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Author Janice Erlbaum on her homoromantic protagonist in “I, Liar”

Writer Janice Erlbaum is most well known for her work as a memoirist and her deeply personal and fascinating books, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir and Have You Found Her. A former Nuyorican slam poet, Janice has a way of weaving a tale and making ordinary prose feel like poetry. Her newest book, I, Liar tells the story of a young woman who spins a web of lies so intricately, even she begins to believe them.

We spoke with Janice about I, Liar and its leading character, Elizabeth, who is drawn exclusively to women.

AfterEllen: We’ve known each other for a very long time. Do you remember how we met?

Janice Erlbaum: I remember that we met in the parking lot of a club in Michigan, where I’d been performing my poetry. I was part of the Lollapalooza tour and you came to a poetry reading I was doing. You and a friend came up to me in the parking lot and bought my little three dollar chapbook. Then we stayed in touch! Before the internet, you actually put a stamp on an envelope and stayed in touch.

AE: Well, that chapbook made its rounds through my high school, that’s for sure. I had never written much before I met you, but you were certainly someone who inspired me from the get-go to put my thoughts down. The way your poetry was, the way it spoke to people-it inspired me to do my own. I’ve always considered you one of the people that were responsible for that initial spark of creativity for me as a writer.

JE: I stumbled in at the right time!

AE: Congrats on the release of I, Liar, which just came out. You published this book through Thought Catalog this time around-why did you decide to go this route?

JE: The first two books were published through Random House. That certainly was the realization of a young writer’s dream. I mean, Random House-how much more legitimate does it get than that? But after having gone through the book publishing process with them twice, I felt a little bit frustrated and their sort of “old economy” ways of doing things. Random House was a great publisher in many ways, but as the industry has changed, the old publishing industry hasn’t changed. They take a year and a half to get your manuscript to be a book on the shelves. That, to me, seems insane. I also found that I had to do all of my own marketing pretty much and that I didn’t get that much support from Random House. Plus the royalties that they gave me were seven percent of the cover price, whereas Thought Catalog got my book out in three months, and is giving me forty percent of royalties.

AE: Wow.

JE: Yeah. I’m trying to reach young women in their 20s and their teens even, and their 30s and their 40s. But I’m trying to reach younger women and these are not necessarily women who go into bookstores and browse spines. They’re generally online, they buy a lot of ebooks. So I wanted to be where they were, and Thought Catalog is run by young people, for young people. So that was my thought. I wanted to get it out quickly and directly to the audience that I’m seeking. And I wanted to keep more of the money. [laughs]

AE: [laughs] You’ve made a career as a memoirist and I, Liar is your first fiction novel. So why fiction now?

JE: Fiction now because I’ve been working on a third memoir about the death of my mentally ill mother and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I’d been mining the worst times of my like for ten years as material so I needed to take a break from the book that I was working on and I decided to do something fun. My agent had been suggesting I write a novel and I thought, yes, maybe I’ll write a novel. Memoir was just getting too fucking painful. It was surprising how painful this novel was to write too, but I started having a little bit of emotional distance from it. Also, I’ve been reading a lot of novels and I’m seeing a lot of plot, but what I’m not seeing is a representation of the way we actually live and deal with each other-specifically when it comes to female friendships. There are very very few books about female friendship, which I think is such an interesting and important topic that gets almost no coverage. I really wanted to address that without making it personal.

AE: Your last memoir, Have You Found Her, deals with a very real situation, in which-for lack of a better word-you were conned by a young woman with Munchausen Syndrome.

JE: Yes, totally.

AE: Like who the fuck does that happen to? That is the stuff that would seem like fiction, but it really did happen to you. There was a time in your personal life where it was nearly impossible for you to sort out the truth from the lies that you were being told on the daily. Did that inspire I, Liar?

JE: That definitely did help inspire I, Liar because I wrote [Have You Found Her] from the point of view of the “victim.” I was the mark and she was the con artist. I realized how interesting would it be to write it from her perspective; from the con man’s perspective. I love books, movies and TV shows that have anti-heroes, where they are doing something that is sort of wrong but you understand why they want it. You kind of want them to succeed. It sounded like fun. I was tired of being the victim. I wanted to feel what it was like to be the perpetrator. So, yes, that definitely had a big hand in turning me towards this subject.

AE: I, Liar‘s protagonist-I almost want to say antagonist, but protagonist is Elizabeth, however throughout the novel, she alters her identity to suit her lies. She has four different identities. What is it like to write a character who is purposely such an unreliable narrator?

JE: I had to be careful that it wasn’t just a private joke between me and myself. There are some poets whose work I would admire if I could understand any of it, and it just seems like this poet was writing something that they understood but that’s not really meant to be understood by anyone else. So I really wanted to avoid making it something that I got, but nobody else could. And that was tricky, that took a couple of revisions, and a couple of people saying to me, “I’m confused.” But also, I was a huge liar as a kid and even as an adult it’s taken a long time for me to shed that impulse. I don’t anymore, but the impulse is always there to make the story sound better or to make me sound like a better person. Or even to be more socially appropriate and to say, “Oh, I can’t come to your thing because lie lie lie.” I’ve been a liar so I understand what it is to keep different threads in your head for different people.

AE: Did you ever find yourself getting caught up in Elizabeth’s lies? There are four almost separate identities that this woman has, did you ever find yourself getting caught up in her?

JE: I definitely got caught up in her. I didn’t realize how much of me I was pouring into her and so I had a very intimate relationship with the character; I carried her around like a devil on my shoulder. I saw her point of view very clearly, I felt bad for her. She had all of my sympathies. I knew what her real story was. I knew what had happened to her and what hadn’t but I also knew how she regarded these things. Like she actually regards them as having happened. It’s been part of her story for so long-being molested by a friend’s brother when she was eight-that’s been part of her story for so long that she actually believes it. In one sense, I almost had to keep notes as to what was real and what wasn’t for my own sake.

AE: Elizabeth never expresses even the remotest interest in me, but she attaches herself very quickly and very strongly to other women. Reading this, I would say that Elizabeth is a homoromantic asexual, as she seems to have very strong romantic feelings toward these women but not the impulse to act on it in a physical way. Would you agree with that assessment or how do you feel she identifies?

JE: I think the phrase you used, homoromantic asexual, if I had known that phrase existed, that would be it exactly. You hit it right on the head. She has no interest in men and one of the things that I [laughs] personally like about this book is that there are almost no men in it. They don’t speak, they’re furniture. [laughs] I really enjoyed that, I enjoyed making her world just women. I don’t thing she understands what homoromantisism is, all she knows is need. It’s almost a sexual need, except without the genitals. Like the need is so strong it feels physical, the way hunger or sexual desire feels, like your body is being hijacked by this need. Her body is hijacked by the need for the love of her friends. It’s just as strong as sexual. But she needs to keep a lot of control in her life, and for some reason sex feels too much like a loss of control. It makes her too vulnerable.

AE: These women that she gets entangled with, they get sprung on her. They are very drawn to her, yet she keeps pulling the rug out from underneath them time and time again. What do you think it is about Elizabeth and her other identities that draws these women in so strongly?

JE: First of all, she’s conning them. She’s making her marks and she’s conning them. They fall for her so hard because she’s trying to make them fall for her. This is her business, this is what she does for a living, pretty much. She makes people fall in love with her and her tactics are many. She plays on sympathy, she plays on guilt, she plays on people’s terror. She essentially taps into the maternal instinct that a lot of female friendships are based on. She makes these girls feel like they are the only ones that can take care of her. Having been on both sides of that relationship, there is something wonderful about being a good “parent” to a friend. It’s really wonderful to be the one who solves things, that can feel really good. She allows people, she serves it up to them. She needs them and there’s something about the way needs them, which is very on and off. She needs you, then she turns it off and turns it back on. It’s not like a toddler who is tugging on your pant leg like, “I need I need I need.” She knows how to make the need itself, seductive. Also she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s devoted. She makes people feel good about themselves.

AE: You yourself identify as straight, but why did you decide to make your first fiction leading character queer?

JE: I don’t even know if it was a decision. I’ve spend a lot of time with lesbian friends in my life…

AE: Like me!

JE: Some of my best friends are lesbians! [laughs]

AE: I just wanted to point out that Janice officiated my wedding, so there you go.

JE: There you go. I was a summer resident of Cherry Grove on Fire Island for over 10 years, and there’s a big lesbian community there. I think I figured that it was part of her strategy…to try and attract women who are already attracted to women. So I didn’t decide to make her queer, she decided to make herself queer because it was a better way to meet chicks.

I did really do a lot of soul searching and the soul searching is not over to whether or not I have a right to write from the perspective of a lesbian, and how to do it so it’s not insulting. And what I did was base the behaviors and the dialogue on actual real life lesbians that I knew. So I figured, I’m drawing mountains from life so I think this is pretty accurate, as much as one person can ever accurately represent another or a group of others. I drew a lot of it from life and it wasn’t really a decision. But by the time I got to the middle of the book, and she was old enough to live on her own, I realized that’s where she would go. She just wants to be around women.

I, Liar is available now on Amazon.

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