The Brooklyn Rail

Margo Steines knows what a body is capable of, and where its limits are. She learned these things the hard way—by pushing hers to the edge. She was a professional dominatrix and an ironworker, welding for a high-rise building crew. She lived on a homestead farm when she was in a violent relationship. She was a Mixed Martial Arts enthusiast, and got into extreme fitness—once running over one hundred miles on a broken heel. And she spent her high-risk pregnancy in quarantine in a southwestern desert city.

Rather than simply compiling these experiences into a ‘tell-all,’ Margo Steines examines and contextualizes them within a broader cultural framework with incredible insight in her debut memoir, Brutalities: A Love Story. The result is a mesmerizing and masterful exploration of violence, power, pain, and ultimately, care. As the title suggests, while the book centers brutal incidents, it does so with tenderness and grace. It’s so compelling and fascinating I didn’t want to put it down—yet so cerebral, and the content at times so difficult, I had to. This is a book that deserves heavy consideration, and needs to be digested.

Steines and I discussed the risk she took publishing something so personal, the research she did around fighting, and trying to understand where the self ends and the body begins.

Rachel León (Rail): I loved the author’s note, which offers a general warning to readers about the content, as well as a disclaimer about the fallibility of memory. While I suppose some could say it lessens the authority of the book, I’d argue it does the opposite: by acknowledging your memory’s limitations, it establishes you as more trustworthy. Was it important to you to establish trust with the reader before diving into these experiences?

Margo Steines: Yes, trust is a big deal to me, and so is something that I guess you could call humility but I am more comfortable just calling “reality”—the reality that experience is subjective, memory is far more iterative than we are comfortable acknowledging, reporting/fact checking itself is inherently biased to some degree regardless of your hard skills (this is my opinion, I’m sure some would argue otherwise). I think we as a culture put a lot of unearned trust into media. Like, “I read it in the news and the news is fact checked so it’s true.” And I think that if we have learned anything watching the events of the world unfold over recent years, it’s that we are living in a much trippier and more convoluted situation than we like to think. As a memoirist I feel strongly about the truth—I don’t write composite scenes or characters, and I don’t take artistic liberties with reality. If I say the sky was blue, I experienced the sky as blue. But blue is just an idea, and if you really want to deconstruct reality, you can always do that. I think especially because I am also writing about other people, who surely have their own memories and interpretations of the events we co-starred in, it felt crucial to me to say, this is the truth of my experience, and those words are chosen very intentionally.  

Rail: Your book made me think about risk, mostly about the ones we can take with our bodies. But also on the page—Brutalities is so open and vulnerable. Do you feel like you’re taking a risk publishing something so honest?

Steines: Fuck, yes, and I did know it the whole time—how exposed I would feel, how much feedback I’m opening myself up to, all of it—but I have to say that it was more of a theoretical knowledge, and now that my book is about to be out in the world, it feels much more real. 

I think part of why I was (am) willing to take that risk is the same reason I sought all the other spaces of risk that the book is about—I have this horrible curiosity that just really presses me to the edges of things, and historically that has caused me a lot of harm, and now that I am more grown and more well, I am trying to engage with that desire in a different way, but it is for sure still there. I think the question “how far can I push this” has been the central question/obsession of my life, and in some ways publishing this book is another expression of that.

But then, separate from my own personal stuff, I really wanted to write a book that didn’t hold anything back. As a reader, that’s what I want, and as a writer, I wanted to do something brave. But brave and stupid occupy the same space sometimes, you know?

The other other thing is I really deeply believe shame is incubated by secrets. I have done so many things in my life that are reasonable to be ashamed of or embarrassed of, and I just don’t want to live walking around with them all tucked away inside me. I don’t want to model that kind of shamefulness for my kid. It all happened and I don’t want to spend any of my energy pretending that it didn’t. It’s funny, because when I was younger, I thought being whatever extra thing I was—a dominatrix, an addict, a female ironworker, whatever—was the most interesting thing about me, because I didn’t really have a personality underneath any of those identities. And now I think they are in some ways the least interesting things; they aren’t things that I AM, they’re just things that I’ve DONE. What I find interesting about myself now—what my actual personality is, it turns out—are the desire and willingness to be intensely curious about the meanings of all those experiences. And part of being that way is signing up for examination, from self and from others. 

Rail: There’s so much that struck me about your book, but damn, your bravery is something I really admire. As someone who can be super impulsive, I know quite well the space where stupid and brave intersect, but we can stop doing things—whether we’re talking about welding, publishing something so intimate, whatever. I guess I’m thinking about impulsivity versus the deliberateness of continuing on with something. 

Steines: Right, yes, the erratic choice vs. the slow weird choice. I have made lots of both, but there was nothing impulsive about the book. That is one of the things about the glacial speed of publishing that is actually great; baked into the process is a lot of time to consider the weight of everything. Writing and publishing this book is a very conscious choice to live in alignment with my values over my feelings. I believe in the power of truth, and in not hiding, and I see a lot of toxicity in what we call privacy and propriety. Like, don’t talk about that, it’s embarrassing—I see that as one of the worst ways to live. It’s a way of living I grew up with, and one I want to violently disavow. But I can believe that and still feel shame and embarrassment and the cringe of having overexposed myself, and I do, all the time.  

Rail: Another thing I appreciate about this book is the thoughtfulness you bring to your examination of your experiences. I hadn’t considered how sex work, animal husbandry, ironwork, and mixed martial arts could overlap thematically, yet you manage to find a connective tissue between these seemingly unrelated things. I’m curious if you saw these connections before you started writing the book, or if you realized while you were working on it that some of the other threads belonged here too?

Steines: In terms of the book and writing, no, I did not. It was writing the book that helped me understand that I had been doing the same core thing in very different ways for my entire life. Before that, in the lived experience, I just knew that I kept having the same experience—and this is something that anyone who goes to therapy probably arrives at, that they are repeating patterns—of pushing something to an unprecedented and often unmanageable degree. Some of the stuff was benign, and some of it—well, you’ve read the book. But I knew that there was something about my relationship to intensity that kept feeling familiar everywhere I found it. 

I don’t think writing a memoir, or any book, is therapy. I’m not of that opinion. But there is something about using the space of a book as a sort of liver for experience, processing and analyzing in a way that is very separate from the ways we consider our experiences in daily life. I don’t know that it’s entirely healthy, to be honest, that level of self concern, but as a writer and reader I think that level of introspection is the most interesting thing. 

Rail: Definitely. I noticed on your website you call your genre “a hybrid of memoir, essay, cultural criticism, and immersion journalism,” which is so apt. It seems like the way you blend genre allows for that “liver” for experience. Because while Brutalities is a memoir, it feels like it goes beyond that. 

Steines: For sure. I both did and didn’t want to write a memoir. I have only ever written nonfiction and have only ever been interested in nonfiction, and for a long time I was primarily interested in memoir. I had a project before this one, years ago, that was a very traditionally formed memoir. It was the first big thing I wrote, and I worked on it for such a long time, and once I was done with it I just wasn’t as interested in the traditional form of memoir as story. I became much more interested in what I think of as “idea nonfiction” (as opposed, I guess, to “story nonfiction”). So: the essay. But I also wanted to do something unexpected or slightly experimental with form itself. I wanted to occupy different relationships to the material, beyond just being narrator and character. My favorite part of writing the book was the research I did around fighting. It both did and didn’t have anything to do with me, and it allowed me to occupy a liminal space in relation to the subjects and the material, and I really liked that. I am far too interested in subjective experience and interiority to do traditional journalism, or even real narrative journalism, but I wanted to make space to go places with an outward looking eye before returning to the space of personal narrative to process everything I took in. 

Rail: “Idea nonfiction” also feels apt. One of my favorite parts of the book is the paragraph about how we’re a culture of euphemism and sanitation, as well as violence, but we don’t want the truth about the violence. It’s so cutting—the examples you use so clear, the prose so sharp, such verity. 

Steines: Ah, thank you, that is one of my favorite parts also. That’s an idea that’s been churning in my head for a long time, around the inherent hypocrisy of squeamishness. The things we tolerate because they are too big and pervasive to choose to see, versus the things where we can sort of define ourselves by our intolerances. Like, you’re a vegetarian because you can’t bear cruelty but you wear Shein because it’s affordable. Or you can’t watch boxing because of “the violence” but you watch the news and that’s fine. Of course it’s easier to see and to judge that kind of thing in others than in self, and for sure I have it too; I think we all do, to some extent. 

Rail: Let’s dive into the research you did around fighting. You mention in the book how when you started you weren’t sure what you were looking to discover, but you had a feeling the answer was there. And you were right—these chapters not only tie together the threads of touch, consent, and violence, but they show how context and consent alter the effects of violence. Can you talk about that?

Steines: When I met N I was still forming the idea of the book. I was writing essays about pain and men and violence, but the edges of the bigger project were fuzzy. N is a highly introspective person who thinks deeply about nuance, broadly, and also he is someone who does this very rough thing—combat sport—that is easy to misunderstand in a way that elides the nuance. When we met each other we spent a lot of time talking, having deep quasi-philosophical conversations, and he was able to articulate these nuances in a clear and direct and confident way. It was those conversations about the nature of roughness, power, fear, all of that, that made me start thinking of fighting as a space that people go to for some of the same reasons I’ve gone to all the places I’ve gone. 

At the same time, I found that I was very interested in being around the fighters and the fighting. The energy there was very familiar and magnetic to me. The fights and the training camps and N’s classes were a space where people were bringing their own investigations into bodily and mental intensity. So many of the ways people pursue intensity are private, and N and Josh were so open and generous about letting me into those spaces, letting me see the 360 and not just the performance. 

I think of both of them as collaborators of that section of the book because it was in talking to them that I started to understand what was going on there. Josh and N are both able to talk about themselves and their experiences in a way that allowed me an expanded vantage point around the core themes of the book. I started to understand fighting as a space that held all the pieces: the explicit violence, the less obvious violence of training and weight cutting, touch, unhinged intensity, care, consent, all of it. It’s funny because prior to meeting the fighters I had thought that BDSM was the space where all of that reached maximum coalescence. And—yes, in some ways it is. But I found that inquiry was self limiting in some ways because there is so much desire attached to BDSM that it obscures a lot. And in fighting, there is a very different kind of desire, and it’s really more about the self than anything else. Was this even remotely an answer to your question?

Rail: Yes, and then some, which is great. Can we talk about the separation of self and body? You touched on that earlier with how you used to think what you did (with your body) was who you were, when that’s obviously not true. But so much of our identity can get tied up with what our body is doing and how it’s performing—whether that’s peak fitness or chronic illness, both of which you’re familiar with. 

Steines: We can, but I don’t know how clear I can be about that. I had to write a whole book to try to understand for myself where I end and my body begins. I remember Melissa Febos wrote something once about having thought that she was the rider and her body was the horse (I hope I’m getting that right), and then later coming to the understanding that she was always the rider and the horse; the body was not the vehicle that she had been treating it as. And, yes, that. I have always used my body to experience and mediate the world—I don’t understand any other way to be. But I see now that not everyone lives that way, that there are many people who are more cerebral, less identified with their bodies, who use them in ways that are more aligned with their design rather than as filtration systems for all of human experience. I am fundamentally lacking an understanding of my body as separate from my selfhood, and at the same time, I often treat my body like something that is renewable in a way that just…isn’t true. 

It’s funny because I am now forty, and I’m a mom, and I no longer identify as a Hot Girl™, and it is in watching and allowing the very specific kind of beauty I had as a younger person to fade that I am feeling a sense of existing outside of how my body is perceived. Like, there’s a ghost that’s been living in here the whole time and that ghost is me. I have always been visibly something—my body has always been, in a lot of different ways, a conversation starter, and now it just isn’t, and yet I am still here.