Interview: Carola Dibbell
Carola Dibbell grew up in Greenwich Village and graduated from Radcliffe College. She participated in many women’s groups and actions before starting to publish journalism and fiction in the 70s. Her short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, Fence, and Black Clock and her rock criticism, profiles, and reviews of books, films, and children’s media mostly in the Village Voice.
Introduced to rock criticism by her future husband, the critic Robert Christgau, she was moved by its mix of amateurism, literary ambition, fandom, and politics, collaborated with him often, and in her own work looked for common ground between feminism and gonzo. Her essay on women in punk appears in Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock and her reflections on the British punk group the Slits in the Ann Powers-Evelyn McDonnell anthology, Rock She Wrote. Her Voice book pieces include the first major story on comic book writer Harvey Pekar and a long personal essay about infertility, “Thinking About the Inconceivable.” Her debut novel, The Only Ones, is a dystopic tale about a bizarre reproductive experiment.
TCJWW: Was writing The Only Ones different from writing rock criticism?
Dibbell: Well, writing a novel is pretty different from writing rock criticism. You’re making up a plot and characters, not reflecting on an existing work or artist. But if you want to talk about tone, voice, spirit, in my own work there’s definitely been overlap, and each kind of writing has influenced the other. I'd been serious about fiction since high school and only ventured into journalism in my late twenties, in the early 1970s. It was an exciting time in journalism—so much political energy, so many new ideas, and meanwhile new journalism had opened the writing up to fictional styling and the personal voice. Rock criticism had all that plus its own anti-authoritarian, anti-genteel animus. Besides very conscious and often wildly exuberant language, there was a great highbrow-lowbrow tone mix, DIY amateurism, personal narrative, and a tradition of rockcrit tall tales involving made-up bands and records and quotes, maybe even imaginary characters. The fiction I’d been writing—at that time first person unreliable narrator—was not bad training for this. Even so, rock criticism had different rules. You had to be brief, entertaining, grab the reader. This turned out to be good for my fiction, which I was writing at the same time and considered my main work.
It was a long time, though, till I thought hard about the difference between that work, which was ambitious but subtle, and the rock criticism, which was vulgar, vernacular and funny. I realized that my rock critical voice had more energy and decided to bring it into the fiction. This decision eventually produced Inez Fardo, with her funny way of talking and her strange but familiar life in the source of so much NY punk—Queens.
TCJWW: Who are some of your favorite writers?
Dibbell: Doris Lessing is my favorite novelist. The mental and emotional trips she takes her characters on are visionary and complex, and I feel they have more to do with my own life than most books. I tend to like the blunt feel of naturalist writers, and she has that a little, though Theodore Dreiser and Christina Stead are more obvious cases. All of these writers can be crude or even sloppy, and I particularly like that about them--the combination of honesty, complexity, braininess, bluntness, and mistakes. I love and often reread Dickens--so big, so humane, so funny. I love John Le Carre’s combination of Dickensian characters and world politics, and his blend of genre and literary has been an inspiration. Dashiell Hammett’s spare style has sometimes been a model, as have Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and Bruce Sterling in science fiction. I read mysteries and especially detective procedurals all the time—I like the dispassion and detail, the emphasis on daily work. Roberto Bolano's Savage Detectives blew me away. That was an interesting structure. Hundreds of small reports from a big cast, over time. I read writers I feel like reading when I’m in the mood to read them, and that means I rarely read the newest thing as it comes out.
TCJWW: Are you a fan of the science-fiction genre?
Dibbell: I’m not someone who gobbled up science fiction in my teens. In my twenties, I got into specific science fiction writers and novels rather than the genre. Left Hand of Darkness, Dune, some John Brunner and Philip K. Dick. Then Doris Lessing's move into space opera opened up the concept for me, and cyberpunk made me think differently about the whole genre--William Gibson's voice, Bruce Sterling's humor and psychological realism about the future. I began to see the genre as an alternate literature with its own community. I read Dhalgren and saw it as a way to make Joyceian ideas about text work as pop. Saw Ursula Le Guin's deep feminism. These days I usually wait till someone recommends a particular book, but I also have it on my agenda to check out some of the classics I missed.
TCJWW: What may have inspired your writing The Only Ones?
Dibbell: First, I had the idea to try my hand at science fiction. My fiction had become slightly
more speculative--maybe fantastical is what I mean. I liked the way it opened up the plotting. So why not try the next step? I was reading mostly genre novels. Why not write one? I thought about science itself, and realized I did actually know a bit about reproductive biology through years of infertility treatments before I went on to adopt my daughter. Then I realized not only that I could write about the classic SF subject of cloning, but that it would be a way to write about adoption, in reverse. Instead of a parent and child who were genetically unrelated, this mother and child would be too genetically related. And they would face some of the same questions my own family has--questions about relatedness, nature/nurture, being different from
other families. Once I was inside the story, I began to feel that the life of a child was pretty SF itself--the strange power of infants, the puzzling culture of toddlers and teenagers.
TCJWW: Do you find that writing comes easy to you?
Dibbell: That's a hard question. If writing wasn't hard, I might not like it as much as I do--all that ruminating and agonizing and rewriting works for me. But in truth I've found it easier to write novels than hold an office job. However, it is definitely not easy to earn money
doing it, especially at my pace.
TCJWW: Any favorite rock or punk bands that you like?
Dibbell: Favorite band: the Beatles. Favorite singer: Aretha Franklin. This is not nostalgia--it's how the listens add up. Favorite old punk band: changes from year to year. Lately I've noticed my ears perking up when I hear Robert Quine's guitar with the Voidoids, Lou Reed, Lester Bangs. Dylan was never a hero to me, but I've come to savor him as a funny and crotchety old man and find I'm dreading his death. I'd rather relisten to Neil Young than the Stones. Tom Ze, Oumou Sangare, Los Lobos and Cornershop, artists I noticed in the '90s, still sound fresh to me. My favorite band of the last ten years is Wussy, and I can't even explain why. I just find them riveting. And Das Racist before they broke up, and solo Kool A.D. and Heems now. I like Skrillex, too.
TCJWW: What was the experience like, writing your first novel?
Dibbell: The Only Ones is my first published novel, but not my first novel. I'd already written a novel about a friendship between two women, which I rewrote so entirely that it was almost like writing two novels. Neither version was published. I also once wrote a memoir. So I've been writing book-length narratives for decades. That's part of the task--living with a book-length project for what will probably be quite a while. I took to that easily. For one thing, it meant I didn't have to keep deciding what to write. With a novel, you know what you're doing for maybe a few years. Getting used to the shape of a book-length narrative is a little different. I once heard a story of a novelist pinning pages of her novel to a clothesline, then looking out the window at them, for distance. I found stepping back so I could picture the overall shape a challenge in the earlier novels. Now I'm more used to it--it's one of those hard things that I enjoy. Unlike those earlier projects, this novel wasn't autobiographical except very indirectly, so I created the characters differently. I had a general idea of the themes, experimented with characters who might work well with them, and soon came up with a cast I found so easy to believe in that I sometimes felt they wrote the book. But the real first with this novel has been having an audience. That is an extraordinary experience.
TCJWW: What attracted you to rock criticism? You write on a variety of subjects, how do you manage to write on so many different topics?
Dibbell: The way I manage to write on so many topics, John, is that I don't. I do the occasional liner notes with my husband, Robert Christgau, and just last month I presented a paper on Lester Bangs at the EMP pop conference, and I do a lot of listening to and talking about music, but fiction is basically all I've been writing for quite some time. I published rock criticism on and off for nearly 30 years, along with other journalism, but fiction was always my priority. In the busy early years of my daughter's life, when I just didn't have time for everything, journalism was what I cut back on.
It was only after I'd pretty much stopped writing reviews that I had those ideas about bringing the rock critical voice into my fiction. Besides the politics of writing about popular music for fans, what originally excited me about rock criticism was its formal openness, its unpredictable tone, its musicality and humor and audience-friendliness. I think of The Only Ones as carrying on the tradition.
TCJWW: Could you tell us about your next book?
Dibbell: Yes, that’s the question. In the course of writing The Only Ones, I learned to write a dystopian novel, and I can imagine ways to do a sequel. I have readers who care about this novel, and I care about them. But there are other themes I want to explore, and I’m not sure how I want to do that. Between published and unpublished fiction, I’ve written about mothering, death, failure, friendship, various kinds of power struggle. I think it may be time to write about sex.
Photo credit:
Author photo coutesy of npr.com / photo credit Nina Christgau
