In Songs for Olympia, Tomoé Hill enters into dialogue with French author and ethnologist Michel Leiris, as contemplation of Manet’s infamous painting gives rise to reflections on family, culture, illness, desire, gender, writing and much, much more. The following is adapted from a wide-ranging and free-flowing online exchange, which took place in early summer 2023.

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In the text, you mention that your first encountered Manet’s Olympia thanks to a series of books on the great museums, what was your reaction on first viewing her “in the flesh”? 

That we knew each other. Then a sort of sadness that I first saw her nakedness without a moral filter: society’s view of the painting, women, sexuality. That now, I saw both. But at the same time I got to spend quite a bit of time with her and others in those books without guile, and the lack of it shaped how I saw the world first.

And so at what point did the notion of Songs for Olympia take form? At what point did it “become” a book?

Everything I write starts with a memory or feeling. When the translation of Leiris’ The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat came out—and I hadn’t known the book existed prior to that—I had the same feeling I had seeing Olympia in the flesh, so to speak, for the first time. The memory of being in bed, where most likely I was sick with something asthma-related, pulling the books down to amuse myself. When I realised the juxtaposition of my and Leiris’ relationships to Olympia: me first seeing her as a child, that not-knowing of anything surrounding the painting or women, and how he wrote Ribbon towards the end of his; I started to think of that duality of knowledge. One is starting life, the other at its end, but both are connected by Olympia. I probably knew it was going to become a book when I found myself talking to Leiris in my head all the time.

A blunt question, but why Leiris? 

I once wrote something where I said sometimes you meet people and it’s like a voice speaking from the depths of your bones. You may have never known them, but they’re familiar. I find the dead are like that as much as the living. Sometimes you read someone and they’re immediately in your head, the words on the page are more than text. They feel like a conversation that has been going on as long as you can remember.

I used to walk to school when young. It was a fairly long walk and I would just think about anything and everything to pass the time. Something I only realised in hindsight was that they were … philosophical, existential, in a basic way. There was an inner voice thinking about death, grief, trying to understand who I was, and then outer me, who was trying to be normal, fit in. We’re talking very human questions, but it was isolating. Leiris gave me a kind of déjà vu: the voice on the page felt like the voice in my head despite the differences of experience and age. I was lonely for very specific forms of connection, and I found one of them in him. Leris says something in Scratches about the paradox of memory being that it’s like a mirror in which your true self lies, but at the same time is distinctly strange. He articulated a dichotomy I felt and desperately tried to understand from the time I was a child. 

Whatever that inner me is, it’s not fictionalised, but not literaturized either. I do think it’s unavoidable that anyone who writes this form of non-fiction is shaping—styling, even—themselves to an extent, even unconsciously. But that’s just another facet of myself; in a way, more natural than the outer me, who has been pressured to conform or be scrutinized in a way my mind was largely not. I lack a kind of fluency of thought in speaking but it’s there in writing and my head. It’s the outside that’s always felt ill at ease. Maybe I recognised that dynamic of unease vs fluency in Leiris. It was that internalised questioning and observation which was like someone waving a flag at me.

What does writing a “response to a response” facilitate that a direct engagement with Manet’s Olympia might not? Was engaging with Leiris a means of seeking some kind of “permission” (used with a deliberate provocation in mind)?

Permission? In a patriarchal sense, that never occurred to me. In this context, I was going in, taking what I found and meeting it—using it—on my terms.

A “response to a response” and direct engagement are the same to me. It is like being under the skin rather than attempting to decipher it. The way they teach you to explain something when you’re small is based on literal understanding. Because of my interiority, I often saw something more abstract. What is the ribbon? It isn’t just a ribbon, after all. The ribbon represents desire, memory, a life. I thought about how Ribbon could be read by someone who was fixated on a literal reading of something in the past but with present context. It seems impossible to read it on those terms without dismissing it as some sort of relic of masculine interiority, ego. And in parts, it is! I don’t see it as inherently bad as much as inherently human. The beauty comes from immersing yourself, reading his words while at the same time understanding these hitherto ‘male’ scenarios—fights, certain desires—against the context of my experiences, realising there is an equal discomfort in its humanity.

Feeling is direct engagement, in an instinctual way. While I’d remembered my childhood memories of “Olympia” when I ‘met’ her, Leiris made me want to further explore that paradox of memory in relation to her. How familiar, how strange. Enough life had passed for me, that he and his book arrived at the right moment for it. I have this tendency to dismiss a lot of memories or experience as not worth writing—I don’t think I need to write about everything, but what I do needs to be in the context of something larger to be interesting.

One of the things you write about is sex and desire, that which is projected onto and seen through Olympia and, of course, your own – when it came to preparing this interview, I found my hesitating over how to approach this topic. I asked myself whether I would ask a guy the same kind of questions that were floating round my head – and if not, why not?

I think it’s interesting that you’re asking yourself whether you’d ask a guy the same questions, or not. A great frustration I have is who gets to write about sex and desire, within what contexts, who gets to ask the questions.

What rules in the mainstream are sexual narratives that either say this must be specifically identity-based, have a traumatic arc, or be some sort of study. We’re not animals, despite sexual desire having real or imagined connotations of the primal. What there needs to be more of: individuality, joy, agency, fuck-ups without apology, humour. Delving into the complexities of desire and how, as women, we take control of our agency for our pleasure, are still seen as too explicit, subject to huge constraints. Surely that’s one of the pinnacles of feminism. Taking your pleasure out of the control of someone else.

I’m not particularly explicit. Its use in a piece of writing should emphasise something. I think that’s certainly what I wanted to show when I talked about Gia Carangi, and also in the part where I’m talking about my surreal experience with a male model. Pushing the uncomfortable, with Gia, is about asserting that you aren’t a subject for the desires of others and subverting perspective. In my example, it was about flipping the hilarious narcissism of it all, and saying, well, you seem nicely occupied with yourself, I’m going to satisfy myself. 

I rarely see contemporary sex written in a way which doesn’t make me think there’s a very obvious sense that if a woman writes about sex outside accepted narratives, there is a moral disquiet. There’s a lot of unresolved issues around the industry’s inability to separate the person and the writer in that sense, because in parts of the industry, the woman is sold as much—if not more—as the book. It only hurts progression, because you have to think about it like a wave: it’s not one on its own. It’s within a sea. Eventually it comes for others. That said, I am not unaware or unempathetic to women who might shy away from writing about sex and desire fully, because of it.

I think to reel myself in a bit, I wanted to also be very clear in the book at points that this wasn’t a wholly critical comment about men or their sexual thinking. I had to ask myself how similar I was in thought if not deed, which is why when I question people like Leiris or Gass, I question myself. Beneath gender and patriarchy and all its complexities, there is a universal human desire.

I had wanted to ask you if you saw any parallels between the way you project onto Leiris’ writing and what he projects onto “Olympia”, and what, if so, those parallels might suggest.

Oh, this choice of words is going to be a little fraught, isn’t it? Well, I felt like he wanted it. I mean this in a matched, internalised, way. You don’t ask the kind of questions of yourself that he asks on the page if you’re not interested in the connection of thoughts between people. It’s a very solitary covenant. You open your mind in the understanding that others will play with it, project onto it, but you also might never know they are doing it.

What role did rage play in the writing of the book? 

I think some people would just say, she’s irrationally angry. Anger, rage, is like love in that there are different degrees; maybe not easy to understand unless you’ve lived with it all your life. You’re not fuming and incapable all the time. Rage is awareness. You can let it overcome you, or use it as a … I don’t know, a kind of viewing platform. You get on it, see who you could be if you give in, what you could be doing if you don’t. Love is just as much a disassociation as rage. I learned early to control it, because you have no real control over other people’s actions or thinking. But it gives you the ability to view the world prismatically. The lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Lover Lover Lover’, when he sings about wanting to start again with a calm spirit? I don’t—I wouldn’t be here without rage.

Aside from a mental escape, writing started as a means to control my own labour, be useful to myself. That’s terribly unromantic isn’t it? Without knowing anything about the industry, I wanted something like revenge. To be visible, in the sense that I had been in a miserable relationship for over a decade, with little to no self-esteem; seen as having done something that someone else couldn’t take credit for. This is laughable, given what I know now! Thankfully that knee-jerk feeling went away pretty quickly as I got into writing, because there was great satisfaction in the work of it, and I became visible to myself.

When I started a new life—or at least, was wondering if I would ever have another—several years ago, I said to myself that I would just see where things led me. I said yes to many writing-based opportunities. Saying yes ultimately taught me when I needed to say no, and showed me who I was in the context of writing. And ‘writer’, well, I’m still making my peace with the word. The connotations are so often tied to worth (not that they weren’t before to some extent, but it feels like now they eclipse creativity almost completely)—money, social capital. It’s a form of indenture if you’re not extremely lucky with the people you involve yourself with, and sometimes you don’t know a situation’s bad until you’re fully embedded. Are you serious if you’re not in it for the money and exposure? If you’re not suffering somehow? I’m not the former, and I’m not the latter—that one is romantic bullshit.

I enjoy the process of writing, because it’s mine alone: I like the working out of putting things on the page, trying to figure out ideas. I’m not a person who has to write every day. I have to read every day, but writing is just as much a process of thinking things through before anything else happens. I’m writing my way now, on my terms; it’s a solitary process to be sure, but it’s my process. If I have readers, I respect them enough not to dictate the terms of how to engage with my writing.

Taking Olympia as a – more or less – formative image for you, what are the books/novels/writers that could be said to hold similar weight in your life?

There are too many, but I’ll give you a few that stood out, and still do. From childhood onwards, the first things I really remember were Thackeray and James Thurber. I was a little kid, and in one of my father’s books from his childhood, from a series called My Book House, there was Thackeray’s novella The Rose and the Ring. Superficially, it was a fairy tale to a fairly young child. But it was my introduction to sarcasm and wit, along with Thurber’s particular dry humour. You can’t explain that to a kid, it has to be realised. You get it in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. There’s something erudite presented in a very normal package, a way of looking at the world that knows it and makes fun of it. Fully realising that blew my mind, seeing words on a page that split in two before you, displaying this alternate meaning. You’re in on the great joke of adulthood. When I was seventeen, in art school, I was up all night working—or supposed to be—on an assignment. Instead I was reading The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart, about the generations of a Jewish family who are the representation of humanity and suffering to God. I meant to just take a break and ended up reading through the night, finishing as the sun was coming up. I couldn’t stop crying. As someone whose father thought it was a lesson for me to watch The World at War when I was young—and it did what it was meant to do, ingrain the horror of reality—reading this, fiction notwithstanding, completed the picture. It gave a window into the particular intimacy of people living through it which compounded the observational horror of the latter. 

Later on, Junichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows was something I recognised the Japanese part of myself in. I have to say I’d read Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book when I was younger, and while I appreciate it now for what it is, then, it was too much like when my parents thought it was a good idea for me to have a diary … except they wanted to check it over for spelling! Nella Larsen’s Quicksand is another where I recognised a particular internal struggle that some people who are mixed-race have: this relentless quest for a utopia where you are accepted as a whole—except that there isn’t one, unless you create it.

I have to say Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is still one of my favourite books in that it is the pinnacle of a genre that probably gets dismissed when we’re talking literature. He wastes absolutely nothing and functions as a cool, amoral camera eye. Zola’s better books of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, like The Kill, Nana, The Ladies’ Paradise, Germinal, The Masterpiece, solidified my observations of people in work and life: he captures the essences of desire, greed, and capitalism, the ruin of obsession, the inevitability of inescapable poverty. Like Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, he gives his women surprising agency and awareness, even in the cases where they ultimately fall. At a point where I was trapped in a situation where I felt like a ghost in terms of sexual desire, I was happy to discover books by Violette Leduc, Catherine Millet, Goliarda Sapienza, as well as Derek Jarman’s journals. Like everyone else I read things like The Story of O, but there was something about the reality of the hunger and the frank openness of unapologetic sex in those that reminded me of what I had been and what I remain.

I’m deliberately keeping it to almost all dead people here as I think contemporary opens up a whole different avenue of thought, and this is a very short list anyway as you’d really need a whole separate piece for me to adequately talk about books.

When did you first read Leiris?

Only several years ago – perhaps it was six? Seven? I was late to a lot of writers. I think for people who read a lot, there are probably three types: those who read everything, those who read methodically—plan their reading lives, and then people like me who read in what seems like a random manner but in actuality it’s a pattern that follows a more emotional current. I had this huge period—like fifteen years—of my life where I was reading a lot of people like Zola, Balzac, etc as a means of escape. When I found myself out of that period, I started to discover people like Barthes, Leiris … this all will be terribly cliché, I suppose to some people, but it was outside of any academic framework or really, any sort of intellectual fandom. I don’t even know how I found them. I just know what I saw in them made sense for what was happening to me at the time and I willingly followed where life and reading led.

As someone who, for better or worse, has chosen to live here, I’m curious about your interest in France …

I’m not any sort of a –phile. I think I know better: even if you enjoy a place, it doesn’t take very long for the grass to stop being green, does it? I’ve spent half my life so far in the US, and half in the UK (I’m a dual citizen now), so I remember what it was like first coming to London, and now how I feel about it. Although I’m not really testing that line of Dr Johnson’s. I still love London. I think I just hate the accelerating wilful destruction of the country. But France. Problems aside (and I am not unaware of them), for someone who doesn’t live in it, France has a particular air of living its culture. That is probably both bad and good, and maybe it’s also that its presence in literature and art is such that it feels like living culture, rather than observing it. Or maybe that just applies to people who read a lot of French literature. I can’t go to Paris without thinking of things like Mavis Gallant’s protagonists or Leiris walking down the street, I stay in a hotel on the street Yves Klein showed The Void at Iris Clert, where Wilde died and Borges stayed. So I guess you could say I’m fine with indulging in that temporary suspension of reality when I’m there. Also, come on. The perfumes.

So can I ask what scent you’re wearing? 

Hermès Bel Ami. I have a lot of perfumes—it’s both hobby and vice—and I’ve always worn scents marketed for men. I usually have only one or two at a time of those, though. Among others, I’ve worn Halston’s Catalyst, Chanel’s Egoïste … now it’s Bel Ami and Bel Ami Vetiver.

Perfumes are moods, personas, masks. I love Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, and how it’s essentially a story of a man made by women, despite his gender ultimately meaning that he is destined to succeed. He is vain and scheming, but also nothing in the beginning. Women teach him everything. I wrote about this recently in a perfume piece—I find it a lovely little joke that Hermès started out in saddlery, using the story as perfume inspiration isn’t quite the story of masculinity one thinks it might be. Women have the whip hand. Bel Ami is a gorgeous rich leather scent, not the screechy fruity leathers that you often encounter now, but strong and buttery and almost animalic. The Vetiver is similar but with an almost gingerbread touch from the added grassy-spiciness. I love the way it melts into my natural scent, and it reminds me to never lapse into what I was unhappily stuck in years ago. To that end I also keep a black riding whip next to my perfume tray.

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Songs for Olympia is forthcoming from Sagging Meniscus Press. You can pre-order a copy here.

Tomoé Hill’s work has appeared in such publications as Socrates on the Beach, Exacting Clam, and The London Magazine, as well as the anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books), Azimuth (Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University), and Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health (Dodo Ink). Twitter: @curiosothegreat

Tobias Ryan is an English teacher and translator. He lives in France. Twitter: @tobiasvryan