When I arrive at Paula Bomer’s apartment building in south Brooklyn I am briefly disoriented in the lobby, until I hear the yapping of dogs and amid them, her voice calling my name. Bomer is tall and striking, in her mid-50s. I met her last year at a reading in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she seemed like someone who cared almost manically about literature and also like someone who would be fun to hang out with, two qualities not always confluent. I had heard of these anxious dogs before, when she and I met for dinner a few months ago, and she disclosed that her life was now spent managing canine neuroses.
“I got them when my dad died,” she says, in between offering me matcha, coffee, tequila or wine (it’s 2.30pm on a Sunday; Bomer doesn’t drink any more, save a glass of champagne on selling her book, but doesn’t mind if others do). “The dogs were a mistake,” she says, “But that’s OK, I’ll survive it.”
Bomer was involved with the cohort of mid-2000s US writing broadly characterised as “alt lit”, an irreverent internet vernacular-driven movement personified by Tao Lin. She published anonymously on the website HTML Giant and had her first novel, Nine Months, in a drawer for 10 years. Mark Doten of Soho Press picked it up in 2012. Since then she has been widely admired in the literary world for her transgressive, vivid work, which often examines women at points of great pressure from an uncanny perspective – her fans include Sam Lipsyte and Jonathan Franzen. This admiration has not yet fully broken through to a mainstream audience, but her new book looks set to do so.
Bomer’s latest novel, The Stalker, is all about the nastiest, most parasitic kind of survival. Its antihero, Robert Doughten Savile or “Doughty”, is the bearer of an entitlement so groundless and infinite that it obliterates anyone he approaches. Born to a once-wealthy Connecticut family but now without material means, he uses his charisma and total confidence to live in New York as he believes he deserves. He lies effortlessly, inventing lavish real estate deals while in fact whiling away his afternoons watching George Carlin specials, smoking crack in the park, and allowing older men to perform oral sex on him in Grand Central for a little extra cash. In the evenings, meanwhile, he is primed to identify and zone in on women who may prove useful.
This is Doughty’s great gift, knowing what a woman needs and what she will tolerate to get it, how his cruelty is best deployed or concealed. To nauseating effect, his skill escalates operatically as the book continues. It’s a knockout novel, one I’ve passed around to friends, scenes from which I still feel a thrill of horror to recall.
“Originally I wanted him to be the devil,” she says. “The actual devil, evil incarnate. But then I found myself humanising him. And I kind of regret it.” By the simple relentlessness of his presence, his unwillingness to allow the women enough space or thought to disengage from his influence, he comes to represent male intrusion on female life.
“On a daily basis, if you leave your building you are dealing with some shitty man spewing garbage,” she says. “It wears on us, and that’s why I have a problem with critics being weary of the survivor-victim thing: ‘Oh just get over it, it’s boring, you can be strong.’ It’s like, I did try that. I did that: ‘I’m strong. I’m going to shoot pool with the guys.’ Although, I really do like to shoot pool.” We derail here while she leads me to her office, pleasantly cluttered with paintings like the rest of the flat, so that she can show me her pool cue, which she has had since she was 19. I ask if she was good. “You rank ’em out of six, I was a solid three. But on a good day I could beat a six.”
We return to the question of victim fatigue, something that has been on my own mind lately, having just read a brilliant memoir called Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood, which exists partly in conversation with the cultural malaise around making art about having survived violence and abuse. Both Hood’s book and Bomer refer to a New Yorker essay by Parul Sehgal titled The Case Against the Trauma Plot, which argues that overuse of trauma as a narrative device has led to constricted, rote work. Sehgal subsequently panned Sarah Manguso’s autobiographical divorce novel, Liars, describing it as “thin and partial”, and asking: “What is this vision of womanhood, of sexually indiscriminate infants running households?” Bomer, on the other hand, was so moved by Manguso’s depiction of infidelity and the violence of being lied to that she wrote Manguso a fan letter (one of seven she has written in her life, Philip Roth and Franzen among recipients of the others).
“Sehgal misses the entire point of the book, which is that Manguso is now free – not bitter, free. Whenever you describe yourself as a victim, you’re immediately dismissed … I feel like finding Doughty’s voice in my book was my way, hopefully, to be heard – in the way that no one wants to fucking hear another story about women. And yet he’s such an everyman. So it’s like, here’s your cliche then.”
Bomer was raised in Indiana by a French professor father and an Austrian mother who was a translator and a painter: “She refused to become an American citizen, for political reasons. Which really makes sense now, right? She was ahead of her time in a million different ways.” Her childhood was marred by the worry and dread following her father’s suicide attempt when she was five; she went on to study psychology in what she describes as “an attempt to cure” her father.
She was married for 20 years and raised two children, writing as much as possible. When pressed for her strategy there she replies, “I had no social life and my house was a mess.” In 2011, she published her first story collection, Baby; her second, Inside Madeleine, followed in 2014. All were warmly received, but her moment of success around the publication of Inside Madeleine could not take hold fully because, in her words, she “disappeared”. Her father had killed himself not long before, and her mother was in the last stages of a long illness. “My father’s death was horrific and violent. My mother’s was slow. There was no way to process. People don’t want to be around you when you’re suffering.”
Bomer was divorced 10 years ago, and describes The Stalker as a sort of divorce book, “but not divorcing a particular man, it’s divorcing men – a kind of man,” she says, before instantly discluding her two sons and her many friends. After our meeting, she emails me to clarify some of her comments and concludes: “We don’t believe people the first time they hurt us, or the second, or the third – until we do. Because we want to have compassion and believe that if we show love and kindness … we will reap it back. And that is where we are wrong. Many, many people are ciphers. They will add nothing to your life, and they will leave with so much of you.”
It’s difficult to reconcile the blunt fatalism of a statement like that one, or indeed the exhilaratingly ghastly novel she has written, with the generous and joyful woman I met. But perhaps the exorcism she has performed with this marvel – a divorce book with no divorce; a book called The Stalker with not that much stalking in it; a book by a middle-aged woman that, following five others, looks set to become her breakthrough hit – has made her so. Not bitter, as she says, but free.
