Make It Up

Lynne Tillman hates the term “creative nonfiction.” The MFA program buzzword, bestowed on hybrid essays, lyrical prose, and any true narrative that doesn’t read as totally dull, could apply to the writer, if she didn’t stand so outside of genre or so reliably upend literary conventions. 

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“Anything you write requires making up something,” Tillman tells me over the phone from her apartment in New York’s East Village, the neighborhood she’s lived in since the 1980s. “You make up the order of things. You make up which words you choose. Every word has not just a denotation but an intonation and associations. This idea that there’s nonfiction that’s not creative is wrong-headed.”

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Tillman believes in finding ways to play with words. She reviews art exhibitions in the fairytale register of “Once upon a time…” And she writes invented tales coldly and clearly: “He said hello, and she did.” At 78 years old, the author has honed her dark curls and thick-rimmed glasses frames to a signature. Her body of work is just as recognizable: It includes seven novels, five nonfiction books, and six collections of short stories, including the latest addition, Thrilled to Death, a selection of 41 missives from across her entire writing life, out on March 25 from Soft Skull Press. Not to mention, she has maintained a steady contribution to the landscape of cultural criticism, from a conversation with Andy Warhol’s Factory actress Pat Hartley in Interview Magazine last year to a recent note about her cat, Basie, for upstart periodical The Whitney Review of New Writing. 

Thrilled to Death is a curated selection rather than a complete collection. It’s not everything Tillman has ever produced because that would be enough to fill several filing cabinets (and it does, in the Fales Library at New York University) nor is it chronological, because, she explains, “That always entails the idea that your stories get better as time goes on, and I don't think that's necessarily true.” She instead ordered them according to how they felt next to each other, letting, for example, a piece about the comforts of an unromantic marriage (“Living with Contradictions”) glide into a scene of mourning doves nesting on a windowsill (“That’s How Wrong My Love Is.”)

The stories are a patchwork of different tones and styles. “When I write, I give myself what I guess you’d call a challenge: to write differently each time,” she explains. There is a second-person direct address to a cruel man that begins, “Remember when you pissed on me in San Francisco?” and a series of vignettes organized as “appetizers” or “desserts,” titled “Myself as a Menu.” There is Marilyn Monroe speaking from the dead, and there is the nonsense language of “Future Prosthetic@?” (The latter was her foray into sci-fi in 2015, when friends asked her to contribute to an anthology of flash fiction written in the tradition of the genre). But whether or not Tillman herself can connect all the dots—she had curatorial help from Soft Skull Press’ former director Richard Nash in addition to its current team because she “needed an eye that was not a capital ‘I’”—her acolytes will detect the themes that never fail to interest her. It’s a fascination with the feminine, and things coded as feminine: best friends, parties, dreams, sex, and so many felines. In “Boots and Remorse,” she recounts her childhood cat Griselda, writing, “[she] used to imitate my mother and wear her lipstick, rubbing her thin cat lips on an uncovered lipstick tube, or, uncatlike, she’d give birth only if my mother was in attendance, assisting.”

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Tillman often uses her own life as source material because she needs to write to understand and distill her experiences. In a world constructed of images, where the identity of being a creative lacks meaning and gets subsumed into a bottomless pit of Instagram bios and dormant Substack intro posts, she is one of the best models we have for working writers. “There's always been the idea that being a writer is somehow glamorous and heady and all of that,” she says. “Writing is different from being a writer.”

Having known that she wanted to be a writer since she was an 8-year-old on the South Shore of Long Island, Tillman spent time bumming around Europe before she moved to Manhattan in her late 20s. There she fell in with the arts crowd downtown, in the era of Kathy Acker, Mary Gaitskill, and Dennis Cooper. She has always been of the world and attracted to adventures, but she has never been beholden to a scene. Writing has always come first. 

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I’m surprised to learn that she has no routines or rules for herself akin to Julia Cameron’s morning pages or Joan Didion’s hour alone before dinner, drink in hand, to self-edit her day’s work. It’s more that Tillman is compelled to her laptop, like a bodily need. “If I don't write something over a couple of days—if I don't kind of push my own work in—I do get more unhinged,” she says, laughing. “Working on a novel or writing a short story or an essay engages me in something outside myself.”

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I’m happy but not surprised to hear that Tillman enjoys the actual act of writing. But she experienced none of that joy when her debut novel Haunted Houses came out in 1987: “It certainly was not a bestseller and it wasn't read by a lot of people, but I didn't know how depressed it would make me feel, compared to writing it.” It got a second chance with a 2022 reissue that was framed as “The Catcher in the Rye for girls.” It introduced Tillman to a fresh generation of readers who eagerly adopted her as their new cult favorite. I remember the day I picked up a reissue in London: I loved the cover, a detail from the painting Girl with a Basket of Flowers, 2009, by Hilary Harkness, in which a coquettish woman in a sheer catsuit holds a man’s severed head, in front of a wall of Fauvist art. Tillman wrote, maybe self-referentially, of Harkness’ women, “They are trouble-makers.”

Pulling together pieces from across three decades, Thrilled to Death can be thought of like an artist’s retrospective, the writer suggests. “Does that not feel a bit…morbid?” I ask her, gently, thinking of posthumous, career-spanning museum shows. But silly me, Tillman is on a higher plane. “Everything makes me think about my own mortality!” she responds. “I started thinking about my mortality when I was 5 years old, expecting to die in my sleep and asking my father to bury me under a blanket, with a pillow. I didn’t want to be cold. That's what I told him.”

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“As you get older, what you don't realize is that you're going to be thinking about your friends’ deaths as much as you do,” Tillman continues. “But it makes me realize what it means to participate in the world with certain people.” You can find her reading in an art gallery on election night, at downtown radio station Montez Press, or in the back of a Greenpoint bar to raise abortion funds. She was at the memorial for Gary Indiana, her friend and fellow Village Voice alum; she’s sandwiched between Whitney Mallett and Tony Tulathimutte; she’s at B&H Dairy, the kosher spot on 2nd Ave. She’s at home compulsively writing or grid-posting. Lucky for us, Tillman is everywhere.