Authors Answer: Gary Lippman
Authors Answer Q&A #561
Author interviews almost always focus on questions regarding an author’s latest publication (and that’s great because it’s how readers discover new books!) but sometimes it’s fun to ask authors to talk about their lives beyond the book they’ve just written. Authors Answer (started as a blog in 2020, moved onto Substack in 2025), is an attempt to give authors space to wax eloquent about the other influences on their writing. The questions posed here move beyond the formulaic classics like, “What books are on your nightstand?” or “What book inspired you to be a writer?” and even “You’re having a dinner party….which three authors (dead or alive) do you invite?” There are 20 standing questions. Authors pick FIVE that they want to answer.
Are you an author? Visit the Questions page to learn more about participating.
Today’s post features Gary Lippman.
Gary Lippman is the author of the novel Set the Controls for the Heart of Sharon Tate (2019) and the short story collection We Loved the World But Could Not Stay (2022). His play Paradox Lust was produced off-Broadway in 2001, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, VICE, Literary Hub, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Lippman’s work has been praised by novelist Tom Robbins, multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, musician Lydia Lunch, and actors Michael Imperioli, Lorraine Bracco, and Matthew Rhys. Beyond writing, Lippman received a law degree from Northwestern University and has served as a pro bono attorney with New York’s Innocence Project, where DNA evidence is used to help exonerate the wrongfully convicted. Lippman’s visual art can be seen at apocalippy.com. Born and raised in New Jersey, Gary Lippman, he has lived in Illinois, Florida, California, and France, Lippman can now be found in what used to be called "Fun City" with his Hungarian wife Vera and his whenever-he's-inclined-to-visit adult son Gabriel.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garylippmanofficial/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GaryLippmanOfficial/
What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?
Am I superstitious? “Not one bit,” says my would-be rationalist self. But don’t believe it. I’ve gathered around me many good luck charms down the decades, and I’m most attached to my collection of t-shirts which bear on their front sides the numeral eight. I fetishize this number because I was born on the eighth day of the eighth month—but also because in China they consider eight to be the most fortunate of numerals. (You bet I make sure to boast about my birthday to every Chinese person I meet.)
I acquired my eight-themed t-shirts in a notable way one balmy night in 2019 while I was on vacation in Honolulu. Strolling down a street near Waikiki Beach, I noticed an apron in the window of a clothing store, an apron emblazoned with a big fat “8.” Needless to say, I rushed into the store and bought that apron (which was fortunately quite affordable). I told the cashier that I had the hots for the numeral eight. Then I asked him if his shop featured any other eight-related items. He looked at me strangely. So strangely that I asked him what was wrong.
“Nothing,” he said. “But have you taken a look around here?”
I swung around to regard the rest of the large store. Every single item for sale—not only aprons, but t-shirts, coffee cups, key chains, even vibrators, were decorated with the number I find most magical. Here was my numerological Shangri La! Feeling almost as happy as I had the day I first met my wife, superstitious me began shopping in earnest.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
I haven’t been asked anything especially odd by readers of my books. Nothing odd from journalists who have interviewed me, either. But I did find it quite odd when a real-live person whom I’d mentioned in my first novel—a total stranger—showed up at my reading of said novel at the West Hollywood store Book Soup. I had not known that Cami Sebring, the ex-wife of the celebrity hairstylist / Manson Family homicide victim Jay Sebring, still walked among us, much less that she might come to meet the author of a book about Sharon Tate (who was Jay’s ex-girlfriend and fellow victim). Still, I got over the oddness of meeting Cami pretty quickly, found her delightful, and am happy to report that she, an inhabitant of my first work of fiction, is now my flesh-and-blood friend.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
Not only have I experienced Imposter Syndrome, I still experience it on a daily basis, and so keenly do I feel it that my Imposter Syndrome has its own Imposter Syndrome. According to psychotherapists worldwide, the route to sanity lies in feeling authentic, and the sub-routes by which to get there can be found in “letting go,” in “saying ‘Fuck it’ to everything,” in “daring to be average” and “bashing on regardless.” Still, our navigation of those emotional roadways is easier said than done. And what if all those smarty-pants therapists are themselves imposters?
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
Ordinarily when asked which film has most influenced my writing, I cite Harold and Maude as well as the whimsically happy-sad movies that it engendered: Amelie, Juno, and so forth. (Speaking more specifically, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant was the direct progenitor of my first novel, while the Canadian picture Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould got me cooking with my second book, which was a collection of one-sentence-long stories.)
Now that I think of it, a different movie may have influenced my work, and influenced my life, even more than has Harold and Maude. It was a Peter Sellers comedy entitled The Bobo. Why the title? I can’t tell you, because I haven’t seen the film since I was four years old and my mother brought me to see it in a cinema while we were on vacation somewhere. I don’t remember where that “somewhere” was, and all I remember about The Bobo is that Sellers was dressed at one point in a matador’s suit of lights with his face and hands—probably his whole body—dyed a deep shade of blue.
Why the costume? Why the blue skin? Again, I’m clueless, but that matador thing and that blue skin thing were so weird that they blew my four-year-old mind, blew it quite profoundly. Life, I realized while watching The Bobo, is weirder than anything my already-kooky mind could imagine. Frighteningly, yet also deliciously, weirder. And that childhood day I looked forward to growing up into a world which would allow me to access all the frightening yet delicious weirdness.
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?
In my new novel, I Wish, Therefore I Am, my protagonist imagines faithfully reconstructing the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World on the grounds of his grade school playground. That’s a museum-grade exhibition I’d pay to see! But no museum exhibit I could dream up can ever rival the stuff they’ve got on display at Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is one of my favorite places in the so-called City of Angels. To learn about this extraordinary place, I recommend reading the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Wechsler. Although the author has been less than friendly to me each time I’ve met him through our mutual friends, I bear him no grudge; maybe Wechsler could perceive my Imposter Syndrome and simply wished to keep clear of it.
The creative architect of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a brilliant and enigmatic man named David Wilson, tends not to engage with the visitors to his marvelous creation. Even so, he does make surprise appearances there. One sun-splashed day while my wife and I drank tea in the rooftop garden at the museum, I recognized Wilson seated alone. To my delight, he was playing a lute. Not wanting to disturb the man, yet nevertheless eager to praise him, I turned to my wife and said loud enough for him to hear me (he had just put down his instrument), “I sure wish Mr. Wilson was around right now so that I could tell him how fabulous I consider this museum of his!”
Needless to say, Wilson looked surprised. It was, fortunately, the pleased kind of “surprised.” When he came over to say hello, my wife told him how she had attached to the collar of her beloved dog Egon a porcelain cosmonaut figure which we had bought in the museum gift shop some years before. (The cosmonaut was associated with the Soviet space dog Laika, who’d been the subject of a Jurassic Technology exhibit.) Upon Egon’s death died, that porcelain figure got cremated along with the rest of my wife’s sweet canine. Wilson seemed touched to hear that an item from his gift shop had personally meant so much to us, and we felt touched that he felt touched, and the sun kept shining down on the three of us until, eventually, as it must, down that sun went.
Endnotes!
This newsletter is a passion project started by me, Elizabeth Rynecki, to try to help shine a light on new-to-me authors. I am also an author (and a documentary filmmaker and podcaster) and if you want to learn more about me, you can visit my website or read my personal newsletter, Ink Trails: A Chronicle in Creativity.
I’ve never made Authors Answer specific social media accounts, but you can find me on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.
Makes me want to read the book. And maybe I will
I Wish, Therefore I Am is fantastic book!!