Author Notes: Victoria Hetherington

Victoria Hetherington Has Something To Tell YouAuthor Victoria Hetherington discusses her excerpt from her upcoming novel I Have to Tell You, featured in Issue 25: Spring 2014 of The Puritan.Like many people, I often feel huge nostalgia for my interpretation of bygone eras—experienced particularly through music. My recent obsession with The Velvet Underground led to a fascination with Andy Warhol’s Factory and, as you’ll glean from this excerpt, Edie Sedgwick. I watched all the Edie footage I could find—Edie dancing in her underwear, Edie putting on lipstick and gazing blankly into the camera, Edie at a party with Bob Dylan—and I was absolutely enchanted—and my enchantment made me feel sick. What was so interesting about her to me, beyond her appearance? Was I attracted to the spectacle of her tragedy? Because really, I knew nothing about her subjective experience, I knew nothing about how her life felt—I knew about how Lou Reed felt about her; I knew how Andy Warhol felt about her, after he’d chewed her up and spat her out.And through writing this book and putting some difficult personal experiences—experiences I'd long kept secret—into narrative, I regained a sense of personal agency, so with this piece I was kind of scolding myself. Tearing down the glamorous Edie Sedgwick hagiography I’d produced as I sat writing this chapter, listening to “Sunday Morning” over and over and watching that footage of Edie dancing—mocking that same enchantment that helped me write it in the first place. It's probably obvious that the women in my book are me, but so often the men are, too.I called the book I Have To Tell You because my characters repeat that phrase over and over, prefacing both druggy boasts and private confessions. When writing my women, I thought a lot about telling: how might a young woman, especially a famous or very pretty one, represent herself on her own terms, and how might she be thwarted? I wrote the music interview section after re-reading Stephen Marche's now-infamous interview with Megan Fox. Even as my unnamed musician is being interviewed, a format in which she can presumably speak for herself about her own struggles, she is muzzled by her publicist, and then manipulated by the music journalist. He only wants to talk about how she looks, and then to loop her into an eroticized tragic narrative, just like Edie’s. And she participates because she has to, and because the alternative—being ridiculed, becoming invisible—is unimaginably worse. Victoria Hetherington is the author of I Have To Tell You (0s&1s, 2014), the full-length novel from which this excerpt has been taken. Her work has appeared in publications like Joyland, This Magazine, Broken Pencil, and This Recording. She lives in Toronto, and you can find her here.