12 Questions for Rayne Fisher-Quann

The poignant internet writer on sleep, dignity, grief, being understood, fictional crushes, her relationship with memory, cigarettes, and more.

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‘Everything we hate in other people is just a projection of something we fear in ourselves’ the twenty-two year old Canadian memoirist Rayne Fisher-Quann (RFQ) writes in her answer to the third question of our meticulous interview. It’s a nice quote: tidy while inarguably true and very personal — this an equally tidy way to describe RFQ’s blossoming style of self-investigation. Although every RFQ thought is ordered and clear, they’re each prone to merciless self-questioning. But I wouldn’t say she’s unconfident, rather cognizant of the shifting nature of perspective; assured while maintaining a sense of curiosity, the knowledge that she could be wrong. The style (style: the summary of one’s flaws) is a departure from confident declaratives strewn across the internet, and, more classically, in the work of macho literature. Yet I’m hesitant to label RFQ’s tendency toward self-questioning the word feminine. It’s more complex than that, the comfort with being only temporarily certain. 

***

‘I’m interviewing Rayne Fisher-Quann,’ I say to Dean Kissick. We’re sitting in the outdoor garden of a restaurant on the Lower East Side, having coffee, getting to know each other, feeling one another out. Dean’s slightly older, more experienced, a bit wiser. I figured I should try and get his advice on something… ‘I’m interviewing Rayne Fisher-Quann, do you know who that is?’ 

‘Of course, yeah. She’s quite young, pretty influential.’ 

‘Exactly, yeah. I actually thought she was older. Not, you know, cuz she looks older, but because her writing and also, like, her disposition is much more mature than what you’d expect from a Gen Z twenty-two year old. When she told me her age on the phone I almost gasped.’ 

‘Young writers are often quite assured in their initial style.’ Dean remarks. ‘Have a look at early Bret Easton-Ellis. The stuff from his 20s is like, something a forty-year old would never have the confidence to write with such elegant flow.’ 

‘To be honest I’m struggling a bit with the Rayne interview, avoiding writing the intro and publishing it. It’s not that I don’t like her as a writer. I think she has these very composed, depth-filled sentences with lots of poignancy, all packed with meaning. The thing is I just don’t completely relate to it, though I really enjoy what she has to say about iPhones, the internet, and grief. And like, I don’t want to write this long, praise-filled intro that’s not genuine. That’d be kind of ugly, wouldn’t it? On the other hand, I’d prefer not to write a whole thing about how I can recognize a writer is talented but that their work is not something that opens up to me. In the end, I’m just not her audience. But I think she’s interesting. And I think her success is interesting. And very much deserved, whatever deserving success means. So yeah, I’m not really sure what to write, or how to approach it.’

‘You could always…. Hm.’ Dean takes a sip of his latte. ‘You could always just write something unrelated yet in the faint style she evokes? Something random, like getting a haircut or going for cup of coffee. Then lead in, somewhat naturally.’ 

‘Yes.’ I reply. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’ 

But it is a bad idea, I think later in the day. It’s a bad idea in relation to good ol’ RFQ. Because, even if I don’t really relate to her work, or if I’m not her ‘target audience’, one can’t deny that there is plenty of there there.

***

To fall under the spell of art is to accept influence, to suspend one’s disbelief, to allow the rhythm of your perception to be guided, if not perverted, taken somewhere new unto the path of transcendence, hopefully beauty. I’ve spent several days pining through RFQ’s oeuvre. I find myself inspired to write something about how I’ve recently quit smoking and how this addiction relates to the iPhone.

It’s now been two months without a cigarette. I don’t remember the exact date I stopped, the problem was never that dire. I would smoke while writing and reading as well as in social situations, something to do with my hands and mouth, oral fixation, as the saying goes. It’s difficult to write without cigarettes nearby. I’ve purchased a stress ball and lollipops, a good solution for when I’m alone. In public, not so much. A friend of mine suggested I start sucking cock, though they mentioned it might be just as, if not more, addictive. For now I’ve managed to quit the habit, however inconvenient. It does feel good to go on runs and do yoga without constantly heaving for air. I’ve also stopped, sort of, drinking hard alcohol, only one to two glasses of red wine per night and, well, the occasional beer or whiskey, and of course, the odd digestif here and there. Some would say, perhaps RFQ would say, that I’m falling into the habit of self-optimization, of what has come to be known as the wellness industrial complex, a facet of contemporary life that RFQ deems inescapable. I’d respond, though, in this hypothetical exchange, that I’m attempting to save my life, or at least add a few years. In our interview, RFQ does preface, however, that the wellness industrial complex is inescapable for ‘young women online more than anyone.’ This is probably true, although I don’t know why. People online are faced with all sorts of horrific influences. To draw an oversimplified binary, for women it’s wellness, for men it’s porn and vitriolic message boards. I guess, according to RFQ, that with all my yoga and nutrition stuff, I’m more of a woman than I’d like to admit. This is all well and fine. 

I’ve never had too much of an addictive personality, just within the norm. All my life, I’ve been able to temper my poor habits through sheer will, without the need for group psychoanalysis or faith-based meetings. More than anything else, literature, my vocation, the reading of it more than the writing of it, usually helps me get out of destructive behavioral patterns. I’ve got a tendency to fall on my face before picking myself back up, playing the past off with considerable whim. Other than my iPhone, there aren’t many enticements I haven’t been able to overcome. But it’s getting to the point where my phone is destructive enough. My addiction to the black rectangle is, like with everyone else in the generations above and below me, agonizing, all-consuming. Most addictions are empty, if they were productive we wouldn’t use the pejorative noun addiction, but instead something approbatory, like passion. Not even the lamest of losers would say, ‘my phone is my passion.’ But the iPhone, unlike drugs, the cigarette, or sex, really gives us nothing other than, like Christian Lorentzen says, ‘the ability to sometimes make it easier to meet-up.’ But even that is arguable. Smartphones offer no tangible experience, only facsimile, the dopamine rush of being notified, pure simulacrum, a mere reflection of something that could, in theory, at one point in time be real. But the craving isn’t for the real, the actual, the existent material structure. Our addiction (from Latin: addicere, ‘enslaved by’ or ‘bound to’) is only for the idea of the real, a ghostlike silhouette without gnostic pull. What an empty emptiness. The emptiest of emptinesses takes hold of the collective consciousness, no way out, I sometimes think, sometimes feel. RFQ feels this too. The influence of this emptiness is one of her primary subjects. And when I read her I feel simultaneously more and less alone, that others are experiencing what I am too, laying it bare with significant insight; a sense of community, but only sort of. Does this make it any better? 

***

Ringo’s barbershop had the faint smell of lavender and mint. It had the feel of inner-city luxury, the room adorned with sparse, minimal, Scandinavian zeitgeist simplicity with a claustrophobic, Lower East Side edge that is, somehow, still semi-existent. I was pacing around the city this past Wednesday, in search of a new barber. I’ve had a break-up with my last one, Rosa, which wasn’t easy at all. It can be more difficult to break up with your barber than a therapist or a friend. It’s easier than breaking up with a girlfriend, yet harder than breaking it off with a situation-ship. This is the level of difficulty in breaking off the transactional yet oddly personal relationships we all tend to build. So what’s RFQ to me? She’s not quite a subject, because what I’m doing isn’t really journalism. She’s not a friend either. I’m not working for her, and she’s not working for me, no finances are being exchanged. It’s also not quite PR, since PR is usually either flattery or the opposite. It’s a bond with no name. We’re colleagues, sort of, collaborating on this thing. Is the relationship similar, in anyway, to the weird one with me and Rosa, or am I, as the cliche goes, grasping for straws?

A barber, at least for a guy like me who has his hair cut once a month, can be as much a fixture of one’s life as a family member or friend. Things got quite weird when my longtime barber began to lose her touch. I’d kept going and going, out of loyalty, but the cuts kept getting stranger each time. ‘You look a bit challenged,’ my friend Josh said after the last one, and I knew it was time for a change. I’d been going to see Rosa on Clinton St. on and off for twenty years. She knows where I live, where my parents live, and she waves to me when my dog and I walk past the shop. To be completely honest, I more ghosted Rosa than put a formal end to the relationship. This was cowardly, indeed. I didn’t feel it necessary to ceremonially call her and say: I’m sorry Rosa, I just don’t think it’s a match anymore. Instead, I did something on the sly, a bit sneaky, and have started seeing other people. What will Rosa think when she sees me walk by with a cut by someone else? I’m terrified, I must admit. I’ve begun a new route for my afternoon walks and haven’t passed by her shop in over three months. I’ve seen four different barbers since, all a bit mediocre. They’re worse than she is, and to boot, lack the formidable experience. Some were a bit too new-age, others clearly in the wrong field altogether. 

Wednesday, in desperate need of a shape-up, I decided it would be my last hurrah before throwing my hands up in surrender and returning to sweet Rosa. I’ve never been one to make appointments with barbers, preferring to walk-in, suss the place out, and see if there’s any room. There has to be a level of serendipitous kismet to the whole experience. Walking around the Lower East Side, four establishments previously unbeknownst to me were thoroughly examined. A couple of them seemed nice but had no room for walk-ins; it wasn't meant to be. The other two, well, I don’t think I’d let them comb my dog’s hair (poor hygiene, bad atmosphere). At the very end of despondency, I found myself on Ludlow between Stanton and Rivington. This is the opposite of the kind of street where I thought I’d find my match, a hyper-commercial pathway I’ve walked down at least a thousand times, where I thought I knew in the back of my mind every storefront on offer. And but, there’s always, in this city of surprise and horror, shock and awe, a few things one has a propensity to miss. 

And it was, you might have already guessed, the aforementioned Ringo’s Barbershop. Affable and gregarious, Ringo ushered me in with delight. 

‘Have time for a walk-in?’ I ask. ‘I just need a little trim, a clean up.’ 

‘Of course I do, gorgeous! Come here, come here. Sit down.’ 

Ringo started playing with my hair, massaging my head up and down.

‘You shouldn’t do too much, you shouldn’t cut the sides too short. You’re a handsome white man, you have it in your favor. Yes, your hair is thinning, but that’s fine, it just means your brain is growing. You must be smart! Very good at, I don’t know, something? I have an idea of what to do with you, something very simple, not try-hard, very natural, almost as if you’ve never gotten a haircut at all. Better, you know, it’s your first time here, so I’m going to give you a discount. Just send me forty dollars on Venmo, I’ll give you the real price if you ever decide to come back.’

Ringo’s presence felt warm, so sharply caring and amiable. In his grasp, I would have let him do whatever he wanted to me, mohawk, buzzcut, you name it. He was so comforting. I felt, confidently, that I was in the hands of an expert. It was similar to reading a book by a great author like Gary Indiana, Emmanuel Carrere, Annie Enaux… I fell under the influence of his charm right away. He mentioned that, more than anything, he would cut my hair to correspond with the shape of my head, sort of like how I try to write an intro that matches the evocative tone of whoever I’m interviewing. This excites me. I couldn’t wait to see what he’d come up with. 

‘I completely agree with whatever you’re about to do.’ I tell him.

‘That’s wonderful, Jordan. I’m not going to disappoint you.’  

People usually talk to their barbers while they perform their work. I don’t like this cultural practice; it’s something I endure. During the whole experience, Ringo was going on about how he’s been in Manhattan for thirty years but just recently moved to Brooklyn because he’s aged out of Manhattan, how Manhattan is nice to work in but to live in, no, makes him feel crazy, totally overwhelmed, this began at his twenty year mark, he says. Ringo has a faint accent I can’t place. I mean, I know he’s Asian, because he’s Asian, but I felt it would be rude to ask from where exactly. I sort of asked at the beginning, and he said America in an incredibly strong yet unplaceable accent. So whatever, he’s from America, that’s good. Instead of pressing the topic, I say: 

‘It took you twenty years to become overwhelmed by Manhattan?’  

‘Oh yeah.’ He responds. ‘The first twenty I was just go-go-go, party-work-party, non-stop, hoo-rah-rah. Now everything is a bit calmer.’ 

The haircut came out weird. I liked it right away, because it was different, and he smothered me in product, and everything in the barber’s mirror looks better than in reality, but it wasn’t anything similar to what Rosa accomplished in her prime. I looked deranged, I realized not until I got home. But he styled the cut to correspond with the shape of my head, the one that Ringo said became bigger because of the way I think, the way my mind has adapted to my environment. So what does this awful new look end up saying about me? 

***

‘If I read one more proclaimed internet writer I’m going to kill myself,’ my friend Cece remarks while walking with me and my dog up Allen St. ‘It’s just overdone, the internet style, the internet reflections. It comes out as drone-like as the very society they’re trying to represent. Or criticize. I’m never sure if they’re trying to critique it or embody it.’ 

‘That’s a pretty good critique.’ I respond. ‘I think RFQ…’ 

‘No, no, Gordon, I can’t hear you talk about fucking RFQ anymore. Just write your intro and then move on.’ 

‘Hear me out for a second, I’m almost there…’ I say, pulling my dog away from a pile of another dog’s shit. ‘I think that RFQ does a pretty decent job, in that endless collection of internet writers, of distinguishing herself. The self-reflection isn’t that narcissistic. There’s a genuine yearning, an authentic tension between who she wants to be and who she is, between her tensions and her ideals, between her perception of reality and of the reality that the internet has, I guess, cornered her into. With every action she’s like, constantly aware, it seems, of what’s internet-borne behavior and what’s influenced by the tangible and real, that is to say family, friends, the socio-cultural elements surrounding her. And even further, she’s reflective on how the internet, by now a monstrous noun in and of itself, has warped what we’ve come to perceive as the more pure emotional elements, like love, grief, or the experience of moving to a new city. Am I encountering the world as it is, or am I imitating very unnatural behaviors? In what way has this always been the case, and in what ways has the internet, has the iPhone, made everything worse? Is it possible to even trust oneself without knowing the answer to these questions? This is the tone that lies in the background of everything she writes. It’s impressive, it really is.’ 

‘Sure.’

‘I get the disquieting sense-’ 

‘Oh god.’

‘Stop, I’m almost finished. Hear me out. I get the disquieting sense while reading RFQ that nothing, anymore, might be real… like, as soon as the fish realizes they’re in water they’re fucked, sort of thing. But with RFQ, what is real is the desire to understand, the genuine yearning I was just talking about. That’s what I think distinguishes her from the massive pool of contemporaries doing similar things. She’s got an impetus I don’t think any of the other internet writers have… it all amounts to something very moving, if not mournful. I think it’s a little more sophisticated than the cheapness of nostalgia. There is plenty of there there.’ 

‘You think she’s like, a voice of a generation, kind of thing?’ Cece says. And I’m not sure if she’s being ironic. I decide to take the question at face value. 

‘Could be, sure. Whether that generation’s voice is worth considering is another question entirely. Like, I’m definitely going to read her new book, though I can’t say I’m excited. Again, like I’ve said before, her work moves me, intellectually, but not really to my core. This is what’s bothering me. I want her to move me to my core, to go past just the ability to understand what she’s doing. I want to feel it in its entirety. I want it, more than anything, like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, to fully open up to every aspect of my being. Is this something that can be contrived?’

‘Every generation’s voice is worth considering, worth trying to understand and relate to. I think the question is whether it offers anything novel to the conversations that have come before it. In terms of whether you can force yourself to be moved from your core through sheer will, desire… honestly, dude, I have no idea.’ 

‘Whether intentionally or not, RFQ has tapped into something no millennial ever could. Perhaps, then, yes. The short answer is yes.’ 

***

In the middle of trying to write the intro to this interview, I came down with one of the nastiest flus in recent memory. 103 degrees, fever dreams where RFQ’s prose came to life, where the answers she wrote to my questions gained different meanings, sensibilities. One night, in bed, covered in sweat, I said to myself: You’re going to go write that fucking intro tomorrow, you fucking piece of shit. You’re gonna sit down, and you’re gonna write it, be done with it, publish it, and stand by every fucking word, and that’s that. 

The next morning, even more sick, I didn’t do it. 

In Chinatown, at the worst Urgent Care I’ve ever been to for the third time in one week, the doctor, a white woman in her fifties who looked smacked out on LSD, wearing a purple Care-Bare t-shirt, arms covered with colorful tattoos in the shape of little night-time stars, tried to express sympathy for my condition. 

‘Ohhhh poor boy. Look at you!’ She says. 

I’m almost thirty, you cunt, I couldn’t help but think.  

‘Yeah. I’m yeah.’ I respond.

‘Awww look at you. So sick. What are we going to do with you!’ 

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ 

‘So, RSV, corona, strep, all came back negative. Urine, blood, clean! No STD’s. Hah. So that’s great to hear. Isn’t it? I don’t know what you have! The rhinovirus has been going around. It could be that.’ 

‘Is that like a mutation from a rhinoceros?’ I ask. 

‘What! No! What a stupid thing to say. It’s just a common cold.’

‘Oh.’ 

‘There’s the also the chance that it’s psychosomatic. I’ve seen temperatures and high blood pressures with no cause but the mind.’ 

‘That’s not what it is.’ I respond. 

‘OK! Mister, “I’m not crazy.” No. Hahah. Poor you, poor guy, What are we going to do with you?’ 

For some reason, she ended up prescribing heavy painkillers, which I didn’t end up taking. Even though I have insurance, which I pay over two hundred dollars a month for, each visit had a copay of one hundred and fifty dollars. I had an urge to go back into the consultation room and flip the desk over, throw the computer monitor against the wall, all these aggressive things. I was galvanized by frustration, a rush of energy I hadn’t had for days. 

That night I went home and took a very hot shower for forty-five minutes. I listened to Nat King Cole, some techno music, Sam Cooke, and then Billie Holiday. I screamed into a cup and then threw my phone against the wall. Covered in flu-driven sweat, I took another shower. I went to the fridge and ate two apples before starting to vomit with intensity. I showered yet again and then ate a grapefruit. I watched an hour of news about the war in the middle east and the student protests on college campuses. I watched a debate on YouTube about how the protests compare and heavily contrast with the student movement of 1968. I listened to all sorts of takes, left, right, and fringe. I thought about my being Jewish for a while, about how much I love Shabbat dinner with family and friends, the traditions of Judaism I was raised with. I thought about the way my grandfather, Jew, would eat not just the apple, but the apple’s core and seeds too, the whole goddamn thing. I began laughing, somewhat manic, uncontrollable and bizarre; a real guttural burst. I then started crying. I vomited once more before taking another shower, jerking off to the idea of a world with no murder, just tits, penis, pussy and ass. I AM OTESSA MOSHFEGH, I said aloud while coming. I AM OTESSA MOSHFEGH. In my robe, I sat down at my desk and emailed a good friend of mine. He responded right away, a much shorter response than what I’d written. I decided not to answer. I opened this document and sighed. I got nauseous but kept it down. I began writing RFQ’s intro and then fell asleep on my couch. 

The next morning, I felt better.  

***

Dear Rayne, 

I’ve overdone it here, haven’t I? 

As I write this, I’m thinking about what Sean Thor Conroe once said, about how literature is the secret place, the quiet place, the destination to say what everywhere else would, and probably should, go unsaid. It reminds me of the scene from In The Mood For Love, when Chow talks about how, in centuries past, when people had a secret, they would go to the top of a mountain and whisper it into the hollow of a tree, before covering it up with mud, walking back down the mountain, and moving on. Then there’s that part at the very end of the film, where Chow travels to Cambodia and does just that, whispering the secret of his never-consummated romance into a hole of bark. I remember the goosebumps I felt the first time I saw that scene, the whole film, actually. I had similar goosebumps when we met. I’d sensed, for whatever reason, that you understood where I was coming from. I said all sorts of bizarre things and you didn’t flinch at all, though it’s true your editor did. This was lovely, a delicate comfort. I really was shocked when you told me you were only twenty-two. It didn’t make any sense.  

Writing, what we’ve chosen to devote our lives to, it’s kind of similar to Chow putting the secret into nature, isn’t it? The difference, I guess, is that instead of letting the deepest, perhaps most verboten aspects of our selves linger within the confines of nature, the bark of a banyan tree, we feel a perverse compulsion to offload the inescapable contents of our minds into form, making it accessible for anyone who’s interested. This is insane, what we do, wouldn’t you say, Rayne? No ordinary love, our profession, our compulsion. And an even more beautiful thing, for you it’s a true compulsion with no outside influence; one gets the sense that you write because it’s the only way to feel alive within the world; it’s genuine and pure; no one can ever, no matter what, take that away from you. You walk around, everywhere you go, with a million dollars that can never be wasted nor spent. 

It’s worth reiterating: I really don’t know you. I met you only once in person, when we became aware of one another at that playhouse in Greenpoint. And then a week later we talked on the phone for twenty or so minutes, about this interview. Practically, that’s the extent to which I know RFQ the person. Though through your writing, the illusion of your existence, your documented brush with existential crises, I feel as though I know you much more than many of my friends and family. Parasocial, is that what they say? Is it the real you anyway? Does that, the real you, exist in the first place? Or are we just the sheer aggregation of what we come into contact with, both practical and physical? Where and how do our souls meet the material world that torments and inspires? That’s the question I think you seek not to answer, but to understand in the first place.  

As detailed above, I’ve struggled with writing your interview, more, so far, than with anyone else. I’ve accurately reflected this struggle and presented your work to a certain degree, so I think my job here is done... Though it’s long, much too long, I’m happy with what’s come out; it’s enough for now.

Much admiration 

-GG 

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Gordon: Someone said something to me recently, about how the best writers are willing and able to investigate themselves as a whole, not only the persona that their era finds acceptable. I find this true with your work. Can you define and describe your own form of self-investigation? Where has it led you?

RFQ: