“I Think Most Things Are Bad”: Andrea Long Chu on Cruelty, Criticism, and Conviction

Andrea Long Chu is the critic we need, and not just because her pen can range from poison-tipped scalpel (on Joey Soloway self-aggrandizing memoir She Wants It: “They mix metaphors like a bartender in a recording studio”) to life invigorating epipen (“There is, after all, a reason that people sit together: they don’t want to be alone,” she writes of mixed-race Asian people in literature). 

It is grand and comforting that a contemporary critic uses her authority, which happens to be the title of her new collection of essays, with self-awareness. Chu does this not just to practice what critic and academic Merve Emre described as “rigorous negativity” in order to imagine a world where criticism reinstates the object or artifact back into the zeigeist, guiding us into framework where criticism and materiality can be reconnected. Her work is not in the world, but of the world. 

In one of the two new essays in the collection, Chu writes of the changing nature of authority capital A and authority within criticism. “We will have to reckon with our longing for authority: our nostalgia, which is the opposite of historical sense; and our idealism, which is the opposite of the future,” she explains. We look to critics and criticism to make sense of the world, assuming that they can help us to do so because they have the context, historicity, and, yes, the “authority” to do so. But Chu, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, knows that authority may after all be an “altogether empty thing.” Unless we connect it with our social and material realities, criticism is the most naked of kings. It must be clothed by its willingness to marry aestheticism, judgment, and, most of all, living in the world.

In late January, the critic and I got together to discuss revisiting her previously published work, how and when some of her most incisive lines occur to her, and our mutual ambivalence toward Andrew Lloyd Weber. 

———

KYLE TURNER: I heard that you were doing a new research project. Are you allowed to disclose anything about that?

ANDREA LONG CHU: Well, what did you hear?

TURNER: Just that you were doing a new research project.

CHU: I mean, I’m batting some things around. I probably shouldn’t disclose. Not to sound mysterious, but…

TURNER: I understand.

CHU: I probably shouldn’t say right now because it’s not totally fixed.

TURNER: Let’s get right to it. Congratulations on the book. I really enjoyed reading it and also revisiting a lot of the work that I’d been following over the last several years. How does it feel to have it collected?

CHU: It feels good. I think that it’s very satisfying to be at a point in my career where I can look back and say, “Look, I have a body of work.” And that body of work actually feels reasonably coherent.

TURNER: Can you talk about the process of going through all of your portfolio, picking which things to include, and arranging the sections?

CHU: For me, it was mostly about figuring out how to order it. There’s a part of me that would have liked just a purely chronological format because it appeals to me, not even as a reader, but as a critic. But ultimately, for the book, it’s really the n+1 essays all grouped together, leading with the Hanya Yanagihara piece, which had some virality in its moment. And then around the middle we get to some pieces that are potentially only remembered by me but that I think are interesting and still enjoyable to read. I feel like you can read the book and sort of see the way that my style has been honed and the way my thinking has grown and developed over time.

TURNER: What was the guiding ethos as far as adding comments or end notes to some essays and not others?

CHU: I think sometimes you get to the end of the process and it feels like something is really missing, but mostly I don’t really believe in revising essays. Again, as a critic, I think of them as artifacts, and so in a way, I don’t see the point. In a couple cases, those postscripts are there to acknowledge things, but ultimately I tried to resist putting them in. With an essay collection, you do sort of have to have the courage of your conviction, which is to say you have to kind of be like, “Well, I think these are good enough to be worth reading again.” When you write an original book, you don’t have that information. In the case of an essay collection like this one, most of the stuff has been previously published. You have to believe that they’re worth publishing again, which can be a different metric. My relationship with using the personal in my work has evolved, and I now feel very exposed when I read those essays. While there was a thrill and a perceived necessity to that exposure before, especially with “On Liking Women,” I sometimes feel the urge to protect my younger self who wrote those pieces. However, in this case, it’s most important not to change them. I would rather write a new essay than attempt to revise the old ones because it would be an endless exercise in hypotheticals.

TURNER: You’re a different person now, with different life experiences. Constantly tinkering with your work could risk turning it into the literary equivalent of the Star Wars Special Editions.

CHU: Absolutely, and when you republish your work like this, you have to be willing to stand by it. Moreover, “On Liking Women” is not only important to me but also to many other people, particularly trans individuals. I’ve heard this sentiment both around the time of publication and even now. The essay was an event for a small group of people, including those on whose behalf I felt I was writing, so it’s better to maintain fidelity to that event.

TURNER: “On Liking Women” had a significant reception as both a critical and personal essay early in your career. More recently, your piece on Hanya Yanagihara also had an incredible reception, though it was comparably less personal. Did the experience with “On Liking Women” prepare you for the success of the Hanya piece, and did it feel different given its less personal nature?

CHU: “On Liking Women” prepared me in practical terms by giving me my first Twitter followers, so it introduced me to the platform. The Soloway piece was the first to give me a similar feeling. The Hanya piece’s success was not entirely surprising due to the existing discourse and strong feelings surrounding the book. While the piece itself was not particularly personal, it ended up being very personal for me. Shortly after its publication, I received an email from a book editor who had read it and inquired about my writing. Although I already had a book under contract, we arranged a call, which is unusual. We met in person three days later, and now we are engaged. I have to thank A Little Life for existing because it is the grit around which the pearl of my relationship has formed.

TURNER: In your piece about Joey Salloway’s memoir, you mention the author’s “pathological urge to tell on themselves.” And in your piece about criticism and crisis, you write, “No critic manages to cut out her heart and hide it under the floorboards without leaving a little trail of blood.” Beyond the overtly personal pieces included in the book, how often do you feel you’re telling on yourself in your work? Is there one essay that feels most blood-spattered?

CHU: Like any writer, I can look at my pieces and see them as the outer manifestation of some mundane drama. I remember how I felt while writing them. The Phantom of the Opera piece is particularly blood-spattered. I recall someone asking why they would have someone who hates musical theater review the show, but all the references are not studied—they’re a march through my childhood. I can play many songs from Phantom on the piano without sheet music. When I write, I often listen to music, particularly musical theater recordings, to get in the zone. For the Phantom piece, I was in a sensory deprivation bath of the original cast recording, which helped me notice things about the score. Some technical music theory observations ended up being cut from the magazine version, but I still think it’s an awful show. The piece came about because Phantom was closing, and my friend and I decided to see it as a sort of ironic swan song before she left the city. We expected it to be bad but enjoyable, but we had a terrible time. The next day, I was supposed to discuss my next writing project with my editor, and I was so annoyed that I felt it had to be about this experience. I have a deep love for musical theater, even if every real fan feels like a dilettante compared to the true experts. My knowledge comes from being who I am, not from research, and that love suffuses the entire piece.

TURNER: Did you see “The Jellicle Ball”?

CHU: I wanted to, but I didn’t get a chance.

TURNER: I would love to have read anything by you about that particular production because, although it may not necessarily address this particular point, I think it reimagines Cats in such a way that it makes dramaturgical sense.

CHU: It sounded like it would make more sense. I think the concept was strong. I wish I’d gotten a chance to see it.

TURNER: Hopefully someone will release a pro shot or something. But enough about Andrew Lloyd Webber. You talk about the difference between a “vicious piece” and a “cruel piece” being the difference between a very hungry, slobbering attack dog and the person holding the leash. Could you talk more about when you realized this distinction and when you transitioned from one style to the other?

CHU: Part of it is a question of my own interest and what will hold my attention. After writing a few critical pieces, the initial excitement fades, and it can start to feel rote. However, I have generally tried to assume a position of greater control in my writing. When writing, there is sometimes a feeling of being in thrall to the object, a dependence on it and a desperation. While this feeling isn’t necessarily wrong, the book follows my passage from late twenties into early thirties, and some of that involves moving from a sense of being out of control and needing to share that with people to a feeling of more solidity, precision, and care. This isn’t a flight from negativity. Now, when I have something negative to say, I try to do it as little as possible. This may sound disingenuous given my reputation for writing negative pieces, but a lot of content ends up on the cutting room floor. Sometimes I have to create an overflow space for the meanest thoughts to avoid piling insults on top of each other. What I mean is that most things aren’t worth talking about at all, and they’re certainly not worth my time given my current fortunate position of writing a comparatively small number of longer pieces each year. I don’t want to waste that opportunity on getting mad at something in a way that’s neither satisfying nor edifying. Some of it is about choosing to use the space well. Moreover, I have come to believe that writing should be a last resort—you should only write if you absolutely have to. For me, the thoughts, arguments, and ideas I want to commit to paper should ideally be the kind of thinking I can only do while writing.

TURNER: Sometimes the more extraneous thoughts aren’t necessarily creating a dialogue or dialectic with the piece. They’re just something you come up with and can discard.

CHU: Exactly. My editor and I will often implicitly or explicitly ask what the bad, unhelpful conversation is that’s being had about this thing. We aim to get to the end of that quickly, by the first or second paragraph. We’ll fully write someone else’s piece, dispatch it, and then move on to the next thing. In that sense, we try to work through what feels like the obvious reaction. A good example of this in the book is the Yellowstone piece. There was a whole discourse for a moment about whether it was a red state show and what it meant that everyone was watching it. Instead of weighing into that debate, it’s nice to take the debate, fold it up, put it in a little box, and then do something more interesting.

TURNER: Absolutely. I also believe that withholding can be power or feel powerful.

CHU: Oh, absolutely.

TURNER: It’s like orgasm denial, but through criticism.

CHU: Well, if we’re going to use the orgasm denial example, what that withholding partly does is leave space for the reader’s subjectivity to take shape. If you take up too much space in your own writing, you’re either plowing over the reader or just ignoring them, telling them what to think. There’s an important distinction between telling someone what to think and telling someone what they think. The second is the sexy one. So the withholding is in the sort of toppy way of “Now, what do you say?”

TURNER: “Thank you.”

CHU: Exactly. That you’re inviting the reader to participate in a kind of critical subjectivity activity. So saying less, implying more, bringing the reader between the lines with you—there’s an intimacy that fosters, an asymmetric mutuality, right? There is a relation, and it’s not one of being equals, but there is a relation where we need each other and ultimately one that is directed toward the reader’s pleasure.

TURNER: Absolutely. How often do you think about when to and when to not address the reader within a piece?

CHU: You mean like explicitly? Like, “Reader, I married him” kind of a thing?

TURNER: Yeah. That happens a couple of times throughout the essays.

CHU: That’s a really interesting question. The corollary is when to say “I” or “I suspect” and how to do that. I think about that a lot too. “Reader, I married him” is the classic case. You want it to feel like both a surprise and an inevitability, reminding the reader, “I’m here, I’ve been here the whole time. And you are here, you’ve been here the whole time.” It depends on the rhythm of the piece, but sometimes I want to be in the mode of “we,” whether I’m using “we” explicitly or just narrating from that position.

TURNER: The reader reading this piece is also holding the object with the writer.

CHU: Exactly. Like Virgil and Dante, we’re going through this thing together. Sometimes I want that sense of “we,” and other times I want to remind the reader of the distance by pulling out “you.” Saying “What I’m trying to tell you is…” can feel like getting out from behind the curtain, displaying authenticity or frankness, which is obviously a rhetorical effect. Nonetheless, it can give the reader permission to draw a difficult, counterintuitive, or blunt conclusion. We’ve been moving through this piece together, and now I am stepping back to let you finish the thought. Obviously, I am the only one writing, but by stepping back and naming myself or addressing you, I create distance, giving you the opportunity to close that distance again and come with me.

TURNER: And as you said before, allowing the reader to realize or conceptualize their own subjectivity.

CHU: Exactly.

TURNER: I’m a bit envious that you write in a couple of the essays that you do not resent the reputation you’ve built up as a purveyor of takedowns or hatchet pieces. Recently at a party, a friend described to a stranger what kind of criticism I write, saying, “Kyle is not afraid to pull punches,” and I resented him for the rest of the evening. It’s not inaccurate; I am aware that I can be a little barbed.

CHU: Well, you have to tell me why you were upset with them.

TURNER: Because I am, at heart, a very sensitive person who uses criticism both as a defense mechanism and as a way to connect with people. I’ve never completely resolved those things, but I’m at least grateful to be mostly around people who accept that about me. After writing for 10 years, it’s just something that I wish didn’t bother me as much as it sometimes does. There are moments when I get over it, but there are definitely times when being described to a stranger makes me worry that this person is going to think I’m mean.

CHU: I can understand that. I am also a very sensitive person, polite to a fault interpersonally, and I hate the idea that anyone is mad at me in my personal life. Maybe you and I are coming from the same place. Aggression is manifesting because we’re spending too much time in our personal lives trying to forestall expressions of anger or hostility. From a writing standpoint, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the role of negativity in writing and thinking, and I feel some confidence in the conclusions I have drawn. I have what feels like a relatively coherent theory of the power of negative thinking, so I am much more at peace with that. But I think it’s also institutional and material. I have been rewarded for it. That has to be the most honest answer. I got the job, at least in part, on the strength of that kind of writing. I continue to perform at the job doing work that others categorize as takedowns, even if I wouldn’t agree with that. I’ve literally been given an award for it. It’s very easy for me to be confident in this thing because it has led to career success.

TURNER: Do you think that part of the reaction to some of your work is a product of a more sensitive age? Broadly speaking, critics aren’t as blunt as they used to be.

CHU: Yeah, I think that’s broadly probably true. When you say criticism is too mean, you’re also saying criticism is too nice, even if you don’t know it. It’s not even that it’s a pair of drums that are always being beaten. It’s a single drum. Social media certainly creates a particular environment for criticism. Yes, you criticize, and the chance of being criticized back is higher. I can see how that would lead to more risk-averse writing. But if we’re going to question the effect of social media on criticism, I think the more interesting argument would be that there’s just so much of it. We’ve always said for the past 300 years that there is so much of it. How could there possibly be more? I don’t just mean in the sense that everyone can be a critic by making a Twitter account, but freelancers and staff writers have so much to review, especially in television and film. To me, what that reflects is that people are writing more things for less money. Under those circumstances, bland approbation is the most efficient form of labor. Because writers in those positions are rarely given opportunities to grow or develop due to lack of meaningful editing and low pay, they take on other gigs or part-time work that’s not writing-related. They’re not actually growing as writers or critics. Of course we get this morass of empty approval, but I don’t think it’s because people are lacking opinions. I think it’s a product of the ecosystem.

TURNER: In your piece about the cycle of people ringing the death knell of criticism, you talk about the constant “amnesia and epiphany” that informs this repetition, often taking the tone of “us good critics versus those bad reviewers over there.” Do you see a way forward in which these two parties can find a sense of collectivity, particularly in an age where traditional apparatuses of criticism appear to be falling apart?

CHU: Well, it’s very hard to be optimistic. There’s essentially an answer which is labor organizing, insofar as I tend to feel that quality is going to be an expression mostly of resource and opportunity. That is part of it, but I don’t have high hopes for that, especially because of AI. Those cheap, meaningless reviews will probably be written by AI soon. I always have a soft spot in my heart for the little magazine, and those will hopefully continue to pop up and die in the way that they do. But by definition, the little magazine is not doing big things. As someone who has one of the vanishingly few staff positions as a full-time critic with a salary, I really don’t know what my contribution to that is. That doesn’t mean that I think that all of that criticism is good, you know? I think most of it is bad. But I think most things are bad. It’s not about giving up quality as an idea. It’s just trying to say that we can think historically about quality.

TURNER: You argue that authority in criticism is an “empty” thing and may never have really existed. If that’s so, what compels you to add such a deep sense of history to your arsenal? You read everything about the object and then some. Do you think you can do good criticism without doing that?

CHU: That’s a great question. Obviously, when I’m reading a bunch of things, I’m trying to bolster an argument and get the broadest view of the object that I can. If you look at this long conversation about how criticism should be conducted, you’ll find that people don’t want to consider that authority because it seems to pull the object out of the aesthetic realm and into, for instance, a historical realm. That’s a version of the argument I’ve heard made about work like my own. People say I’m just doing biography, history, or politics, just some political drive-by of an author who deserves better. And I mean, sure. I’m not at all opposed to good argument, evidence, and marshaling all of that. But I don’t think they’re a source of capital-A “authority.” I think history is a source of history, and history is part of what a thing is. Now, is it possible to do criticism without doing that kind of historical work? Absolutely. My method has developed, especially over the past couple of years. At some point, it might feel tired or formulaic to me, and then it will be time to figure out how to do something else. But I do think it’s a particular kind of criticism, and it’s totally possible to do something different.

TURNER: What I appreciate about your method is that you have your very stylish, critical, and aesthetic judgments over here, and then through historicizing the object, author, or artist, you often let them hang themselves with their own rope.

CHU: Well, you know, the rope will travel.

TURNER: Like with the Ottessa Moshfegh piece; you have a bunch of quotes one after the other that, in a way, make the argument for you.

CHU: Well, I do have a strong textual background in terms of graduate school and close reading and deconstruction and psychoanalysis and all of that stuff, which lends itself to that kind of work. I want to get a whole picture of the person. You read enough of someone’s work and an image of them is going to emerge. So it’s just terribly useful to try to just put those things together and let them tell the story that they’re telling. Some fiction writers will cop to having a set of interests on a thematic level. They’ll say “I’m interested in class, I’m interested in freedom,” or whatever. They’re less likely to attribute claims or arguments to themselves. And I can understand why. But when you do sit down with someone, especially if they have written a lot and you’ve read a lot of it, it often seems important and useful to just pull those thematic interests out and find the artist’s intellectual project. I think some critics really hate the idea of doing that, and certainly plenty of artists hate the idea of that. But I don’t think it’s that easy to not have ideas.

TURNER: Do you think it’s easier to have ideas or opinions?

CHU: You’re talking about the Maggie Nelson piece?

TURNER: The Maggie Nelson piece. You write about the Transparent Israel arc and the looming dread of having to have an opinion. Where does that dread come from?

CHU: Luckily, I am much more cloistered these days, having essentially gotten off of social media, so I don’t have to have opinions nearly so often. And when I do, they can undergo a rigorous editing and fact-checking process. I say that Maggie Nelson has no ideas, only opinions. I guess an “opinion” feels a little more like a reaction to me. At most, it’s like the germ of an idea, but it’s fundamentally about responding to a situation or an object or a person or whatever—”I like this, I’m scared of this.” But it has no maturity. You know? You read these culture war people in The Times and the op-ed sections, and other than being annoying, it’s very easy to see that these people are chomping at the bit. But it’s really just opinions without any development. It’s like, “Oh, that made me feel a certain way,” and then it gets sent off to the printer and they never think about it again. I don’t think these guys are actually going around fuming all the time. 

TURNER: Did you hear Pamela Paul got fired?

CHU: I did hear that she got fired, and I am going to write about it.

TURNER: Delightful. Delicious. Well, last few questions. I know that I’ve taken a bunch of your time, and I really, really appreciate it.

CHU: Oh, of course.

TURNER: You write a lot about desire. What’s the closest you’ve been to being rescued from wanting things, which is a phrase that you use in the Myra Breckinridge essay?

CHU: Rescued from wanting things. Gosh. Well, I mean, going through a breakup can be an experience of that, even when it’s mutually agreed upon. All kinds of things happen in a breakup. On the one hand, you have to acknowledge the ways that the desire has been absent for longer than you were willing to admit. At the same time, most of the time—and not every breakup in my life has been like this—you also have to reckon with the fact that the desire is present much longer than you wanted it to be. Those two things together, usually operating simultaneously, can be a very difficult experience. The best kind of breakup is one in which you can mutually rescue each other from wanting to be with each other.

TURNER: Yeah, that makes sense. You write about Walter Pater’s claim of the critic’s mission to keep the flame alive in oneself. How do you keep the flame alive in yourself?

CHU: Oh gosh. I mean, it feels like keeping the flame in check is the taller order. It depends on what we mean by the flame, I suppose. For me, I have a very active mind, so I’ve learned over time that one of the really important things for myself as a writer is to stop working, even if I haven’t gotten very much done. Observing deadlines and then giving myself dumb shit to do is, in a way, much more important than trying to go to a museum and reignite my passion for visual art or something like that. I don’t often lack for interest. It’s more that I will neglect myself. Anything I can do to relax is maybe the most important part of the process.

TURNER: What’s your favorite snack? You’ve talked about snacks a bunch.

CHU: What’s my favorite snack? Well, I mean, like many other Americans, last year I was introduced to the NERDS Gummy Clusters.

TURNER: What?

CHU: You don’t know what it is, or you’re surprised I was introduced to it?

TURNER: I don’t know what it is.

CHU: NERDS has reinvented itself by taking many little NERDS and affixing them to a small gummy.

TURNER: Oh.

CHU: It’s like a NERDS rope.

TURNER: Uh-huh.

CHU: It’s NERDS knots, essentially. They kept the NERDS rope and cut it into pieces and changed the ratio so there’s a little more gummy. It is miraculous. They are so appallingly good. I’m shocked that you’ve missed this boat. 

TURNER: Okay, I’ll have to get on that. Can you tell me a little bit more about your fascination with the movie Don Jon?

CHU: I mean, I don’t know if I would say I’m still fascinated with Don Jon. But you mean in the context of Females?

TURNER: Females, and the essay that preceded it, which used to be on your website but I couldn’t gind it again.

CHU: I took it down because it’s in the book now. Did they tell you, by the way, that a second edition is coming out?

TURNER: They did not, but that’s very exciting.

CHU: Yes. I’ve written a new afterword.

TURNER: A doubleheader for you this year.

CHU: It’s a very cool new cover. They did a really great job. So Don Jon—I mean, I spent several years in graduate school thinking about the feminist sex wars. It was a real area of focus for me in terms of my studies, because it continues to be a flashpoint and because it continues to be argued about. What was just so nicely revelatory to me was that it made it clear that there is a disconnect between the historical discourse about the anti-porn position that feminists have or had and what was actually going on. The film is very clear that watching porn makes Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character into less of a man. So to take that to its logical conclusion, I think anti-porn attitudes that continue to exist now, whether they are feminist or not, are coming from the same place that fears about the increased numbers of trans people are coming from. They’re coming from the fear of drag queens in libraries, which is a fear that men are becoming feminized, or that men are giving into some sort of feminizing impulse that was already there inside of them and that they’re failing to guard against. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I think that is the most interesting theory of pornography I have ever read, because I basically have read them all. I mean, I had immersed myself in this and was like, “It’s really interesting that I’ve never seen this before.” It ended up being a very, very helpful object in that original paper. And then, in Females, I get into how the message of that movie is that if you are a man and you watch porn, you will lose your desire to fuck Scarlett Johansson. And that is dire.

TURNER: Since the movie was released, the pornographic landscape has changed pretty substantially.

CHU: Oh yeah, for sure. That was part of trying to develop a larger theory of feminization, but I think we are going to see, in a very concrete way with this administration, the weird knots that the right—and not just the right, but also the center—will tie themselves into in order to forfend against the prospect of men becoming less like men.

TURNER: Right. And I believe Females theorizes that there is not an envy of the phallus, but rather a desire to not be held up to some sort of phallic ideal.

CHU: I mean, it’s a thing that’s actually, in a way, very moving about imagining this mythical man who is waiting for his wife to go to sleep and then is jerking off in the bathroom to whatever. In a deadening, heterosexual culture, there’s something sympathetic about it. For me, there is ultimately a tiny piece of optimism to be found, which is that, on some level, he knows that he doesn’t want to be a man.

TURNER: Okay, I know I said this 20 minutes ago, but my last couple of questions. One, do you miss grad school?

CHU: No.

TURNER: Two, do you miss Twitter?

CHU: Yes, of course. I miss what Twitter was. I think it was the right decision for me to get off it when I did, and I wouldn’t want to be back on it, but I do miss it. And in a way, it’s better that now it’s gone..

TURNER: You’ve talked about the girl’s sleepover as an ideal form of sociality. Since having thought about that, have you gotten to indulge in that practice or ritual and is it what you hoped it would be?

CHU: What? An actual sleepover?

TURNER: Yeah.

CHU: No, I don’t think so. I mean, it wouldn’t be accessible to someone who is an adult, I think. I think being a kid would be too much part of it.

TURNER: Not an adult girls night out? Or in?

CHU: I don’t know. Maybe there are things that would qualify for that, but I don’t think it’s the framing that I would choose to use anymore. There’s forms of female sociality that maybe have kinship with that in my life. It’s not the sort of thing that I spend as much time worrying about anymore, in part because, like with Twitter, there would be no way to go back even if I wanted to.

TURNER: Well, thank you so much for your time.

CHU: Totally. This has been lots of fun.