It’s an association Gurba doesn’t shy away from in “Creep: Accusations and Confessions,” which includes that review alongside 10 other essays. By turns baldly direct and slyly entertaining, the collection explores the lives of those Gurba calls “creeps” — people who exploit or abuse others — and the culture that covers for and nurtures them. Some are public figures, like Joan Didion and Ernesto Miranda; others are people she knows personally, like an abusive ex whose violence increased alongside his resentment at the acclaim for “Mean.” Throughout, Gurba also turns that lens on herself, especially as she recalls a childhood full of morbid games and practical jokes.

Gurba and I spoke by video on Sept. 1. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did this collection come together?

A: The North Star that guided the project was thinking around a question that was often posed to me after the release of “Mean.” Sometimes this question was phrased like more of a comment: “The act of engaging in confessional art-making must have been a cathartic experience, right Myriam?” [laughs]

I was hearing this over and over and over, and there was so much confidence in the question. The question bothered me, and I wasn’t in a position where I could answer it. And so “Creep” is a sort of long answer, almost like a multigenerational answer, to that question. Ultimately, what I want for the reader to understand is that it’s important to refrain from making particular assumptions — in particular, the assumption that the creation of that artwork was inherently therapeutic in some way.

Q: The assumption that, because you had published some work about a topic, you were in some sense done with it — as opposed to still living through it?

A: Correct. That there are some type of — I suppose a suitable word might be “closure,” that some sort of door had been closed and that the creation of the work functioned as some sort of purge. Creating a work of art can open its own wounds, creating a work of art can be dangerous, creating a work of art can put a person’s life at risk.

There’s a sense that the work of art is a funeral for the trauma — and it’s like, no. It’s not a mortuary capstone to my suffering. The pain of trauma can be very volcanic, and you don’t necessarily know when a volcano is going to blow. I mean, ask the people in Pompeii, you know?

Q: There are a lot of jokes in “Creep,” and different kinds of jokes. Some of them are very affectionate; some of them are obscene or designed to be shocking. Does comedy come easily to you when you’re writing?

A: Yes, it does. And I think that is because historically, I have read a lot of my work onstage. The vulnerability that a writer can feel when they’re sharing their work like that, orally, is so profound and so overwhelming. In order to make a warm connection with the audience, I, like so many other writers, turn to humor. When you’re onstage and you share laughter and you know you have provoked it, it gives you that necessary confidence to keep moving forward. It sustains both the audience and the artist.

Q: On the page, do you think it functions differently?

A: It provides these beats that are a little bit jarring but then also invite the reader to breathe. Because laughter promotes breath. So even if I’m writing about horror and there’s a reader who has been holding her breath, now she’s being invited to move differently and to breathe differently and even to potentially hydrate herself, after laughter. [laughs] There’s definitely a rhythmic challenge being posed by humor.

Q: One thing I noticed in your critiques of writers like Alice Sebold and Maggie Nelson and, to a certain extent, Didion, is that you think of them as mostly humorless — or at least that their books on sexual violence tend to be that way. What makes you dislike or distrust writing that you find to be self-serious?

A: I move towards distrust when I encounter humorlessness because it strongly suggests that this humorless figure occupies this position in which they take themselves extremely seriously. It’s important for those of us who engage with the world critically to be able to do that, of course — to be able to engage with ourselves in the world in this very serious way — but to also be able to kaleidoscopically shift into the opposite stance. To be able to breathe, to be able to laugh, to be able to unburden ourselves — and to also be able to put our pain into a larger context, so we’re not looking at our pain through sort of a microcosmic lens, but that we situate our pain and our suffering within the macro world.

What I find more bothersome is when that becomes established as a storytelling habit. Of course, we’re going to have people who approach subjects such as sexual violence with almost reverential tones, right? We’re writing about a horrifying experience. But when that becomes a template, I think our storytelling habits ossify. And when those habits begin to ossify in ways that are pernicious, it’s important for us to start breaking those bones and resetting them.

Q: Have there been moments when you’ve had to consider: Does that joke work?

A: Absolutely. I am a person who enjoys occupying space at the crossroads. I like lurking at that intersection between humor and horror, although sometimes, when you’re in that liminal zone, you find yourself creeping into an area that you didn’t necessarily intend to set foot in. And so I have made missteps with my humor that I take responsibility for. But I do think that unless you go to that crossroads, it becomes difficult to learn where that line is. So again, I feel like the book is a challenge to the reader to come to that place where we’re trying to find the line and bump up against it, in terms of propriety, civility, etc.

Q: Are there specific examples that you’re thinking of, when you think about lessons you’ve learned?

A: I think if I were to go back and edit “Mean,” I would rewrite a lot of the humor. That’s one of humor’s characteristics, though: It doesn’t age well. [laughs] I think stylistically, that’s why so many people who aspire to “literary fiction” are advised to sanitize their work and minimize the humor. This style might curdle and rot.

Q: Are you embracing the current-ness of this book, or are you guarding against the possibility that some stuff in this book may feel different later and might curdle?

A: I think part of the fun is knowing that my vision is limited. I’m a limited person. All people have our limitations. It’s important, I think, for us to be our own critics. We should all constantly be reassessing our work. But that’s something that I do consider: What am I going to look back on, and what’s going to have brought me to cringe? Nobody can make me cringe like myself.

Q: One of the other elements of this book that I found fascinating — kind of engrossing, and kind of disturbing — is the different memories you’re describing where you or people around you are taking pleasure in other people’s pain or punishment. I wondered, how do you square these instincts — the desire to see people suffer, especially if we think they deserve it in some way — with your other moral or political commitments?

A: I have compassion for how we are socialized in the United States, especially for how we are socialized through copaganda. Copaganda socializes us to conflate punishment with justice. So when we are witnesses to punishment, we are invited to delude ourselves into thinking that we’re watching somebody experience their just deserts. I think that that’s where so much of that pleasure comes from.

And like I demonstrate through several essays, that voracious sadism begins very early. I have so many instances of children delighting in sadism, especially delighting in it when pain is visited upon adults.

Q: I want to ask about the “American Dirt” review, which I was sort of surprised to see in this collection. I don’t know why exactly — it feels different than the other essays. I wondered if you could talk me through your decision to include it.

A: Yeah, I went back and forth on that one, and ultimately decided to include it, because I came to see the book itself as less of a chronicle and more of an assemblage. I wanted to give the reader a sense of traveling through a scrapbook of sorts. The reader is immersing themselves in my world. They’re coming to know my family, because my family is incredibly present, both those who are living and those who have become ancestors. And I’m also exposing the reader to what I would call my literary genealogy. If I were to have excluded that essay, which is an undeniable part of my sort of … finding my literary place, it wouldn’t create a full picture of my literary world. And so I felt that I had to include it.

Q: This is a statement masked as a question, maybe. “American Dirt” is a book that you really, well, hated, right? Or strongly disliked. And yet your name is sort of linked with it.

A: Instead of saying that I strongly hated it, I would say that it really, really, really annoyed me. [laughs]

Q: So, a book you really did not like, and really annoyed you — but you bring the review into this book. It’s not just floating around on the internet. And I wondered what it’s like to embrace your name and your work being consistently tied to something that annoyed you.

A: Yeah. You know, I see that essay a bit differently. That is one interpretation: How strange it is that my name is now attached to this artifact that I don’t have much affection for. But at the same time, the essay that I wrote about it has become its own literary artifact, and it’s not necessarily one that I’m going to disavow or distance myself from. I still stand by many of the ideas expressed there. I do think that the ideas have been wildly misrepresented. So many ideas have been misattributed to me that I never wrote, that I don’t support.

But that essay was not written for just a general audience. That essay was really written for other Latines to give them a heads up that this was coming onto the scene. And in a sense, I’m kind of spilling tea, but just for us. And if other folks who don’t necessarily belong to the audience that I am addressing want to come and be readers, want to consume this essay, they’re invited to, but the party is not for them. So that’s how I sort of see that essay now: It was actually intended for an incredibly narrow audience. It was just for us to kind of snicker at what I take to be a really badly written book.

Myriam Gurba will give a reading, in conversation with Lupita Aquino, at Politics and Prose on Sunday.