Sam Heaps: On Fanning the Flames of Purpose, Claustrophobic Seduction, the Malleability of Memory, and Their Novella ‘The Living god’
In an interview with Sarah Gerard back in 2023, I asked what they were reading. “A few ARCs,” they said, including Proximity by Sam Heaps. I looked the book up immediately: “From CLASH Books March 2023, a literary meditation on sex. Sam Heaps is a millennial Anaïs Nin, exploring their most intimate power struggles with a raw and artful voice.” SOLD.
I’ve followed Sam Heaps’s career ever since, and I was beyond thrilled when I saw the book announcement for The Living god to be released with SARKA. Told in an intimate, hallucinatory first-person voice, The Living god follows a pregnant woman, “baby,” who is holed up in a motel in rural Montana, haunted by memories of her life inside a charismatic commune led by the magnetic, manipulative Elaina. As she waits with her lover Jesse—Elaina’s former partner and fellow defector—she drifts between scenes, dream sequences, and vivid recollections of her years of devotion to Elaina, caring for her son Immanuel, and competing for her attention and love.
The book becomes a meditation on faith, desire, submission, and the cost of giving one’s life over to another’s vision of salvation. Sam Heaps captures so well the inescapable pull of the past. Their prose often feels like a spell itself—immersive, disorienting, intoxicating. The Living god is a mystical potion, and readers should be ready to drink it up.
Brittany Ackerman: It’s so great to finally talk shop with you! Congrats on this transcendent experience of a book. Whew! Where to begin? I guess let’s talk about the narrative voice first.
The narrative weaves between sensual nostalgia and raw disillusionment, portraying Elaina as both prophet and predator, able to inspire radical visions of community while binding followers in cycles of control and dependency. The narrator recalls the cult’s feasts, theological debates, shifting power dynamics, and her own gradual erosion of autonomy, even as she convinced herself each act of subjugation was an act of love.
How did you approach structuring such a fluid, nonlinear narrative? And how did you find and sustain this voice?
Sam Heaps: I’m so excited to finally be doing this interview, Brittany! And, thank you for the kind words about Proximity. It is still a book I am very proud of. I’m so honored by the time you’ve taken here, and the careful thought you’ve given god!
I think one of the main motivations for writing god has always been this desire to expose in writing the illusion of perceived time. And so structurally, the organization of the book did not plod forward in a single linear line but instead tried to illuminate the path forward in the day, as it excavated the compounded experiences that shaped every moment for baby.
So much of trauma recovery is this arduous process of convincing the body it is lying to you and that you are no longer in danger. To the point that some treatments, like EMDR and Ketamine therapy, look and feel more like hypnosis, trickery, than any real enlightenment or truth. In my own recovery journey, in talking to friends, this idea of “the hurt” being history increasingly seemed to be fallacy. It felt to me like another convenient lie I was being told to control me or make me easier to handle, as much of my life had been a series of lies to keep me docile and compliant.
Baby is contained. By the narrative, by her financial constraints, by her family history, by her overbearing lovers, by a society without any systemic supports, by her own inability in text to even audibly verbalize in a way we as readers can recognize or be sure of. Through her suffering in this state, as well as the memories of the spirits who surround her with their own narratives, I wanted the reader to feel the way a CPTSD survivor feels. Everything is happening all at once and forever and nothing can ever end. You are lonely, but you are not ever at peace. So, I guess this book cannot, to me, exist in a solely linear fashion. The form is part of the purpose.
BA: The whole thing is a complete fever dream that felt extremely cinematic to me, reminiscent of films like Martha Marcy May Marlene and Kinds of Kindness. These are where the plot isn’t necessarily what’s propelling the vehicle forward, but rather the character work is what ignites the flame of purpose.
Particularly in the third installment of Yorgos Lanthimos’s triptych, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” cult members Emily and Andrew (devoted followers of leaders Omi and Aka) seek a prophesied woman capable of resurrecting the dead. Emily, estranged from her family and deemed “contaminated” by cult standards after being drugged and assaulted by her husband, pursues this miracle to win reacceptance.
I couldn’t help but compare Emily to Living god’s baby in her forbearance amid the brutal manipulations and tragedies at the hands of the others. The way she moves between devotion-jealousy-memory-hallucination shifts her status at every turn. How did you think about shaping her as both a reluctant disciple and a deeply sympathetic, haunted survivor?
SH: I don’t think you become a zealous disciple of anything if you’re able to meet your own needs in your life.
I love a lot of Lanthimos’s work but haven’t had time to see this triptych yet. What you’re saying, though, reminds me of a lot of films and books, and these kind of broken characters sunk into these rigid belief systems. I’m thinking of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, or even the new Ari Aster, Eddington, which stars Emma Stone as someone drawn to radical belief to escape their own past. I don’t particularly enjoy watching these films or reading these books. I’m usually a very annoyed observer sitting there saying, yes, that’s right, good for you for noticing. But I know many of these films are revered and they do highlight an often overlooked truth.
It is interesting to me the way we know inherently that people who are drawn to faith are people who are being let down or injured by their fellow man, and the systems of care we refuse to tend. Proselytizers of Christian faiths in particular promote Jesus as a force which can cleanse sins, and bring the dead to life. But what we find interesting about these stories is not just the con of the sales-pitch, but more the luridness of the fall. The humiliation that comes with momentary alleviation. These are no different than the way we tell stories about drug or alcohol addiction. The appeal is in seeing someone worse off sinking lower than we imagine we possibly could. The Living god is just starting to try to turn its eye outward, to place the blame where it ought to be on our collective inability to believe in one another and approach some kind of restoration. Baby still believes she is inherently weak, and I think, without help, she will forever. But I don’t think Claire or Martha or Georgette always will. I’d be interested to see the ways they decide to address their pain going forward.
BA: To bring another film into the mix, I thought of Dune: Part Two, when Lady Jessica is forced to consume the Water of Life, a poisonous bright blue liquid extracted from a young sandworm. It’s a ritualistic drink that is part of the process for a Bene Gesserit sister to become a Reverend Mother in order to gain access to the memories of the past Reverend Mothers. To an untrained individual, the substance is lethal. This radical experience also fundamentally alters Jessica’s unborn daughter, Alia, who is born with full ancestral knowledge.
The Living god interrogates similar ideas of faith and submission. There are aspects that are simultaneously alluring and dangerous.
I’m interested if you could discuss this reimagining of generational trauma, be in a family or a community, and what drew you to these themes?
SH: Definitely. It is very interested in generational trauma. Initially a large section of this book was told from the perspective of Patience and Lily, the two women Jesse is dreaming of in the book’s opening. Mormons have a documented obsession with genealogy and ancestral lineage, and growing up I had a deep familiarity with my ancestors. Particularly those who traveled across the country via wagon and handcart. One ancestor of mine, Patience Loder, even kept a diary of her experiences, which I had a printed booklet of. I was even compelled by the church to dress as her and reenact her struggles during a miserable month in Wyoming in the early aughts.
But while I was being encouraged to develop this obsession with settlers, I was also developing a romantic relationship with a girl in my neighborhood from the Nez Perce tribe. This kind of broke me open in a few ways. First was the obvious homosexual attraction and the way gender changed for me in our dynamic, and then the kind of really racist mythology around native tribes in The Book of Mormon which I was forced to interrogate, and with it this opening of white guilt and confusion. This was the relationship that ultimately led to me leaving the church. But, then long after I left it of course opened up anger at the poverty both of us were raised in, which women like Patience Loder seemed directly responsible for. And so then for a long time I struggled with this closer-to-home domestic terror I felt evident in a lot of my female relatives and ancestors’ lives, and also this unbearable wrath at their dogmatic abuse and stupidity, and the way I felt it living in me. Sam Shepard really says it best in The Starving Class when a character talks about his father and recognizes “His poison in my body.”
Baby, Jesse, Elaina, and many of the other disciples in god are low-class white people struggling with identity and shame and physical and spiritual destitution. Climbing out through beauty or conniving or luck and finding their histories are in their bodies forever.
I’m sorry I’m so behind on pop culture, so I also haven’t seen any of the Dune films. I feel like your question has more of a positive association with this kind of passing on of knowledge. I don’t think I was playing with that so much, although I like the idea. Some inoculation to the pain through transference? Some knowledge that teaches one to avoid the same mistakes? I wish it worked that way. Or that I knew a way to make it work that way.
BA: Cutting back to Martha Marcy May Marlene, where a young woman struggles to reintegrate into normal life after escaping a manipulative cult in the Catskills, grappling with trauma and paranoia that blurs the lines between past and present. The fear and turmoil are palpable on screen.
Your novel captures the claustrophobia and seduction of life in a closed community. What do you hope readers carry with them about power dynamics in such groups?
SH: I hope readers take away a wariness of any insular community and its structure of hierarchy. I hope they are willing to question openly those excluded from their group, and why.
What is the dominant narrative in these communities? Do you believe this story, and if you have an issue with it, can you interrogate it without risking expulsion? What are you personally willing to sacrifice to your desire to belong, and do you recognize the full scope of the consequences of your actions or inaction within this group?
BA: One of the aspects of the book I find most compelling is the way memory bends, shifts, and even dissolves. There is so much meaning to be found in these distortions.
How do you think the malleability of memory shapes the stories we tell—whether the stories of our own survival or the fictional worlds we create to seek understanding and purpose?
SH: There is some general consensus right now that essay/creative non-fiction/memoir should be labeled simply as fiction. Or that these genres somehow can meld together into some autofiction conglomerate.
Proximity is a memoir. That does not mean it is a perfect accounting—like you say, memory is malleable, experience is biased—but it is as true a telling as I was capable of at the time of writing. And there have been both professional and personal consequences for me, not even naming names, but just saying this is not fiction, this story is true and matters to me to tell.
I think there is a lot of bravery in writing an essay or piece of memoir and not hiding behind a character and being willing to say, This happened. I experienced this. So it is eternally frustrating to me when I find Proximity shelved in the fiction section. If I was not trying to represent true power imbalances and wrongs, I would have fudged some things and I definitely would have looked a lot shinier coming out of it. I think that trying is important. I think it created a shape that was sometimes looping or redundant, or annoyingly interrogative, because it was kind of bound by the limitations of my lived experience.
Whereas in god I get to be much more playful with fallibility. Who is me and which memories are folded into a shape easier for me to tolerate is part of the joy of novel writing. And I’m really interested in people who are playing with the fallibility of memory like Catherine Lacey, or even Benjamín Labatut, but I think there is still space to tell a story that is your truth and call it that.
The Living god is, of course, also a book seeking truth—it just does not claim to be constrained by absolute honesty in that pursuit. I think the question should always be what is the best way to tell the truth here.
BA: To end on something, perhaps, weird, I’d love to know your own personal definition of faith and what it means to you. This might relate to your writing practice or some personal pedagogy. Or even, how do you define faith in our day and age?
SH: Oh, an easy question to end with.
My inclination is to say I do not have a relationship with faith. Or, that faith to me is danger. Is surrender of power, is willful ignorance, is cowardice, an inability to live the reality of daily life. This, you can see, slips quickly into cynicism, even nihilism. And is also mean.
I was reading recently about Charity Woodrum, a NASA scientist who lost her son and husband in a freak accident in 2017. The way she talks about her relationship to the night sky is maybe the closest feeling I have to religious belief. The comfort in our smallness, and simultaneously the meaningfulness of each celestial interaction or rejuvenation, and that ricocheting impact on our relationships with one another here. Human and animal and environmental. I find comfort in this largeness the way some find comfort in God. But, since it is as real as anything else—it seems a matter of focus. I would not call it faith.
I would never presume to have a strict definition of faith in our day and age. Although, I do think the same muscles that atrophy in faith atrophy under fascism. Or, the same needs are met by both systems.
I will also say, I do not think faith is the same thing as hope, daily action, or love. Even though it is often confused for these things. And I do not believe it can replace these things.
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Sam Heaps is the author of Proximity (Clash 2023), a labor organizer, an adjunct writing professor at Temple University, and a political philosophy student at NYU. The Living god is their first novel.
