HILTON ALS

In his acute, allusive writing on literature, visual art, and performance, Hilton Als has made critical analysis and introspection a conjoined practice. The essay, which he has called “a form without a form,” is his primary mode—open, omnivorous writing that invariably lays bare family and friendship, American fixations on and lived experiences of race and sexuality, and the places where metaphor and reality meet. In “The First Step of Becoming an Art Historian,” one of Als’s earliest published pieces, from 1985, he describes coming “to realize a desire to relate the illusion of memory, based on [others’] facts, to the illusory present.” It may still be as good a statement of his purpose and methods as any.

Als was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, and grew up there with his four older sisters and younger brother. He attended the High School of the Performing Arts, and his first forays in art criticism were published in the Brooklyn City Sun when he was in his early twenties. He was appointed a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and has served as its chief theater critic since 2013; he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for that writing in 2017. In 1996, Als published The Women and, in 2013, the collection White Girls, each a hybrid of memoir, portraiture, and criticism. Many of his essays are uncollected, but the effect of his voice is cumulative: when Als received a Windham Campbell Prize, in 2016, the jury cited his “ingeniously provoking” essays that take “enormous risks in content and form” and “break open standard narratives of gender and race.”

Als has also written screen- and teleplays; self-publishes the broadside project “After Dark”; and has curated exhibitions of the work of Alice Neel and Christopher Knowles, as well as a recent three-part installation of his and others’ “visual things.” (His widely followed Instagram account is yet another forum for his curiosity about the human as a “living work of art.”) Playing across these varied subjects and forms is an eye that resists sentimentality but is fascinated by all of our vulnerabilities—and by the grammar of this scrutiny. As he puts it in the opening essay in White Girls: “I, you, me, us, words let alone concepts I struggled with.”

Our conversations took place last winter: once in the offices of The Paris Review and twice at Als’s West Village apartment, a space filled with books and talismanic pieces he has gathered and been given, including art by Kara Walker, Judy Linn, and Diane Arbus, a bronze bust of James Baldwin, and an ornate mirror that had belonged to Laura Nyro. These sessions capped a fantastically busy few years of work and travel for Als, who had been thinking about changes professional and personal. His rich voice, in person as in his writing, was palpably alive and emotive in the questions that he, too, asked, and in his searching interest in working out answers together.

INTERVIEWER

What does home mean to your writing?

ALS

It’s a great question, because I now, at last, have a grown-up apartment, the first place where I can really work and sort of drift around. I had a desk built in, made for me. The first thing I said when I got the Windham Campbell Prize was, I can move now. It was a bit like 1988, when I lived in Brooklyn and heard about an apartment in Tribeca. I had no money, but I said, I’ll take it—and the next day I got a raise and a promotion at the Village Voice.

INTERVIEWER

And the home you grew up in?

ALS

My little brother pointed out not too long ago that we moved so much when we were young that our mother must have kept us moving in part to protect us. And because there was no capital and we were always at the mercy of some landlord, we had relatively little control over where we landed. I remember feeling very vulnerable to the relatives—my mother’s siblings, et cetera—we sometimes stayed with. One of the great things about becoming an adult was having my own space. My mother was very intent on my independence. It is a great sadness to me that she didn’t live long enough for me to take care of her, to give her her just do, a house of her own. We grew up under the yoke of social services. The government issued food and case workers came into your house, to see if you had a radio or if there was a man there. So there was no real privacy. My sister Bonnie and I would go pick up the food, and it was very shaming to her. I think all of these things added up