Lisa Crystal Carver has been an underground household name for decades, starting with her zine ‘Rollerderby’ and band/performance project ‘Suckdog’ in the 1980s, before going on to perform solo and publish a long list of books. She’s also been featured on The Aither before – back in 2021. In a wide-ranging interview that gives a crash course on her colourful life and works.

Since then, to name but a few highlights of Lisa’s last few years: In 2022 she survived a debilitating stomach cancer. The first major health scare of her life – and emerged relatively unscathed.
In 2023 she released her book ‘No Land’s Man’ (via our friends at Pig Roast Publishing), that documents her travels in France and Botswana.

Lisa’s 2023 book, ‘No Man’s Land’.
Published in 2023 by Pig Roast.

Now in 2024 Lisa is married for a fourth time; to a Frenchman named Bruno; and is living with him in the Paris suburbs. Whilst also taking trips throughout Europe, to Belize, and Peru. She also purchased a home of her own back in the USA, outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania and has thrown herself into its considerable necessary repairs. Potentially signalling her eventual return to American shores one day.

Lisa is also about to release her latest book, ‘Lover of Leaving’, which I was lucky enough to get a preview edition of. For a first-time reader of Lisa’s books like myself it was the perfect introduction to her unique way of experiencing and describing the world. As it brings together some of her most recent travelogues with older pieces that offer glimpses into each of her marriages; relationships with her two children, and parents.
The title is both of a motto for the book, and something of a theme, as the various pieces touch on moments of change and feelings of in-betweenness. Readers can look forward to (in Lisa’s own words from the introduction):

  • A skit performed live about the time I tried to kill myself with a potato peeler.
  • The dissection of a sadomasochistic relationship (the one personal essay I ever published anonymously, as I was afraid my husband would use it against me in court).
  • An article about when I went crazy and found out from a feather that I was God.
  • A cautionary parable about why we should never marry for a good reason (better to marry for no reason – It’s more honest).
  • A diary of losing all my blood and coming to in a French hospital where the nurses smoked cigarettes and gossiped all night long.
  • A treatise on loving the Buddha’s wife.
  • Discovering what happens when your daughter doesn’t want to see you anymore.
  • And what happens when you stop dancing with your husband.
  • Learning to live with bugs and mice and snakes and ghosts in the French countryside.
  • And going to Peru and a shaman put her hand through the back of my skull and pulled out all this stuff and I have never felt so clean.
The cover image for Lisa’s upcoming book, ‘Lover of Leaving’ – A photo of Lisa’s friend Simone performing a butoh piece.

‘Lover of Leaving’ is set to be published in the Spring of 2025.
In the meantime, one way to ensure yourself a copy is to subscribe to Lisa’s Patreon at the $10/month tier or higher. Not only will this get you a free copy of ‘Lover of Leaving’ shipped to you as soon as its printed but ALL of Lisa’s upcoming books, for as long as you are a member. Along with sneak peeks at her newest adventures and participation in her weekly Zoom events like ‘Philosophy Hour.’

I caught up with Lisa to talk about impressions I got from the book (not always correct), her marriages, family relationships, and a favourite topic of mine – the Catholic Church.

OWW: In your new book ‘Lover of Leaving’ you reach a decision to buy a house in Pittsburgh as a means to possibly reconnect with your daughter Sadie as well as articulating a growing dissatisfaction with your marriage to Bruno and lack of independence.
You’ve got the house now – are these still your primary reasons for the move and are there other ones?

LISA: I’m not sure I’ve ever reached any decision. I don’t think anything through or do it for reasons. My life is kind of I just do something and then I find out why after. I do wish I had been in the country when my daughter had her breakdown.
The next time something big happens to her, good or bad, I’ll be here if she wants me.

I wouldn’t say there was a growing dissatisfaction in my marriage. More a vacillation between total satisfaction and total dis. I wish there could be more calm. I think it will be very helpful to have a house of my own.
One thing I really don’t like about France is the rich people neighbourhood we live in, too much privacy, service, and uniformity. Pittsburgh doesn’t have any of any of those!

A gargoyle in front of Lisa’s new house in Pennsylvania, between Allentown and Knoxville.

It seems like your closest reconnection with your mother in your adult life was when you moved back in with her as a caregiver. Assuming you couldn’t prevent it from happening – how would the same thing happening with your daughter make you feel both for her, and for yourself?
.. and do you think your mother would have had, or indeed did have, similar feelings?

I’m sorry I’m so argumentative with you, but I didn’t move in with my mother. She moved in with me for a bit and it was impossible, so I got her an apartment across the parking lot from me and brought her meals. We never lost a connection so I didn’t have to reconnect with her. But it’s not like we were ever really connected in a way.
She was a dreamer and so was I, each in our own way – neither of us connected significantly with the real world, never mind another human being. And when she was dying she was out of her mind on morphine and the cancer reached her brain, rendering her even more childlike and frightened.

God no, I would never ask my daughter to be my caregiver. I don’t want anyone to be my caregiver. I’d kill myself – I don’t mean that dramatically, only practically. I’ve lived as I’ve wanted all my life.
I will die as I want, too.

That’s what my mother always said and even asked me at one point to get her a cache of opiates as an exit policy. I reasoned with her that I would inevitably take them myself on a subsequent visit and thankfully she saw the logic. In the end she seemed to almost manifest the cancer that took her out as she wanted to follow my father before too long.
Anyway I’m all for people going out on their own terms and would certainly want to myself.

Another revelation you seem to come to on the Peruvian retreat that opens ‘Lover of Leaving’ is that life has become overly painful for your son Wolf and you are causing him pain by pressuring him to cling to it.
Do you still feel this way and has it changed the way you interact with him?
Have there been major changes in his health since you wrote this section?

This is sounding like a really dark book! But yes, I do feel that I was trying to force Wolf, who has always had a lot of burdens, to not only live longer than his body or spirit may wish to, but to also live more – I mean do more, learn more, experience more.
It’s terrible that we tend to infantilize the disabled so, make choices for them that are none of our business.

Yes, my change in attitude has remained. For example, he doesn’t want orthopaedic shoes that should help him not fall over or his hearing aides or his glasses. He chooses to move through this life as God made him.
If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

A recent photo of Lisa with her son Wolfgang (Wolf) in France.
Along with a page from a 2002 diary that Wolf and Lisa used to communicate with each other.

Have you only been pregnant three times?
I’m curious as to what being pregnant felt like for you in a physical, neurochemical sense as I’ve heard of experiences ranging from incredibly euphoric to life threateningly dysphoric. Do you remember what you felt?
… and, if so, was it consistent across pregnancies?

I recall feeling clumsy, fat, slow, stupid, ecstatic, waiting, perfect.

I couldn’t get a clear impression from the book as to whether you’re still married to Bruno or not but I think probably not.
Did you go into any of your four marriages thinking they would last for the rest of your life?
If not would thinking that actually prevent you from marrying someone?

I am married to Bruno.
One of the things that I appreciate about this marriage is he allows me total freedom in articulating to him or to my readers every little thing I think, no matter if it’s utterly negative. Usually people tell only the good things while the relationship’s on and only the bad things when it’s off. That’s not very true to life, I think.

No, I don’t think I went into any of my marriages thinking they would last forever. I married if I wanted to marry someone – for something to last is never a criteria for me, not in anything. I think I did think this one would last because he’s eight years older than me and I’m already old, so one of us will probably die first.

A recent photo of Lisa, her husband Bruno, and the couple’s six children from previous relationships.

Ah, okay – I must have taken a brief statement about a random French motorist theoretically becoming Husband Number 5 too literally.
What has felt different about each time you’ve gotten married and what, if anything, has felt the same?

I contemplated marrying the tiny shaman too, remember?

Um, I was a totally different person each time. I think I’m extra-delusional when I’m in love, so it really evaporates when I’m out of it. Can’t remember a thing.

Have you ever married?

I’ve been legally married for the last ten years as of July 5th but my wife and I celebrate another anniversary on November 17, 2012 which was our third day together and when we got on the same page about operating as a married couple.
While I’m also something of a memoirist, and an open book, my wife is incredibly private so I can’t write too much about the nuts and bolts of our marriage. I will say it is incredibly chaotic and absolutely stable in equal measures and we both feel reasonably certain it will last our natural lives.

This has been my only marriage and started relatively late when I was 32 years old.

So you’ve had an experience I haven’t yet, and the one I probably never can have: stability. Surety.

I’ve never written about anyone who asked me not to, either.
Anais Nin had a husband she never wrote a word about.

All of your marriages have been to men.
Have you had significant sexual and/or romantic relationships with women?

I mean, I’ve really tried.
Alas.

A photo Lisa took on her recent trip to Peru.

The only religion you were exposed to in your family was Protestantism from your grandmother right?
Do you think this made Judaism and Catholicism more attractive to you?
What specifically drew you to Catholicism?

Protestantism is a very unsexy religion. It’s also way too hierarchal for me.

Judaism was great for me because my life was too chaotic and I needed some rules but chafed against familiar ones, and Judaism didn’t make any sense to me. Following rules that don’t make sense is easier for the stubborn.

I fell into Catholicism by chance. I became engaged to a fellow who I think was just pretending to be Catholic… he pretended to be a lot of things, and I believed them all. Anyway, we had separate houses in separate cities, and he was with me on Easter and I surprised him by taking him to church, and it turns out I loved it!
The colors, the songs, the kind messages instead of the frightening ones of my youth. I was jealous of my fella getting a piece of the body of Christ on his tongue.
I always felt close to Jesus.

The last I read you still hadn’t completed your catechism and only took communion if instructed to do so by a priest.
Are you a “Catholic in good standing” yet?
Have you given Confession?

Sadly, no.
The church in Montmorency wouldn’t let me do catechism with them because my French isn’t good enough.

You strike me as something of a “natural outlaw” but both your forays into religion seem like they were characterized by strict adherence to the rules – why is this?
Would practicing a religion without strictly following rules be less appealing?

Buddhism is really what I align with most, and I find it the least rule-y. I float in and out of it as I please. It floats in and out of me as it pleases. We are friends.
So I suppose it’s less appealing in the obsessional way other religions have caught me, but I’ve also never burnt out on it.

What do the resurrection of Christ and the coming resurrection of the dead in the Nicene Creed mean to you?
Do you view them as literal resurrections or something else?

The resurrection does not intrigue me. What does intrigue is that Catholicism says I have to believe it literally and proclaim that, yet I do not believe it literally, yet I go ahead and believe it because they ask me too, and why not?

I am not attached to my beliefs. I let beliefs leave me all the time, but this was the first time I purposely gained one.

That’s almost exactly how I felt about the Nicene Creed during my 14 months of Catholicism!
Besides the Mass and Eucharist my favorite part of Catholicism was Lent. Have you observed Lent yet and, if so, what did you give up?

I’m a Scorpio. We hold a grudge. I gave up a grudge for Lent one year.
Turns out my grudge-partner did not give up hers, and is still talking smack about me to this day. Guess who’s getting the penthouse view in Heaven now.

Do you think you’ll be Catholic for the rest of your life?
Is the question of whether you will or not even important to you?

No, I don’t think I’ll stay Catholic.
And no to your second question, haha.

A Stercoranist is defined as somebody who believes the divine elements of the Eucharist are subject to the natural processes of digestion including eventual expulsion as waste. To be absolutely transparent this is not a belief any body within the Catholic Church has claimed to believe in but rather an insult rival factions accused each other of while arguing out the fine points of transubstantiation.
Still the idea seems worthy of consideration – do you think you’re a Stercoranist?

Never heard it before, but I like it!
This too shall pass, haha.

Handwritten notes taken by Lisa during a recent ayahuasca trip in Peru.

This question might seem pedantic but I’m fascinated with drugs and pharmacology: In the book, you mention how in hospital you refused Xanax due to addiction but have no issue with Valium.
Is there something about Xanax that makes it more addictive to you than other benzodiazepines? Or is it just past experience and familiarity?

Xanax IS more addictive than Valium.
It’s stronger, better, faster, power.

It’s certainly carved out a niche as a street drug that the “mother’s little helper” never did!
Maybe I’m the weirdo for thinking of all drugs in the same class as essentially the same but I also go out of my way to consult relative strength charts and adjust dosages accordingly.

The most literal way to take the “Leaving” in the title is you physically departing one place to go to another; but you do just as much leaving, if not more, mentally.
There is a single point where your relationship with Bruno seems to shift toward ending but even more striking is the way you are constantly leaving definitions of yourself. You will describe yourself in a certain metaphor, a trussless roof for example, then reject it a few paragraphs later.
Do you think there is a hierarchy between physically and mentally leaving for you – like does one of them enable or cause the other?
To what degree are both of them conscious choices?

It is not a conscious choice to be a leaving kind of person. I’m just built that way.
Positively, it’s because everything looks fine to me, and I’m awfully curious and want to experience it all, so it’s really a moving TOWARDS things rather than away from anything. Negatively maybe, I don’t care for anything hard. I don’t see a reason to work through problems or stay with someone or some way of life or some declaration just because at one time it felt right.

If it doesn’t feel right now, it’s not right.
All we have is this moment.
THIS one.

You mentioned not really believing in time. I don’t keep up with the new quantum physics but I’ve always thought of time as an inscrutable, higher dimensional but physical structure.
The easiest way to explain it is if you imagine a circle sliding from left to right across a rectangular plane and then you took all the discrete moments of this movement and stacked them on top of each other you’d get a slanted cylinder with time being the third dimension rising above the plane.
Anyway I think every moment we ever have or will experience is just part of an incredibly more complex but still physical object in an upper dimension we can’t see or experience because we live in three dimensional space. Like the circle and the slanted cylinder any tiny slice of it would be a moment in time as we experience it.
What do you think time is and what do you believe in regarding time?

I don’t think time is anything, of course! Like, I believe in what you describe, the sliding circle, but I believe in everything. I think everything can exist, or even does exist – I also think that has nothing to do with any order, and time is imposed order by humans who get uncomfortable and want to focus.

Some pages from Lisa’s very full passport!

I promised you I’d work the worm sex in…

I never worry about working anything in. I hate transitional sentences or paragraphs. That’s the worst part of working for high-paying magazines or sites. The demand for the transition.
Just say whatever you mean, man, when you mean it, how you mean it. We think irregularly, why shouldn’t we receive thoughts irregularly?

How about I ask the question?
Ossian, tell me how worms get pregnant please.

In the book your friend Simone mentions noticing worms having sex while at a silent Buddhist retreat and you mention thinking worms were hermaphrodites and could fertilize themselves by forming loops. You were half right – earthworms, and leeches actually, ARE hermaphrodites but their male and female sexual organs are too close together for self fertilization.
When they mate, two worms line up facing opposite directions so each organ can face its counterpart and then they impregnate each other. An earthworm approaches each sexual encounter both wanting to impregnate and be impregnated!
The female parts are under that turtleneck looking thing earthworms have called a clitellum.

Lisa and Bruno’s furry friends, relaxing on their bed in Montmorency, Paris.

Links

All photos provided by Lisa or sourced online.