to assimilate entirely, to leave their parents’ generation behind, to leave Europe behind—because, of course, their Europe, their Russia, their Austria, was a place of oppression, pogroms. So it’s incredibly hard to get even any information from them. But whether or not my knowledge of their decision, unconscious or conscious, to suture over all of that plays a role in my thinking about displacement, is hard to say. Later I became conscious of their difficulty, but not from them. PN: In Motion Sickness you have the narrator say, ‘It will probably be my fate not to learn other languages but to speak my own as if I were a foreigner’ (M, 51). There’s a question that the novel keeps raising about access to other languages, other codes, with a parallel sense of being alienated in one’s own. LT: I think it’s the frustration one feels being born into one’s body, and one’s body politic. I’m always amazed when people can move from one culture to another and adopt the customs of another culture. Some people can do this, some people can really transplant themselves. I don’t think I could. PN: The attention you’ve shown to cosmopolitan experience strikes me as somewhat unusual in writers of your generation. Perhaps it ties you more to a slightly earlier group—Burroughs, the Bowleses and others—for whom Europe was an indispensable reference point, not to say an escape route? LT: I was certainly interested in them, but before that I was fascinated by the period of the teens and the twenties, by the expatriate groupings in Paris, London and Zurich. Anyone fleeing. I suppose the desire was first to leave home, and then discovering that home is bigger than family, than your own tribe—that it includes the nation. That was something I contended with. PN: What do you think you gained from the metropolitan cultures of London and Amsterdam that you wouldn’t have found in your native New York—or, indeed, in other American cities like San Francisco or Chicago? LT: I think I needed, with my insecurity about writing, just to be in another place. To survive. All the otherness around me allowed me to express my difference, my Americanness. It was easier to be an American in a way and to find my own language in the midst of people who weren’t. The paradox is that you come closer to discovering what home is when you’re far away from it. And how it influences you so you can try to break from it, because at least you see it. PN: This was the period of the Vietnam war and its aftermath, of course, so there’s also the question of being an outsider politically.