Lucy Ellmann is a well-regarded fiction writer whose debut novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. But perhaps her best known work is the critically-acclaimed Ducks, Newburyport—a stream of consciousness 1,030-page novel that consists of a single sentence—which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2019.  Ellmann's latest book, Things Are Against Us, is a collection of satirical essays, dealing with the patriarchy, American ignorance, and the environment.

The essays range in tone, but are full of exasperation and irritation at things ranging from bodies and bras to appliances and air travel―and she delivers these diatribes with her signature wit and humor. Many of these essays have been previously published, most within the last five years, though one is from 2000; but three are new. Some, such as "The Lost Art of Staying Put," have been updated to now mention the COVID-19 pandemic. Each essay is accompanied by an illustration by artist Diana Hope, which complements the colorful nature of this collection. Fans of Ellmann will likely delight in Things Are Against Us. 

I recently had the opportunity to interview Ellmann via email. Our conversation, which offers her trademarked sardonic takes, appears in its entirety below.

Rachel León

Some of the themes explored in these essays are present in your fiction. What do you like (or dislike) about writing nonfiction?

Lucy Ellmann

Most contemporary nonfiction doesn't interest me. It lacks the depth or range of fiction, and so much of it really seems pretty abysmal: hip, cynically crowd-pleasing, goofy, banal, and repetitive. There's a craze for lacing nonfiction with backstory on every personage mentioned, and filler about their choice of clothing or hairstyle or breakfast cereal, or irrelevant asides about the internal workings of the electric toothbrush or the Ford motor car. Are we children? Just give us the facts, man. I think the problem is that nonfiction writers envy fiction techniques and what we get are their cack-handed stabs at novelistic scope, shape, pacing, characters, plot, subplot and digression. Add some fashionable jumps in time, and literary references that border on literary desecration, and you've got yourself a book. My essays aren't exercises in fact-finding, I'm glad to say. They're merely vehicles for the expression of opinion. Fiction allows me to get my opinions across too, but sometimes it's fun to just fly off the handle. My essays are also full of good advice, since the only real self-help is self-hatred, and that I can teach. Otherwise, the job is the same as in fiction: to write things the way they ought to be written.

Rachel León

Diana Hope's illustrations are great and nicely complement your work. How did that collaboration come about?

Lucy Ellmann

I've known Diana for some time, both through her work and her interest in books. She paints beautiful still lifes and landscapes, and her line drawings are tender and clever, with an anarchic edge. About five years ago, in search of an illustrator for a different publication, I asked Di if she'd do it. She stepped up to the plate marvellously. She's adaptable, unpredictable, and full of ideas. The drawings she's done for Things are similarly terrific. Di is one of those rare artists who can be truly funny. Oldenburg was funny, Calder, Arcimboldo, Jean Tinguely, Philip Guston, Mary Cassatt sometimes and Picasso too, and Reinhard Behrens, whose work often hilariously features an old toy submarine. But how many others? Humor in the visual arts usually falls flat. But Di's wit is uncontainable. She's also one of the best-read people I know, and gets verbal nuance and satire like nobody's business.

Rachel León

Some of my favorite lines in this book are from "The Underground Bunker," an essay that begins by talking about the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots. For example,  "Americans are acutely unaware of the past and the future. Also, the present. History is infinitely malleable for them." You then discuss America's me-me-me consumerism mindset, highlighting the country's unique brand of ignorance. Are people across the globe laughing at us the way I imagine they must be?

Lucy Ellmann

Americans do seem exceptionally delusional these days. Whether this is due to poor nutrition, minimal education, poisoned water supplies and fundamentalism, or slavish allegiance to the car, TV, porn, social media and computer games, or just an unassuaged appetite for "authentic frontier gibberish" (Blazing Saddles), they appear to be high as a kite on GARBAGE. Their weird attitudes to vaccines, climate change, guns and healthcare leave the rest of the world aghast. Americans can't even agree on calling insurrectionists insurrectionists – when we all saw the Capitol ransacked before our eyes! Who needs Swift when you've got this many actual Yahoos stamping around? It's a problem.

Rachel León

Several other essays also criticize America and considering you were born in America, I wondered if there's something like the James Baldwin quote about a love for the country giving one a right to criticize it perpetually. Or have you lived in Europe so long you see this country's flaws with the perspective of an outsider.  Maybe it's a bit of both? 

Lucy Ellmann

My patriotism died during the Vietnam War, but I'm not sure I can love any country. The UK, where I've spent my adult life, is nutso too. Brexit, based on brazen lies and won by the narrowest margin, destroyed decades of peace, prosperity and cultural exchange, all to appease a bunch of British bigots. Now, the whole economy's ruined. Big surprise. What aggravates me even more is that the UK government's response to Covid has been openly genocidal. But America, with its unwieldy size, wealth and impact, merits a corresponding increase in castigation. It has now messed with everybody's head, so everyone on Earth has the right to criticize it (though I wish Baldwin was still around to drown the rest of us out). FDR was remarkable, but his advances were quickly bulldozed in favor of industrial devastation, racism, misogynistic violence (fifty women are shot a week), the FBI, the CIA, the atom bomb, and a pathological love of bullshit. Unless you regard sneakers, reality TV and high school bullying as valuable achievements, it's not a great record. 

Rachel León

I enjoyed "The Lost Art of Staying Put" about the ridiculousness of travel and how some people have struggled with staying home amid a global pandemic. Was it your ability to 'stay put' that allowed you to write this book this past year?

Lucy Ellmann

I generally do stay put, with or without a plague. This is how most books get written – it's not a glamorous life. But, before Covid grounded us, I overheard these guys talking on a train once about all the soccer matches they attended worldwide. They gleefully recounted how they would fly somewhere just for a night to see some stupid game, and then fly home the next day (the sports fan's version of the one-night stand) – while Greta Thunberg was missing school in order to beg for action on climate change, and had to get to America by sailboat! There are still people who feel fine though about using up the last of the world's fossil fuels on zooming around, for business or pleasure or pain. We were once led to believe that the more worldly we became through travel, the more tolerant and civilized we'd be. It isn't true. Tourism is almost wholly destructive and exploitative. Few travelers busy themselves building bridges between nations – all they want is a tan and a few plastic souvenirs, as boastful proof of peregrination. Political and economic migrants are the only people who should travel. The rest of us would do well to buckle down, read books, play music, and attend to our own locales. 

Rachel León

Most of the essays deal with issues of patriarchy, but perhaps none so distinctly as "Three Strikes," which was inspired by Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. You propose housework, labor, sex strikes to start to level the playing field with men and women. It's such a compelling essay that I hope people will read themselves, but I was hoping you could talk a little about it. 

Lucy Ellmann

A friend recommended Three Guineas to me a few years ago. It's witty, elegant, balletic, indignant, and manages a winning self-restraint. Woolf's extensive footnotes charmed me too. But so little has changed since that essay was published, it made me mad. I can't compete with Woolf, but I attempted a kind of homage and update. My essay urges women outright to usurp male rule, and I went to town on the footnotes, pursuing tangential rants in all directions. I'm not sure people register just how mean men are, how callow. Some are splendid, sure – but, on reflection, not enough of them. Certainly not enough to counterbalance the effects of Hitler, Trump, Attila the Hun, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, the Taliban, Boko Haram, and their many adoring followers. An awful lot of men just want to sit around terrorizing everybody. And we've been so patient! Men have had every opportunity to make their testostereophonic bombast work – women even fortified them with hearty stews for thousands of years and, latterly, lemon meringue pie! – and all we've got to show for it is a stinking, rotting mess of want, war, airplanes, nuclear waste, and thunder egg collections. Men sold us down the river, and now they have to pay us back. While the natural world still functions at all, while there's still a little air to breathe and water to drink and a little ice left at the Poles, women must take over. Global women's strikes would be a perfect way to begin and the time is now: animals, birds, fish, plants and coral reefs can't wait much longer. And neither can Greta.


Nonfiction
Things Are Against Us
By Lucy Ellmann
Biblioasis
Published September 28, 2021