Jon Lindsey is the author of the novel BODY HIGH (May 1, 2021, House of Vlad). He’s also my husband. We met at CalArts in 2009. We were both students in the MFA writing program. Jon was in the class above mine. The first time I saw him he was surrounded by friends, running through the rain in a hoodie yelling, “I’m a Ninja.” I felt attracted to him. Not long thereafter, we both attended the same birthday party at a shitty club in west Los Angeles. Jon wore a western shirt patterned with the silhouettes of wild horses, galloping against a setting sun. Again, I felt attracted to him. Also, wary. I sensed he was a player and at that particular point in my adult life (I was twenty-three and very worldly) I felt it was in my best interest to avoid players. But there was no one else to dance with, so I let Jon creep up behind me. I kept turning to face him, he kept turning me around so he could push up on my butt.
When the night was over, I gave him a ride back to the CalArts campus where his car was parked. He lingered, trying to hook up, but I kicked him out.
After I rejected him, Jon seemed more interested in me. A few weeks later, we had our first date, at the dog park, then a yoga class. A few days after that, he took up residence in my apartment. I kept expecting him to leave, but, basically, he never did.
At the time, Jon had just started writing the novel he intended to present for his MFA thesis. Everyone in his class was raving about it. He handed me pages like he was bestowing a great honor, by letting me read his work. Which, in retrospect, he was. But at the time, I thought the pages he shared were rough and spastically written. Still, I could picture every scene like a movie in the theater of my mind. And I was flattered when I read a description of the love-interest in the book, in which my partial heterochromia was also her partial heterochromia. “She has my eyes,” I reported to Jon, expecting a profession of his developing feelings for me. He said, “She’s a composite of every girl I’ve ever slept with.”
Jon has come a long way since then. So has his writing. So have I. In the past twelve years we’ve fallen in love, married, moved from Los Angeles to Texas and back again. Together, we’ve caretaken both our moms, both of whom died, mine from cancer, Jon’s from suicide. And all the while, Jon has brainstormed (in the shower), read (craft books, everything NY Tyrant, Emmanuel Carrère) and written a novel that is, indeed, a body: high and fast and hot and wild, complicated and true. To me, BODY HIGH is a living document of Jon’s growth as a writer and person, his tentative foray into his own emotional unconscious, which resembles a quiet ocean, glassy, beautiful, but sometimes cold. To get beneath the surface, I drove Jon to the hottest spot I could think of: a party hotel in Palm Springs, where I sat him in front of a camera and fed him tequila, several grams of cocaine, and at the end of the evening, a generous Ketamine nightcap. What follows is our conversation.
Lovers talking - I love when they do this -
Here's another one - a BONUS!
Clancy Martin in conversation with Amie Barrodale
In his latest book,Love and Lies, Clancy Martin argues that love requires deception and self-deception. He uses philosophy, literature, and his own life to argue the case. I am his wife, and I wanted to ask him the difficult, scary questions—like what should a married woman do if she has an affair and gets pregnant with the other man’s kid—but in the process I found that we all know the answers to those questions. The answer is: lie. But still, many people, when faced with the situation, are too weak; they tell the truth. So I tried to find a place—still difficult and scary—where I could ask questions that touched on the truth about love and our marriage, and I wasn’t sure what his answers would be. I am his third wife and he’s my first husband, and that’s part of what’s scary, of course. Did I marry a pathological liar?
Their conversation at the link:
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