Elle Nash is the author of Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books) and Nudes (SF/LD Books). Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, Literary Hub, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and a fiction editor at both Hobart Pulp and Expat Literary Journal. Her novella Gag Reflex (Clash Books) will be out on June 21st, 2022, and is available now for preorder. 

Told through fictional LiveJournal entries, Gag Reflex pulls us back to 2005 and deep into the mind of its teenage narrator. Nash joined Fatal Flaw associate fiction editor Daniel DeRock for a conversation about the new book, experimentation in writing, and creating fiction more honest than reality. 

In the spirit of early 2000s internet culture, names have been modified slightly and greetings and sign-offs added.

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xXfatalflawXx (DeRock)
sup

oOelleXnashOo (Nash)
nmu?

xXfatalflawXx
nm

As I was reading Gag Reflex, it felt incredibly urgent, like it had to be written and you had to be the one to write it. I'm wondering if that matched your experience. What was the process like for you?

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oOelleXnashOo

When I was delving into it, I had just moved back home—meaning my parents' house in my hometown—and ended up getting stuck there because of COVID. So, I had a lot of time to just reflect on my adolescence and live in a house in which a lot of my teenage and childhood trauma occurred, and just kind of process a lot of that. I think it was born out of that process and that reflection. 

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xXfatalflawXx  

There are so many great details in the book, like the songs Lucy (the narrator) listens to while she’s writing journal entries. What were some of the influences on your writing?

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oOelleXnashOo  

There was a time when I was talking to B.R. Yeager (the author of Negative Space and Amygdalatropolis) about LiveJournal and nu metal and stuff like that. Just existing as a teenager in 2005. We ended up finding our old LiveJournals and exchanging usernames so we could both go through and look at our entries. And I was like, how far back can I go? I ended up finding my old LiveJournal from when I was thirteen or fourteen. Which is incredible to think about, because I didn't even know it was still around. But it is. It's still there. And so I got to dive back into these memories of who I was as this person that I've completely forgotten about. I just felt really inspired by that and I wanted to create something that felt the same way. I wanted someone to feel like they were stumbling upon an artifact of this time period and finding someone that they get to know intimately without ever actually knowing who they are. 

There have been times when I've found old LiveJournals from that time that aren't even from people I know. They're sharing all these details of their lives and this narrative begins to thread together of who they are as people. And I just don't think an internet like that exists anymore. Everything is so built on reputation-building and attaching it to our names. 

Another influence was Marya Hornbacher, who wrote a memoir called Wasted that came out when she was in her early twenties about anorexia and bulimia. That book has always affected me since I read it as a teenager. I've always wanted to write an eating disorder narrative, and I've never known quite how to get that story out. That was one of the things I was thinking about: I want to write about this, but what's the best form for it?

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xXfatalflawXx  

This is definitely my own ignorance, but I've never read anything that deals with eating disorders in so much depth. I really learned a lot from this. I know it's not your job or anyone else's to educate people about it, but was that part of your motivation? Or was it more of an unintended consequence?

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oOelleXnashOo  

I guess I would say it’s an unintended consequence. Whenever I’ve watched or read eating disorder narratives, the most popular ones tend to be Lifetime movie-style narratives. Like, Oh, she's skinny and doesn't want to eat, then she goes to the rehab center and some male therapist helps her figure out her life, and then she eats the sandwich and everything is better. And I never feel like those stories have enough depth for me. I wanted to show the daily struggles. I think there's a general idea of what living with anorexia nervosa is, where it's just that someone doesn’t want to eat, they want to be really skinny. But there's a lot more complexity about how we live in our bodies, how a person who has a body experiences the struggles with it, you know?

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xXfatalflawXx  

Yeah. As I said, I came away from the book with a much more nuanced understand of eating disorders, and I think that was possible because of how intimately we get to know Lucy, the narrator. So, I want to go back to the experimental form of the book. Do you think writing in journal entries and online chats opened up possibilities that you wouldn’t have had with a more traditional structure?

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oOelleXnashOo  

Yeah, I think it just allowed a lot of psychic closeness—to really get you into this person's mind where the plot isn't necessarily so important, but the narrative around it is. A big part of it, too, is that it allowed me to explore a lot more of the philosophical questions around having a body and why someone would want to control their body in this way. I don't think you could generally do that as well with a traditional novel. If you spend too much time inside the character's head in a traditional novel, you might lose someone. But because the form is already set up so that you're expecting it to be more internal, you can have people sit with that for a longer period of time.

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xXfatalflawXx  

At the same time, Gag Reflex doesn’t feel unstructured at all. There’s clearly a plot, there’s tension, the journal entries contain really strong scenes, and so on. It’s all there, right? Did this come organically? Or was this editing?

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oOelleXnashOo  

It’s probably both. When I was actively pulling it all together, I don't think I was explicitly thinking, this is a technique that I'm going to employ. I really was just trying to make it read well. I wanted to make sure that, structurally, the entries all kind [of] flowed and made sense and that nothing was out of place. Because it's linear, you do have to make sure that kind of stuff is solid. But it's hard to think about, structurally, what I was purposely doing in the moment, because it was kind of a whirlwind.

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xXfatalflawXx  

Gag Reflex is obviously fiction, but it seems like there's also a lot of you on the page, if that's fair to say. Was it ever hard to separate yourself from it?

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oOelleXnashOo  

No, I don't think so. I've never really worried if there's too much of me on the page or not. I kind of have this mantra that as soon as something is on the page, it’s not me anymore. It’s fiction. So, it doesn't bother me. 

A lot of people do ask if the things I write are autofiction or not. And I've never self-identified as being an autofiction writer, even if things may have relevance to my life. I'm a person in the real world, and this is a person on a page. Does that make sense?

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xXfatalflawXx  

Oh, definitely. And I can imagine it’s annoying to get asked that question all the time—whether your writing is autofiction or autobiographical in some way.

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oOelleXnashOo  

No, I think it's totally fine. My main goal with writing is the realistic aspect of it. If it feels real, whether or not it is real, that means I've been a little bit successful. Plenty of people can write about their real lives and then have it not come off authentic. It’s kind of like with Tom Spanbauer and Dangerous Writing. One of the things that he says, which I think is from Gordon Lish, is “fiction is the lie that tells the truth truer.” 

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xXfatalflawXx  

I'm glad you mentioned Dangerous Writing and Tom Spanbauer. I know that you learned from Spanbauer and were influenced by his approach of Dangerous Writing. Is this one of the main philosophies that guide your writing? 

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oOelleXnashOo  

Yeah. His is definitely one of the leading ones, because Spanbauer really opened my eyes to the possibilities of fiction. Before my workshop with him, in 2013, I was trying to write a speculative fiction novel. And I didn't know what I was doing at all, because I didn't know really how to world build, or how to write anything with structure or anything like that. But I wanted to write novels, and I needed to figure out how to do that. 

And so, when I went to his workshop and explored Dangerous Writing, basically what I learned was that, if what you're trying to do is express human emotion—and this is not a dig against speculative fiction, because I like sci-fi—you don't need all that stuff. It made sense for me to really focus on those basics of, like, the core of emotion. How we can analyze and inspect this from every single side—to get to that core, the painful core of expressing what it is we're trying to express. 

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xXfatalflawXx  

Absolutely. I think it’s interesting how you explore some of that through spiritual and philosophical themes in your work, including Buddhist ideas. How did those themes enter this new book?

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oOelleXnashOo  

A lot of how I explored myself, my understanding of spirituality, right after high school was through delving deeper into Buddhism and meditation. Just trying to understand more about how the universe works outside of me. I've been on and off trying to understand Buddhism since I was like sixteen. The older I get, the more it kind of clicks, even if I don't always understand it. But I think it helped a lot in trying to understand the cosmology of my suffering and how my suffering fits in with the rest of the world—the fact that suffering is normal, right? When I was younger and very alone, I felt alienated in my suffering because I was like, I'm the only person that's experiencing this, and nobody else really can reach me or understand me. And that feels painful. And that's what makes me alone. 

Figuring out that this is something that's actually universally common—it's actually so common that there's an entire religious practice based on understanding the origin of suffering—that helped me process and undo some of the negative rituals and self-destructive habits I was engaging in. But it's been a long process, you know. It was not something that happened immediately. I think being affected by an eating disorder, even if you kind of recover—recovery is more like health management. It's like being sober. It's something that always has to be managed and stayed on top of. And it does get easier over time, but it takes a long time. It's always with you.

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xXfatalflawXx  

So, this is a pretty experimental book in terms of its form and structure. Do you have any advice to writers who are interested in breaking out of more traditional forms?

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oOelleXnashOo  

Yeah, I think there are two things. The first thing is that when it comes to experimental forms, you have to teach the reader how to read the book from the outset. That means having consistency, because readers normally have a certain way they expect a story to be told. You see this all the time, like when you watch like an art film and then you go read the Amazon reviews, and all the one-star reviews are like, this is so boring, this wasn't linear, I don't like the way this story was told, because they expect to be told a story in a certain way. And I'm not saying you should feed into readers' desires. It’s just that having consistency in structure, and sometimes even having a well-timed departure from it, really helps. You want to make sure the balance of it makes sense for the story itself, which I think is hard to define exactly; it's kind of an intuition thing. 

And the other thing is that if you can establish authority in the beginning of the piece, then you really can take the reader wherever you want to go. As long as something seems believable at the outset, they will go anywhere with you in the story. 

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xXfatalflawXx  

thx, elle

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oOelleXnashOo  

g2g

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xXfatalflawXx

k, ttyl