Find Creative Inspiration From Your Vices

In Tony Tulathimutte’s new short story collection, Rejection, a man fantasizes that his “individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations”; a group chat splinters over a bloodthirsty raven and a “coochie juice” stain; and a terminally online recluse ascends “from human to spam.”

Brain-twisting, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, these stories follow a loosely connected group of loners who obsess over their respective experiences of rejection.

I first met Tulathimutte when I took his creative writing class, CRIT, earlier this year. We spoke over Zoom and email about autofiction, inspiration, and indulging one’s vices.

Angela Hui: The first story in Rejection is “The Feminist,” which went viral after being published in N+1 in 2019. The main character is a male feminist who becomes a blackpilled misogynist. I’m curious to know about your inspirations, literary and otherwise.

Tony Tulathimutte: When I started the story in 2013, it was just about a guy who gets rejected a lot, and I didn’t know what to do with it. There was no movement to it. Around the time of #MeToo, I thought it would be a funny angle and give the story a stronger focus to make the character someone who’s rejected because of a misapplication of ideology: he’s a feminist but in an incredibly off-putting way. At first I thought his character arc would be something like Breaking Bad. But I realized that making this dichotomy was actually a bit naive and Manichaean, because acting like a feminist to suit your own purposes is not the opposite of misogyny; it’s on the same continuum. There’s the same ideological strictness used to justify self-interest, and the same hyper-confidence in your ideological purity, which tends to blind you to your other faults. So it’s less about a process of corruption than it is about his apprehending and acting on what was there the whole time.

But anyway, the story just started with the feeling of rejection. Rejection is a very intimate and isolating state. You don’t welcome condolence or reassurance, especially not from the person who rejected you, and often not even from your friends. So you’re alone with this condition that forces you to think about what you look like to other people, what they saw in you that caused them to reject you. You’re not likely to chalk it up to bad luck or fate unless you’re very mentally healthy. As a sort of ego-protective mechanism, you start creating this theory of the world and of other people that externalizes your own flaws.

What I wanted to hold onto was the idea that all the way up until the end, even as he commits this act of violence, he still considers himself an unimpeachable feminist. He believes he’s the true feminist and everybody has adopted this insincere bad-faith form of it, which explains why he’s not being rewarded for it.

AH: A common theme in this collection is how people behave when they anticipate being rejected: they can try to get ahead of it through self-sabotage, antisocial behavior, or preemptively acknowledging their own faults. Are people better off not knowing why they keep being rejected? 

TT: Yeah, probably. When someone rejects you, their reasons for doing so may not be straightforward, so if they give you a reason why, they might be telling the truth, but they also might dress it up to spare your feelings, or give you false reasons so they don’t reveal something ugly about themselves, or may not properly articulate what they really mean. In the moment it may not even be articulable at all, but just a vibe or intuition. Of course feedback can be very helpful, but the person giving it has to be doing so accurately and in good faith, and the person receiving it has to uncynically lower their guard, and those things don’t often line up when rejection is involved. 

AH: Your story “Our Dope Future” takes the form of a Reddit post, and I’ve noticed that many of your stories, if posted in r/AmITheAsshole, would get a lot of conflicting responses, probably with a plurality voting “Everyone Sucks Here.” You’ve said yourself that your characters are insufferable pieces of shit, but I also sympathize with them deeply at times. What are your intentions when it comes to reader response?

TT: Obviously, I’m saying this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but what I really mean is I’m an insufferable piece of shit, or at least that’s how I feel most of the time. And that’s something I project onto my characters, who I do care about, whether or not I like them. Most of the stories in this book are a form of hairshirt in some way or another. “Our Dope Future” was mainly a vessel for my grievances around working in Silicon Valley and the capitalist, solutionist mindset behind it, toward the ends of maximizing utility and profit, irrespective of people’s dignity, rights, and happiness. Maybe because of my time in Silicon Valley, and maybe not, I tend to approach problems by trying to break them down and fix them, which is something I’ve tried to moderate in myself, because not everything warrants it. That story is about a guy who attempts to break down and fix someone else who does not want or need it, and his attempts to do so wind up constituting hideous psychological abuse, whose effects he’s completely oblivious to. 

To your question about reader response, I try not to think about it too much, except that I want to make people laugh.

AH: You’ve mentioned that you didn’t start using humor in your writing until around 2010. What have you gained from switching to a more comic writing style?

TT: For the first seven years of writing I did nothing but write mopey stories about white people, and I had a lot of convincing-sounding justifications for that. I grew up in a very white town and went to very white schools, so I thought, why do I have to write about myself at all, isn’t this fiction? I believed that a writer was good insofar as the characters were fictionalized, that the extent to which they were different from the writer was the yardstick of talent and empathy and imagination. A lot of this denial was fueled by stereotype threat. I was aware that anything that I wrote would automatically be associated with Asians, and be seen as typifying “the Asian experience,” and so on. I think a lot of Asian writers go through some version of that, and it was even worse back then, when there were fewer prominent Asian American writers. With some significant exceptions it wasn’t until recently, I mean like six or seven years ago, that the publishing world consistently cared about Asian American writers writing about things other than Asianness.

Around the time that I decided I wanted to write comedy was when I realized I could write about race in a way that suited me. It turns out I had plenty of things to say about race, but through some heavy layers of grotesquery and irony, and that was not available to me in the shoegaze-y mode I was writing in before.

AH: Let’s talk about beating the autofiction allegations. Your stories “Main Character” and “Re: Rejection” explicitly point out that you have biographical similarities to several of your characters, including ones that you probably wouldn’t want to be confused with.

TT: To answer this, I want to unravel the thread of autofiction a little bit. I’ve said before that I think autofiction is like the personal essay plus plausible deniability, and that for a lot of reasons—maybe out of a desire to stay in your lane, or maybe just because some publisher decided on it—we have been migrating towards fiction that cheekily skirts the boundaries of self-reference. It goes some way toward alleviating those anxieties around things like stereotype threat I was talking about earlier, getting ahead of readers connecting you to your work by doing it yourself, and telegraphing your awareness of it.

I knew that with really personal subject matter and with characters that resemble me in all kinds of ways, this book was going to get read as autofiction no matter what. And so my attempt here is to fight autofiction with metafiction. The thing is, I actually kind of hate metafiction as it’s usually practiced, the exhausted Hall-of-Mirrors variety. Like yes, we get that this is all a game, we’re all very smart. But I think it gets interesting again when you run it through autofiction. It takes for granted what autofiction is always hinting at, which is the meddling of the author, and the self-conscious construction of the stories. And the distancing that’s inherent to metafiction stands in a tense relationship to the assumption of personal investment and involvement in autofiction. 

Originally I thought that the only story I’d take that approach with is “Main Character,” which has an authorial self-insert near the end. Even though it goes pretty far, I didn’t feel like I’d gone far enough, so the last piece, “Re: Rejection,” goes all in and ends up disassembling the entire book in the form of a rejection letter from a fictional editorial committee. I thought it was funny that I’d written myself into a corner by writing a book that resisted closure, and the conventional redemption narratives around rejection, or any suggestion of self-knowledge or virtue as a silver lining. But I didn’t want to end it flatly either. And so this was the other solution that I came up with—that, staying true to the point, it’d rip itself apart at the end, recapitulating itself in kind of a mean way. And metafiction is good at that.

AH: Speaking of the conventional redemption narrative around rejection, is that what the Ralph Waldo Emerson epigraph is supposed to represent? (“…but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.”) The book seems to reject that narrative around rejection, but as a work inspired by rejection, it also kind of proves it right.

TT: Emerson actually comes up twice in the book, and the idea was to sort of twist his optimism about individuality into something more ominous. What I like about the quote is that it’s written in this soaring exalted style, but if you read closely, there’s nothing definitively positive about it. “They build a heaven before us,” but that means you’re stuck on the outside of heaven looking in. The “new powers” and “new and unattempted performances” just sound ambiguous to me, because why couldn’t new mean worse? But the real key here is that it’s only the second half of the passage. The first half is about how people who accept us are “dear” to us. This idea, that your rejectors matter more to you than those who accept you, certainly worked with my premise.

AH: As we’ve discussed, many of the stories in Rejection experiment with form. “Re: Rejection” is a rejection letter, “Our Dope Future” is a Reddit post, “Main Character” is a wiki, and “Sixteen Metaphors” is a list story in the vein of Lydia Davis and Carmen Maria Machado. What do you feel that this formal experimentation afforded you?

TT: First of all, variety. Switching the form up is one way to keep things lively, and it’s a good way of forcing yourself into different registers. I had originally imagined this book as being about half fiction and half nonfiction, so it was actually a lot more experimental at its inception. The fiction parts were meant to have a specific kind of voice that followed all kinds of rules, like distant-omniscient narration, protagonists with no names, mostly summary, and so on. I got the idea from self-help books, where sometimes the chapters will begin with made-up anecdotes, you know, like: “Meet Bob. Bob wakes up in the morning at seven o’clock and gets up and brushes his teeth,” etc. I was doing a takeoff on that: what if this went on for much longer and got much more specific and was not so much a morality play or a “Goofus and Gallant” story, but this voyeuristic account of somebody messing their life up, with no lessons learned whatsoever? I thought that all the fiction pieces would be like that, and you’ll notice that the first three stories of the book form a kind of trilogy along those lines, but after the third piece, I didn’t feel like writing that way anymore. I also think form is just usefully generative. It helps me come out with more writing and results in a less monotonous experience in reading it.

AH: In your previous interview with Electric Literature, you said it’s interesting in writing to “hyper-indulge your vices.” What does that mean to you? Is that something you did when writing this collection?

TT: Yeah, like I alluded to before, developing as a writer really demands that you strip away different layers of denial. I think that your biggest enemy is this vaunted idea of yourself as a writer, which is bound up in ego and wanting to be perceived and respected in a certain way. Your vices, however you define them for yourself, are things you’re automatically going to be interested in, and will generate feeling and insight and material.

Obviously the glaring example of this is all the porn in “Ahegao.” It’s not really the most dignified thing to be authoritative about, but you have to push past that and write about whatever you’re really interested in. When I was working on that story I found that the ending, which is a very elaborate custom porn video that was not in the first drafts at all, kept getting longer and longer, to the point where I just had to concede that everything else had to be organized around it. 

AH: The editorial board in “Re: Rejection” also calls metafiction self-indulgent.

TT: Another word would be “masturbatory.”

AH: It’s funny that “Re: Rejection” accuses the book of taking on different perspectives to ward off accusations of navel gazing, but “Ahegao” has an image that takes literal navel-gazing to its extreme: attaching an endoscope to a dildo and winding it through nine meters of digestive tract. Was that something you were thinking about? 

TT: Actually, that is literally the operating metaphor there. With that image I was partly playing off that David Foster Wallace story in Oblivion, “The Suffering Channel,” which is about an artist who shits out intricate sculptures, with cameras trained on his asshole while he’s excreting them. I think this dovetails with what we were just talking about, the desublimation of your interests in writing, because this is where Kant is actually able to get past his inhibitions and articulate what he wants, despite it being comically gross and impossible. He is gaining literal insight into his fantasy, though he falls short of ever getting it. It’s an expression of his most honest self, even if he doesn’t mean it that way.