Hilton Als Is Finding Language for the Inexpressible

In this conversation with Isabella Vega, Als discusses his new book ‘My Pinup,’ the nature of desire, and the vulnerability of writing.

When Hilton Als’s voice barrels through my telephone, I am once again the fourteen-year-old girl in the back passenger’s side of her mother’s minivan, watching the drab sights of rural central Florida pass me by, headphones on and attention tuned to Als on the Rookie podcast, speaking of his work and artistry with such rare candor. It’s a moment I remember like it was yesterday—the day I decided to become a writer.

Hilton Als’s career is so storied at this point I can recite it from devoted memory. He began as a staff writer at Harper’s Magazine and eventually became a theater critic at The New Yorker. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for his theater criticism, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and taught at a multitude of Ivy League institutions. As a writer, Als’s work has the ability to totally inspire and subsume readers, sweeping them away into Als’s frame of reality, learning something new about his subject and themselves in the process.

Als’s newest offering, My Pinup: A Paean to Prince, is a memoir chronicling his time with the late legend Prince, whom he observed during the weekend he spent profiling him. My Pinup also explores Prince’s legacy, entwined with Als’s own coming-of-age in love.

Als and I spoke of his career, the humanization of journalism, and how writers partake in living.

The conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Isabella Vega: How did you begin writing? And how did it transpire into this legendary career?

Hilton Als: I began to write because I have four older sisters. It was a way that I could get a word in: to write it down. I think it was really my mother’s support of my ability, actually more of my desire, to communicate with language and words. What I would do is that I would write these stories. I think they were always based on what I had seen or known—where I grew up, and my imagination. I would leave [these stories] to my mother to read, and she would always write comments on them. And she would write it so sweetly. She had a kind of wonderful way and an amazing way to communicate her support. It wasn’t that she would even talk about things in a kind of abstract way; it was just always that she was really supportive, you know, that she liked it. So the support that I had at home from her was an incredibly moving experience for me.

It was a way that I could get a word in: to write it down.

I think I also wanted to please her and [to] continue doing that kind of work. And the pleasing part was that it was a way for me to communicate who I was to her at a removed distance. I wasn’t confessing to her, “I did this or I did that”—I found lots of metaphors to describe myself. It was a way of really describing myself and doing it in such a way that it was a form of truth telling where nobody got hurt, where I could reveal things about myself. It was “about other people” but it was a story and so there was a distance of metaphor and invention and all that stuff.

IV: I think it’s so beautiful that your first experience of writing was out of love. Because I feel like so much of My Pinup is about love. And one of the things that really struck me about the book was how you explore so many different dimensions of love. I remember in particular the pie that you had baked your boyfriend at the time that sat in your lap during the Prince concert. You also explore the dichotomy between how you loved Prince and the love you shared with your lovers. Why did you want to examine different forms of love throughout this book? And did writing it give you a new perspective on the dimensions of love that you have felt throughout your life?

HA: The love that I’m describing, I think, is not one thing, [but] that there’s something profound about the ways in which we experience and express it. I think that we have many needs that are very different in our existence, and that one of the things that we’re especially excited about, always, is the possibility of how love will be transformative in some way.

I’m really trying in my writing to express, or kind of marry the needs—that these needs are really kind of profoundly unanswerable in a lot of ways [and] that we can’t ever satisfy those desires necessarily. What I’m interested in conveying as a writer are the ways in which we can connect, and how sometimes those connections can make us even more human—that that need for vulnerability can make us more humane and better people to one another. I know I’m not answering your question properly. Because it’s a pretty good question. And I’m trying to understand how we get to this point where intimacy is the hardest thing for us to do, even though it’s the thing that we desire most. And I’m just trying to understand that myself.

IV: I remember listening to you on the Rookie podcast years ago, when you answered a listener’s question about her desire to be an artist. You said, “You are already an artist because you’re asking exactly the right questions.” That stuck with me. In listening to you speak and in reading your work, you made me realize that the writer isn’t just a passive observer watching life unfold around them but an active participant and a narrator in action. How did you come to this awareness of your craft?

HA: One of the things that makes it so hard about what we do is that it takes a lot of energy. Because we’re so super vulnerable. A lot of great writers don’t make it because they turn to drink or whatever. They don’t make it, but I’m wondering how [and] why is that? Why are we so poor as well?

I think that one thing that is so important for us to understand is that we have to be alive to experience all the time in order to tell these stories. So it’s a weird thing, right? That we are involved in this business of being vulnerable all the time. Because if we don’t, if we’re not allowed to experience, what do we have to write about? I’m just wondering if our difficulties in this world, as always, [have] to do with the world itself—that the very thing that we’d love and want to communicate about is the most difficult thing. It’s sort of like what I said earlier about intimacy, that thing that we crave the most is also the most difficult. So I feel that we, as writers, we’re always at a philosophical crossroads about the stuff.

IV: Is there any part of My Pinup that felt the most necessary to include to aid in expressing forms of love?

HA: It was talking about the experience of wanting to be the kind of Dorothy Parker person to that boy. It was about a friend of mine who disappeared in the fall. And it’s not even ghosting; he’s just disappeared. I’m just wondering how much I want to give [this book] as a gift to him, but I don’t know where he is. So by publishing a piece, we have a wonderful experience of—it’s almost like putting a note in the bottle, and then you put the bottle on the ocean. Then you hope that it gets to the other person. I feel that I sent a message in the bottle to this particular person, so I hope he sees it. And I think that that was the hardest part for me to write. When you write something, you have to kind of dry your tears first, so that you can express it with a relative lack of sentimentality. It’s just a fascinating process to kind of recall people or recall love. It’s such an internal thing. I think that the thing that I love about writing is that it demands that we find a language for the inexpressible. So that was the hardest part.

IV: After reading My Pinup, and as such a voracious reader of your work, I’ve wondered about celebrity culture, specifically the celebrity profile, which you have elevated into an artwork. You cut to the core of people so beautifully. Prince, throughout this book, is equal parts the fully fledged person you met and an amalgamation/representation of your lovers and your identity as a Black gay man. How did you explore the dichotomy between Prince as a human being and Prince as a cultural touchstone?

HA: When I met him, and we spent those two afternoons together, I realized how incredibly, incredibly vulnerable he was, even though he was isolated. And I wanted to describe him in real terms, what that isolation might have felt like. I think that I was trying to make it evocative in a way that really brought him out as a person as opposed to a myth. And it was really important to me to get the reporting right about him and to get the sense that he was, you know, just, like, that he was folks. And I love how he was open to experience and how his music had changed, and he was this figure despite worldwide acclaim, who always put himself out there and didn’t hide behind the pain so much as he used it to access others. People with stories. So it was important to me not to kind of make him up. But trust us to see him.

When you write something, you have to dry your tears first, so that you can express it with a relative lack of sentimentality.

IV: I especially felt that idea of trusting your reader to see your subject. I’ve seen that throughout your work, particularly in your Harper’s piece on the late André Leon Talley. Your subjects, who are public-facing people who are so often dehumanized, must feel so comforted with how you, as a writer, are fighting against [their dehumanization] and showing their fullest selves. Have you always had your hand on the pulse of other people’s vulnerability? Did it come naturally to you?

HA: I think the word is intuitive. I’ve always been intuitive, able to empathize with people to some degree. I think that I’ve always had that particular gift of empathy. And one of the things that is important to me is if you have that particular kind of feeling, you need to describe it and work with it. And I think that I feel lucky to have that particular insight.

There’s a thing that Diane Arbus said: that she felt that there were things that no one else would see unless she photographed it. And I think that just a really profound thing that we have in the world is that we can have the possibility of expressing language in language, the myriad difficulties of connecting. We have to do it, but it’s very difficult. Because you’re describing the inevitable.