Rachel Kushner was born in 1968 in Eugene, Oregon. She is an award-winning author and Guggenheim Foundation fellow. Her latest novel, Creation Lake, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Who are your heroes?
I read a biography of Angela Davis at the age of ten or 11 and was very impressed. Her protégé Ruth Wilson Gilmore is an adult hero of mine. But right now, Ta-Nehisi Coates for the way that he has used his enormous platform to speak up for the human rights of Palestinians.
What’s your earliest memory?
Staring at wooden floorboards in our living room in Eugene, Oregon. I was a baby, not yet walking. The living room seemed huge. But as I discovered when I knocked at the door of that house as an adult, explaining I grew up there, it was quite a small house. In my own childhood there, one rainy night we got a knock at the door. It was an older man who had been born in the house. We invited him in. So I’m not the only one who has done this.
What book last changed your thinking?
Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory.
Which political figure do you look up to?
Political figures are not really my thing.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
It’s hard to imagine a life other than the one I’ve lived. I cherish my childhood in the 1970s and when I see movies that capture those years first-hand, such as Nashville, by Robert Altman, I feel protective of the innocence of that era, even if there were already indications of a dystopic future.
Who would paint your portrait?
The American artist Alice Neel.
What’s your theme tune?
“If There Is Something” from Roxy Music’s first album. It’s not so much the lyrics. It’s the song structure, which features dramatic transitions: from its dopey and twangy opening, to a highly fraught lament, to a mesmeric and reflective rhythm, a synthesis. It is epic like life, and like novels.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“Move regally through this world,” is what Colm Tóibín tells me and I try to follow that. To my mind, it means don’t ugly yourself in the face of ugliness.
What TV show could you not live without?
I can live without any and all TV – and I do.
What’s currently bugging you?
“Bugging” is an oddly casual word, to which I’m inclined to say: nothing. Life is holy and blessed and I take it and cherish it as it is. But if you asked me what was bothering me, I’d say: the ominous possibility of a widened war in the Middle East.
What single thing would make your life better?
I just don’t think that way. What makes life better is to approach it with grace, and that’s what I try to do.
When were you happiest?
In this era, maybe. I love getting older so much: I feel intense joy in my fifties that seems to have to do with knowing more about how to meet the world, the future.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
I’m not sure. Maybe a film-maker?
Are we all doomed?
Come back to me in a week and we will take this one up in your next session. And don’t forget to leave a cheque on your way out. Because absorbing your doom doesn’t come without costs.
Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake” is published by Jonathan Cape
[See also: Israel and Iran’s final reckoning]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate