Haunted Houses

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Lynne Tillman's protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things: a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight."-Dennis Cooper I caught up with Lynne Tillman over the phone just before the release of Haunted Houses to discuss its original publication, her hopes of what the novel would achieve, and why her writing still feels so fresh after 35 years. Miller, Nicole (2018-03-24). "An Interview with Lynne Tillman". Hyperallergic . Retrieved 2021-09-30.

Freeman, John (14 December 2007). "Lynne Tillman: The author who inspired the Manhattan avant-garde". Belfast Telegraph . Retrieved 24 February 2023.Lynne Tillman: I didn’t know any better than to have faith in it. And every time you get rejected it gets harder, but I had such a strong belief in what I had done in Haunted Houses , which is kind of crazy because I am a deeply neurotic person with a lot of anxieties and insecurities. I have been in some form of psychotherapy for basically all my adult life and yet… I felt so strongly about this novel. Lynne Tillman's writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring... To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today."-John Zorn

Lynne Tillman’s Haunted Houses is a novel that continually intrigues, as it unsparingly captures the transition from girlhood into womanhood through the perspectives of Grace, Emily and Jane. The novel begins with Jane, establishing a dark tone with the first sentence that tells us how ‘her father liked to scare her’. This opening gambit is indicative of the fractured parent/child relationships Haunted Houses explores. The examination of these relationships forces us to revisit what it means to grow up and how we have carried events from childhood and adolescence into our present lives. Tillman deftly recognises that ‘real conflicts arise when a girl grows older; as we have seen, she wished to establish her independence from her mother’ as we hope to establish ourselves as distinct beings separate from our past and parents. In Conversation: Lynne Tillman and Eileen Myles, archived from the original on 2021-12-14 , retrieved 2021-09-30

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The Fales Library Guide to the Lynne Tillman Papers 1939-2008". The Fales Library. October 24, 2019 . Retrieved November 3, 2019.

Alongside the mummy issues in the novel, there is internal conflict directed at ‘daddy’. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ from the eponymous poem feels close when reading these passages. The daddy issues that the novel works through feel rooted in a modernist style, with wrought depictions of the interiority of characters. There is a passage about Jane’s father that grapples with these complex feelings within the general landscape of our harmful patriarchy: ‘but he’s your father, he’s not any man. Not any man. He is a man, the first man I knew. He was the only man for all of us, all of us women, wife, girls, daughters… He hates himself. He hates all of us. He loves himself sometimes, he loves us sometimes. Oh, Daddy’. These conflicting statements (here whirled and whipped by the winds of repetition) explore the uncertainty of self, an uncertainty that we hope will eventually settle within us, but Tillman shows us that they remain in adult life – even parenthood. Her style, on occasion, can verge on constrictingly tight. Sentences bunch up and concatenate; the prose scuttles dizzyingly through time. And, being so stringent, it loses some of the local colour that could have distinguished (say) Emily from Jane. At the outset of each chapter, you work to reorient yourself to a new set of particular threads: this girl’s frustrations, her feuds with her mother, her interests in bed. Yet the hitches are brief, and Haunted Houses more often has an engrossing brilliance, an intensity that stills your breath. It’s a cliche that writers are “like no other”, but Tillman reads like no one else.In Haunted Houses, Tillman puts together the separate stories of three American girls—Jane, Grace, and Emily—as they come of age and into their own. Jane has violent father and a dead best friend, Grace is hazed by her peers into rebellion, Emily is withdrawn and considered "not normal" by her parents, and none of them can be described with a single quirk or characteristic like I have just attempted to—they are complex, confused, real people; not conclusive and not reducible to types. They observe the world, gain experience in it, make friends, feud with their mothers, and get on with their lives as you and I might: not with ambition, and not necessarily without. They are each a haunted house impressed upon by their own memories, traumas, histories, and experiences; if their stories seem sometime to blur together and feel like they represent something, it may be because they are so defiantly singular. Her father liked to scare her. He knew she adored him. He’d creep into her room early in the morning or late at night and jump on her and she’d cry. He’d console her with kisses and hugs. Years later Jane would say, It’s a hard habit to break. Loving madmen. Jane’s parents, particularly her father, had wanted a son, having two girls already, and had waited nearly seven years before making the unsuccessful attempt to have him. Jane’s mother would need an operation after Jane’s birth, which would put an end once and for all to her childbearing days, but Jane was innocent of this fact, as well as their desire for a son. Otherwise she was not a difficult birth. Ms. Tillman's characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives . . . this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times . . . Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here."-LA Weekly An Interview with Lynne Tillman The novelist and critic discusses her new book of fiction—Men and Apparitions. [12]

I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He’s also a wonderful man. My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years. By the time Jimmy announced that he loved her, or rather her shadow, which she knew meant her, the fact that they were in different grades meant more to her than having won the attenuated battle for his affections. He was 11 and not as skinny as he’d once been, and even though his nostrils still quivered, he just wasn’t as cute, she thought, so she pretended not to understand what he was saying, which was, she discovered early, a disguise that worked. An unspoken contract existed between Jane and her father; she went along to ball games and amusement parks when other fathers brought their sons. She played seriously with their sons, stretching across the slippery iron horse, reaching for the brass ring, though she was afraid of heights, reaching for it as if she really cared about winning. She hated losing her balance. Jane was almost certain that her father was her partner in this charade, and that he knew she was humoring him. But his moods changed as fast as she changed TV channels. He’d always been violent and had used his belt on Jane when she was small, but these violations were more than balanced by his good looks and charm. Her violations were almost invisible, something about the way she answered a question, something about the way she walked into a room. Everyone was in love with her father, Jane thought. He was so young-looking that her oldest sister’s friends thought he looked more like her sister’s date than her father. I think it just is a very contemporary novel. Like you said, it’s a novel about the interiority of girls, and at the time that wasn’t a subject that was broached much in fiction. Whereas now, that’s one of the most common subjects; there are so many young women writing about being young women. So I feel in many ways a novel like this feels so of today, and like an antecedent of that current trend we see in literature.Lois said she wanted to go to UCLA to study acting, and then try to get roles as a comedian or a character actress. I’m not that pretty, she stated indifferently, I couldn’t be the romantic type, but somebody has to be Rosalind Russell. Jane didn’t know what she wanted to do. None of Lois’s friends were as determined as she was. One of them called Jane on a Sunday morning and told her to sit down. It was very early. Jane said what’s wrong and the friend said Lois is dead. She was killed in a car crash. Lynne Tillman (born January 1, 1947) is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program. [1] Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She writes a bi-monthly column "In These Intemperate Times" for Frieze Art Magazine. Lynne Tillman: Well, I finished the first three chapters, one for each girl, and I said to myself, now they’re supposed to meet. This is a novel and characters are supposed to meet. But I couldn’t find a reason for them to meet. Maybe they’d meet at a party or they went to the same college or they knew the same people – but that all seemed phoney to me. I thought the novel is a container and the girls’ stories are contained within the novel, their lives are contiguous. They don’t know each other but they are living at the same time. And, of course, that probably was one of the many reasons why it was rejected by 18 publishers.