number of short discourses on gender and identity politics. Why do you think it’s important to talk about these issues and to take a particular stand on them, as the novel sometimes does?
For me, as with pop culture references, it’s about finding the right balance and choosing the right references. The book is set in a particular time and place, and politics are part of the landscape. In some cases, I got rid of very specific political references because they didn’t fit into the book well; they felt distracting or soapbox-y. But then on the other hand, in real life, people do make references to specific thinkers or ideas or policies. To remove those moments entirely from a book about gender and power seemed disingenuous. I just always tried to remain authentic to how I think characters would speak and interact with each other.
I’m struggling a little with how to answer the question about it being “important to talk about these issues,” because I think the importance of engaging politically is self-evident, and yet I also think there are many forms this engagement can take in literature. It’s hard to generalize. I do know that in writing Take Me Apart, I felt a great sense of urgency and responsibility around the issues of mental illness and gender and violence, and that feeling really pushed me along while I was writing.
There’s a quote in the middle of the book that caught my eye: “Men aren’t afraid of misinterpretation. It’s not dangerous to them. Women, we know bad things can happen when someone misreads you.” I think that will resonate with a lot of people. Does this apply to art as well? Do men reject women artists whose work is difficult to understand?
Some men reject women’s art when it’s difficult to understand, yes. Some women also reject other women’s work. Not understanding art can be very frustrating, especially when the art is coming from someone that has traditionally been stored in a certain box. But there can also be a lot of pleasure in struggling to understand, and encountering difficult art can help us grow.
I do think that that quote is less about the difficulty of trying to understand and more about the difficulty of trying to be understood. Miranda is drawing a parallel between her experience as a woman living in the world and her experience as an artist. As an artist, she’s producing an object that must be let loose for interpretation. As a woman, her body, her face, her reactions are the objects that are interpreted and evaluated. I am interested in the similarities between fearing for one’s body and fearing for one’s art. What does it feel like to live on the defensive, and to produce art from that space?
When characters in the novel make observations about visual art, are they talking just about visual art, or are they also commenting in some way about literature?
I think most of the observations can be extended to literature — though they may require varying levels of interpretative work to get there! Photography is very present in the book, and the fact that Miranda is a photographer rather than any other kind of artist is important. There are some elements related to photographic technique or the theory of photography that are more medium-specific. But many of the ideas about creativity and ambition and identity can be extended to pretty much any other kind of art. And I’m a writer, so my personal experience of creativity is mostly tied to literature. There’s a moment when Miranda says that the key to art is a sense of “something suffering beyond the edges of the frame,” and that’s something I think about when writing — the value of something lurking in the background, something slightly incomplete that the reader’s imagination can latch onto.
Are there writers whose work inspired this novel specifically?
There’s an endless list of authors who have inspired me more generally. Like most crime writers I know, I love Tana French, Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn: authors who create truly complex characters and use crime fiction as a way to illuminate some of the darkness of contemporary life. Those authors have been very formative for me in terms of helping me see imagine a bigger scope of what is possible with contemporary crime fiction.
In terms of Take Me Apart in particular, the book has a strong Gothic element — I love when books give you an unsettled, claustrophobic feeling. Its combination of romance and fear, as well as the conceit of a young woman trapped in an old crumbling house, is a bit inspired by authors like Charlotte Brontë or Daphne du Maurier.
How do you think your novel now reads in context of this pandemic? Does it take on any new dimensions or themes when read in light of our strange new reality?
Well, I don’t have enough distance from the book or from our current moment to offer a definitive answer about how the book might be read in the context of the pandemic. But I can say that as an author, it’s been very rewarding for me to get messages from readers who say that the book really absorbed them or gave them a sense of escape from their obligations at home or their sense of isolation. It’s certainly a dark book, so it may not be escapism in the classic sense of the word, but there’s something therapeutic and meaningful about being carried away by a book. Being able to provide that experience means a lot to me.
Purchase Take Me Apart
You might also like our interviews with these authors:
Liam Kelsey is a writer from Minneapolis, MN. His fiction, science fiction, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Silver Needle Press and other independent publications. He would like you to read Break it Down by Lydia Davis and The Weird and the Erie by Mark Fisher. He would like you to listen to the band Pile.
