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THE MYSTERY OF PERCEPTION

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A book-length interview between author Lynne Tillman and critic Taylor Lewandowski, The Mystery of Perception takes the reader on a journey through American art and culture from the ’60s to today.

Read this if you like: NYC-centric oral histories—Just Kids by Patti Smith and I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell come to mind

If you’re a Lynne Tillman fan, The Mystery of Perception is a must-read. If you’re not yet familiar with the New York literary legend, let this be your introduction. Tillman’s stories about life in Downtown NYC often feel like a who’s-who of 20th-century pop culture:  Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Kruger, and Andy Warhol all appear in her anecdotes. Yet Tillman’s star shines the brightest as she reflects on her bibliography, which includes boundary-pushing fiction (e.g. Weird Fucks, Men and Apparitions) as well as journalism and criticism (e.g. The Velvet Years, on the unique personalities that made up Andy Warhol’s Factory). Conversations about literature lead into musings on what it means to be a woman in various contexts—on the dating scene after the Sexual Revolution, in the professional world, in the public eye. Throughout their chats, Lewandowski offers his insights, helping Tillman string together the past, present, and future of transgressive art. 

Recently, we had the chance to catch up with both Tillman and Lewandowski over Zoom. We talked about the evolution of gender constructs, the nature of love, and the passage of time.

In the Mystery of Perception, Lynne, you explain that when you started out, “I didn’t want to be a woman or a man. I just wanted to be a writer.” How has gender influenced your life as a writer, in terms of either your authorial perspective or how your work has been perceived?

Lynne Tillman: Gender and the limits that have been placed on women's lives in all sorts of ways, including women not being able to control their pregnancies until the mid-’60s, have been very defining for me. When I was a kid, there was really a sort of setup about what you were meant to be or look like. And I was very resistant to that, if not oppositional. I knew what I wanted to be, and it didn't matter to me to be feminine or masculine. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. And I would have really absurd things said to me. I remember talking to this man—I was maybe 18 and he was 40. He was my sister’s colleague or something like that; we must have been at a cocktail party. He asked me what I wanted to be, and at that point, I wanted to be a poet. And he asked me, “Wouldn't you rather bake a cake?” It was shocking—it sounds so idiotic, even worse than, “Don’t you want to have children?” I said, “Absolutely not,” and I walked away.

 “It didn’t matter to me to be feminine or masculine. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.”

From my perspective, gender was something to deconstruct. I wasn’t going to follow the rules. I was just trying to be myself. I had two sisters who were quite a bit older than me, and I saw them as smart girls. It never occurred to me that girls weren't as smart as boys. A lot of that stuff didn't enter my thinking, because I had these models before me. And because my parents were not conformist in a lot of ways. They were neurotic, but they didn't conform to a lot of the codes that may have been traveling around them. 

Lynne, you tell Taylor, “My subversions, they’re rarely mentioned. I think my writing was, for a long time, seen as unsensational. There’s not much said about its rebellious nature.” Taylor, which of Lynne’s subversions do you find most interesting? Lynne, if you have anything to add, please feel free to chime in. 

Taylor Lewandowski: I think first of your story “Diary of a Masochist,” which was collected in the High Risk anthology. In the book, I talk about this idea of writing from all these different perspectives and owning this idea of multiple perceptions and tapping into this fluidity of voice. I was really fascinated by that, and I kept thinking about it in relation to Men and Apparitions, because it’s grappling with biology and what you’re inheriting and family history.

Lynne Tillman: That’s one of my early stories. I wrote it without any apprehension about how people would perceive it. It’s about the extreme experience of a young man and a man who says he wants to give up everything for her. She’s available, she’s vulnerable to wanting to be loved, and she gets into this sadomasochistic relationship with him that lasts a few months. I was interested in the idea that you might not know somebody whom you think you know. I mean, obviously—it’s almost a truism. But this man begins as a friend, and then the girl finds out that he’s a complete alcoholic and he becomes a different person. I think the story also speaks to the need to be loved. I can't say it's universal, because romantic love is a very peculiar contextual idea. It’s getting a powerful beating now, and I think it deserves it—because some women shape their lives around meeting the right man, and some men shape their lives around meeting a woman who will fit all their requirements. Nonetheless, the need to be loved is still there—or the need to be needed, which sometimes can feel like love.

I don't know how socially constructed needs are, and I don't know how I would have felt if I'd been raised in a very different atmosphere. I do know that when I was living in London with groups of people, I felt much less in need of being in love, because I felt loved.

Lynne, you state that it’s easier to meet writers today than it was a few decades ago. At the same time, you open up about all the interesting artists you were able to connect with at loft parties. You remain engaged in New York’s social scene today—in fact, you met Taylor at a reading at KGB. How do you think the milieu of the New York arts scene has transformed over the years? Taylor, hearing Lynne’s recollections, what observations were most striking to you?

Lynne Tillman: Well, it changes and it stays the same. I'm not nostalgic about it. I'm not romantic about it. I think things happen when you're young, or younger, and things happen when you're old, or older. The first interview I ever did was with Méret Oppenheim, the great Surrealist. Being very young and imbued with the Surrealists, I said to her, “What was it like being alive in the ’30s?” She said to me, “It’s just like it is now. I’m friends with artists and writers and I make my work.” I never asked that question again, of course—but later, a much younger person asked me, “What was it like being alive in the ’70s?”

We exist in the time in which we live, but we're just human beings. Technology has changed, and that makes a big difference—you're not going to get lost on the way to a party because you can either use Google or phone somebody. But in terms of real human interactions, are people all that different? I don't know. From one night stands to hooking up, the expectations may be different, but what the feelings are, what people experience—that isn't necessarily so different.

Taylor Lewandowski: In the book, yes, I did want to contextualize your work throughout the years in terms of the different groups that you were a part of up into the present day. But I tried to do that in service of helping people be able to read your work with more background information. The more digging you do, the more you understand that there are parallels to the present. That’s what has been exciting to me: to think about the past as a gateway into the present and future, to ask, “What does it mean to be an artist or writer now?” “What has been done before, and how can I take from that and do something different or similar? 

I think it’s important that you’re not romanticizing the ’70s or the ’80s or ’90s or even today. As a young writer, I romanticized a lot of writers; they seemed like these figures in the sky. But when you start to engage with them, they become human. For some people, that’s scary, but for me, it was exciting—like, “Oh, writing is something I can do. Writers are just human beings with flaws and good traits and bad traits.”

“Every new thing I write is another test of my ability.”

Lynne Tillman: The other night, I did an event at McNally Jackson Seaport. This guy—he was maybe 28—had me sign his book. Then he said, “May I ask you a question? I’m worried about my motivation. I don’t know how to get myself to start writing. What did you do? How did you get motivated?” And, going back to what Taylor was talking about, I realized that I had become that person who I had once admired. It’s not that I see myself that way. Every new thing I write is another test of my ability. It’s not as if it gets simpler; it actually gets harder. But I told him, “Well, I had wanted to be a writer from the age of eight. And suddenly I was 28 and I wasn’t doing anything, so I said, ‘It’s now or never.’ You just have to say that to yourself: ‘It’s now or never.’ You can write about anything. Write about something that happened to you when you were a little boy. Anything.” It’s peculiar because how you think of yourself is not what you mean to other people.

QUICK PICKS

What’s an older book you love?

Lynne Tillman: Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles

Taylor Lewandowski: Sweet Bird of Youth, Tennessee Williams

What’s a newer book you love?

Lynne Tillman: Too many to name…

Taylor Lewandowski: Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines

What’s your favorite work of art?

Lynne Tillman: Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez

Taylor Lewandowski: Anything by Karen Kilimnik

MORE BY LYNNE

Weird Fucks (1982) | Haunted Houses (1987) | Absence Makes the Heart (1990) | Motion Sickness (1991) | Cast in Doubt (1992) | The Madame Realism Complex (1992) | The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967 (1995) | The Broad Picture (1997) | No Lease on Life (1998) | Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999) | This Is Not It (2002) | American Genius, A Comedy (2006) | Someday This Will Be Funny (2011) | What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014) | The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016) | Men and Apparitions (2018) | Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence (2022) | Thrilled to Death (2025)

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