Darcey Steinke on writing the female body and avoiding the paparazzi with Jackie O.

Send us Fan MailDarcey Steinke is the author of five novels and a memoir, as well as most recently, the fragmentary investigation, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. Her work has been described as suburban Gothic and frequently borrows from her own life, drawing on her complicated relationship with her late mother, a one-time model and pageant girl, and the distant figure of her father–a Lutheran pastor. In her novel Sister Golden Hair, the narrator is a teenager whose father used to be a pastor, and whose mother was once a beauty queen. The protagonist of her novel, Jesus Saves is haunted by her mother's misery, but it was her second novel, Suicide Blonde, a candid, deeply poetic tale of sexual exploration published in 1992, that turned Steinke into a literary sensation, elevating her into the company of celebrated outlaw writers, like William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. She says, “Questions about my relationship to the universal force or God, or how we're supposed to be oriented to this life or how we're meant to live with the fragility of the human body, these questions are central to me, these are the questions that drive my work.”