“Bad fellows have done bad things to your advice columnist,” E. Jean Carroll writes early on in What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal (St. Martin’s), her new book that functions as a memoir by way of an old-fashioned American road trip. As she traverses America interviewing strangers for the titular answer, she recalls a series of unpleasant interactions with men, which she catalogues in the “Most Hideous Men of My Life List.” In the book she alleges that Donald Trump violently assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room about 23 years ago.

For the past 26 years, Carroll has served as a columnist for Elle magazine (where I was her colleague for about four and a half years) and, she says, most of her answers to all manner of questions are variations on a theme: Get rid of him. A husband holds petty grudges? If he doesn’t shape up, “chuck him in the clink.” A male employee is sending inappropriate emails? Turn him over to H.R. She came up with a plan to reduce all the world’s men to their composite elements—hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, etc.—“put those elements to better use,” and take the $170 million or so to buy, she says, 11 or 12 Birkin bags. Should I mention Carroll is a satirist?

Her writing also includes the 1993 biography Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, a dive into the world of NBA groupies for Esquire, and a piece for Spin that charts a string of murders and accidental deaths within a group of cheerleaders and athletes in a small New York town. (A story that at least 15 film companies have tried to option—she’s turned them down; the central figure is her niece.) The “E” in “E. Jean” stands for Elizabeth, a name she gave herself after growing up as Betty Jean. She lives in a cabin she calls “the Mouse House,” surrounded by trees with trunks she’s painted a striking shade of pale blue. When she embarks on her road trip, in a Prius named Miss Bingley, she leaves behind her cat, Vagina T. Fireball, but takes her now-departed standard poodle, Lewis Carroll, whose pompadour was also dyed blue.

Carroll’s 21 hideous men include three who attempted to or succeeded in throwing her to the ground and molesting her, all before she turned 15. They also include Trump, who she says forcibly penetrated her in a dressing room at Bergdorf; Les Moonves, who she says groped her following an interview for Esquire (both Trump and Moonves have denied her accusations); and Roger Ailes, a former friend who joined the list when the allegations of sexual harassment broke in 2016. Her second husband, John Johnson, who allegedly strangled her—“J.J. has apologized four or five times for his past behavior,” she writes—is on the list. (Johnson declined to comment when reached by the New York Times.) In Arkansas a man drives by in a truck and asks if she is fucking her dog. He’s on the list too.

No reader of Carroll’s column will be surprised to find that such violent moments are interspersed with huge helpings of levity. She recalls an interview with Fran Lebowitz: “I asked if a woman’s purpose in life was to find the perfect man. Fran said no. A woman’s quest in life should be to find the perfect apartment.” At the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, one can pay $100 to have a plaque put up in honor of a woman, a copy of which is then sent to that woman. Carroll sends one to Melania Trump that reads: “For Idiocies Suffered as a Result of Being Donald Trump’s First Lady.”

Last week, New York ran a cover excerpt of What Do We Need Men For?, breaking the allegation against Trump. The president first responded in a written statement that read, in part, “I’ve never met this person in my life.” (A circa-1987 photograph is included in the article and Carroll’s book, in which Carroll, her then-husband Johnson, Trump, and his then-wife Ivana appear to be in conversation.) He has since told the Hill, “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened.” Carroll writes that she told two of her friends about what she calls the “fight” soon after it happened. (They corroborated her story in a Times article published Thursday.) Here, in an interview with Vanity Fair, she talks about her book, hideous men, and the past week in her life.

Vanity Fair: Who have been your sources of advice over the years?

E. Jean Carroll: Henry David Thoreau, the great P.G. Wodehouse, Jane Austen. Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius—seriously, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Henry David Thoreau, that’s the block. P.G. Wodehouse because nothing gets Bertie Wooster down. And that is it. I go to my friends. Each one has a category. [Lisa] Birnbach gives me career advice, and Carol Martin gives me personal advice. I went to Robbie [Myers], the past editor of Elle magazine. Robbie never steered me wrong.

Tell me about Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach going public as the two women you talked to.

It was very difficult in this world, where it’s so divided, to convince two of my very closest friends. And they always say, “Anything you want, E. Jean, we will do to support you. Anything.” But to actually ask them to go on the record was a step that neither of them wanted to take. It took Megan Twohey of the Times, Miss Big Foot Pulitzer, who is one of the most wonderful people who ever walked or crawled the earth. It took her five days. And finally Lisa Birnbach called her best friend. I think I’m her best friend, but she called probably her real best friend, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jamie Lee said, “Why are you hesitating? What’s the big deal? Speak on the record. That’s it.” After talking with her family, and after talking with her partner, and after talking with everybody she could talk to.

You write in the book that the original proposal didn’t include your personal experiences, which include the accusations. Was there anybody you consulted as you shifted it into what it became?

No, no. Reading letters for 26 years from women, it made no difference whether it was about their careers, or their kids, or their love lives, or their outfits, or their weight, or their orgasm—it didn’t matter. There comes a line in almost every single letter where the cause of the woman’s problem is revealed, and that cause is men. And so year after year, all I do is sit there and say, “Get rid of him. Get rid of him. Get rid of him. Get rid of him.”

I ran out of ways to say, “Get rid of him.” So I just figured out one day, let’s just get rid of the buggers. And so I came up with a plan for doing away with the male sex. But I had to find out, before we get rid of them forever, do we need them for anything? So I hit the road. Only went to towns named after women, only ate in cafes named after women, only wore clothes designed by women, fed my dog Rachael Ray dog food. We took it to the extreme. And then I get out of the car in the town named after a woman and ask people, “What do we need men for?” And boy, the answers were just juicy. I had the best book in the world. And then of course, all hell broke loose when Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor dropped the Harvey Weinstein bomb in the New York Times. Remember how the country rose up? The women? We all knew guys like this.

So then you decided that you were going to include your own personal stories about your own hideous men, which is such an interesting play on David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

He turns out to be a hideous man. One of our favorite writers, one of the great writers. He tried to throw her from a car. He got a gun and was going to shoot her boyfriend or her ex-husband. He threw a table at her. We're talking about Mary Karr, who has stated this herself in her Twitter. Our god, David Foster Wallace.

Does that change how you feel about his writing?

No, I still read him. It’s the art for me.

In the last week you have gone from living a pretty private life to being very much in the public eye. What has that been like?

Fabulous. Buoyant. It’s almost merry because of the support when I walk down the streets. It is incredibly heartwarming. I’ve been getting messages. I don’t read Twitter now. I’ve been off it, which is a miracle because I always would check Twitter, but I’m staying off. Many times [strangers on the street] don’t know what to say and they grip my arm, or they burst into tears, or they say, “I had a story. I couldn’t tell it. Thank you.” A group of men in their 20s, as I walked by, gave me the thumbs-up. As I was talking to somebody on the phone yesterday, a man just stood in front of me bowing as I talked on the phone. It was amazing. It was like he was standing in front of Queen Elizabeth.

You did hear that Trump said, “She’s not my type.” What was your reaction to that?

I was thrilled. As I said in the book and in the New York magazine piece, one of the reasons I did not come forward is that I thought it was going to help him. It’s too soon to see how it’s going to play. But he got a lot of people on his side just by saying that.

You are not calling the attack rape. You’re calling it a fight. You’ve already explained in depth why you’re doing this: because you don’t want to identify as a victim and because you think that there are other people who suffer more violent, prolonged abuse. Does it bother you when other people call it a rape?

That’s their word. As an advice columnist I have no compunction in telling a young woman, “Honey, you were raped. You better go to the police. Listen to Auntie E. That’s a crime. He’s a criminal.” I say that. I remember there was a letter from a woman who—either she was married or he was her five-year-long boyfriend. He was a cartoonist, and he videotaped them having sex without her consent. I said, “That is a crime. Report and call the prosecutor. Get the police.” I was like, “All of it. Get the police in the house. Take the computer.” So of course, I’m full of baloney. I can see it with other people, but I’m not going to put it on myself.

While talking to Anderson Cooper, you said that people associate the word “rape” with sexiness. You got cut off in that interview. Can you explain your thought behind that?

You know, somebody explained it much better than me. Joy Behar explained it. She went on The View and got into an argument and she was defending my vision of the word “rape” being filled with sexual imagery. And fantasy connotations. She said everyone here has seen Gone With the Wind. She said, you know when Rhett Butler grabs Scarlett O’Hara and picks her up and carries her up the stairs? She’s fighting him. She is slugging his chest, and he is going to take her and he’s going to throw her down. They cut to a scene of her in bed as happy and rosy, and fulfilled as any woman. And many women have this fantasy. Nora Ephron. She’s written about it. Having her clothes ripped off by a group of men. The only way she changed that fantasy was she was wearing different outfits. It is a female and a male fantasy.

In the recording obtained by the Washington Post of Donald Trump talking to Billy Bush on an Access Hollywood tour bus, he describes taking a woman furniture shopping and then says he “moved on her like a bitch.” He also says that when you’re famous, as he is, you can “grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” What was your reaction when you heard that recording?

My memory has now been corrected. I was running around the last three or four days saying I was excited and thrilled to hear it. That’s how I remember feeling. My sister corrected me. My mother was on her deathbed when that tape came out. I must’ve heard it after because we were with my mother who was dying. I don’t think we had a TV on and I don’t think I saw it. I think I saw it later when I could be thrilled. I had to really question how I remember that. I remember being thrilled.

I had to have seen it before the election because I thought, This is it. Everybody said, “This is it. It’s over.” I had lunch with George McGovern when Bill Clinton was running for president. He said, “What do you think of the bimbo eruption?” I said, “What do you think of the bimbo eruption?” That was the term. He said, “Oh, it’s helping him.” I think all the women coming forward and the grabbing audio helped [Trump] get over that hump. I really do.

In some parts of your book, certain memories of men and boys trigger other memories, things you haven’t thought of in years. Other women have shared similar experiences through #MeToo. What advice would you give to a woman who is just now surfacing old memories of past abuses?

I’m the wrong person to ask that. Move on. You cannot change what happened. You cannot change. The only thing you can do is accept that it happened and move on. If you can’t, find the funny thing in it so you can laugh at least a little bit. Because if you’re not laughing, then these days you’re crying. If you’re crying, the load—a burden of horrible feelings will just get stronger. If you laugh, you can really…well, women have laughed forever about this stuff. This is what we do. You and I laugh. We’re laughing right now. You got a big smile on your face because it’s making you happy to think how you’ve moved on, right?

It’s also, I think, a kind of protective reaction.

Of course it protects you. It lifts your spirits. That is my advice. Hardly anybody can follow it unless you’re demented. It works for me.

What helped you move on? What are the things that make you happy, that help you move on from these things?

I’m way older than you. I’m a member of the silent generation, remember. World War II was going on when I was born. Whoa. I speak for many women my age. Chin up. Move on. Here I come. Watch out and laugh. That’s how we do things. We don’t yammer about it. I was a cheerleader in my column. All I do is tell people to get up. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

My whole object in life is to be merry. Really. That is my object. In order to do that, you cannot dwell on the past. It is so over, the past. It’s so over. Although, whoever said the thing about the past is it’s not past? For me it is past. It is past. That’s the secret.

In the book you call yourself a hideous woman.

Oh. I was bad, bad.

Because you flashed a professor.

He was the most popular professor on campus. So adorable. He went on to Washington to become quite a big deal. He was the golden boy. He was in Ballantine Hall lecturing. Ballantine Hall is the largest auditorium campus at the time. I had the temerity to walk on the stage in a trench coat and dark glasses, open my trench coat wearing a bright yellow bikini, and flash that man four, five, six seconds. He could barely stand up. Now, if a man did that today to a female professor, I hope that man would be in jail. So I put myself on the hideous list. He married a friend of mine. I was Miss Indiana University and I crowned the next Miss Indiana University, who he married.

Did you feel guilty looking back on that later?

No. I laugh my ass off about that. My friend emailed me about it. It was great.

You also confessed to sexually harassing Roger Ailes while you had a show on his cable channel America’s Talking. He is also on your list of hideous men, but was once a friend.

Oh, I did it. Every day I had a chance. I call him the pearl of his sex. Right on the air. I roll up my trouser legs. I would wait for the camera to come over. Then I would slowly pull up the right and then the left trouser leg. It would say Roger Ailes. I would say, “He’s my future husband.” It never stopped. I’d ask him to twirl for me. I adored him.

What makes a hideous woman, as opposed to a hideous man, or is there no difference?

No, I don’t think there’s a difference. If you’re a hideous woman, you’re a hideous woman. What I did was wrong. Hideous women are hideous. [Ailes] of course ruined America. Me asking him to show me his muscles is not going to ruin America. He actually managed to do that. He picked the next president. People who don’t realize it, it was Roger Ailes who put Donald Trump in the White House. [People] are not aware.

Who is on your list of not-hideous men?

I have a lovely list. They’re called honorary women. I put my dear friends on there and I put my editors from Esquire on there. I put my neighbors who helped me get out of the snow on there. I put my lifelong friends on there. I put an ex-husband on there, Stephen W. Byers. These are the men who will not be gathered up when we get rid of them. These men are honorary women. They get a pass. I wanted to make it clear that there are really great guys out there.

You write about your somewhat complicated friendship with Hunter S. Thompson.

Hunter and I were discussing something, I can’t remember. And it turned into…He’s huge, he’s like a tree, he’s just huge and contrary to popular belief. And he was very strong and very able and very athletic. Yes, one leg was longer than the other and he limped. And he had a gun on every surface of the house. When you walk into Hunter’s house, it feels like a utility room. On the dryer or counter of some sort, he had a hypodermic needle that was two feet long.

I was working on the biography, taping every minute. And then when he told me not to tape, then I would sneak off and write notes. And we got into an argument about something, I can’t remember. We were disagreeing and I think I pushed him back, and then he pushed me back, and then I pushed him back, and then I thought, Ooh, I’d better get out of here. So I go to the phone and I try to dial “T-A-X-I.” In Aspen that’s what you dial. And he put his finger on it. I tried it again. “T-A”…I was getting pretty upset by this time because Hunter, you don’t want to mess around with Hunter.

Were you scared?

No. I was pushing him. I was a little hysterical. I dialed a third or fourth time and the person, a very nice lady, picked up and she said, “Aspen Taxi,” or whatever taxi. I said, “Help!” She said, “Are you at Hunter’s?” Way before IDs. She knew her stuff, that lady.

He’s not a hideous man. He lives in a state of grace. He’s the one and only Hunter Thompson. He did great things, political writing. He really helped the city with what was what and cut right through the malarkey, and he would drive at 120 miles per hour in the mountains in the dark with the headlights off. He lived in a state of grace beyond anything I’d ever seen. He was like Napoleon. Napoleon never believed that the bullet had been made that was going to kill him. He was right.

He would go 80 miles an hour past the state cop place with the lights on, with a snow cone in his lap, which was a Chivas Regal over ice, smoking grass with his cocaine, with his grinder right there, and it was like throwing red meat to the wolves. It was like he was this big in Colorado where everybody loved him.

So: What do we need men for?

We like them. We even love them. We just don’t need them to run everything. Also we need to put them in a special place and retrain them.

We’re just now starting to make a little bit of difference. In the 1800s we started making strides. It feels like baby steps. But it’s enormous. On the timeline of history, what’s happened in the last 200 years has been a cultural upheaval. We’re just in the middle of it and we just want it faster and faster. But anyone who reads three pages of history realizes we’re really…You want to be alive right now because it’s all happening.

Who’s your 2020 candidate?

Elizabeth Warren. That’s my candidate. She’s brave. She took on Wall Street. She absolutely believes in the middle class. And she has plans for health care, for educating the children. She feels their pain and she’s just so bright. She just feels to me unstoppable. She’s just the best candidate and the smartest and will do the best for the country. She speaks in complete sentences. She’s like Barack Obama in that way. She’s got a plan.

Has the past week changed any of your plans for the future, short or long term, in any way?

No. I also don’t think about it. But it’s probably affected me in ways we’ll never know. I mean, Mitt Romney has come out and asked, “let’s look into this.” Mitt Romney. So that right there…. I had no expectations. None. Zero. I didn’t think about it. I’m still not thinking about it. I’m in the middle of it and I’m not thinking about it. I’m going with the flow.

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