An Interview with Gina Nutt

After reaching the last page of Gina Nutt’s debut essay collection, Night Rooms, I immediately returned to the first. This time I studied the ways that each essay coheres around fragments to create a hallucinatory experience that doesn’t obscure but instead deepens the subjects that Nutt explores. When she writes about ballet, beauty contests, and themed college parties, she shows their bleakness through self-aware examinations of depression, anxiety, and body image. She breaks apart almost every essay with horror film references or allusions, which, as Amy Berkowitz points out, “describe feelings and experiences that can’t be expressed in words.”