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  • “I’m Interested as A Writer in Less Exalted Persons”An Interview with Jessica Hagedorn
  • Michael Collins (bio)

This interview took place on May 21, 2008, at a café in New York City.

I. Rock and Roll and Gender

COLLINS: There’s an autobiographical element in novels of yours like The Gangster of Love. What approach do you take to fictionalizing your life? Do you consciously fictionalize or does it just work out that you start a story and autobiographical elements enter into it?

HAGEDORN: Yeah, I think it’s actually the latter. Something about a story you want to write pulls at you, and then—for example with Gangster . . . , we can look at that for a moment. I always thought that I had never read a satisfying novel that dealt with music from a woman’s point of view, particularly rock music, which is a very male-dominated field. I wasn’t interested in writing about the female character as victim. I wanted to set the main part of the story in New York City, a tough arena in which to prove yourself as any kind of artist, and draw on my own experience leading a scruffy little band in the late 70s and the 80s. One of the fictive elements included creating a character named Voltaire, the troubled brother of Rocky Rivera, who is the novel’s female protagonist. Voltaire and Rocky are both, in some way, inspired by the rock star mythology of Jimi Hendrix. I’ve been shaped by my adolescence in San Francisco in the 60s. I saw Jimi Hendrix perform many times.

COLLINS: In Gangster, just to follow up on what you’re saying, the theme of the woman in the male dominated world of rock—

HAGEDORN: The female musician in the narrative of rock, jazz, and the blues is often relegated to the tragic, junkie songstress who’s driven to kill herself after her lover leaves her. You can throw opera in there, too. Look at La Boheme.

COLLINS: You bring that up in the dream dialogues that the main character, Rocky Rivera, has with Jimi Hendrix. There’re a couple of times when Hendrix asks her, “Why do you try so hard to be a man?” and I guess the answer is that it’s . . . [End Page 1217]

HAGEDORN: More fun? [laughs] To be a man.

COLLINS: Of course, more fun. [laughs] I was going to say she feels that’s the only way that she can succeed, but what exactly do you mean when you say it’s more fun to be a man?

HAGEDORN: Men have more power—they can do anything. They are given permission to fail and to sin; fail, fall, sin, fuck up, deceive, lie, cheat, steal—it’s all fine.

COLLINS: Whereas with women?

HAGEDORN: It’s not so fine. Failure and weakness are not attractive, not redemptive.

COLLINS: One of the lines that sticks in my head from the same book—and I think it’s something that I see with a lot of your characters—is something Rocky says about herself; and another character, Sly, picks up the same line. And the line is “Myself chasing myself.”

And Sly actually grew up as a middle class kid in Detroit. But he wants to make himself into this sort of “Superfly” character. And he dives into all of the sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and wears these Bootsy Collins star-shaped sunglasses and I think at one point Rocky says, it’s pathetic how much Sly believes in this “stardom crap.” And so in that sense, he’s chasing a successful version of himself. And even though he never makes it, he lives as though he’s already a superstar; he’s chasing himself in that sense—running after this image of himself.

HAGEDORN: Yes. You absolutely nailed it. Sly is the sort of person who is willing to do anything including demean himself, to achieve that stardom. I think it’s a particular kind of stardom that is being explored in my novel.

COLLINS: I see that in the some of the other characters. For instance, in your recent play Most Wanted, Danny Reyes...

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