At the start of the California Book Club meeting to discuss Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, CBC host John Freeman noted that he wanted to start in the deep end, about landscape and memory. He asked what Watkins was thinking about when she began assembling the book and what she wanted to address by blending the stories of early explorers of the West with characters in a collapsed civilization. Watkins explained that the animating myth of the book is what happened in Owens Valley—the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system and the draining of the valley, most spectacularly, Owens Lake. Watkins was born in Owens Valley in Bishop, and her mother would tell the story of the aqueduct and the draining of the lake all the time. Watkins noted, too, that the Nevada Test Site was also nearby, a place where the U.S. government undertook some 1,000 nuclear tests until 1992, when she was in second grade. “I don’t know how to be surreal once that kind of thing has happened in your home,” Watkins said.
Freeman asked how she’d conceived of the blend of intimacy that’s in the book. “There’s this unexpected kind of zooming intimacy that is often not inappropriate but is unexpected,” he said. The novel’s protagonist, Luz, takes a child, Ig, who she believes needs help, and later, Luz is rescued by Dallas, a woman in the desert to whom she tells her whole story. Freeman asked, “What does that balance of intimacy and projection do for a novel, and do you find it’s realistic to life?”
Watkins agreed that the intimacy in the book can be weird and intense and “kind of inappropriate or very confusing...like Dallas becoming a wet nurse for Ig.” She commented that perhaps she focused on warped, twisted intimacies because the story of intimacy in popular culture is “flat and inadequate”—something that she saw looking back at the Manson Family phenomenon. Her father was a member of the Manson Family, and she got to know her dad through the related media, including sensational true-crime books and his book.
Karen Russell, a friend of Watkins and the author of, most recently, The Antidote, joined the conversation as the special guest. She noted that Gold Fame Citrus “dissolves the binaries of setting and character or self and world” and that categories like fantasy and realism start to break apart when you look at the scale and history of the landscape of the book. She asked Watkins if breaking down categories was always going to be part of the book.
Watkins explained that the dune was the first thing in her book. “It was basically not that much more sophisticated than getting high and watching David Attenborough’s Planet Earth,” Watkins said. Russell commented that with Watkins’s bestiary in the novel, Watkins reveals that “the emptiness of any place is an illusion.” She commented that Watkins’s mom had a natural history museum in the desert and that there was something “really tender and moving in [her] situating a house for stories in the voiceless, edgeless, very old place.”
Watkins commented that her mother was a great storyteller who talked in geologic time, even when they weren’t in the museum, elaborating that her mother liked to “entertain herself.”
Watkins described leaving the West for the first time to go to grad school in Ohio, “which is such an aggressively normal place that I just became immediately obsessed with my home.” When she was living in Ohio—and later, Pennsylvania and New Jersey—she would tell people she was writing a book about the water crisis in the West. But they didn’t respond with a lot of recognition, and, she said, “That made me even more freaked out.”
“And it’s almost like the book is this gland I had to express.... It’s like a nightmare novel,” she said. But she liked making it beautiful or stylistically interesting or formally fun. “The lightness is just because I had to get through the feeling of, basically, my home, which is a fraught home to begin with. And I have a complicated relationship with it. All the way down it is dying, and no one seems to notice or care, and maybe that is by design.”
Later, returning to this theme while talking to Freeman, she said, “We know how to stop climate change; we don’t have the political will. But a political system is something we made, and that’s something that can be unmade. I’ve come to be surprisingly, like, life-affirming through all of this—again, expressing that gland.... I live in relation to these old-ass mountains, and I look at them all the time. So, it gets me to think in terms of billions of years. I think we don’t get to pick our moment. We have to treat it like a miracle, like a gift to be born.” She pointed out that she has a note of something Freeman said: “You could have been born a lemon tree.” She said, “Which I understand to mean something like, And instead, you were born a human who can language and feel intimacy and build and make different decisions.”•
