Jules Fitz Gerald: Your novel includes a few fleeting references to a pandemic—which I presume is COVID, though it’s not named—and the pervading sense of loneliness and dislocation so many of the characters experience is very reminiscent of that time for me. I’d love to hear more about the book’s genesis. Did the pandemic play a role?

Nini Berndt: I did start writing it towards the end of the pandemic, but the book originally began in a vastly different iteration. My wife and I were going on a lot of walks during COVID, as a lot of people were, and we walked by this building I’d never seen before called St. Catherine’s Home for Working Girls. I became fascinated with this building and the idea of work, particularly women’s work and what that meant in the context of 1899 and what that means in a contemporary context. For me, so much of that was about caretaking. One of the interesting things about COVID is how disparate people’s experiences were. I would talk to friends who would say, “I haven’t hugged another person in months,” and my experience involved me, my wife, and our child, and my mom in our house, all of the time together—I would go to the car to cry because I was never alone, I was with my family all the time. There’s so much disparity in loneliness in these different contexts, like the loneliness of being surrounded and also the loneliness of the impossibility of connection. 

JFG: I really appreciated how much the story centers nonsexual desire and how many of the nonsexual exchanges and connections actually feel much more intimate than the sexual encounters in the book, including even those between Lucy and Helen. Was this something you consciously set out to explore, or did it emerge more intuitively? 

NB: I think it was more intuitive. I like writing about sex—sex and desire center in all of my work—but we don’t value nonsexual desire very much, and it plays heavily into how we are in the world. Particularly I’m thinking about nonromantic relationships, and the covetousness and jealousy and longing that are still so foundational to so many of those relationships. Even with Mikey and Lucy being siblings, there is still some of that hole that we associate with romantic or sexual desire. Though it’s not sexual, it occupies the same space of obsession and that same impulse and need for validation. It’s particularly true in queer relationships that the line becomes even more blurred, murkier and fuzzier, so that distinction becomes harder to parse. Like so much of our lives is wrapped up in that kind of need, and being able to detangle that from sex is really hard, but also really important.

JFG: Yeah, I didn’t realize how much I have been craving more queer stories like this one, which engages the concept of found family at so many different levels. Like how you were describing your living situation during COVID—the way so many of us live our lives is so multi-dimensional and intergenerational. I also loved the complicated role that Mrs. McGorvey, the homophobic neighbor who lives in the same building as Lucy and Helen, plays as a kind of surrogate grandmother, even as she’s paying Lucy to be a surrogate granddaughter. Where did that character come from, and why did it feel important to include her?

NB: I love the idea of the old woman in the attic, that literary trope, but Mrs. McGorvey also feels foundational to the house in some capacity. She was—is—in large part, a strange homage to my grandmother, who was this sort of eccentric British woman. My grandmother was so funny and cutting, and I was extremely close to her up until shortly before her death, when she learned I was getting married to my wife, and that really changed our relationship. So much of the book is about loneliness to me, and the loneliness of being toward the end of one’s life is so profound, because there isn’t a way out of that. So Mrs. McGorvey’s relationship with her husband, to me, is like my grandparents’ relationship. My grandfather passed away and my grandmother unexpectedly passed away soon after, and there was that sense that she did really just die of a broken heart. They’d been together since she was sixteen. I mean, what do you do without the person who is your whole life? So Mrs. McGorvey finding this sort of family with Helen and Lucy after her husband’s death maybe was some way to play out this fantasy of what it could have been like for my grandmother at the end of her life.

JFG: I’m also really curious—the ways you describe Helen’s cuddling clients and their requests felt very vivid and believable—what kind of research did you do into professional cuddling? Do you know people who work in that profession?

NB: So my introduction to cuddling as a profession is this: I was sitting at a coffee shop, a man sat across from me. He slid me his business card and said, essentially, I’m a professional cuddler. I was like, okay, go on, so we talked for a little while, and I thought about it a lot after the conversation. There was a weird exchange where he took my hand and was like, “Cuddling is about consent,” and I was like, “You very much just touched me without my consent.” I think it’s very easy to imagine the sort of people for whom this is right, like something they need and don’t know how to get from other people in an organic way. It was a part of the book I really loved writing—just thinking about these men, all men—and I loved that it was Helen, sort of dykey, completely-uninterested-in-them Helen, who is providing this service and that they love that, like there is a safety and a sense of security that they’re getting because it’s Helen. Like the boundary for them is very different than if Helen is someone else.

JFG: I’d also love to talk about the near-future element of the book. Something that struck me is just how small the differences are between our reality and the book’s reality.

NB: Yep.

JFG: It’s that subtle tilt that makes it even more haunting. How did you arrive at this way of depicting the near-future?

NB: Yeah, this is my preoccupation, and it’s even more profound with what’s happening now. I work for a tech company, and so I’m constantly bombarded with this now, in a way that so much of my brainpower now goes to the inevitable conclusion that human labor as we’ve understood it is going to become obsolete soon. Going back to the idea of work, that initial conception of thinking about St. Catherine’s Home for Working Girls—what does it mean to work, what is the nature of work, how is that changing, how has it changed? So much of our sense of self is based on the work we do, so much of our sense of self-worth, right? So much of it is not about money, it’s about our ability to self-actualize, and what happens when that no longer exists? Where does that leave us? So it was very easy for me to imagine a world—again, with the slightest tilt—of going into a restaurant and being like, oh, they don’t even need to employ human beings anymore, we can have robots do this for us. We don’t have to have people drive a taxi anymore, we can have robots do this for us. I mean, that’s tomorrow, that’s happening now. It was always sort of strange for me to think about this book as speculative, because I’m like, listen, a week from now, it’s not going to be speculative anymore, it’s going to be our reality. The feeling is that everything is changing in the most rapid way possible, and that’s been true for a long time, for at least the last hundred and fifty years, but never on this scale. That’s also why Mrs. McGorvey’s character was so important to me, because it’s very different when you didn’t grow up with a computer or cell phone, being able to acclimate to this world is impossible. I just don’t understand how someone would even do it, the loneliness that creates. It’s like Alice in Wonderland-esque, the surrealism of our current landscape.

So the way that I am moving around the world and the way I see other people moving around the world, it feels tilted in such a way that it is impossible to make sense of anything or place myself in a context that I understand. And that speculative element for me always was trying to capture the strangeness of the moment without ever looking directly at it. It’s the feeling that the world is different in a new way every day, and in a way that I have no control over, and that is sort of constantly also trying to kill me. I mean, the world actively feels threatening in a myriad of ways all of the time. Again, none of this is a stretch, it’s just simply tilting it a little bit to even more acutely elicit that sense.

JFG: It’s almost more realistic because of that. I live in the West as well, and the character of the Air Monitor as this anthropomorphic avatar issuing constant air quality alerts and impending extreme weather dangers throughout the book while characters are just trying to live their lives felt very, very real. Do you remember that old version of Microsoft Word with the little paperclip assistant, Clippy?

NB: Yes!

JFG: The Air Monitor kind of gave me Clippy flashback, like the way it was hard to make Clippy go away, he was always there.

NB: I love that.

JFG: So where did the Air Monitor come from? How did you invent this magical way of boiling down the constant alarm?

NB: So the summer that I really started working on this book was a summer of particularly bad wildfires in Colorado. They were bad everywhere that summer. I would walk outside every day for weeks and there’s ash falling from the sky and the sun is red all of the time. There’s this physical and visual sense of like, I see the world burning, I see it burning because there is ash falling from the sky and there’s not another way for me to interpret this other than it’s all on fire. So I was watching the air quality alert a lot, and Denver regularly will have the worst air quality in the world. You’re in Oregon, right?

JFG: Yes, was this 2020 or 2021? Both of those years were really bad.

NB: It was 2021, and the air quality in some places truly was, like, you cannot go outside.

JFG: Yes, the AQI was three hundred here some days. I mean, you learn the AQI scale, and I got to where I could look outside and guess the AQI within about twenty points.

NB: Exactly! Like, you look out and ask, can I go out there? Will it kill me today? I loved the idea of the Air Monitor in their suit, the sort of official and deeply absurd sense of this holographic entity telling you how to live your life in this way that is sort of Big Brotherish but is also completely necessary. I mean the intention is to keep you alive. It’s no longer an abstract, existential idea of what happens to our planet, but what do I do when the air is poisonous to breathe? What do I do when it’s genuinely too hot for anybody to go outside?

JFG: It’s all the more poignant that one of the key moments in the book is sparked by this window of clear air. Like how the quality of the air reshapes your life—if the air is clear, you are going to behave differently, and it creates openings, and it creates openings for your characters.

NB: Yeah.

JFG:  Thinking back what you said about the impact of AI on the nature of work, I’m struck that Helen’s work as a cuddler and Lucy’s work as a surrogate granddaughter fit into this kind of middle swath of human need that falls somewhere between sex and what I think of as AI companionship as being able to provide. But a key thing that AI cannot do is that it cannot touch. And that is really powerful, the role of physicality in the book, and there’s a different level of intimacy when it’s not transactional. The relationship between Helen and Mikey starts out as Mikey being one of her clients, but it becomes a real friendship to the point of resembling a chosen sibling relationship, almost to the same level as Mikey’s close biological sibling relationship with Lucy, but with a different dynamic. And I wonder if the value of that kind of relationship has necessarily gone up dramatically because of our culture and because it’s something that AI cannot do. We know when we’re talking to an AI, in the same way that we know when we’re paying for sex or we’re paying someone as a cuddler, it’s a transaction, part of the capitalist model, versus something more freely chosen.

NB: It’s such an interesting distinction because we’re seeing a lot of art right now that does the inverse, focusing on AI companionship. This story flips that, like all of the other work is being done by robots, but not this human work of physical connection. There’s that line from the cuddling handbook where Helen’s boss says, people need flesh, they need blood—that felt important. During the pandemic, I remember a friend saying, I went and bought a stuffed animal because I needed something to hug, I needed something to hold onto. I think that exists all the time for people. I love all the ways in which the men, Helen’s clients, want her to be present with them, that human need just to be touched, to have a physical presence, somebody holding your hand, feeling somebody’s body near your body in a completely nonsexual or mostly nonsexual way. Our species doesn’t survive without that, and also on an individual basis, we need that, some huge part of us is missing if we don’t have that physical closeness, and we can’t get that from robots. That need—the simplicity of the need to be held, someone to hug us, to hold us, to hold our hand, to touch our face—these are such small simple things, but they are essential to us as human beings.

JFG: Your Donald Barthelme epigraph feels very much tied into this: “Truth is greatly overrated, volition where it exists must be protected, wanting itself can be obliterated, some people have forgotten how to want.” I’m curious where the quote is from, because I tried to find it and couldn’t. And what do you think drives that forgetting? 

NB: It’s from a story called “The Sea of Hesitation,” which is not one of my favorite Barthelme stories, but the last three pages are extraordinary, like three of my favorite pages of writing anywhere. It’s about this encounter between a man and a woman where they’ve foregone all their other responsibilities just to be together in this exploration of feeling infatuated with somebody, just happy to be alive in another person’s presence. 

The world is so precarious right now it feels hard to want –– so much of what we want isn’t allowed. Can I want to have children? Can I want to have this future? Can I want to do this job that in five years may no longer exist? And I think the lack of want is akin to our loss of intimacy. We are reliant upon desire, but it’s also terrifying to want. 

I think about this in relation to art a lot. I’ve been a writer for fifteen years, and this is my first book, so there was this sense at times of, when do I say that I can’t want this anymore because it’s not happening? If I want something so badly and it doesn’t happen for me, what does that mean for me? And that’s what keeps so many people from wanting. So the fearlessness and abandon of being able to recklessly want was so important to me, to this book, to my identity as an artist, my identity as a person, my identity as a queer person. The reckless abandon of want and being able to center that in this moment of hopelessness is crucial, like that’s all we can do, and it also feels impossible a lot of the time.

JFG: I also love—well, love feels like the wrong word because of the damage drugs do in the lives of some of your characters—but the names and functions of the drugs you invent in the book are remarkable, and I’m struck by their metaphorical power. Like Tryfeusil, for accelerating psychological desire, and Emperadine, for combating existential angst by enabling people to focus only on what’s immediately in front of them. What was your process for building that aspect of the fictional world?

NB: From a linguistic perspective, it was just really fun to play with words and weird spellings, like we understand what a pharmaceutical should sound like. Tryfeusil started with “try,” this image of trying, wanting to regain some sense of “okay, I have to live in the world.” Emperadine comes from “empirical.”

I’ve wanted to write about addiction for a long time—my brothers have all struggled with addiction in different ways—but I didn’t want to come at it head-on. We have so much already about the opioid crisis and I didn’t need to necessarily add to that directly, but with the way substances impact our actual world, in my mind it’s hard to write without that taking up some sort of space in the fictional world. Going back to that idea of desire, the idea of the desire that keeps us alive and the desire that kills us, even just thinking of myself as an artist, I think a lot about what is self-preservation and what is self-annihilation, and how delicate that line can be sometimes. To want something so badly, to want a person so badly, to want an idea of something so badly, to want a different world so badly, to want to escape so badly—that the abundance of desire destroys us, and the lack of desire destroys us. 

It’s again very Alice in Wonderland. If you take a little bit, maybe that’s helpful, but there’s also the problem of becoming reliant on it. One of my favorite lines of dialogue is at the party when Simon says, “A little bit goes a long way, and then, after a while, a long bit goes only a little way.” The drug very quickly becomes something else, and it’s hard not to fall into that trap when it is manufactured that way. I think this plays into the larger context of our addiction to instant gratification—like I am as guilty of this as anyone, the number of times I’ve checked Instagram today is insane if I think about it. We do this in romantic relationships and friendships, too, like, oh they texted me back, and now I have this dopamine rush, and how do I chase that again? What I’m chasing is high-highs and low-lows, and so much of the time, this place in-between, of not even stasis or complacency but relative comfort, feels like its own danger. It’s a really interesting place—that precipice between necessary desire and fatal desire. How do we toe that line safely?

JFG: It’s striking too because I remember Mikey as fundamentally seeking the feeling of insulation from all that’s happening in the world around him, and he’s also an artist who just wants to make art. I heard you speak about the book briefly a few months ago, and you described thinking about literature—and maybe art-making more broadly—as being essentially an alternative to drugs as a way to alter reality. I’d love to hear more about your thinking around that, how it shapes how you write and read.

NB: Even though I don’t really think of myself as a speculative writer, I think the tilt is always important to me, because that tilt is where we see things most clearly. It’s not even an amplification of our world so much as a bend, a slight bend, where things come into focus. So many of my favorite writers do this—like Joy Williams does this exceptionally well. She’s just such a uniquely strange person and writer, and that strangeness captures what it feels like to be alive. Barthelme does the same thing for me. Jane Bowles, Shirley Jackson. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Samantha Hunt’s The Seas. David Lynch—like a Lynch world is our world, but stilted and awkward and strange, and there’s something it elicits in us, like the emotional response is truer in that strangeness. We see ourselves more clearly because it’s the underneath world, the world we feel and don’t get to fully inhabit. I feel like we get this channel between our brain and somebody else’s brain, and we are able to have this experience of like, oh, yes, you understand, at an emotional level, an ontological level, you understand the world as I understand the world. The strangeness and inherent terror and beauty and wonder of being alive. That is what I’m always looking for in art. That is my highest idea of what art can do, and if I can do that, as a writer, as an artist, I could ask for nothing more.