September 28, 2004

Today is the day to do a little light stalking.

Today's interviewee is the former author of the column "Female Trouble" in the New York Press, and now the proprietess of the column "Naked City" in New York Magazine. She's currently busy on the road promoting her new book My Old Man. She's a busy and interesting lady but fortunately she had some time to chat with me.

The Amy Sohn Interview: Just Under Twenty Questions

You write about sex in your column for New York magazine. Do you get people coming up to you and sharing all-too-personal information?
Thankfully, no one comes up to me and tells me about STDs, but I do get a lot of single women saying, "You should write about me! I have the worst dating life of anyone in the city!" The fact that only single women are saying this, not single men, is disturbing.

What is some advice or information commonly dispersed by sex columnists that you'd like to debunk or challenge?
Communication is overrated. I have learned this through trial and error. All the feminist sex books like Lonnie Barbach's talk about telling your lover what you want. I think this is valuable for women who are completely dissatisfied with their sex lives or have totally clueless lovers, but for everyone else I think it's easier (and less incendiary) to show, or guide, but silently and subtly. Men have a hard time being corrected so the key is to correct without letting them know you're correcting.

You're obviously a very attractive young lady...have you had publicists or agents ask you to play that up in author photos and appearances and so on, or are you just being your lovely self?
Photos are part of book promotion these days - every author gets his or her photo in the window of Barnes & Noble when they do a reading there, even the ones with faces made for radio. I did a Bloomingdale's ad where I posed in Anne Klein but I only did it because they told me they would mention my novel, which they did. Free advertising for an audience of 3 million is not something most authors would pass up.
And when Gawker posted a bunch of photos of my book party, I was not in any of them. I am not sure if this is some sort of hostility or a generous act that saved me from being photographed looking hideous, something I would not put past the people at that squib.

So if HBO were to make a television series about your career as a New York columnist, who would play you and your significant other?
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paul Bettany.

How are you different from the protagonist in Run Catch Kiss?
Ariel was angrier and more romantic. That may have been a close portrait of me at the time. She was also very descriptive with her language, and naïve in certain ways about men.

Why are hotel bars better than regular bars?
They make you feel like a tourist in your own city. There aren't many places that can make New Yorkers feel romantic about New York any more. The King Cole bar is one of them. I even like the Soho Grand, although it's so over. Also, there is always the promise of renting a room for sex that very night, which eliminates the your place or mine conversation.

Your column with the New York Press caused your parents shame at cocktail parties, it says in your bio. Do they read all your work?
I think they do. I don't know if they have read my book. My mother when asked, said, "Yeah," and then didn't say anything else. My father hasn't told me yet. There is a vivid portrait of a middle-aged father so I can understand his trepidation. I try to respect their right to read or not read as they please. That is one of the downsides of being published in the same city, although my in-laws live in Tucson and subscribe to New York too.

Post Sex and the City, there seems to be a lot of pop culture cache in the theory that women are more and more looking for hookups than relationships. Is this true or is this more of a fad?
I never believed that. I think the central comedy of Sex and the City was based on that inversion - the women often acted like men - but any woman who looked to that show as a model for how to act was either delusional or 22. The premise of that show was important and role-changing: that women in their thirties could be single and happy. But as Mary Gaitskill pointed out to me when I had lunch with her recently, it never showed the negative implications of casual sex - for men or women. STDs were treated as one-liners, there were few instances of dry mouth, fear of waking next to a stranger, emotional fragility, or orgasmless depressing and degrading one-night stands. Those women were the most acrobatically orgasmic group I have ever seen.

Naked City is pretty third person. Do you feel the desire to comment often on your subject matter? Do you usually want to weigh in positively, negatively, sarcastically, etc?
I try to mix it up. The column will get more of my voice in in coming months; it is going to be shorter and weekly and I think that will give me ample opportunity to riff and synthesize instead of sum up other people's stories.

Is being the featured wedding in the New York Times vows section all its cracked up to be? Did it bless your marriage with instant fabulousness?
Haven't you heard? The first year is the hardest.

In your observation, are women in New York suspicious, jealous, supportive of or indifferent to each other?
Good question. I was pretty competitive and horrible. I have lost two friends in conflicts related to boyfriend sharing. At the same time, when I was single I frequently set female friends up with guys I had dated once or twice and wasn't too conflicted about it. I think women are less catty than men like to believe but there are still a lot of women who see other women as obstacles instead of potential sources of setups. You are either the kind of woman who says, "I don't have female friends," or the kind who says, "I have a lot." I used to be in the first category and now I'm in the second.

You and your work have often been offered up for criticism and discussion: how does one develop thicker skin?
Once someone has written about the imagined smell of your genitalia, there is little else that can be as upsetting. I will say that I am disturbed by a general trend in young aspiring writers away from initiating their own material, fictitious or not, and toward synthesizing, critiquing, and ogling other writers. Perhaps it's the advent of the Internet and blogging, perhaps it's a postmodern thing. But those who cast all those stones, it seems, with the exception of my colleague Elizabeth Spiers, have an enormous amount of agita. Their time would be better spent crafting that first novel than making fun of stupid blond celebrities and ugly young journalists. Celebrities are stupid and journalists are boring.

How has the book tour been going? Have you been getting good crowds? How does one prepare for the (hopefully never-arriving) day when two or less people show up for your reading?
That's sweet of you. The crowds have been decent. Never less than fifteen and that was in a small joint. You try to just think of all those readings as a generous act and not get hung up on crowd size. Then you trash your hotel room.

Any plans in the future for more scriptwriting?
I'm working on a spec romantic comedy. I'm on p. 55. It's going OK. It will be good someday but it's not good yet. I also have a tv project in the works which I imagine would involve writing scripts.

You've mentioned feeling like you've written yourself into a 'sexual ghetto,' and are looking for different topics. Is there anything in particular you'd love to write about, journalistically or otherwise?
I live in the Krakow of the crack. I have mixed feelings - I won't be doing this forever but for the time being I enjoy it and I always learn new things. In the future I would like to write about marriage and also perhaps (gasp) motherhood.

Chick lit: is it real, is it good, is it going away, what's the deal?
It's really chewy and sweet but after a while it loses its taste and it's just a gray mass of nothing that you can't find a receptacle for.

With novels, columns and freelancing, what is your writing schedule?
Hectic. Insane. And I am not that productive or disciplined. Somehow it works.

What have you been reading lately?
Tom Perrotta's Little Children, Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar, Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, of course, Bill Clinton's My Life.

How does it feel to be the 107th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
Oh honey, it feels like the first time every time.