I think the trigger for the letting go at the end was when she goes upstate, and she has this experience with nature. The climax of the book, the ending of the book, is really about refining the connection with nature, or looking for a connection with the animal self, something that is very forgotten in our era, especially when you live in a big city. When I was writing it, I had been living in New York for around two years. I was walking on the street one day in Greenwich Village and I stumbled; to keep myself from falling, I held onto a tree. I realized that I hadn’t touched a tree in months, if not in years. It was a very disturbing moment.
I love the narrator’s criticisms of America. One of my favorite lines is, “I was scared of American culture. When I say that, I don’t mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity.”
I knew you were going to pick that!
Then there’s the plot of selling Hermès bags to Americans because they are too vulgar to access them directly—the narrator can “sell them at a premium to the trashy and unworthy.” There’s a lot of side eyeing.
Yeah, that’s my outsider look into America. It’s the things that I saw that American friends didn’t necessarily see, because they were just so used to them. I landed in New York two days ago, and driving from Newark into the city, there are huge billboards, one after the other, and it’s all for plastic surgery and lawyers. Crazy! I had a tough time, culturally, living here in New York, and in the end I left for that reason. There was no click. Probably to the great disappointment of generations of my family who tried to move here, or wanted to move here…
The reality of Palestine adds a devastating political layer. There’s this part where the narrator fights with this guy she’s seeing, Trenchcoat, and he says, why don’t you go back to where you came from? And there’s nowhere to go, which is upsetting to her, and is also upsetting for the reader. Her frustrations with New York can’t lead back towards any path tied to her roots. Did that political angle feel urgent to you?
That came in much later stages. I started to see connections, I started to understand my own work, and only then did I understand: Oh, OK, this is a person who is dispossessed. I didn’t know that at first. I don’t even know if I know that I’m a dispossessed person—I’m not sure I would even admit that.
My background and Palestine kept interfering into the book. There was a moment in the editing where I was like, “I could just remove Palestine from this entire book; it wouldn’t cut so much out.” You know, not have to pay my dues. But it was impossible. It was such a backbone of the book that it would not exist without it.
While fundraising for a gala for Palestine that she’s going to, the narrator says she resists the idea of belonging to a people, even though she’s also rejecting her American surroundings.
She says: “I don’t want to be with similar people… if you rub many knotted strings together, they don’t solve into a beautiful braid, they just become a big ugly mess.”
Exactly. So I’m curious about that, because there isn’t a sense of a possible alternative.
She’s not in the homeland, and she also doesn’t fit in the diaspora. That’s something that is a very true reflection of my own personal condition. It’s not just a political non-belonging. I was also trying to express an individual feeling of non-belonging, which is something I have. I also feel like I don’t belong anywhere, nobody understands me, I’m a freak, you know? And that’s not necessarily political—it’s also just a very human experience.
Can we talk about the “you” that she addresses throughout the book? It makes the reader wonder about the dimensions of what’s going on.
It was also unclear to me when I was writing it, who this person was. When I got to the end, I figured it out. But I don’t want to say who it is; it’s a secret I keep to myself. There’s a lot of secrets in the book. Some I don’t even know the answers to. But some I keep.
Do you have a physical copy of the book?
Yes.
Did you find the coin?
Oh wait—is that what’s at the bottom of each page? I was curious about these little markings.
It was a surprise from my publisher. If you do this: [flick through the pages, creating a flip-book image of a moving coin].
Oh my god, I love that.
I was proofreading the pages and I was like… there’s a smudge on every page, it’s so strange, I don’t know why!
That’s such a wonderful nod to the title.
Yeah—it adds to the mystery.
Speaking of mystery, can we talk about Trenchcoat? I love the description that he looks like someone who’s never sat at a computer.
He is hard to pinpoint. We don’t know where he’s from, we don’t know where he sleeps, really, we don’t know exactly who he is. During the editorial process, there was pressure to define him more, but I kept resisting. It connected to what he believes in, which is total reinvention. He believes that it doesn’t matter what your actual conditions are; what matters is how you act and how you feel.
There’s the scene where they go to the cafe, and he pretends to be smoking a cigar, and he doesn’t have enough money to actually smoke a cigar, he’s just holding it every time he’s at this cafe. His worldview is that the facts don’t matter. It’s something that you come across a lot in the city: people who are in the process of reinvention. Immigrants too are the process of reinvention.
But what happens to the narrator is that she understands that it’s not a possibility for her.
There’s a memorable line that seemed like foreshadowing: “I wondered if it was true what I had told him, that I didn’t need to pretend. Maybe pretense was all there was, fashion is pretense, education is pretense. Personality too is a form of internalized pretense.” The participation in pretense is social, and then when you don’t participate, it creates mayhem.
I think that’s the last line I wrote in the book. It’s in the middle, but I wrote it just before publication.
I think it’s the thesis of the book. It’s what the book is really about. The next line is “I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary in nature, untamed and unconditioned.” That’s the ending of the book, really.
The Paris interlude—and the scheming with Trenchcoat there—is fun, because you include these character studies of the people who are thirsty for luxury. Did you go to an Hermès store in Paris?
I did—and I went to see some Eastern European guys behind the Champs Elysée, who gave me 200 euros to buy a bag there. They even gave me a Chanel bag to carry when I walked into the store—so ridiculous. Of course I failed miserably, but it was fun. I did the research.
Where’d the Birkin scheme ultimately come from?
Well, it allowed me to develop the thesis of the book. And it was just really fun to write…I could go to a different setting, to a city that I love. I could write about fashion, which I love. I would think of the character looking at beautiful clothes online. It also served the function of creating a little bit of space and pleasure: They go away for Christmas, they come back 40 pages later. In terms of novel structure, it gets through the difficult part of the middle. It’s like a vacation inside the book.
