The Brooklyn Rail

If I Close My Eyes starts with a mass shooting, Kim Kardashian, and reality TV cameras—a contemporary American trifecta. The tragedy of the shooting brings together two of its survivors, aspiring screenwriter Jesse Shore and “model, actress and doll” Marsy-Rose (Mars) Arenas. Over the course of a year we follow Jesse as he contends with his desires (for Mars, to master the narratives of his life, to act with grace), his struggles with addiction, and his wrestling with the grief he holds on to from his mother’s death a decade prior. Set against the backdrop of sun-blasted Los Angeles and at-“its best at night” New York City and crafted with a poet’s enthralling and attentive command of language, Ben Fama’s debut novel asks us to consider what is true in our social media, celebrity obsessed culture, and what is just our fantasy.

Over a mid-morning call, I spoke with the author and co-founder of Wonder, an imprint that publishes innovative poetry, fiction and nonfiction, about using form to add dimension and instability to the story, writing characters that lose control of how people think about them, and how research fuels his imagination.

Elizabeth Lothian (Rail): While many know your work as a poet, If I Close My Eyes is your debut novel. Why did you decide to write a novel now? And how was your process similar or different to writing a poetry collection?

Ben Fama: My fiction journey really started ten years ago. I started working on novels trying to figure out how they work, how to build characters, how to put them in a setting, how to show how they want, how to describe conflicts within a narrative structure. Poetry doesn’t have any of those things and I think at that time, I had hit the limits of what I was doing with my poems. I wanted to experiment in other literary genres. I also love reading novels and thinking and talking about them. So I wanted to get on the inside of it and just see how it worked.

Rail: The novel begins with a Page Six-style spotted piece titled “Shooting Stars!” which explains the inciting incident for the work—a shooting at Kim Kardashian’s Selfish book signing that injures Jesse Shore and Marsy-Rose Arenas. Why did you decide to start the book with this form?

Fama: Different forms show up a lot in the book—there’s the post at the beginning, but there’s also New York Times-style feature articles, text messages, a reality-TV-style field note that describes a scene. I really liked using different forms like that to add dimension to the story and also instability, because you’re getting information about the characters, about the story, written in these different ways. The medium is the message in the way where it’s like, where is the truth? You see the characters, what lives they think they’re living, and then you see the way people talk about their lives. And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Using a third-person point of view similarly creates another dimension, a different way to triangulate the storyline. Also, I wanted to put the shooting piece right up front so when people open the book, and start reading, they realize this book is going to make you contend with different forms throughout.

I also think, like with art, it’s good to stage some kind of confrontation with the viewer or reader right at the very beginning. I don’t think my book is hostile towards a reader, but there’s a Marina Abramović-staring-at-you kind of thing happening—I always like when art makes you know you’re there.

Rail: The first chapter begins, “Jesse Shore was watching reality television on his phone.” Immediately I could hear the voice of a writing professor I once had who would repeat the adage don’t put a Coke can in a scene and laughed. Did you intend for this opening to be a push-back against that maxim, so often touted in workshops, of not writing work that is branded to a certain time?

Fama: For me, it’s not so much about timelessness but more so about relatability. The point is Jesse’s distracting himself standing in line. But if that’s going to make somebody shut the book, that’s fine with me. I do have a fuck-you attitude where it’s like my writing and my interests are my interests. To some degree I could have toned that down, but to what end? And I’d say with the Coke can in the scene, Coca-Cola has been around for so long, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s timeless. In that it’s like Shakespeare now.

There is also a juggling act of how relentlessly referential this book is going to be versus there being a point where I know people aren’t going to understand all the references—and they don’t need to. That oversaturation becomes ambient the way living in the world is. You’re going to hear the names of probably two-thousand people between the time you wake up and go to sleep, whether it’s journalists killed, celebrities, football players, hometown friends. We’re relentlessly inundated with all this stuff, and I wanted the book to reflect that element of our existence.

Rail: You start things off with another element of our current existence—a mass shooting. Did you set out with the intent to write a novel that uses a public shooting as its jumping off point?

Fama: These kinds of public shootings have been going on for so long. Obama was president when I started the book and I did get kind of concerned thinking that there would be gun control measures implemented and then the book would become irrelevant. But not much has really changed at all. The possibility of getting shot is actually only higher now.

I also really wanted to write a love story first and foremost, where characters are in love with images of themselves that reflect back partial truths about their lives—but also fantasies, and just watch them exist in that fun house. But the whole inflection that the shooting added to their image, and caused them to have to deal with losing control of how people think about them, created a lot of friction for their fantasies in a way that allowed me to write a lot about it.

Rail: Jesse’s desire, and at times belief, that a love story would happen between himself and Mars was so interesting to read. On one hand, he has experienced a lot for being only nineteen—he’s lost his mother, been an addict, been to rehab, gotten sober, been estranged from his father. But on the other hand, his way of approaching thirty-year-old Mars as a love interest is so young and naive. It’s also a refreshing reversal of the older man seducing a teenage girl trope.

Fama: The default is that men have more power, structurally. So what’s interesting is flipping that situation. As a reader, especially if you’re closer to Mars’s age, you’re going to understand that what Jesse has to offer is not very attractive. But if you were a teen, you might feel like it could still be possible because you just don’t understand the world as much. So there’s a lot of irony there. Jesse is willing to go as far with it as he can. He has this almost pathetic sense of wanting to take whatever he can get from Mars. And her perspective on him is, she’s got this whole hope for her life that has been snuffed out. She’s using her fifteen minutes of fame to try to latch on to some more acting roles. She doesn’t treat him poorly but she doesn’t really think about him that much.

All relationships do have some element of power, back and forth, but Jesse never really has much power. It’s not until he realizes that and stops trying to make things happen for himself that he’s able to get any peace of mind. But as far as the things that he actively wants, he never really gets them at all. He doesn’t yet realize that desire is often so futile. But Mars has. So there was a lot at play, seeing how two different people in two different parts in their lives might do that, especially with respect to their gender.

Rail: Celebrity worship and the inescapability of celebrity culture is a strong thread throughout the book. In many scenes it often veers into total absurdity—when Jesse and Mars get into a fender bender and it turns out that Judd Apatow has hit their car, when Jesse is coming down from his bender and David Schwimmer happens to be in the restaurant bathroom beside him to offer him a Xanax, or when Jesse sees Angelina Jolie roll down the window of her SUV so one of her children can litter out the window, all come to mind. How can we view these moments as a statement on contemporary American culture?

Fama: We are being inundated with celebrities. Jesse’s family is also in the entertainment industry, so he’s scanning for that because it is relevant to his life. It is absurd! But also why is David Schwimmer in that bathroom? Because it’s a fucking novel! I wrote him in there.

Despite the fact that the situation is absurd, that scene also shows how bad Jesse is doing. So it’s also more complicated than the bit of having David Schwimmer in there. I tried out a lot of different types of celebrities in these situations, but I’m into semiotics—what did they signify? I was thinking of all the different father figures that could have been in this bathroom—emotionally what they meant—but David was pretty neutral and that just seemed to fit for me.

With Judd, I did a lot of research for this book and listened to a lot of interviews and didn’t want to do harm to anyone I represented. Anyone who I wrote about I followed them on all social media, watched their interviews, watched the way they talked.

I do think research is necessary but it also fuels my imagination so much. For every page of the book I could have written three pages and notes about it. The book is pretty short but it took a lot of time to understand what was fueling it. For the haunted house stuff, I watched so many haunted house walkthrough videos and read reviews. For the New York Times stuff, I read a lot to get their house style, but I also had been interviewed by a New York Times feature writer for my poetry before. But when she was about to publish the piece, she said her editor edited it and that it came across kind of snide. I learned a lot from that experience. Does being written about in the media mean subjecting yourself to letting everyone be able to make fun of you? And Mars, I think, knows: yes.

Rail: There are a lot of philosophical threads woven throughout—about suffering, grief, the afterlife, grace, living gently as connected to Jesse’s sobriety—which brought a lot of dimension to the work.Were you inspired by any particular philosopher or research you did about philosophy?

Fama: Jesse rationally has assimilated a lot of good ideas but behaviorally he can’t do them. So that dynamic was interesting. He says he’s committed to living gently but he’s not gentle on himself—he drives and does drugs, gets blackout wasted at his bottom and pisses himself. He’s not living according to any good advice. But his worldview is a blend of the more sublime elements of Buddhism and Christianity and then maybe some kinds of therapy-speak. He’s so young. When you’re nineteen, you just really haven’t had enough time to build your character based on the hard situations you go through and reflect on them.

Personally, I really like Simone Weil a lot and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The idea of trembling, when you reach your limits—whether it’s your patience, or your love, or how much courage you can have—and there always being a shaky point where you start to break down. Knowing when to just surrender and either go with the flow, or just call it off, takes an advanced spiritual experience.

Jesse ends up laying in the pool at the end, and that for him is the closest he can get to that because he’s literally floating in water. And in a sense, it’s like being back in the womb, but there’s also a Buddhist-like quality to it where he, at that place and time, has accessed this very chill moment that is also relatively infinite. If he could always carry that, like in the way in meditation it’s said that the stillness you can access now is always there, despite how loud the world gets.

Jesse talks about grace at some point, and I think a lot of the time when people say grace, they mean God’s grace or inspiration from outside of themselves—putting your own self-seeking ideas beside your motives and taking things as they come and then controlling your intentions. To see a character move from one condition to another one I’ve learned has to happen in a novel. Jesse is young and naive, and he has some experience, and he has a lot of direction that he’s told he can’t follow. But he learns what’s going to happen if he doesn’t do what he knows is in his best interests, ultimately, in the long run, and he embarrasses himself a lot by learning those lessons. It’s fun to write kids spiraling, but you do hope that in the end, he ends up not doing it again.