If I Close My Eyes

Terry Nguyen talks with Ben Fama about his debut novel, If I Close My Eyes (SARKA, 2023).

To quote Billie Eilish, “When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” This question makes an appropriate companion to If I Close My Eyes, the pop culture-infused debut novel from poet Ben Fama. You can read the novel’s title as a dare or a daydream, a condition proposed in the conditional. If I close my eyes, then what? Will I dream or nightmare, or will I disappear altogether?

The novel begins like a nightmare. An afternoon book signing and Kim Kardashian meet-and-greet turns into the site of a shooting, the sudden gunfire “like snapping bubble wrap.” Among the wounded are 19-year-old Jesse Shore, a wannabe Hollywood screenwriter and nepo baby, and 29-year-old starlet Marsy-Rose Arena, who strike up a virtual friendship in the event’s aftermath. The novel, at its heart, is a love story between Jesse and Mars, two people with diametrically different lives and desires but whose fates become briefly and bizarrely entangled. Set in Hollywood, where the sunsets are “a bonnet over a sleepy province of ticking desperations,” and about the entertainment industry, IICME’s characters grapple with notions of fate, agency, and tragedy. “Reality is the scariest thing,” one character remarks. Reality is also something that producers can edit and stitch into ruptured fantasies

Jesse and Mars are “living in quotations,” imagining how their lives would make “great television,” and metabolizing their trauma for a foot in Hollywood’s tightly shut door. On social media, they are living the dream, but their day-to-day existence can feel like scraps of a discarded nightmare. I spoke with Fama, who I became friends with after quoting his poetry in a Dirt piece, about main character syndrome, fantasy, the Kardashians, and writing novels vs. poetry.

A BRIEF INTERRUPTION

Commerce is the culture. What we buy is a function of who we are and where we buy it. Future Commerce is the primary source for the business-minded in commerce to level up their thinking. 50,000 leaders trust Future Commerce to see around the next corner, with sexy print, sharp and incisive essays, B2B fiction; even poetry about enabling our slow decline into late capitalism. Shape the future of commerce by subscribing for free today.

Terry Nguyen: IICME feels quite meta and modern, in the sense that your characters, like people today, are extremely aware of being the main character in their life’s story. What was your intention with this awareness?

Ben Fama: I wanted to make it clear that the book knows it’s a book about how stories are told. If I was going to spend this long on an artistic work (I started in 2015), I wanted to make some strong points. The “main character” trend was easy to demonstrate by using a third person POV, something I learned from Alan Hollinghurst's novel “Line of Beauty.” From third person, we see the distance between the stories the characters think they are living (in their heads) compared to what’s going on in the world around them. That ironic distance is interesting to me because that’s where meanings become complex, and you can play with signifiers and the situations the characters get themselves into. It’s also where sympathy develops. I don’t think any of my characters believe they are the ‘main character’ of their lives. They are hungry and curious about the world beyond their self-interests, but when they try to fulfill their desires, that’s where things get interesting.

TN: There are many celebrity cameos in the novel, but none are more prominently featured than the Kardashians. I get the sense that your opinion of the family is much like Jesse’s. He’s not their biggest fan, but he’s intrigued by the production of their lives. Why the Kardashians?

BF: I believe that, like family ties and work relationships, you don’t get to choose which celebrities are in your life, you simply contend with them because you can’t really escape them. The Kardashians were the obvious selection when I was starting the book. None of the characters are particularly interested in the Kardashians, they are just sort of part of the environment. It’s interesting that the family is still as relevant as ever now, with a newer show “The Kardashians”, and Kim being on “American Horror Story: Delicate” (She is playing a publicist! I couldn’t dream this up).

TN: There’s a passage—one of my favorites, actually—where Jesse’s fantasies are described as “[indulging] the opposite to these ragged edges of the disappointing narrative life forms—ones that certainly make uninteresting television. That life is necessarily tragic, ending with nothing but a banal or even humiliating string of leftovers, what Virgil referred to as ‘tears in things,’ sorry remainders bereft of finality.”

He’s also been relapsing on drugs, which feels like a kind of purgatorial refuge for fantasies. Does fantasy have a narrative shape or coherence? What is the role of fantasy in this novel (the title itself is a reference to dreaming)?

BF: The best thing about fantasies is that there are no contradictions, so you can just dissociate and drift on away. Nostalgia is the same, it’s where we locate our desires without an active conflict. People seem more willing to see nostalgia as a poison, and I would extend that to Fantasy. Fantasy mixed with reality creates a toxic plume.

TN: I love how Jesse gets a sense of Mars through her love of films like Splendor in the Grass (1961) and The Sandpiper (1965). It’s such a specific, yet revealing way to characterize her. I’m curious: Have you watched all the films mentioned in the novel?

BF: Hell yeah I have.

TN: Having written two poetry collections, Deathwish (2019) and Fantasy (2015), do you think of IICME as a poet’s novel or somehow related to your poetic oeuvre?

BF: My obsessions are present in all of my writing: Intimacy, desire, the precession of simulacra, language itself, the play of signifiers, unstable truths. In poems I can gesture towards conflicting narratives by using phrases, but you don’t have to legitimize them around characters. It’s more 21st century affect flows, or dynamic images, like looking at ads in a magazine.

I think the poetry world has spoiled me due to all the freaks, burnouts, perverts, wingnuts, angels and visionaries I get to hangout with day to day. I would love to see analytics on sex and drug use at poetry events vs fiction events. The “fiction world” I have been exposed to in New York in the 2010s is not like that, maybe because it is an industry with financial stakes. The poetry world definitely has stakes, related to ego, acclaim and visibility, but only a few academic jobs open up from time to time. I think fiction writers are more practical people, but I also don’t think all novelists are artists.

TN: You told me once that this book was written years ago. Yet it feels so modern, probably because pop culture’s celebrity hierarchy and the landscape of Los Angeles does not change very much. What was your writing process like? Were there certain chapters or details in past drafts that didn’t make it into the final novel?

BF: This was my third attempt at a novel. I think during try number two, at an industry event, a recently published author said that writing a novel was like taking a flight, because the take off and landing are exhilarating and the long, middle of the experience is dreadful, like being over an empty desert. I believed them and would repeat this metaphor to people. One day someone pointed out how awful thinking this way was, to be writing something you felt this way about. From then on I decided not to think that way either.

I started this book on Nov 1. 2015, in the afterglow of a ridiculous Halloween party. I remember thinking I wanted to flush all of the thoughts I had been told about writing fiction and just go full in a writing project—something I thought was really ridiculous, pleasurable, and had a concrete plot (a problem for me). Writing and finishing this novel was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Once I finished this book and signed with an agent, I realized I was going to have to do several revisions before we could “go out.” I got to a point where I wanted to give up; I didn’t have anything else to give to the book. Months later, maybe a year, I randomly opened the word doc of my manuscript and just read through the work I had done, which was like 4-5 years of work by then. I thought there was still magic in my book, that I had set out to do specific things and worked really hard to do that. I split with my agent, and eventually found SARKA Press. We saw the same things in the book, with all the formal innovation and hyper-reality. That’s the novel that is published.