Spotlight Conversation - Part 2 with Ann Rower

An in-depth conversation with writer Ann Rower on coming out in your 40s, early LSD, love, loss and the healing act of writing. (Part 2 of 2). For Part 1, see prior Substack.

Nov 05, 2022

A Spotlight Conversation with Ann Rower - Part 2, continued from Part 1.

Ann Rower. Photo courtesy of her personal collection.

I ask Ann to describe what changed with psilocybin exactly, and she offers a snapshot: the first time she took a little white pill. Leary got them courtesy of Sandoz. It just hit me right away. All the boundaries began to collapse, between me and other people, me and the world. I felt an incredible bonding. Honestly, I learned so much about myself. After that I wasn’t the same person. She later wrote a piece about her LSD years that was performed by the Wooster Group, King Leary, or Leery about Leary. By then, she was living in New York. The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery became her new spiritual home. She met Vito, her male partner, and lived with him for the next 20 years.

Ann was never a hippie. At Harvard, she took part in antiwar protests, her first activism. Her people were the Beats, the gay writers she admired, Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. Everyone gathered twice a week at the Poetry Project, then went drinking all night, talking seriously about poems, literature and life. She credits the Beat and poetry for influencing her diaristic writing, the rhythm and flow. Are you a Beat writer? I ask. I think that’s a good label, she says. Sure, I like that. Though I feel a little younger to be seen as a Beat.

She admires other writers from that time, including Henry Miller, Paul and Jane Bowles, Susan Sontag, as well as her Semiotext(e)peers, Cookie Mueller and Eileen Myles. I had a crush on Eileen for years; we became friends, she says. She loves Jeanette Winterson, though, she writes stories that are more formal that I do. Later, she emails me another name: Sapphire. Push is one of the all-time great books, I think. A common thread is the outsider /outlaw voice and experience: the queers, the addicts, the edgy bad boys and girls, the failures, the abuse, the family betrayal, the road and drug trips.

Our talented friends that we miss. (see links for more below). Mueller photo by Peter Hujar. Barg photo: courtesy of Barbara Barg website. Torr photo: courtesy of Diane Torr website.

It’s not surprising that she fell in love with Heather Lewis, whose edgy first novel, House Rules, is funny and harsh and tender and violent. Lewis was drawing on personal experience, having survived incest and violent abuse. For a minute, she was a 90s lit world darling, but her demons were never far.

Heather Lewis. Photo: Jill Kremnitz.

I still can’t talk about Heather, not the last part, Ann tells me. It’s still too painful. She’d rather talk about the good parts: the great sex and the company, the wild fun and adventure they shared. Heather had a sharp, dry sense of humor. The two met in 1991 and both fell hard. Ann was newly, but fully out: she’d finally left Vito.

Heather looked like a cowboy, tall and forlorn, a long-haired serious butch, one who could give Kevin Bacon a run for his money with her laconic swagger. Their love affair was intense but never easy, Ann says. They drank and partied too hard. Looking back, she feels like Heather was coping with a lifetime of untreated bipolar disorder, but nobody ever realized it. She suffered from chronic depression. Coupled with incest, she could never outrun her past.

The pressure of overnight success was too much. After House Rules, Heather struggled to write a commercial detective book, to please her agents and publisher, Nan Talese, but she felt like a fraud. That’s Ann’s opinion. Fractures reappeared. Drugs reappeared. They were living in Bisbee, Arizona, trying to write, and making runs to Mexico for pills.

Ann doesn’t like to think about how it fell apart. How it became really, really bad. How Heather had a full-on breakdown, and later, hung herself. She prefers to think about the less-known posthumous book that Heather wrote, Notice, after delivering The Second Suspect to Nan Talese. Amy Scholder brought Notice out two years after Heather died. It was rejected by critics for being too dark and sank. I disagree; I love that book, Ann argues. I think it’s her best writing.

We’re on our third conversation, this one by phone, and she’s telling me about how hard it was to cope in the aftermath of the suicide. She wanted to write about Heather, to write herself past grief, but couldn’t. She felt frozen. I was just so angry, she says. Now, since Val’s death, she’s been able to touch pieces of it -- her love story with Heather, and with Val, too -- one memory surfacing another. She’s back to scribbling it all down, but this time, she’s not abusing pills, so it’s a new experience. She can’t hop downtown to visit her old friends, but she’s taking long trips through her life, reliving the moments.

Heather Lewis, a 90’s literary star.

For her part, Heather made it clear how passionately she felt about Ann, her partner on the choppy seas of their relationship, one who supported Heather through bouts of alcoholism that were part of her coping with the deep blues. She made an insider reference to their love story in the dedication to The Second Suspect, and what they called The Grasp and The Grapple. Those were the names of two rescue boats that were sent to find any survivors of a plane crash at sea that they’d watched for weeks on television while living in East Hampton. The plane was never found, nor any survivors. The boats were them; the attempt to rescue was them, too. So was the plane going down with a slow tail. Heather thanked Ann for hoisting the wreckage.

Falling Plane, Credit: Priscillia Akacat on Deviant Art 2018

There’s a subject Ann wants to talk about, and we touch on it: the unknown, possibly limited, time ahead. She doesn’t dwell on the possibility of death, but she’s lost so many friends by now. I just really want to live long enough to see my new book come out, she says finally. I mean, no one knows how long we have, but that would make me really happy.

In the meantime, she’s mad-scribbling away. When I call her the next day, post-chat, she can’t talk because she’s writing again, spurred to think about a question I asked that she couldn’t answer. I wanted to know about how she’d felt about having had much younger lovers and friends for much of her life. I’ve had my share of younger lovers and I think about the dynamic. I think it’s about energy, I posit, more than age. We’re drawn to people who have that energy. It’s like that sense of adventure, the joie de vivre. Like with you and Heather. She agrees. I never thought about it, even with Heather, she admits, the age difference. It never came up. Now I wonder why it never did. Or maybe she did think about it and now I’ll never know. Now I want to think about it….

The words are coming fast. Maybe this will become a final story for the new book, she adds, excitedly, when I check in later. That, and what sexuality looks like for her now and how she thinks about it, how it’s still a taboo subject. A much older woman who still desires touch, is still hungry for the world, to be turned on as before, by stories and people and connection. Maybe this won’t even be the last book, she adds, her statement more of a question. Maybe, she smiles, the next book after this one will be ‘If You’re an Old Lady’. Maybe I’ll just keep writing until, well, until whenever. All I know is I want to be writing.

Writing, writing and writing, I think. With a beat in your head.

Tell Me Everything

Discussion about this post