While her writing is determined, what’s functional still flickers. On the cult of Daphne DuMaurier’s work, for instance, and the author’s 1952 short story, ‘Birds,’ which later inspired Hitchcock’s adaptation, Sehgal writes: “It feels less written than administered; it acts upon you with unerring, hypodermic efficiency.” In a profile of Mary Gaitskill, Sehgal describes the author as speaking “haltingly, with great care, as if she is on the witness stand.” On Marilyn Minter, Sehgal characterizes the artist’s drippy visions as celebrating a “leakiness in self and sensibility.” On the “bitter paradox” of immigrant fiction, she wonders how “a genre with such a wide sweep […] can be derided for, of all things, narrowness.” Even when Sehgal is describing her 14th-month-old daughter to me—who is now walking—the account is vivid and wonderfully peculiar: “She’s an octopus. She’s got tentacles everywhere.”
I interviewed NYTimes Book Critic, Parul Sehgal
ON WRITING OR BUST
I only care about doing the work. I have zero other ambitions. I’m the laziest, least socially ambitious person, ever. And I don’t get off on the punitive power of the critic; you know that brand of critic, the scold, who has appointed himself to keep the ecosystem clean. That’s the kind of thing that I find very uninteresting. Taxonomizing has very little to do with how and why people read. It’s just the work of criticism I enjoy—getting close to the text, close to language. Don’t get me wrong: writing is the worst fucking thing in the world, but after all the hemming and hawing, and procrastinating, and whatever it is that you need to do to get into that place of deep thinking—that’s all I care about.
ON PROFILE WRITING
I’m in the middle of writing a profile that I’m finding difficult. For those of us who write criticism, which tends to be argument-based, flushing out a scene is delightful. The emotional relationship that develops, maintaining it, I find hard. And scary. I think the thing that freaks me out about profiles is that often the piece seems to hinge on one gesture, one moment when you, the writer, have “caught” the subject being their authentic self, a moment of self-revelation (and one that’s frequently a moment of anger or vulnerability). This feels complicated and gross to me: it’s like sizing up a mark. And yet such pieces are so tempting to write—and undeniably delicious to read.
Photographs by Heather Sten
