Markita Naomi Schulman
An Interview with Eula Biss
Eula Biss makes the case for interconnectedness. Our responsibilities to one another are at the center of her work, in her writing on wealth, vaccination, race, and romance. In a social and historical moment defined, in part, by isolation and division, Biss’s books feel especially urgent.
On Immunity addresses childhood vaccination and the way our bodies affect the health of other bodies. Though On Immunity comes out in favor of vaccination, Biss is careful not to demonize any individual for their choice to vaccinate or not. In the context of COVID-19, the book is newly relevant, but Biss is careful not to claim expertise.
Having and Being Had, Biss’s most recent book, is a frank examination of class and property ownership made up of short meditations on paint colors, IKEA, Monopoly, and much else—the quotidian manifestations of capital and its complexities. The essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land is an account of whiteness, illuminated by Biss’s personal experiences across America, from teaching in New York City to reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego. In both books, Biss writes about privilege from within privilege—but it is never that simple. She troubles commonly accepted ideas about power and prejudice and challenges too-easy terms—“classism,” “racism,” “privilege”—that elide meaningful criticism.
This winter, Biss joined me for a conversation about humility, writing into discomfort, fear as an implement of violence, and more.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How are you doing?
EULA BISS: I’m in a major transition period. I left my teaching job and am working out new ways of doing work.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m curious how you’ve been spending your time during the pandemic, because so much of your work is concerned with connection and building community. How have you managed to stave off disconnection in this period of transition and isolation?
EULA BISS: For the first time ever, I’m renting a space for writing, and I share it with two other writers, which is really great. I love it. That has helped. The community of the university was really important to me and that made leaving difficult. That was probably the hardest part to leave—being in constant conversation with all these interesting people. I’m working on rebuilding that outside of the institution of the university—outside of any institution at all.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Since you’re in your writing space now, could you tell me about any new projects you’ve been working on?
EULA BISS: I’ve been spending a ton of time writing, since I’m not teaching right now. I’m very happily working on a new book, a collection of essays. The first essay, I’ve actually been working on for years. This book is a companion to my book that just came out, Having and Being Had, but this book is different stylistically, it’s different in its focus, it’s very outward-looking. It’s a book about land and property ownership and the politics around land and property. Its scope is international.
The first essay is about the birth of private property as we know it, in England, somewhere around the seventeenth century. There’s a long, fuzzy period in which our contemporary understanding of property emerged and replaced all these other communal, collective ways of understanding how land could be used and held. Up until that point, almost everywhere, even if you owned land, other people could use it. That was the huge shift that happened with private property as we practice it now: the idea that, if you own land, other people can’t use it, other people don’t have rights to it. So it’s a long essay about medieval England, which is not at all where I would have predicted I would end up. I had no baseline knowledge about that area or that time period, but it’s super interesting to me—it’s become interesting—and it’s a long essay. The longer I work on it, the longer it is.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It sounds fascinating! And it sounds like a great continuation of Having and Being Had, which is so inward-looking.
EULA BISS: Yeah. I felt like I needed to do the inward work first. I knew I wanted to write this other book, but I felt like I needed to take a hard look at my own assumptions, my own value system, my own relationship with property, money, capitalism, before I charged in and started making critiques of global economic systems. I felt like I should really take a hard look at myself first. And actually there were a lot of surprises that came up in that process. I think I was under the impression that because I was an artist, I somehow lived outside this system, which is not at all true, and almost nobody does. I think I definitely had some delusions, and the book really helped me do away with some of those delusions and be a little more clear-eyed about where I’m writing from. It did what I needed it to do, which is set me up to be more responsible in the way I meet these other subjects, which are almost all located in different places or different time periods. I felt like I needed to know who I was in the here and now before I went traipsing all over time and space.
I have a couple other essays in mind for this new collection. One I’ve done the research for, and that’s about land politics in South Africa. That’s probably the next thing I’ll be working on after the new year. And then I’ll be sinking into something that I’m excited about, which is learning about Native American land ownership practices in the area of the country that I’m from, which is upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley. There’s a lot I don’t know there about land ownership and land processes that were in place before colonization. All this is super exciting to me, but it’s very different work. It’s research-heavy work. Like, I spent most of this morning reading about pilgrims.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m interested in the idea of a personal accounting that must be completed before research and critique can begin. For Having and Being Had, you created a specific set of rules that you had to follow—which was really a set of rules of polite conversation that you had to break—including naming specific sums of money and not minimizing what you had. I’m curious how uncomfortable it can be to do this kind of inward accounting—regarding wealth and property, and race, too, for Notes from No Man’s Land.
EULA BISS: One of the things that I have learned over now twenty years of practice is that when something makes me uncomfortable in a work, it’s the thing I need to do. Earlier in my practice as a writer, there would be a long period of me dancing with my own discomfort, where I’d come close to something and then say, “I don’t want to go there,” and I’d hide from it, but then the essay would bring me back around to it, and I’d have to face it. I think now, as I’ve matured as a writer, part of where those rules came from was, as soon as I detected avoidance or discomfort in myself, I was like, “Okay, now there’s a rule that will make you go there.” So really those rules all came out of observing my own discomfort and locating it and then making a rule that would disallow myself from avoiding it. This was probably the most rule-burdened book that I’ve written, but I’ve had rules like that in the past that were all designed to just drive me deeper into the ideas. What I really didn’t want to have happen in Having and Being Had is, I didn’t want to be so scared or embarrassed of my subject matter that I couldn’t think clearly about it. I really just couldn’t allow myself to hide—though I really wanted to. Hide from myself, hide from the reality of my material conditions, hide from my own privilege. One of the rules I made for myself, which I don’t think I even put in the back of the book when I wrote about this, was that I wasn’t allowed to write about how hard I work. That’s another middle class trope: “Oh, I have all this stuff, but I’ve worked so hard for it.” So I just made a rule that you’re not allowed to say that, nor are you allowed to imply that. Those rules did accomplish what I wanted them to, and they did drive me deeper into the ideas. They drove me deeper into inquiries. They made me ask questions that I wouldn’t otherwise ask. They made me look hard at things that I’d prefer not to look at.
Earlier in my work, I had other rules. In Notes from No Man’s Land—that book was all about racial identity and whiteness—one of the rules that I made for myself was that I wasn’t allowed to use the word “racism.” It was a book that was essentially about racism, but I felt that it was a kind of crutch for me, using that word. I think that this rule came about because I used the word once, then asked myself, “What do you really mean by it in that context?” Because racism has so many different meanings in so many different contexts, so many different little inflections. When I asked myself that question and had to translate what I meant by the word in that context, I ended up with three pages of writing. It took three pages to say what I had tried to say with one word, and once I saw that I thought, “Oh, okay, this is now the way it’s gotta be in this book. I’m not allowed to just use the word ‘racism’ to shorthand what might need to be three pages or ten pages or a lot more, what might involve talking about history and context, my own complicity, all kinds of other things.” Saying “racism” also can sometimes be for white people a way of just saying, “I recognize the problem, but I’m not gonna say any more on it.” So that’s another rule that I can bring to mind. Again, the purpose was to drive me deeper into the work and drive me deeper into the questions.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I notice in reading your work that the word “privilege,” which is used to mean so many different things, also comes up very infrequently. It’s always more specifically defined.
EULA BISS: Yes.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is it like to follow these rules and confront these areas of discomfort knowing you’re doing it for an audience? How does that change the work?
EULA BISS: Really, for most of writing Having and Being Had, it was probably the first time that I wrote with a real dread of the work becoming public. I didn’t like the idea. I eventually could only get writing done if I said to myself, “You don’t have to publish this. You have to write it for yourself, but you don’t have to publish it.” That became harder to say after I sold the book, and I sold it before it was finished. So I did have to publish it. Actually, I was contractually obligated to publish the book. I knew that, but I still tried to tell myself, “You don’t have to leave any of this on the page. Just get everything on the page, and then you can take away whatever you want to.” I told myself that about the monetary amounts that are actually in the book. My salary is in the book, what it cost for me to go to college is in the book, there are a lot of exact sums in the book, and that was definitely a rule that was important for me in terms of tracking money in my own life, but it definitely made me uncomfortable. I was not excited about all those numbers being public. I did tell myself, “Okay, you can take those out when it’s published,” but ultimately, I didn’t. To me, this book was partly an exercise in honesty—not exactly honesty with an audience, because it’s not a full accounting, right? There are a lot of aspects of my financial life that don’t make it to the page. Because I’m an artist, I have a really complicated financial life. I’ve got lots of 1099s, you know. They’re all for like two hundred dollars, but I file like twenty of them. So I’ve got a lot of paperwork in my life, and it would be a really boring work if I treated it as an audit. But I think the real project for me was a project that was around honesty, and the honesty was with myself. I wanted to be honest with myself about class and money, which was harder than I anticipated. During the writing of this book, I came to believe that actually very few people are entirely honest with themselves around class and money. More and more, I detected that in my conversations with other people. Partly because I spent all day not allowing myself to take certain easy outs, I became very familiar with those easy outs and then constantly noticed them when other people used them. Little elisions or fabrications. You know, there are all kinds of stories we tell ourselves around money and class. It’s maybe mostly story telling—very little accounting and lots of story telling.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I think there’s a generosity in exposing your personal accountings, offering up that internal honesty to others. As you talk about inward- and outward-looking elements of your work, one moment in particular comes to mind. Notes from No Man’s Land ends with an apology: “I apologize for slavery. It wasn’t me, true. But it might have been my cousin.” In both Having and Being Had and Notes from No Man’s Land, you write about privilege from within privilege in a way that is neither self-flagellating nor self-congratulatory. It doesn’t strike me that you’re seeking absolution. Why end the book with an apology? For whom?
EULA BISS: Yes, it is true that I’m not seeking absolution in my writing. At least not earthly absolution, and certainly not absolution in the realm of public opinion. I don’t need or want a reader to declare me good or innocent—in fact, that would be a failure of my efforts, particularly in writing about whiteness. But I am writing out of a deep desire for insight into repair, or reparations on the grandest scale. These reparations, these efforts toward truth and reconciliation, are as necessary for the wellbeing of the historically oppressive as they are for the historically oppressed. I believe that racism is a mutually damaging system, and I write from within that damage—through it, and hobbled by it—in an effort to save my own soul as much as anything else. In writing that closing essay “All Apologies,” in thinking about what an apology might or might not be worth, I was struck by something a psychologist said about apologies for devastating acts that have harmed a great many people—the greater the impact of the act, the longer it may take to make an appropriate apology. The apology might even need to be made generations later, and it might need to be an ongoing, elaborate apology that is offered by many people in many different ways. I was thinking of that when I wrote the last line of that essay. But I wasn’t thinking of my apology as being for someone else. Any apology for slavery is, I believe, an apology for what we’ve done to ourselves. How monstrous we’ve made ourselves.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’d like to talk about On Immunity, your book about vaccination, which I know you keep getting asked about, for obvious reasons, recently. In the book, you can be scathing about people in positions of power and influence, but you are also so intentionally respectful of individual choices—the choice to vaccinate or not vaccinate one’s children. I wonder what it feels like to have that text be brought up now, in the context of COVID-19, years after you first wrote it. What does it feel like to be asked, “What do we do about people who are vaccine hesitant?” when the subtext so often seems to be, “What do we do about those backwards people, those irrational people, those bad people?”
EULA BISS: I’m really, really glad that I wrote that book in a different context, because I think it reveals to me things that might be difficult to see in this context. I was writing about vaccination when no one was looking in that direction, right? It’s like everyone’s looking over there and I’m looking over here. It does feel strange to suddenly have everyone looking over here when they’ve been looking over there for a long time. I’m not used to it as an essayist. My mode is a little bit like, “Okay, where’s everyone looking? I’ll look somewhere else.” So it does feel strange to suddenly have all eyes turned on a subject that, in the moment I was writing about it, was considered a very small subject.
That’s part of why I was writing about it. It was considered a small subject, and it was feminized in various ways, partly in that it was considered a matter of concern mostly to mothers, particularly new mothers. I’m talking now about around 2009, around the time when I was beginning to write that book. In that moment, when people who didn’t vaccinate were criticized, there was often a really strong, either overt or covert, insinuation of misogyny. The assumption was—actually, the reality is that a lot of the decision-making around vaccination is done by women. But the assumption was, “This decision is being made by a woman, and, if the decision is not a good decision, it must be because she’s dumb or doesn’t know anything about science or isn’t capable of understanding the complexities of this.” That was present in a lot of the popular coverage of vaccination at that time. That has changed, I will say. But, in that moment, which wasn’t that long ago, there was a real, palpable sexism in a lot of the popular coverage in newspapers and magazines—and also, definitely, if you talked to medical professionals, which I did when that book was published. I visited a bunch of medical schools, and there were still some vestiges of that there: this sometimes unintentional or unexamined misogyny, and this assumption that people who are not vaccinating are dumb, that they are science-deniers.
A lot of what was driving that book was a kind of feminist project, which was: Let’s assume that women are smart. As smart as anyone—and as dumb as anyone—but no dumber or smarter than anyone else. Let’s just have that be our baseline assumption. And women are just as capable of understanding science as anyone else. Let’s just start there. That was my project, that book was very explicitly feminist. It was, for me, a conversation that I framed as a conversation between women. The book is dedicated to other mothers, and I saw myself as speaking to other mothers. There are people of all genders who make vaccination decisions, but, because of the misogyny I saw, I wanted to speak directly to the people who were being, I thought, misunderstood.
So, that’s a long preamble, I know, but, as to how the whole experience affects the conversations I’m having now . . . That book is pro-vaccination, and it’s fairly obviously pro-vaccination. Now, when I’m invited into conversations about vaccination, I often feel conscripted into a kind of exchange that I’m actually not comfortable having, which is the, “Why are these people so dumb?” kind of conversation. I’m just not willing to do that, because I feel like there’s a lot we don’t know. Even very recently, I was talking on a podcast with Jonathan Katz and, in preparation for that, I was reading around a little bit and found this New York Times article that was really revealing to me. I read it, because the headline was, “The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think,” and I was like, “That’s what I’ve been suspecting.” One of the pieces of data that the journalist mentioned was that the best predictor that someone will be unvaccinated is not their politics, it’s not their age, it’s not their race, it’s not any other affiliation; it’s whether they have health insurance or not. That, to me, was an interesting complicating factor. That’s something we’re not talking about as much as we probably should be: yes, we’re a big, rich, industrialized country, but we have a shockingly high number of people who don’t have health coverage, and these people might have really different attitudes around healthcare, because their experiences have probably been really different than those of people who have a doctor who they can reliably see and who don’t get most of their healthcare in emergency rooms and who don’t have bad experiences all the time. I’m just extrapolating from the data, I don’t know what the real story is, but the data suggests that there is a real story to be found out there. Something is going on between a person’s healthcare coverage status and their relationship to vaccination, so it may be just not having a relationship with a doctor you trust and can talk to, or it could be a whole other world of complexity.
That’s a long way of saying that, as I engage in the conversation of now, I’m trying to remember the lessons of that book. Because of my political affiliations and leanings, now I have hardly any contact with people who don’t vaccinate, or people who I know don’t vaccinate. That wasn’t true around the other question of childhood vaccination. I was around a lot of people who didn’t vaccinate their children, and I talked directly to them about it. That’s not my situation right now. I know almost nobody who’s not vaccinated or who is opposed to COVID vaccination. That includes a lot of people who weren’t vaccinating their kids, who now are definitely vaccinating them and themselves against COVID. So I think I also have a different vantage point. I don’t have the same kind of access to the other side of the story that I had with this other question around childhood vaccinations, and I feel very cognizant of that. I feel reluctant to wade into this conversation thinking I know people’s motivations for not vaccinating or thinking I know exactly what’s going on in other people’s minds.
The other part of that is that writing On Immunity gave me tremendous respect for true expertise. I spent a lot of time interviewing various experts in all kinds of areas: immunologists, infectious disease experts, toxicologists. The breadth and depth of their knowledge was incredibly impressive. One of the things I came out of that book very clear on was that I’m not an expert in this area. My partner said he was going to make me a button or a T-shirt that said, “I’m the essayist, not the expert.” Because I was constantly having to communicate that to people. It’s so easy in our culture to establish fake authority and fake expertise. People were totally willing to accept me as an expert on vaccination after this one book, and I had to constantly say when I was asked for interviews and things, “You know, I’m not an expert,”or, asked a certain question, “You know, that’s a great question for an epidemiologist. I can’t answer that.” I remember I opened one interview by saying, “I’m not an expert,” and the interviewer said, “I’ve never had the author of a book say that to me before.” But I very much feel that now. Questions of public health are very intricate, and they involve so many factors, and I feel deep respect for the people whose job it is to coordinate all these factors and work with partial knowledge, knowledge that’s imperfect and in progress. We’re watching knowledge be born around COVID right now, which is amazing and exciting, but also terrifying. We know there’s a lot we don’t know. So it’s with tremendous humility that I continue to engage.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I admire the humility and sense that that’s part of the motor that drives the project.
EULA BISS: Yes.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In On Immunity, you explored the role of metaphor in discussions of illness, contagion, and vaccination. During the COVID-19 pandemic, plenty of figurative language has become commonplace; “the health of the economy” and “flattening the curve” are two phrases that come to mind. How much, if any, harm do metaphor and abstraction do? Is there a better language for talking about illness and death?
EULA BISS: “The health of the economy” is a particularly telling phrase. The idea that people might need to die to preserve the “health of the economy” reveals how disturbingly alienated we are from our own economy—we don’t think of it as something that serves us, as an extension of all the activities we find necessary and essential, but something that we’re in service to, and to the death. This is typical of the way the economy is talked about by both economists and ordinary people—we tend to think of “the economy” as an entity of its own that follows its own mysterious rules and that operates entirely outside the control of people, rather than as something that is made for and by people and thus can be changed and altered by people. A metaphor that suggests the economy has its own health and its own body isn’t responsible for this thinking, but it reveals this thinking—the metaphor is the symptom, not the disease, to use another metaphor. Part of why I’m so interested in metaphors is that they are powerful tools for thought. Metaphors are one of the primary ways that we make sense of unfamiliar things—we compare them to more familiar things. A good metaphor can be illuminating. But a poorly chosen metaphor can distort our understanding or reinforce an already distorted understanding. So, yes, I do think there’s better language that would help promote a clearer understanding of both the economy and of illness. I’m partial to educational metaphors around illness, in part because they are accurate to what is happening in the body, where the immune system is “learning” how to recognize and respond to a pathogen, but also because of how they might potentially shape our experience of disease. Might we experience a cold differently if we weren’t “fighting” the cold but instead were being “schooled” by the cold?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the metaphors sometimes used for illness is “invasion”—a sort of fear-driven, “us versus them” understanding of disease as a foreign army on the attack. I’m interested in the way you’ve written about fear of the “other” in a lot of contexts—as it relates to illness, race, class. What role does fear play in your work?
EULA BISS: Through my work, I’ve come to this belief that fear is incredibly destructive. Even when it’s earned, even when it’s rational. It is just a very destructive social force. That has made me keep an eye on my own fear. It has made me think about what I do, what we do out of fear.
It’s written into our legal system. We just saw this case—another one—where a white person’s fear was successfully used as a legal defense against murder. Definitely not the first time that’s happened. Part of what that [Kyle] Rittenhouse decision signaled to me is that white fear is held very precious in this country and is sanctified in lots of ways, legally protected in ways that certain basic rights are not protected. But fear is treated as if it’s a basic right. Maybe part of my project is to not treat fear that way, not treat it like it’s a right, or like it’s sanctified, or like it’s earned.
Writing On Immunity was actually really useful because, as you could see in the text, I really related to a lot of the fears that the women I was talking with shared around vaccination. Some of them I shared and felt myself and, even the ones that I didn’t share, I empathized with. I remember talking to a well-respected and also totally maligned immunologist, Paul Offit, who said, “You can respect the fear, but you don’t have to respect the decision that is made out of fear.” That was a really useful distinction for me. Yeah, you can respect that people have feelings, but we can also agree among each other that we don’t get to act rashly out of our feelings; you don’t get to murder someone because you’re scared. That should be one of our social pacts. That should be an agreement that is fundamental to living together. Around vaccination, I think it’s a fundamental social pact that I will not allow my body to be dangerous to your body. Because we have to live together. That’s where I’ve come in that thinking.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I want to push a little on how fear operates in practice. Have you ever had to admit to yourself that fear might be useful, in addition to being a violent impulse, especially as a woman?
EULA BISS: We’re wading into such complex terrain. I’ll talk specifically to the “as a woman” part. I actually think that a lot of times what’s going on around fear and women results in social control. While it’s true that people face real dangers, if the fears surrounding us were successful, that would mean not going out and not having experiences that are valuable. Maybe part of this is, I do think there’s this peculiar middle class American assumption that there is such a thing as an absolutely safe existence, which I don’t think actually is real. Dangers are real, and they’re unpredictable. You can be a victim of crime in another country, you can be a victim of crime in a very fancy neighborhood, you can go to an excellent boarding school and be raped by a teacher, there are lots of situations where bad things can happen, and I think that’s one of the upsetting realities of life—it’s very hard to predict where and when the bad thing is going to happen. But I really don’t think that cultivating the right amount of fear or the appropriate fears is the way to keep oneself safe. A certain awareness of one’s situation is excellent. I did appreciate Barry Glassner’s book, The Culture of Fear, I quoted it in Notes from No Man’s Land. He writes about how the number of dangers we’re surrounded by is not something we can actually compute or handle. Sorting the reasonable fears from the unreasonable fears is also not something we can handle. So every culture makes its decisions about what to fear and what not to fear. One of the interesting things about his book is he said that, for the most part, our cultural decisions about fear are not rational. We’re afraid of the wrong things. We’re not afraid of the things that are actually going to hurt us. I think with women there’s a social control and there’s also a certain kind of blame around this. So if something bad happens to you, you weren’t appropriately afraid, you didn’t exercise the appropriate caution, you didn’t curtail your own activities appropriately enough. It’s essentially another way of saying, “You were asking for it.” Ever since I was first on my own as a young woman, I have felt resistance to that particular manifestation of fear. I just didn’t want to live my life as a woman within that.
But your question is when do I find fear useful. Part of why I wrote On Immunity was, as a new mother, I was like, “Okay, I have to take care of this fragile being. How do I sort what’s dangerous, what’s not dangerous? How do I get through the day surrounded by things, including air, that could kill him?” Part of the answer to that is just knowing that bad things will happen and it won’t be your fault. That psychology is essential to parenting, it’s essential to living as a woman, it’s essential to just life in general. But there’s a particular form of anxiety that I think is whipped up by the middle and upper middle class assumption that one is entitled to an utterly safe existence and that the right amount of fear and anxiety will help produce that, ensure that, protect it. I think that it’s worthwhile to be cautious in certain situations and I’m not always cautious in the right situations, sometimes I’m just lucky, and often I’m helped by other people. I have also lived a life that allows me to cultivate quite a bit of faith in other people. I know that part of that is a manifestation of privilege, but I also would like to believe that part of that is because most of the time, in most situations, people don’t want to hurt you.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I think we’ve come back around to the importance of community in your life and work. Thank you so much.