It’s 3am, the night before the De Vere Ball. I’m tossing and turning in my bed, tormented by a deep philosophical question—who do I have to fuck to get Elon to tweet about Oxfordianism? I was never a party girl. In college, my social calendar was built around the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and our performances of 19th century operettas in Rhode Island’s premiere senior centers. So imagine my surprise to find myself throwing a party hotly anticipated by Dimes Square’s crème de la crème,
MM) First thing that jumped out at me was Laura and the protagonist, their back and forth, their almost twin-like dyad reminding me of Ágota Kristóf’s Notebook Trilogy but of course Laura is a girl and this creates a difference the book explores magnificently. Was that always the plan, to have Laura maybe as a proxy for the protagonist, able to go where he sometimes can’t such as the first scene — and was that first scene always conceived of like that?
When Manny approached me about “doing an interview” for Donald Goines I was clear with him that I was only interested in interviewing him about Goines. “But, I mean, you wrote it,” Manuel said and I said, “Yes. But you agreed to publish it.”
Manuel relented and agreed to an interview that met my own idiot guidelines. I asked that he join me on Discord where we could just talk about my book and I could ask him questions and he could maybe ask me questions and we could “see where it goes.”
MM) Why did you choose to name your characters Kendall Jenner and Lil Peep?
OKS: It’s the other way around: the novella began with Kendall. I’ve never watched the Kardashians, and don’t care what she’s like as a person, but I was obsessed with her images. Her face is so banal that it suggests nothing; its beauty is like a void. You can’t “read” into it.