Our generation was like, ‘Okay, we can talk a little bit about your feelings, but not too much.’ And now Gen Z is like, ‘Let’s practice nonviolent communication. I think Gen Z is allowed to talk about their feelings. We had the internet, but we didn’t-ĪO: We didn’t have the tools or the language. I work a lot with teenagers now, and, at least in Portland, Oregon, a lot of them are like, ‘This is how I identify.’ The internet put up so much for them. Ultimately, Lou is not me, but I certainly had to create me as a 19-year-old, as a character-an exaggerated version of myself at that age, set now-ish, since I graduated from high school in 2009, when nobody was talking about being queer. Obviously, there have been models celebrated for their androgyny-even when I was doing it. I had to present a certain way: wear high heels and move in a feminine way.
I was very closeted and kind of unable to move within that world. They could’ve only wanted me for my body, because there was nothing else. That essay was the first time I had written nonfiction in a decade, and it felt like I was accessing a different emotional space. JULES OHMAN: I am very much a fiction writer. Are you inspired by real events in your life? It’s like all my fans kind of knew before me. I think that I have, too, but in a different way. Jules, you’ve written about coming to identify as queer through your writing. It’s the first time I’m sharing my actual life, or the actual events that inspired the songs. I’ve often asked myself, am I creating chaos in my world? Or is it the way that I see through this? My most recent record is probably the most intimate, honest, unguarded thing that I’ve done. It made me think of how distress can lead us to create-and how it can also lead to an experience that ’ s pleasurable for an audience.ĪNGEL OLSEN: approach writing is I will change a few things from what happened. listening to Angel ’ s album, feeling blissed out. I lost myself in Jules’ book, reading on my patio with my dog for hours and I’ve been driving around L.A.
You ’ ve created work that gives the audience so much pleasure while working through some painful stuff.
REBECCA SACKS: First of all, mazal tov to both of you for making art during the pandemic. In a conversation moderated by novelist Rebecca Sacks, Jules and Angel talk art, sex, and heartbreak. She recently joined a Zoom call with debut novelist Jules Ohman, whose book, Body Grammar, follows Lou, a teenage model thrust into the world of fashion, all while navigating loss and queer love. In her sixth studio album, Big Time, Angel Olsen works through grief and pleasure-the pain of losing both her parents, two months apart, after having experienced the joy of coming out to them as queer. There’s an argument to be made that all art-fiction or otherwise-is on some level an artist encountering herself.