LYNNE TILLMAN
Read at KGB on 1 April 2022

“An observation; a dry fact; a memory; something noticed; someone encountered; a joke; something wry; a provocation; something playful.” Lynne Tillman does not put these to the page, as her friend Colm Toibon writes, to “invite company to the dark & lonely ceremony of being.” Her distrust of the grandiose prevents this. Instead, Lynne moves, intently, with the mind’s wanderings, leading the reader through a sort of clarifying walk through the world, though it is not that, not exactly. “Books are not mirrors,” Lynne writes, “and life doesn’t go on the page like life, but like writing.” 

Across six novels, five short story collections, two essay collections & two nonfiction books, Lynne’s tone gains its vividness from her commitment to examining things closely enough to let them surprise her, and from her insistence on expression that is precise & frank, daring, funny, & searching. “I’m not interested in safety,” Lynne told James Yeh in a 2018 interview in The Believer. “A great risk in writing is imagining you have something to protect. Playing it safe to placate someone or something.” 

Lynne has written through multiple New Yorks, publishing adventurous work across the past five decades. In 1980, there was her now-cult-classic coming-of-age novel Weird Fucks, described in The Quietus as “a compelling, uneasy, and haunting ride through a young woman’s formative years.” In the 1990s, she compiled an oral history of the beloved Manhattan independent bookstore Books & Co., which closed in 1997 after 20 years. And across the 2000s and 2010s, she fleshed out a character called Madame Realism, a “playful yet stern” art critic through which she recorded “subtle, ironic, & wry” observations on art in exhibit catalogs, Art in America columns, and short story collections. The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories was published by Semiotext(e) in 2016. Through Madame Realism, Lynne blends fiction & nonfiction and favors observation & detachment over judgment & reaction. “Madame Realism couldn't decide what was trivial, insincere, fake, inauthentic, frivolous, superficial, and gaudy; she herself was all of these. . . . Reality was a decision she didn’t make alone,” she writes. 

When it comes to downtown New York writers, Lynne is a blueprint: She’s read all around the city, been photographed by Nan Goldin, had her archive acquired by the Fales Library. Her humor is “sharp like her city’s, tough and hilarious,” the publisher of her 2014 essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? writes. Her influence has been absorbed, whether by osmosis or direct inspiration, by a wide swath of younger New York writers, including a few here tonight — I see it in Gideon’s sense of play, in Stephanie’s interest in the uncanny, & in the experiments with form that they both conduct. In the mid-’70s, Lynne typed up her first commissioned short story on a blank menu from the Manhattan restaurant chain Longchamps. “It’s very strange communicating like this,” she writes under the header “Specialties,” “but experience teaches that what is strange is lasting.” Please welcome Lynne Tillman.