Kristen Iskandrian’s first novel, Motherest, is told in first-person by 18-year-old Agnes, who lives in “the middle of a New Jersey nowhere” and has just begun college in “the middle of a New England nowhere” in 1993. Soon after arriving at college, Agnes learns that her mom, who has a history of unexpectedly disappearing, has left home. In each chapter, Agnes describes her life at college and also writes a letter to her mom—“If I had stayed, would you have stayed?” Her older brother Simon, who has committed suicide, is another missing figure in the book. Living in a “post-Simon, post-mother world,” Agnes one night in a library imagines “passing out” from loneliness—“an actual concussion of loneliness.” Then she meets someone, becomes pregnant, and moves home to live with her dad. She seems to both want and not want the baby. In a letter to it, embedded in a letter to her mom, she writes: “Sorry that I didn’t want you, didn’t plan you, sorry that I routinely fear your arrival.” At an ob-gyn practice, when asked how she feels, she answers “Pretty good” but tells the reader “Suicidal, elated, nauseous, starving, sore, waterlogged with exhaustion, terrified.”

I met Kristen online in 2006 and we’ve met once in person, also in 2006, when I had a reading in Athens, Georgia. We didn’t talk much in person, but I remember, at dinner with people, overhearing Kristen say things that were funny and unexpected. Agnes is also like this. For this interview, we spoke on Google hangouts and by email. 

—Tao Lin

I. Motherest

THE BELIEVER: What books or authors inspired, motivated, or influenced you while writing Motherest?

KRISTEN ISKANDRIAN: Oh, God. I feel like I sort of prayed to every book I ever loved while I wrote Motherest, to be worthy, to take part. I thought a lot about Madeleine L’Engle, whose books The Small Rain and Camilla were favorites of mine as a teenager. Lydia Davis, Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be, The Stranger by Camus, essays by Mary Ruefle, The Woman Destroyed and A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir. Joy Williams, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf. A lot of women writers. And I feel this weird debt to Henry James for his insanely dense sentences, which I found myself thinking about from time to time.

BLVR: What do you like to share when people ask you what Motherest is about?

KI: In terms of sharing the “about”—quite possibly my least favorite question—I tend to share very little. I don’t think...