Lynne Tillman: The author who inspired the Manhattan avant-garde

Three decades ago, Lynne Tillman lived in a one-room flat at the tip of Manhattan which cost less per month than a lunch for one today at the Odeon. The city was bankrupt. The World Trade Center had recently arisen, and South Street Seaport still employed fishmongers. "They'd be coming in at the start of their day as we finished ours," Tillman remembers, sitting in a leather armchair at New York's SoHo House, dressed in black, sunglasses cutting the glare. At rest her face has the tilted mystery of a Modigliani portrait. But when she speaks a guarded nostalgia softens her eyes. She is not sentimental, but memory counts. "There aren't places where such overlaps can happen any more," she laments. "They've kept the cobblestones down in that neighborhood because it's quaint. But now that place is just a mall, owned by Canadians no less."

Being Lynne Tillman in Manhattan today must entail frequent reminders of how far the city has come from its grungy days. In an age when few writers can afford to visit Manhattan, let alone live here, she comes from an era when the hottest upstart literary magazine (Between C&D) was printed on a nine-pin dot matrix printer, and some of the most evocative young fiction writers Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill had worked as strippers. The art and literary worlds mingled in the pages of new magazines like Bomb, which launched in 1981. Tillman had studied as a painter at Hunter College, and wrote about art under the name "Madame Realism".

The writer Patrick McGrath remembers Tillman as "a restless and eternally curious figure on the art and literary scenes downtown, a formidable critical intellectual". He recalls her as "always extremely good company, warm and witty and serious and combative by turns, and with a true talent for friendship... Hers was a unique position within the downtown scene, and her books and essays have never lost their edgy, adventurous, thoughtful, experimental energy".

Now, as the art galleries have moved north, Tillman's writing has glided toward a more autumnal, ruminative mood. There are few sentences in her latest novel, American Genius (Soft Skull Press, 9.99), that get in and out quickly they snake and wind and curlicue to false halts, before trickling onward. Told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, living in a closed community, which might be an asylum or an artists' colony, American Genius follows her in and out of manias and obsessions. Among her worries: skin, her cat, America, farting, and death.

"I wanted to think about what we mean by consciousness," Tillman says. Here is the American mind, addled by modern life: afraid, allergic, associative, and terribly alone. Tillman's heroine is locked into a painful internal loop, but allergic to just about anything that alleviates her solitude. "We didn't use to have all these allergies," she says, thinking of wheat-free this and gluten-free that: "We weren't always so afraid of being permeated."

In American Genius, these cultural markers become symbols of a country that has begun to wear its nervous conditions like a point of pride. It doesn't have to be this way, Tillman believes. She still believes that the Constitution was a work of genius and the country itself a fabulous experiment. "Genius used to be a force of nature," she explains. "And it was there when the Constitution was written."

As an undergraduate at Hunter College she read American history, and gets annoyed when large, complicated swathes of America's past are reduced to simple narratives about exploitation. She is equally angry about the country's direction. "It's incredible we could have a policy of pre-emptive war: it will take years to undo."

It's clear Tillman thinks of American Genius as a kind of political gesture but not in the conventional sense. "I think the problem with novels or art which calls itself political is that it can be so literal. You could say Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a political novel, but he didn't structure it to constantly remind you of that." Nor will she take pleasure in being called one of the last experimental American writers. "There's a lot of hubris if you call your work anything, because it doesn't mean anything if it can't get people to read it."

Over the years, this has been a small problem, but not a major one. Tillman began writing as a child in Long Island, and never sought an audience. She thought of writing as a way out. "We might as well have been living in a suburb of Cleveland," she says. An aunt took her into the city one day to an Off-Broadway show. Thereafter Tillman became determined to get into New York. She fell in love with the city, but after college knew she had to leave it for a time. "This is a tough town and it was not easy then if you didn't know exactly what you wanted. I... had to protect my mind."

So Tillman moved to London, where she fell in with a crowd, worked odd jobs and lived in a squat with the painter, poet and playwright Heathcote Williams. When life became too hectic in London, she would move to Amsterdam for a while. "I created a person who could be a writer," she says of this time. "I didn't have mentors, I wasn't savvy, I was really a purist and decided I wouldn't make compromises." The work of Jane Bowles was a revelation. "I thought if she can write about girls, then I can, and I had some ideas about how to present the lives of girls that would portray how tough it is to become a woman, to just get out of those years."

In 1976 Tillman moved back to New York and began slowly writing her first novel and living. She moved downtown. One night she went out and swung by the Barnabus Rex, a now-defunct writers' and artists' hang out. "It had a pool table in the centre and almost nothing else," she remembers. She sat down on a bench between two men the singer-songwriter Bob Musial, and a bass player named David Hofstra. "David had just come to the city from Kansas, and we were of similar minds about why we were here." She hit it off with him, and they have been together since.

And Tillman has been writing since. In the early 1980s her fiction, art criticism, essays and reviews began appearing in downtown journals. She wrote stories to accompany gallery shows by Kiki Smith and other artists. She finished her first novel, Haunted Houses (1987), a triptych of tales about three middle-class American women coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. "I kept thinking these tales should connect, then I thought, why do they have to?" In Motion Sickness (1991), Tillman reversed this movement, telling the tale of expatriates tumbling through Europe, running into each other. "No one is in the country they were born in," she says. Cast in Doubt (1992) is set on Crete and concerns a gay detective, smitten by a young woman who goes missing.

With each book, Tillman took a form and made it anew. When she wrote about Warhol's factory in The Velvet Years, she turned to oral history to capture the verve of the period. In 1999, a small project on the 20th anniversary of the now-defunct independent New York bookstore Books and Co. turned into a full-scale cultural history when the store was threatened and closed. "It took me three years to write. Each day I would get up and go to my desk and cry, it was so daunting. I wanted so badly to make it interesting. I ended up talking to over 70 people and weaving all their stories into a kind of collage."

This act of bookish goodwill and the publication of her 1998 novel, No Lease on Life, which tells the story of a woman who can't sleep on a noisy New York evening, have marked Tillman as a New York writer. "It's funny because that's the only novel I've set in New York," she says, shaking her head. She has almost no resentment about this label. Since 1982, she has lived in the East Village with her husband, who still schleps his tuba and bass to band performances. A few first-generation Russian immigrants live on the block still, but they are slowly moving away. Half the year, Tillman packs herself onto a train up to Albany to help young students learn how to write. No doubt some of them have wild ideas of the bohemian city they will run off to. Though she could, Tillman doesn't seem the type to shatter their illusions.

Biography: Lynne Tillman

Raised in New York and Long Island, Lynne Tillman studied history and art at Hunter College and later lived in London and Amsterdam. Back in New York, she became an art critic and fiction writer. She has published three collections of short stories, starting with Absence Makes the Heart (1990), and five novels, including Motion Sickness (1991) and No Lease on Life (1998). Her art essays were collected in 1997 as The Broad Picture; she also wrote the text of The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory, with photographs by Stephen Shore, and a history of the legendary bookshop Books & Co. Her new novel is American Genius: a comedy (Soft Skull Press; distributed by Turnaround). She lives in Manhattan with musician David Hofstra, and is professor of writing at the University of Albany.