Interview by Valeria Berghinz
Portrait by Paul Schwartz

VB Was there a specific reason that you decided to structure the novel around a quest narrative?

SK As a child, the first movie I loved was Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and I adored picaresque novels. It’s the ultimate comic form. As an adult, I’ve found that many of my favourite novels are picaresque, like Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) and Kafka’s Amerika (1927), so I was naturally drawn to writing Paradise Logic that way. I can’t say it was totally deliberate, but I do think there’s something appealing about playing with something formally ancient. It’s a nice juxtaposition against the more contemporary elements of the book. Quest narratives can move from funny to tragic very quickly, and that felt important with this project. 

VB The narrator, Reality, is very influenced by the internet, and is very aware of being young in a major city. How did you approach balancing  those epic, almost spiritual stakes with the everyday chaos of modern life?

SK It has great comic potential. To me, there was something funny about writing a book in the tradition of Don Quixote from the 17th century about a 23-year-old girl who has no hobbies and not even much of a job. 

VB The novel feels like it’s in constant conversation with contemporary visual arts. The smiley face page breaks, the recurring doodles – they reminded me of zine-making and computer graphics. How did this visual culture influence you in the process of writing this novel?  

SK I really don’t know anything about visual art – I’m not trying to be self-deprecating. I’m very savant-y about things that I like, and as a result am completely in the dark about things I am not clinically obsessed with. That being said, the reason you’re picking up on the book being like a zine is because I wrote it to be like one. I grew up making zines. Paradise Logic originated from a series of zines I made shortly after my first real breakup in New York. I hadn’t written a novel when I started writing, and every time I got freaked out, I just told myself to approach it the same way as making a zine. In terms of the smiley faces… I just thought they were fun. Also, Alexandra Kleeman includes them in You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015), which is one of my favourite novels from the last decade. 

VB I wanted to ask you about the influence of women’s magazines. So many of us grew up surrounded by them, and I know you have some professional experience in that world. How did that background shape the creation of Girlfriend Weekly, the fictional woman’s magazine that appears repeatedly in the novel?

SK I’m very interested in defamiliarising things we take for granted as women. I was a tween in the late 2000s, and consumed a lot of women’s magazines. Looking back, all of it was completely ridiculous. One of my main aesthetic interests is taking those strange but common aspects of womanhood and blowing them up to an absurd form. Working at magazines has given me an even deeper familiarity with how all of that works. 

VB Paradise Logic is such a fresh and boundary-pushing debut. What was it like to put something so bold and unconventional into the world as your first novel?

SK I wanted to write a book that I would want to read. I read very little contemporary fiction, so I don’t think I tried to write a book that wasn’t like other books. I wanted to write a book that was good, and it ended up being very different from a lot of what is popular. I do not like or enjoy most of what is popular. 

VB Sex plays an important role in the novel. For me, Reality embodies an intense female desire that feels very true to a lot of women’s experiences, but at the same time, many of the more erotic scenes were quite gutting. How did you approach writing about sex in the novel?

SK I love writing sex in fiction. People are so scared to do it, which is weird because almost everyone does it. I wanted the sex in Paradise Logic to be fairly shocking and disgusting, because sex can be pretty shocking and disgusting.  

VB I was also drawn to the other female characters, especially the strange, ethereal “Girlfriends”. There’s something stilted and a little threatening about how the female community operates in the novel. How did you think about writing that dynamic?

SK I feel very disillusioned by writing about women which proposes that if we remove the threat of men, we can all live in some sort of matriarchal utopia. In the novel, I wanted the women to be as dangerous as the men. I think that is more true to life. Women can enable terrible behaviour in one another, and everyone is complicit in everyone’s suffering. There is no feminist utopia in this novel because right now, I don’t think anything like that is possible. That’s one of the few realist elements in the book.

VB You’re already working on your next novel. What are your inspirations at this moment – whether they’re connected to that project, or just things you’re thinking about in life generally?

SK I’ve been reading a lot of theatre, like the plays of Sarah Kane, which are very inspiring to me. I also read the Anne Carson translation of Euripides, which was mindblowing. Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). The movies Safe (1995) by Todd Haynes and 3 Women (1977) by Robert Altman. .