What is it about Sandra Bernhard?
I’m very interested in her willingness to say virtually anything. Her interest in breaking taboos, in being nasty, in being risk-taking, in being willing to position herself as the bad girl in the culture, in being willing to say unsettling things about herself, using herself as a symbolic representative of the worst of the culture, being drawn to the culture but being repelled by it those are all strategies that interest me quite a lot and speak very strongly to my literary strategies. I’m very influenced by a whole series of performance artists like Rick Reynolds, Sandra Bernhard, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Woody Allen, Denis Leary. There’s a wonderful line by Theodor Adorno that I quote in my previous book, Enough About You, in the chapter on bad reviews. He says a successful work is “one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.” I try to embody the contradiction. The person on the page, th
