Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of the Rat is subtle and riotous, “a fat California orange in the palm of your hand.” Hall invites us to examine how we are changed by our tragedies and our inquiries—every shard of human experience piled at the sides of our roads. It is an exploration of our private ruins and all that finds a home there.
I sat down with Elizabeth in West Adams to discuss Season of the Rat, anal breathing, sex, shapeshifting, California, and what’s on deck for this literary powerhouse in the making.
Aiden Brown: I was so excited when Allie [Rowbottom] asked me to read this book. Without knowing what to expect, or knowing you, it just blew me away. One of my favorite things about it is the ambiguity of its genre identity, so I have to start by asking how you describe Season of the Rat.
Elizabeth Hall: I think I’m officially calling it autofiction. It’s definitely based on my actual life. I’m usually not very interested in writing just a straight memoir because I get bored easily. And so the research is a huge help to stay motivated, and also provide a necessary counterbalance of joy and exhilaration—so any memoirs or essays I’ve written in this vein dovetail heavily into research, for better or for worse.
AB: That was one of my favorite things about the book—the research kind of weaves into and around the more emotional and personal narrative, which creates such a strong portrait of intellectualization while still resonating emotionally. Your protagonist’s—or your—exigence for the rat research is self-evident within the narrative, but what drew you to researching abandoned gay bars?
EH: The bars were actually before the rats—I found this book about Orange County by an LA Times writer Gustavo Arrellano, and there was this anecdote in the book about them. My friend Caitlin and I started going on adventures to these places in Laguna. It was an avenue of research that served as kind of a reprieve from my other research about my mom, or the cult she was part of that was founded in Orange County. A lot of my work focuses on sex trauma. Some heavy things were coming up within my own family in that regard. So I think it’s natural that I gravitated toward locuses of queer joy, especially in what I tend to think of as such a stiff place. And that research, too, helped me navigate my own queer journey. It was easier for me to go to an abandoned place to discover my queerness in a way than to go to a gay bar with people in it. I took the introverted path.
AB: That’s so interesting because in the book, there’s almost always someone with you in those scenes. Actually, that brings me to one of the things I loved the most about this book—I mean, of course, I don’t love that it happened—but the way your relationships, for better or for worse, kind of lurk beneath your research and weave in and around it. In particular, I found the connection between the trauma you endured and the research on rats, garbage, and ruin so striking. How did those connections develop for you? Was it something you planned going into the project or something that emerged over the course of writing it?
EH: So, the origin of the book was the sex assault. It started, honestly, because of an argument with my wife. The scene was cut from the book, actually, this tiff about the tent. But it was the first camping tent I’d bought for myself, and I’d taken it on so many solo camping trips, including a journey from here to Portland for my first book tour. And when I was about to go camping by myself in Joshua Tree with it, my wife was like well, you’re not going to bring that tent. And I was like obviously I’m bringing the tent. I don’t have another tent. She and I had just moved in (this was during the pandemic)—my wife also works a corporate job, and so she was living at a very different income level than I was.
So, I took the debate over the tent as almost a symbol of that disparity. Like, of course you can just buy a new tent while I have to be okay with sleeping in my rape tent. I also didn’t want to give [Mark] or the assault power over my beloved tent. Eventually, it became a joke between my wife and I—we had a riff on “rape tent” for a very long time. And so the first scene of the book was originally going to be about this rape tent. I had intended it to be an exploration of [Mark’s] and my relationship through the lens of class. Actually, the assault came to be more in the background compared with the original exigence of the project. I really wanted to emphasize how much resources play into why people stay in abusive dynamics.
AB: Period. Absolutely.
EH: This was around that time when it was really popular in certain lit circles to listen to edge lord-y podcasts like Red Scare. They had an episode—actually, just the other day—where the hosts speculated that people stay in these dynamics for psychosocial reasons—they were attempting to do a psychoanalytic read on various dynamics like narcissism, or codependency. So, there was also a part of me that wanted to write this in opposition, not to Red Scare specifically, but to that whole idea that people are addicted to their lover, or that emotional reasoning is even a primary motivator. I wanted to shift the conversation—people, I feel, are almost taking pains not to talk about the resource aspect. It’s expensive to live in Los Angeles, and a person shouldn’t have to give up their life in a place because someone chooses to do something to them. When the assault happened, we had already been broken up for a while, but we were still living together. My primary motivator for staying wasn’t that I was just having such a good time hanging out with this person, it was for want of choices which didn’t implode my life.
The choice to stay was one I made to try and control the situation. I’d just gotten a nonprofit job, which I was able to turn into a full time position largely because of the stability I had at that time, and because of the stability I’ve had with my wife Heidi since. At the time I was writing this book, I was working at one of the most beautiful libraries in Los Angeles. And I’ve worked hard to get these two idyllic situations. Had I gone to a shelter or stayed on a friend’s couch, that destabilization would have been observable to an employer. And I’d never had a full time position. I wasn’t able to even get a tooth fixed. I’m a big proponent of Maslow’s Hierarchy—like, how are you supposed to concentrate when you’re worried about having your basic needs met? Without the stability I have now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this book, at a minimum.
AB: What is your relationship with [Mark] like now? How did it change or what changed about your perspective on it while you were writing Season of the Rat?
EH: A part of me wanted him to bear witness to the pain he’d caused. Another part of me wanted to write about it quickly—I wrote it within months of leaving the situation—to preserve the sense of love I still had for him. Another myth that I’ve encountered is that you’re supposed to immediately hate someone after they’ve harmed you in that way. But we shared all kinds of deep intimacies with each other over the years. I understand why people do close their hearts, and my feelings toward [Mark] have hardened over time.
I don’t think of [Mark] as a monster—I think doing that makes it harder to heal. While I understand why people would need to think of someone who did that to them that way, it created a dissonance for me between the reality of what happened and the ten years we spent together, the friendship we had. And even after it happened, we lived together; we were in a band together. Prior to his violations, I really did enjoy his company. After the assault, he was still my primary emotional support, which was that much more destabilizing. There’s a pattern in my life of being close to someone that then I had to extricate myself from—music I couldn’t listen to anymore. I always knew I was going to write about him, and I wanted to do it with a degree of diplomacy. I mean, I could write another book about sex assault two years later and write it totally differently.
AB: You say this in the book—and really it was a gut punch for me as someone who’s had similar experiences—that he never denied the assault, it was just something that didn’t impact him on the day to day.
EH: Yeah, he just went on living his life. The day after it happened, we dropped off the other person who was on the trip with us (who didn’t know what had happened) and I noticed that [Mark] was already on dating apps. He dropped me off in downtown LA to go on a date, and I spent the whole afternoon floating through the city. By the time I’d gotten in my Uber home to San Pedro, he was taking selfies in the desert with a new girl he was dating. I remember going home, crying and just thinking I can’t run away from this—I mean, literally—I didn’t have a car. And he got to just go on like everything was normal.
AB: I was really struck by that portrayal of the banality of that kind of assault, and how human—or maybe diplomatic is the word—you were while still expressing that anger and that devastation that comes with sexual assault. I mean, we harden toward them over time, like you said, but making them monsters can also obfuscate a situation for us in so many ways. It is like floating, or like walking a tightrope. That brings me to this tension between fear, harm, and love. I felt that tension very strongly in Season of the Rat. What’s the relationship between those ideas for you personally?
EH: I’m someone who grew up very much fearing showing emotion with the exception of, perhaps, within the church system. Definitely one of those people who went wild at a youth retreat—hands in the air, all that. I felt like it was like a safe form of love, I guess. I’m not religious now, but when I was younger, the idea of Jesus providing unconditional love was huge to me. Especially because that was not something I was getting necessarily in other aspects of my life. My mom is a wonderful person, but she has a lot of anxiety that tends to manifest as hypercriticality of herself and others. I think she moves through the world believing criticism is really helpful, and that it’s a loving thing to do. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home that created that lens of get it together, you know—“lock in.” That was translated to me and my sister through her, so I don’t think I was ever going to have that easygoing, free feeling love vibe.
Part of [Mark] and my whole relationship was that we were both very much afraid of vulnerability and emotionality. The main thing we did together was smoke a lot of weed all the time and listen to music together—we really were not linked up in a soul-bonded, emotional way. In fact, I don’t think we ever even said I love you until we’d been dating for four or five years—which is insane—and it only happened then because I was having an emotional affair with someone who was so free-flowing with love. That’s why I was attracted to the affair, I’m sure. It woke me up to the range of love that I was missing out on. Even today, I’m married and I still get very embarrassed about showing affection. My wife worked on a really big live show, and I was making her a little card for when she came home, and then I was so emotional, and it low-key embarrassed me. I was like, I’m not going to put this out. And then I was like, wait, yeah, I am. This is so dumb! I am almost 40 and married. I don’t still need to feel that way. So it still happens, that fear of being seen, to use a TikTok phrase…
AB: The mortifying ordeal of being known.
EH: Exactly. I mean, love is one of the most vulnerable things about us—the fear that it won’t be returned. I’m not like that now—compassion is free, love is free; it hurts me none to share these things with people. I think having access to love from Heidi—she’s a very extroverted person, very giving, a very different person—and seeing her vulnerability with me and with her friends has been really helpful in navigating that vulnerability and fear, and letting love kind of effuse within our dynamic.
AB: I haven’t had the pleasure of reading your first book, but I assume by the title I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, that it explores similar ideas around vulnerability, love, and sex from a different standpoint, since you were in a very different place in your life when you wrote it compared to Season of the Rat. I’m curious how, if at all, your process differed between the two books?
EH: Both were written during destabilizing times in my life. Going to CalArts for an MFA was a pretty good culture shock for me. I’m really more of an autodidact. I barely went to undergrad college, skipped a lot of classes; I thought it was like a hack to use a spreadsheet to track my class absences. It’s not a hack, it was a waste, but I thought I was real slick. Going to CalArts was, in and of itself, a bit of a risky move for me. [Mark] had applied to grad school in California, and CalArts was the only place I got into near where he was accepted. At the same time, my mom was in the process of finding some things that had happened in the past with my sister which were pushing her to get divorced, and then she went bankrupt—her whole life kind of blew up. So, I don’t think it was that surprising that I was drawn to an excessive research project. I think it was escapism. I’m a very escapist person, whether that be through marijuana or exercise.
The idea for the clit book came from a poem that I had previously published, which was comprised of sex writing cutups, that people were responding really well to. I didn’t feel like I had the writerly skillset for a novel, but what I could do—similar to the rats—was, and is, research. I can always do that because it makes me happy, and research is an escape in some ways. You get to live in another world. The clit research made me feel so alive. I’d wake up in the morning at like 5am (I’m an insomniac) and the sun would be shining—California sun, you know, every day.
It was so beautiful, and I could travel to the sixth century or something and it felt crazy, and that made me really happy. I also was learning at the time how unhappy my sex life had been with [Mark]. Because I was raised really religious, he was the first person I’d ever had sex with. Even though I wasn’t religious anymore, there was still that internal backbeat of thinking it was cool that, although I was like 26 and in grad school, I had only had sex with one person. It was definitely misguided in retrospect. As I wrote, I was having a lot of compulsory sex with [Mark], because I just didn’t know. I was having sex every day and giving blowjobs every day, and had no idea that wasn’t a normal thing. And I never came, obviously, so—I’m only being this frank because it’s a sex book—
AB: No, I love it.
EH: So, I was in the process of recognizing that cultural training, and of discovering that it wasn’t just me—it was actually everyone I talked to. I would talk to friends in the grad program and they all were like yeah we never come, even people who’d had upwards of twenty partners. I initially thought maybe it’s just [Mark] and then it’s like–, okay, no, this is systemic. Actually, until he read the book, I don’t think he had a desire to focus on my pleasure. I really think this comes from an internalized misogyny among many women and men, this idea that women’s pleasure just doesn’t matter. Like, no one comes from penetration. I mean, some people do.
AB: Love that for them. Huge if true.
EH: Right, it’s rare; the vast majority of people don’t. And he was like Well, I’ve never had that problem with previous partners.
AB: Okay, so those women were lying to you.
EH: They’re lying to you! Until he read the book, which probably hit home the ethical aspect of pleasuring a partner, did anything change in terms of us having better sex. But writing the book was eye opening for me and really changed a lot of how I thought about actual sex and agency around sex. It also exposed a lot of my own internalized misogyny, which I’m still working through.
AB: Speaking of things you’re working through, I’m curious what your writing life has been like—how did you start?
EH: I struggled with learning disabilities, and didn’t really read a book until high school, which was when I got into diaries—Sylvia Plath’s specifically. Then, I got into biographies of writers. Anaïs Nin was the first writer I was obsessed with. I was still very religious then, so I would go through and cross out the curse words and the sex words. I always knew I wanted access to a different life than the one I was living, and reading and writing were windows into other worlds. Reading shapeshifts time; you’re slowed down and almost living inside the book and alongside the book. I was interested in the lifestyle of a writer or what I thought that would be. A lot of my favorite writers were very craft-oriented like Nabokov, Miller. But Nin especially—she was self-taught and kind of a bad writer when she started, so revision was big for her. I knew with my academic sensibilities that it would be huge for me too, and that’s really informed the kind of writer I’ve become.
AB: I really see the confessional style in this work. That’s so interesting you say that because my primary impression of this book (once I could catch my breath) was how well-crafted it was, both structurally and on the sentence level. Season of the Rat comes out in May—what else is on the horizon for you?
EH: I’m not working on a big project right now, but I am working on some smaller essays.
I write reviews, for Full Stop and other places. I really like doing critical work. I think I was scared to do any kind of review work because I didn’t feel like I had the academic training to understand books systematically, but I found out I really love doing it and my editor at Full Stop, Fiona, is such an amazing reader and editor that I just want to keep working with her. I’m kind of loosely working a novel idea—the problem with novels is that I lose interest really quickly—but, it’s about a health clinic that does anal breathing—
AB: Oh, hell yeah.
EH: —which doesn’t exist, but it’s inspired by trends in colonics. I’ve always written a lot about wellness and been interested in it, not as a practitioner necessarily, but as a cultural phenomenon.
AB: I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t see someone trying to harness anal breathing in a few years.
EH: Oh, anal breathing is the final frontier. I feel like whenever my larger projects don’t work out, they usually become a smaller piece. I have an essay coming out in Hobart that kind of dovetails with Season of the Rat’s storyline. I feel like there is an idea for something about my mom that’s percolating. I tend to be inspired by things in a moment and then go hog wild over them. If I were a really disciplined person, my life would probably look different, as would my writing, but I let my ADHD take the reins creatively. I’m definitely here for the girls and for the messiness.
AB: There’s a lot of really beautiful vulnerability in that too. Girls forever. I can’t wait to see what you do next.
Season of the Rat is forthcoming this June from Cash 4 Gold Books.