Risa: Always, but more in the last ten years.
What’s the best novel ever written and why?
Fuck everyone because it’s The Corrections. It’s about everything going on in America now and it’s ruthless but comic and deft and accessible and devastating and manages to be about so much within one family and is deeply and believably from each character’s point of view. It’s a perfect book.
Who’s the lamest famous novelist and why?
I don’t read lame famous novels. There’s too much good shit on the web.
Were your teen years like the life that you write about in your stories?
Yeah—a lot like that. I grew up in Connecticut. My world was a mix of Colonial and dirtball. GunneSax and GTOs. Ozzy meets Audubon Society. I love that world.
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hate Stew but he sells weed. So one Saturday, me, Mike, and Mike’s brother Ross drive Stew’s fuck-friend Boudreau out to Stew’s house to cop.
Boudreau sits up front which is fine with me except that I have to look at the back of her head with her blond hair feathering all the way back into gross split ends.
Mike and Ross are clearly all hopped up that she’s in the car—she works with them at Mattatuck Manufacturing where they make brake cables and she’s like the only woman there so when she walks across the floor at the factory, everyone just goes nuts, sticking their tongues through their peace-sign fingers. Stew cheats on his wife with her, which is one reason that I hate him. Also he acts like he’s the shit, buying this huge new truck all on credit which Mike said they’re going to have to repo.
Stew lives out by Holy Land, which I’ve driven past a million times but never been to and I always wondered about it. Holy Land is a hill with a big lit-up cross on it off of Exit 19 in Waterbury where some guy spent his life building a miniature Bethlehem. On the side of the hill it says in big letters: Holy Land U.S.A.
Photo by Jaimie Warren
