A version of this interview was published in the San Diego Reader. I met Cindy Lee at a cafe on the day after Thanksgiving and as we talked for about various things before I turned on the tape machine, her fans came up several times to ask her where she would be playing and what she had been up to. Entwistle Books published her novel, Memoirs of a Female Messiah.

Jazz: How is writing a book different than writing a song?

Cindy Lee Berryhill: That an interesting question [one of Cindy’s fans comes up to our table at the cafe…] With song writing-- before I made my first record, because nobody knew where I was coming from it was really easy to just say anything I wanted in a song and not have somebody think that it was non-fiction all about me, now whenever I write things people think that it's really about me, and I hate that, partly because I’d like the freedom to have it be real or not real, so for me the freedom of writing this book was that before I put my name on it and told myself I would never put my name on it, so I gave myself an anonymity clause, so that I could say anything that wouldn’t embarrass Cindy Lee Berryhill. Because I loved the fact that the character was so stupid, so profoundly dumb that I wanted the freedom to be as dumb as possible. And not feel the embarrassment of that reflecting on Cindy Lee. When I finished I thought maybe it’s all right to be considered dumb.

Jazz: There’s that big disclaimer at the beginning.

Cindy Lee: This sucks, I didn’t write it.

Jazz: 'This girl just gave me the manuscript in a bar in Borrego.'

Cindy Lee: That was the original idea because I never wanted it to be written by me. When I wrote it it didn’t feel like it was me. It felt like a blast, sort of stream of consciousness, like when you said something about it being like a series of dreams at times, I could let myself write anything that came to my head.

Jazz: There’s a song in the book called “Ovarian Dreamscape?” Is that the kind of song Cindy Lee Berryhill would write?

Cindy Lee: No it’s not, it’s not something that I would have allowed myself. I like to write songs from an anonymous place. Maybe now working with the Troy Sisters I can write songs like Ovarian Dreamscape and have them do it. There’s another one “Pick Nose, not Rose” It was whatever popped off the top of my head, which could be ridiculous.

Jazz: Your character, Michelle Domingue,  gets really famous for saying really stupid things, and people just love her, that’s the way pop culture is, maybe even our own pop sensation Jewel?

Cindy Lee: Could be, but I started this book before Jewel. It’s an inadvertent comment on pop culture and media culture. We as consumers will eat up anything that the media tells us, they tell us that the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest fucking shopping day of the year, so everybody goes out like idiots to stand in line. The media has too much power and too much control.

Jazz: Do you use Oil of Olay? There's a reference to it in the novel. I was wondering how stuff like that gets into a book?

Cindy Lee: I use different products, whatever’s on sale, however much money I have that day if I need something. I guess it’s from watching too much tv when I was a teenager, I’d watch so much fucking tv, I’d get home from school and turn on the tv. You’d just see all this propaganda that would spout out at you and if you’re in a state of mind that you’re just rambling off the top of your head, that stuff is just going to come out. It wasn’t like I thought, ‘Which products should I actually mention?’

Jazz: Why did you decide to set the book in LA and New York rather than San Diego where you live?

Cindy Lee: LA’s my home town, I was born in Silverlake and my earliest memories are about Los Angeles. My dad always had a big thing about movie stars and we would drive by and look at movie stars' homes. And then part of the time I was writing it I was living in New York City, I was referencing places I spent a lot of time around. The closest we get to San Diego is Jacumba at the very beginning of the book. Everything that’s media and sort of pop culturish comes out of those meccas.

Jazz: The book is filled with references to “heart chakras” and Buddha and Catholicism, do you consider yourself religious?

Cindy Lee:  I consider myself spiritually oriented and yet about organized religions, I have always been weary and skeptical. I’ve had a lot of friends that were really involved with various groups and I’ve definitely dabbled, even in my late teens, I lived in LA, and people told me how terrible Scientology was, so I just had to try it, and sure enough it really did suck. I’ve always been fascinated by various spiritual things and what brings people to spiritual groups and I think when I started writing this book a friend of mine had given me a copy of a Shirley Maclain book, so I think the book started as a retaliation against a kind of new ageism that so many of my friends were into… they wore purple a lot. What’s with the new age and purple? They really go together.

Jazz: There was a reference to the seminal punk group Dead Kennedys which I could see you as a socially conscious musician making, but didn’t seem to fit with the character Michelle Domingue. Why did you put that in there?

Cindy Lee: One of my favorite bands. Because she lived in LA. Don’t you think that a lot of people know about Dead Kennedys? Spending time in LA, you end up knowing a lot of different things. You drive down Sunset and there’s a big sign in front of the Whisky that says “Dead Kennedys Tonight” How could you forget a name like that? Punk rock was what I grew up with. I was like this lonely kid going out to shows and Dead Kennedys were my favorite live band in the early 80’s. Jello was the best performer I think I’ve ever seen. One time I saw him he shaved every place on his body that had hair on it in a stripéd fashion. So his arm, his head everything was striped. I don’t know how Michelle Domingue knew about it, I’ll have to give her a call and find out.

Jazz: I’m stuck on pop cultural references now, maybe because this is a book about the manufacture of pop culture, what did you mean by a “he laughed in that 50’s Fred MacMurray sort of way?”

Cindy Lee: Sort of a patronizing, ha ha, I’m so on top of the world because I’m a white male kind of in my power place and you are so much smaller. Pop culture really happens right after or during World War II, because of the world starting to get involved with each other. I was just listening to a program about Norman Rockwell, he was a propagandist really, creating a myth and illusion of American  lifestyle. Even then media was propagandizing. I just see media as an unconscious entity propagandizing us in a certain way whether they know it or not, there are a lot of innocent people involved in it. They do what the editors want them to do, the editors do what the advertisers want them to do and it’s just this unwieldy creature that’s suggesting to us that we should shop the day after Thanksgiving.

Jazz: Even the Reader is guilty of that.

Cindy Lee: The Reader is more about plastic surgery than anything else.

Jazz: The music section has a lot of ads for night clubs. But the book section doesn’t have many ads

Cindy: It’s tiny.

Jazz: So I couldn't write this for the book section, but the music section has more money, so if there's a music angle we can do it.

Cindy Lee: Were doing a lot of bitching and griping.

Jazz: Are Cindy Lee Berryhill’s music fans anything like the fans of Michelle Domingue, modern day messiah?

Cindy Lee: Guys with glasses. She’s much more universal than I am, I’m just an obscure cult hero, she vastly more popular than me, she’s beyond Jewel.

Jazz: I thought of Jewel just because I was in Trader Joes and heard her song playing and I’ve also heard it over the PA in Ralphs grocery. And you think, ‘Why is this here while I’m shopping?’ And Michelle Domingue is like that too, everywhere you go she’s coming out of every media source.

Cindy: Who knows there could have been another messiah that happened the next year.

Jazz: There’s a pop singer in the book called Mary Rockett and she’s forced to start the all girl band Meow? Did record industry people ever tell you that you would have to do something like that to forward your career?

Cindy: No.

Jazz: I was wondering how you draw from real life experience for your novel? I’m thinking about the section in St. Mark’s Place? There’s also a scene where Michelle Domingue sleeps on a park bench. Have you ever done that?

Cindy: I’ve slept in my car. Some of those places like the Washington Square hotel, I’ve stayed there a few times. I referenced places I knew well, St. Marks, walking up and down there, St. Marks pizza, places I went to regularly. References to places I had been, but completely different experiences had by her, taking things to an excess, or a ridiculous conclusion. A lot of the things in the book are references to things I’ve read. There’s a lot of weird references to history and non fiction. A reference to the Rosicrucian people, an offshoot of the Knights Templar--

Jazz: Weren’t the Mason’s dressed up like them in a parade?

Cindy Lee: The first crusades and they became huge money lenders during medieval times, then they were all slain. I was reading a lot of Roman literature-

Jazz: Did you see Fight Club? The guy who wrote it wrote this other book called Survivor that has the exact same formula as your book. The character is the only surviving member of this cult that committed suicide. And he gets swept up in the media and becomes this superstar.

Cindy: It must be because we’re on the millennium. There must be some astrological reason.

Jazz: I especially liked the part where Michelle Domingue asks the pope for a super maxi -pad. Is there some symbolism involved there?

Cindy: Whenever I think about the pope and those people I think of white, they’re so white bread--

Jazz: That they don’t want to deal with real earthy things like menses-

Cindy Lee: Yeah, really bloody things like that.

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