Haunted Houses

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In Haunted Houses, Tillman puts together the separate stories of three American girls—Jane, Grace, and Emily—as they come of age and into their own. Jane has violent father and a dead best friend, Grace is hazed by her peers into rebellion, Emily is withdrawn and considered "not normal" by her parents, and none of them can be described with a single quirk or characteristic like I have just attempted to—they are complex, confused, real people; not conclusive and not reducible to types. They observe the world, gain experience in it, make friends, feud with their mothers, and get on with their lives as you and I might: not with ambition, and not necessarily without. They are each a haunted house impressed upon by their own memories, traumas, histories, and experiences; if their stories seem sometime to blur together and feel like they represent something, it may be because they are so defiantly singular. An unspoken contract existed between Jane and her father; she went along to ball games and amusement parks when other fathers brought their sons. She played seriously with their sons, stretching across the slippery iron horse, reaching for the brass ring, though she was afraid of heights, reaching for it as if she really cared about winning. She hated losing her balance. Jane was almost certain that her father was her partner in this charade, and that he knew she was humoring him. But his moods changed as fast as she changed TV channels. He’d always been violent and had used his belt on Jane when she was small, but these violations were more than balanced by his good looks and charm. Her violations were almost invisible, something about the way she answered a question, something about the way she walked into a room. Everyone was in love with her father, Jane thought. He was so young-looking that her oldest sister’s friends thought he looked more like her sister’s date than her father. In Conversation: Lynne Tillman and Eileen Myles, archived from the original on 2021-12-14 , retrieved 2021-09-30

Lynne Tillman's writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring... To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today."-John Zorn Lynne Tillman's protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things: a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight."-Dennis Cooper National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists for Publishing Year 2014". National Book Critics Circle. January 19, 2015. Archived from the original on January 22, 2015 . Retrieved January 29, 2015. Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept. The Intersection of Writing and Sculpture: Writer Lynne Tillman on Roni Horn, archived from the original on 2021-12-14 , retrieved 2021-09-30

By the time Jimmy announced that he loved her, or rather her shadow, which she knew meant her, the fact that they were in different grades meant more to her than having won the attenuated battle for his affections. He was 11 and not as skinny as he’d once been, and even though his nostrils still quivered, he just wasn’t as cute, she thought, so she pretended not to understand what he was saying, which was, she discovered early, a disguise that worked. In 1995, Tillman's nonfiction work, The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967, was published with photographs by Stephen Shore; it presented 18 Warhol Factory personalities' narratives, based on interviews with them, as well as her critical essay on Andy Warhol, his art and studio. Tillman is also the author of the nonfiction book The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999), a cultural and social history of a literary landmark where writers and artists congregated for nearly 20 years.

Ms. Tillman's characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives . . . this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times . . . Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here."-LA Weekly Her other story collections are: The Madame Realism Complex (1992); This Is Not It (2002), stories written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists; Someday This Will Be Funny (2011); and The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. Lynne Tillman’s Haunted Houses is a novel that continually intrigues, as it unsparingly captures the transition from girlhood into womanhood through the perspectives of Grace, Emily and Jane. The novel begins with Jane, establishing a dark tone with the first sentence that tells us how ‘her father liked to scare her’. This opening gambit is indicative of the fractured parent/child relationships Haunted Houses explores. The examination of these relationships forces us to revisit what it means to grow up and how we have carried events from childhood and adolescence into our present lives. Tillman deftly recognises that ‘real conflicts arise when a girl grows older; as we have seen, she wished to establish her independence from her mother’ as we hope to establish ourselves as distinct beings separate from our past and parents. Absence Makes the Heart (1990) is Tillman's first collection of short stories. The Broad Picture (1997) is a collection of Tillman's essays, which were published originally in literary and art periodicals. Mesmer, Sharon (2014-09-11). "Finding the Question That Hasn't Been Asked: An Interview with Lynne Tillman". The Paris Review . Retrieved 2021-09-30.Her father said Jimmy was dirty. He didn’t brush his teeth much, even when he dropped by to see Jane. Sometimes their meetings were accidental, but Jane didn’t really believe in accidents. If questioned she would deride notions of fate—she was very rational—but still she thought Jimmy and she were meant for each other. Now that he was a senior, he drove his convertible into the city, and spent time with people Jane didn’t know. Though one high school yearbook picture shows her sitting in his convertible, it was unusual to find her there. In 1987, when Haunted Houses was first published, the figure of the young girl was hardly a topic of literary interest—unless, of course, she was being written about by men; unless she was extraordinary, a woman or a story, in a way that the (often white, and male) tastemakers could not afford to ignore. Lynne Tillman wrote about the lives of the average (though also white) girls, and she was relegated to the domain of non-recognition (in the UK, where she was published nearly a decade later, her work drew maybe one positive review, and soon went out of print). At best, she was "a writer's writer," which is shorthand for "loved by a few and for the fact of her being obscure"—but mostly, she was obscure. There are moments where I found the novel physically restrictive as if my spine was cast in iron, forcing me to put it down. It’s not especially graphic or gratuitously violent; instead, it holds up a distorted mirror of my memories. Forcing me to confront what I have experienced or watched other women experience. I was compelled to keep reading. It is not always joyous, and the characters are not always nice, but Tillman’s stylish prose keeps you hooked. She is masterfully skilled in depicting the unpleasant and the uncomfortable; it is her ability to evoke in you the desire to see what lurks in the darkness, to witness horror, to understand pain. Perhaps I could only keep reading because, as uncomfortable as it is to face, I saw elements of my life and my friends’ lives, relationships, and transitions into womanhood in this novel. Tillman refused to let me look away. When she played with Jimmy, Jane insisted upon wearing dresses. He’s too wild, her mother told her. But his nostrils flare when he speaks, she responded, which meant to Jane that Jimmy was sensitive, like a rabbit. She could even tell him about the children’s book she loved and hated because it confused her. There was a little girl who had a blanket. The blanket got a hole in it. She wanted to get rid of the hole so she decided to cut it out. She cut that out and the hole got bigger. She cut that out, too, and the hole got bigger. Eventually the hole disappeared but so did the blanket. The little girl cried and Jane was genuinely puzzled.

At two she had tried to claim her father as her own, covering his face with her little body, and shouting, He’s my daddy, my daddy, to her much older sisters, who could dismiss that kind of behavior as babyish. But Jane was driven. She became Daddy’s girl to the chagrin of her mother, who had her hands full anyway. The third child is always the easiest, she heard her mother say to a woman who was visiting. It’s like she’s raising herself. Lynne Tillman: I didn’t know any better than to have faith in it. And every time you get rejected it gets harder, but I had such a strong belief in what I had done in Haunted Houses , which is kind of crazy because I am a deeply neurotic person with a lot of anxieties and insecurities. I have been in some form of psychotherapy for basically all my adult life and yet… I felt so strongly about this novel. Her sisters were hardly ever home, and Jane had her parents to herself. She couldn’t decide if her father was much crazier than he used to be, or whether, now that she was alone, she noticed it more. It didn’t help that business was starting to fall off. His younger brother Larry, who was also his business partner, never seemed to worry. He was divorced, ran around with women, played the horses, and saw a psychiatrist. To Jane, Uncle Larry had style, but he wasn’t a favorite of her mother’s. Years later someone told Jane that her mother was always too much in love with her father. Jane had never considered that what her mother was in was love.My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years. As Jane grew up her father’s alarm at what he called her wild ways also grew. The way she washed dishes. The way she flipped electric switches. It was all wild. Her parents fought over her too. During one fight Jane’s mother took all Jane’s father’s clothes and threw them on the floor. Jane observed the action from her place at the top of the stairs, this time not lying flat on her stomach but seated as if in the balcony of the UN. At school Jane was considered something of a diplomat, but not by her father, who didn’t move out as her mother said she wanted him to do. Jane wrote in her diary: Now that I’ve seen this, life is different. Life is not that different, she discovered, when Jimmy reappeared with another neighborhood girl and Jane thought she was in love with him all over again. She thought that showed maturity—to be able to be in love with someone for so long.

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Lynne Tillman's haunted houses are Freudian ones - the psyches of three girls, Emily, Jane, and Grace, each wrestling with the psychological 'ghosts' that shape them . . . . Frequently shifting points of view are expressed in crisp sentences. Rather than forming a modernist stream of consciousness, however, the writing remains controlled."-Lucy Atkins, Times Literary Supplement Freeman, John (14 December 2007). "Lynne Tillman: The author who inspired the Manhattan avant-garde". Belfast Telegraph . Retrieved 24 February 2023. Lynne Tillman (born January 1, 1947) is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She is currently Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts' Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program. [1] Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collection of essays, and two other nonfiction books. She writes a bi-monthly column "In These Intemperate Times" for Frieze Art Magazine. What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2014) , her second essay collection, was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2014.