Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, creator, and the author of Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living from Chronicle Books.

For those of you just tuning in, Slow Stories is a multimedia project that began with this podcast and now includes a newsletter on Substack. There, I write about things like time, creativity, and pace—and on this show, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.

Before we get into the episode, I wanted to quickly thank everyone who has shown support for Slowing in some way, shape, or form. Publishing a book—a first book, no less—is truly an all-consuming experience, and I'm so grateful to have received support and encouragement from readers around the globe. That said, if you want to show your support for Slowing, and if you've read and genuninely enjoyed the book, consider leaving a review, as this will help Slowing find even more readers.

As a reminder, you canalso follow Slow Stories on Substack for a behind-the-scenes look at bringing a book to life and follow me [on social media] @rachelschwartzmann for real-time updates.

For now, I'll leave you with this refresher on the book: Slowing caters to many literary sensibilities: essay and memoir, creative wellness, and personal growth. Language and lyricism are front and center, but there is also a practical component. There are various ways you can engage with and experience this book. For that reason, I don't know where exactly you'll find it on the shelf, but I'm confident it will fit somewhere in your home. That's where I wrote it, and that's what it means to me. I can't wait for you to read it!

Now, on to the episode, which begins with an opening story from Hannah Bonner, who reflects on the power of poetry and pace—and shares a poem that she returns to often. Here's more from Hannah.

Hannah Bonner: My name is Hannah and I'm the author of Another Woman, a poetry collection out from Eastover Press. I'm also the poetry editor for Brink, an imprint/literary journal dedicated to publishing hybrid cross-genre work of both emerging and established creatives who often reside outside traditional artistic disciplines. When I'm not writing poetry or doing editorial work, I'm an educator at the University of Iowa, a film critic, and an avid reader.

If I think of slowing down as both an act of resistance and love, care and contemplation, then reading poetry is one of the few things that asks that kind of fixed attention from me. Poetry both demands and rewards solitude, but even within that space, it is deeply communal.

I fell in love with one of my best friend's poetry before I ever met her. Reading Julia Anna Morrison's work is like walking through Iowa during a winter night—disquieting and deeply felt, like testing the ice of the rivers to see if it will hold or crack. There is danger and hurt but also beauty in her poetry collection, Long Exposure. I often return over and over to her poem, "Myths about Trees," which always stuns me into silence and contemplation. I invite you to slow down and listen to this poem now.


Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Hannah for sharing. Again, the poem she referenced is "Myths about Trees" by Julia Anna Morrison's collection Long Exposure. You can follow her on social media @hannah__bonner and order her debut poetry collection, Another Woman, wherever books are sold. Now, here's my conversation with Lauren Elkin.

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Rachel Schwartzmann: What does it mean to be faithful? This question is at the center of Lauren Elkin's singular debut novel, Scaffolding, which follows the trials and tribulations of two couples across time and space, occupying the same Paris apartment in 2019 and 1972.

Though it is a work of fiction, Scaffolding is the result of sixteen years of Lauren’s personal explorations, changes, and experiences. It is an incisive study of transformation—physical, emotional, geographical, familial. It is a question and questioning of love and desire: how we give it, show it, (try to) contain it, and ultimately let it shape us.

Known for nonfiction works like Flâneuse and Art Monsters, the shape of this conversation moved us in several directions from reflecting on Lauren’s previous books to current affairs. In this interview, she shared more about her relationship with cities, her arrival at Scaffolding's central themes, and thoughts on the connection between grief, power, and time.

I spoke with Lauren in early September during a particularly charged moment in both of our lives. It was ahead of the release of Scaffolding, which happened to share a publication day with Slowing, and it was before we knew the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election. Listening to our conversation again reaffirmed the power of and unwavering need for stories that hold a mirror up to the world—and bring us together, even when we feel like retreating. As Lauren writes in Scaffolding: "Separation is one of the two things we fear the most. The other thing is coming together."

I was deeply moved by my time with Lauren and don’t want to give too much more away, so on that note, here's Lauren Elkin, author of Scaffolding.

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Lauren Elkin: Outside of being a writer, I am a mom and native New Yorker and adopted Parisian and temporary Londoner. I also really love to sing and play the piano.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Amazing. What do you play?

Lauren Elkin: I play a lot of really bad Tori Amos [Laughs] among other things, but yeah, that's my happy place: a copy of my songbook of Scarlet's Walk and an hour where nobody is going to be home.

Rachel Schwartzmann: That's so interesting. Did you ever write music?

Lauren Elkin: I have tried and I'm so very bad— like really, really bad. So I gave that up. I found that I was more drawn to just words without music. That's my happy place. That's what I have to bring to the world.

Lauren Elkin: I have tried and I'm so very bad— like really, really bad. So I gave that up. I found that I was more drawn to just words without music. That's my happy place. That's what I have to bring to the world.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It's more than I can say. I've always wondered about playing the piano.

Lauren Elkin: I find it to be very calming, especially playing more classical stuff like a Bach fugue or something because it's very organized. It can help me sort out my thoughts, and if I'm feeling a bit of brain fog or a little bit messy [playing] a little bit of Bach sets me right.

Rachel Schwartzmann: [So then] would you say it's part of your creative process at all, or is it completely removed?

Lauren Elkin: Oh, definitely. Yeah. It's so funny when you've spent the whole day typing on a keyboard to then be playing the piano—and then go back to the keyboard. It's a very strange transition. It's something you have to kind of think for a minute about what you're doing.

But I find it very restful to take a break from language, from written language and to think about this other kind of musical abstract language and take a break from thinking and turn towards feeling, if that makes any sense.

I don't know. I'm a very intuitive pianist—I mean, I trained classically a million years ago—but I was never very good at being disciplined. I like to play what I wanted and nothing of what I didn't want. But it's something that helps me during the day to get out of my brain and into my feeling. Not to make it such a binary, but it's just a different way of processing information, I think.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Maybe quieter, too, like you're a little outside of yourself.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah. I mean, quieter and noisier, right?

Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh yeah!

Lauren Elkin: I mean, at least when I play the piano, it's pretty noisy.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you play with your son at all?

Lauren Elkin: No, he has no tolerance for me playing the piano or singing. He's got some sensory processing issues, so he's not into it.

He loves to sing. There's this one French song he's obsessed with at the moment, so he'll sing ad hoc. He loves to sing "Camptown Races." My in-laws were just here. They're from Wisconsin, and they taught him to sing it, and we were like, actually, maybe we shouldn't be teaching him this song. I don't know if that song is still politically correct in America. It's been a minute since I lived there.

Rachel Schwartzmann: How long has it been?

Lauren Elkin: I moved for good in 2004, so that was the last time I lived in the states.

Rachel Schwartzmann: So, speaking of French songs and just living [there], can you tell me a little bit about who you are outside of Paris? I know you haven't been there in a while, but do you feel like there's been a big change in your identity? Do you feel more or less yourself when you're there?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah. I definitely feel most like myself when I'm there. It's for sure temporary that we're not living there—for various reasons, having to do with my partner's job and my son's school. But yeah, it's very hard not to be there. I think in part because—and I hope this doesn't sound horribly pretentious or something—I lived in France for 20 years. I lived there for my entire adult life: my early twenties to my early forties. Now, to be here in the UK speaking my native language with my American accent [feels] like it erases those 20 years or something. It's very hard to have my French identity be part of my daily life here outside of the house. I mean obviously, at home, I listen to French radio, and I read the French newspapers and talk to my friends and everything, but it feels like my public identity has been kind of reduced to just being American, and I don't feel more American than I do French. I grew up there and my family is there, but apart from that ... to spend half your life in one place and half your life in another just makes you a kind of incurable hybrid, I think.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you miss the States at all?

Lauren Elkin: I miss New York. I miss New York a lot. Your Instagram makes me so homesick for New York.

It's an important place to me. It's where my family is from. I've got grandparents who built that city—it's a place that's very important to me and an integral part of who I am that I really want to pass on to my son.

But as someone who makes their living as a writer and a translator—my partner's a composer—I just don't know how we could have a middle-class life in New York. It just felt like we were priced out of that city, and I don't really want to live anywhere else in the States. I have real issues with the political situation, and anyway, it doesn't feel like a country that I need to live in necessarily. But I do miss New York... And yet, I'm addicted to American politics. I'm like a big news junkie and have to listen to, you know, Pod Save America every night. I'm so tense about the debate tonight; I'm having anxiety attacks about it. So fundamentally, I'm still very invested in that country.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I actually wanted to go back to a comment you just said—your grandparents helped build the city?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, so my great grandfather—this is my dad's side of the family—his mother's father was an Italian immigrant who was helping to dig the tunnels ... connecting Long Island and Manhattan and then helping to build—he was a contractor—the on and off ramps to some of the bridges, like the Whitestone Bridge possibly the Triboro as well.

And then on my dad's side, his father's father had a construction company, so they were the ones who would get the commission to design and build those tunnels and bridges—primarily be on and off ramps.

So they actually worked together and then their children didn't meet that way, but one day met like, because I think they were both working at the Bulova watch factory in Queens. And then my dad's an architect and built a lot of buildings around Long Island in the five boroughs. On that side of the family, they're all engineers and there's just this very strong sense of my family having left its imprint on the infrastructure of New York City. 

Rachel Schwartzmann: Maybe that's why you're so taken with cities.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, I think so. For sure. On my mom's side, her dad worked for ConEd and did a lot of the tunneling and working in tunnels, you know, but I don't really understand what it's, he did, but yeah, he was also in the tunnels.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Your next book needs to be something underground.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah. I mean, I will write about New York City at one point. All of this is just fodder.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I read the bus book—as you call it—because I wanted to get a sense of your relationship with Paris and it's just so interesting to see all of these parallels from your life, make their way into your work. We'll obviously talk about Scaffolding in a few minutes, but I want to keep talking about cities if that's okay.

Lauren Elkin: Mm-Hmm.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And also how you relate to cities on the page. Because No. 91/92 is a diary, I'd love to start by talking about your relationship with diaries. I just finished The Folded Clock and read Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries earlier this year, and I'm really finding myself more drawn to that sort of writing lately. It's also very prominent in Scaffolding. So, all of that to say: What is a diary to you at this point in your life, and what is it not?

Lauren Elkin: That's a great question. I have kept a diary since I was about twenty and studying abroad in Paris. I remember I bought a couple of notebooks at one of the department stores, and they were great. They had blank pages [and were] not lined. It was the first time I ever bought a little book that had blank pages. I bought pilot pens. It was just the right, not too skinny, but not too thick, and I just started covering pages in my handwriting. And that was the first time I'd really done that, seriously.

I kept a diary when I was a kid, but not religiously. Something about being in Paris and having the leisure time to sit in cafes every day and just write about what I saw or what I was feeling or you know, I don't know, I don't think I wrote much about what I was reading, maybe a little bit about like Hemingway and Jean Rhys, but it just became a place for me to pour all the stuff that I was grappling with.

That might sound really obvious. I think that's traditionally been the role of the journal, right? I mean, going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, keeping a diary was a way of almost daily hygiene—keeping the pipes of your brain clean, accounting yourself to yourself, and making sure you were living an ethical life. Flash forward to now, my diary is partly on my computer and partly in these blank notebooks, although now I like to use Moleskines.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Me too.

Lauren Elkin: They're just so beautiful. I was using only the black hardcover ones with blank pages, but now I've moved to the ones that are like craft paper, brown, and they're soft covered and really skinny. They're easier to carry around. But yeah, it's just a daily cleansing.

I think it's important to keep track of what's going on in my life in case I need to refer back to it later. And it keeps me writing, keeps me connected to the page, keeps me connected to language, and keeps me connected to myself and my life. It's a way of keeping life from running away with itself or getting away from me. It's like I can kind of pin down a moment every day, and that way, I really feel I'm anchored in my life instead of floating or sliding around on top of it.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you feel like it gives you a sense of control?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah. I think without [a] diary, I probably would feel a little less in control of things in my life. I mean, my diaries are also full of to-do lists and stuff I don't want to lose track of—lists of projects that I'm working on. So it keeps me from getting overwhelmed by all the things that I have to do. So yeah, definitely.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Have you read The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş?

Lauren Elkin: No, I really want to. It looks great.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I feel like you would connect with it. It's not a diary but it has that kind of tone. At least that's how I read it—just appreciating, noticing, and honoring the dailiness of life if that makes sense.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah. I think that's the spirit in which I finally came to finish Scaffolding. It wasn't necessarily there from the outset, but you know, as I went on—because I started in 2007—and as I became the person who wrote Flâneuse and then became just obsessively interested in the ordinary world—or the infra-ordinary world—that making peace with the idea that literature could be about the daily was a very big moment for me and I think it enabled me to finish writing the book.

*Rachel Schwartzmann: I think you can lose track of that when you live in cities too, especially ones that are so attached to that external sense of glamor or performance.

Lauren Elkin: I think that's true of cities like New York or London, but honestly in Paris, it's just what life is like. I think, or at least for me, I had a much more of a connection to... how to put it? There's just much more of a sense of the daily ritual and the shape of a year. Like I'd never eaten seasonally, for instance, until I moved to Paris, and it wasn't a question of well intended like let's eat seasonally, let's be good, you know, world citizens, it was more just that's what's in the fruit and vegetable stores, that's just whatever is in the season, and you learn, oh okay, it's root vegetables right now let's eat a lot of pumpkins. And it sounds really strange to say, but having grown up in a place like New York where you can just have whatever you want whenever you want, I think that really distances you from the way that the year is shaped or the way that our lives are shaped.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I have a strong feeling that by the end of this conversation, I'm going to want to move to France. [Laughs]

Lauren Elkin: [Laughs] I don't know what your situation is or how your partner would feel about it, but all I can say is do it! You'd never regret it, not for a second.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's interesting. As I was researching for this conversation, I came across old interviews, and you did one with the Irish Times about your first book, Flâneuse, and your interviewer asked a really, I thought, poignant question about whether or not a city can be "read." Just walking through a city is like reading or receiving and processing so much information. Do you read cities differently now? How has your read on Paris or London changed since the pandemic?

Lauren Elkin: Well, I think writing Flâneuse taught me to read the city in a different way than I was used to doing. I think it taught me to be a close reader of cities just to pay more attention to what I was seeing, to what it all meant, how it was put together, and how it could be otherwise.

It's hard to say since the pandemic because I moved during the pandemic. I moved from Paris to—well, we were briefly in Liverpool [first]—to London, so it's hard to do a sort of before and after. But I think it's so funny how writing just one book can change the way you think, the way you write, and the way you approach the world. Everything I've done since  Flâneuse has been in some way about cities, spaces, and legibility.

I mean, all I can say is that I'm continuing to work on that and to write about that. And I'm writing about Southeast London, where I live right now. This is a part of the city that I did know a while back. I used to spend time in this part of London a million years ago and kind of dismissed it—I thought it was too suburban [and it] reminded me a lot of Queens. And I was like, This is what I left. I left suburbia. I left Queens. My family is from Queens—

Rachel Schwartzmann: I grew up in Queens, too.

Lauren Elkin: Oh, [Forest Hills is] where I lived! That's where my family was from. 

Rachel Schwartzmann: Astoria [too], so all over.

Lauren Elkin: Oh, amazing. I lived in Astoria for a year after graduation. Queens baby, but you know, that's home, that's where I come from. And then I tried to leave that, and I've ended up in a British version of that [place]. I'm trying to make peace with being where I am and learning to see what's around me and engage with what's around me instead of wishing that it were something else.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that parallels so nicely to Scaffolding in a lot of ways: repeating those patterns, making peace with where you are and realizing it's gonna look a little bit different than you thought.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It's interesting, too, because so much of your nonfiction—at least from what I can tell and what I've read—is dealing with movement. And writing about Paris, and placing Scaffolding in Paris, one of the central characters is stuck in a lot of ways. There's a stillness. What was it like to write and think about Paris from the vantage point of near stillness or paralysis?

Lauren Elkin: I think that I gained a new appreciation for paralysis and stillness in Paris after I had a baby and then we had a pandemic—because, before that, my life was always on the go. And then, actually, what happened in my own sort of pandemic story was that I came down with pneumonia right before the pandemic, in February or so. We think that it was probably an early case of Covid because we had just been traveling a bit in January and were traveling a lot: we went from Liverpool to Paris and then to New York and then to Phoenix and then back to New York and then back to Manchester. It was intense. So, I think I came down with this case of Covid.

In any case, it was diagnosed as pneumonia, and I was house-bound for a while and then hospital-bound for a little bit. And so I was like raring to go. I really felt that feeling of just being contained, contained, contained, ready to burst out just as lockdown started. So I definitely borrowed that feeling of pent-up energy for Anna and had a very funny time—as the book came to its conclusion—having her go into lockdown just as she's been through this whole being in her house, very depressed.

So yeah, we left Paris in March of 2021, and all the cafes were shuttered. Nothing was happening; nobody was going anywhere. The schools were open but barely. It was just a very depressing time to be there. And so I felt a little bit better about leaving given that Paris wasn't really Paris.

Rachel Schwartzmann: That's interesting. I feel like that kind of sets us up to talk about Scaffolding, but first, do you want to read from the book?

Lauren Elkin: Yes, absolutely.




Rachel Schwartzmann: So Scaffolding took you sixteen years to write, which to me is the epitome of a slow story. And on that note, .

Lauren Elkin: Yeah. Oh my god, totally. [Laughs]

Rachel Schwartzmann: Literally! So, I have a two-part question with that in mind. I guess the first is: What did you separate from throughout that time? And then the second question is when you hear the phrase slow stories or slow storytelling, what comes to mind?

Lauren Elkin: Oh wow. I separated from everything during that period. I changed my whole life. I was living in Paris having a very French life when I started writing [the book]. I had a French partner and French friends; I was in a French PhD program teaching French students at a French university. Now, I live in London with my American partner and our American child, and I left academia while writing [the book]. I married and divorced while writing it; my writing career became a career. I went from not being a professional writer to being a professional writer; I started being a translator. I don't know. I found out I'm autistic. I said goodbye to being what I thought was neurotypical. It was a crazy sixteen years.

I think the book could not have come together without having gone through all of that. I needed to go through all of those life experiences. I became a mother, obviously, during that time as well. I had various miscarriages, one abortion like it was; it was a [crazy] sixteen years. I don't think I want to take another sixteen years to write another book, but I think there's something about the long bubble on the stove that works for me. I have a number of projects going for a while, and they take the time that they take. Some of them mature more quickly than others. But yeah,

I think in terms of your second question, it can be useful to be a fast writer sometimes. I think I can do a piece of journalism relatively quickly, but I've found over the years that the kind of thinking that I need to do for a book needs to happen—like in that kind of geological time zone, time space—you can't rush it. Things need to percolate for as long as it takes for them to be ready. I'm writing a couple of different books right now, two that I'm contracted to write and another one I'm really not supposed to be writing. But that third one, I've been at it since like 2016, and I'm hoping I'll finish a draft soon. But, it's just taken a while, and it's just what happens, I think.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Would you say you're a patient person, then? Or is this just something you have to sort of practice?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, I think you learn patience as a writer. I mean, maybe some writers are fast, and they don't have to learn patience, but I've seen what happens when I rush things. I've seen things spoil, and I just don't want that to happen. You do have to be patient, I think.

Rachel Schwartzmann: So I guess because so much was happening in your life, was the plot of Scaffolding changing at all? How did you arrive at the story, and what came to you first? Was it ideas, characters, sentences?

Lauren Elkin: All of that. Yeah. It was always going to be a book about infidelity or fidelity. Really different forms of fidelity, different ways of being faithful—and faithful to whom? To your partner, to your past, to yourself, to your family, your friends? What does it mean to be faithful? And I think, for a long time, it was an open question for me of how it was going to end. I'm not going to give anything away obviously, but I didn't want to write, you know, another adultery novel where like it's like: Does the husband find out? Does he not find out? Do they stay together? Do they break up? And then for it to be whatever the ending was to be like my kind of message to the world of how I thought couples should be or behave. I didn't want it to read—sorry, I'm trying to think of the word—a validation of one way of living over another.

And it took me some time to be able to sit with ambiguity in the book and to find where the real story was to be able to listen to what I was really trying to write about and not to get sucked down the path of the predictable adultery story. So, you know, it's a novel about adultery basically, but how it thinks about that situation is what's important about the book—or what the book has to bring to a conversation about the way that we love or the way that we desire.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Mm. I'm just thinking of a moment where you write: "One of those dreams where I find a whole other wing to my apartment that I was previously unaware of. Great joy to find there is new space in which to be. Followed by anxiety: what am I going to do with it?" I feel like that's a driving question.

Lauren Elkin: Oh god. And I have that exact dream. [Laughs] I have that dream all the time. ... [the] teeth falling out dream is another one. I have that [drea a lot]. Other people seem to have a lot as well. But these are our preoccupations as human beings. We want our freedom. We want our space. We feel constrained. How can we make more space in our lives? But also, oh my god, what would we possibly do with more freedom? Like ah, who wants that?

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think with that in mind, can you tell me a little bit more about the psychoanalysis through lines in the book? You know, I wasn't well versed in that, to be honest, when reading, but it felt correct to portray time in this story. So maybe you could give us a little overview of how you came to that thread.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, so when I started writing the book in 2007, I was in grad school, and we were reading Lacan. I was doing a PhD in English, but you read a lot of French theory, or you used to, anyway; I don't know if you still do. Something [stood out to me] about his parable of the mirror stage whereby the baby comes into subjectivity by looking in the mirror and realizing that it's separate from its mother—that it's not just conjoined to the mother's kind of boundless, infinite oceanic dyad of love—but actually that you're your own person and you're going to go it alone is a foundational moment in all of our lives and we all go through it and it's how you make your entrance into language and into being a person with your own kind of alertness and awareness.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, there's this idea that you become an individual and you gain language at this foundational moment of loss.

And so who we are as people is predicated on lack, on not having something that feels really like we used to have or something kind of foundational to who we are or something we think we ought to have. So we spend our lives chasing one desire after another with this idea that if I just get this thing, if I just sleep with this person, if I just get this job, if I just write this book, then we'll be complete or we'll have what we need and obviously we know it even as we're going for it that it's not true that you'll never get there. There'll never be enough love, sex, success, money, accolades, et cetera. And I just found that to be a really interesting idea to work with in a fictional sense. And so I immediately started writing a novel about it, and that was this novel.

There were just passages about love and loss that started coming out immediately after having read Lacan. So I couldn't possibly have written a book about Lacan or would have even wanted to, but I wanted to write this way about Lacan.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's so, so interesting. I'm also thinking of a moment in the third part of the book, which opens with: "There is no such thing as love at first sight. What there is is a reaction. Someone puts a hand on you from behind when you don't expect it and you jump, startled out of proportion to the touch. When I first met Jonathan, it was like feathers brushed the wrong way. A disruption in the order of things. And that's what it felt like again, seeing him, again." I'm curious what you think now about writing about love versus desire—the desire to want something—a person, place, a freedom—versus loving those things?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, it's funny because I've been talking about the book a lot, obviously, and I'm coming to realize that it's not so much about love as it's about desire. So I've realized I thought that love was my great subject here, and it's not actually.  

The book I'm writing now—the one I'm not supposed to be writing—is also about this kind of twinning of love and desire. I'm trying to figure out what the boundaries are again, like how they overlap, how they intertwine, where one stops, where one ends; if it's possible to differentiate between them; if it's important to differentiate between them. And I actually think it is., I think that desire can kind of deceive us into believing that it's love when it's not. It's need or lack or want, and it's wonderful and it needs to be honored for what it is and not transformed into something that it isn't. I mean love can be there as well obviously, but it isn't always. And I think that we can kind of accidentally trick ourselves into thinking our desires are our loves.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And we see that playing out across time and space because Scaffolding deals with those ideas and relationships in 2019 and 1972. There's a kind of a collapsing of time as these characters' parallels reveal themselves against the backdrop of the same city but a totally different time. So I'm curious why it felt important to integrate Henry and Florence—and also, how did writing about people from the past inform the book's present?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, so another big influence on the book in 2007 was Elizabeth Bowen's novel, The House in Paris, which I was also writing my PhD on back then, which is a great novel, and I fully recommend it to anyone listening. But the thing that I find really interesting about it is that it's a tripartite structure. Parts one and three are set in the present day, and part two flashes back ten years earlier to look at the same characters and how the situation in the present day came to be. It sat in the same house in Paris and played a lot with the different floors of the house and who was doing what on which floor. I liked this kind of spatial and architectural approach to the novel, and I wanted to see if that could work with my book because I was so interested in this idea of desire and the idea of someone from the past returning the idea that the past is never over. It's still happening; it's still with us. The section that I was just reading from [is] this idea that we can mark a separation from the past, but that doesn't undo it. It's still there. It's still present.

Florence says somewhere the finding of an object is the refinding of an object, like nothing's ever new. We're always kind of looking through or dealing with the same issues again and again, and the same people and the same desires. So I thought it would be interesting to adapt Bowen's conceit to the present day, but rather than flashing back ten years to look at the same characters, to kind of look at who else might have lived in this apartment building in Paris or the same apartment and how they might be dealing with similar issues.

There was never meant to be a psychoanalyst, but I realized I wanted to include it somewhere in the frame of reference, and I didn't want Lacan to be a character because I thought that would be really cheesy. So I decided she needed to be attending his seminars and studying to be a psychoanalyst herself so that I could get in some of what he was talking about ... it seemed like a more elegant way than having all of this exposition, and here's what Lacan said in 1972. I could just have 1972 in the novel. Once I'd made that decision, I realized there were all these amazing ways to play with echoes and doubles and mirrors and have Henry and Florence going through a lot of what Anna and David were going through in the present day. But obviously, marriage in 1972 is a very different thing to marriage even in Paris where we like to think that everyone's [redacted] just everybody else all the time; that's not actually the case. And certainly, ideas were different in the seventies than in, you know, the twenty-teens. So yeah, it was just a really nice way to explore feminist history, the evolution of women in public space in Paris, and thinking about psychoanalysis, thinking about the family, thinking about motherhood, but to collapse it all into the same space, the way that Elizabeth Bowen did.

Rachel Schwartzmann: [This question] might be more applicable to nonfiction writing, but just as we talk about the past, what responsibility do you think we have when it comes to telling stories about people from the past? Was that on your mind at all when crafting this novel?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think we have a responsibility to be as true to their perspective as we can be. I think people can do incredibly experimental and amazing things with historical fiction. So, I don't mean to be too prescriptive, but for the sake of this book, I wanted to be as true to what Florence would've been thinking about in 1972 as I could, so without introducing anacharisms in terms of how women thought about their bodies or their marriages or whatever.

There's a certain amount of obedience that we see in Florence that you would never see in Anna. Henry sort of controls the finances, and he's the one who makes the money. She's very happy to just be studying, and he makes money. She's going to have a baby, and maybe one day she'll work, but she's not too fussed about working per se. She just wants to study psychoanalysis and then help people.

But she is very much of her time in the sense that she's decided she's going to stop taking the pill. She has the right to take the pill. First of all, it was pretty new in France at that time it was seven years old or something. But she can decide to stop taking it when she wants to, and she can have a baby with whoever she wants. I was trying to capture that kind of sixties free love feeling of: What is fidelity? What is infidelity? Love who you want to love.

One thing I did to try to get the tone right for the time was I bought a bunch of issues of ELLE Magazine from 1972. French ELLE is a very specific thing. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a weekly instead of a monthly, and it's full of (especially in the seventies) recipes and stuff. It's very different than American women's magazines, which I think are mostly just fashion and beauty—and then maybe a story about current events to make it look like people care about politics and the world. But French ELLE is political. It's literary. They have really good book pages, stuff about travel, about living a more sustainable life, and recipe pages. Anyway. And then, in 1972, it was sort of the '72 version of those concerns.

So I read several months' worth of French ELLE to see what they were talking about, what women were thinking and worried about. And it was all the right to take birth control, to have an abortion, to get a divorce, to have their own bank account. It was all the stuff that they didn't take for granted. It was stuff that they were trying to win for themselves. So anyway, all of that sort of fed into how I was thinking about Florence.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Again, I'll need to relocate to France and find these old issues and fully immerse. [Laughs] Why don't we pause here and have you read another section?

Lauren Elkin: Sure.



Rachel Schwartzmann: Can you tell me about the space you're currently in now and any history you've inherited since living there?

Lauren Elkin: Sure. I am at the top of our house in my partner's office, which doubles as our guest room. I'm up here because my son will have come home from school a little while ago, and if he knew that I was home, he would interrupt us. So I'm hiding. 

I love your Instagram; I love your aesthetic. I share your devotion to specificity and particularity and slowness, of course. My office is my refuge and I love it so much. I mean, it's a little more cluttered than I would like, but it's my intellectual home—but I can't be there, so I'm in a space that's the opposite of that, [where] everything is thrown together, very messy. It's very much my partner's aesthetic. It's like his den. So yeah, that's how I feel about the space I'm in right now.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And what is home to you now? How has that definition or framework changed—maybe even since becoming a mother?

Lauren Elkin: It's really splintered now. It used to be just New York was home—my parents' house on Long Island specifically—and Paris was home, my real home, like my functional, actual home. And now that's shifted since we've moved to London.

Now we live in this lovely house in the suburbs where we're raising our son. We moved here a year ago and I really love it here. I deeply love this house. It's a bit far out—because obviously, we couldn't afford anything more central—but it just feels like a haven, and I'm very happy to be here and feel very safe here and not in a big hurry to leave it. But I would like to spend more time in Paris.

The funny thing is that when I go back to Paris, it doesn't feel like I don't live there anymore. It still feels like home. It just feels like I've been spending a lot of time abroad.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's interesting thinking about home in relation to space because I'll hit my 20th anniversary in New York next February, but I've been saying to people that New York feels less and less like home. It just feels familiar, if that makes sense.

Lauren Elkin: Right. Yeah.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It was interesting to think about those ideas while reading Scaffolding because you can feel Anna's tension and just kind of the puttering around the space and then seeing the transformation happen around it with the renovation and obviously within herself.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, I think there's something about that intentionality that you lavish on a place that kind of transforms it, however temporarily, into a home.

I mean, there's a time when I felt like my home was this traffic island on the Euston road between the British Library and the [inaudible]. I just felt like I spent all my time crossing that street, and it just was so familiar. It's so strange because at that time I didn't really live in London. I just, for one reason or another, was spending a lot of time there. And it's strange to feel like your home is a traffic island, but that's how it felt. [Laughs]

Rachel Schwartzmann: That makes sense. There are definitely places within my neighborhood that feel just so safe or familiar or just good to be in. I can relate to that, for sure. And kind of thinking about streets, there is another recurring through-line where Anna comes across these posters by the, I'm sorry, I’m going to butcher the pronunciation...

Lauren Elkin: Les Colleuses. It's okay. We can do some French lessons before you move. [Laughs]

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yes, we'll need to, or I'll get some pretty big side-eye, I'm sure, from the locals. [Laughs]

So I kind of wanted to talk about that aspect, but also talk about grieving because Anna's going through it. She's thinking about what could have been, what is, what was, and sort of circling back to the plot line surrounding Clementine, Les Colleuses, and the tense dynamic between Anna and Jonathan—and David. I'm curious how you think writing about power is the same as writing about grief?

Lauren Elkin: Hmm. Is writing about power the same as writing about grief? I mean, there are different kinds of grief in the book, right? And some are bound up with power in different ways. So Anna's mourning the loss of the pregnancy at 19 weeks, which she couldn't have helped or have done anything about. But at the same time, Clementine and Anna are grieving the women who have been brutally murdered by their domestic partners.

I'm thinking a lot about Les Colleuses this week. I don't know if you have been [following], but I've been completely obsessed by this story of Gisele Pelicot, this woman who's in France, whose husband was drugging her and then inviting men to come and have sex with her unconscious body. All of France is riveted by this story. For ten years or something like that, he would post on this dark website and invite men to come. He was drugging her, and she had all these gynecological problems, like STDs she was contracting, and she had no idea why. It's just a horrific story.

And so, yeah, I think in those instances, the grief that we feel at those instances of femicide or rape—or even just this Olympic athlete who was murdered by her boyfriend when she got home—it has to spur us on to speak truth to power and do something to make these men pay for what they've done to hold them responsible and to make it plain that you just cannot do that. We have to do better at raising boys who become respectful citizens of the world and not murderers and rapists. Like what is going on? Obviously, I don't want to be blaming their mother or their parents, but as a society, how are we producing such violent men with no respect for other people's lives?

So, I think that there's probably a connection between grief and power in the sense that grief can spur us on to try to take back some measure of power.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm just thinking, too, one of my guests, Amy Lin, who wrote a memoir called Here After, who said this about grief, and I felt like it was kind of pertinent to this conversation: "Once you enter the territory of grief, time is different in grief in many ways. Time moves differently and is flattened in grief in a way that I think you'll carry the knowledge of, if not the reality of your whole life. I feel very aware now: of the fragility of our idea that time is a coherent beast."

So yeah, those are things I was thinking about while reading just about time and grieving.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, I think my bus book was my Folded Clock about the grief of losing that pregnancy and experiencing the Charlie Hebdo attacks—obviously not directly firsthand, experiencing them, but living in Paris at the time when they happened. I think that that experience, 2015/20 16, was a period of just immense disruption, and time just shifted this way and that. I had to keep that journal every day to kind of keep track of myself in the world and to—as I was saying at the outset—keep life from slipping away from me, to take the measure of what was happening and what it felt like.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Did you feel like you could do that with Scaffolding?

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, a lot of that made it into Scaffolding into the early sections when she's just at home, unable to work or do anything, really, besides running and going to see the therapist. And when she can't see any of her friends, Clementine is like, What are you on strike? And Anna was like, I just don't know. I just can't leave my house.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, Clementine was so funny to me. [Laughs] Obviously, I could just feel her presence.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And just kind of talking about their dynamic for a minute, a lot of this stems from being haunted by certain realities or unknowns and unresolved questions or being afraid to ask certain questions. And I'm curious now that you've maybe had some distance from the book, is there a question you wish Anna had asked Clementine or vice versa?

Lauren Elkin: Oh, that's a really lovely question. Ah.

I think Clementine could have pushed Anna a bit more just in terms of the political possibilities for psychoanalysis. And it's a hard one to answer because I don't necessarily think that I should have written that into the book. I don't think that there would've been room for that. But it's an area that I think was really interesting between the two of them. It's a real point of divergence, and I don't think that Anna would be able to say anything different to Clementinethan what she does say in the book, but I think that Clementine could have pushed her a bit more.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And then what about any other characters?

Lauren Elkin: It's really hard to say because I just have this feeling that there couldn't be anything more than what there is. If there could have been anything else, I would've written it. It's like a very precarious balance of giving some information but not too much and leaving some things ambiguous.

I would have liked to have spent more time with Henry in the present day. I think it would've been nice to know more about what his life is like—or I should just say like the man at the boulangerie because it's not ever confirmed that it's Henry, but obviously it is.

There's a scene where he's like buying all this tahini, and he has a New Yorker tote bag, and Anna's like, Does he read the New Yorker? Who is this guy? Who is he going to eat all this tahini with? Does he have a family? Does he have children? And so I think I would like to spend more time with Henry—possibly in another project, but I don't that I'll necessarily do it—to know what he got up to after he and Florence broke up. He's the thread I'd like to follow.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, each character could have their own sort of standalone situation.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, totally. I mean Florence in America. Yeah.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I could even see this as a play.

Lauren Elkin: Oh, I would love that.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And then I guess on the note of questions, I only have one more question before we have you read a final time from Scaffolding, but this is something I ask all of my guests.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm curious if there's a question that you hope people start asking you more often, whether it's about this book, art, marriage, desire, France, or anything that comes to mind?

Lauren Elkin: I'm not sure. I think people do ask me great questions. I'm always happy to talk about Paris. I can't really answer that.

I was reading a bit of Parul Sehgal's piece on Garth Greenwell's new book, Small Rain, in The New Yorker, which I'm dying to read. It looks so good. And I guess the way that she's thinking about that book in the context of his other books... I'm always really happy when people take the time to read what I've written before and to think about the ways that it fits together. Not just out of some kind of vanity exercise but because it really helps me figure out what it is I'm doing, what it is I'm after, and more importantly, what is resonating with readers—though not in the sense of give the people what they want, but genuinely what do people want to be having conversations about.

I think, again, that goes back to being neurodivergent and not really having a strong sense of what it is that people think about. Genuinely, I just feel totally baffled by other people most of the time, and I'm sure a lot of people feel that way, but all the more so you for being autistic. And so it genuinely is helpful to me to be asked questions about how the work fits together to have things pointed up to me, but I didn't notice and had to be told what's interesting. I have no idea what's interesting. To me it's all interesting.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Hmm.

Lauren Elkin: Like autistic people have a hard time telling you what the big picture is. If they read a piece of writing, they'll just like be able to tell you about all the details, and so I can't see the big picture of anything, but definitely not of my work.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it might help you stay in the present a little better.

Lauren Elkin: What—having the big picture?

Rachel Schwartzmann: No. The details.

Lauren Elkin: Yeah, totally. Definitely. It's good for that.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, there's probably just so much more we can dig into. It's crazy that over an hour has passed.

Lauren Elkin: I know. I know. Thank you again so much, Rachel, for having me on, especially at a time when you've got so much going on in your own life. I'm very much looking forward to reading your book. I hope we'll get to chat another time in person. That would be lovely.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I would love that. I would love that. Why don't we close things out by having you read one last time?

Lauren Elkin: Yes.



Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Lauren Elkin. You can purchase Scaffolding and Lauren's earlier works anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Lauren on social @lauren_elkin_. I'm Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.