The Lynne Tillman Wormhole
Dearest Fertilisers,
This week we’re bringing you exclusive content from the newest issue of Worms; a short story by long-time Worms collaborator Lynne Tillman.
Here at the worm farm, we’ve also curated a Lynne Tillman Reading List for you to browse. Please come and sink into the Tillman wormhole! We’ve put together a compilation of some of the first stories she ever wrote, some Lynne Tillman essentials, interviews, films and all the best bits we could find.
Remember you can get Worms 5 here for a lot more.
Enjoy her razor-sharp prose as well as some celebrity spotting in her short story ‘Angela and Sal’.
Worms HQ xx
“If life differs from novels, it’s mostly in the management of time and incident.
A LYNNE TILMAN READING LIST
Weird Fucks (1983)
A firecracker of a novella with unforgettable moments. Sit down for an afternoon, plummet through this book and get prepared to be thrown head-first into the Tillman universe.
"He undressed me in the doorway and fucked me. It went fast after so many weeks, like a branch breaking off a tree. The time had come. It was a snap."
Mothercare: On Obligation, Love, Death, and Ambivalence (2022)
Having an elderly parent myself, this autobiographical novel about Tillman’s mother’s declining health was a moving account about the politics and intimacies of care. With razor sharp prose and heavy insight into the societal structures of care and to whom that burden rests upon most often, her most recent book is not one to miss.
“We walked uptown to her apartment on Twenty-third Street. On the corner of Thirteenth Street and Second Avenue, we passed what appeared to be a homeless man. Mother commented, ‘He’s waiting for someone.’ Her interpretation was a kind of identification with him or a projection, and unusual from her mouth. Later, I thought: she’s waiting for her husband, my father.”
“Dying is an activity, the organs go about their task toward entropy, needing time to shut down. The body is active to the end. It is so odd. Without eating and drinking, people can live up to two weeks.”
Men and Apparitions (2018)
Tillman writes about a man reckoning with what is it to be a man after feminism has become a manistream practice.
Eccentric and ever questioning, her protagonist Ezekiel Hooper Stark is spiralling into a crisis and Tillman takes us deep into his head in a series off episodic, essayistic takes on our contemporary world.
Frieze magazine publishes essays, profiles, interviews and reviews by writers, artists and curators. Among their wide-ranging publications, from Squid Game’s Lee Jung-lae’s thoughts on collecting art (love that), to a guide on the best shows in Munich, is an extensive archive of writing by Lynne Tillman, a frequent collaborator (she writes a bi-monthly column for Frieze called “In These Intemperate Times”) as well as an abundance of writing about her as well.
Get lost in the archive, or if you need some nudges to get going, here are some recommendations:
How Lynne Tillman’s first story was written on a restaurant menu.
Can’t stop rewatching the same old movies? She can’t either!
Love Eileen Myles? Same. Listen to them chat with Tillman.
If this is too much and you don’t know where to start
This article will give you the whole rundown, her trajectory through Europe, her participation in a film cooperative, her experiments in writing, her stint as an editor for the sex newspaper ‘SUCK’.
Or… dive into her films
In her writing, her characters, like herself, participate in film cooperatives, theatre troupes, circus troupes or are involved in the film and performance world in some way. In the aforementioned interview with Eileen Myles, Tillman explains that she practised her reading skills by watching actors audition, which she describes as hilarious.
Watch a clip from her film Committed.
