When Sophie Kemp is writing a book, there’s a point at which it becomes more like doing maths. “There’s an inherent logic problem in taking something like a document and engineering control into it,” she tells me over Zoom. “That’s a really difficult thing to do, especially when the first draft of your book is an insane free-write.”
It’s hard to imagine a different sort of origin for Paradise Logic, an experimental quest narrative set in a grimy, bohemian Brooklyn. Propulsive, hilarious and strangely erotic, the novel unfolds in the key of a campy odyssey, following protagonist Reality Kahn as she turns her attention toward finding a romantic partner. After all, the book’s narrator states, “the main function of a boyfriend is to unlock the goodness inside of the soul”.
Reality, a 23-year-old zine maker and part-time waterpark commercial actress, who drinks “vodka with egg” and claims to not “have many needs”, is a caricature who nevertheless seems to express something essential about contemporary womanhood, or at least what emerges when one tries to locate their identity in the desires of another. “To be a girlfriend,” Reality asserts near the end of chapter six, “an amazing thing to do is have your past be a void.”
The comedy of Paradise Logic stems from the absurdity in the social imperative to find love, revelling in the humiliation rituals of relationships alongside other ecstatic depictions of modern life. If the book is a critique, Kemp says, it primarily takes aim at “the kind of crazy shit women do to make men like them”. Interspersing crude maps and illustrations between interludes in French and anachronisms with a screwball sensibility, there’s more than a lot at play in Paradise Logic. Here, Kemp talks us through the influences connected to her effervescent new novel, interacting with themes like bimbo feminism and autofiction; her launch party outfits and favourite picaresques.
You’ve said that the book illustrates a certain ‘thing that happens to women’ in a hyper-stylised way. Can you elaborate on what it’s really about?
Sophie Kemp: I think it’s about how women have a lot of agency in bad relationships, which is kind of tricky. When you are a really young woman, and you’re desperate for attention, you can kind of allow yourself to fall in love with anyone. That’s a really scary thing that happens all the time. It happened to me when I was young, and I had a lot of agency in it.
You told Jezebel that Paradise Logic started as ‘shitty autofiction’ but I know you’ve also rejected the label as ‘slander’. It does seem a bit reductive in terms of describing what you’re doing here.
Sophie Kemp: I really love autofiction. I love Ben Lerner, I love Sheila Heti, I tolerate Knausgård. But when I started writing this book, I wasn’t really even a writer yet. I hadn’t figured out my voice. Also, there’s a talking snake in my book. It’s not rooted in lowercase ‘reality’ at all. I’m sure that men also get asked about if their writing is autofiction, but I think if a woman writes about sex, people really want to know if it’s about sex she’s actually had.
I know some primary influences on the text, especially its tone, are Kathy Acker and Donald Barthelme. Could you tell me more about those?
Sophie Kemp: I love Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote a lot, which is a feminist quest narrative. There’s not a specific Donald Barthelme thing, I just mean that tonally I really, really love his short fiction. I was also really inspired by the Jean-Luc Godard movie Pierrot le Fou. I feel like the Anna Karina character was the original Reality prototype, because everyone treats her as really dumb, she’s super violent, has a ton of guns, and she’s really hot. Then there’s also Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which is about being the best butler of all time.
I’m sure that men also get asked about if their writing is autofiction, but I think if a woman writes about sex, people really want to know if it’s about sex she’s actually had
You satirise bad-faith women’s media in your fiction through faux publications like Girlfriend Weekly and, who could forget, the LadieZdietbible. How do you remember your own magazine years?
Sophie Kemp: I think that women’s media is really weird, but I have always felt a certain level of alienation from ‘girl stuff’. I had an interesting time working in magazines. I loved working at Vogue: I was Sally Singer’s assistant, but she treated me like a colleague and really respected me. I look back on that period very fondly. After that, I was at GARAGE, which doesn’t exist anymore. That one I loved all my colleagues but really hated [the job], because I was on deadline constantly and forced to write blog posts about stuff I didn’t care about. When I was doing those jobs, I felt like a Martian.
Coming of age in the 00s and early 2010s, I grew up reading these magazines for teenage girls where they would just tell you what food to eat to be skinny, or like, how to dress to look hot for boys. I’m really glad to feel like that era has long passed. But having been exposed to all that toxic media as a young person was super influential to me creatively. I’m really interested in aestheticising my experiences of what it was like to be a young woman, and I think it’s a really exciting thing to write about because it is so absurd.
How do you feel about bimbo feminism as a label for Paradise Logic?
Sophie Kemp: I think that’s a really cool reading. Because Reality is incredibly smart and is concealing her intelligence from people all the time. She’s definitely someone who’s actually very aware of what’s going on.
I’ve really been enjoying the character-informed YouTube playlist you compiled alongside your interview with Deep Voices. It starts with that legendary Ann-Margret clip, which is also directly referenced in the book. What about that performance reads as Reality-esque to you?
Sophie Kemp: I watched that clip for the first time when I was a teenager, and I just remember feeling so overwhelmed by it. It was one of the craziest things I had ever seen: this woman wearing this bright yellow dress, screaming her head off in front of this extremely blue backdrop, produced a feeling in me that was deeply unsettling. It felt really hyper-feminised in a way that I still can’t totally put my finger on. That feels very Reality to me, that way of performing being a girl that is upsetting and self-destructive.
Do say more about the ‘completely psychotic three-page design brief’ you sent Simon & Schuster when you were workshopping covers. I know the 80s-era computer magazine Računari was one part of it, but how did you come across those images?
Sophie Kemp: My design brief had a lot of different things in it. There were album covers from punk records, advertising copy; examples of Web 1.0 typeface that I thought were cool. And then of course there’s the Yugoslavian computer magazine that I’m obsessed with. I kind of just sourced all that myself just by being somebody who has quite a specific relationship with the internet. I don’t like to identify as someone who’s very online, but I also am.
When you are a really young woman, and you’re sort of desperate for attention, you can kind of allow yourself to fall in love with anyone
A number of critics have placed the book in the picaresque tradition. What are some of your favourite works in the genre?
Sophie Kemp: Picaresque is kind of the ideal comic form for me. I feel like the two big ones that come to mind are Monty Python and The Holy Grail and Kafka’s America, which is basically about a little boy who gets raped by his babysitter, is told that it’s his fault and is forced to go to America where he just gets abused by various street urchins. It’s an incredible comic novel and it’s also deeply upsetting, obviously.
Last question: can you paint me a picture from your launch party?
Sophie Kemp: I had two launch parties, which was really fun. The first one was on the Lower East Side at a new bar called Funny Bar. I have these friends who run a literary magazine called Forever: they’re really well-connected, so we didn’t have to pay the bar anything to host it. It was a lot of fun, that one was more of a party vibe. I ate a steak there right before it started, and I was wearing this really tiny, slutty, I think early ‘90s Nicole Miller dress that I found at a thrift store in Paris. The second one was less of a rager: my parents and, like, all the other adults in my life were there and that was at Public Records which is a club in Gowanus. I had been looking at antique wedding dresses on Etsy and I found a shop owner whose name was like ‘Holly Hobbins’ but with five ‘z’s. So I was wearing this handmade wedding dress from the early 1920s. It was totally see-through. I’m sure my parents loved that.
