Mary Ellen Mark, Martin Bell and the Three-Decade Odyssey of “Streetwise”

Copyright Mary Ellen Mark 1983

June 27, 2017

By Dylan Foley

Materials discussed:

“Streetwise” (1984 documentary, 1985 Oscar nomination)

“Tiny: Streetwise Revisited” (Exhibition, Aperture Foundation,

Chelsea, May-June 2016)

“Tiny: Streetwise Revisited” by Mary Ellen Mark (Photobook, Aperture, New York, 2016)

“Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell,” a film by Martin Bell (2016)

“Streetwise” Facebook Fan Page (Ongoing)

In March 2017, a gunman walked up to an African-American homeless man on the streets of Seattle and shot him four times in the back, killing him.

Two days later, on the Facebook group for fans of the classic 1984 documentary “Streetwise,” which focused on Seattle runaways and teen prostitutes, a woman named Erin Blackwell wrote that the 52-year-old man murdered was Patrice, who was a 20-year-old pimp featured in the film.

Erin Blackwell was the star of “Streetwise” when she was a 14-year-old girl nicknamed Tiny, living on the streets of Seattle and selling herself to older men to survive.

In the documentary, Patrice Pitts is a handsome, cocky character. He is a pimp, who lives off the sexual trade of his fellow children. After the film, Patrice had lived on the streets for three decades and suffered from long-term drug addiction before he was murdered. [Patrice was murdered over a drug deal and for insulting a dealer. The killer was caught eight days after the murder.]

The genesis of the “Streetwise” odyssey started in 1983, when the photographer Mary Ellen Mark was hired to take photographs for a Time Magazine piece on Seattle street children living near the then-decrepit Pike Place Market area.

Focusing on the ethereally pretty 14-year old Tiny, Mark photographed her and a dozen of her friends, recording their daily hustle, the prostitution with much older men and the petty thievery that the kids used to survive.

Mark gained the trust of Tiny and her band. She chronicled the often volatile love affairs between the kids, the fighting and sheer boredom of hanging out for hours on end, waiting for something to happen. Along the way, we meet Munchkin the pimp, who has two teen girls in his stable. We also meet Shelly, who escaped her sexually abusive stepfather, and is now turning tricks on the street.

After Mark finished her magazine assignment, she came back to Seattle with her filmmaker husband Martin Bell to film the street kids from Labor Day to Halloween 1983. The country singer Willie Nelson provided $80,000 in seed money to make the film. The result was the riveting 1984 documentary “Streetwise.”

In the documentary, the kids do drugs, they fight, they get picked up for paid sex, they fool around with each other and fight some more. Tiny went to the street to escape her alcoholic mother at the age of 13. The barely teenage Tiny looks younger than her years, but already has the brutal knowledge of the streets. “I think it’s very strange that these older men like little girls,” said Tiny in the documentary. “They’re perverts, that’s what they are. I like the money, but I don’t like them.”

The most iconic still photo is of Tiny from the documentary, dressed in a black skirt, black blouse and a black pillbox hat with a mesh veil, looking like a mourning Jackie Kennedy , circa 1963. Tiny stares at the camera with an intense gaze. In another version of the same photo, Tiny blows a bubble gum bubble, like the child she is. Tiny told Mark that she was dressing for Halloween as a French whore.

The “Streetwise” documentary was nominated for an Oscar in 1985. Tiny dressed for the Oscars in a rented tuxedo. Mark and Bell offered to take her back to New York, to keep Tiny off the streets, but Tiny declined the offer when she found out that attending school was a requirement. Tiny was offered a film role in Hollywood, but though she was very bright, she was functionally illiterate and could not read her script.

[Editor's Note: 18 hours after my blog post was up, Erin Charles (AKA Tiny) sent me a clarification on her reading skills..."Hi Dylan its tiny....just wanted to say thank u for writing about me & not putting me down for who i am.....but i also wanted to say...i do know how to read ...i just hated reading."...Thanks Tiny, for setting me straight]

In 2015, Mary Ellen Mark died at the age of 75. Her 50-year career encompassed young prostitutes in the Falkland Road brothels of Bombay, the Indian circuses, homeless families in America and movie set photography of such films as Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and Fellini’s “Satyricon.”

Mark’s greatest and most long-lasting work may be the “Streetwise” project and its evolution over more than three decades. Mark kept in touch with Tiny for the remaining 32 years of her life. She chronicled Tiny’s pregnancy at 15 and the birth of her son Daylon, as well as Tiny’s addiction to crack, which started in 1989 and lasted through the 1990’s.

Tiny and Daylon

Copyright Mary Ellen Mark

Along the way, Tiny had nine more children with a number of men. She found a partner named Will (the father of her youngest five children) and appeared to settle into a life of stable poverty. Mark came back many times to chronicle the growing children and Tiny’s loss of her ethereal good looks as she gained weight, becoming a heavyset woman on methadone maintenance.

In May and June 2016, the Aperture Foundation in Chelsea mounted a major exhibition titled  “Tiny: Streetwise Revisited,” coinciding with the release of Martin Bell’s updated documentary “Streetwise Revisited” and Mark’s last book with the same title as the exhibit.

The gem of the exhibit was Bell’s hard-to-find original cinema verite documentary, following Tiny, Rat, Patty and Shadow the pimp as they go through their daily hustles. They bicker over crushes and climb into cars with strange men for sex. The film was made from 200 hours of footage.

Fortunately, I found my copy of “Streetwise” from an iOffer vendor from Portland, Oregon. Thirty-two years later, it is still a mesmerizing story of a city and how it neglected its most vulnerable children. [The whole original documentary can now be seen on youtube.com]

Unfortunately, I missed the New York screening of “Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell” in June 2016. The film played in Seattle to packed audiences, and was also shown in Iceland at the end of 2016. I am waiting for it to be available for streaming or to be shown on PBS.

Tiny is the center of the original documentary. She got her period in the summer of 1983 and went to the streets soon after. Mary Ellen Mark met her on the night of her 14^th birthday. Early in the film, she goes to a free clinic and the medical worker eases out information on the three STDs she’s had already. If she gets pregnant, Tiny says, she won’t have an abortion.

Tiny and her sons Rayshon and E'Mari, 2003

Copyright Mary Ellen Mark

In the documentary, a 16-year old named Dewayne goes to the doctor, where he is told that his chronically infected tonsils are affecting his growth. Dewayne visits his father in prison, where the father is incarcerated for arson. The middle-aged loser tells Dewayne that they will open up their own thrift store, then starts berating him, doing a “Scared Straight” routine, calling him a con man and taunting him that he is going to be a street punk and will wind up in jail soon enough. “Look at you, you bite your nails,” yells the father. “You are too damn little to be tough. I love you, you’re all I’ve got. I’m gonna make it up to you, what we didn’t do.”

Later in the film, a Pentacostal minister stands on the sidewalk hawking a new shelter for homeless street youth, with a small cot as a prop. While he talks to the camera, behind him a little boy crawls on the bed and starts to jump up and down. An amused pimp named Patrice banters with the preacher, asking if he can go to the shelter with his girlfriend. The preacher good-naturedly says no.

Later in the documentary, Patrice is seen with his mother in a parking lot. She clearly loves him. The brash Patrice is meek and quiet, putty in her hands. She wants to take him to a restaurant to feed him, but won’t give him money, because he will spend it on drugs. This was the same Patrice that was murdered last March.

“Streetwise” is beautifully filmed and cut. At one point early in the film, a street performer named Baby Gramps plays guitar and sings “Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” with the creepy refrain of “If you go into the woods today, you are in for a big surprise,” as the young hustlers cavort like feral cats while the Seattle residents and commuters going to and from work stream by.

In the movie, Rat is Tiny’s boyfriend. “[Tiny] is only 14, but she talks like she wants to get married,” he says. He dreams of joining the Air Force. Tiny and Rat sit on a mattress on the floor in a room in an abandoned hotel. They move from being the bored kids they are to discussing their inevitable separation. Talking big, Rat says he is going to go to a juvenile lock up out of the city to break out his running partner Mike from jail. Tiny looks at him with pride at his macho bluster. “Look at you,” she says.

Tiny in the 1980s

Copyright Mary Ellen Mark

 Rat is 16, but very small for his age. Rat visits Tiny in juvenile lock up after she gets arrested for prostitution. He lovingly taunts her, “You can take the hoe off the street, but you can’t take the street off the hoe.” Tears run down Tiny’s pretty face as he is about to leave. They embrace. He leaves. She breaks down, alone in the juve dorm room.

Meanwhile, Dewayne gets busted for selling pot. Through some bureaucratic mix up, his parole officer can’t get him released into the custody of Dewayne’s friend, a 20-year-old former street kid with a child. Dewayne is trapped in the juve hall for days.

Dewayne Pomeroy, 1983

Copyright Mary Ellen Mark

In early 1984, Dewayne hung himself at that juvenile detention facility, the day before his 17^th birthday. One theory of his death was that Dewayne was due to be released, and that he was tired of the struggle of the streets. The parole officer noted that only three social workers who’d worked with Dewayne and his father (with prison guards in tow) showed up to the funeral. “Like his life, it was a pretty skimpy affair.” He noted that Dewayne had wanted a family, a mother and father, and a house, like every kid should be entitled to have. His juvenile parole officer poignantly said that Dewayne would be cremated and his ashes would be spread over Puget Sound. Dewayne was finally free, said the officer, when he’d never been free before.

The film juxtaposes Dewayne’s funeral, with his father crying over the coffin, and Rat making plans to leave town by hoboing out on a freight train.

Playing with the chronology in the documentary, Bell first shows the funeral of Dewayne, which took place in early 1984. The last scene is Halloween 1983, around the Pike Street Market.

On Halloween, clowns and demons go down Pike Street. Patty and Munchkin kiss. There is footage of Tiny running out of a shower at her mother’s house, wrapped in a towel. She dresses carefully in her black sleeveless dress. The last shot is Tiny walking down a dark street, with her little dog on a leash, dressed as a skinny French whore. The movie is dedicated to Dewayne Pomeroy.

After the release of “Streetwise,” Tiny became a national story and something of a cult figure. The Streetwise kids would occasionally make the news. In the film, Lulu is an aggressive young lesbian, not afraid of confronting the cops who are hassling other hustlers. In one scene, she grabs a hobo who groped a girl’s breast. Hitting him on the face and head, she forced him to bow down and apologize. She had a reputation for trying to defend the most vulnerable runaways. In the film, she finds a new girl with a broken jaw, who had probably just been raped by a john. She stops the traumatized girl from banging her head against a concrete column and calls an ambulance.

In 1985, Lulu made national news when she attacked a man with a garbage can who was assaulting her girlfriend. He stabbed her in the chest, killing her. Dan Rather eulogized her on CBS News, with her death making a sympathetic two-minute item on the national news. Her last words were, “Tell Martin and Mary Ellen that Lulu died.”

In 1993, a decade after the Time Magazine photo essay, Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” revisited Tiny. Mary Ellen Mark went back to Seattle and filmed her in the middle of a crack binge with an abusive boyfriend.

Mark sits with Tiny on the bed of the seedy hotel, reminding her of her then-two beautiful children, and tells Tiny that she could find a better man. Tiny was dancing on the edge of the abyss. It was voyeuristic and depressing.

The photos from Mark’s visits with Tiny through the 1990’s shows a family fractured by drug abuse. Her first daughter LaShawndra, about six, waits for her mother to come home from one of her drug binges. Her wide, pretty face is clouded by anxiety as she looks out the window, waiting.

Tiny keeps having kids and there are numerous photos of children in diapers and underwear cavorting with each other and their mother. There is genuine affection and chaos displayed in the photos. In several pictures from the early aughts, a teenage LaShawndra has a black eye. A reader is left to wonder if it is a domestic violence from a family member or a boyfriend.

I actually had the good fortune of meeting Mary Ellen Mark in 2005 for an interview on a gigantic photobook that Phaidon put out of her work called “Exposure: The Iconic Photographs.”

Mark, then 65, was quite regal with her signature, tight black braids. She was very witty. Mark told me that she would have a fight with Tiny every time she got pregnant again.

Martin Bell, her filmmaker husband, had his film production business in the same studio. He was already at work editing a short, updated version of “Streetwise.” He was overjoyed that I hadn’t seen the original, so he showed me a 20-minute clip of the film for my virgin eyes. It was a moving piece, showing an older Tiny, now going by her birth name Erin Blackwell, who has gained weight and burdened by years of drug abuse and a growing family, living on the poverty line.

The problem with Mark’s large final project, “Tiny: Streetwise Revisited” is that there is an element of repetition that she did not have in the original photos of “Streetwise” in 1983. In “Streetwise,” there were the mean streets of the Pike Place Market, several years before the area gentrified. There are the abandoned hotels, the freight trains and the street characters, the dirty old men that pay children for sex, the disabled panhandlers and the old-school hobos.

In “Revisited,” the vast majority of the photographs take place in Tiny’s home, a sterile new construction, and there are many pictures that are the same—Tiny smoking while holding a child, kids cavorting in diapers and underwear, Tiny crying while smoking. There is not the same grittiness of the street life.

Readers will see that Tiny has survived, when five or six of her friends and Mark’s original 1983 photo subjects did not. Though there is the questionable decision of having 10 children when it is hard to care for them, and one or two children suffered from Tiny’s active drug use in the 1990’s. At least four of the children were in foster care. The two oldest sons hint at their drug involvement and one says that he has the daily struggle to stay clean.

The Streetwise Facebook Page is a fascinating addition to the Streetwise history. With more than 4,100 members, some of the original Streetwise kids write in. Those kids who have died have memorial threads. There is Patty, who died of AIDS, and Roberta Hayes, who was murdered in the early 1990’s by the Green River serial killer, who preyed on prostitutes. Roberta is immortalized as a pretty blonde 16-year-old with a big grin on her memorial page.

There are also survival stories, like Rat, who is a truck driver in the Northwest, and is a grandfather. Erin Blackwell (Tiny) is a member and wrote in recently of her daughter’s Ranaja’s devastating hospitalization in April 2016. In Mark’s last book, Erin Blackwell said that Ranaja had been cutting herself, indicating self-destructive impulses by her daughter.

“Streetwise” is the kind of legendary documentary that is shown on PBS every five years. Or there is Mary Ellen Mark’s original, haunting book “Streetwise” that is being stored in a library somewhere. The Facebook “Streetwise” Page gives the people and events behind the documentary a burning immediacy. Members cheer the survival of their favorites and mourn those who died years ago, like Lulu, the heroic young gay woman who protected other kids, who was stabbed to death.

On his website for “Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell,” the “Streetwise” filmmaker Martin Bell promotes his follow-up film. He promises that he is also working on some short films on Rat and Mike, a young man in a motorized wheelchair, who hung out with the young street kids in 1983 and was embraced by them.

In the afterward in “Streetwise Revisited,” Mary Ellen Mark writes a moving passage about Erin Blackwell, her muse of 32 years. At the age of 14, Erin displayed a great openness in discussing her life and was comfortable before the camera. Thirty years later, Mark marveled, Erin still had this openness with Mark and was willing to talk about her life and all its turbulence and heartbreak. Erin Blackwell was the perfect subject for a great photographer to follow for 32 years.

In return, Mary Ellen Mark created a nuanced portrait of Erin Blackwell. Erin became more than just a pretty young sex worker in a two-week photo assignment. She became a mother, a drug addict, then a woman in recovery. Erin Blackwell became a moving story of a woman struggling with her kids on the poverty line.

J'Lisa, 2014

Copyright Mary Ellen Mark

In one of the last series of photos that Mary Ellen Mark took in 2014 for her final book is of J’Lisa, one of Tiny’s youngest girls. She poses in a grimy alley behind Tiny’s house, dressed in a long t-shirt and a tiara, playing ballerina. She is skinny and bony is the way that only a five or six year old can be. She is beautiful and the reader hopes that her life will not be as rocky as her mother’s was, that she won’t descend into drugs as she gets older, that she won’t have to sell herself to survive.

The Manhattan Bridge Shantytown in Demolished, New York Times, August 18, 1993

For Homeless, A Last Haven Is Demolished

By IAN FISHER

Published: August 18, 1993

Bulldozers yesterday plowed through one of the oldest and last shantytowns in New York City, crushing into bits of plywood and muddy rags one of the most visible symbols of homelessness in Manhattan. 

Officials said the encampment at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge -- known for an 18-foot teepee that towered over wood and tar paper shacks -- had become a fire hazard and was increasingly plagued with drugs. The site, a knoll called the Hill, was one of many semi-permanent communities created by homeless people in the 1980's in spots from Columbus Circle to Tompkins Square Park to the United Nations. 

Yesterday morning, it became the latest to be ripped down. Officials said its 50 or so occupants were uprooted for their own safety. But advocates for the homeless saw political purposes in the strike. 

 'It's Going to Be Rough Now' 

"It's been the Dinkins administration policy to get rid of any encampment that appears too visible on the political landscape," said Ted Houghton of the Coalition for the Homeless. "Unfortunately, they have not attacked any of the roots of homelessness. What we've got now is more people on the street than ever, but more spread out than ever before." 

City officials and homeless advocates both said the Hill -- known for nearly a decade as an orderly, if rough communal encampment -- appeared to be the largest remaining shantytown in the city. But it was small compared to an earlier settlement at Tompkins Square Park, where as many as 200 people lived. 

Not long after bulldozer treads bowled over the teepee's bare and charred poles -- its mailbag skin was burned off last year -- one 52-year-old resident said he would miss the Hill. 

"It wasn't the best spot in the world, but at least it was something," said the man, who calls himself Preacherman, as two machines snorted through the settlement where he lived for three years. "It's going to be rough now." 

In an effort to soften the blow to residents, city workers had visited the encampment daily since Thursday, offering alternate shelter, medical help and admission to programs for drug or alcohol abuse. About 15 residents accepted help, said Howard Salk, the director of outreach for the newly created city Department of Homeless Services. 

Advocates for the homeless said the city acted too swiftly, and the Coalition for the Homeless, which learned of the decision to raze the Hill only on Monday, tried to block the destruction in court. A judge declined a request for a restraining order, but the city agreed in negotiations to store the property of any resident who asked. 

Many shantytown residents interviewed yesterday said they wanted no part of the city's system of homeless shelters, but were also not happy about returning to the streets where many had lived before. 

"You sleep out on the street and you've got to worry about someone robbing you or setting you on fire," said Al Fell, 37, who lived in a small hut at the Hill off and on for five years. "Here, you don't have to worry about that."

 Encampment Had Changed 

The decision to demolish the Hill, which had slowly spread to cover a 20,000-square-foot lot at Canal and Chrystie Streets in Chinatown, was notable because the settlement had received so much attention in newspaper and magazine articles about homelessness. In a long New Yorker article two years ago, Joseph DePlasco, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation, which owns the land, said the agency was taking "a reformist position" and had no plans to tear down the shanties.

Yesterday, Mr. DePlasco said the encampment had degenerated over the last year from a self-contained and self-sustaining community to one that was a threat to itself and the area around it.

"There was more filth, it was more of an eyesore, there were sanitation problems," he said.

Concern began as long ago as May 1992, when an arson fire tore through the Hill, killing a long-time resident, Yi-Po Lee, and destroying 6 of the 15 or so structures, which were often lovingly constructed and outfitted with sofabeds, televisions and hotplates.

Since then, officials said neighbors had complained bitterly about an increase in drug use and sales in the camp -- a trade which some of its residents confirmed yesterday. Last Thursday evening, as workers from the city Human Resources Administration met with residents to tell them that their homes would be torn down, a drug-related shootout erupted in the settlement.

Early last week, after meetings among several city agencies, the Fire Department inspected the camp and issued an order to vacate the property on the grounds that it was a fire hazard. Michael Kharfen, director of the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit, said the decision was not aimed at the homeless themselves nor at shantytowns but at unsafe conditions. Increase in People on Streets

"We do look at each of these situations individually and very carefully and in this case the situation had deteriorated considerably," he said. "We really determined that this was a serious and critical public safety and fire hazard."

But Mr. Houghton, of the Coalition for the Homeless, and other advocates said the Hill's destruction was part of a continuing effort by Mayor David N. Dinkins to eradicate shantytowns and disperse the homeless into smaller, less noticeable pockets around the city, to minimize them as a political issue.

He said that a survey conducted by the Coalition last year found an increase in the number of people living on the streets not long after shanties and other, less permanent homeless communities were razed at places like 72d Street and the West Side Highway, Columbus Circle, the United Nations, Tompkins Square Park, Pennsylvania Station and near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He said that more homeless people were also living in the boroughs outside of Manhattan.

While conceding that the Hill was a fire hazard, Mr. Houghton said his homeless organization only wanted more time to place more of its residents into assistance programs.

There were fewer than 25 people in the Hill's shanties when bulldozers and dump trucks arrived at 6 A.M. For five hours, city workers searched for remaining residents and collected some residents' possessions for safekeeping. Then the heavy equipment set to work, digging out huge scoops of worn jackets, twisted bicycles and splintered plywood. Wondering Where to Go

Destruction of one section was briefly halted after workers dismantling a hut by hand heard a man inside, warning them profanely to get away from his roof. The man apparently scurried out of the shack, down a slope toward the East River, and the hut was crushed.

All day, homeless men milled around the sidewalk across Canal Street complaining that their homes where being destroyed and wondering where they would go. One man said he would return to his wife in Brooklyn. Others said they would stay in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, across the street from the Hill. Louis Watson, 52, was reunited with his white cat, Thomas, after the animal emerged from the debris.

Mr. Watson, who lived there for seven years, peeked past the dump trucks at the opened shell of the seven-foot high hut he built himself, mostly with materials he found on the streets.

"It's been enjoyable here because you don't have to pay rent, you don't have the landlord harassing you," he said. "You want to get drunk, you get drunk, whatever you want to do."

The site will now be fenced in, and Mr. DePlasco said he hoped it would be turned into a community garden.

Photos: The oldest and largest shantytown in Manhattan falling to bulldozers yesterday at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The encampment's 50 or so occupants were uprooted in an early-morning action that officials said was for their own safety. (pg. B1); An 18-foot teepee towered over the wood and tar paper shacks of the largest shantytown in Manhattan yesterday, shortly before bulldozers moved in to tear down the encampment on orders of city officials.; The rubble left when the site, known as the Hill, was razed near the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. (pg. B4) (Photographs by Angel Franco/The New York Times) Map of Manhattan showing site of Shantytown. (pg. B4)

Jami Attenberg on Literary Break Ups, Writer Credit Card Debt and Epic Book Tours

(This interview appeared on LitHub.com on March 7, 2017)

By Dylan Foley

In 2010, the novelist Jami Attenberg published her third book of fiction, The Melting Season, which had a woman on the lam from Nebraska to Las Vegas with a suitcase full of cash. The book received very good reviews, but did not sell well. She was dropped by her publisher.

Attenberg took the literary break up like a punch in the gut. “I wasn’t sure if I could keep going as a writer,” said Attenberg in a telephone interview in Washington D.C., where she was attending the AWP conference last month. “I thought, ‘Oh, man, I have to go get a real job.’ I was so confused because I thought writing was what I was supposed to be doing with my life.”

A year later, Attenberg’s fortunes took a 180-degree turn. Her editor left the same publisher and sold her new publisher on Attenberg. Attenberg’s 2012 novel The Middlesteins, a crisp domestic drama of a family ripped apart by a mother’s eating disorder, was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, hit the Times bestseller list and was sold in 10 countries, being translated into German and Italian. The book became Attenberg’s breakout novel, putting her prominently on the literary map.

Now the 45-year-old Attenberg is back with her fifth novel, the witty and dark All Grown Up, which introduces readers to Andrea Bern, a 39-year-old Brooklyn professional woman who wants neither a husband nor baby, but is searching for a fierce connection with her friends and lovers.

Maybe Andrea drinks too much for her own good and has turbulent taste in men. She’s a failed art student in a boring, stable job she does well. Andrea is dealing with some buried traumas from her past and isn’t dealing with her brother’s daughter, who has a rare, inevitably fatal medical condition.

“The very first chapter I wrote was ‘Indigo Gets Married,’” said Attenberg, as she put on make up for a PBS interview related to AWP. “ I don’t even know where Andrea came from at that moment. I wanted to write about a person who was watching a friend achieve all these adult grown-up milestones in her life and she was not achieving them. Andrea is not me, but myself and so many other people can identify with watching a friend do the things you are supposed to do.”

“In a way, the Indigo cycle of chapters was easy to write,” said Attenberg. “It was ‘Here’s 20 things that are annoying about this.’ I then put the novel away because I didn’t want to do it at that time.”

“I didn’t want to write this book, to deal with the subject matter,” she said, which addresses sexual violence. “I sincerely had a sense of taking one for the team. There finally was a moment when I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’”

“I made a list,” she said. “I want to talk about how young women view themselves. I want to talk about how older men treat young women.  I want to write about when a friend has a baby and disappears. All these things were happening around me. I wrote this book so fast.”

“I don’t feel this character exists elsewhere, or that these issues are discussed enough in fiction,” she said “In many books, female characters are forced to think about when they are going to find their romantic partners.”

“Andrea lived in the physical landscape I had occupied for so long,” referring to the South Williamsburg neighborhood that the fictional Andrea Berg and Attenberg have both lived. “I had an idea of the annoyances and grievances that she had. I could see it all around me.”

Attenberg published Instant Love, her first book of stories, in 2006 when she was 34. “My first book was about what love was for the women of New York back then,” she said. “I think the two books are connected.  I wrote the new book when I was 44. I want to show what life is like out there now.

“It is the weirdest thing, for fiction is fiction, but I kept telling myself that I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted there to be a specific honesty to it. The characters are invented, but there are these important feelings and sentiments.”

In the novel, Andrea goes through the men in her life. There is Matthew, the truly impoverished painter committed to his art. Then there is Barron, a shell-shocked divorced father of a little girl, groping his way around, trying to put his life together. Finally, there is Kevin, who is the closest thing to a soul mate for Andrea, but whose mother won’t let him bring a white woman home.

“Andrea is jealous of Matthew, because he is committed to his art,” said Attenberg. He’s a pain in the ass, for he can never afford to pay for his own dinner. “I definitely identify with Matthew,” she said. “I’ve had conversations with myself, where I’ve said ‘Either I’m not going to write, have stability in my life and not be happy, or I am going to do this and accept what comes my way.’”

Meeting Barron at a party, Andrea takes him home and seduces him. Barron proceeds to indulge in comic egocentric and acrobatic sex, where he needs to keep his glasses on to watch himself during the act.

“With Barron, I’ve never been in a 12-year relationship and gotten out of it,” said Attenberg.  “I’ve known people who’ve done that and everything after feels huge, everything feels like the first time.”

“These people fell in love, they felt they were all grown up, they were doing everything they were supposed to do,” she said. “Suddenly, it’s over. ‘Holy crap, I am completely adrift and I don’t know how to behave myself. I have to figure out how to be an adult in a different way.’”

“All the men that Andrea has sexual interludes with—I don’t think I can use the word romance—they are all in different ways trying to figure out how to be grown ups, how to treat people and how to be in the world.”

Andrea goes out for drinks with Nina, a 25-year-old coworker. Over stiff drinks, they bond over bad dates, creepy sexual behavior by men, rape and near-rape stories that happened to themselves and friends.

“I’m on social media and I see what young women are readily revealing about themselves, that they might not have revealed 20 years ago,” she said.

“The way that we talk about rape culture and that it exists wasn’t discussed 20 years ago,” said Attenberg. “It’s a positive step that people feel comfortable talking about the negative sexual things that happened to them.”

Andrea finds out that the ambitious. competent Nina is sleeping with their uptight, married boss. Horrified by the soul-killing discovery, she notes, “Every day, there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up and walk out the front door.”

Andrea’s yoga-teaching, gorgeous friend Indigo resurfaces when she has her baby. She is condescending about Andrea’s single status. “I was thinking of all these women who have those fancy tech jobs, who say ‘All I want to be is a yoga teacher,’” she said. “How do they afford it? Oh, you’re married to a super-rich dude!”

“There’s no point in writing Indigo if I’m going to make fun of her,” said Attenberg. “A one-note character is not interesting to me." Indigo’s final appearance is in “Indigo Gets a Divorce,” when she finds out her banker husband is having an affair. She tries to reconnect with Andrea, looking for sympathy. 

Andrea mockingly compares their lives: “Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions…But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It’s delicious.” 

 In a flashback, Andrea explores her jazzman father’s heroin addiction and impending death that will severely disrupt her family. At 13, she trails her father from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village, where he scores and shoots up. She confronts her father’s junkie friend, defiantly saying, “I make my own rules.”

“I think what Andrea means is ‘This doesn’t feel right for me, this situation doesn’t fit for me,” said Attenberg. “Andrea is going to spend the rest of her life trying to make things fit, or to make herself fit in.”

After the father dies, the family struggles financially and Andrea’s mom resorts to “rent parties,” where her fellow ex-hippies come over for vegetarian food and to smoke pot. The 17-year-old Andrea is bombarded by unwanted attention from balding 50-year-old men with ponytails, some more predatory than others. One man’s inappropriate sexual attention veers into assault, but is interrupted.

“The mother is high and sad, not able to protect her daughter,” said Attenberg.   “That scene is reflective on how some men treat younger women and take advantage of bad situations. I wanted to create a character that would allow readers to feel less alone.” 

After high school, Andrea goes to art school in Chicago. Her own art dreams are thwarted after she becomes an assistant to a charismatic, abusive woman artist Felicia. Felicia systematically rips Andrea down, burying her artistic ambitions for years.

“The teacher was a mentor, as well as a friend,” said Attenberg. “I wrote this relationship to show how it is the responsibility of women to support each other.”

“I do think women can destroy each other in more specific ways than men can,” she said. “Friend break ups are a million times worse than romantic break ups.”

At the end of the novel, Andrea Bern finally reconnects with her brother, his wife and their dying daughter. “This book was a way for Andrea to look at everything that was important in her life,” said Attenberg. “Andrea is offering up what made this character who she is today.”

“Some readers may feel differently about the ending, but I feel that she does all that, so she can move on to the next part of her life.” Attenberg paused, then said “Not death.”

Attenberg’s path as a journeywoman novelist was nontraditional. “I had a very indirect path to a writing career,” she said. “I didn’t get an MFA and moved around I a lot, all over the country. I met a lot of different people and got into all kinds of trouble.”

Attenberg is from the Chicago suburbs. She moved to Seattle after college.” My aunt tells me that after I finished college, I told her that I was going to travel a lot. At 21, I knew that I was going to roam. My mother calls me the Wandering Jew.”

By the late 1990s, Attenberg wound up in New York. At that time, she was an early blogger, writing about culture, dating and sex in her adopted Brooklyn neighborhood. She supported herself as a freelancer, writing shopping books and dull pharmaceutical copy. “Sometimes three months of freelance would pay for four months of my own writing,” she said.

First came Instant Love, followed by The Kept Man in 2008, which was narrated by a woman who discovers that her comatose artist husband had been having prolific sexual  affairs with Polish coffee shop waitresses in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as part of his last photo project.

After Attenberg was dropped by her publisher and moved to Grand Central Publishing, her editor and new publisher tweaked her career, taking her out of the box of women’s fiction and promoting her as a literary novelist. 

“Grand Central knew what to do with me,” said Attenberg. My editor Helen Atsma saw The Middlesteins as a chance to relaunch my career. I had been marketed as a women’s fiction author, which was not true to the material I was writing. When you are mismarketed, when the audience picks up the book, they are not going to read it or talk about it. Word of mouth is what sells book. Half the battle is getting people to talk about your book, to tell their friends about it and to read it for their book club.”

With loyalty to her editor, Attenberg followed Helen Atsma when she moved to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is publishing All Grown Up.

Before The Middlesteins was published, Attenberg had doubled down on her writing career. “I was massively in debt,” she said. “Six months before The Middlesteins, I was couch surfing. It was probably foolish, but writing novels is the thrill I like to do, so I just went all in,” putting her expenses on her credit card. “Maybe I went too far. I was 40 and in bad financial shape.”

Becoming a bestselling literary novelist had unexpected perks. “I didn’t really know how bad my career was until it became good,” said Attenberg. “I had been plugging along publishing books, but not selling that well. Before The Middlesteins, no one asked me to write for glossy magazines No one asked me to speak at universities. Now there are travel opportunities and events to promote my books. Because I’ve published in Europe, I get invited back there, as well.

Unless you are a writer like Stephen King or David Sedaris, the epic bicoastal book tour mostly went the way of the dodo in the early aughts, when publishers realized that the expense-sales ratio did not make tours that useful.

Attenberg is going old school, doing a book tour of 27 events, mostly over a five-week period in March and April, swinging through the northeast, going down to Key West, out to San Francisco, through the Midwest and the South. She’s hitting the great indy book stores, like Politics and Prose in D.C., Elliot Bay Books in Seattle and Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

“It’s not the fanciest book tour ever, “ said Attenberg, “but my publishers are behind me and I feel super lucky. I’ve written three books in five years, and I’ve built good relations with the independent booksellers. I feel like I am coming home, because I am seeing the same faces again.”

Attenberg looks forward to the conversations that will be had in the newly toxic Trumpland. “I want to see what’s happening in America,” she said. “We are going to have an enormous conversation. Everything feels so urgent now.”

Though based in Brooklyn for two decades, Attenberg’s wanderlust continued every year. She’d sublet her loft for months, going out to a new city, like her sojourn in Los Angeles several years ago. Recently, she kept going back to New Orleans. “For the past five years, New Orleans has been my spot,” she said.

A two–book deal pulled Attenberg out of debt and allowed her to buy a house in New Orleans. She splits her time between there and Brooklyn. “The house is called a side-hall shotgun, with all the rooms off one hallway,” she said. “It is a small house, but it has a beautiful office. New Orleans is a great place to write.” 

“I love New York for millions of reasons, but I am interested in my quality of life,” said Attenberg. “My quality of life is better down in New Orleans. I was looking to where I wanted to be in my 50’s, and I wanted to be here.”

The title of her novel begs the question--does Attenberg feel grown up at 45? “Am I all grown up? I don’t know if anyone can be. I have this little house, a dog and a quiet and secure life,” she said. “I don’t even know if I was dreaming of that, but suddenly it became possible. For me, to have a home of my own feels like progress.”

Attenberg has tapped into the New Orleans literary scene.  “There are a lot of writers down here,” she said. “I helped organize a Writers Resist event recently. I knew some writers and met a lot more. There are a lot of journalists down here who write about New Orleans for other places. It is a fascinating place with a complicated history, and a lot of things to write about.”

“I’ve met some great people,” said Attenberg. “I had my birthday dinner in November and I was at a table with people dressed in black. We were all writers. We all have shared sensibilities and neuroses. Wherever I go, I can’t escape that scene.”

The Novelist Gish Jen on Bridging America and China’s Culture Gap

(This interview appeared on LitHub.com on March 1, 2017)

By Dylan Foley

Several years ago, the Chinese-American novelist Gish Jen came across the story of a Chinese teenager who applied to the elite Milton Academy in Massachusetts. The girl had top-notch test scores and great essays, and her interview on Skype showed a profound command of English. She was accepted to Milton.

A few months later, representatives from Milton picked up what they thought was their stellar foreign student. The Chinese girl they met at the local airport spoke halting, substandard English. It turned out that the girl they were picking up was the sister of the great student, sent in her place.

Jen uses the Milton story to open her new book, The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, which explores the major differences in Chinese and American culture and worldviews, from the interdependence in Chinese culture and the proud individualism of Americans.

“I’ve been going to China for many years,” said Jen in a telephone interview from her home in Cambridge, Mass., of the four decades she’s been travelling to China. “When I arrive, I am always amazed at how Chinese China is.  I am also struck with how baffled the long-term observers can be by China.”

“People say to me, ‘Don’t you think China is changing? Shanghai is so modern,’” she said. “The Chinese wear their Nikes, they drink lattes at Starbucks, but the Chinese are not like us and it is the height of hubris to imagine that they are like us, or will become like us.” 

In her compelling new book, Jen sets out explain the differences between the “big pit” individualism of Americans, where the needs of the person are put first, and the “flexi-self” interdependence of the Chinese, where the intense obligations to family and then society are given priority, by mixing compelling anecdotes with academic studies exploring the differences.

“I bring in the academic studies because you can make lot of assertions and describe and describe, but without the studies, it seems very anecdotal,” said Jen. “I have the anecdotes, but then tie them to the larger, established truths.”

Jen plunges into the Starbucks study in Shanghai, where an American academic took 100 Starbucks throughout the city, and in each one pushed chairs together, blocking some of the aisles. “The researcher arranged the chairs so they were very close together, and he watched to see how many people would move them,” said Jen. “The chairs were placed so they were really in the way. In America, customers would have moved them.”

In the end, only 1.9 percent of the Chinese moved the chairs.  “This was the most cosmopolitan city in China,” said Jen. ”It shows a big difference. I spoke with this sophisticated Shanghai journalist about the chair experiment, and she started laughing and said, ‘Of course they wouldn’t move the chairs!’”

Gish Jen’s parents are Chinese immigrants. Her father survived World War II, going to college classes held in caves to escape the Japanese bombings. He came to the U.S as a civil engineer and eventually worked on the atomic bomb program. Her mother gave up her graduate school dreams to become a schoolteacher. The family was very traditional, and as Jen writes in her new book, they were a “first-son-comes-first” family and also had the attitude that  “No one wants to marry a smart girl.”

Jen rejected her family’s interdependent view.  “I was the rebel and broke very dramatically from my family,” she said. “I became a writer when people like me did not become writers. My parents could not have been more opposed. I broke with the whole thing—I did not speak Chinese. It was a completely Western program. I became a novelist, which is the most individualist thing you can be.”

After she finished Harvard, Jen went to Stanford Business School, but dropped out in 1981 to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her mother stopped speaking to her, though they did reconcile after about 18 months.

It was only after Jen published her first novel Typical American in 1991 and was the subject of a large profile in The World Journal, a major Chinese-language newspaper, that her parents realized their daughter was a success.

Jen, 61, has written four novels and a book of short stories called Who’s Irish? She also the author of Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self, which was from a series of lectures Jen gave at Harvard in 2012, which helped inspire the new book.

Family roots can be hard to pull out. “There is a huge part of me that is still interdependent,” said Jen. “I can see how my book is resonating with people like Yo-Yo Ma, people who are so Western. We drink our lattes, but there is an interdependent part that persists.”

“My a-ha moment on my interdependence came when I had my first child,” said Jen. “I was in a mothers’ group. The kids were like six weeks old. The other mothers put their kids on the floor. I couldn’t put my kid down. They went around the room, asking what the mothers wanted for their kids. They said they wanted them to be independent. Independent? These kids can’t hold their heads up. I said I wanted my kid to be happy.”

“Many Americans have a strain of interdependence in them, but mine is more pronounced, because it comes from China and my parents are immigrants,”” she said. “You can see the interdependence in second, third and fourth generations. It really persists.”

Jen recounted how a Greek-American acquaintance sheepishly admitted that he lived with several generations of his extended family. “He feels like it is not that American,” she said. “Why is it un-American if it is true of so many families?”

According to a study Jen references, 85 percent of the countries in the world lean towards being socially interdependent, including China, Japan and Korea, the South Asian countries like India and Pakistan, many African countries, large swathes of South America and the historically Catholic European countries of Spain and Ireland. In the United States, rates of interdependence are high among certain subgroups like firemen and members of the working class. 

In the book, Jen offers the example of her sophisticated middle-aged brothers, who still visit their 91-year-old mother almost everyday. “My brothers are ambi-dependent,” said Jen, straddling individual American traits and the interdependent immigrant culture.

Jen writes about the Dafen Oil Painting Village in southern China, where artists churn out copies of paintings by Van Gogh, Klimt, Picasso and many others. Do you want “The Starry Night” to be extra large? No problem. The interdependent village of artists finish each others’ paintings when needed.

“The Dafen painters would not meet my criteria for art,” said Jen. “I feel sorry for them because I see them as in between. In other ways, I don’t feel sorry for them. Many of them are completely happy with who they are.”

Jen presents amusing stories of interdependence and cooperation. There is a Chinese painter who is best friends with another artist who forges his paintings. When the forger runs into financial trouble, the real painter signs the forgeries to make them more valuable, helping him out.

In a bizarre twist, Chinese police officers develop close relationships with the dissidents they are sent out to repress. Showing the societal interdependence, police enquire about sick parents and even offer to help find the dissidents jobs if needed, while they continue to monitor them.

In a personal story, Jen recounts losing her keys while flying kites with her children in Tiananmen Square, a massive public space. Seeing her panic, a kite vendor approaches her, and through a chain reaction of help with other competing vendors, the keys are located and returned. The pivotal figure of help turns out to a blind vendor. All offers of tips are refused, but satisfaction at the community response is evident.

For Chinese immigrants who come to the “big pit” individual culture of America, life can be emotionally taxing. 

“A lot people who come from China find America very hard,” said Jen. “As we can’t imagine how different their lives are, they can’t imagine how different America is. They know it is richer and everybody drives everywhere, but the psychic landscape is so different. They can’t begin to imagine.”

Born in New York, Jen was initially raised in the tough working-class city of Yonkers. ‘The kids would throw snowballs at us that had rocks in them,” she said. “I was so happy when we moved to Scarsdale, for the snowballs didn’t have rocks in them.”

Even in Scarsdale, the Jen family experienced the casual racism and bigotry of 1960’s New York.

“There I was in 5^th grade, in Scarsdale, New York, in an incredibly liberal, sophisticated community,” said Jen. “I can tell you that I was asked almost every day if my father ran a laundry. Of course I knew it was offensive. They had never seen anyone like me. They didn’t ask that of me by the time I was in high school.”

“My brother was beaten up every single day,” she said. “He was being beaten up so relentlessly that my parents sent him for judo lessons.”

“There’s a way in which it didn’t damage me as much as it could if my background had been more individualistic,” said Jen. “I got it, but I didn’t focus on it. There were so many other things to worry about. It was one more thing.”

“It’s an interdependent view of the whole life,” she noted.  “Why do you get an education? The answer is, ‘If I don’t get that M.D., I’m always going to be beaten to a pulp.’”

“My brother survived this time, as did myself and my sister,” she said. “It is not okay. It’s a big, dark cloud, but there may be a silver lining. Once you are bullied a few times, you are aware. You are prepared to deal with the world.”

Unfortunately, Jen noted, the bullying of Asian kids still goes on in schools. “Bullying is not a thing of the past,” she said. “I don’t make light of it.”

The relationship between an individualistic “big pit” view and the “interdependent “flexi-self” can be quite fluid, changing over time. In the book, Jen refers to the family history of her Korean-American friend Jeannie Suk, now a Harvard Law professor and a contributor to the New Yorker.

The Suk family was living a miserable, impoverished existence in Korea, with too many relatives living in the family apartment. Jeannie Suk’s grandmother demanded that Jeannie’s mother turn over her meager wages to her. The mother refused. Jeannie’s family then broke the larger family obligations and moved to New York, to pursue a better life.

“The same mother who’d been individualistic in Korea made the interdependent decision to send Jeannie to a miserable cram school, so she could pass the test to go to the elite Hunter College High School. Was the mother’s decision so bad? Jeannie wound up with many opportunities.”

“Now we come to the part where Jeannie wants to dance,” said Jen. Jeannie had been elevated to a prestigious ballet program. Jeannie’s mother, again being interdependent, refused to let her go.

“I want to throttle the mother who says no, you can’t dance,” said Jen. “If my daughter had wanted to be a ballerina, I would have taken the ‘big pit’ route and supported her. Of course, I am on Jeannie’s side. I wanted to be a novelist when everything was saying to me, ‘You cannot do that. Life is not about self. Do something practical!’”

“When you hear that the four girls who took the class Jeannie couldn’t take all got injured and no one went on to become ballerinas, you wonder if the mother was that wrong,” mused Jen. “Now Jeannie is a tenured professor, having a great time. Who knows what would have happened?”

“I feel that in America, to take such a hardline interdependent approach in a world that is so big-pit oriented, it makes for much misery for the child,” said Jen. “It is not really an option for most American parents. If the mother had done that in China, the child feels distress, but not as much as in America.”

Jen periodically teaches at NYU Shanghai, so she goes to China for weeks or months at a time. She also spends time with her extended Chinese family.

“In Shanghai, I understand the Chinese I work with, but they are not me,” she said. “I have a lot of sympathy for them. That’s why I am not hard on the Dafen artists.”

“My family in China is wonderful, but I don’t go to every family event,” said Jen. “It will take up every minute of your life, if you let it. I am big pit enough to say ‘I am not going with you, I am staying here to read the new Elena Ferrante novel.’ In China, I feel just how American I really am.”

“The idea of being kind is so important in China,” she said. “The family forms a really important network. It is the social safety net.”

Jen has high hopes for the book, that it will help Americans truly understand Chinese interdependence and its profound influence on family obligation and China’s social structure. 

“Some of the research on China is new, but much of it has been out there,” Jen said. “I don’t think people have been able to use the research to help them see China as they should. This is a book that I hope will help change the world,” she said. “There has already been a flash with the early readers, where people go, ‘Oh, I see it now.’”

“Some of the research on China is new, but much of it has been out there,” Jen said.  “I don’t think people have been able to use the research to help them see China as they should. This is a book that I hope will help change the world,” she said. “There has already been a flash with the early readers, where people go, ‘Oh, I see it now.’”