Todayâs guest, Caren Beilin, talks about her latest novel Revenge of the Scapegoat. All four of her booksâtwo nonfiction, two fictionâeach stand alone but they each also share recognizable people/characters that travel across books and across genre. How do the fictional versions of the real people in her lifeâher partner, her parents, her siblings, her friendsârelate to their âreal selvesâ and how does this spilling over from one book to the next help Caren engage with shared questions that animate them all? We talk about what it means to write prose with a disability poetics, about painâs relationship to form, about the unruly body and body humor, and about creating stories that interrogate and undermine destructive systems, from medical and institutional gaslighting to âthe scapegoat mechanism,â to the dynamics of the family unit itself. We also talk about sentences, about the pleasure and power of knots of language, as a site for expression, rebellion, and even liberation.
For the bonus audio archive, Caren discusses and reads from Flaubertâs final, unfinished novel Bouvard et PĂŠcuchet, the novel whose two grumpy old men, Bouvard and PĂŠcuchet, Carenâs most recent protagonist names her two painful, arthritic feet after. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and to check out all the other potential benefits of becoming a listener-supporter of the show (including a limited number of signed copies of Carenâs Blackfishing the IUD) head over to the showâs Patreon page. And finally here is todayâs Bookshop which contains many of the books mentioned today (from those by Sheila Heti, Gustave Flaubert, and RenĂŠ Girard to those by Beilin herself).
The post Caren Beilin : Revenge of the Scapegoat appeared first on Tin House.
