my life with SM: a story in interviews

INTERVIEW #1: in september 2011, MY BELOVED HUSBAND, aka SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, and i met at a reading we both did for perfect day publishing and vol. 1 brooklyn. i thought he was a strange man in a strange suit but also the most talented person i’d seen in a long time. the fact that i’d never heard of him before made me feel like i’d been ripped off. so i interviewed him for electric literature, since he was coming back to NYC a couple weeks later. it was the first interview i ever did. later i came to learn that i really liked doing interviews, and i also really liked this strange man named scott.

INTERVIEW #2: in february 2013, i flew to philadelphia last minute because scott asked me to. i didn’t understand why, because i told him i wasn’t interested in him *in that way.* he said he didn’t care, paid for me to stay in a separate hotel room, & didn’t try any funny business. both nights, we stayed up late and didn’t eat much. we were both feeling pretty bad. scott was “hitting rock bottom” on his self-destruction and alcoholism. i was still recuperating from a (bad) mental breakdown that happened the previous month. i remember feeling giddy and nervous/excited during this interview, and also incredibly conflicted, because i thought my subject was super fun and interesting but he was also a sad sweaty drunk and i wasn’t interested in that type of man. later one of scott’s coworkers watched the interview and said he could sense the chemistry, which made me mad and embarrassed, but i guess he was right. 

i was having internet problems and spent several hours trying to upload this video in electric lit’s office to get it up in time for the reading scott was doing that night.

INTERVIEW #3: I think the fanzine asked if i wanted to write something for them, so i pitched this idea. it was november of 2013. a few weeks before, we’d traveled to NYC at the same time. it was the first time we ‘came out’ as BF/GF. previously i was really paranoid about it, because i didn’t want people to look at me as ‘scott’s girlfriend.’ i felt like ‘scott’s girlfriend’ for a long time. (right now i feel like ‘juliet escoria.’)

INTERVIEW #4: this interview came out two months after we were engaged, three months before we were married, two weeks before Black Cloud was officially published, 2.5 years after we first met. i don’t have a lot to say about this except i sound like a complete maniac.