I read Elizabeth Hall's newest book, Season of the Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, June 2025) over a long July afternoon, flopped on various furniture in a rented beach house. I first encountered Hall in her book-length essay, I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016). Both books fuse a heady erotic current, lush sensoriality, and astute excavation of personal memory with entertaining, skillfully woven research—all in under 100 pages. The opening sentence of Season of the Rat is a testament to the lure of Hall’s captivating prose:
“I don’t know when I first noticed the rat living in my apartment. Maybe it was summer. Back then I was easily confused. The sound of claws on the roof was or was not the scraping of a sagging palm frond.”
As the narrator becomes subsumed by tracking the rat’s movements, she concurrently traces her own fevered journey through memories of sexual assault, accumulating research about rats, and navigating the daily rhythms of work commutes, stoned beach trips, anxieties about money and the future, dancing, dating, migraines, writing (or trying to write), and all the rest.
I get the impulse to seek relaxing vacation reads, but this book was ideal to encounter exactly where I was, psychically and physically—a space of relative stability. This version of me strolled rocky beaches, tenderly cataloging cordgrass, saltspray rose, and coastal shrubs. I felt thankful for a few days of doing nearly nothing, and for everything in my current life (partner, friends, job) that made it possible. But there was also the self who wandered the neighboring beach town among yacht-tanned throngs in white linens, all tight smiles and bespoke third homes and monosyllabic boutiques selling $200 t-shirts unironically emblazoned with Viva la revolución, feeling incredulous and queasy. Class rage never dissipates, even if I’m no longer the me who planned dinner around free pizza happy hour at a neighborhood dive to avoid overdrafting my bank account.
Wherever you go, there’s your multitudinous self. I’m one doomed encounter or emergency away from being a self I pretend to forget. Body and mind still keep the score, of course. I’m grateful for Hall’s accounting here—and for the chance to catch up all these years after inviting her to Philly during her book tour for I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris. Spending time alongside her brilliant mind again feels like stepping into the unsparing clarity of California sunlight.
Alina Pleskova: I just read a great interview with Lyle Lovett where they’re chatting about this-and-that and don’t get to anything about his actual music until the very last question, when the interviewer is running out of time. We’re in a shared doc, so that scenario is less likely here, but I do want to start with a non sequitur to set a vibe…
You describe Southern California with such sensory precision in this book: “Pizza in the park under a raft of old-growth palms. Their skirts shake, but the fronds are still. There is no wind. It’s so evocative.” In that spirit, where are you right now, what’s around you, what does it smell like, and what are you listening to?
Elizabeth Hall: Ahh, that’s a big compliment to me! Southern California is my chosen home and one of the great loves of my life. I still feel giddy when I drive by a long line of palms. I don’t even hate the freeways. That’s where I am right now, riding in my wife’s truck, dash full of sun. We’re on our way to San Diego for a reading, and we keep passing patches of blue ocean broken up by military equipment. The latter is a good reminder: California’s no golden land. I have to watch myself, the way I go around romanticizing everything.
This morning I was moving a little slow, so I’m listening to Sexxy Red. Nothing hits my nervous system harder than she does. She’s so unserious. I’m always playing Sexxy when I need to lock in. I’m addicted to the tension her unabashedly raunchy lyrics hold, how they appear, on first listen, to cater exclusively to the male gaze, but then she’ll sing something like my pussy’s so wet I need a panty liner and I’m like ohhhhh no, this isn’t for the boys.
AP: Those lyrics! That landscape! I can imagine all of this vividly. For what it’s worth, I think your descriptions are romantic without romanticizing. Like Eve Babitz writing about LA—at least when she’d deviate from the effusive optimism.
You said in another interview that you’re “not very interested in writing just a straight memoir,” and that research helps keep you motivated on a writing project. This book, and I Have Devoted My Life… both give me the sense that the hunting-and-gathering aspect of research is a huge draw for you.
EH: Research may look back into the past, but it's also an anticipatory act. As a researcher, you’re ultimately searching with the expectation that you’ll find something interesting. You give yourself over to the belief that something will be discovered, if not today, tomorrow. As a practice, it's all dawns. And I never underestimate the power of having something to look forward to.
AP: There’s a delightful line in the latter, where you talk about discovering something in Flaubert’s letters: “This fact, like all my facts, does not tell me anything new about the clitoris or desire, or anything else, but I love it nonetheless.”
EH: I love that you mentioned that line! I’ve always liked gossip, and literary archives offer a never-ending motherlode. Diaries, in particular, are one of my favorite genres. I also enjoy reality TV for the same gossipy reasons. The thrill of discovering Flaubert’s favorite tea isn’t all that different from finding out a beloved Real Housewife secretly smokes. I’m obsessed with the gap between how we want to be seen, how we think we’re seen, and how we actually behave when we think no one’s looking.
Research is also a powerful tool for connection across time and space. It injects intimacy into my writing practice. Even the most mundane details — about people, animals, cities — can light me up, because they anchor me in lived experience. They’re a reminder of our fundamental interconnectedness. For me, daily ephemera are the meat stuff.
AP: Yesss, daily ephemera are the meat stuff, absolutely. I feel the same way when it comes to writing poems; I’ve learned to ignore the scoldy voice that says to aim for timelessness or grasp at some sort of universal relatability. The quotidian details are the essential, singular stuff of our lives—and like you said, connect us to the collective.
Can you say more about the role of research in your writing process—or maybe it’s writing in your research process? How do you decide what rabbit holes to disappear into? How do you know when to stop?
EH: Knowing when to stop isn’t my strong suit. For me, there’s a fine line between research and procrastination. I only know when to stop when I catch myself reading in search of something predetermined, or to prove a point. That’s when I know my curiosity has died and given way to self-soothing behavior.
I’m often prompted to dive deeper into a topic when I sense tension. It's how I quell my eternal craving for drama. With the rats, I felt a friction between their reputation as dirty, trash-eating nuisances and the reality of their lived experience in California, where the majority of black rats are vegetarian and avoid filthy spaces whenever possible. Same with the inspiration behind researching the forgotten gay bars of Laguna Beach, an area associated with wealth and suburban homogeneity, glossy tv and centrist politics, not queerness. Once I learned about the bars, I couldn’t stop wondering about the string of tumultuous events that must’ve led to this profound shift.
AP: That impulse to follow your curiosity and instincts runs all through SOTR. The narrator’s fitful approach to her research on the history of gay bars in Laguna really resonated. For example, she books time at a university library, gets as far as the parking lot, then bails. I loved those sections, even though they gave me familiar secondhand anxiety.
Maybe I’m projecting my aversion to completionism, but I think there’s a resistance in the book to the expectation that we should be linear, tidy, and in sync with normative notions of productivity and achievement. That felt particularly present in a section I underlined and asterisked: “I refuse to be seduced by narratives that spotlight rats’ usefulness. I resist the premise that rats have a right to exist only if they produce value to human society. I keep a love note tacked above my desk: You are worth so much more than your productivity.”
What’s your relationship to writing and the concept of productivity? Is your writing life at all routine?
EH: One side effect of the sex assault that takes place in the book was that the resulting anger and grief eroded my ability to sit still or concentrate. For months, writing anything more than texts was hard.
Even though I couldn’t write at the time, I didn’t want to abandon the bar project. I thought, oh I’ll do research. But the more I procrastinated visiting the library, the more I began to suspect that my research about the gay bars was a stand-in for my own lack of experiences. So I started visiting the bars themselves, or the buildings where they were once located. I spent long afternoons at the beach by the bars. Then, I got on dating apps for the first time, and I had even fewer nights to write. But I truly gloried in all these so-called distractions. I learned a lot eating falafel with strangers from the internet. I learned even more laying out at the beach. There's so much more to life than work, creative or otherwise.
Now I’m more in a routine. I write in my journal most days, and my job requires a lot of storytelling. I try not to go too long without writing. Too much time away, and returning can feel awkward, almost painful. Like hitting the gym for the first time after a debaucherous vacation.
AP: Being present in life when you’re in survival mode is so difficult. I love that you found ways to live in the so-called distractions—which, to echo our earlier thread about the quotidian, are actually indispensable. I do believe that everything’s grist for the writing mill. It’s all percolating, even when we aren’t actively working on it.
The book’s promo copy alludes to “the transgression of true romance”, which I read as an allusion to how romantic love can rearrange our lives, even when we’re totally acclimated to life being a certain way. The final scene of the narrator being called to dinner really struck me: “She calls my name. I sit down at the table and eat.” It’s not a resolution or redemption, but there is a shift. Does writing from the vantage of being happily in love feel different to you?
EH: For me, eating is a big pleasure, maybe even the pleasure, so that line is a nod to how my love with Heidi allowed me to truly, and for the first time, eat, by which I mean relax and enjoy life a little.
Maybe it's cringe to admit, but love has made me a more open, generous person and writer. Like, I used to LOVE critical book reviews and profiles, but now I’m more interested in reading about what art, landscapes, and cultural phenomena people connect with and why.
AP: Aww, hell yes. I don’t know if it’s getting older or what, but I’m so in my cringe era of embracing sincerity and effusiveness. That actually segues into some final thoughts I want to share.
Something I really appreciated in SOTR is how candidly you discuss class, precarity, and money in relation to how we navigate relationships, writing, time—literally everything. The part where the narrator continues to live with an abusive ex lays bare the material conditions that constrain someone’s ability to leave an unsafe situation, and I feel like it’s rare to see this all approached with such nuance and honesty in literary writing, autofiction or otherwise. I don’t know that I have a tidy question here, but I wanted to thank you for that.
EH: You’re such a perceptive reader! With Season of the Rat, I really wanted to make explicit the often unspoken link between intimate partner violence and housing insecurity. A recent ACLU study found that 46% of unhoused women reported that they had previously stayed in abusive relationships, because they had nowhere to go. Even more telling: in Southern California, 50% of unhoused women are the victims of intimate partner violence.
Poverty ratchets up your precarity, whether that manifests as limited housing options, not knowing how to land a high earning job, or feeling like you can’t afford to pursue creative endeavors. I think it's essential to have frank conversations about the material conditions that allow some people to thrive while others are left scrambling. No one’s life benefits from poverty. Let that myth die here.
Elizabeth Hall is the author of Season of the Rat (C4G Books) and I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Bon Appétit, Black Warrior Review, Electric Literature, the Iowa Review, Pleiades Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her on instagram at @badmoodbaby.
