The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #57: Richard Scott Larson
"The most difficult thing about writing this book was learning how to apply what I’d studied in fiction workshops to a project centered on my own experience and personal development..."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 57th installment, featuring Richard Scott Larson, author of The Long Hallway. -Sari Botton
Richard Scott Larson is a queer writer and critic. He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his creative and critical work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, Electric Literature, and many other journals and anthologies, including It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. His work has also been recognized twice by The Best American Essays and has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and the Willa Cather Foundation. He is the author of the memoir The Long Hallway, which was published earlier this year by the University of Wisconsin Press, and he’s an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. He holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I just turned 40, and I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I published my first short stories as a teenager in fantasy and horror magazines that no longer exist, and I was an MFA student in fiction in my late 20s before my focus turned to creative nonfiction.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
The Long Hallway was published in April.
What number book is this for you?
This is my debut book.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
My book is very much a memoir, with scenes of personal experience juxtaposed with a close reading of John Carpenter’s Halloween that demonstrate how it reflected the development of my queer identity from a closeted perspective as a child.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
“Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter’s inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael’s potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the torments of the closet. This lyrical memoir expresses a boy’s search for identity while navigating the darkness and isolation of a deeply private inner world. With introspection and tenderness, Larson reflects on how little we understand in the moment about the experiences that mark us forever.”
The book began as an extended critical engagement with the horror genre from a queer perspective, but I quickly realized that I needed to be as specific as possible about my own personal experience as subjective evidence for any broader claims that I wanted to make. That’s when the shape of the memoir emerged with scenes from my own life showing how horror had informed my identity, rather than relying on representations of other texts to build an argument.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
The book began as an extended critical engagement with the horror genre from a queer perspective, but I quickly realized that I needed to be as specific as possible about my own personal experience as subjective evidence for any broader claims that I wanted to make. That’s when the shape of the memoir emerged with scenes from my own life showing how horror had informed my identity, rather than relying on representations of other texts to build an argument.
I was a fiction writer before this project, but I’d been stuck on a novel for several years after finishing my MFA, and suddenly the only way I could get words down on the page with any authenticity was to admit that my protagonist was myself. I thought I was only taking a break from the novel, but the stakes changed and evolved as I felt a new responsibility and freedom to express through memoir what I’d been failing to convey in fiction. And the use of Halloween as a handhold through the telling of my personal and family narrative opened new possibilities that I’d never imagined, infusing my story with the atmosphere of suspense that reflected how I’d experienced the world during the years I was writing about.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
The most difficult thing about writing this book was learning how to apply what I’d studied in fiction workshops to a project centered on my own experience and personal development, including intimate stories about my family. But by trusting the ingredients of my own life as a guide, it became clear that the tools and techniques of narrative apply to both true stories and imagined ones, the reader always being guided toward a particular emotional experience.
In terms of publication, the road was very winding due to the pandemic arriving just as my agent began submitting the book to our first round of editors. But eventually everything started moving again, and I was so lucky to find the amazing team at the University of Wisconsin Press, specifically the series on queer autobiography that includes my book. The publishing landscape for literary memoir in the U.S. is a challenging one for writers to face, and I’m grateful every day for the independent and university presses that still champion this genre.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
In addition to being very raw about my childhood experience of the closet and how obsessive desire came to define my life, I also present a very intimate look at my family and how our collective circumstances helped to shape who I eventually became. My mother and brother are distinct characters in the book, and both read the manuscript in draft form before we began the submission process. No changes were requested, but revisiting the past together opened new conversations about how alone we were in many ways, even while living under the same roof.
The people I was most worried about representing with care were the ones who are no longer alive, namely my father and a female classmate who was murdered around the time of my father’s death. Both events affected me deeply, and I knew I needed to structure my memoir around the personal aftermath of these early experiences with death—especially since I was also writing about my fascination with horror and fear—without sensationalizing or reducing either person to the circumstances of how their lives ended.
I was a fiction writer before this project, but I’d been stuck on a novel for several years after finishing my MFA, and suddenly the only way I could get words down on the page with any authenticity was to admit that my protagonist was myself. I thought I was only taking a break from the novel, but the stakes changed and evolved as I felt a new responsibility and freedom to express through memoir what I’d been failing to convey in fiction.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
When I became more intentionally curious about the queer canon of personal writing, I became immersed in the large body of work that came out of the AIDS crisis, specifically texts by David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Hervé Guibert, and Paul Monette, among many others. The urgency of personal narrative is so alive in those books—alive in the face of death—and I was instantly captivated and deeply moved. I won’t claim that my book necessarily emerged from my internalization of that tradition, but my appreciation for the possibilities of autobiographical writing broadened dramatically.
At some point while casting about for inspiration, I also stumbled across J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, a posthumously published memoir that investigates his late father’s secret life alongside a self-examination of Ackerley’s own personal experience as a gay man. I was exploring how to balance those two threads in my own work at the time—my father died while I was in the throes of understanding and coming to terms with my sexuality as a pre-adolescent—and Ackerley showed me a way forward, even as his text often grapples with the paradox of memoir itself: “Curiosity about myself has carried me somewhat further than I meant to go, and to small result; however honestly we may wish to examine ourselves we can do no more than scratch the surface. The golliwog that lies within and bobs up to dishonor us in our unguarded moments is too clever to be caught when we want him—unless by others, to whom this superficial sketch of myself may be of value when I lie under another sort of sod.”
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
Don’t think about publishing until you have a manuscript that you’ve shaped into something as close to your initial vision as you can get it to be. When the book says what you want it to say as clearly and artfully as you can imagine possible, then you can bravely face the publishing landscape knowing that at least you’re armed with something uniquely yours. The rest of the process will seem random and sometimes frustrating or demoralizing, but the part you can control is the version of yourself you’ve committed to the page and the story that only you can tell. If you’ve done the work, I do believe that someone will eventually notice.
What do you love about writing?
I love the moments in the drafting process when thoughts and ideas collide to form new meanings that I wouldn’t have been able to conjure otherwise, except by patiently following the subconscious and trying to identify the connections it quietly makes. I used to think that writing was all about planning and outlining, but now I understand that it’s just as much about deliberately ceding control to the thing trying to make itself through me.
What frustrates you about writing?
The fear of the blank page is real! I’ve tried to develop a regular journaling practice to make myself more accustomed to writing new text on a blank page almost every day, but the performance anxiety—even when you’re only performing for yourself—is always there. I wish I was someone who could find joy in the freedom of the drafting stage, but I’m too anxious and prone to shame for that. All I can see in the initial draft is how dramatically the result of my effort fails to match up to my intentions and initial vision for the project.
What about writing surprises you?
There’s a delightful feeling of surprise when that early vision changes or deepens through the course of the writing—when the act of writing itself offers opportunities for meaning-making that you can’t access in the planning stages.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times?
My preference is to write during sustained immersive periods, like the ones provided by residencies. I’m lucky enough to have attended several of these over the past few years that have offered me weeks in a row of concentrated time to work. I’m also in a writing group that attends several annual retreats together—renting an Airbnb for a long weekend where we write all day—and those help keep me going as well. Between these bursts of output, the work is also always evolving in my mind, the threads weaving together to form what that reaches the page when I have the time to focus for hours and days and weeks at a time.
When I became more intentionally curious about the queer canon of personal writing, I became immersed in the large body of work that came out of the AIDS crisis, specifically texts by David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Hervé Guibert, and Paul Monette, among many others. The urgency of personal narrative is so alive in those books—alive in the face of death—and I was instantly captivated and deeply moved.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
I was about to answer that I turn to criticism when I want a break from longer projects, but of course writing a review or a critical essay is still writing. I really can’t get away from writing! I’m also very into physical exercise, though, especially weightlifting these days, and I would say that a lot of my “writing” takes place while I’m busy pushing my body to some kind of limit at the gym. Trainers say that to build a muscle, you have to push it to the point of failure. And I think often about how that relates to the drafting process, which for me is always a direct reckoning with failure in a similar way—something to push through and past to achieve a desired result.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I’m currently working on another memoir project focused on my adolescent fascination with women’s gymnastics as a closeted queer spectator. Many of the gymnasts I watched back then have now reframed their competitive years—the years of my intense fandom—in light of the culture of abuse that has since been exposed. The narrative perspective of my project is also informed by my own experiences of sexual abuse as a closeted teenager, as well as how the experience of witnessing the testimonies of these gymnasts in the wake of the Larry Nassar revelations informed my relationship with that period of my own life.
Yes!!! I loved this book!
This resonates with me as a writer who began as a poet. I was trying to write my childhood experiences into poems, and I couldn't make it work in a way that felt true to me. I had to open myself up with prose to feel like I was being honest and clear about myself--both to myself and to the reader.