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| photo: Mischa Baka | |
Ella Baxter is an Australian writer and artist. Her debut novel, New Animal, was published in 2021 by Two Dollar Radio. Her second, Woo Woo (Catapult, December 3), is about what it means to make art as a woman, and about the powerful forces of voyeurism, power, obsession, and online performance.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Woo Woo is a dark, gothicky novel filled with wild women, art making, a disintegrating marriage, ghosts, the Internet, and fear.
On your nightstand now:
A lamp and a glass of water. I go to bed at 9 p.m. I lay down and fall asleep. No reading, no TV, just oblivion. Reading revs me up, so I can't have all that going on before bed. Many of my books I keep in the car, as I am chronically early to things, so I read while I wait. At the moment I'm reading Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados. It's on the back seat waiting for me.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Run Zebby Run Run Run by Binette Schroeder. I remember that Zebby the zebra wore high heeled boots and looked terrified on every page. The beauty of this book is that it has no words, only pictures, and so I could make up new stories each night for it. There is a page where the zebra is running from a lion, and it jumps behind a white fence for camouflage. I thought that was so clever. I remember being really impressed with the zebra for doing that.
Your top five authors:
This is a hard question for so many reasons--some of the best authors, who have created works of genius, have also been the parents of utter duds. I don't know any brilliant minds who have a flawless track record. In saying that, I love Lorrie Moore and I love Sappho, Danez Smith, Ben Lerner, Carmen Maria Machado, Kate Jennings. I love the writing and mind of Michaela Coel, but she's not an author. I love David Lynch; I admire his television work most of all.
Book you've faked reading:
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Anything by Nietzsche. Keats! There would be others for sure but that period of my life, the period where I would pretend to read for some imaginary academic credit, is dead.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. It is a brilliant look at marriage and desire and artmaking. I value it highly. I reread it annually. I will never get over the genius of that story. If I love you, I have recommended you this book, probably even bought you a copy as well.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Animal Farm by George Orwell--with what looks like a nice big pig with the mustache. There was also a copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë that had some bleak, windswept painting on the front and I bought that.
Books you hid from your parents:
I hid cigarettes, not books. I was always encouraged to read widely. Books were never the enemy when I was growing up.
Book that changed your life:
Grapefruit by Yoko Ono--it was so uniquely destabilizing. At first, I thought the whole thing was a joke, but then I kept reading it over and over, and I realized it was brilliant. Not just brilliant, but experimental, and bratty, and brave, and a truly, authentically, unapologetic piece of highly eccentric work. Sometimes I open it up and have a look, close it, and wander off dumbfounded. No other book has had this effect on me. No other book has even come close.
Favorite line from a book:
There is a line that goes (something like): "she had hair so blonde she didn't need to shave her legs." It is from a collection of short stories called Come to Me by Amy Bloom, and that particular story is from the point of view of a wife, observing a woman who she suspects is having an affair with her husband. I think this is a perfect sentence, and I think about it often. This sentence is heavy with jealously. Hair, so, blonde--this alone tells us the wife is not blonde, she envies blonde, she notices blonde, and then the part about the legs. She doesn't even need to shave. The wife is seeing this new woman as a smooth-legged demigod. She's catastrophizing her beauty and his attraction to her. I love this sentence. It gives us so much of the wife. This sentence could be all I ever need to know about her. Bloom was a true master to conjure this.
Five books you'll never part with:
The thing is we have to part with everything; we cannot take books to the grave. I actually just culled a lot of books and it felt great. You can lug books around for decades, never opening them up, letting them collect dust on the shelf. I feel books should be fed into more of a barter system of giving and receiving. I feel we should all turn our bookcases over every so often--out with the old, in with the new. In my opinion, humans would do better to attach less to things, and attach more to each other.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle. I was part of an event at the Wheeler Center alongside Dylin, and I was lucky enough to hear them read an excerpt from their novel. The piece was so wildly horny and beautiful and bright. Dylin's writing is deeply evocative, sensual, and profound. I felt like setting the world on fire (in a good way) after the reading. I bought their novel the next day. I would love to read that novel, as if for the first time, again and again and again.