In The Spotlight: Claire Phillips
Claire Phillips is a Los Angeles based writer. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Motherboard-Vice to list a few. She is the writer of the thrilling and provocative novella ‘Black Market Babies’ and also teaches writing at CalArts, SCI-Arc, and UC Irvine.
I had the absolute pleasure to speak with Claire about her most recent publication, ‘A Room With a Darker View’, a memoir that chronicles her mother’s ongoing struggle with schizophrenia. We talked about the themes of family, mental illness, and feminism - which are evident throughout the book as well as the confessional writing style that the book portrays
Amelia Kennedy: First of all, congratulations on your book release! It must have been a hugely cathartic piece to conceive. What made you decide to tell the story of your mothers’ illness now?
Claire Phillips: Thank you for your interest in A Room, Amelia. In the midst of writing this book, my mother passed away. In the Jewish faith, you are encouraged to mourn a family member’s passing for a year. While I am not a practicing Jew, writing about my mother’s life was a powerful tool for honoring her memory. Prior to this, I had been reluctant to write about my mother’s battle with schizophrenia for a number of reasons. She had experienced a lot of sorrow around her diagnosis and the dissolution of her marriage in her early forties, and I did not want to cause her additional harm. When I was in graduate school at NYU studying creative writing, she suggested that if she would ever write a novel, she would title it Sad Joy. She understood well the irony of her name (Joy) and I found this remark especially heartbreaking. I should also add, my parents had been very reticent about personal matters, especially given their British postwar cultural background. This also shadowed my literary production.
In 2013 when caring for my mother became a daily thing, when she kept relapsing through no fault of her own, I knew I had to speak out. It wasn’t fair how difficult it was to access resources even with my mother’s ample insurance. It wasn’t right that psychiatrists would abandon my mother whenever she relapsed. We conflated my mother’s personality with her illness which just wasn’t right either. It was deeply troubling that my family did not try to obtain mental health care for my mother years before. That she passed away as a direct consequence of multiple relapses was deeply unfortunate. Had she received a diagnosis and treatment much earlier on when she was in her thirties, she might not have had to endure such a powerful medication with its adverse effects for as long as she did; but at least with her passing I no longer had to worry how she might take her story being exposed publicly.
AK: As a writer who has produced a study of her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia, would there be anything you would want to challenge regarding the stigma surrounding mental illness?
CP: Often I think we have overcome the stigma associated with these illnesses given the wonderful literary production on the subject of disability and illness narratives of recent years —Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenia, Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians, and Bruce Bauman’s Broken Sleep are among my favorites — and the serialized television that does a terrific job of examining the complications surrounding treatment and diagnosis: Shameless, Spinning Out, and recently the Netflix movie, Horse Girl. But I should not be naive about this.
Many families still struggle with supporting family members whose first brush with illness occurs at a young age. This is especially concerning if you consider how little support, financial or otherwise, someone in their late teens may have when they experience a manic or depressive episode or psychotic break, and how difficult it is to find housing these days. Students of mine have become homeless when faced with confusion on the part of their families until they become stabilized. Certain cultures may be suspicious of mental illness diagnoses. This is especially difficult for the person experiencing the illness, who must find the resources to get proper treatment as well as teach their family members the importance of medical treatment. A circumstance that takes great bravery, fortitude and a certain amount of good luck. Medical apartheid is a serious challenge in this country, especially when it comes to mental health.
AK: I also found there to be an exploration of the waves of feminism, as your mother initially worked as a lawyer and then you as a writer. How important was the link between this story and the idea of feminism?
CP: Because my mother was struggling with hallucinations and delusions while working hard to appear in court every day on behalf of her clients as a public defender in major metropolitan cities, she didn’t have much to offer me in terms of traditional mothering. She had also not had much mothering herself, having been sent to boarding school at eleven years old 10,000 miles from home, then Rhodesia and rarely returning home because of the distance.
I was fortunate to find single, independent women when I was attending San Francisco State University, baby boomers or second wave feminists, if you will, who had sacrificed traditional domestic life to pursue financial independence outside of the confines of corporate America. They weren’t academics, they were spa owners, when spas were not corporate chains. I learned about all kinds of new age-y stuff: saunas, massage, facials, psychic surgery, witchcraft. You name it. My family was fairly one-sided and I craved a more earthy existence outside the academy and patriarchal economies. I was a collective experiment: the teenage daughter for women who had no progeny. It was lovely and deep. I was raised by “lipstick lesbians” who modeled for me a feminist bohemianism that would be my lifeline for many years.
AK: You reference various other writers who have openly written of mental illness, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Philip K Dick. Were there any other writers who influenced your work?
CP: I worked with Maggie Nelson at CalArts in Critical Studies before she became a household name. Her books Jane: A Murder, The Red Parts, and The Argonauts definitely gave me permission to examine my family story without focusing on feelings of deprivation. Jane especially affected me. Published by Softskull, Nelson’s first book is composed of lyrical poetry, journal entries, letters, researched family history, and is utterly flawless. The underlying tragedy and feminist perspective resonated for me. The story centers on Nelson’s aunt, a bright ambitious young woman, a budding intellectual, who was tragically murdered while an undergraduate student by an unknown assailant. She was the first female in her family to forge a path in this direction and portrayed by Nelson as an incalculable loss.
This loss paralleled for me the grief I felt surrounding my mother’s lost potential. She wanted to make a name for herself in law, pursuing a career in the early 70s when barriers to employment in large legal firms for women were steep. To add to this, my mother’s untreated illness made regular employment impossible. She was able to run an office on her own and pursue work as a public defender, which she took great pride in, but she always felt at a great disadvantage. By opposite measure, her father and her husband were always winning, being lauded by their peers and the world. My mother, it seemed, was always drowning.
Jane is an elegy, a true crime mystery, and a feminist cri de coeur. I didn’t find work of this kind being written by my generation. It recharged me to read such strongly feminist work.
AK: The writing style of your book is quite fractured as it is told in memories and reflections. What was it that made you decide to write in this style?
CP: I had actually hoped to write something more experimental. A braided narrative. Chaotic, charged. Like my early poetry and on par with the essay I wrote for Black Clock magazine, commissioned by cult author and critic Steve Erickson, entitled Hanging from the Chandeliers. Instead I found the book needed to be written chronologically, beginning with my earliest memories and ending with the passing of my mother. A looser organizing principle was out of the question.
The 500-word vignette passages worked as a mnemonic device. I would write my early teens or twenties, and find by writing in this short concentrated way, I could evince a strong memory. Clouded by perception perhaps, but still in sharp focus. That felt very pleasurable to me. I also wanted the gaps to speak volumes. I wanted to lessen the intensity of the material, too. Give the reader space between agonies and adventures.
AK: I found your writing to be incredibly brave and inspiring, what advice would you give to writers looking to share their own personal stories?
CP: As far as personal stories go, I am still agog that I have told mine. I wish I had allowed myself to do so earlier. However, writing about family can be particularly challenging. You might need to change names or consider whether every anecdote is necessary in actualizing your purpose. Whether it might do more harm than good. Recently I found the words of Porochista Khakpour, author of the stunning nonfiction collection Brown Album: Essays on Exile & Identity, who just appeared in the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series that I direct at Glendale College, especially salient: as your work appears in the public sphere, your family grows with. This might not be easy, but is part and parcel of the trade.
I am also thinking of sage advice from a dear colleague and Los Angeles treasure, historian and critic Norman Klein, best known for The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. He was the first author to tell me to choose my topics carefully, and to consider becoming known for shining a light on something specific. In my case this might be illness narratives, mental health disorders, in particular.
Claire Phillips is the writer of ‘Black Market Babies’ and ‘A Room With a Darker View’. She resides in Los Angeles and teaches writing at CalArts, SCI-Arc and UC Irvine. She is co-founder and director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series at Glendale College and holds an MA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA in English from San Francisco State University.
About the Interviewer
Amelia Kennedy is a British born writer and actor based in Brooklyn, New York. She writes poetry and has had three short stories published in Literate Sunday. Amelia is currently working on her first novel entitled ‘Daughters of the Revolution’ - which will be completed this year. Her writing influences from feminist theories, punk music and Shakespeare sonnets. Find Amelia on Instagram @ameliakennedywritings
