excerpt from Green Girl and Self-Interview posted at The Nervous Breakdown

Here's the self-interview. I had some fun with the form, and was quite bitchy to myself. The excerpt is kind of a stand-alone scene, it's my thesis of the psychology of the cosmetics counter.

And what does this have to do with the narrator?

The narrator is her former self, in a way. At the beginning she gives birth to her. She watches over her. But she is not literally the mother. She is kind of like a god figure. I modeled this somewhat on Clarice Lispector’s male author-narrator in The Hour of the Star, who creates and imagines a horrorshow ending for his mystic-girl Macabea. Instead of Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe my Ruth has Julie Christie in Darling and Green and Blacks chocolate and a penchant for fucking strangers.

So, is the narrator you? Or are you Ruth? Or both? How much is the novel drawn from your real life?

Again, a brutally uninteresting question.