Interview with Lauren Elkin

The Los Angeles Review‘s Riley Mang interviews Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (FSG). Elkin’s essays and criticism appear regularly in The Guardian, the New York Times, frieze, and other publications. She is an award-winning translator, and a contributing editor at The White Review. She lives in Paris. 

When did you start to consider yourself a writer?

It was here [in Paris], while I was studying abroad my junior year of college. I was going to Reid Hall over on the Left Bank. I went to Barnard for my undergraduate and they had a program here. I just bought some notebooks and started writing in them.  I think it was from reading A Moveable Feast, as you do. Reading Hemingway’s writing about daily life was the first time I really read creative nonfiction, or at least essays that weren’t about politics or history, just personal narratives of being in the city. So I was like, I can do that! I didn’t have certain ambitions to be a writer, I just thought, well, I’ll sit in a café like Hemingway and write in my notebook and see what comes of it. And I got completely addicted to it, I couldn’t go anywhere without my notebook. It felt good to write. And I just haven’t stopped ever since. It was probably after college when I started working at a literary agency that I started writing for money, book reviews, and that was when I started thinking I could supplement my income with writing. It wasn’t until my first book came out in France in 2012 that I realized maybe now I’m a writer.

It feels like one of those things that’s difficult to claim for yourself – it feels like asking too much to say that. It just comes with time.

When did you know that you wanted to write a book like Flâneuse?

I write in the introduction about how I started researching the topic for my senior thesis at Barnard, and then after reading a lot of the critical material on the figure of the flâneuse it seemed it had been decided that there could be no such thing, and I wasn’t able, at that time, to find a way around that. So I decided, that’s fine, I’ll write about prostitutes or something. And then when I finished my PHD, which I had been working on for such a long time, I thought, what do I want to write about? I felt like I still wasn’t done talking about women in public space. Women just don’t occupy the city in the same way men do. The problem I had encountered in my undergraduate research was that feminist art historians were claiming there could be no flâneuse because in the nineteenth century women didn’t have the same freedom to walk in the streets that men did. I had a problem with that because, first of all, that ignores the fact that there were women walking around cities in the nineteenth century even though they maybe weren’t supposed to, and secondly it seems to suggest that we today have the ability to walk in the street the way a man does, and that still isn’t true. It felt like it wasn’t the whole story on a couple of levels, so I wanted to go back to the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire was codifying the figure of the flâneur, and ask: what were the women doing?

Was there a particular moment when you personally discovered that it is much different for a woman to walk down the streets than a man?

Yes, unfortunately. I was teaching English at some business office. I got off the metro and I was wearing a pencil skirt with a slit in the back and this guy came up and put his hand up my skirt and actually grabbed a handful of my lady parts. Nothing that violating had ever happened to me. Guys had rubbed up against me on the metro or I’ve been kissed on the street, but this was really, really traumatic.

It’s such a weird moment right now in the culture to be thinking about this stuff. I originally had a section in the introduction where I talked about street harassment more explicitly, and listed all the moments when my friends and I had been harassed. My editor and I talked about it and we decided it was a really negative way to start off the book so we thought maybe I could talk about street harassment in the epilogue and deal with it in some way that doesn’t involve a litany of assaults. Then I cut the list altogether because I thought, why, at the end of this celebratory book, would I devolve into that? I felt of two minds of it, and still do because with the #MeToo movement it seems incredibly important for women to be speaking out and saying “this is what happened to me.”

I loved the title of your book and the way you take a masculine word, make it feminine, and use that to attack this gendered cultural norm. How do you see the role of language in subverting culture?

After the book came out, frequently people have come up to me asking how it is pronounced, and they’re very nervous about it. I started feeling really bad! But I didn’t call it something easier to pronounce, or something in English, because I sort of wanted it to be a weird word, I want this female ending to be the dangerous supplement that undoes the whole idea of the word, of legibility, troubling the ease with which we talk about women in public space. It doesn’t just feminize the idea, but totally torpedoes it, and makes you think maybe we have to build this idea from the ground up.

I was just involved in a conversation on Twitter today about this subject. The French are having a big debate right now about inclusive language, writing e.s. at the end of modifying words which agree with gender. The word écrivain is masculine; a group of five women writers might be referred to as écrivaines but the moment there’s a man in the room they become écrivains, and you no longer know what gender the writers are – they become this generalized masculine “they.” But changing the spelling, as some people want to do, to écrivain.e.s suddenly makes women visible in that room full of writers. The Académie Française is against it, obviously – they’re acting like the future of the French language hangs in the balance.

Then there’s the question of whether the term should even be feminized to écrivaine. In English we tend to feel belittled to be called an actress or a poetess: women fight to be considered actors or poets, on the same level as men. A French writer called Chloe Dealume recently came out against the word auteur and for the word autrice. For her, that was incredibly important to mark out that you are a female writer, that woman don’t have to occupy or be made invisible by a male role like auteur or écrivain. And I was really surprised by my reaction. I thought, I can just be an écrivain, it’s the job, why do we need to feminize it? And then I realized, well, I’m the author of Flâneuse, that’s exactly what I did with the title of my book. I don’t know why it feels in one case a good thing to do and in the other, a disruption. Maybe because flâneuse is not something we regularly call ourselves. Writer is such an everyday word, it feels like there is room for there to be male and female writers and whatever kind of writers you want. I feel like within the broad church of language, there are times when it feels necessary to destabilize words like flâneur, or other words that are more unusual. I can see a case for rebuilding them or remaking them.

It would be amazing to have to feminize “president” in French but I would like to think that it would be so usual to see women as presidents or in positions of power that we wouldn’t have to. To suddenly feminize the word “writer” would make it seem like it was unusual to have a woman writer when, in reality, we’ve been at it for so long. It’s like that famous Barthes essay, “The Death of the Author”: Nancy K. Miller wrote a feminist critique of it where she basically said, don’t kill the author before I’ve had the chance to be one. Let’s not do away with the role of this creative genius before everyone has been able to occupy it.

In a more contemporary context, how do you think the internet and social media have affected both the  flâneuse and art and literature in general?

It’s changed everything. I feel very happy to have written the book in the age of social media. I think I find out about a lot more writers and artists because of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

It just feels like we’re all hanging out in the same auditorium, more or less hearing the same stuff, because we can see each other and hear each other in a way we weren’t able to before, when we were all kind of atomized and in different places. There is a piece by Iain Sinclair in the London Review of Books from his new book The Last London. This really great artist called Ruth Maclennan wrote a letter to the LRB and said basically “I cannot believe in this long piece about London, you didn’t mention any women, are you not aware that there are women on the sidewalk with you and that they, too, are writing the city.” And then he made some pissy remark in his own response, about how he has a chapter on the flâneuse in his new book, as if we can get off his backs now because he acknowledged women in one chapter (and, of course, he quickly pointed out, he has worked with Rachel Lichtenstein several times). I was delighted to learn about this exchange! I’m not delighted with Iain Sinclair’s attitude towards women but it gives me more fodder for my own writing. I read the LRB, but not as faithfully as I would like to (they do pile up) and I might not have seen it if it weren’t for my friend on Twitter who told me about it. It of course made me very glad to know the term “flâneuse” was getting used more widely – even by male psychogeographers who were previously acting like she didn’t exist.

Another great thing about flâneuseing in the social media age is Instagram! I’m an amateur photographer and I find having a place to post my pictures (@drlaurenelkin) has made me even more attentive to the city, it’s helped sharpen my eye, and directed it in new directions, or pointed me towards details I might have overlooked before.

In your book you are often a foreigner. I’m wondering what you think about the adage “Write what you know.”

I guess my response is: how do you know what you know? All I know is each moment as I experience it. So in that way, I know as much about my day in Venice as a tourist as I do about where I grew up, or my family history, things that I’m supposed to know “better” than Venice. I’m really interested in the experience of otherness, of writing of things we’re not supposed to know about or can’t know about firsthand. I think a lot of that comes from being American, and being such a weird mix of cultural backgrounds. My dad’s mom was born in Italy and his dad descended from Russian shtetl Jews, and my mom’s family came from Ireland and Germany, so I can’t point to any one thing and say “yes that’s what I am.”  I’ve always felt “other” even unto myself. I think that’s what it is to be American, to have such a conflicted relationship to identity. I also think that’s why you see so many people reaching for their identity like it’s a sword, like they’re going to use it against other people on the basis of their ethnicity or cultural identity: it’s because they’re afraid that deep down, their sense of who they are is an empty construct.

I think writing what you know is just a question of situating yourself within time and space and being honest about what you’re experiencing and what you’ve gleaned from your daily life and then understanding how that fits into your experience. Someone who writes what they know, from where they grew up, is not necessarily writing with more authority than someone writing about an experience as it’s happening to them.

On the topic of otherness, writing and traveling can feel very intimidating to people who feel excluded based on their identity. Do you have any advice for them?

It’s very complicated from my perspective in terms of walking in cities because I’m completely aware that the city is more accommodating of me because I’m middle class, white, and reasonably thin, and that it would be incredibly different if I were fat, or black,  or disabled, or if I signaled a different class background. So I’m certainly benefitting from a certain amount of privilege when I’m walking around the city. And yet it’s still incredibly complex to navigate public space.

All I can say is own your space. Coming from writing to flâneusing and back to writing has been about situating myself in time and space and becoming attuned to how the world is put together around me and becoming attuned to the ways in which you and me and everyone on the street are contributing to the city in a certain way. The buildings we see around us, the shapes of the streets, the obstacles of walls and gates: that’s the “hard city,” but then there’s also the “soft city,” as Jonathan Raban calls it, which is the one that we’re all creating and participating in. It’s the emotional city, it’s how you feel safe or unsafe in a city space. My friend Garnette Cadogan has written wonderfully about what it is to walk in the city as a black man, about the strategies he’s adopted to make women feel safe from him on the street, and ways in which he himself has to change the way he walks to keep himself safe from the police. We all have different survival tactics to navigate the soft city.

What I tried to convey in Flâneuse is that we are active agents in the soft city. It’s the same with writing I think. It’s just a question of writing from where you’re standing, owning your space. What you have to say is valuable, you have a right to be on the street and you have a right to be on the page. Especially for young women, I think that’s true. Men just don’t question their right to take up a lot of space around them. Just write your truth and try not to worry about people who want to take it away from you.

Your book has been categorized as anything from essays to memoir to travel writing and cultural criticism. Is genre significant to you at all in your writing?

I think genre is significant only insofar as it’s fun to defy it, to blur it. I think it’s important to have a sense of what literary criticism is, what memoir is, what biography is, and then play with those distinctions. I didn’t at all see it as travel writing which is so funny because that’s where it’s shelved at the Strand, and the rights just sold in French to a travel writing publisher. I worry people might be disappointed if they’re expecting some travel writing and they open it up and realize it’s actually a feminist polemic, one that is critical of a too-easy cosmopolitanism, and also of small-minded populism, exclusionism, the way the idea of “belonging” is used against women, refugees, people who we think don’t belong.

I was very gratified that my publisher let me do all this crazy stuff within one book, but it is a bit of a problem once it has to be shelved somewhere. But there are a lot of books being published at this intersection of so many different genres, so clearly they need to make space for us on the shelf!

Have there been any surprises in the reception of your book since publishing?

I’m very happy that people have responded so generously to it. I guess I have felt like – back to the conversation about street harassment – I do wish that I had been a little more explicit because it does feel important, and yet I still have a hard time seeing how that could fit into this book. I’ve been surprised how some readers have felt I didn’t tell the whole story because the book doesn’t deal at length with harassment. For some readers the book isn’t fulfilling without that. I thought that there would be more room for positive writing about the experience of cities. But actually, we’re not quite there yet, we’re not done bitching about how terrible it is.

What projects are you working on now?

I wrote a small book right after I wrote Flâneuse. I wrote it on my phone while I was riding the bus from where I used to live in the fifth arrondissement to where I worked in the seventh arrondissement. I just used my phone as a way of observing the world around me – it’s a collection of diary entries on the bus about life in Paris, what people are doing, what people are wearing, how I’m feeling, written on my iPhone (more smart phone flâneuserie!). And it ended up coinciding with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015. I also had an ectopic pregnancy so it turned out to be a charting of this collective tragedy coinciding with a personal trauma. It turned into a way to look at daily life in the city, again from a transportation perspective, against bigger and smaller traumas. Then the novel I’m writing, I’ve been writing for ten years or something, I just never have time to finish it. It’s called Scaffolding and it’s set in Paris in the present day and in 1972 in the same apartment. So it’s about the different people who lived there at different times. I love thinking about who else has walked these streets, and it extends to the inside as well; who else has lived here?

Then there’s a bigger non-fiction project about women, art, and monstrosity that I can’t say much about just yet, but I’m very excited about it!

Riley Mang is LAR’s Editor-at-Large. Based in France, she also teaches English and writes book reviews.