Eloise speaks to GDS marketing manager, Mason Wood, about her part manifesto, part comic book, 'big beautiful female theory'.
First of all, congratulations. I know you know this but I want to reiterate that this book was a joy to read. How does it feel to have it out in the world?
I don’t know how to answer this without listing a bunch of adjectives like I’m writing a blurb for a literary thriller. Strange. Unnerving. Exciting? Uncomfortable.
It’s a surreal experience spending about five years working on something and then one day it’s just… out there? And people can read it and enjoy it or take issue with my moral fibre as a human being and express that on the internet and I can read about it? The whole thing is very wild to me.
I’ve written a couple of smaller chapbooks and a lot of zines and online publications, always on the assumption that barely anyone would read it. I guess I’m feeling hyper-visible in a way that I haven’t felt before. But also of course, and more importantly, very happy and excited. The launch of the book at Readings in Carlton was an incredible experience, and Maria Tumarkin did such a wonderful job of asking thoughtful, probing questions. I could just bathe in her reflected glory all day. I’m trying to focus on experiences like that, and the lovely, personal messages I am getting from people who have read it, rather than the extreme amount of mortification I am inclined to feel about everything.
This seems like a unique contribution to publishing right now. Do you think of the book in line with any other contemporary releases?
I’m not sure if I think it’s unique, but perhaps hybrid in the way that a lot of work I love is hybrid? The book is a blend of memoir, prose poetry, cultural criticism, essay comics and illustrations so yeah, it doesn’t fit into any neat category. But I think I’ve been deeply inspired by artists making interesting, blended work, including Evelyn Araluen and her incredible collection of essays and poetry, Dropbear, and Ellena Savage’s unruly and deeply self-excoriating collection, Blueberries. And of course, the essays of the inimitable Maria Tumarkin, and Sam Van Zweden’s wonderful body memoir, Eating with my Mouth Open. Internationally, I loved and was inspired by the work of Maggie Nelson (duh!), Phoebe Gloeckner (her Diary of a Teenage Girl changed my mind and my art forever), Jillian Tamaki, Alison Bechdel, and the wonderful collection of poetry and fragments by Jamie Hood, how to be a good girl.
Do you think live readings or performance has changed the way you write?
Absolutely! I think reading and performing, particularly performing poetry, has shifted my practice a lot. A few years back my friend Andy Connor did these nights at their house of Poetry/Comedy shows and it was a fun and supportive place to test material. Ideas around comedic timing and joke structure have influenced my writing style. I’m obsessed with the rhythmic dimension of my work now and record myself reading aloud many times before I am done drafting something. So much of my work is about breath, breaks, momentum and emphasis, so I am always very conscious of how my work sounds, trying to create a kind of rollicking rhythm that sometimes threatens to destabilise what I’m writing (I’ve once heard it described as a runaway train running off the track, which is an image I’ve been trying to live up to ever since).
A chapter titled MUM, DON’T READ THIS BIT includes the line: “I turn my family into literary figures into literal figures I mean look at their figures”. It must be intimidating to write so honestly about one’s own life. Can I ask how the people depicted or echoed in the book have responded? Were you nervous about your readers? Is it more nerve-wracking to write someone or illustrate them?
It’s absolutely something that keeps me up at night and gives me chills and sweats and nightmares. I try to be deeply, uncomfortably honest when I’m first drafting and writing, because I find the moment half-truth or insincerity sneaks in they can rot the whole thing. But I have revised work and taken things out about other people, not necessarily to shield them, but because often these details are very personal and it doesn’t feel like my place to share. I have had conversations with most people in the book before it was published (the only exception being when someone has hurt me and I don’t think they deserve the right of reply… or I don’t talk to them anymore for this reason). I spoke to my mum about her parts in the book and she told me she wasn’t upset or hurt by any of it, but that she didn’t want to read the sex bits! I told her she could just gloss over those parts.
I find it more nerve-wracking to write about people than to draw them, though in the end I didn’t illustrate many people from my life, apart from in a complimentary way, so perhaps that’s not really correct. Writing takes a lot more time to decipher through the reading process, whereas illustrations are much more immediate. Therefore, I was happier for written depictions to stay, but then taking someone’s unflattering likeness and putting in my book along… it just feels a little more vulgar to me?
Do you have a process? Writers are sort of famous for having weird habits or rigid schedules. How do you fit writing into your life?
My process is based in a deep-seated aversion to boredom. It’s a very multipronged approach, encompassing research, free-writing, illustration, doodling, watching films, reading books, etc. Anything and everything can become material so (I try) not to be too restrictive in how to do things. I have had phases of rigidity, getting up in the morning and working for a certain number of hours before I could do other things, but this sort of process always feels like pulling teeth and diminishes any creative energy I do have. I think the reason I have such a multimodal approach is due to absolute intolerance of tedium, and as such I can switch it up between a range of different ways of working, particularly in the initial stages of a project when I am often filled with self-doubt. So if I don’t feel like writing, I’ll draw. If I don’t feel like drawing, I’ll read. And so on and so forth, until I’m eating Tim Tams on the couch again.
How do you feel about being a poet and a memoir writer and a comics artist (among other things)? Do you feel like more of one than the other? Is there any tension there for you or do you perceive it in readers or editors?
I’ve always had this fear that I try to do too many different things and that’s bad for my brand and I should focus on one thing. Really though, I’m much more interested in creating work that interests me and that appeals to my disparate interests and skills, rather than that fits into a preconceived mould. Also, thinking about having a ‘brand’ makes me want to peel myself out of my skin like a banana and throw myself in the sea.
I think there’s a difference in how editors treat my work when I’m in different genres. Editors are much more likely to pick apart essays or memoir, but often are afraid to give feedback on comics. There are exceptions to the rule, of course. I had a really positive experience writing for The Nib recently where the editor, Eleri Harris, gave me wonderful developmental feedback on my comic which made it much better. But no, I don’t think I have a preference amongst the different things that I create. I’m much more focussed on the ideas or the project than the genre that I’m working in.
How do I convince my book club to read outside of familiar forms and get into cross-genre work?
Tell them to stop being little pissbaby cowards!
There’s such a sense of catharsis at the end of the book (especially the final coin image! Don’t want to give too much away). Did you know you were finishing the book as you were writing this last essay? Was it just the most recent one and therefore most interesting to you?
I actually had another essay originally after that last one, which had more of a positive note and talked a bit about my relationship with my husband and how that has been healing for me, but it didn’t end up in the book. Healing is boring! But actually, I think it was a bit unnecessary and was perhaps a kind of throat-clearing after I’d said (and written) what I wanted to write.
The final essay published in the collection, Huge sweeping meaninglessness of life with human body, for scale (no, I don’t know how to write a short or unmelodramatic title, sorry), is my favourite because I think it dismantles a lot of the assumptions and ideas of the preceding text. In it, I examine the whole idea of creating ‘confessional literature’ and the idea of vulnerability as a balm (which a lot of people have critiqued successfully, including Eda Gunaydin and Jia Tolentino). In the piece, I was trying to understand my constant need for graphic self-exposure in my work. While I don’t think the process of disclosure in my book has necessarily been a therapeutic process, I think it’s perhaps been a neutralising one: the things that used to weigh very heavily on me have taken on a new dimension after having written the book. They now will always be filtered and coloured by my art in some way, which perhaps removes some of their implicit trauma.
Do you have a favourite story/image/bit of the book? Or maybe a favourite moment in releasing the book?
I definitely enjoyed coming up with the concept of the Museum of Fat Bitches Art the most, because it felt like the most ridiculous and fun thing to make. I wrote a comic a few years ago called the Museum of Everything We Tried to Throw Away, which was supposed to be a kind of memory museum, but ended up turning into something else, so I was excited to come back to the idea of creating a conceptual museum for the mind. I really enjoy a lot of the images in this section as well, particularly doing the sendups of Picasso and Rubens paintings. I also really enjoyed recreating artworks by some of the painters and artists that I love, including Kaylene Whiskey, Ruby Hoppen, Catherine Opie and Mark Aguhar. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I hope the artists that I referred to enjoyed how I have tried to celebrate their work.
What’s a question you wish people would ask you about big beautiful female theory?
I wish they would ask me why I have such a juicy ass!!! I kid. I’ve actually really enjoyed this interview. It’s lovely to be asked about craft and writing rather than you know, just the body stuff. Though there’s nothing wrong with body stuff per se, but my work has a lot more to it than that. Like my juicy, juicy ass. You know?
big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills is out now through Affirm Press.
Eloise’s comic ‘All the real thin bodies trapped inside my fake fat one’ was published in Going Down Swinging #40. You can read it in the GDS Archives or purchase a copy of #40 from our shop!