Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is author Kamala Puligandla. She is the author of two books: Zigzags, which came out late last year, and a new novella, You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, which came out earlier this month and is the topic of our conversation today. While she currently lives in Los Angeles, where, according to her website, she “eat[s], snob[s], wear[s] elastic-waisted pants, skulk[s] around the farmer's market, attempt[s] to go to the Y, swipe[s] on Tinder, and thrift[s] for flair that makes style pop,” she is a Bay Area native, originally hailing from Oakland. 


Kamala Puligandla, welcome to Story Behind the Story.

Kamala Puligandla (KP): Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here


Oh good! Well first of all, I loved this book, and I can't wait for us to dive into it. So I think we'll just go ahead and do this. Both this and your last book Zigzags could aptly be described as “ Queer coming of age stories,” though I think it's important to mention that these are not coming out stories, or stories of people realizing or reconciling themselves to their  Queerness. They are past that point. What makes a  Queer coming of age story like this or Zigzags different from a heterosexual coming-of-age story?


(KP):  I think that's a really good question. I think coming of age can mean a lot of different things, and so… I do think one of the things inherent in a  Queer identity is that because there are very few — I mean, there are plenty depending what's the culture you are in — but there are very few “standard” sets of things that you have to make or you have to meet in order to achieve various levels of adulthood. So I think we all have really clear ideas of what those milestones are in heteronormative culture, it can be relationship milestones, it could be children, it could be property purchasing, it could be all different things. And not to say that those don't come into play into a  Queer adulthood, but I think coming of age often includes this part of yourself where you have to be, like, “Who am I within the world?” “What kind of world do I want to live in?” “Who do I want to be in it?” “How do I want to relate to people and then what are the sorts of structures I do want to build in a more permanent fashion in my life?” There's something about, I think, being  Queer, where those get redone all the time. You'll be like, I learned something new, or I had a new experience, and now I have to redo all of these things! And I think part of it is this idea that you’re continually growing, I think in my  Queer communities for sure. You're always continually growing. So you're always collecting new ideas, new experiences, and that it would feel foolish for you to NOT integrate those things into how you live on a regular basis. So I think, for me, the main difference is the idea that what the end goal is is always shifting; And not to say that Straight people don't grow — that's ridiculous. But I think there is a way that heteronormative culture sets those things out for you ahead of time, and to move away from those allows you a million different reinventions of yourself. 


(CSA): Well, I think that's really interesting, and you see that also in another very important aspect of this book, which is the way it handles friendship. The three main characters in the story — Veronica, Phoebe and Remy — they're incredibly close, incredibly connected, and yet they're also very much their own people, so it's a different... It's not a codependent view of friendship. It is very much them establishing their identity and then finding ways to integrate each other into their lives, and to integrate the new information of their lives into each other. How do you balance that tension between the closeness of friendships or of community, and the need for independence and a separate identity in your writing?


(KP): I think that there's a way, so… I think that I unintentionally create these really, really involved worlds, and I think, more often than not, the worlds are what's tying the characters together. In this one in particular, I wanted them to share a certain kind of intimacy — especially at that time! This was, like… I think I wrote this around 2017/2018. I was really, really excited by the idea that your friends could be your most intimate relationships, and that people should build around that. You can have a lot of flexible things happening in your life, if that’s how you arranged it, but that also meant, of course, everyone needed independence to pursue other things. I think in the writing itself, I like to give each character a little journey, and every character has to have some motivation that's pulling them through it anyway. I sort of like when they're separate, because then you get to go on more journeys than just all of them together in one path. With this book in particular, I was like, let's give all of them slightly different things they're trying to pursue, and let them pursue them, in this world that does contain all of their things. So you can sort of see the repercussions of them playing off each other. 


(CSA): Yeah, yeah, I really like that, and I think there's also — right? — what you were saying about how the goal posts are different in life for Straight heteronormative culture versus in Queer culture. I think that centrality of friendship as a Relationship compared to, say, romantic relationships, or parent-child relationships, is also something that I, at least, associate really strongly with the  Queer communities that I'm a part of. 


(KP): Yeah, I mean, for sure. Because I think there are lots of ways that we are totally open to the complete flexibility of what friendship means, in a way that we're not so much in other kinds of relationships that usually have — even if people are very flexible about them — DO have some kind of role attached. People have expectations of what parents do, and we're pretty socially all together on what those things should be, even if there are some rifts between those kinds of groups, we’re like, “these people care for other people. That's what parents do.” I think in friendships we have a similar thing; You support each other, yYou care for each other, but the actions you can take to do that are incredibly wide open. They could be anything, and the cadence of it does not have to be set at all. 


(CSA): So of course for all these reasons, you have explored friendship a lot in your writing, both in this book and in your previous one. Has exploring it in that way… has writing different types of friendships into being, has it changed your understanding of friendship and its mechanics in real life. 


(KP): Oh yeah, I mean my work and my writing are just totally intertwined. So yes, absolutely. It's really interesting because I usually start writing something that I think that I'm experiencing in my life, and more often than not, the path I take to the story is what determines the outcome in my real life. 


(CSA): Oh, how funny!


(KP): And the outcome always comes later, because I write it, and I'm like, “oh! This is a revelation I was having about this particular relationship!” I would say that in so many ways, I am writing my own future (they both laugh), whether I like it or not. Because I think it's hard once you've come to a certain revelation about a particular relationship, even if it's fictional, there are certain lessons you take away, and how can you not carry those into your life, you know?


(CSA): Yeah yeah. Well one of the first things that I noticed as I started reading, You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone, is just how funny it is (Kamala laughs), right? Humor is infused in every page, and yet it's not a snarky humor. tTo the extent that you're satirizing your characters, they're in on the joke. It's very sincere. Talk to me about the role that humor plays in your writing: What purpose is it serving in this book, and maybe more broadly? 


(KP): I think that humor is always there to... I actually think of it as a form of self-reflection, in that when you are able to really go deeply into a joke — whenever you make fun of something you're allowing yourself to step back away from it and be, like, “What is my relationship to this thing?” and, “How absurd is this thing?” or, “What is this thing?” So in this particular book, I wanted to use humor because I wanted to talk about feminism in a way… that, I mean. I can't…. There are ways that feminism is really hard to take seriously (Clara laughs), even as someone who fully embodies it all the time. It’s still absurd, the notion that we have to create a movement on the idea that humans should be treated equally. That. That's a weird... That's weird. And I think that humor allows you to take something that could be depressing or an obstacle or challenging, and throw it in a different light, and I like that. But I also wanted to use it in this book to talk about this sort of “commodified” feminism –


(CSA): Yeah!


(KP): – and use that, you know... We're going to laugh at it and make fun of it, not to say that it shouldn't exist or that doesn't have value, but that there's other stuff. There's other things that are happening that might be more rooted in actual feminist ideals. So that's where I was taking the humor in this book. 


(CSA): I kept coming back to that opening paragraph, that opening line, where Veronica is – and you'll read this later – but where Veronica is expressing her skepticism about the FemmePhone as the technocratic solution to… Everything. (Clara chuckles). To feminism. To… whatever. And she talks about in those terms as being… Her skepticism is framed as, “This is for White people. It's for people who think that femininity is entirely tied up in being a mother.” Those sorts of things. What's interesting is that while I think we see a lot about the way that she engages with the FemmePhone and how she integrates it into her life, and how she maybe has a different relationship with it from what she expected… it is not clear to me that she ever draws conclusions about that. What do you think about that? 


(KP): I have this reaction anytime anything is “meant” for women, I'm skeptical, “Why?” I'm always like, “Why can't it just be a thing, and then if it's actually good for any particular group of people they'll just use it?” So I think that that was… her initial response was my initial response to things that are set out to be “different.” It just reminds me of when Bic had pens for women, or something, and I’m like, this is the antithesis of feminism; Anyone can use a pen. I think that’s where it started out. I think at the end she does have a reckoning with what any form of frivolity can do for a person. I think that, in such that she imagined it was going to be directing her or guiding or pushing her to be something in particular (I think she finds out that that's not true), but she also has things ingrained in her from just being alive in society that are things that she has to grapple with too, and the phone doesn't heal those, or remove those. And so I think, actually! Someone probably COULD use the phone and be all those people that she was feeling disparaging of… I think those people could also use the phone and benefit from it. (They laugh)


(CSA): Well, I think that brings up an interesting point, which is that most of the conflict in this book is internal. It's musings on the mismatch between a person's stated desires and their actual desires as determined by their behavior, or whatever. Or between a character's radical beliefs and values, and their readiness to do what it takes to sacrifice the things that are required of them to make those into reality in their own life. And many of these tensions are revealed by the FemmePhone, and particularly by Veronica's many conversations with her phone (which I just found so delightful!). Why is that? What role is the phone itself playing that the real people in this story can't play, either for themselves or for each other?


(KP): I don't know. I think there's a couple of things going on. So one of them is that, I do think that the people would like to play these roles for each other, and I think that there is a sense of a person being not as available as your personal technology, whose only purpose — the only purpose of the phone is to gather your information and help you. I was like, oh it's sort of like having an assistant! But I think it would be hard for somebody else who is a real person — And this is something I think about all the time — who else knows your relationships as deeply as you do? Who is in your texts and your messages with everyone? And there is something about a phone that's able to be privy to all kinds of different media that you're sending, that, even if I were to send every text of my current relationship to somebody else and talk about it with them, they wouldn't digest it in the same way as some digital program could. So I think there's that going on. But I also think that anytime you use anything to record yourself, it's also a form of reflection; It doesn't have to be a phone. It could have been literally anything. It could have been a journal, but I think anytime anyone's trying to be like, “Okay. Let's keep track of myself!”, it is a way of being… oh! and then when they reflect on the reflection that's a whole other level of showing who they are. I guess in some ways, the writer in me wants to be like, this was a really nice way of having someone record themselves and document themselves and reflect on the reflection in order to come away with what their actual internal struggles were. And the phone just happens to be a character that's kind of snipe-y — and good at it! (Clara laughs) And the phone can deliver these impartial messages that are just data-based, which they're not totally. But we always assume people are showing their opinion because it's really hard for people to not. 


(CSA): You mentioned world building earlier when you were talking about the fact that you create these really rich worlds. How do you think about world building when you're writing or plotting things out?


(KP): I think the honest truth is that I don't think about it, and people have told me on multiple occasions that what they enjoy about my writing is that I don't explain what's happening. You just immerse yourself into it, and you are then presented with things that you, I guess… I guess my favorite way to create a world is you learn how to regard something in a world based on how the characters react to it, and so if a character is presented with something that you don't know how to take and they don't seem really ruffled by it at all, that's how you learn that it's normal. I think that that's kind of how I take it. In terms of what I put into the world or what I like to bring into the world, to me it's always something that an insular small social group has decided is important. I think that those are the weirdest worlds to create, and I love to imagine if everyone shared the same kind of small reality as, like, whatever my friends are obsessed with at the moment. So I think that's where I get a lot of these story worlds from. But I like them to feel familiar, cuz I don't want them to feel exclusive or a person couldn't enter it and get oriented in it, even though I'm explaining anything. (She chuckles)


(CSA): So, that's a really good question! How do you accomplish that? If you are not explaining things, how do you create — because I think it's very successful — how do you create this world that is still inviting to people who have a very different experience?


(KP): I think when we're talking about speculative fiction or fantasy and sci-fi, some people are building entirely new processes for how the world functions, and I'm really using what I consider pretty universal life at this time right now, and then just putting some costumes top of that to send it to a slightly different dimension. I'm just opening them up a little bit, and I think that it's not a full departure from our world, it's more like you're walking into this weird hazy area; so that's kind of what I like to keep: Is this those little intersections between what is perfectly understood and universally known, mixed with this tinge or something kind of strange or unusual. Because that's where I find the most interesting stories to tell, too. 


(CSA): Yeah, I like that approach. I like the idea of putting costumes on everyday life.


(KP): Right, and it's sort of just, like, pushing ahead kind of thing. The phone is not… It's still a phone. It’s a phone as we know it, it's just wearing a costume of a different kind of phone. 


(CSA): I do think that's also… It's an interesting thing to bring out, especially thinking about the fact that you are from the Bay Area, you live in L.A. — These are two communities that have been very impacted by the tech industry, and I think also a lot of Queer communities and a lot of communities of color have really complicated relationships with the tech industry, and the technology it produces. I think there's something, to me, that feels very profound about even just saying, “this is just technology,” right? This is just a tool, and it can be used in all of these different ways.


(KP): Yeah. I started writing this book when I was working for a tech company and I learned lots of different things that you could do, and it still to this day baffles me that the technology that we have that we decide to use it for SELLING people things — of all the things! And we use it for many other things too, so I don't want to just totally relegate it, but we have so much information. We have so much ability. And I think it just speaks a lot to our society that we're like: “What we're going to do with it is we're going to build this visual platform where mostly people… shop.”


You know, we could do a million…


(CSA): It's a mall!


(KP): Yeah, yeah, Exactly! It's just replicating things we know just in a different format. But especially with information about people and their interests and what they like; I was working in marketing so we would collect all kinds of data about that, and there are all kinds of insignificant actions you take every day that express your interest in things. I was like, this is kind of amazing because we have this treasure trove of what people are interested in, and what if we used it to do something else? What if they had access to it themselves, so they could be like, “Here's what I am expressing interest in!” And then could notice, and could be like, “Well, actually I don't really want to be interested in that,” or “Why am I interested in this?” Or, “Maybe I have a different interest that I would like to be guided toward.” And since we're already guiding people's interests, there are so many different ways that that could be done or accomplished.


(CSA): Yeah, and I think that is a very noticeable thing about the FemmePhone: is that it's not selling you things, right? There are no products that it hawks.


(KP): Or, it is, but it's trying to sell you… I think of it in the way that you're like, “Oh, I want to help out; there's a taco cart that I like, I'm going to make sure I go to that guy.” Like, you can have that sort of thing in your phone, because we ARE all going to buy things; That's just how it is, so I do think of it as you could tell it what kind of priorities you have.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is author Kamala Puligandla, who's novella, You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, came out earlier this month. 


Well, I think this is a good time to have you read a little bit from the book, and help ground listeners in all of the things that we've been talking about. Before you do, why don't you set up the excerpts that you're going to read? Tell us about what we're going to hear.


(KP): I'm going to read from the beginning, which is an intro both to the phone, and also to our characters and their world and their friend group.


(CSA): Cool, sounds good.


(KP): (Reading) When the FemmePhone first came out, claiming to bring my own feminist agenda to personal technology, I was skeptical to say the least. I was positive that shit was for Straight women White women; The kind who thought that breast cancer still needed more awareness raised, and that motherhood was the pinnacle of femininity. To be fair, I could revel on a Maggie Nelson meditation on White motherhood for hours, but I still didn't think I needed that as my operating system. 


My friends, on the other hand, were all in. Phoebe was always sending me strings of emojis I'd never seen before, telling me to bow down and worship her Goddess pussy. It wasn't I didn't have any need for that. I did, but I also had words at my disposal. “Yes, your highness,” I'd respond. “I would be honored to pray at your righteous honey hole, right after it picks up your wig collection from my apartment. You said you’d do it two weeks ago, and you know how I feel about unattached hair.” Phoebe’s FemmePhone, sensing my passive aggression, would automatically respond with something along the lines of, “My mind, like my body, is a temple. Act accordingly.” And if I kept it up, I'd soon be met with a snippet of Rupi Kaur, serving some passive aggression about how the human heart only grows stronger when put through pain. 


Meanwhile, in all of my communications with Remy, the phrases, “Sure!” And, “Yes, bitch!,” and “Oh, you know!” triggered a set of terms and conditions that I had to agree to in order to see the rest of the message. I appreciated the level of consent, but every time I wanted to know if he liked my new shirt, or if he had fucked someone from the party last night, I had to agree to understand that any affirmative response was ephemeral, and flexible, and only represented his feelings in the moment. This wasn't news to me, and I was offended at the suggestion that I might have any less expansive expectations. 


“You're just jealous,” Remy told me, as he poured sparkling wine into Phoebe's cup and then mine. We were at the lake, sharing a blanket that was a little too small for the three of us. 


“That's ridiculous.” I said.


“I am divining heavy denial vibes about your FemmePhone FOMO,” Phoebe chimed in. She’d only had the phone for 2 weeks and was already feeling extremely superior about it.


“I'm just skeptical,” I said. “Why do I feel more disconnected from my friends with FemmePhones? Also, don't you find this mass marketing of “Femme Power” flattens its very nuances? I'm not about gender essentialism. How is there a single phone for all Femmes?”


“Veronica” Remy said, “you set the volumes for your own FemmePhone — it's not one size fits all like those t-shirts second wave feminists wear, claiming the future for themselves just like a man.”


“It guides your praxis,” Phoebe added. “You'll love it. Imagine if your phone shared your values, instead of prodding you with its capitalist boner all the time. Here, put these violet glasses on, and then see what you think.”


Remy, Phoebe, and I had recently purchased a set of color therapy glasses. They looked like regular plastic shades in garish bright colors, but when you put them on, they drastically altered the way that light appeared. It was like taking drugs without having to. Or, as we preferred: you could take a microdose of acid, and then it was wild!


The violet glasses were supposed to enhance my ability to self-reflect, and when I put them on, the sky glowed a deep,piercing fuchsia. I felt a bright calm open up in my chest. 


“Maybe you're right,” I said, and laid back to stare at the endless expanse of sky. “I have no idea what it's to have a phone that gives a shit about me.” 


Remy laughed. “Of course you don't! We didn't know we could have that!”


“Just you wait,” Phoebe said to me. “Any minute now, some woman you're obsessed with will be using a FemmePhone, and it'll make you love her even more, and suddenly you’ll be falling all over yourself to get one too. And we'll say we told you so.”


“Wow, rude!” I said.


“Honey, we all know it’s true,” Remy cooed, and rolled me over so he and Phoebe could hug me.


(She finishes reading)


(CSA): Thank you for that lovely reading. One thing that I think you can see immediately in that is this kind of meditative quality to this story. Things happen, they unfold in a logical way, and yet the fact that they happen is ancillary, or secondary almost, to the way that the characters think about their lives and their identities, and the ways that they relate to one another. When you're writing a story like this, how do you think about narrative ?


(KP): Narrative is really not something I plan out at all. I'm always just writing… What I do is I think about what scenes I want to create, and who I want to be in them, and then through that I figure out how everyone's different motivations are going to interact at any given time. I like to change up the dynamic between who is — especially in this one, I specifically wanted three friends so they could change their alliances at all time[s]; Not that the alliances are against each other, but that each pair has a certain kind of vibe that pulls them in a different direction. So that's kind of what I was thinking about. 


I also think I tried something different in this book that I don't usually do (or that I haven't done with longer pieces) where I just don't describe what period of time they're in, and you're just skipping around from scene to scene, with the implicit understanding that some time has passed. It doesn't really matter how much. And I think that that was a really fun thing for me to do with this particular story. 


(CSA): Do you feel this is — I mean, it's a novella. It's short: it's 100 pages. How do you compare the process of writing something like this that is in that shorter zone, to something you're novel that is a bit more expensive?


(KP): I mean, honestly, they are completely different processes, because…


(CSA): Oh yeah?


(KP): …I’m a very different writer. I started my first novel when I was in grad school. I was just grasping — and I, to this day, (she says while chuckling) I don't know if I’ll ever write something not long again — but I was just grasping at how I could turn a story, which I can hold in my head, into this fairly expansive, several hundred page narrative. I really just thought of it, at the time, as writing a very long short story, and that's how I moved through the novel. But I spent years working on that. I redid every character's arc several times, I redid the places where they intersected, I went over how it was going to move in all these different ways, and the structure for it was something I laid out ahead of time. Whereas this story, at this point, I was just writing short stories that kept turning out supremely long, so I was like, I'm just going to write the whole thing. I'm just going to sit down and write whatever I think happens next, and I went back to edit it, and I was like, I could change all these things, but I don't know that it would be better, necessarily. And there's something about the improvisational quality that makes a fun movement through the book, and I wanted to keep that. So I just powered through it, and that's how this one happened. 


(CSA): That's wild. I think of all these little — like, in that passage that you read, all these little details (which I think are what you were talking about when people say you aren't explaining things, but you're showing them, right? And a big part of that richness of the world building, and as you were reading it I had this memory of the fact that every character in this book is an Aries, and that is both so... I mean, astrology was big in the 60s and '70s for maybe a different set of reasons, but now it is so associated with feminist and Queer feminists in particular communities. But the fact that every character that gets a sign is an Aries is this… that's the turning of that humor there, right? 


(KP): Yeah, it’s the turning of the humor, but it is also… Those are very distinct qualities of the narrative and of the characters; They're just rushing into things, and just deciding and going for it. So I did want to name that in the book itself because I think that's a really… The whole book is an ode to Queer culture in many different ways, and so I just wanted to put that in there. 


(CSA): Tell me about the setting of this book; It's clearly in real places, but there is this speculative and surreal quality to it. Is this happening in the present? Is it an alternate reality? Is it the future?


(KP): I always think that I'm writing in the near future, which could easily be a parallel universe. But I like to think of it as: we're almost there; This could be next year, and if we don't arrive there next year it's because we split off into a parallel universe. The setting itself I wanted to be… I don't know. At the time, I hadn't yet moved to LA and I was planning to, and I was really enamored with all these different pieces of it, and I wanted to write about them. Though what was weird is when I first started writing it, it also meshed with different things I loved about living in Oakland, and I just moved them into this world where it's some amorphous California of my making.


(CSA): Like in demolition man.


(KP): Yeah, exactly! I was just like, we’ll just pull from here and then I’ll have here… I don’t know, I think something about settings that I... I don't take geographic setting very seriously. I think it's good to have little gestures so people aren't lost, but I think the actual place — knowing it, or your own knowledge and recollection of it or familiarity with it — is unnecessary, and I don't think it should be necessary to understand any narrative, but particularly, you don't need it to understand mine. So I guess the setting is one where we're almost there, it's familiar. It works similarly to our lives, but it's definitely running with slightly different rules; lots of things that you don't expect could show up, and that's the fun of it!


(CSA): In the vision that you present here of this near future, would you describe that as utopian? 


(KP): (She pauses) No, I don't think it's utopian; I think what's happening in it is that people love to talk about the “bubble worlds” that we live in, and I, in some ways, just think of this as a bubble. This is a bubble where we don't have anything super different pierce it, because that's not a thing that our characters have to do on a regular basis. But in my mind, it's not a utopia, it's this particular… scene! I think of it like a scene, where anyone else could pop into it. It's just that they don't happen to encounter those people, and I think part of that was intentional on my part, where I think that as a Queer person, as a person of color, as a person who's mixed, I wish that I could live in an uninterrupted bubble of my own experience, and because I can't, I just write them. I don't let anybody else come and interrupt it; This is the norm and if something's going to be outside of it, I might allude to it, but in a shorter piece like this, that's not going to be what's precedent.


(CSA): Yeah, in the process of creating, you get to carve out those spaces for yourself that are uninterrupted. 


(KP): Yeah.


(CSA): I think you talked about this a little bit earlier, but I'm curious to hear you expand: Where did the idea of the FemmePhone come from?


(KP): While I think that yes, in one part it came from the marketing work that I was doing, but a lot of it also came much earlier; I think I was in college and post college when much of the flirtation and beginning's of new relationships that were romantic took place via text. And I just remember thinking how weird it was that my phone had access to all of the things that I would say to people; Like, who I was in these various relationships (that, really at that time, nobody else did, cuz I wasn't telling everyone), but I was texting people. At that point, I was like, oh it is very interesting: This phone has a collection of memories. If you could take all of my phones from the past — what? 10? 20? years — they would have this narrative to tell about who I am in intimate relationships that I'm not even aware of! So that was also another part of it. In addition to data on other people, and guiding people in their lives, it's also that your phone is this document of all the things that you do. And I was like, “Whoa, that could be really cool in terms of personal relationships, learning about that.” 


(CSA): You mentioned that a couple of times that the insight — the unique insight — that the phone, which is mostly an inanimate object, has with you. You talk about creating this phone as a character; In some ways a 4th, and I guess 5th and 6th prong to this friend group that exists. Can you talk about that? About the dynamic of their interactions with their phone, and how it affects their interactions with each other? 


(KP): I think that one of the things I thought the phone could do was sort of… I mean, it can be your go-to for things that don't necessarily require the attention, like, the FULL attention of another conscious human being. I think about this sometimes where you're like, “Oh, I just need someone to bounce an idea off of,” and there are times you are not using the person to actually use their full being to be in conversation with you; You use them cuz you have a specific thing you need from them, which is just to be listened to. And I think there are various kinds of needs that are interactive like that — not that people shouldn't have them with other people, but you could have it with an object. (She says through laughter:) An object could be perfectly suitable for it! So I think among them, I was thinking of each of their phones as amplifying their own personalities or amplifying their own motivations. In some ways, it tightens the tension between them, because their phone reminds them that the other people don't carry that same motivation as strongly as they do. But in other ways, it's able to take into account and hold the interest of the other characters in a way that a character who's very emotionally involved in a moment might not be able to. It sort of does just act like if you had a couple extra people in the friend group, but the phone doesn't have any investment in this particular friend group; Should any of the characters ditch all their friends and get new ones, the phone...


(CSA): Yeah, the phone doesn't care.


(KP): Right! Like, you want new friends! I think that for the narrative, it’s like having an impartial person there all the time to just reflect.


(CSA): You talked also about discovering the voice of this particular story and how it's different from the voice in your novel Zigzags. I started connecting that with what you were saying earlier about the Queer coming of age story, and about, in queer communities, reinventing yourself and changing the mileposts. Do you feel this is a voice that you're like, “Oh, this feels authentically me. I'm going to be using it over and over again,” or do you feel you're going to be doing that reinvention as you continue to write? 


(KP): I mean honestly, I hope to be doing reinvention forever because otherwise I feel the art making gets tired. I also do feel like all my voices and all the things fit within a certain kind of trajectory. The novel was me trying to figure out how to be me authentically, and I think that I've moved into a space where I can be different kinds of “me”s in a performative way that's still true to who I am, but offers you a little more space between “me” as an actual person, and then “me” as a character being presented, which I think is more fun for the reader. I don't think I could write another novel that's so directly about me again, as the writer of it. It meant that I spent years reflecting on a really particular period in my life that maintained interest to me for several years, that I don't know I would feel the same way about…


(CSA): There's only so many things we can draw from that don't just make us want to hit ourselves upside the head. (She laughs)


(KP): Right! Cuz in some ways, that novel (after you read it I’d be curious what you think), but that novel, the themes aren’t SO different from the ones here, they're just a slightly different advanced version. Once you've already decided who you are, you're still left with this idea that you need to grow and become somebody else, or you WANT to grow and become somebody else, and there are just different ways to approach that depending on what part of your life you're in.


(CSA): Yeah.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is Kamala Puligandla, whose novella, You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, came out earlier this month. 


What are you interested in reading? What do you look for in the stories that you consume? 


(KP): I wish I had some strong thing; It's whatever looks cool, whatever all my friends are talking about. I haven’t been reading too much fiction. Well, okay. There's a couple of things; I have a whole bunch of books that I got for Christmas that I just haven't gotten into yet, and one of them is this book called Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, who wrote this book called… I think it was like, The Convenience Store …?


(CSA): ... Convenience Store Woman, Yes! I loved that book!


(KP): Yes! So I'm always looking for weird shit, and my sister loves reading really weird shit too, and she read that and was like, “You have to read this,” so I loved it. And that also, similarly to me, has really particular worlds and strange things that happens. But you know, really related to our familiar world. I also just like reading Queer fiction, so I'm reading the McSweeney's Queer fiction issue that just came out, and I'm reading a bunch of non-fiction too, cuz I was like, I should just read more about… stuff. (They both laugh) I'm reading Glitch Feminism, and I was reading before that Algorithms of Oppression… Just things that I think help me… part of it is helping me imagine these speculative worlds that I want to fantasize about, and I do need books to open up my imagination. I'm also reading this book called Tentacle, by someone named Rita Indiana. All of these books are right now helping me imagine these other worlds I want to write about. 


(CSA): Cool! One thing I saw in a couple interviews that you've had previously is you said you have difficulty with endings and with letting go of work, and letting it live in the world and be done. Why do you think that is?


(KP): It’s less that I have trouble with letting it be in the world and be done; That part is—as soon as I see it printed, I’m like, “Oh, it’s no longer mine! It belongs to everybody.” But I think I have trouble with the idea of where a story ends just because I think that endings are so… they're so fake, in some ways. They're a huge tech… They're such a piece and a tool of fiction, right? Creating an ending is one of the most performative things that we do in writing, because in real life, so many things don't end, and what is time even? I think to decide on what an ending is for any story… I don't know… is fraught. This one I had a difficult time with because I was like: to end it is to close off all the places that I've just opened up and sent my characters off into, and I don't want you to not think about those. I want you to think about ALL of those, long after the book is done. I think in some ways I have difficulties with endings because I don't want to... I've always had a problem where I don't want to close off opportunities. I want to leave them very gently open, so that at the end you are guided to a particular place, where then you can choose your own adventure out of it. I think knowing when that moment is happening is sometimes not easy for me to find when I'm really in the story. Because as far as I'm concerned, every story I've written, I could just keep writing for years and it would just keep going.


(CSA): Yeah, I like that. I hope someday you explore that a little bit more directly. That would be fun. (They laugh)


(KP): Yeah I am curious about that.


(CSA): So what are you working on these days? 


(KP): You know, I don't know. I've started a bunch of things. I have a story that I wrote… I feel it's a similarish world to this, where I started writing about dating my clone.  That one, speaking of where I don't know/difficulties with endings, I started dating someone who felt really similar to me and I was like, “Oh no, this is a… I don't know where the story is going to end now!” (They both laugh) Because I have to incorporate all these things I'm learning. 


I also have this other story where it's sort of a… I don't know exactly when this happened; I think it was probably around the time of 2016, the Trump election... Did I start it then? I don't know when I started the story. But it was about this period of time on Earth when there's just not that much time left, maybe 7 years, and everything in our civilized developed capitalist culture, including most White people, decide to live on some other planet. And there's a group of people who stay behind to live out whatever dreams and fantasies they had in their Earth life that were never possible, because of all the systems in place. So it's directly about building the fantastical world that you want to live in. I have come at it from a few different angles and I'm not sure what it's going to be yet, or what its central questions are yet. I'm just playing around with characters in the world, but I'm hoping that will become another novel. I think that maybe could happen.


(CSA): Cool. I think this is a very inviting and welcoming story that anyone can enjoy; It also feels like there is a specific audience. Who do you see as the audience of this, and what are you hoping that they will take away from it?


(KP): I think that I've always said that I'm writing for myself, and this one feels the most myself I've ever written for; But with that in mind, there are lots of people who live not dissimilarly from me, so it’s specifically for people who live in Queer communities like this, and who are on their phone a lot and who don't see technology as the antithesis of who they want to be and how they want to live, but are like, “Why? Why is it happening like this?” I think that's the main audience that I had in mind. I am definitely curious what you took away from this. I do think you are actually who I wrote this book for in many ways, too. 


(CSA): Well, I think it's… there's a lot of things that I took away from this. I mean one is just, I think the humor is a takeaway in it, in itself, right? For me, the experience of reading something that is both so sincere, and also so funny and, like you said, kind of bordering on satirizing itself. I think that's a thing that I really love in the communities that I'm part of — both the Queer communities that I'm part of, and all of the other communities that I'm part of. I think there's something about… it's not even really the inside joke, though that's part of it. There's something about the invitation to be messy that I think is really captured in the humor there. 


There 's another thing, it's almost sort of stray, but I am bisexual, and I have a lot of identities that feel bi and in between. And I had this weird realization while I was reading your book which I think was connected to it; I spent some time living in Istanbul, which is a city that is literally on two continents: European and Asian. I fell completely in love with it (and i'm sure part of it was just being there), but I remember this feeling of deeply feeling at home there, partly because of the social communities I had — most of my friends in Istanbul were Queer, and I don't even know how I lucked into finding Queer communities in a place that can be so unfriendly to Queer people, but I did. So part of it was that scene, but I think it's also something about that liminal identity that I have felt very strongly for my entire life. I think you do a good job… I don't know if I can talk about it exactly as a takeaway, but I do think the exploration of identity, and of liminality, not in the same exact sense that I was talking about but in this passing between worlds; Between the capitalist world and the bubble world that you've created, between this character working in marketing in tech, and the tension she has with the parts of that that fit with her values in this superficial way, and that it's founded by a Black woman, right? And the parts that very much do not fit with her values at all,  taking these artists whose work she takes very seriously, and boiling it down into these consumable trips. I think that kind of exploration of liminality resonated very strongly with me.


(KP): I think that makes a lot of sense, because that kind of fluidity between (unintelligible: invented?) worlds is something I know I live in on a daily basis, and I think a lot of people do. That's really cool; I love that you took that away because that is something that I was like, “Oh I'd to imprint this on a world that people could access, so that sounds cool. 


(CSA): I really loved this book, and just thank you so much for joining me, for talking about it, for laughing about it, and for writing a book that we can laugh about. 


(KP): I am honestly so, so happy to hear that you enjoyed it. I remember when we printed this book and I was like, well, I don't know who the hell is going to buy this book but I really like it, and I hope people enjoy it!


(CSA): Well, Kamala Puligandla, thank you so much for joining me today.


(KP): Thank you for having me.


(CSA): To learn more about Kamala, or to order a copy of You Can Vibe Me on My FemmePhone, visit KamalaPuligandla.com.
Catch Story Behind the Story on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. right here on KSQD 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@ksqd.org. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.