Tama Janowitz
Issue #40
The famed "brat pack" writer talks about not-so-nice women, 'The House of Mirth,' and her writing life since Slaves of New York
By Katie Haegele
Published: June 1st, 2009 | 12:00pm
What do you wear when you’re visiting legendary writer Tama Janowitz? I arrive in an outfit of high-waisted crepe de chine slacks and a sort of silly top with a parrot print. Janowitz lives in Brooklyn, in the penthouse of one of those gorgeous prewar buildings. She’s stylish, easily, in green plastic glasses and black cowboy boots.
“Fury! Get in here,” she tells a tiny toy poodle, one of eight, at her feet. The ten of us trundle through the dining room into a huge, sunlit sitting room filled with eccentric art, a brass floor lamp, and a stack of shellacked cigar boxes that serve as an endtable.
It’s from this apartment that Janowitz watched the Twin Towers collapse on a city she has been chronically chronicling since the ’80s, most notably with the Slaves of New York, a 1986 satirical short story collection about the artists, junkies, and grad students that made up mid-80s Manhattan. The bestseller transformed her into an about-town celebrity — quite a change from the “lonely-as-hell” girl who moved to the big city in 1981 after winning, at the age of 22, an NEA grant for fiction. Back then, she wandered the streets, following and eventually plugging into the gritty downtown art scene.
In 1987, the Village Voice named Janowitz as part of a new wave of “brat pack” writers, alongside Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney. In her writing, Janowitz’s humor and honesty make you feel brave about being a woman, being weird, wearing ridiculous outfits, and making a mess of romantic situations. Her satirical wit, evident in the observations of her characters, is laced with a keen social commentary.
With several novels under her belt, the youthful energy of Janowitz’s early work has mellowed and deepened over the years. Not that it’s ever been easy. “I have never found writing to come easily,” says Janowitz. “It was hard when I started and each time I wrote a book, it was hard and now I think it’s even more difficult.”
Her latest novel, They Is Us, is a “cautionary horror story” set in a scary future of genetic mutations and invasive technology. So far the book has been published only in the UK, as a limited edition of only 1,000 copies, each of which has been signed by hand. Maybe, Tama muses, English readers are more comfortable with fiction that’s not always nice.
Nice isn’t a word you’d necessarily use to describe the driven female characters in Janowitz’s works, whether that’s the title character in Peyton Amberg or Florence Collins in A Certain Age. She points to social-climbing Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth as a classic example of a not-so-nice woman. “I mean, she was horrible, that Lily Bart,” says Janowitz. “She had a perfectly nice boyfriend. He wasn’t making a big living, so that meant she couldn’t have anything to do with him! But it never bothered me that she wasn’t likable. I don’t read a book to find a nice person. I read a book to enter somebody else’s world and see it through their eyes.”
Janowitz is continuing to write the stories that interest her. “I think the last few [of my books] have been darker in tone, although they were always pretty bleak on the world outlook,” she says. “In They Is Us, I wanted to try science fiction but thinking realistically; how much are people going to change? They’re still going to be the same — hoping for power, money, love, fame, glory. My favorite part of this new book is toward the end: the whole world is crumbling and about to collapse but one of the main characters is busy thinking, ‘You know, if I could just lose five pounds I would be a lot happier.’”
We walk out onto the terrace for a little air. She has been living in the apartment with her husband, British curator Tim Hunt, and their teen daughter Willow for ten years. In front of us, the whole city is spread out beneath this hill, and Manhattan’s skyline is a pretty playground miniature.
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