Rail: I do think love could save us a lot of problems in our current political climate—but I’m going to throw a Jesse at you here and say, “even love has limits.” This might be totally separate from the sort of love you’re talking about but do you agree with Jesse when she says that the story of Adam and Eve “has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that human relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough?” Ginger is an older teen, aimless and into casual sex and drugs, hanging with a local bad boy, Ted, and his even badder best friend, Steve. Hers is an odyssey of American suburbia, where an ugly poetic aesthetic can be found in the seediness of strip malls. She is definitely not the kind of role model preferred by the attendees of her father's suburban church, where he ministers to an aging, ever-dwindling congregation. Evolutionary biology traces the emotive face from a time before language and links it to the growing complexity of our early social groups. The better early humans were at conveying feelings, the more successful they were at the co-operations that pushed civilization forward. Some scientists have suggested that homo-sapiens greater facility for facial expression is what allowed us to overtake the less facially dexterous Neanderthals. a b "Steinke, Darcey". The New School. Archived from the original on July 31, 2012 . Retrieved July 15, 2012. DS: I do. Questions about my relationship to the universal force, or God, or how we’re supposed to be oriented to this life, or how we’re meant to live with the fragility of the human body—these questions are central to me. These are the questions that drive my work. I’ve found myself, through my writing, moving even farther away from doctrine and deeper into to the idea that the world itself is divine. People, animals, every plant—it’s all a manifestation of God. It’s just not very worthwhile to me to get bound up in confining ideas of God anymore.

Also, I wear a hijab so I definitely think twice about writing anything that is particularly descriptive about any part of my body that I don’t show in certain public settings, but even for men or women who don’t wear hijab, I don’t know how I feel (morally/Islamically) about describing or talking about sex or bodies in a way that can—to put it simply, turn people on. “Is that Islamically appropriate, to test people’s hearts that way?” that’s the question I always ask myself. In the Islamic tradition, any sex outside of marriage is considered a sin. So when I say “test people’s hearts,” I really mean “make life harder for people who are not happily married by showing them how great sex and physical intimacy can be?” I do not think sex in itself is shameful—certainly not the desire for it, since one of the greatest gifts God promises the people of heaven in the Islamic tradition is sex and companionship—and a lot of other pleasures that are purely physical. But as a Muslim, I have come to think of the pursuit of pleasures outside of a set of guidelines as sinful. I know that different Christians have different ideas about the pursuit of pleasure (sex or otherwise) both within and without sets of guidelines, but what grounds you personally? DS: Yes, but I also sometimes feel very nostalgic for the years when my father was in a parish. We lived in the rectory. We played in the church, and when we wanted to talk to our father, we could just run upstairs to his office. Eventually, after I turned eight, he trained to become a chaplain and didn’t have a church again after that. But those years before are romantic and sentimentalized in my memory now. DS: On the other side, though, you can’t just throw off the faith, because it’s you. My family is full of ministers. You know that beautiful hippie-Jesus painting—Jesus with the long, flowing blond hair? There was one in my grandparents’ house, like it was the portrait of an ancestor. I grew up with Jesus as if he were a relative. And the Bible stories were closer because my family was a clergy family. They weren’t just stories I heard in church; they were entwined with the narratives of my own family.Just before I lost consciousness last September, my young surgeon, Dr. Katsuura, came in to join his team in his gown, cap and mask. His eyes were the last thing I saw before I went under. My doctor’s mask, standard surgical wear, also seemed like part of the uniform of a metaphysical astronaut, one positioned between my body and its pain, even its mortality.

Steinke: In my generation, most women were cut off from their mothers. In part because our mothers had lead lives that were limited because of what was possible for women at the time they came of age, and what was possible for my generation was more. And we resented our mothers for accepting limitations. I see this as wrong now, of course. I just read my mother’s journals—she has been dead for five years—and in one way they are the sad writings of a divorced women who blamed her problems on everyone else, but in another important way they are like The Handmaid’s Tale, a story of a woman beaten down by patriarchy. Rail: Part and parcel of Jesse’s relationship with her mother and other women in the book, and in your memoir, and your Granta piece on your mother, is the theme of beauty and aging and how that plays out in each of these women’s lives. As women, writers, as mothers, sisters, friends, and mentors, how do we get over this? And, what can you tell us, especially since you’re working on a book about menopause now, about your own opinions regarding both age and beauty, as a woman and a writer and how they’ve changed since you first wrote Suicide Blonde? Image:In reading Flash Count Diary, I was moved by the beauty and honesty with which you write the complications and complexities of your spiritual life. On a personal level, I related. Like you, I’m also the daughter of an ELCA pastor, and in my experience, growing up as a clergy child has made me less capable of magical thinking, but also less able to separate from the influence of the church—from faith—because it is knit into the fabric of my identity and way of seeing the world.At the zoom funeral for my uncle, my father’s brother, I watch my 85-year-old father. He is one of 30 relatives on the screen, each in their small rectangular box but it is his face, as the service progresses, that most compels me. He, along with my mother, were my first faces. Faces I struggled to understand and connect with as a tiny baby, even before my own memory began to unfurl. A Talk about Music: Joey Agresta's Let's Not Talk About Music & Viewfound's Memorate By Daniel Wilson

My face, as I age, has become less interesting to men. This is what women mean when they say that they feel invisible. The feeling is not that different from wearing a Covid-19 mask. People on the street don’t look at me, don’t register my face. Among colleagues, friends, sometimes even family, I am less funny, less animated, somehow blander and less interesting. My face, as I age, has become less interesting to men. This is what women mean when they say that they feel invisible. I have to admit I initially bought this book for the cover. That beautiful naked, blonde woman smoking...yeah. Look at it one more time. Children who are genetically predisposed to prosopagnosia cannot follow the plots of television shows or movies, as they cannot distinguish one character from another. While there is no known cure for face blindness, children and adults with prosopagnosia can be taught to use jewelry, clothing, hand expressions, gait and even smell to tell one person from another.

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Image: Let’s close with just one more question. Early on in the book you quote Katha Pollitt as saying, “Questing is what makes a woman the hero of her own life.” What’s your next quest? The language, though. The imagery. And what is the word for imagery about smells? One of my favorite quotes: Steinke's prose has been said to "repeatedly hint at the divine in tangible things." [2] According to a The Washington Post book review of Steinke's novel Milk, "Steinke writes some beautifully mystical descriptions of sexual encounters, and the conjunction of sex and the spirit, bodies and souls, is fascinating." [14] My face, while a body part, is much more than a hand or a foot—it stands in for my whole body, my whole self.