Tess Wayland

Parul Sehgal calls herself ‘congenitally secretive’ and her work ‘conspiratorial.’ She describes writing as ‘secreting shameful sentences’ and reading as ‘subversive’ and ‘stolen.’ Teju Cole once called her a ‘good smuggler.’ On a Monday afternoon in almost-spring, both of us late on our deadlines, Sehgal welcomes me into collusion.

 staff writer. Though she was born outside of D.C., her childhood was roving, with stints in Delhi, Manila, and Budapest before college in Montréal and a MFA at Columbia. Now she writes from the scale of self-contained inquiries to sweeping interventions. Her criticism on the prevalence of the trauma plot and the so-termed “tyranny of the tale” read like treatises for her project as a critic. Story is being flattened, co-opted, abused; story is being valorized even as it’s debased. And story just might need Seghal. Her prose acts as a response to her critiques: careful but sharp, so as to leave no blood on the kill. When I meet Sehgal, I find that this grace in her work is affirmed by her person.

, seated in the trappings — a rarely-opened Oxford dictionary and two bottles of Trader Joe’s red — of the poser undergraduate literati. Sehgal had a sort of opposite literary education to mine: alienated, unmediated, where the “scene,” she says, consisted of a book leading her to another book. Even today, she comes to me from what seems like hiding. Outside her window a stoney shed is overgrown with vines and moss; she sits at the fore of a wallpaper where women in long skirts talk to each other under palazzos. It looks a bit like a fairytale, and Seghal is stately enough to pull it off.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You often bring up your sense of secrecy. How do the public demands of the critic conflict with your innate nature — I don’t know if shy is the word?

Shyness and reserve and hoarding oneself are all good words. I don't think about it in terms of a balance so much as protecting, as you put it so beautifully, that innate orientation to this kind of work which is private, which still for me tends to happen at night. It is professional, but it also does involve some of the oldest and most stubborn questions I have. I keep getting to pose them to different books or writers. Who does that work and pleasure really belong to and who is it for? I keep myself in the forefront.

You ask about the public. I think I'm my own public. You're making something for other people to read and you are working with other people's words when you review a book, but there is something so rare about doing this kind of thinking and reading that always feels paramount. That notion of something being for you, something feeling a little conspiratorial is a way that I am figuring out how to do this work long-term. How do you do it over years and decades? How to stay interested, how to stay, I hope, interesting. The private questions or the private pressures you're putting on the form  — your own sense of the reader and the specialness of that address — are ways to keep it feeling vital.

I'm curious how that dynamic changes over the kind of long career that you've had, which has been marked by moments of virality. In 

, you talked about not wanting to write for a mass, but for some unknown voyager. So what does it feel like when suddenly you don't know where your voyager is and you're faced with the mass staring you back in the eye?

You don't have to necessarily make eye contact. You can go elsewhere. If I paid attention to too much of the response, doing this work consistently would be very hard for me. It's okay for other people. I think for me, it just wouldn't work. That notion of privacy, that notion of something being worked out in solitude and by myself, alone, to the best of my ability, my knowledge, and time to research — that's part of what makes writing criticism feel very exciting and human to me. It certainly is why I love reading other people's criticism. Sometimes you read it and there seems to be something quite brave about it, and quite obviously imperfect. A consciousness bringing everything they have to bear on an idea. All of that is fragile for me.


So much of the pleasure of doing criticism for me, especially in the early reading stages before I need to come up with anything to say, is to get filled up with somebody else’s work. There’s a self-forgetfulness that criticism, or any kind of immersion in any kind of art, can allow you to have. I was just reviewing a book a few months ago by this writer with a very distinct style. You can feel that syntax creeping into your own sentences. I started to feel like a character in one of his novels, and it's wonderful. Who else gets to have that regular, contractual abduction?

My criticism wouldn't work if it felt like I was doing this to curry favor with anybody or fight anybody else's battles. Although I will say that part of the excitement — sometimes what feels like the necessity of doing this work — is to settle the score. If you do feel like somebody has been misinterpreted, you can take up a pen in service of somebody else. By that metric, does it feel good to have your own work misinterpreted or misread? No, but I think that the only way I have ever been able to manage anything like that is to already have moved on to the next thing.

I love that idea — criticism being something that's deeply personal, deeply vulnerable, but also decentering of the self, an almost anti-trauma plot. I can show you myself without giving up myself. That’s so rare, to be able to express yourself that way.

They do call me a good smuggler — and Teju knows me well. He knows what I'm tucking into these pieces, what I’m trying to work out or resolve. You do get to show yourself and parts of yourself that can sometimes feel so much more vulnerable and exposed and uncertain and undone. That kind of hide and seek of criticism is often very exciting to me as somebody who loves to read criticism. Around the edges, you get to see how somebody is changing and how somebody is evolving.

The smuggled or hidden agenda critics can have when writing is really interesting, because if you are any good, of any integrity, it's not actually getting into the piece. The piece is really about that book. But some of your feeling, some of that urgency, some of the care you’re going to take with the shaping of that particular piece, the syntax, the lede — it's coming out of the ways that you’ve been activated by a book. It’s good to be the instrument, in this way.

You wrote that one of the powers of the novel is that “mere ownership of it does not constitute possession.” But when you write a review, it opens the book up to possession. Sometimes I read the review and I don't read the book. It gives me a way of feeling like I know what's inside or I have some understanding of it. When you write a review, do you feel like it's an attempt for you to possess a text, to have some sort of mastery over it in the form of critique? Or is it about releasing it to the world, almost exhuming it from yourself? How does that relate to the reader’s experience?

How do I answer you honestly? In making the review, I'm thinking about being fair towards the book, and to be as careful and as complete in describing who the writer is and what they want to do, especially if it feels like this is a writer that has been misunderstood or unfairly disparaged or not given enough space in the consciousness. That said, I really, really, really care most about the reader. To have the review be an experience worthy of the reader. Whether or not the reader reads the book is not as interesting to me.

I’m conscious of my own feeling that so many places and people who write about books now feel very publicity-adjacent. A certain kind of coverage has subsumed criticism — reading lists and things like that.

I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a novelist, and she's always very angry at the fact that I'm constantly thinking of the reader and she wants me to think more of the novelists. I said, I'm sorry, I get it, I really do, I try sometimes. The reader is the person I care about — in part because I feel so personally addressed by the critics I love. I feel so cared for by them, in cahoots with them, and I feel like that's something that has seeped into my own thinking and writing.

Bank of America recently sponsored a list of the Great American Books in the Atlantic and it felt like a symbol of our times. What is your relationship to the market, or the economy of literature, as a reviewer? I imagine you need to have your finger on the pulse, to know what's popular, to comment on what's popular. But you can also reject or go against what the market dictates.

I’m guilty of list-making. I’ve dabbled. Not that it doesn't have its own purpose, or allows for a certain sense of discovery. Not so many decades ago, any book could be counted on getting 100 reviews. Any book! You would just get 100 reviews, you would get them in newspapers and you would get them in magazines. A lot of these places have vanished and that also means that when you have a job that allows you to write about books, you have more of the sense of power. It'd be foolish to pretend you don't. There's a definite obligation and pleasure in saying: this is what's popular, here's what the conversations are, here's what you should know. But one of the important aspects of this job is genuine discovery, surfacing something based on your own taste. If you don't do that, readers won't trust you, if you're just going to sit and write about Sally Rooney yet again, God bless her. They also want you to bring some news of something else that's happening.


Douglas Crimp is so wonderful, and he says — he's very humble — ‘Look, I just want to interrupt the cliches.’ There's not a more noble task.

Let me ask you a question: how do you find what to read?

It's weird: I was introduced to literature as a scene. I have this simultaneous attraction to and derision of it. The figure of the poser, a bunch of Harvard Advocate kids sitting around with their boxed wine — I catch myself being driven by what's cool. What my friends who I admire are reading, the critics of campus. Oh, she recommended that, let me move to that faster.

Back then, I read to read against any notion of scene. It was so different. The scene was book leading me to book, sad to say. But it was a much more alienated childhood.

I’m also somewhat attracted to virality – if I'm picking up a book in my free time — this summer, that Emma Klein book. I didn't even read it, but I kept 

 to read it. Oh, I should see what that's about.

I have a colleague who’s always telling me ‘you have to keep up with the zeitgeist.’ He's 82 years old. He was reading 

 as well — you should, we have to. It just can't be the only way you find what to read.

My friends and I are so obsessed with our degree. Should we be English, should we be Comp Lit, should we be History and Literature. You studied political science. The first time you wrote something creative was for your MFA application. How did you pivot? Reading seems like something that was always with you, but what was it like to professionalize it? How do you feel like your undergrad serves you now?

That’s so dark. I was not a very committed or engaged student. I just couldn't understand the point of going and telling the professor what they already knew. I did read texts that felt difficult and complicated and I’d just sit with it and stay with it. And so it taught me some sense of patience, it built up some stamina. But I was very politically engaged when I was in undergrad, feeling very consciously and gratefully how ideas were changing people's lives. People were living different lives because of a certain idea in a book or a poem or an essay.

I went to college in a city that was incredibly cold, and I couldn't go outside because I was always so cold. I stayed inside and just read. I was very, very reluctant and lazy, did not like going to class, but there was reading that I got done because it was self-directed. It was harder to find books at that time. There wasn't a scene. There wasn't literary Twitter. I would go to this used bookshop — it sounds so romantic now — and try out a bunch of different things. It gave me my own confidence in my taste and my own sense of what I needed to know. Here’s where my education needs to take me.

It's the only way I managed to learn — it’s the only way somebody does learn — to have some sense of what they're moving towards and why. To do it instinctively. I don't think I knew what some of the questions were. I just was moving intuitively between this novel to that novel to this book. Surely there were cheaper ways to do this than to go to college.

There's this notion of the political writer. My friends worship Sontag and that ability to live both. Coming out of a political background, how do you view writing as something which very easily becomes dulled and apolitical if you're doing it wrong, but can also be incredibly sharpening of political awareness and action?

Sontag, borrowing from Brecht, said the essence of all thinking is ‘yes, but.’ The idea is to actually think, and think prismatically. Sontag is an interesting case, she changes her mind halfway through a sentence, between books. There's that act of rigorous looking, of thinking against yourself, of putting one book against the other, of refining. Politics is not 

 something that happens in the mind, but it very much 

 to happen in the mind. We have to keep interrupting our own cliches. There’s a restlessness: we will not arrive, we will not arrive. How do we stay open? How do we stay imaginative? How do we stay insubordinate?

These are things that I definitely learned in different ways in community with people. Those lessons are always harder than the ones when you're sitting in your room reading. But the reading does prime you for it. I was able to listen to anything or change course or pivot, because the readers that I loved made it seem so attractive to change your mind, and to be argued with, and to move with your critics. To do it, sometimes without shame, sometimes with great pleasure, sometimes with a necessary shame. That ongoing conversation with the self and access to other people's minds and opinions, for me, it was and continues to be very necessary.

Do you feel like you disagree with yourself often? Do you feel like you are interested in doing that publicly or writing reviews that build on things you’ve previously written?  Or, once something is in the world, is that its life?

When I look back, and I see some essays or articles I've written, I can see similar kinds of questions coming up again and again, and how each book prompts me to think about it in a different way. There is some sense of continuity. But I think you're asking a much more interesting and much more difficult to answer question: how do we learn how to think and keep thinking and thinking well?

I learn a lot from just being in life – how the people I know read who aren't professional readers or thinkers or intellectuals, I learn a lot from their responses to novels. I'm always trying to understand how reading itself is changing. It's not the same. I do think the way that people read after the pandemic is very different to me. I think that people read differently after a death. I think people read differently after having children. I think people read very differently when they're in love. I think people read differently when they're ill. My notion of how to read and how to be read is also constantly moving. I think we've already established that nobody ever arrives.

You recently spoke at Harvard, where Teju Cole asked how you avoid making your writing feel pat and neat and, or,  ‘smooth like capital’ as he put it? You answered that it had to do with introducing friction and bumps. How does negotiating frictions, then, work in a room with an editor? What’s the difference between a darling you have to kill and a darling you keep in protest?

I’ve thought a lot about Teju’s comment. He's such a dear friend. I thought about his idea for a while, and suddenly I was like — this isn't my anxiety. It may be his, but for me, some of these questions I'm trying to ask, these little repairs I would love to make on behalf of writers, these moments of autobiography, I like that they're under a skin. I like that they're in this particular, very smooth, reasonable package. Underneath that, one can do all kinds of things. I think that kind of calm form also helps me see; it helps me think things through.

It also helps me feel braver to take up some of these things. I’m not attracted to a certain kind of vulnerable first person. Maybe if that's all I had, I would never go to some of these emotional places. But I can speak through the review.

What is so satisfying about that style? You can get through an issue of 

without feeling any whiplash — you can gulp it down, and it’s delicious.

It’s nice to feel you're making your own kind of experience, your own kind of object for the reader. That sense of an offering about criticism can feel very lovely.

I've always been a fan of a strong house style, because then you get to be a little bit mischievous with it. You get to push it here and there. I would not like freedom. I like to be like, ‘Okay, now we have to rein it in, that joke isn't as funny as you think it is.’ Maybe this goes back to all the notions of the illicit, getting in trouble, all of the ‘getting away with’ that feels very, very crucial to me about any form of thinking.

I swear the best thing was when I was first starting out in freelancing and you had to learn to throw your voice for a bunch of different places. It was fantastic. It's still yours, but you have to just tweak it a little bit here and there. Practice how much to titrate your own personality into it.


You said in another interview that you don't have a lot of friends who are writers. Has that changed?

I have two friends who are writers. And then I have some journalist friends, but I don't quite count them in the same category. The positions have been filled. No, no, I can't do it. How can you tell them the truth? That notion of writing in the scene has never been very attractive. I'm with my books, that's all the writers I can handle. At least for me, it has to be kept apart and kept separate. Maybe I’m just too much of a softie. I can be bought.

Before we go, what’s been on your mind recently? Preoccupations? What have you been reading?

I'm working on this piece that's taken over my life and my house. My child named her doll after the writer I'm writing about because it's all I talk about. What else is happening with me? It’s so dull. And the piece is late. It’s spring here, so it's getting warmer. Maybe we'll do a little gardening.


I’m just in the middle of a piece. It's actually nice talking to you. When I speak to people, especially undergrads, it's like, ‘oh, we have the same life.’ I think you want me to have a more interesting life. And I'm actually like, no, what are you doing later? I'm probably doing the same thing.


Which is crazy, because I was not, as I said, a particularly interesting or particularly engaged student. Somehow I'm doing penance for the rest of my life by having a paper due every week forever.

Tess Wayland

Tess Wayland

Features

Spring 2024

An Interview with Parul Sehgal