Talking William James, Traveling Alone and 'Actual Weirdos' With Jessa Crispin
In Depth
In The Dead Ladies Project, Jessa Crispin—founder of the online lit mag Bookslut—weaves together longtime preoccupations to create a bracing, prickly, through-provoking book.
Each chapter pairs a person and a place, so that she considers Rebecca West in Sarajevo, Maud Gonne in Galway, Claude Cahun in Jersey Island, William James in Berlin. It’s an antidote to the Eat Pray Love school of travel writing—and deliberately so. As she winds through her list of dead ladies, Crispin interrogates marriage and family and the assumptions people still make about how we should organize our lives. It’s personal, but rather than looking relentlessly inward, she’s getting there by writing about literature, and specific historical personalities, and in one case some charming Swiss cows.
To give you a taste: “So I spend my birthday in proper spinster fashion,” she writes at one point, “with a night at the Russian ballet, wearing a ridiculous dress and sparkly shoes, sipping champagne and eating little caviar sandwiches, smoking on the rooftop without inhaling, just kind of lighting the cigarettes and waving them around, and looking out to the river that flows to the Baltic.” Buy it as a season’s-greetings gift for your friend who’ll fucking scream if she has to hear “Here Comes Santa Claus” one more goddamn time.
I sat down with Crispin and we talked traveling, dead ladies, weirdos, and tarot, among other things. Here’s an edited-down version of that conversation.
Tell me about how you picked the ladies that you did. And not just ladies—you ended up with William James, as well. Did you pick them before you embarked?
Once I figured out what the structure was going to be, it became really clear who was in and who was out. I needed some sort of link between them and the city and me, some sort of metaphor that worked. There were a couple that got cut, but the list that I started with was essentially the list.
Who’d you cut?
Robert Graves, in Majorca. Because he doesn’t like women, but he worships women, and I find that really interesting to think about. But I didn’t feel ready to deal with that, because that’s gross, and he’s gross. He has this book of poetry called Man Does, Woman Is. Fuck you, Robert Graves. I decided I didn’t want to do that.
The other one is Josephine Baker. She aged amazingly. She became a radical political person, a communist, and fought for equal rights and for the poor and adopted kids and became this amazing person, which you don’t expect for any sort of figure who is, like, the sex figure. Like Madonna. Madonna has not aged well. She has not become a humanitarian or anybody interesting at all. But Baker did. Maybe I’ll do it at some point, but I am interested in how that even happens. Because I’m scared of losing it, whatever it is. Becoming boring, or starting to fuck with my face. She got cut only because I didn’t want to go to Paris, and I didn’t want to do two French chapters, because anytime you read about expats, it’s Americans in France. And I had more personal connection to Margaret Anderson, just because our biographies are strikingly similar.
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