Ellie O'Neill on Empathy by Sarah Schulman

What about this book then? what connected you immediately to it? Obviously, you had that pre-experience of spewing up on a boat and reading series.

Always formative.

Dubably, you were less sick during reading Empathy, although the title suggests maybe the empathy of feeling ill on a boat might help.

But what did you connect with it? What for you kind of made this go, oh, this is something going on here?

again another kind of like strain of everything being so like like so much synchronicity around this book as well as that my girlfriend is studying to be a psychoanalyst and she was doing her essays while I picked up this book so she's like typing away about Freud and I'm reading this book and Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously the opening of it is so like hardcore and immediately you're like thrust into this like crazy sort of homophobic Freudian quote that is like amazing.

And then you immediately meet Anna who has internalized this kind of yeah few and it's like splintering and I just think yeah it's just it was like so there's so much of it that was like so funny to me so moving so like expansive and like so like slippery and like porous and everything yeah there's just like no peace in it really but there's still so much like tenderness and so much like beauty which I thought was like a really like bold it's a really like boldly written thing I think in that way we're like we're not really allowed to get comfortable which I love

I said before I started recording that it is a weird book and it's weird in the sense that it's weirdly structured.

I'm latterly realizing that I'm kind of obsessed with structure of novels particularly.

And this is so interestingly structured.

And Sarah Shulman talks about the fact that she's trying to get all these different structures.

She talks about how real and more confident she was in her own life.

I think this was a fifth novel and she felt more confident doing that stuff.

which i'm interested in kind of exploring and also how that works as i was like learning more about yourself earlier i was the way you approach songwriting and so i want to like maybe pair them but just to go back to that that opening like with the freud thing i was a bit shocked by it really because i wasn't familiar with that i was like all right okay like and i think the book is born of counter analyzing this idea and correct me if i'm wrong and say weird things but He basically, like, the way he describes homosexuality for a woman as, like, being driven to it, like, just comparing it to being because you want to upset your father and all this kind of stuff, it's very dismissive.

And in that short, like, quote, I was like, okay, right, okay, right.

okay, Freud, calm down kind of thing.

But then that whole comparison to other people and that experience of having to compare yourself and just being dismissed like that, I was fascinated by that.

Were you familiar before reading that with the Freudian view of that? In my ignorance, I didn't realise that that was a thing.

And then I was like, jeez, this is a bit... yeah

well i don't think it's like an ignorant thing necessarily to not know about those parts of like freud because in many ways he is obviously the worst guy in the world anyway but also so much of it is like accepted as like and there are so many people who like you know can take that with a pinch of salt and also like re like sarah shulman is doing they can like recontextualize it and like take what you need from it and also like bring it into like your your own like needs or whatever but um it's definitely something that i did come across in college and was like okay um but i think it's so cool what she does with it i think she's like using this kind of like dominant voice in the culture to like comment on you know the dominant idea of the culture that is then like internalized by like queer people internalized by the family system internalized by queer people's like relationships to each other as well which i think is a really interesting and important theme of this book Probably the thing that I love the most about it is the way that she describes this idea, say, like the Freudian idea of like lesbian existence or like female homosexuality being this pathology and then takes it and is like investigating that and also like interrogating the reader by confronting the reader with how do you intervene on these like ideas that are so inherited and like internalized by everybody.

Well, that was, I was kind of, because I was reading it, and I went in, you arrive at everything with baggage in life, and so I'm reading this book, I'm like, okay, what's it about? Don't know, like, weirdly never heard of Sarah Shulman, kind of looking and going, right, okay, what's going on here? Who's this novelist? Not wanting to read too much, just getting content and going, okay.

And it's saying, all right, this is one of, like, the first kind of postmodern lesbian novels and all this kind of stuff, and I'm going...

Okay, fair enough.

And I'm reading it from that point of view, but then I kind of had to, and obviously it opens with the Freudian setup, but then the irony is she makes the whole novel take place in a psychoanalytic view.

You've got this... believe are these two characters of of anero and then doc the kind of the psychoanalyst that she's speaking to and pacing between and very quickly and the arbitrary setup is she's kind of broken up like or been been affected by this relationship that she proves but very quickly i kind of And I guess this is the power of the book and the cleverness of it is that, and the reason it's called Empathy, that idea of being able to empathize with someone and someone outside of your situation.

As I got further into it, I was like, what's this got to do with empathy? not was this got to do with being a lesbian or anything, but it was like, isn't kind of the priority of this book.