“You have no control over anything as a child, not even the bedspread,” she says.
Unable to be out in the world, books became LaCava’s building blocks. “It wasn’t exactly a place where you imagine meeting young other friends in the street, for example, let alone if you’re American,” she tells me. When LaCava was a child her family was expatriated from Boston to France through her father’s job, and she grew up in Le Vésinet – a small, quiet town about an hour outside Paris, near the Palais Rose. While a familiar streak runs through LaCava’s work, it comes from a place of personal affinity.
The presence of pop culture in IFMPIY in general gestures towards many of LaCava’s own touchstones, which include French 60s writers like Françoise Sagan and Marguerite Duras, whose protagonists reconcile their desires for freedom with the supposed rules of convention. On the same note, Margot and Graves become “a thing” and mostly spend their time fucking and watching films, particularly the features that would have been shown at the 1968 edition of Cannes, which was cancelled amid controversy surrounding the Langlois Affair against a backdrop of general discontent in France. And though so much hinges on flesh-and-blood, veering into Cronenbergian body horror in some instances, in the end, LaCava’s concern is more often with fantasy and projection – things that aren’t there. In both cases, the young girl is a product and a vessel. In I Fear My Pain Interests You, out next month via Verso, our lead is Margot – the young daughter of two famous musicians who, she discovers after crashing her bike and being rushed to hospital by a man known only as “Graves”, cannot feel physical pain. In the case of LaCava’s first book, 2020’s The Superrationals, the protagonist is Mathilde – a gallery worker who follows her best friend to Paris, where she processes losing both of her parents as a teenager while critically surveying the high-end art world that reveres – and then exploits – her blank slate beauty. At the heart of her narratives you’ll typically find a jeune fille a young woman who is in desperate search of herself, but ultimately remains caught in a neverending swirl of withholding lovers, absent parents, and psycho-sexual tendencies as mapped onto her by others. That wicked humour is something you can guarantee from LaCava, whose work performs surgery on pain, desire and youth as they play out within the culture industries – often as commodities. If you don’t like the book, she reasons, you can burn it.
Stephanie LaCava’s latest novel comes with a merch line that includes a box of matches.
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