INTERVIEW: Margo Steines (Brutalities: A Love Story)
Brutalities: A Love Story
Margo Steines
W.W. Norton
Interview by Chelsea Davis
Early in her memoir Brutalities: A Love Story, Margo Steines’s boyfriend orders her to stand in the corner while he beats her with a camel whip.
A camel must be really big, I thought when I first saw the whip. I was still half a child, and I thought a child’s thoughts …. And then everything was gone except one thing, it was only the hot electric agony stretching from him through the camel whip to the flesh of my ass, there were no words or thoughts, just a high-frequency cracking feeling …. I was not in pain—I had become pain. I did not move.
Why is Steines attracted to hurt, and to people who hurt her? This question is at the center of Steines’ book, which recounts her decades-long quest for physical extremity. She runs so far and hard her heel bone cleaves in two; she welds molten metal during a stint as an ironworker, her smallest errors leaving “hole[s] the size of … pencil eraser[s] in [her] skin”; she kicks men in the balls as a teenaged pro-domme.
But Brutalities is no mere provocation. Its reflections on masculinity, class, and love are as delicate as Steines’ experiences are harsh. Ultimately, the book situates Steines’s personal attraction to pain within a broader American culture that does not just tolerate, but in fact welcomes and demands, the pounding of flesh. As screen culture overexposes and numbs us, in equal measure, to images of death and suffering, Steines’ book asks us to slow down and reconsider violence so that we might understand and transform it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Chelsea Davis: Toughness is a value that the Margo of Brutalities keeps coming back to: the younger you hustles hard to be accepted in the macho, masculine worlds of weight-lifting, professional welding, MMA. But there's such a vulnerability to publishing about your own experiences, too. Were there moments during the writing of this memoir where those two imperatives came into conflict—the impulse towards sharing and softness, and the impulse towards stoicism and toughness?
Margo Steines: That's the fundamental friction of my life: I want to be a soft and malleable and open person, and then also I want to gird myself against all of that shit. And so I do a lot in both directions and it largely cancels itself out. Often with Brutalities, and also with the book I'm writing now, I'll be in the process, doing my thing, and then I’ll have these flashes of horror: “What are you doing? No one wants, no one needs, to know about any of that.”
I don't know what that voice is. I don't know if it’s from culture, from my father, from deep inside me. But I think that if you're a person who wants to make art about the most private and intimate parts of your life, unless you have a personality disorder that allows you to not suffer from self-doubt, it's going to be part of it, the “Who cares?” voice. All of us carry it with us.
In my family of origin, there was a lot of messaging about privacy and what stays in the family. And it felt both terrifying and so freeing to publish my book, to be like, “Well, everything's there now, and anyone with $17 can find out the worst things about me.” And to be the one who did that. I had all the agency; it wasn't done to me.
CD: The book is broadly interested in carving out a place for agency within experiences of trauma and brutality. Early in the memoir, you attend a dinner party after a session of violent sex, and your friend notices that your face is turning black and blue. You write, “I can't help what I like, I told [her]. That turned out not to be true, but I didn't know so at the time.” Sometimes that can be controversial territory—the idea that we can shape what we want, sexually or otherwise.
MS: Yeah. I thought that I had no agency in terms of what I responded to. In the context of that passage, I did mean sexually, but it definitely extrapolated outward into the rest of my life: I didn't really think I had any choice in deciding who I would be. And then I got roughed up by life long enough, and I realized that, oh, at a certain point you can just change to some degree. What happened to me such that I'm now a person that enjoys being treated with kindness is a lot of work. But also, at a certain point I did start seeing myself as someone who is malleable and not fixed, and there's so much freedom in that. Because then you're not doomed to whatever the fuck is going on in the moment.
CD: I wonder if writing about your experiences had anything to do with that change in mindset.
MS: For sure. I don't think writing is therapy; I'm pretty cautious of that idea. But I do think that there is stuff that I understand about myself and my own experience where there was no way I would have understood it without turning my whole life into a research site.
CD: One of the life events you actually write about at greatest length in Brutalities is pregnancy, which you undergo while living with a loving partner during COVID lockdown. The memoir’s chapters alternate between various genres of intense violence you’ve been involved in (narrated in the past tense) and your pregnancy (narrated in the present tense). What about that experience of pregnancy made it feel like the right scaffold for the more hardcore chapters of Brutalities?
MS: Pregnancy was very violent to my body in a lot of quiet ways, but without being an experience of harm. The sense of being trapped in my body and in that environment was really high-key. And I realized, “Oh, wow, the brutality of this experience is evocative of all of the others.” So I wanted to look at the way that, culturally and personally, we experience pregnancy as a joyful time, an aspirational thing—in contrast to, you know, getting punched in the face by some shithead in an S&M dungeon.
CD: Even though pregnancy is the memoir’s pedal-point, you chose not to depict childbirth itself, which is one of the most universal experiences of extreme pain. Why did you choose to end the memoir right before you go into labor?
MS: Most of it was that I finished the book before I gave birth. So I was editing and thought, “I could go back and add in this experience,” but it didn't feel like the same narrator that had narrated the whole book was available any longer. I was a different person.
The other part is that I had a lot of birth trauma, and it's probably the only thing that I'm not really willing to go there with; I just don't want to talk about it. Which is, I realize, sort of unexpected after all the things that I am very open about. But even now, four years later, I haven't really processed it enough to write in detail about it.
CD: Speaking of, I noticed that you’re about to teach a class on writing trauma. By definition in that course, and probably in your other personal essay classes, students must be constantly bringing to you or pushing themselves towards experiences that are hard to talk and write about. As a teacher, how do you create a space where people feel ok spending a lot of time with their toughest memories?
MS: I’m always careful to say, “I'm not a mental health provider, and I can hold space for you, but I do it in a peer-to-peer capacity, not as a professional.” Then, there are a lot of granular practices that I recommend to the people I work with. But the high-level idea is beginning or deepening a sense of attunement to your own body.
Because what happens to so many of us is that we have some reaction of being triggered by a past trauma but we don't recognize it as that. For me, I don't really feel anything. I just forget to eat. I don't feel sad or fucked up. And people have asked me a lot, “What was it like to write that book?” And I’ll say, “I felt fine. Disturbingly so.” But I was not behaving like a person who felt fine.
Other people become emotionally labile instead. But what we can all do for ourselves is develop a sense of, what does it feel like when I'm starting to get activated? Does my stomach hurt, do I suddenly become uncomfortable in my physical surroundings, whatever. And then once you have a practice of this self-noticing, then you can check in with yourself regularly as you're working and ask, “Am I up for this today?” If there was one best practice of trauma-informed pedagogy, it is to find that line and continually approach it, but not ever cross it—and to slowly move it over time.
I wish I had had more of these practices for myself when I wrote the book. I developed all of them through writing it, but I was definitely just winging it out there for a while.
CD: One of your memoir’s central questions is, “Why am I attracted to experiences of pain?” You approach that question from a lot of different angles, but are also frank about when you hit up against the limits of your understanding. You write, “[t]here are holes where the answer should be, a series of absences.” Did you ever feel pressure, external or internal, to push towards more definitive answers?
MS: I think some of that unknowability in the book is my pushing back against the trauma plot. But I do want to have answers for everything. And it's hard to know whether something is unknowable or you just haven't searched hard enough.
I have received some feedback from readers [to the effect of], “Why are you so bewildered by everything?” And the reason is: because shit is bewildering! Anyone who fucking claims that they can do, like, a tight wrap up on the human condition—I'm just so suspicious of that shit.
A lot of things in our culture—media, and therapy, and the three-part structure of film and theater—have primed us for this sense that we get to understand everything at the end. And I think that’s a lie; it's just something that we like to snuggle with. And I did not want to participate in that, even if sometimes it means I look like an idiot that just didn't think hard enough.
CD: Maybe there's even something specifically American about that push towards a tidy ending. Very Hollywood.
MS: Totally—the resolution narrative. And if you look at people who've written memoirs and you talk to them five years later about what they thought they knew—well, they all know new shit in five years. Our self-awareness is constantly evolving. So the thought that I would make some static assessment of “This is what is real” just felt arrogant. And that's not one of the ways that I'm arrogant.
