Clement Goldberg’s Debut Novel is Horny, Queer, and Very Revolutionary

In Clement Goldberg’s madcap and campy debut novel, cats, plants, alien intelligences, and a group of human misfits conspire to make us all freer and more joyfully connected. New Mistakes offers a hilarious, surreal, and sexy new vision of queer collectivity—one that involves the living earth and intelligences from beyond—while a cast of mundane and zany antagonists, ranging from a government intelligence agency to protestors against cat psychics to the plain old decentralized corporate defanging machine, works to shut it all down. 

It’s rare that I read a book that makes me laugh so hard and at the same time feel as though the horizon of queerness is just a little closer. The novel teems with wordplay and kinky sex, but harbors an undercurrent of social and ecological collapse. 

The work builds thematically and aesthetically on Goldberg’s body of film and animation work, which includes a lemur-based queer evolutionary/extinction mythology in Our Future Ends, stop-motion mushrooms who conspire to take over the earth in The Deer Inbetween, and a wild multi-director adaptation of Michelle Tea’s classic lesbian novel Valencia. 

New Mistakes is the first single-authored book from Michelle Tea’s Dopamine Press. It follows Dopamine’s first book, Sluts: Anthology, a multi-authored collection packed with queer writers celebrating pleasure, connection, and life. Michelle handed me a New Mistakes galley at a Dopamine Press reading, a few nights into my return to LA after two years on academic exile to Ohio. The combination of Sluts and New Mistakes offered me a space in which to land and from which to think—together, they announce Dopamine Press as a queer refuge, a cauldron of life-giving queer magic, and a preservation of the ways in which queer artmaking creates a web of influence where we all just keep giving birth to each other.  

As a queer writer who also channels earth voices in a campy way, and who is always on the hunt for fellow horny and funny queer utopians, I knew I had to talk to Goldberg. Luckily for me, they were already a fan of my book Sarahland, and we moved easily into creative interchange, swapping books and films and ideas—in the two months since Michelle gave me their novel, we’ve been talking. Here is a bit of our exchange.

Sam Cohen: I think we’ve both been compelled by the overlap in our work, so maybe we can start with that. I feel like we’re both giving voice to the earth in a campy way, and then also just, like, being funny and gay and referential and, even a little stupid sometimes.

Clement Goldberg: Yeah. I really like stuff that’s extremely dumb, but  so brilliant. I think it’s a very queer art that does that.

SC: The premise of New Mistakes is maybe that plants, cats, and aliens are at the fore of revolution via communicating to human misfits. It is really absurd and great and I’m curious where you started with the project, with that premise or somewhere else. What emerged and surprised you as you wrote?

CG: So much of the book came out of walking up the hill during the pandemic lockdown, in the neighborhood I live in. The plants here are very chatty, and the animals. Specifically, I was having a relationship with a particular tree, and then one day there was a cat who seemed lost and was asking for help. This other time I saw a giant light in the sky, and I thought, Oh! This is it! They’re here. This is the moment. I felt all of these chemicals in my body as I prepared. I was like, am I ready, or am I scared? Like, do I want to go with them? What’s gonna happen? And then I figured out it was a comet. 

So, all of that gestated, and was in the background of developing these human characters who foreground the narrative.

SC: So I think that we talked about—

CG: Is nature conspiring towards revolution? Is that the talk that’s in the air? 

I feel like some of the trees have had it. They’re thirsty. There’s a drought. The soil is falling off the hill. They keep building fences and developing over here, and the coyotes are like, why are we the bad guys? 

SC: I really love that your book allows plants to be pissed. I just like that you allow the non-human world to be, like—

CG: Annoyed with a leaf blower? 

SC: Yeah! Salty and bitchy some of the time. There’s trees with complex feelings and hedges with petty feelings and it’s just really great. I also wanted to say that I lived here, on the hill you live on, where New Mistakes is set, when I wrote Sarahland. “Becoming Trees” is set in my old backyard here. So I think there is a kind of magic in the flora and fauna on this hill that we’re both tapping into.

CG: I felt very connected to your book when I read it. And I read it while I was living here. So it felt folded into the writing.

SC: The chattiness is real.

CG: It’s a very chatty neighborhood. But you never saw a UFO-type orb or comet? Have you ever had any kind of experience like that where you’re like, oh my God, it’s happening, am I ready? 

SC: I think that I have not. I do think that when I first came to LA, that there was this really expansive sense of what is possible. I think people make fun of LA people for believing in astrology and—

CG: Astrology’s real.

SC: Yeah, I know, but astrology feels more real here. The possible is very expanded here, in terms of the social and being a city of dreams or whatever but also in terms of this very felt connection to the universe and the nonhuman world. But no. I haven’t had that with UFOs because I see all kinds of weird shit in the sky and it’s like, is it drones? Like, who knows what people are putting up there.

CG: Trash and leaving it up there. It’s rude. 

SC: On the note of expanding the possible, each of your character’s arcs opens up possibilities for existing in the world more freely and playfully, with more generosity and kindness. I’m wondering if that is something that you set out to do. 

CG: When I set out writing, I thought the book was about people being suddenly set apart and how they were going to navigate that. And then I think once I got deeper in and I was thinking about the book being called New Mistakes, I realized that everybody at the top is coming from a place of making their old mistakes over and over again and each character is coming to a point where they’re ready to make new mistakes. Maybe they come to more liberatory, playful responses because the situation itself is sort of absurd.

SC: When I say that I mean you have a dyke in her sixties who gets to do drugs and party and have fun and have hot sex. You have a 25-year-old girl who is very aware of and in charge of her sexual power, and very pleasure-oriented. You have a failed academic who reroutes his life in order to sit in a roundabout chasing UFOs and everyone’s fine and together and connected. I think your characters are also just really kind to each other. I think it feels rare that fiction shows us a more playful, hot, loving, cool way to live. 

CG: I know a kind and generous queer world of artists. I adore a lot of the people around me and I’m inspired by those people. Maybe having a book that’s not talking about childhood or the birth family gave room to be more focused on what it has been like to be a queer person. I care about queer culture and representing the world I inhabit, but also at the same time, I was never a Julia, who’s the 25-year-old, but she just seemed like a really fun protagonist to give everybody an opportunity to inhabit. I liked the idea of Julia as the everyman.

SC: Why do you see her as the everyman?

CG:  I don’t think there is a universal person but, if there is, it’s some white man, you know? If we take that away and then we give everybody the opportunity to make Julia the everyman, it’s a fun new place to go, which feels different than what one would expect. It’s usually not a she, she’s usually not 25. I would want anybody with any identity and any location to be able to see the world through her eyes and have an experience within that container. And I just adore femmes and femme culture, and why not center a book with a fun person that you can move through the world with? 

SC: You have this great line spoken by Julia’s ex-girlfriend Reggie, who says that she “just wanted to get plowed in a sundress like everybody else.” I love that language, which makes everybody be wearing a sundress. It’s no weirder than the ways we’re supposed to understand masculine language as neutral, but just felt so fun and freeing. 

Okay I also want to ask you, on the theme of getting plowed in a sundress: This is one of the most unabashedly horny books in American letters. But it’s also very much a book about multi-species revolution and how to exist at the end of the world together. And I am just curious if you see a relationship between multi-species justice and being a horny slut. 

CG: I think that nature operates on desire. I think that horniness is what drives things to continue to sprout and flourish and connect and change form. Colonization has killed off the vibrancy of the planet, and it’s killed off cultures that regarded nature in high esteem and instead it holds up the human animal in a way that leads to this man-versus-nature idea. But so then I’m on nature’s team, I’m, like, a species traitor. I’m in cahoots with the animals and the plants, and then if there is some kind of extraterrestrial force that has some good ideas, I’m interested in hearing them. 

My time on this planet has basically been the arc of destruction and depletion of the natural world. You look at, like, the World Wildlife fund or these other data collecting things, and it’s like, I enter the story, and then everything goes downhill as far as how much of the natural world is left. Wildness has been killed off at every turn, so a lot of my work looks at wildness and wilderness and the non-human. And so maybe somehow horny sluts are therein. I think it’s queerness. 

I think a lot about extinction and the disappearance of things. And it’s just a really sad part of the story. And then I think horny sluts are, like, happy. So I think it is a way to be joyful and still look at the decline of the natural world. Maybe my last project had lemurs and this one has horny sluts. 

SC: Well, it has a lot of things. It has cat psychics and cats. A lot of cats. 

A really cool tree. A bitchy hedge. In addition to being very horny and very revolutionary, this book is very funny. And I have a question about that, which is: this novel doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the dystopia of environmental destruction and crumbling institutions, wealth, hierarchy, and governmental control. Yet it’s also very hilarious and fun. Do you have advice for accessing humor in these times or insight about how humor works in apocalyptic fiction?

CG:  I hesitate to call any of the projects that I’ve done apocalyptic. I just think it’s what’s happening. 

SC: Well, I would say we’re living in apocalyptic times. Societal collapse. Environmental collapse. I’m using apocalypse as a shorthand for that, not something imaginary or, like, biblical.

CG: I just feel really sad. I can’t even watch a happy nature documentary anymore. I feel devastated. And I don’t function well looking head on to, you know, a polar bear standing on, like, an ice cube because the whole glacier melted. These things make me want to curl up under my desk or my bed and never come out. I have found that being able to engage with these horrors—internalizing them, processing them—requires a sense of humor. Like, gallows humor. I think it’s a survival skill that I’ve gotten from people within queer community and a family that’s been through a genocide.

I think writing this book was really about creating something fun and, like, a place to go. I find I have a higher threshold for holding horrific things and circumstances if there’s some humor with the heaviness.

I feel like you do that in your work, too. I find your work very funny, and I feel like maybe there’s characters in pain or going through painful circumstances, but then you use humor to where it feels like a fun story and refuge. It feels almost candy-colored. There’s some kind of candy element to things that makes it so you can engage with heavier topics and emotional landscapes. 

SC: Your book has a lot of collaborative energy in it, including direct references to living queer artists. We see the ecosexuals, and I think it’s hard not to think about Catherine Opie when we read about the photographer/professor character. How did you decide to include real queer artists in your fiction?

CG: Queer culture is really important to me and I have this feeling of wanting to stockpile it. It’s an homage to all these people who, like, I’m here because they are here, and then there’s also people that were here that are no longer here. I carry all of these people with me. I don’t see myself as separate or able to exist and work not in relation.

I also just like stuff that rubs up against reality. I like a blend of fiction and the real world and I take a lot of inspiration from queer artists and then want to play with that and note it and let it be within the story. 

SC: I read this back to back with Miranda July’s All Fours, and it made me feel like we were entering an era of almost a new ethic of listening to desire or following the body. Both books made me feel like following desire was the way to move. Is that something you’re wanting to give? 

CG: As someone who is progressively becoming more embodied from a place of having been disembodied, I think it’s a good time, and I want to give people a good time. I feel like that’s been really hard and getting harder, and so maybe offering a rich, desirous, queer fun romp felt like something that was a gift to give. I wanted it to be a kind of a queer refuge and a very vibrant, good time. 

In a way, Michelle Tea commissioned the book. She loved the pilot I’d written and encouraged me to write it and said that she would help me get it published. We didn’t know then that she was starting a press. I love her work, and we’ve been long-time collaborators, and her work is really fun and funny and full of sex. A lot of the book was written to make Michelle Tea laugh. And since, in a way, she was the person that I was writing to, the book is a conversation I’m having with her, but one I wanted to share with everyone. 

I also feel excited about Dopamine Press and about the Sluts anthology being the first thing that hit the world from this place. I feel like that anthology is doing something really fun and important and collective and, like, cool for everyone. So maybe I would include Sluts in the pantheon of All Fours.

SC: I want to confirm that your book is a refuge and a gift. I know that you’re coming from a particular place of getting in your body, but I think, too, about all of the ways that the state and its institutions are constantly telling us not to be in our bodies, not to listen to our bodies, that our desires are bad and we have to shut them down, so it feels great that there is so much permission given to listen to the body in all of these works. 

I will also include Sluts in the pantheon in a personal way because I think that I am very much having a Sluts summer. I left this academic institution in Ohio and went immediately into the Sluts tour, and it felt so life-giving. 

I, too, would not have written that piece without Michelle’s invitation. I was so jazzed that Michelle Tea asked me to be in Sluts and I was really taken with the earliest description of the press, which was like unvarnished stories of queer lives. Then I was in Europe and my reasons for going there fell apart and I just ended up in Vienna having this wild affair with a past lover. There was a moment when I was riding on the back of this person’s bike where I was like, oh, this is the piece for the anthology.

It felt like we could have, like, this moment outside time, because of queerness and I thought, this is it, my story of unvarnished queer life. So Michelle Tea is definitely creating magic invitations that plant seeds for this very pleasureful work to be made. 

I wrote in my Sluts piece that riding on the back of the motorcycle was the meaning of life, and then when I was on the Sluts tour I was like, Oh, this is the meaning of life, too. Just, being able to be together as queer writers and readers, to make art and live to see that art birth other art. 

CG: Yeah, there’s no better feeling than being with queer artists and writers and making work and sharing work and experiencing work from each other. It’s really my favorite thing about existence. Most of my work is in service to that and in relation to it and in awe of it. 

As much as I pushed the project forward by myself, you reach a certain point in writing where other people are involved, and then it is a collaborative art form, you know? It returns to the collaborative queer realms of multispecies revolution and horny sluttery. 

I hope someone will give New Mistakes to Chappell Roan so that I can give back a gift to the summer spell that she offered to me and to so many of us.