The text is peppered with antiquated words—like “forsooth,” “bornth”—why this weirdly anachronistic vocabulary?
I don’t know. I just like reading stuff like that, honestly. I was really playing a lot with sentence acoustics, how the unit of the sentence can sing. For me, it was just like, How can I pimp this out and make it as weird as possible?
In terms of other formal choices, there are all-caps sentence interludes, smiley faces to demarcate paragraphs, line drawings, and maps. Did you include these as you were writing the text?
My background creatively is making zines, which is something that comes up a lot in the book. Every time I felt frustrated writing, I was like, You need to stop thinking about this as a novel and start thinking about this as something that you would have made as a zine—which, for me, has always been doodling and being kind of random. Doing it made me feel less freaked out by the fact that I was writing a novel.
What kinds of zines did you make?
I still do it. When I was a teenager, I was making zines with girls on Tumblr that were really bad in a charming way. I just got girls on Tumblr to make comics. Then, when I was in college, they became more text-based. I remember when I was 19, I read Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, which is a pretty stream-of-conscious novel, and there’s a lot of drawing in it. I was going through a complete Kathy Acker era when I was 19, 20 years old. Now, the ones that I do are mostly typeface. They’re really experimental. I feel I’m making an art project where the medium I’m using happens to be text.
At the beginning of the book, Reality is couched within this long biblical lineage leading up to her existence. At the end, “paradise” is defined as the seats far away from the main stage, creating a wider perspective. Why these macro framing devices?
It’s just really fun to be super dramatic. I love the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and that’s kind of what happens at the beginning, right? I think really intentional melodrama is incredibly funny. That’s the main reason I did that. Just because this is some random girl doesn’t mean that her life isn’t full of meaning and is incredibly serious and funny and tragic. The stuff at the end was writing about what it is like to be a young woman in your early 20s, where you’re trying to make your life as shitty as possible because you think it makes you interesting.
You mix in quite a bit of French. How did you balance this idea of Reality’s intellectual limitations with your own more elevated expressions?
I liked the idea of presenting Reality as a character that at first you might think is a complete moron but then, over time, hopefully, you kind of realize that she’s actually smart, and is presenting herself in a certain way because she thinks it seems hot. Like, Oh, this is somebody who is actually quite well educated and is well read, and speaks another language—but is playing dumb the whole time. It feels like something that many women in their early 20s do, trying to impress men by playing down their intelligence. If there’s any part of this book that is autobiographical, it’s just me skewering my own naiveté and willingness to be kind of dumb for men.
Did you have an epiphany that allowed you to supersede that?
Just getting older.
Because this is your first novel, and people might not have context for your ironic writing style, are you worried that the humor is going to be lost on some people?
I just don’t really care. I don’t write to make things more accessible for people. That’s not what I want out of literature. I love playing with hyperspecificity in fiction, and making things deliberately confusing for people. I don’t regret any of it. I hope that people like my book, but I don’t think that you have to write a book that everyone likes. People should not be looking for books as something that is going to entertain them like TV. I feel morally opposed to writing a book like that.
Although it’s a separate person’s job to execute this, I was wondering if you had any input on the cover.
I did not pick this cover; I did not find the image. When I got asked what I wanted for my cover, I sent a completely insane three-page design brief. It’s like my personal manifesto for what I think book covers should look like. I’m very opinionated about these things. I didn’t hear from anyone for three months, and then found out who the art director was: Martha Kennedy, a veteran book cover designer. She’s an older woman, she’s been doing this for her entire career.
What was in your manifesto?
I was just, like, no colorful blobs—I don’t want this to look like a millennial book. It needs to have an image. I became obsessed with this erotic Yugoslavian computer magazine from the ’90s, and sent a lot of reference images that were like really sexy girls on top of big computers with big web 1.0 block text on the cover.
…How did you come across that?
I don’t know. I’m interested in those kinds of things and, like, they find me.
Gary Shteyngart blurbed your book and he was one of your MFA teachers. Was he an important resource or guide in terms of humor writing?
I took a humor writing class with him, and it was great; we read Pale Fire. I’m sure just listening to him talk about satire was influential on the book. Gary is an incredibly wonderful person. I became friendly with him because we both went to Oberlin, which is a really specific experience. I got to know him just through mutual shared Oberlin brain damage.
Speaking of college and friendship, the way things play out between Reality and her college friends/roommates sour. Was friendship a counterpoint to a sexual relationship or was that incidental?
I think it was maybe a bit incidental. But I feel I want to just show that Reality acts so crazy all the time, but is somebody who is also profoundly normal, and has normal friends. And I think the Soo-jin character is really important in terms of grounding Reality. I wanted her to have a real female friendship, and show readers Reality is not giving us a totally trustworthy version of herself; like, here’s somebody who knew her when she was younger and was maybe different.
Do you think someone in their 20s, who’s still influenced by problematic ideas of what it means to be a young woman, will receive this differently than someone who’s older?
I’m sure that will happen, because I think that if you are socialized female, your relationship with being a woman is always in flux. I’m really excited to hear what younger people think about my book.
Most men in the book speak disparagingly about Reality. Do you think that men, as readers, will grasp the humor?
I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I have no idea. Actually, most of my readers on this book were men. My core little writing group from Columbia was a super close female friend and then three guys. They all thought that the way that I was skewering them was funny, but if other people don’t get it, that’s fine. It’s such an absurd book that I don’t think anyone would really take any of it that personally. Also, I think that it’s important to skewer men, because men a lot of the time are dangerous and bad. But I also am friends with a lot of men and am in a heterosexual relationship, so.
