Interview with Forrest Muelrath

August 1, 2024

Manuel Marrero) These days it’s hard to tell what’s real. I log onto social media and there’s no cohesive narrative. There’s media flying at me from all sides of the ideological divide, much of it altered in both technologically advanced ways and via old fashioned sleight of hand. One reason The Valeries is so timely right now is it grapples with the way storytellers shape reality, albeit in a very specific context but nonetheless relevant to the speed at which the average user (once the average news consumer, or “normal person” subscribed to the paper of record), now a social media user, is subjected to elaborate conspiracy theories or disclosures, rapid recontextualizing, deepfakes, AI-assisted fabrications, footage from every conceivable POV, etc. Are you someone who’s susceptible to suggestion, diving down rabbit holes of intrigue, or are you incredulous these days, or blissfully inattentive perhaps, of the disclosures coming to light?

   

Forrest Muelrath) I like that you relate storytelling to conspiracy theories. I believe conspiracy theories can be a rudimentary and nearly pure form of storytelling. It’s a neat and simple formula. There is a void in what is knowable, something that exists on the fringes of our common language, and the theory is an attempt to explain what is unknowable. The unknown frightens us, so the desire to construct a conspiracy theory can come from a very earnest place – a place of fear. There is plenty of overwrought fiction that comes from a place less earnest than the best conspiracy theories. So in this way – as fiction – I am personally susceptible to conspiracy theories, and I do go down rabbit holes occasionally. But I am also a person who is incredibly full of doubt. In fact, I am so filled with doubt that at times I doubt my own existence. I prefer this frame of mind over someone who needs to know, or claims to know with absolute certainty. I think doubt is healthier for me. From the position of doubt, I am able to treat reality as a sort of fiction, or perhaps a partial hallucination. I would rather not be put in the position of journalist or news reporter, and instead be thought of as a correspondent of the unknowable.

   

MM) The nature of taboo, of criminally salacious materials, pornography meant to arouse the most desensitized of hedonists, for some this is an idea of paradise. I’ve lately felt that pornography is downstream of horror, which aims to frighten, and comedy, which aims to amuse. I think art that seeks to make someone horny, scared or amused doesn’t seem like high art at all, but instruments of gratification. High art teaches us how to live well, or moves us to something deeper than knowledge of sensory input, to understanding and wisdom. The protagonist or antihero of The Valeries is a grief counselor, whose aims at surface level at least, seem to be oriented toward minimizing grief and casualty. There’s also a sense of solipsistic claustrophobia and serenity– the entire novel is from one person’s point of view, thinking into a typing machine, from the outset in a position of checkmate which isn’t so cut and dry by the end. His world consists of his mission, his memories of his wife and son, doing battle with a world far beyond what the mind wants to imagine. Is there a parallel between the plight of the novelist versus the system, and the plight of Blackwell versus the system? Or am I reading into it? Is there such a thing as a good, big lie?

   

FM) I want to talk about the way writing can affect physiology for a minute, what you refer to as ‘an instrument of gratification.’ I think about the ways writing can alter a reader’s body all the time, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it so directly with anyone.

I might agree with your hierarchy of literary affect. The easiest way to affect a reader’s body is with smut. Following smut, it’s significantly more difficult to make a reader afraid within a genre like horror, but easier than some things. And to truly make someone laugh, and consistently, is actually very difficult in my mind. I don’t find too many writers funny, and when I do, I hold on to them tightly. But I don’t wish to assume it’s simply easy for any person to provoke a physiological response in a reader. Smut comes easy to me, so I kind of assume it’s easy for every writer. I tend to believe that almost anyone could write a one-handed novel, but I’m not actually sure if that’s true or not. Recently I have been looking with some intention for horror that might truly scare me, and horror stories that truly scare me are few and far between. At least at this point in my life. I remember my mother taking Stephen King’s It away from me when I was 11 years old because it gave me insomnia. I would love to find a book that could bring me back to that place.

I don’t really think of these genres in terms of low and high art. To me they’re more like a bag of tricks, and one that I’d like to have more control over, to keep getting better at. I think fear, sex and comedy are like what primary colors are to mixing paint. All that is needed with the palette of porn, horror and comedy, is black for death, and white for spirituality. Then you have the prima materia of all human experience. I like to fantasize about a writer fully mastering these base emotions, and what might be possible. Could you take over a reader’s body? If so, what would you do with that power? I can imagine how total control over these elements might be used maliciously, if not simply for trash content that could mess-up someone’s drawers on a lonely afternoon, but I also think being able to convey a blend of fear, sex and comedy is necessary when developing an aesthetic that can realistically depict experience. I mean, what artist doesn’t have some inkling of a desire to gain total control over someone else’s experience? What fun! If I could just have you step into my endocrinmogrifier, good sir, I will show you a truly magical time! It’s a really Sadean desire, and I don’t think there would be any way to satisfy it once you had that ability. It’s too powerful. 

My favorite essay of criticism addresses this topic of physiology and affect in art. It’s a piece of music criticism by Nietzsche called Nietzsche contra Wagner, which is at once both hilarious and terrifying. It was one of the last things Nietzsche wrote before he completely lost his mind, and I like to imagine it’s the thing that ultimately pushed him over the edge. In it, Nietzsche pummels Wagner with insults. He especially insults the way Wagner’s later operas had, as Nietzsche saw it, become emotionally manipulative, overwrought with decadence and sentimentality, while appealing to only base desires of human emotion and physiology. He states that Wagner’s music makes him physically ill due to the way the rhythms and melodies manipulate his emotions: ‘But do not my stomach, my heart, my circulation also protest? Are not my intestines also troubled?’ and so on. The language is crass, the ideology fierce, and displeasure is on full display. It’s the sort of pugilistic polemic I wish more critics today would have the guts to write. As if the stakes of aesthetics were actually so high, that the balance of civilization was resting on our art (and btw, of course it is!). I wish more critics would cultivate a philosophy of aesthetics as severe. A few critics who have come around recently seem to believe that being a prick will be enough, but when these prick critics cannot articulate their own aesthetic philosophy, and have nothing to back up their attitude, they are revealed as being palsied, puerile and inconsequential. Nothing could be more pathetic in my mind than a prick critic who is ultimately impotent, but this is certainly not Nietzsche. After listing physical ailments, Nietzsche goes on to predict that the popularity of Wagner’s music would lead to a decline of art, a decline of morality, and with that, he paints a picture that could only amount to the destruction of Western civilization. This was exciting stuff to read as a young man who was into cultural artifacts like the Decline of Western Civilization, a documentary about the LA punk scene, and also the likes of Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, and Dennis Cooper. For many years, it felt like I was witnessing Nietzsche’s prediction play out in real time, and perhaps even in some ways, I was an instrument of the destruction and decadence he predicted.

One thing that has amused me throughout my time with The Valeries is that its inception is an incredibly crude commercialization of our language —meaning smut. I believe what we can understand to be another person is nothing greater than a collection of words and speech patterns. Language is the kernel of the human system, and the last stop of understanding before consciousness becomes some mysterious programming code only God can understand. If language is the core ingredient of a human being, then the commercialization of language is the commercialization of every modicum of one’s being. So if by ‘novelist versus the system,’ you somehow mean novelists vs social or economic institutions, then yeah, this story is born to a character whose entire being has been co-opted by commerce. The narrator (his father) witnesses the abduction of his son’s being and completely freaks out. If you see a parallel here between the narrator as a would-be novelist, and novelists in real life vs a system, then there must be a parallel. 

   

MM) The kompromat/disclosure at the center of your novel derives from reality, both directly and indirectly. What’s to become of society’s darkest secrets when it can all be scrubbed? Does what live in the collective imagination and memory exist? Do you believe there are Satanic or pedophilic cabals at work behind the machinations of politics? Or are they just stories and if so, what function do they serve?

   

FM) Believe it or not, I have no idea what is going on with pedophilic sex cults these days, and if I did I probably wouldn’t be blabbing about it on the internet. But I’m flattered you asked because I want people to believe that the narrator has discovered something on his son’s computer that could be used as kompromat. I really hope readers can fall into the strange little world of this narrator, and get immersed in his story.

The Valeries is fiction but it comes from a real place. It comes from something I witnessed. I witnessed something that frightened me. It appeared dangerous and it seemed like there was no rhyme or reason behind it, so I believed it to be cosmic in origin. This thing I witnessed seemed to have roots in the very cosmology of our world — or a world, perhaps a fictional world. When people tell stories about the origin of the universe, at the beginning, there is often only darkness and light. That is where the thing I witnessed seemed to come from. The place where you begin telling a story about the origin of the universe. I don’t think what I witnessed was all that unusual. I think most people witness something like it at some point in their lives. You might even say we have all already witnessed the thing I witnessed. Many people will make up stories about frightening things they’ve witnessed. Like the way children who are sexually abused will later in life often claim to have been abducted by aliens. I don’t know if we have had alien visitors, but I like stories about aliens. The alien story is a dangerous thread because some people lose their minds. My story is fiction. I’m satisfied not knowing what’s at work behind the thing I witnessed, and I think that’s healthier for me — to be in a cloud of unknowing. The root of this story is a bottomless scam, which implies to me, something is obfuscated or mystified about our experience. Human perception can not fully render what is behind this story, and it’s not really anything someone has put into words. So the void of unknowing that is the hole at the bottom of this bottomless scam gives me something to put words around, and then create, in writing, an adult American man with a consciousness and way of being in our world, written in a way that I hope is believable to readers. And maybe even likable, despite that he is pompous, a bit of a doofus, and ultimately very sad. 

   

MM) On that note, Blackwell, the narrator himself, has aspirations of publishing success that are rather perverse. Do you think these sorts of aspirations are inherently perverse? You’ve been writing a long time. How do you feel about this, your first novel, seeing the light of day, being read, and being “successful?” What is novelistic success to you? Is there vanity involved?

   

FM) I’ve been teaching myself how to write a novel for a long time. Like 12 years. When I started, I thought it would take 6 months. I can’t tell you how frustrated I was when I discovered I could not write the best novel I had ever read within six months. And furthermore, there was no way to know how long it would take, because I had never written a novel before, and no one was showing me how to do it. 

After 12 years of teaching myself how to write a novel, you’re asking me if it’s perverse to publish a novel? As if I am some sort of quack practicing the antiquated folk science of psychoanalysis, and not just a deadbeat sitting in front of an unpublished manuscript? I’ll accept this because the narrator of my story wanted to be a hotshot psychoanalyst in New York City before accepting a more ordinary role in the field of mental health. So I will pretend to answer your question like my old boss, who was an especially eccentric psychoanalyst: Of course there’s some element of perversity to publishing a novel. It’s completely exhibitionist behavior! The author takes his interior life and whips it out in front of the entire world. As for me, now that it’s whipped out, after I worked so hard for so long to get it just the way I wanted it before showing it to you, I’ve got to say, it feels fucking amazing. Look at it! 

   

MM) Tell me about how The Valeries came to be, from the first idea to the last. What does the title signify in plural?

   

FM) You know, I think I settled on the name after watching Heathers during the first few months of the pandemic, when everything felt slightly out of place and a bit psychotic. This is funny and very stupid to me because the novel has little, if anything, to do with Heathers. Like a lot of stuff I write, I like how The Valeries rolls off the tongue. I mean, how many Valeries do you want? Is there a surplus? Do we have to thin the crop to keep the market stable, or is she selling so fast we can’t keep her in stock? I once had a friend who would refer to herself in the plural, especially when speaking about her internet presence — her multiple email accounts and alt socials. Valerie has a life that is separate from me on the internet. She has her own email address and some other traces. I used her name for ghostwriting when I first started out writing professionally. I found it was easier to attract clients as a woman, and she became a multiple of me with her own life on the internet. Her email is still active, and in fact it’s printed in the book. If you email her, maybe she will email you back. Maybe she will tell you privately about the torment she  endured to become who she is today. 

   

MM) There are elements of pulp, parapolitics, depravity, cultural digression, and disclosure (conspiracy). Tell me about how various influences came to inform such a multifaceted novel.

   

FM) Most of these elements came to my attention while having a good time on the internet. Good times on the internet that especially occurred through the particular technological epoch that gave rise to the social internet. I think that’s what you’re looking for. And maybe you are also looking for a young man’s life that runs parallel to that period of technological upheaval. The digressions – mostly the narrator’s hobbies, a few pastimes he has developed late in his life, elements of his life where he can eke out some small bit of joy –  might be, in part, about the author’s pastimes.  Objects of my own fascination, or hobbies that I would like to develop at some point in the future, such as lawn care. 

   

MM) When you and I first began corresponding, it was 2020, everyone was a bit touched by madness, and you and I would correspond vigorously and feverishly about all manner of things, from possible apocrypha, forgeries and unpublished materials of a certain late great author’s estate (I’ll omit names for discretion), to the pervasive climate of despair, to the art world and various somewhat obscure points of reference.  Since then you’ve been all around the western world and back in New York, have had run-ins with KIRAC, and have been thoroughly immersed in the art world. There’s a very distinct pipeline here in this work of fiction between not just reality and fiction, or truth and secrets, but art/artistry and sociopathy/domination/perversion, as well as narrative control. Do you see such forces at work in the real world? Tell us what you’ve gleaned in your travels. When, in your life, did you first get the sense that things aren’t what they seem? Were there multiple revealing moments?

   

FM) Haha, yeah it was very exciting emailing with you when we first met, and also getting involved with Misery Loves Company, and beginning to use my Twitter account that had been sitting stagnant since 2011 or so. I didn’t really have a place for my fiction before then. In fact, it was hard to see any place I even wanted to try to publish my novel until I came across Expat. And by that point, I had made myself sick while trying to learn how to write a novel in isolation. I can’t say enough for the value of an artistic community. In some ways, I think coming into one has saved my life.

On that note, I’m going to co-opt your questions about Europe to talk about my beautiful soon-to-be wife, Jacky, who is an amazing visual artist. She created the image we’re using for the cover, and she is the reason I went to Europe. The Rijksakademie in Amsterdam offered her a two-year residency beginning in 2021, which saved us from my roach-infested apartment off the Utica stop on the 4 train in Brooklyn. Europe was incredible. People used to say to me, you should just go to Europe. And I would think, yeah, well, I actually haven’t paid my rent in three months. But then out of nowhere there was this opportunity, and I took it.

I’d say the primary thing I learned in Europe was an appreciation of a more conservative sense of beauty. In New York there is this tendency to bowl over whatever came before and attempt to reinvent everything anew. This used to be exciting to me, but it’s not sustainable. A cultivation of conservative aesthetics came in part came from getting to know members of KIRAC and a few other artists, but it also came from walking around cities like Amsterdam, or Harlem, or Colmar, France, or rural Bavaria, or southern Italy, and looking at the way people live among very old buildings and streets. 

To pair the old with the new, there is of course a vibrant and vast contemporary scene across Europe, and of course I gravitated toward Houellebecq. It was incredible to witness the great Houellebecq — a living symbol of the withering French intellectual — duke it out with KIRAC in court. You are right to ask about it because that experience certainly informed my work. Houellebecq is a treasure. I really am in awe of him. I rarely say this about a single author, and especially about their persona beyond their work, but he is a gift from some cosmic mutant frog pond, and I hope the global literary community cherishes his every remaining breath. Despite everything, all writers should be ready to admit we are in some way blessed to have him.  Witnessing him in an ultimate state of Baudelairean depravity on video, and then watching him fight the existence of that video in court – a video, to be clear, which Houellebecq asked for –  will stay with me for the rest of my life.  The Dutch courts are a little different than our courts in the US – maybe not as much like a sporting event, or as ripe for a thriller in the vein of John Grishman – but the essence of a court battle is still about the control of a narrative, as you imply.  I find this fascinating beyond even the thrill of a John Grisham story. The impulse to control a narrative is such a narcissistic thing, hence a dangerous and exciting thing. People will get so locked in to believing that their version of the story is the right one, that they’ll lose all empathy for the opposing party. Often when those competing narratives are dragged into a courtroom setting, at least one party will desire to completely obliterate the other narrative from existence. The root of it is very much a homicidal impulse. We see these homicidal impulses play out on social media all the time — in the so-called court of public opinion. I have a hunch that the primary energy powering social media today actually comes from the homicidal desire to obliterate the other from existence. My novel is very much informed by these thoughts.  

In terms of the first time I got a sense of things ‘not being what they seem,’ I think it’s been my entire life. One of my earliest memories is getting extreme deja vu and feeling afraid I was living in an alternative timeline — my introduction to cosmic horror. But that is not really here nor there, and I think most people have experiences like these, and it’s just part of our material reality. One experience I remember vividly is reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis and feeling like the ground was about to open up underneath my feet. Kafka has the ability to strip layers away from reality, and I feel so grateful to live in a world where literature like this exists.

   

MM) It’s an election year in America. There is an unprecedented information war, scandals atop scandals. Who do you suspect is really running things?

   

FM) Oh, I don’t think my opinions about American elections really matter haha. My narrator might have a few things to say about American elections though, given that the man who abducted his son is an elected official. I’m personally more interested in books, and love, and the pretty blue flowers. Maybe I’d join a political party like a writer’s union if someone I trusted suggested one. Aside from that, I prefer politics to simply be a way toward being polite around the polis.

   

MM) Which writers, artists, visionaries, icons, etc. have influenced you in your art and writing, and specifically, The Valeries? How did you begin to write and create?

   

FM) Well, I hope someone who reads my book wonders how I got to know so much about grief counseling and psychoanalysis, because a lot of my knowledge in this area comes from a lived experience and I hope that experience comes through. For nearly ten years I was the assistant to a psychoanalyst in Manhattan. She ran a magazine and was tied in with a worldwide network of analysts and academics working in the Lacanian field. Since I was an editorial assistant as well as a sort of personal assistant, I got to read a ton of psychoanalytic literature, while also observing how some mental health professionals live. The analyst I worked for attracted a lot of early-career therapists, and I got to watch everything these therapists went through, which actually is some wild stuff. In some instances, more wild than even what I see young artists and writers going through, because the mental health profession often attracts people who are themselves in need of mental healthcare. Along with being full of quacks and crazies, it’s also a very competitive field, especially in the odd branch of it I observed. Many young therapists go through these extreme ego fluctuations, much like young artists do, which results in some incredibly ridiculous behavior.  If you read The Valeries and you find that the grief counselor narrator gets himself into situations you find too extreme to be believable, I could give you real-life examples of quacks with more extreme behavior. 

Aside from the literature on mental health, which is vast and ancient and undying, I’m also fascinated by technology, especially computer science and media. I spend many hours a week tinkering with computers. I have this thing I do that I privately find hilarious, where I teach myself how to set up a crude desktop system that is meant to be distraction-free for writing and research. The funny part to me is that I spend countless hours procrastinating while building my distraction-free computer. It’s to the point where the distraction-free computer has become my primary distraction.  I actually don’t mind this. I probably could have healthier hobbies, but I certainly could have hobbies that are much less healthy. So I like anything related to technology, from classical philosophy and the history of art and craftsmanship to media theory to the technical manuals of whatever whacky software I might install. My knowledge about the way this technology works top to bottom is frustratingly limited by a lack of raw talent for mathematics, but striving to understand it is still a thrill for me. 

Regarding literary figures that influence me, aside from the people I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this interview, and figures the narrator references in my book (all of whom I admire, even figures the narrator may say disparaging things about), I’ll say that the character Valerie is extremely derivative of female writers I love. For prose that digs in close to my bones, I like to imagine that I am a man who has been forced into exile with only a rucksack to carry all my earthly possessions. I can fit seventeen books at a time in this rucksack. What authors will I take with me? I don’t want any more than seventeen, because honestly my mind can’t handle it, especially in such a state of persecution when I am being chased to the brink of survival. While on the lam, every few months I will come across a tiny library or shop, and I can trade one book in for another, but I still must carry only seventeen.  The feminine prose writers who Valerie was constructed from were in my rucksack at one point or another, and most of them still are. I almost feel guilty about this, because Valerie at times is an extremely shallow character. At certain points, she was purely commercial smut. I chopped up some legendary women beloved by readers all over the world and constructed a feminine persona who is the literary equivalent of a prostitute. It’s a dirty, dirty thing, and at certain points, I’ve struggled to get over this.  But I also always imagined Valerie had more potential, and that she could somehow have a completely different life that I was not privy to, where she was a brilliant prose stylist, beloved by a literary community.  When I encountered Elizabeth Aldrich for the first time, I thought wow, if Valerie could be a real live girl, she would want to be just like Elizabeth. Valerie definitely idolizes Elizabeth Aldrich, and now Lizzy is in my rucksack.

 

MM) What are you working on now, creatively and otherwise? Tell us about your life. Plans for the next year?

   

FM) Right now I work at a hotel near my home, up the river a ways from New York City.  This hotel job has been pretty good for my writing because I can write during the first half of the day, and then I go to work in the evening when my mind sort of naturally fizzles out. My plan with The Valeries was always to develop a style I could carry with me and improve upon for the rest of my life. So I’m writing new fiction now and I’m hoping I can find readers and keep building a creative community, such as the community I have found around Expat. Besides my work, I help Jacky with her art as a sort of tech assistant. She has just asked me to help her ‘create cosmic sounds for a new video simulation of the spirit world and subnatural forces.’ This is something I love doing and something I find hugely inspiring. Jacky’s narrative style fascinates me. I love making up stories in my head about the strange, silent girls she animates. Jacky is the love of my life. I admire her work and her presence to no end, and we are currently planning a wedding. 

   

MM) Psy op. What does this word evoke for you? Do books like yours fall into this category? How does meta play into it?

   

FM) I don’t get that much from ‘psyop’ aside from it being a funny term I see on social media sometimes. But my novel must have something to do with it, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked. I can tell you that my book is definitely not part of some psychological warfare campaign enacted by the US federal government, or any other institution besides my publisher and me. I’m flattered you might think so, but it’s really not. If you read my novel and believe that it has something to do with a real live psyop, I will be very happy , because I will believe I have really done my job as a fiction writer. Honestly, I strongly suggest reading my book as if it is a true life story. I hope somebody figures out what is really going on inside the narrator’s son’s laptop. 

   

MM) What do extremists and evangelists crave, and what makes them like that? Is there any truth to the notion that civilization is engaged in a spiritual battle? As humanity progresses, we’ve seen extreme pornography and sexuality, referenced in the novel. We’ve seen extreme drugs – fentanyl, for one, referenced in the novel, and extreme forms of intake of more garden variety speed. There are extreme ideologies, there are extreme forms of news coverage, extreme forms of medicine, treatment, extreme new precedents for what is possible in the world. Your response? What is the endgame of this evolution?

   

FM) I’m glad you brought up the references to drugs in the book because the fact that they are part of the story is something I struggle with. These drugs — speed and opioids — have been around me since I was a small boy. I grew up in an area of New England that was known as being an epicenter of the opioid epidemic. I began losing friends to suicide, psychosis and drug overdoses when I was a freshman in high school. And this hasn’t really stopped since. I’ve been able to remove myself from that world for the most part, thank God, but I still have friends I worry about on a daily basis. I’m sure most people reading this will have felt the loss of someone in their community. This loss is a great source of sadness for me. It’s also a source of inspiration because it is motivation for an upward spiral, away from that destruction. It is something I feel is healthy to write about, and it is an event I wish to reframe with greater empathy, and perhaps, if possible, depict the psychological state that leads someone to go one step too far. I feel as writers tasked with chronicling our time, to ignore this element of our shared American experience would be an unconscionable shame. That said, drug use certainly isn’t part of every story. In fact I’m really sick of it now, and I wouldn’t even be talking about it if I didn’t somehow feel guilty for including it in my story.  But someone has to, and I hope that I’ve treated the material well. 

To address your question more generally, I believe most of what you bring up about extreme ideologies comes from a technological upheaval that has occurred over the last 10-15 years.  Specifically technology that affects the way we communicate. So I think what is extreme is actually our communication. It feels extreme, but it’s not even really all that extreme, because technology throughout history is always disrupting certain elements of society, and these sorts of disruptions should be expected by now. Communications technology specifically has gone through these upheavals periodically throughout history. Writing itself was one of the first major technological upheavals ever documented. Writing, as I understand it, first became truly useful in order to combat misinformation spread through the mimetic poetry of the ancient world. I like to think that this is still writing’s primary function — to sort of disengage meme warfare, so we can begin setting things out in clear terms with laws and a history that can be referenced and fact-checked. So if there is an end game to this upheaval, I think it will be the end of wild times on the internet. I think The Valeries speaks to this. It would be much more difficult to do what Valerie did today, and it will likely be all but completely impossible in the near future.