Cherrypicker | Literature  Horny Hangovers in the USA

In her new book, Stefanie Sargnagel reports on a stay in the USA, accompanied by singer Christiane Rösinger.

The Viennese writer and cartoonist Stefanie Sargnagel is an outsider who celebrates being one. In the late 2000s, she became known for her Facebook status messages, which she published in book form in 2017, followed by her first auto-fictional novel, Dicht, in 2020. Jens Uthoff from the taz called it the “notes of a layabout” and wrote it is “an ode to outsiders ..., a homage to the fearlessness of youth.”

In her status, Sargnagel once wrote: “Sometimes I have nightmares that I’m a fictional character documenting my life for the eyes of hundreds of strangers.” In her new book Iowa, Sargnagel carries on this literary treatment of her life. This time, it’s the story of an “excursion to America.” A college invited her to small-town America, to Grinnell, Iowa, to hold classes in creative writing. Sargnagel is accompanied by the Berlin singer Christiane Rösinger. At a concert there, Rösinger performs her song Liebe wird oft überbewertet (Love is often overrated), a humorous case for living alone.

Meaningful pointlessness

After their arrival, during the journey by car from Des Moines to Grinnell, Sargnagel – curious about this, for her, new world – enters a petrol station. The America she always dreamed of opens up to her, a “psychedelic, brightly coloured landscape, all the Simpsons episodes at once.” A huge selection of beverages that can be filled into huge containers, the hot dogs seem to have been rolling around in their own fat for years, building up an “armour of futility.” The young cashier wears a heavy metal T-shirt and radiates “meaningful pointlessness.”

In Grinnell, Sargnagel and Rösinger move into a very large house right next to the college campus and look for adventures, or at least usable experiences, in the small town of 10,000. They start by visiting a branch of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, where it’s even legal to spend a night in the car park. That’s all the shopping they can do, as most shops in the city centre close at six o’clock and the display windows are half empty. The two of them head quickly back home, where Sargnagel likes to cosy up in front of the telly in her onesie.

The beauty of dive bars

Eventually, however, they find a drinking hole called Rabitt’s Tavern that looks like “a film set from a significantly bleak film.” A sign at the entrance reads: “NO GUNS ALLOWED.” Inside, there are a couple of scruffy men, one even named Homer, which naturally appeals to Simpsons fan Sargnagel, while a depressed woman in her mid-forties with sad eyes serves behind the counter. Sargnagel loves the “beauty of dive bars... The more clouded the windows, the more covetous my gaze becomes.” Through the underdogs in this pub, Sargnagel and Rösinger eventually become familiar with the phenomenon of trailer parks.

In her academic environment, Sargnagel admires how casual and unaffected Americans are; among the professors, “there is none of the typical stuffy vying for attention that we know from the German academic milieu; everyone wants to have a good time and no one cares about making an impression.”

For Sargnagel, America is not just a stage for looking at the world, but also for looking at herself. Time and again, she deals with her shortcomings, be they of a physical or social nature. For her, wearing size 16, second-hand shops are “yet another place to be humiliated.” She admits to her “voluminous pubic hair” and habit of masturbating extensively after nights out, her “horny hangovers.”

Searching for the brown bear

Last but not least, Iowa is also a book about friendship, a friendship between two women from different generations: boomers and millennials: “Christiane is 62, though she insists that she looks 54.² I’m 37, I feel like I’m 16, yet it’s rare that I have the feeling I’m dealing with someone older than me.” Rösinger also has her say in the form of “corrective footnotes”, such as one for this statement, in which the singer clarifies, “The author’s imagination and internalised ageist thinking probably got the better of her here. Because at the age of 62, it’s doesn’t matter at all when people think you ‘seem younger.’”

The two have different approaches to love. While Sargnagel uses dating apps to get to know the men in small-town America, soon realising that the type she prefers resembles one from a “brown bear enclosure at the zoo”, Rösinger isn’t interested, she thinks “that last bit of sexuality, you can do that for yourself.”

Iowa confirms Sargnagel’s great wit and powers of observation. Sargnagel takes a clever, ironic, critical, but by no means patronising look at the USA, at herself and basically at everything she sees.

March 2024