SCARY COOL GOODBYE 27
Getting to the heart of it with DIY legend, memoirist-adventurer, & certified lover girl, Lisa Carver.
“Lisa is the laugh, the fart, the make out, the beauty, the LIFE. She is a messenger of God.”
— THURSTON MOORE on LISA CARVER
“In the last year and a half I've lived in Alabama, Minnesota, Botswana, Pahrump, Vegas, Paris, for three months each. That's four or five time zones. Before each move, I gave away or sold some stuff, left more stuff behind in a trail away from each place, had all the cold weather clothes I stored get stolen, and now I am truly down to one suitcase and one backpack in this world (except for the books Rachel is keeping for me). It feels good. I have no job really, no retirement account, and no worries. Everything always works out fine.”
— LISA CARVER via PATREON
Not to brag or anything, but my lover is a Gen X man. I like their style, these Gen X fellows; for one thing, they have some SCRUPLES when it comes to being (or not to being) a corporate shill, plus they’re horrible at Twitter, and best of all, everyone’s always forgetting about them. I never especially cared for grunge, but I’ll always take the side of the slacker, the deadbeat, the void-starer. My long-dirty-haired 47-year-old lover didn’t listen to grunge as a teenager, anyways; he liked Slayer and AC/DC and Megadeth and Metallica. He couldn’t name a Drake song with a gun to his head. So cool.
My sisters and I watched a horror movie last weekend called Gone in the Night, whose basically only redeeming quality is the fact that it stars Winona Ryder. Not only does it star Winona Ryder, it would’ve made no sense without her, as her character is not a person but a symbol, a stand-in for Gen X at large, which in this case means a middle-aged dweeb who used to be cool and now has sad wine parties that end at reasonable hours. There’s a sort of confused message about generational angst, with millennials as narcissists with mistaken ideas about authenticity and Zoomers as creepy little non-binary sociopaths, and the movie’s real boogeyman is, spoiler alert, AGING, and so on and so forth. The dumbest part is how we’re all supposed to feel bad for Winona Ryder, as though she’d be much cooler were she doing TikTok dances or joining the BTS Army.
Anyhow, you’re supposed to conflate Ryder’s character with IRL Ryder, Quintessential ‘90s Dream Girl. In that case, I’d like to propose an alternative candidate, who’s also in the running for Quintessential ‘90s Nightmare Girl (I say with the utmost affection)… I’m talking, of course, about Lisa Crystal Carver. And let me just say, first off, that a slacker, a deadbeat, a void-starer she is NOT, and has never been. (“I have many qualifications for being the new voice of our generation,” she wrote in Rollerderby, the best zine of the ‘90s and of all time, shortly after Cobain died. “I’m younger than Kurt, cuter, and I don’t mumble.”)
Lisa Carver, who has lived everywhere, written 14 books I know of and surely more I don’t, been married four times and divorced three, and has tattooed her arm to say “LIVE FREE OR DIE,” is the grabbing-life-by-the-ballsiest writer I have maybe ever read. A little too young and far too uncool, I wasn’t hip to Rollerderby in its time, which Lisa self-published for all of the ‘90s and some of the 2000s, nor to Suckdog, her unlistenable band/performance troupe, whose shows were famous for onstage sex and casual violence with audience members. (Selling a Suckdog 4-track recording for a shiny Sacagawea dollar, she described the item years later: “I cannot understand why anyone would want this, but maybe there's one person who does, and it's you. Actually, the more I listen to it, the more I…it's not like I LIKE it…it's just kind of inspiring in its awfulness, its unrestricted and un-give-a-fuck wild. Not wild like sexy, attractive. Wild almost anti-attractive. Like what I envy about insane people at their peak.”) But I’ve spent my summer reading and re-reading her memoirs, old Rollerderby PDFs, and her Patreon, the best $1 a month a girl (or whomever) can spend, breathless at the honesty, the lust, the LIFE, with which Lisa writes about, well, everything — but it’s the falling in love, or out of it, that gets me every time.
Take, for instance, this, from an essay she wrote for the New York Times entitled “SEX; Letting Go,” which was published two days before 9/11, on the subject of sex and power and her first French husband…
The places that takes you, in three little paragraphs. Or this, from her 2021 book The Pahrump Report, which begins with a move to an unincorporated desert shanty-town at the request of her third husband. Then in the middle she’s alone, and at the end she’s in love with a guy named Steve, a duplicitous Catholic banker-slash-sex god…
One more—this, from a Patreon post back in February, a few days before her fourth wedding (a Frenchman again… but more on that later). It is entitled “cold feet.”
I hope I’m not making Carver out to be some kind of romance diarist; there’s so much more to it than that. But that part’s what interests me most, and why not? I suppose there’s an element of nosiness to the rush I get peeking around one relationship or another, finding out if other ladies are as psycho as I when it comes to romance. (And as it turns out, they are!) Lots of people these days write confessionally, though, or at least they imagine they do. But none of it feels the way Lisa’s work does: unflinching, ready for whatever. Her prose — fast, funny, exact — brings the transcendent to earth and shrugs bemusedly at the tragic: oh well! (Describing a desert dinner party in The Pahrump Report, absent her soon-to-be-third ex-husband, she writes: “I was a tense host, though, what with my husband/co-host never showing up. Evelyn chastised, ‘He has to work, or do you have a money tree?’ Had it been a Woody Allen movie, I would have bellowed: ‘JESUS, DON’T YOU RECOGNIZE WHEN SOMEONE’S OUT DOING BLOW AND WHORES AND TRYING TO DESTROY ME?’”) Joy, boredom, misery, failure — all things to not just accept but to love, ‘cause they’re real and they’re now and that’s all that there is. Cheesy, maybe, but it feels true.
Three selections from The Pahrump Report, on the subject of divorce…
In my last newsletter, I quoted from Lisa’s first book, Dancing Queen: The Lusty Adventures of Lisa Crystal Carver, about the joys of growing up sleazy and shameless and free in white-trashy Dover, New Hampshire, plus fun essays on Fabio and K-Mart and Anna Nicole Smith and the like. Having read it, you’d likely come away with an idea of Lisa Carver as the happiest, horniest woman to ever live. Her second book, 2005’s Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir, offers a correction. By then, Rollerderby was mostly over, as was the ‘90s DIY ethos in general, and Lisa had moved back to her hometown with her infant son, Wolfgang, who has some disabilities. And it becomes clear that things for Lisa were not as happy-go-lucky as she’d made them seem. Drugs Are Nice, for me, was a brutal read, especially when it came to her relationship with Boyd Rice, the fascist noise musician and father of her son, who reprises the role of Lisa’s abusive father. And still, something about it reminded me of what Mary Gaitskill wrote in a recent Substack post about incels: “What I’m wishing for, basically, is more humanity and more acceptable ways to express it, less fanatic conformity and desperate commodification, less Ewww! if someone isn’t doing it exactly the right way, whatever ‘it’ is.”
There’s so much more I could say, but I’d rather you read it yourself. (Besides, I wanna get to our interview already!) And I’d recommend, too, that you check out the latest issue of n+1, which by happy coincidence, or maybe something in the air, features a great essay by Lisa Borst, “Live Free or Die,” on Carver’s brave and enduring appeal, continuing to stick it out on her own in today’s thoroughly corporate, “breathtakingly un-punk” world of media. This quote rang especially true: “One of Carver’s particular pleasures, and the quality that’s made her first-person work since early Rollerderby so compelling, is the frequency and panache with which she makes the sorts of decisions that for most of us feel paralyzing and life-defining: marriage, pregnancy, divorce, and cross-country moves occur in her work as regularly as other memoirists describe their furniture or dreams. Reading most of her work, you’re reminded that it’s possible to live extraordinarily densely — that a life, even a very difficult one marked by repetitive domestic and economic struggles, can be dynamic and multiple, punctuated by frequent reinventions.”
One last note before our interview: I’d highly recommend subscribing to Lisa’s Patreon, then immediately reading it from start to finish, or from when she moves to Botswana in February of 2021, to her trip to Paris that same spring, during which she meets and falls in love with her current husband, Bruno, and writes about it in such a way that I literally had to lie down between posts, until now. And right now Lisa has been diagnosed with cancer, if I understand the past month’s posts correctly, much of which has been spent inside a French hospital, and is facing some major-sounding surgeries. These posts are not easy to read, and I feared I was being horrible, in the midst all this, emailing Lisa to see if she would answer a few of my questions. As it turned out, not only was she up for it, she replied to them almost immediately, thoughtfully and truthfully as ever.
AN INTERVIEW WITH LISA CARVER, WHICH TRANSPIRES OVER A SERIES OF EMAILS:
MG: Hi Lisa! How’s life?
LC: Haha, how could it be anything other than good, as a writer? The more you lose the more you win.
Do you think it’s normal to fall in love at first sight? Sometimes I’ll read therapy-type things about how it’s healthy to get to know someone slowly and let things develop over time. But the way I see it, if you don’t know whether you want to marry someone in the first five minutes of meeting them, what’s the point? Maybe I'm nuts. What do you think?
I fall in love pre-sight. With my first and fourth husband: one when I heard his song "Happy Go Lucky Native" and the other when he sent me his friends covering the song "Whatever You Want" and he said I CAN have whatever I want. Plus the father of my son when I read about him in Re/Search. Everyone else I've fallen in love with the first second of sight or never. I think some people fall in love consciously and some are like a reptile. I'm the latter. I also think we all look to lovers to recreate our childhood dynamics with and try to fix it this time, or try to punish, or try to win, and some people may have more to fix or punish or win back than others; they may need to fall harder and frequenter.
Oh, and are you a fan of therapy? I'm on the fence.
I'm a fan of everything. 12-step, talk therapy, tantra, meditation, drugs, theater, fasting, hypnosis, religion, silence, the desert, BDSM, beliefs, academia, running, and anything I haven't tried yet. What worked the most indelibly for me was EDMR.
Have you ever had a big breakthrough that changed the way you write?
Actually, EDMR really changed the way I wrote and actually really handicapped me for years. Before that, I'd been extremely dissociative and I could block out absolutely anything—I mean anything—and whip off fine articles every day, in a different tone depending on which magazine or newspaper or site it was for. After I integrated, I started questioning whether what I was saying was true or whether it mattered or would hurt someone for no good reason. Really hampered my output.
What’s the proudest thing you’ve written?
I don't care about anything I've written once it's done. I only care about what I'm working on now. What are you proudest of that you've written? Maybe your reasoning will jog my emotions.
Now that I think of it, I guess I’m most proud of what I haven’t written. Probably why I’m barely employed, but it’s the best to say no to shit that is stupid and pointless that I’d only be doing for money. I can only bring myself to do what I feel like doing, which is soooo totally bratty. But I don’t care! What’s been your favorite age to be?
I'm going to sound like a broken record, but right now. Always right now.
That interview you did with Courtney Love: not that it matters, but… DID you like her?
I disliked her as hard and as fast as I fall in love. She felt like a murderer to me, both the physical act and a suffocator of souls.
I have this tendency where I don’t want things I’m involved with to be ugly. I want to surround myself with beauty as an antidote for how ugly modernity can feel. However, this feels sort of… anti-art. Any advice?
I agree with you. I've only ever written about what I love. There's beauty in violence, in hatred, in boredom, in ugliness. I am going to guess that what you're talking about as ugly modernity is people or things pretending to be other than their true nature, trying to present as such, and wasting our time and irking us.
That, and also just plain old ugly. Like how Taco Bells used to look like little pueblo huts and now they’re gray boxes. And how all the new music on the radio is pretty awful now. (Well, I think so…) Do you believe in ever-lasting love?
No. Do you?
Well, I hope for it, but hope isn’t faith. Ever-lasting love is probably the thing I want most out of life, and I feel like it’s the case that wanting something the most means you won’t get it, like in The Little Mermaid (the sad fairy tale, not the cartoon movie) where she tried with all her heart to be human and instead becomes this sort of ethereal being of the sea and air. So… something much cooler!
Would you consider self-awareness to be a gift or a curse?
Awareness of anything is all there is. All the world, all of life, is only the story we're telling ourselves in that moment.
My two favorite things are being in love, and being alone, and I like them both equally. Oooof, tough one. What can be done?!
Well, I like to marry the unavailable: workaholics, alcoholics, narcissists and psychopaths. Then you can have both your favorite things at the same time!
Favorite thing about marriage? Least favorite thing about marriage? Favorite thing about divorce?
My favorite thing is having someone to watch movies and eat with, and then we talk about what we watched and ate, and then we talk about what we're going to watch and eat, or maybe what we watched and ate a long time ago. My least favorite thing is I can't really be free to be stupid and wasteful with my day. Having a witness. My favorite thing about divorce is the electrifying sorrow, the endlessness.
What do you like best about French people?
Oh boy! They're wonderful lovers! They're delicate thinkers. They love to talk and they're good at it. They're as arrogant and disdainful as they're reputed to be. When one deigns to like you, you feel so special. They notice their children as human beings.
Do you read much current journalism? It’s a bad scene, if you ask me. So much of it feels like doing your homework. And writers seem… shy. What’s the trick to a good interview? Who’s been your favorite person to interview?
No, that part of my life is over. My trick to a good interview is ask what you actually want to know and only that. Oh boy, so many people have been my favorite interviewee! I feel like such a dweeb saying this, but I can't pick one.
You’ve been spilling your guts for much of your life. Do you keep any secrets?
No. I like to travel light. I've divested myself of all my secrets, almost all my possessions, and not enough memories. That's next.
Would you tell me about either a really divine first date, or a really awful one? (I use the word “date” loosely, I don’t really actually know what that means. Whatever it means to you.)
Hm. I met my second husband by staring into his eyes, swaying, and saying, "I'm going to change your life for the worst!" and puking into his lap. Whatever the opposite of manic pixie is. It all came true. One time I went on a date to Dunkin Donuts with a man missing his front tooth and when he laughed a blueberry from his muffin flew out of the hole and landed in my lap. Then we walked to the movies and he talked loudly about his ex-girlfriend and how fat her daughter was! He was fat, too!
What’s more important for being a good writer: discipline, or a life well lived?
Oh definitely discipline! Not in the sense of sitting down at your typewriter for a certain number of hours, but a dedication to the work that precludes your own pride or despair. You can't let your personhood get in the way. I mean, you can, why not? But for me, my ego will pull all kinds of shit to get me to not do the work and I have to remind myself that myself is not at all important. We're all just communicating to each other. Reading is communicating as much as writing is, and to think the writing isn't good enough to go on with is just your ego telling you your imagination matters so much more than the reader's. In fact, the writer's imagination is the least important aspect.
Most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen or imagined?
Oh goodness! What an intimate question! I'd say the sky over the ocean on the east coast at night, the sky over the ocean on the west coast by day, and the sky over the mountains in the southwest at sunrise and sunset every single day. In America. It's the only thing I miss about America. And plain Cheerios.
How does one live without fear?
One doesn't! One lives with fear. Fear needs love, too.
Lisa Carver’s work is for sale on Suckdog.net.
Her Patreon can be found here.