I’m a longtime reader and admirer of Jeanne Thornton‘s work, so I was thrilled to be able to talk with her about her new novel A/S/L. It’s a book about a lot of things: online communities, creative collaborations, fraught friendships, and video game design among them. Before the book’s debut, we met up at a Midtown bar to discuss, well, everything. And if you enjoyed this chat, I moderated an epic conversation between Jeanne and Alex DiFrancesco in 2021…
I’m not necessarily going to say Summer Fun was about a band, but a band plays a pretty big part in it. And in some ways, A/S/L is a novel where there’s a question of whether or not the band is going to get back together. Do you feel like these two novels are in dialogue with one another?
I thought about this book in some ways as being a corrective to some elements in Summer Fun. Not that Summer Fun necessarily needs a corrective or anything. The longer I worked on Summer Fun, the more I started to think about how this is a very specific kind of American novel. It’s about a musician who’s a genius. The material substrate of the novel is Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, which is a story that has tragedy in it, but we also all acknowledge that the music is good.
So I was thinking, what if you took away that assumption? What if you instead had an art form that’s as important, where you’re using as much of your brain on it, but it’s not necessarily going to equate out to something that’s universally beloved. It’s important to a certain number of people, but you can be putting that level of craft intensity, emotional importance, and all these things into it, and then also just have it not work out very well.
What if it was just never going to go anywhere in some ways? What if it’s sort of a story about failure in a different way? It’s not a story about failure to achieve potential. It’s not not that again, but I was thinking about it as related to the earlier book in that way.
There’s also the subplot in A/S/L where the father is working on music on his own, which seems connected to that.
That owes a great debt to [Jonathan Lethem’s] Fortress of Solitude, where the dad is an abstract filmmaker. There’s the idea that you can have these lonely visions that you can be very, very diligent about, and that there’s something valuable in that diligence. There’s something about that kind of monastic pursuit. It’s about this sort of spiritual dimension to creativity. But it doesn’t have to have a cash value. It doesn’t have to have a commercial value.
They’re both books about collaboration. In Summer Fun, all the collaborations in that book are a little bit messed up in one way or another. The most pure collaboration that happens in that is with the backing band, and most of their scenes got cut before the final novel. So with this, I wanted to do something that’s about what does collaboration sometimes feel like? What does it feel like to really have three people who are bringing all of their own energies to it and who misperceive one another in these ways.
It’s also notable that in A/S/L, all of that collaboration is happening when those characters are relatively young…
One of the weird things about it is just how urgent things feel when you’re young. For permissions reasons I had to cut a joke in it where they did not want to tempt the ire of Billy Corgan. But originally, the company’s motto was “Crucifying the insincere since 1997.”
So good.
They’re all haunted by these feelings and have imperfectly processed them in one way or another, to more and more punishing degrees. I felt it was I thinking going into the book, I felt like that was so noble and great. And coming out of the book, it’s sort of during the last phases of it, it was more that these people are really hung up on stuff that happened when they were quite young.
Were you involved in a similar community of game creators? I’m a little older than these characters, but I can remember sitting down one day in high school with my oldest friend, and we were using a D&D game creation engine to basically re-create our high school as, essentially, a dungeon. But there was no real community for it, so we ended up abandoning it.
This is very, very, very close to one sort of very specific gaming community. One of the starting points from this novel is one that was a very singular experience in my life. It’s called CraftQ in the book, and it’s ZZT in reality.
I can remember being on AOL as a 13-year-old and wondering if there was a Calvin and Hobbes video game, and then finding that some kid had made one. It wasn’t good or anything like that. I remember they tried to get the sense of one of the wagon rides by using this sort of janky conveyor belt sequence. But it was really interesting. There was someone who was a kid around my age, who’d been able to express some similar feelings about Calvin and Hobbes to me using a tool that’s really not meant for that.
So I got really, really steeped in this. Like Lilith in the book, I grew up in Texas. I wasn’t as disconnected from the social world as she was. But there was definitely a feeling of a realer social world in this strange game community. And the long IRC chapter, for better or for worse — it’s not a transcript or anything, but I did work pretty closely with what transcripts I could find to try to recreate that sensibility. I wanted that chapter in particular to be as faithful as possible to what it felt like to be in this space with all these kids just being late 90s toxic disasters in a way that was, in retrospect, horrifying.
At that point, it was like straddling middle school and high school for me. It was not like this. Nothing as exciting as what happens to these characters in the book happened to me, but there was always this feeling of real life being here. This community is here. I wanted to celebrate that with the book.
My publicist, the wonderful Johnny Nguyen, reached out to one of the former community members, a guy named Dr. Doss, who’s in his early 40s. He has a day job and is also doing all this archival work trying to keep everyone’s games alive. There are still people making ZZT games today. Kids who are 16 and 17, which is crazy to me; it’s hard to even imagine running it on a modern computer.
He said he really appreciated that I had written the book, and that it was surreal to see that IRC chapter, because it’s really hard to explain what this was even like to people who didn’t experience it. He said it would be easier to explain that you were in a cult, in some way. We were making games that weren’t commercially viable, that were barely even games. And we were all kids, and we were all doing it online. A lot of us are transsexuals, it turns out.
In A/S/L, you combine prose with IRC chat logs and add emails — never-sent emails included — into the mix. And there’s some use of the second person here; in keeping with the gaming theme, I was curious if that was an homage to Zork and text adventure games in that vein.
Exactly. A lot of Summer Fun was in the second person, and I made a pact with myself that if I finished that book, I would not do the next book the same way, but I wanted to still do things with point of view and stretch it in some ways. And I wanted the second person part of this book to feel very different.
One of the major touchstones for the Sash parts was interactive fiction. It was really, really hard to do her voice in the book. At any given moment during the revision, I was closer to one character and didn’t really understand the other two, and which character that was would change pretty regularly.
In the final book Lilith is the one I feel the most distant from; I just have the least connection to her in some ways. That would change if I revised it again, it’s just a process of doing it. The Sash stuff really came through for me when the email chapter came out. I was at a writing residency, Sundress Academy of the Arts, I think this was in 2018. It’s this farm space, and I was away from technology, and I realized I want to write an email from this character to another character, and realized — what if the whole chapter was this? What if so many of her chapters are this?
I think the idea of them becoming unsent came later in the revision process, with the idea of — are you familiar with the Alanis Morissette song “Unsent”? It’s this glorious song that is entirely unsent letters to exes, right? And it has this really interesting quality of what can you say if you know it’s not going to be sent.
With Sash, a lot of her project in the book is disappearing entirely. It became really interesting to think about a character who’s so intensely curating herself that just the tiniest fragments get to the surface. I think she’s got a blog that updates every six months or something with ten words apiece. So that became really interesting in that — what does it mean that the reader gets all this access to Sash that no one else in her life has?
She talks about dying here in a way that parallels with Abraxa in some ways. It really came together with the second-person parts when I was thinking about how to communicate what video games feel like. I got some feedback from my agent who is a little bit older than me and said, “I just don’t have experience with this. I don’t get what’s going on in this. I never played all the Final Fantasy games until three in the morning as a child.”
In Summer Fun, I can rely on the fact that everybody knows what “Good Vibrations” sounds like. Even if you haven’t heard deep weird Beach Boys, you’re not totally at sea with it. With Final Fantasy, and ZZT text mode gaming — not just playing it, but making it — what does it even mean to make a game if you don’t have that experience? It was a really intense craft challenge.
One of the tools that I tried to use to get that was leveraging the language of frequently asked questions files. They have this very distinct voice and it’s like a wry cookbook that’s also a fantasy novel.
You’re writing about several trans characters both before they’re out and after they’re out, so there’s a question of their identity not necessarily lining up with what they’re presenting to the world at times. That question of people showing the world different identities comes up elsewhere in the book, like the personas Sash uses for sex work — and, for that matter, for the character someone might play in a video game. Was it challenging managing all of these different layers?
I finished a draft of this book in 2019. A lot of the time between now and then has been attending to exactly that. Unlike Summer Fun, which has a really monomaniacally parasocial perspective, where the narrator is dictating to this character what happened to them in a way that’s pointedly invasive. The idea here was that each character would have access to things about the others that they that the others don’t. And so the process of working on the book was really just trying to build up the characters to be roughly equivalent with Final Fantasy VI. How deep is your Final Fantasy steeping?
I played the first couple, and more recently I played the one with the Florence and the Machine song in the beginning.
There’s one with a Florence and the Machine song?
I think it’s Florence and the Machine playing at the very, very beginning, where the heroes are all pushing a car down the highway…
Oh, yeah, XV. I’ve not played that one, actually.
I think VI was one that came out in the US as III in 1994. I remember being in elementary school and talking to people about how cool it was but it has this weird tone where it was consciously designed as an ensemble piece. Most video games have a main character, right? This was consciously designed where they didn’t do that, and there are 14 main characters that could each plausibly be the center of the story.
I wanted this to be constructed in the same way. I think that’s more typical for novels to be like that, but I got to it through Final Fantasy because I’m a dirtbag. But it was that idea that any one of the characters could feel like the main character depending on your inclination. This could be Lilith’s story where you have these weirdos she’s hacked with; this could be Sasha’s story about reckoning with this person as a side plot in her ultimate story about Lilith; this could be Abraxa who’s having her own affairs she’s introduced to by the other two. Any of those could be coherent stories depending on your inclination as you come to it.
The hardest thing to do was making sure that that felt true. Every revision pass I said okay, this time, this is going to be the main character. Everything has to work dramatically for the story. This is why I think Lilith is more siloed off than the other two for a lot of it until the very end. She’s not in the book for a whole section in the middle that’s quite intense other than the other characters talking about her. It’s one of those things where I could want to revise it forever, but you can’t. It’s done.
What does each character know at a given point? What does each character believe to be true at a given point? I went out of my way to make two canonical interpretations about what Lilith looks like. I think we might know what Abraxa looks like. I went far out of my way to not describe Sash particularly, but to have the other two have very clear ideas of what they think Sash looks like. The work of adjusting that took a long time.
There was a point reading it where I had the sudden realization that the three central characters of this book had not actually met IRL.
It’s this weird feeling of online friendships and online relationships — particularly in the 90s. Now the internet feels very different. It feels more like it’s where you go to work rather than where you go to live. It’s where you go to be friends. That was how it felt like to me in the late 90s, as a kid who was isolated, a closeted transsexual in Texas. It’s that feeling that it almost ruins it if you know what the person is other than a voice.
The supporting characters outside of the central trio also felt very well-developed. I’m thinking of Fiona’s plan for a retreat and the reading that Sash attends at one point. It felt like if A/S/L had suddenly veered off to follow one of those characters for a hundred pages, there would have been an equally important story there.
Yeah, that was conscious. I’ve done a great deal of teaching. One of the things that I try to be an obnoxious broken record with my students about is that you really can’t have minor characters in a story. There is something very rich that comes from believing that at any moment anyone in a story can become the main character of the story. If you can do that, then you’re thinking about the richness that reality actually has, and you’re engaged. I think it’s useful to try to think about what it looks like from someone else’s point of view, particularly at moments that are emotionally intense.
There’s also an almost metanarrative aspect within the novel about RPGs and three-person versus four-person parties…
There’s richness that’s available at the four-person party, and there’s lots of weird woo-woo numerology in that. I don’t think I ended up sticking with this, but: A/S/L is “age/sex/location,” but also “Abraxa/Sash/Lillith,” right? There was a period of time where I was trying to have that be true of any plausible one of the fourth characters, so if you had Marcie as the fourth character, it’s SLAM. It didn’t end up working because I ended up changing characters’ names a little bit.
Were there any books that you found useful either as reference points or as examples of what you didn’t want to do with this particular setting?
The Corrections was a distant one. Some of Martin Amis’s books; London Fields was generally quite important to me at one point. I’m always coming back to Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin in terms of having a book where either character could plausibly be the main character. That was a really strong one for me.
There were a lot of development blogs by video game people. I think dev blogs have this really specific strange tone to them — it’s hard to think of specific ones, other than maybe Jordan Mechner’s long, sometimes sorrowful and sometimes joyous diary about the making of his first game Karateka — all these moments of excitement as he figures things out, tears out features that he realizes are more complicated than he can reasonably make, dark-night-of-the-soul moments realizing just how long it takes to make game s— like prose writing timelines cubed.
There was one line in A/S/L in which one of the characters talks about writing something for their future archivist. I found that incredibly relatable; there are definitely times where I’ve jotted something down with someone like that mind.
I am glad that line stuck to you. It definitely speaks to me. I had a dear friend of mine talk about how time is quite fleeting in different ways; days are quite short. At my day job, I spent a lot of today going over an interview that’s going to appear in a book that we’re doing in December. The interview is with the author Louise Meriwether, who was interviewed toward the end of her life, maybe a year or two before she died.
The interview goes through all of these very, very specific things that you would not know were you not her. I think there’s something so deeply valuable about it; we take it for granted just with so much of our lives kind of archived and collected online.
We want to be understood in some ways. Going back to the Alanis Morissette song with the letters, some of them are quite mean, but one of my favorite of the letters is — my friend Ted Kerr talked about how this is the most generous thing you could ever say, which is, I will always have your back and be curious about you. That’s sort of what one wants from an archivist, right?
When we say we’re interested in archivists, we want someone to be curious about us, someone to have your back, to be a little exasperated by you or maybe a little angry at you, but also to get what it was like to go through the world as you. It’s kind of what novels do for us in some ways.