This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
R.O. Kwon, the bestselling novelist of The Incendiaries and Exhibit, does not believe in God. Even so, Kwon’s writing about God and faith feels more familiar to me than that of many who do believe.
As someone who very strongly believes in God, I find that kinship feels a little scary and a little dangerous. To avoid too much psychoanalyzing, it makes it feel like the waters between belief and unbelief are rather porous. This line of thought is tempting to run from, as all scary things are, but it’s here that I return to Kwon’s work.
Kwon is no stranger to topics that often scare us. Alongside vivid portraits of belief and God, her writing mines topics that many of us grew up believing “good Christians” should avoid, including the allure of fanaticism, the pain of losing one’s faith, and — stay with me here — kink, which she defines as any consensual “sexual practice that deviates from or falls outside often extremely narrow definitions of what sex should be.” As a fiction writer, she offers neither censure nor endorsement; instead, she does what the church has all too often failed to do: Ask what it means to have desires that scare us, what we can learn from those fears and desires, and how that affects those around us.
In our interview, Kwon and I explored the relationship between faith, fear, and desire. Along the way, we also talked about her habit of extreme weightlifting, charismatic worship, and talking publicly about sex.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: You write a lot about growing up as a very zealous Christian teen, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about why specifically you wanted to be a pastor when you were younger.
R.O. Kwon: I used to say that I wanted to be a pastor in part because it just felt like a shorthand for what I wanted. But, honestly, I was so religious and bent on devoting my life to God, what I wanted more was to be a saint. I just wanted to completely devote my life to God, my whole life to be about serving the Lord.
Pastor/isolated mystic. It’s not exactly that I felt driven to want to be a pastor. It was that I wanted my entire life to be about Jesus.
As I was reading your work, the summary that came to mind was that a lot of it is about being at war with our bodies and finding ways out of that war. Does that feel fair?
That’s really interesting. I love the way you put that. I don’t know if I feel — it’s not at all inaccurate, but I would maybe slant it a little differently. My work has to do with the ways in which our bodies run into conflict with what we’re told our bodies should want and be. And actually getting closer to being at home in one’s body.
I wondered if faith telling us to be in conflict with our bodies is part of what you’re getting at when you talk about what we’ve been told we’re supposed to want and be.
Yeah, absolutely. You’ll be especially familiar with the ways in which, at least the varieties of organized Christianity that I knew when I was very religious, absolutely told me that and had strictures that said what I wanted was wrong, evil, and sinful.
My whole family’s very Catholic and I grew up Catholic, and then I turned toward Protestantism and evangelical Christianity. A lot of those strictures that I grew up with still reside in my body despite how long I’ve been away from the faith.
I wanna follow up on that a little bit. Was part of the appeal of the more Protestant and charismatic forms of faith, the way that it was very embodied in the worship? That it was very emotional and trying to drive a sort of bodily reaction?
Oh, that’s so interesting. Again, I’ve never heard anyone quite put it that way, but yeah. I loved going to praise rallies, I loved the singing, the dancing, the talking in tongues. I loved the routine. I loved the proximity. I loved how close the ecstatic was with that kind of Christianity.
And yeah, absolutely. I remember sitting in mass with my family; as a kid I read the Catholic missals over and over again during mass because I would get bored. And more charismatic versions of Christianity were intensely not boring.
Charismatic worship wasn’t quite so appealing to me, but I think that was because I already had other experiences — particularly sports — that were such a shortcut to getting into my body and out of my brain.
That’s really resonating.
I was going to ask this later in the interview, but now that I’ve mentioned sports, I read that you’ve had a lot of anxiety while writing and talking about Exhibit, and that you addressed that anxiety with weightlifting. Could you tell me more?
Sure. There was and continues to be a lot of anxiety around that book. Writing a book is harrowing for anyone. But I had, and continue to have, a lot of panic attacks around that book. Panic attacks have been much longer and more severe than anything I’d known before.
A lot of that did have to do with the sex in the book and the kinds of sex that the book is particularly interested in, which are queer and kinky. The messages that my body would send me when I was, and sometimes still am, in the middle of these panic attacks was so over the top yet so loud. My body was saying things like, “Run!” and “They’re going to kill you!” and “The killers are at the door!”
Anyone who’s experienced panic attacks will know that it’s very difficult to reason oneself out of a panic attack. Because the body becomes convinced that we’re dying.
It seems most likely to me that these messages come both from the weight of the Protestant and Catholic traditions that I grew up with, as well as my being Korean. There are so many ways in which Koreans are very reticent about sex. Anyone who has watched a romantic K-drama knows it can spend like 20 episodes leading up to the characters maybe sharing a kiss.
Being very open about sexuality runs antithetical to my body and to the world in which my ancestors grew up. It really feels as though my ancestors are trying to keep me alive, because that’s what they knew.
Korean women are not supposed to talk about sex. We’re not really supposed to give any indication in public we’ve ever had sex. As far as anyone knows, all Korean children have been conceived immaculately.
All of that was part of what was feeding my anxiety. What I’ve slowly found is that since this anxiety resists being reasoned away, what seems to help most is engaging with anxiety as the bodily, physical response that it is.
The things that help most are, if I can get a cold plunge then doing that but otherwise taking a cold shower. And lifting very heavy weights has been very helpful. My primary form of exercising is power lifting.
Basically, any physical activity that makes it close to impossible to think about much else has been medicinal.
I’m curious about a dichotomy that I see: On one hand, writing about kink is your way of exploring that what your body wants and desires is not necessarily evil, wrong, or bad. And yet I also hear that you had a strong desire to stop writing this book. It makes me wonder: How do you know which desires are worth trusting or following? Or is that the wrong question?
Yeah, that’s a great question. Over time, and in the course of writing this book in particular, I’ve come to really trust in fear as a guiding light toward what I want to be writing and what I want to try to put on the page.
I believe that in part because, over and over when I have felt alone in the world for believing as I do and wanting as I do, literature and art have been there to tell me that I’m not alone and that the solitude is imagined. That has been genuinely lifesaving at times.
It seemed to me that if that’s part of what I value so much about literature, then what am I doing in this discipline if I’m not trying to offer that back? I’m trying to write for a past version of myself who, at various points, has felt marked — this is hyperbolic — as being apart from all of humanity for wanting as I do.
I’m trying to write things that let her know that’s not true, and that it was never true. If I keep that in mind as something I’m interested in doing with my work, then I can sort the various fears and desires accordingly.
I’ve learned in my own life that the things that I feel most afraid of are something that I need to, not necessarily run toward, but listen to and pay attention to.
Absolutely. There’s a beautiful Toni Morrison quotation about how fear is information. I think I do try to run toward what I’m afraid of with my writing. I’m pretty cautious in a lot of areas of my life but with the writing I never want shame-related fear, guilt-related fear to stop me from writing what the bravest version of myself would be able to write.
How do you understand the relationship between what we desire and who we want to become?
I tend to have trouble generalizing about things like this. And this is partly why I love fiction so much and why I love writing so much. To write a novel is to be so interested in the particular.
Would you say more about what you love about writing novels then? And how it allows you to tell stories that get at these questions without trying to answer them too generally?
I continue to think of myself as a novelist who also writes nonfiction. And for me, that’s in part because — and any number of my friends who love both equally would have different feelings about this — in fiction I can be the most honest, with that scrim of plausible deniability. It’s in fiction that I can get as vulnerable as I can possibly be. I can’t quite do that in nonfiction.
In preparation, I read two essays you wrote back-to-back. In the first, an essay about the way that people willfully conflate kink with abuse, you write: “It can be so lonely to wish to stop wanting what one often cannot help wanting.” In the second essay, about losing your faith at 17, you write: “It’s a loss that’s still happening, daily reshaping my life and mind around His ongoing absence. It’s always what I’m writing about, maybe because, as long as I’m writing about the Lord I lost, I can still, in a way, be with Him.”
Is there a relationship you see between those two ideas?
Losing God was and is the sort of the great pivotal loss of my life. It’s a loss. The pain of that loss has not diminished in the least. If anything, increasingly, I have found that the solace available is an understanding that the pain will not diminish.
In some ways, I don’t want it to diminish because it’s what’s left. Losing faith went completely against my will. I still badly wanted to stay, and that faith became unavailable to me. With my writing, I am fascinated by the divide between our will and what we are and who we are.
Why do you like writing about kink and faith in the same piece of fiction so often?
Honestly, for me, I can’t not. I’ve tried over and over, but I’m always writing about God. Every single piece of fiction I’ve ever published has it in some way or another — there are a few short stories where the word “God” never comes up, but it’s there.
Anytime I’ve tried to keep that loss out of what I’m writing, eventually the piece of fiction that I’m working on will start feeling thin. I’ll start feeling like something’s missing. It lacks a certain depth. And then I’ll realize, “Oh, it’s that f---er again!” Faith has to come back into it.
It’s less that I feel compelled to write about sex and God at the same time. It’s more that God’s always — that ghost is always sneaking in.
Do you feel anxiety around writing about losing God and about this experience of losing faith?
I hear a lot from so many kinds, ex-Mormons, ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I hear a lot from people with ambivalent relationships to their faith or the beliefs they grew up with.
Part of what can be so extraordinarily painful about losing a faith as all-encompassing as Christianity was for me, and part of what’s so bewildering, is that it doesn’t even read as a legible loss to a lot of people who don’t know about the joy of faith, who haven’t experienced how wonderful it could be.
With each book so far, I keep thinking, “Okay, this time I’ve written it, this time I’ve gotten it down the way I needed to read it.” And then I’ll think of more ways I can say it better or more truthfully.
I don’t know if it’s quite the kind of panic-attack anxiety that I experienced with Exhibit, but it’s anxiety that I’ll never get it down exactly right. As I’m sure you know too, part of what’s so endlessly frustrating and fascinating about writing and making art is that it does feel like an asymptote.
I’ll probably never get there, but I’m gonna keep trying.
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