From her involvement in New York's downtown art scene in the 1980s to her most recent novel, American Genius, A Comedy , Lynne Tillman has resolutely ignored the borders of mainstream culture and literary convention. The author of five novels, she is equally renowned for her experimental short stories, essays, and art criticism . Tillman spoke with Boldtype's McKay McFadden about rebels in literature, living and writing in New York City, and why Americans have become so sensitive.

Boldtype : Do you think great writers have to be rebels?

Lynne Tillman : The concept's too romantic for me, and writing isn't. I want to read writers who reject complacency of all kinds, and they may do it quietly. I don't have time for writers who repeat and reproduce tired or conventional ideas, and how it's done— how that rejection takes place — can be good writing or bad. But ultimately it's the writing that makes the subject — Virginia Woolf writing about the death of a moth.

BT : Which rebellious writers or books have been most important to you?

LT : Virginia Woolf; St. Augustine's Confessions ; Freud; Jane Austen; Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies ; Kafka; Henry James' Figure in the Carpet and The Golden Bowl , particularly; Paula Fox; D.W. Winnicott; Primo Levi; Vance Bourjaily's The Violated; Edith Wharton; Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish"; Salinger; Kerouac's On the Road ; Foucault; Gertrude Stein; Robert Creeley; Emily Dickinson; Beckett's plays, especially. I could go on and on, there are many more.

BT : How does living in the East Village affect your writing? What do you like about living and writing in that neighborhood?

LT : I don't think my nabe influences how I write, but I did make it the place of my novel, No Lease on Life . NYC influences me— its rhythms, characters, weirdness, problems. The city reassures me, just by going out onto its streets. There's so much life around me that's not mine. I can observe it, and it takes me away from myself.

BT : Do you have an ideal writing environment?

LT : For me, an ideal writing environment is when you can do it whenever you want, no one bothers you, and you have the quiet you need or the music you want to hear. Then you get a phone call from the right person right at the moment you're feeling awful about what you're writing.

BT : Is there anything today in New York, or elsewhere, that compares to the '80s New York downtown art scene that you experienced?

LT : I think people are always making environments that they need to do their work, to live with some excitement. Are they the same? No. There are too many shifts in culture, built upon and rejecting what came before. And new technologies shake things up: obviously, the Web, virtual communities, pictures through cell phones, and text messaging. There's constant communication now; people are always in touch. Maybe there's less alienation, in an odd way, or more fear of separation and being alone.

BT : NYU Press' 2006 Up Is Up But So Is Down by Brandon Stosuy, which includes some of your work, pays homage to the social energy that contributed to the downtown literary scene from 1974-1992. Could you describe how that sense of communal energy affected your writing?

LT : I don't think it affected the writing itself, but it did me, my sense of what was possible. I knew there were magazines to publish my work, clubs to read in, people I wanted to read and to hear read, people who felt that way about me. You don't need a lot of people, you need just some you regard.

BT : How long did you work on American Genius, A Comedy? Was it a different project from your earlier novels?

LT : I worked on AGAC for about five years, very off and on until the end, when I wrote more than a third of it in eight months. Teaching was a big problem for me, I couldn't work on it when I was, and getting back into it was hell. I carried it around in my mind, but was very frustrated when I had to drop it. With each new project, I try to do what I haven't done, go where I haven't been, in every way I can imagine. So, yes, it was very different writing it from the other novels, as each of them is from the others. Also, as you write more, you learn more, you acquire more craft, or technique, capacity, approaches, all of which can drive you crazy. But new space opens up.

BT : I've read (on LargeheartedBoy.com) that you listened to a lot of music while you wrote American Genius— that many of the same albums were repeating in the background and their rhythm and repetition permeated the prose. Besides the musical soundtrack, what other constants in the background affected your writing?

LT : That's a hard question, but there's so much going on that you're unaware of. But I'd say the presence of memory in daily life and a watchfulness about what others around me were doing, how people reacted to news, to a letter arriving, to rejection, different facial expressions, odd events, too. I kept a mental record of those things. Maybe I always do.

BT : Throughout the story, the narrator is constantly trying to calm her mind as well as soothe her skin with creams and emollients. Since she associates skin diseases with specific eras and nationalities, one gets the sense that this is a peculiarly American hypersensitivity. How'd we get so sensitive?

LT : That's one of the first questions I asked myself when I started writing this novel. Where is all this sensitivity coming from? Why in the middle of so many new sensitivities springing up are we — Americans — as indifferent as we are to others? Cruelty rages on. I was interested in that paradox or contradiction. Our greater sensitivity results from environmental changes, for one thing, but maybe it's also symptomatic of our changing fears, insecurities, and vulnerabilities.

BT : Throughout the book, your narrator ruminates on the same specific things: chair design, the Polish woman who gives her facials, how unsatisfying lunch is, and Leslie van Houten of the Manson family, to name a few. What made you decide to build this book on repetition?

LT : Memory persists in the same way. When you remember an event, you remember it with the same images, you talk about it using the same words. Childhood memories especially become fixed in stone, until you begin to forget and wonder if it happened that way or if it was a photo you saw. So, it seemed to me repetition was true to how we think, and also how we repeat our past in our present.

-McKay McFadden