Interview: Natalia Singer on the 1980s

It’s shocking at how popular the 1980s remain. After all, Roseanne is back on TV and a big ‘80s icon, Donald Trump, is now president (unfortunately). Sure, since the ‘80s we’ve had lots of changes: 9/11, two Iraq Wars, the fall of the Soviet Union, a black president (after two Bush presidents), the Internet, the IPhone, the OJ trial, the Great Recession, marriage equality, social media -- but, if you look at all the 1980s nostalgia around us, it’s clearly the decade that won’t die.

We still love the ‘80s … for reasons I can’t quite comprehend.

Natalia Singer has a few thoughts about that decade – and many more. She literally wrote a book about it, a memoir about her life as a young woman in the Reagan era. Now an English professor at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, Natalia’s personal journey through that time was intertwined with its political and social changes. In the first of three amazing interviews, Natalia tells us about her book and her 1980s experiences, her life now, her thoughts about New York, and her visit to Rajnesheepuram, subject of the fascinating new documentary Wild Wild Country.

You wrote a memoir, Scraping By in the Big Eighties, about your life as a young woman in the 1980s. What inspired you to write a book that's personal but also sociological?

Thank you for this excellent question. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to tell this very personal, raw, intimate, and sometimes harrowing tale within this larger political and sociological context because I saw the two as inextricable. I was inspired by the work of George Orwell, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, and Susan Griffin—writers who saw their lives within the larger context of history informed by a lens of race, class, and gender, and who provided a rich template for how to make the personal political, and vice versa. I read their work while I was telling my own story because my story is not only about what happened to me at various key moments in the 1980s but about what happened to us as a nation as the social safety net I had relied on as a child began to unravel under Reaganomics.

As the daughter of a single mother who was disabled, I would probably not be alive were it not for the social safety net. Lyndon B. Johnson’s dream of a Great Society “where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled” had yet to be fully realized when I was growing up in a working class neighborhood on the West Side of Cleveland, but my family of three was able to rely on Medicaid, food stamps, Aid to Dependent Children, and a thriving public school system in which my honors track classmates and I went on to study at topnotch universities. I was able to get free legal aid during a family crisis, 3% student loans, fee waivers on college boards and applications, and, as a student and then a young adult, affordable rent.

And then Ronald Reagan happened. Watching him hasten inequality, exasperate America’s racial divide, roll back reproductive rights for women, kill the ERA, declare war on America’s unions, poison our air and water, all during a militaristic buildup that was frankly terrifying: I wanted to tell that story too and how it affected me personally. I wanted this book to dig deep to the marrow, to hit bedrock emotionally, but also to reach out to engage with others as a literature of witness.

I am a very political writer and I always look to find common cause with my readers. Writing for me is a form of resistance, and it’s also a way of building communities. I also teach the memoir, and I have always been really irritated with the way the American memoir relies on the conversion narrative (dating back to The Confessions of St. Augustine) married to the Horatio Pulled-myself-up-by-my-Bootstraps Alger myth. In other words, in hard capitalism, we like stories about people who suffer and fall and then rise—through self-determination alone. I wanted to write about what happens when you don’t rise because someone else’s boot (and presumably, bootstrap) is being held against your neck. I wanted to critique the mentality that says that we, as individuals, can do and be anything—an ideology that became very popular in the eighties as Ronald Reagan did everything in his power to hasten inequality and systemic racism and sexism.

But I also wanted to write a book that would bring all our disparate struggles for justice together—to unite us, not divide us. A quote I go back to repeatedly from Susan Griffin to inspire both my writing and my teaching is this one: “Any healing will require us to witness all our histories where they converge, the history of empires and emancipation's, of slave ships as well as underground railroads; it requires us to listen back into the muted cries of the beaten, burned, forgotten and also to hear the ring of speech among us, meeting the miracle of that.” Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life.

It seems like Eighties nostalgia never ends. I remember Eighties nostalgia starting in the 1990s! GLOW and Stranger Things are the most recent examples, and now Roseanne is back (it first premiered in 1988). You might even call Donald Trump's presidency (both the man and his reactionary agenda) a piece of ‘80s nostalgia. Why do you think this decade seems to hold so much power over the common imagination – and has it become almost self-destructive?

Donald Trump was a big joke in the Eighties. He was The Donald, a symbol of 80s-style materialism on steroids, and, for the people who had to run into him in the city and at all the clubs where he groped women, a shallow icon of male white privilege. He is and always has been a vulgar con man.

I am mystified as to why people are nostalgic about that decade. I spent most of those years in terror that we’d all be killed in a nuclear war—that we started. When I think of the Eighties, this is my montage: Jimmy Carter putting up solar panels on the White House and Ronald Reagan taking them down; Reagan’s myth of the Welfare Queen; first-strike nuclear capability; AIDS spreading unchecked because of our president’s neglect and homophobia; televangelism and Tammy Faye Baker’s mascara clumps; “Just say no;” $10,000 gold-plated nuclear sub toilet seats; the HUD scandal, the Savings & Loan Scandal; the Stock Market Crash of 1987; Iran-Contra; U.S. sanctioned torture and human rights violations in Central America; the Valdez oil spill in Alaska; the rise of the prison system and disproportional incarceration of people of color; I’m just getting started. Trump represents a continuation of this mass destruction.

But, I will say this: the Eighties had excellent music! The Pretenders, the B-52s, The Clash, some of Madonna, Sting, The Smiths, Cowboy Junkies, 10,000 Maniacs, U-2, Radiohead, The Talking Heads, Roxy Music, The Cure, Blondie. Who wouldn’t want to have an Eighties dance party and rock out to these songs again?

Talking nostalgia, what are your favorite memories of the 1980s (both personal and otherwise) – and your worst?

Before housing costs were insane it was possible to live in a gorgeous place, pay very little rent, and sort of eke out a life working part time and making art the rest of the time. This ended before the decade was over, but I still remember my $170 apartment in Ballard in Seattle, and my friends, Cindy and Dawn, who had a Thompson Street apartment in the Village where I stayed when I came to NYC and slept semi-comfortably on the floor (even if my head was in the bathroom and my body in the little hall in front)! Until 1985 I lived in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, and then Port Townsend) and it was easy to scrape by on restaurant work, a little writing and editing, and to spend long, rapturous weekends hiking the Hoh River Valley or camping at Third Beach near La Push of bicycling and whale-watching in the San Juan Islands for very little money. Those memories are imprinted on me for life. Up on the coast, I met people who lived in trees—literally—and they functioned in a post-capitalist economy by bartering, foraging, and just hanging out. And in NYC and in LA, in those years, I met many people who got by just fine because of rent controlled apartments, free clinics, community gardens, and luck.

Low points—too many to count but I did list a few under 4. This is the decade in which we see the rise of homelessness and food banks, the backlash against feminism, increased police brutality, and the hard core resurgence of a kind of militaristic masculinity that seemed already passé in the seventies but came back with a fervor then—a harbinger for Trumpism. The ecological disasters—Valdez and Chernobyl. Industrial farming: get big or get out. Basically, it was a nonstop nightmare. 

What are some of your favorite music, movies and TV shows from that decade?

I didn’t watch TV in the eighties at all. I watched a ton of TV as a child, then stopped in college and didn’t really start again until the late '90s. I gave you a list of my favorite music from that era above (should have read all the questions first!) In the Eighties I watched a lot of foreign films by Werner Herzog and Peter Weir. I also liked Hannah and Her Sisters, A Year of Living Dangerously, and of course, The Big Chill. 

Thanks Natalia! In our next interview, Natalia tells us about her 1982 visit to the now mythical Rajneeshpuram, the Oregon site of the Rajneeshee cult, the subject of the hugely popular and controversial Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.