Garth Greenwell: Incredibly Vulnerable Beings

When I first read Garth Greenwell’s novel-in-stories Cleanness, I did not know that I was about to endure three months without human contact. Our interview took place over the phone, as nearly all my conversations do now. Even at a distance, Greenwell was fully present. He tends to speak in paragraphs. In my conversations with friends and loved ones, I try to emulate his resonance.

It’s difficult to define precisely what I mean by “resonance”—maybe conviction in the power of langugage. Consider this sex scene, in which Greenwell’s narrator observes his capacity to render language “real”: “I kissed it, too, as I had kissed the rest of him, and said again the words that somehow became more real with repetition.” At the end of the scene, the narrator kisses his lover across the forehead, declaring, “I had garlanded him.” I think of the name of the virus, its mock regality, and thank Greenwell for this tender vision. May the future bring safety and justice and garlanding galore.

— Liv Lansdale for Guernica

Guernica: At one point your narrator says, “I felt with a new fear how little a sense of myself I have.” What are the challenges of writing from the perspective of someone with an unstable sense of self?

I think it’s an assumption on my part about human beings: that we don’t know ourselves, that we are much more mysteries to ourselves than we are clear, and that someone who feels they are not a mystery to themselves is deluded. It always seems to me that there’s a great deal of ourselves we don’t know, and that we don’t want to know. One of the things that interests me about narrative, and about having the same narrator over two books, is the possibility that presents of repeatedly putting this person in situations where he undergoes a process of coming into self-knowledge and is forced to look at things he’d prefer not to look at