In 2009, after winning a contest called “Undoing the Novel,” Kate Zambreno’s debut, O Fallen Angel, was published by Lidia Yuknavitch’s indie press, Chiasmus. Since then, Zambreno has gone on to publish nine more books, some with indie presses, some with university presses, some with big New York houses, and a few—like O Fallen Angel, which was reissued by Harper Perennial in 2017—with first one and then another.

In various ways and to varying degrees, all these books are undoings. One of Zambreno’s most talked-about books, 2012’s genre-exploding Heroines, for example, has been called a group biography, a gossip’s dream, autotheory, and a manifesto for “toxic girls.” Christopher Higgs, in The Paris Review Daily, aptly described it as “poetically swerving in and out of memoir, diary, fiction, literary history, criticism, and theory.” (Heroines was reissued this year with a new introduction by Jamie Hood.) Then there are 2020’s Drifts, which, as we discuss in this interview, Annie Ernaux said “invented a new form”; the elegantly inventive 2021 novella-essay-diptych To Write as if Already Dead; the 2023 literary-critical experiment Tone, coauthored with Sofia Samatar; and, also from 2023, The Light Room, which, while marketed by its publisher as a memoir, is, according to its author, not a memoir at all. But it’s in this very in-betweenness—a space of generative undoing, of formal reinvention—that Zambreno’s writing thrives. 

Kate Zambreno was born and raised in the Midwest. They have an undergraduate degree from Northwestern and a master’s from the University of Chicago, where they studied performance theory under Lauren Berlant. Now an adjunct professor of creative writing in the undergraduate and graduate programs at both Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, they live in Brooklyn, New York, with their partner, John Vincler, and two young children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the last several years, their writing and thinking have turned increasingly toward motherhood, labor, and precarity. These interests came to a head in 2022, when Zambreno’s youngest child was diagnosed with lead poisoning, a situation that embroiled the family in an extensive legal fight and necessitated a move from the apartment that had served, for a decade, as the familiar backdrop of home in Zambreno’s writing.

Kate spoke to me from their new apartment about the reissue of Heroines, shitty landlords, celebrity, the publishing industry, genre anxiety, notebooks, foam. Normally, our relationship takes place via email, so when we found ourselves face to face on Zoom, we were excited and very chatty. We talked for several hours. At some point, John stepped into the frame with a homemade muffin. But that part got cut for length—as did our discussion about a broken refrigerator, Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, and Jonathan Franzen’s essay on cats.

—Danielle Dutton

I. A Worthwhile Canon

THE BELIEVER: Kate, you know I don’t come to New York very often, because it stresses me out, but our friendship was cemented the day you took care of me after I’d had a panic attack near Washington Square Park.

KATE ZAMBRENO: Yeah, I remember that.

BLVR: I mention this because I’m interested in friendship in your writing. I don’t think people talk about this aspect of your work enough. You’re a fierce friend, and you seem interested in interrogating friendship, even in formal ways: in particular, your Guibert book. I mean To Write as if Already Dead, of course, but I always think of it as your Guibert book.

KZ: That’s what I call it too.

BLVR: That diptych is a form that I think you’ve called “a friendship.”

KZ: Yes, I write that!

BLVR: And in my mind, you’re good at being a friend. You have a gene that makes you a good friend.

KZ: I don’t think it’s true. When I was younger, I had almost no friends. I often had periods of feeling friendless, or at least alienated. I have been with the same partner for a long time, who in some ways is like a best friend. But people always disappeared from my life, or I disappeared from theirs. And I think it is also difficult for me to keep in touch with people from my past, from before I became a writer—almost like I had to become a new person in order to convince myself I was a writer.

So, no, it’s not that. I’m just less interested now in the individual experience of being a writer. When I first started being published, I was promoting myself constantly: Me, me, me. I wrote this book. I found it incredibly isolating. I realized that if I don’t view writing as a network—that I’m writing to others—then it’s too isolating. It creates this culture of scarcity, which is what capitalism wants. So I think it’s more like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. I’m interested in trying to find ways of thinking in community that feel good.

BLVR: It feels like you’ve created a solid community of friends with writers you’ve never met. I’m thinking of Rilke, Hervé Guibert, Kathy Acker—they come up again and again in your work.

KZ: They’re like elective affinities, or like alter egos or antagonists.

BLVR: So you’re creating this fictional community within and across your work, but then you also write a bunch of authors you do know into those same spaces, including your friend Sofia Samatar, Bhanu Kapil, Amina Cain, Suzanne Scanlon. And somewhere you also write about the strangeness of encountering yourself in someone else’s work—

KZ: In Screen Tests. I’m referencing Sofia’s essay “Why You Left Social Media: A Guesswork,” which she dedicated to me, and people think it’s about me. But it’s a tricky and slippery speculative essay, and it’s actually about both of us. It was one of the first times one of us put the other into our work, which is our practice now. We are each other’s citations, friends, interlocutors, intended address. The New Narrative writers are a model here, the gossipy nature of their work. It’s also us saying we are as worthwhile as any canon, and we’re going to put ourselves next to Guibert or Sebald or Kafka, even if no one else puts us next to them.

BLVR: This is reminding me of Renee Gladman’s talks for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. They were collectively called “Am I a Fiction?,” and somewhere in there she spoke about what happens when you write yourself into a work that is a fiction. Do you become a fiction? Is your relationship with Sofia partly fictional now?

KZ: Well, the reality is that in my day-to-day life, people kind of know I’m a writer, but it’s more like an incidental fact that’s inconvenient. [Laughs] The reality is that most of the time I’m not a writer, even when I’m a teacher of writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the artist Eva Hesse and how her work is about investigating materials. It is absurd. It is mischievous. And that’s how I think of writing and rewriting books. It’s like this private, weird thing I do—like making sculptures that mostly don’t sell. It’s kind of absurd in the contemporary moment to even do it. And, yes, then writing yourself into work that is possibly fiction makes lives and writing even more absurd and strange. But it’s part of the way I feel alive in the world and how I process the world.

Sofia and I do have an actual friendship. I will write to her about my domestic chaos or teaching alienation or sicknesses. We do have a friendship, but we will also have these long, engaged discussions that pick up after dormant periods when we write to each other less. But we are always thinking and reading together, about literature and writing, but also, lately, about the absurdity and horror of institutional life, climate change, and the atmosphere. Reporting on our private everyday experiences is all part of the thinking together.

BLVR: Speaking of Eva Hesse, I wanted to ask you: Do you have a background in visual art that I don’t know about?

KZ: Not at all.

BLVR: How did it happen that you so often write about artists now? I know you sometimes write commissioned pieces for art catalogs.

KZ: My partner, John, and I both came from homes where there was no art; that was something we connected over. We wanted to escape the Midwestern Catholic family, which gave us a claustrophobic view of what our futures might be. When we met each other, we were living in Chicago, and we both wanted to surround ourselves with art. We’d go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, to the Art Institute. We’d save up all our money, which was almost nothing, to travel to see art. But also I think the fact that neither of us have training or were taught the right language with which to write about art means we have been allowed to invent a new language for it. I’m allowed to be playful and conceptual when writing about art. It is a way I see the world. It informs the books.

BLVR: Is there anyone whose work you’re especially excited about right now?

KZ: There’s a Finnish photographer, Iiu Susiraja, who just had a show at MoMA PS1. She does all these stagings with her body, often in her parents’ apartment, using hot dogs and balloons. They’re grotesque, they’re absurd, they’re referencing old masters. That was probably the last show I saw that I was taken with. To be able to access this private, weird, beautiful, unruly practice.

II. “Today Show Attention”

BLVR: What was it like to watch Kristen Stewart read from Heroines at the 2023 Chanel event in Paris?

KZ: It was weird. I think something can happen in the writing world where we’re not very critical when a celebrity likes our work. You know what I mean? I’m remembering when Kaia Gerber posted that picture with the Duras book that Dorothy published.

BLVR: Oh, the bikini picture? Yeah, that was wild. It definitely sold some copies.

KZ: Publishing is broken in so many ways. There’s so little support for writers. There’s so little sense that writers are workers, and of all the unpaid labor involved. And there is a sense that a book needs to get Today show attention, or be made into a movie or TV show by a famous director, or it doesn’t exist. So much of publishing is just looking for books to become part of the monoculture.

I knew that Lidia Yuknavitch, who was the first person to publish me and really the first writer to support my work, had given Kristen Stewart a copy of Heroines. And Lidia told me that Kristen loved Heroines. But then the Chanel event made me feel somewhat icky, especially in the context of these fashion conglomerates not signaling support of Palestine right now. That whole event was this girl-bossery thing, to the exclusion of everything else going on in the world. I don’t like feeling co-opted, and I increasingly do, especially when I’m brought into these museum spaces to speak. I often feel I’m asked to be the feminist. I mean, feminism is of course important, but it’s most important to me right now as an ethical relational position rather than as an identity. Still, it can’t be a way to avoid talking about this genocide, or the crisis of the Anthropocene and the Capitolocene, or white supremacy, or transphobia, you know—the world right now. And feminism can’t be branding for a fashion show. I mean, I love that she loves the book, and I thought her reading was beautiful. I think she’s a serious actress.

BLVR: Heroines is being reissued this year.

KZ: Yes.

BLVR: Is it the ten-year anniversary?

KZ: It’s not the ten-year anniversary. I think it’s been twelve years, but it just recently went out of print.

BLVR: How do you feel about the book now, a decade or so later? For a lot of people, it’s your big book.

KZ: Yes, that or Drifts. The period of shock I had after Heroines came out—the shock of moving to New York, the shock of then having my next books with corporate publishers, and the shock of Heroines being hated and loved in equal measure—was a catalyst for the way my writing metamorphosed. But Heroines is definitely a legacy I have to contend with. The language is somewhat essentializing, even though I am actually writing about genderfluid and queer artists from the past and present, including myself. And, except for the friends who are writers and bloggers that I write about, the book is so white. For me there was an absurdity, as well as a pathos, in the historical women I was writing about. I was casting myself into a persona, but because the book is framed as nonfiction, that persona gets flattened.

I do have to also recognize the power of the book, though. I read it recently for the reissue and I couldn’t believe how audacious it is. It’s a really wild book. I literally had no rules. I was young. I was full of so much alienation and anger and parodic wit. It’s like this incredibly incendiary text, and I’m glad it exists. But I do think it’s funny that it’s the text people tend to know me for, and that they tend to think I’m still that person—or that I was ever that person. I mean, I guess I am still the person who masturbates while reading, or who cries in public—it’s a really intense, excessive, horny, sad book; I really admire it for that.

III. “The awkwardness of genre”

BLVR: You just mentioned Heroines being “framed” as nonfiction. I want to talk about your latest book, The Light Room. A review in The New York Times called The Light Room a memoir, but you’ve said it’s not. Why isn’t it a memoir? What does that mean to you?

KZ: There is this risky, interesting, contemporary tradition of nonfiction that I would put T Fleischmann in, along with Renee [Gladman]’s Calamities, Bhanu [Kapil], Sofia [Samatar], many of the books that Semiotext(e) publishes. I also love work that’s at that boundary between fiction and nonfiction, like yours, Mieko Kanai’s, Olga Ravn’s. And to me, that’s where my nonfictions lie. But when you publish nonfiction in a corporate setting, as I’m learning, there’s no sense of the awkwardness or mutability of genre.

I was taking a shower before I got on Zoom today, and I was thinking about how I really resisted the way everyone in corporate publishing asks you, “Who are your characters?” If you’re writing fiction, that’s all they ask: “Who are your characters?” But in corporate nonfiction, they ask, “What are the ideas?” and “How can this translate to a wider audience?” Those are the questions. “How can this be a think piece? How can this be something that changes people’s minds or makes them feel better about themselves?” The way publishers market memoirs suggests that one’s sense of identity is stable and integrated, to put it in psychoanalytic terms.

The Light Room was the first time I had a nonfiction book published by a larger corporate press. It didn’t position the book as literary, which is how it had positioned my novel Drifts, even though I see these books as a series. Larger publishers’ idea of nonfiction isn’t literary but closer to self-help, especially if they see you as a woman. And then when The Light Room was pitched to UK houses, everyone was like, Oh, we already have a motherhood book. So not only did these houses frame the book as a memoir, they framed it as a motherhood memoir. And that was a flattening experience, in terms of my concept of what my writing does, my experiments with form, my gender and class positions, lots of things.

BLVR: You recently told me that everyone feels weird about genre. I was like, Do they?

KZ: [Laughs] We live in a time of awkwardness of genre. And this is paraphrasing Lauren Berlant: Are we living in a comedy? An absurdity? Are we living in a horror? We live in a time where genre is essentially unstable. And so these traditional ideas about what fiction is and what nonfiction is are not the most interesting ways to talk about writing.

BLVR: Maybe instead of genre what I want to talk about is form. There’s a quote from Annie Ernaux on the cover of The Light Room that says, “Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.” I want to interrogate every single part of this.

KZ: Well, she wrote it about Drifts, though, which has been translated into French.

BLVR: Really?

KZ: Every publisher just took it and ran with it.

BLVR: That’s blowing my mind. I mean, I do this at Dorothy, of course. I take blurbs out of context, but I try to be really careful to not make it sound like the person said something very specific about our book that they actually said about a different book.

KZ: Desperate times.

BLVR: I thought: Annie Ernaux, what do you mean by “absolute present”? What about “real life”? And then this idea of a “closeup.” Is that a genre? A form? The closeup.

KZ: I think Drifts and The Light Room were part of the same experiment: how to write dailiness. So I do link them together, perhaps also with Appendix Project—my series of lectures on grief after the birth of my first [child]—and the Guibert study. They were my books that each reflect a year of a life. They’re durational projects.

I’m much more interested in form than in genre. With The Light Room, I thought about translucencies, a series of light boxes. Or with Screen Tests, screen tests were the form. With Drifts, the idea of the drift was the form. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of realisms. I’m writing realisms. But what form is that?

BLVR: I know you’ve been calling some of your new pieces reports.

KZ: Yeah.

BLVR: Is a report a realism or something else?

KZ: Brian Evenson gave me that term, reports, when he blurbed Screen Tests. The idea of an investigation or a report is interesting to me. I’m thinking of the report especially with the zoo pieces I’ve been writing. It suggests something more strange or speculative. Kafka’s short stories, especially his animal stories, feel like reports.

IV. “At least my children
will have my notebooks”

BLVR: I know your notebooks have a special role in your work, or maybe it stands out to me because I passionately do not notebook. But I was just reading Suzanne [Scanlon]’s new book, Committed, and she quotes that Didion essay about keeping a notebook. Didion says the impulse to write everything down is an actual compulsion, one that is inexplicable to people who don’t do it. And I don’t. I don’t get it. Are your notebooks compulsive in that way? Are they diaristic or more like an aestheticized space or a research space?

KZ: With Drifts and the Guibert book, I was writing the day in my notebook, trying to write the day and see what was in it. How does one capture it? Drifts has often been read as a published notebook, but my notebooks are somewhat distinct from the finished works, which have the movement of a time-based project. Annie Ernaux, too, has the notebooks first, and then when she writes a book, she doesn’t refer to the notebook, but the book has the feeling and energy of duration. The notebooks are this aesthetic space to practice and research, but also a form of survival. It’s like I need to write in my notebook until I can figure out how to start writing the book. But when I do try to work on a book, especially recently, I don’t often refer to the journal. There’s too much there. I want to have the feeling of active thought and present time in the work. I don’t want it to be weighed down by past notes.

BLVR: I read that Kathryn Davis, when she wrote her novel Versailles, read all the books she wanted to read about Marie Antoinette. And then once she started writing, she had a rule—although now I’m worried I’m getting this completely wrong—that she couldn’t go back to the research. If it hadn’t stuck in her mind, it was gone. I love the idea that the research served some preparatory purpose and that the writing had to be separate from that.

KZ: I go through the process, usually every year, of transcribing my journals, and it’s terrible. It’s literally one of the things I hate the most about writing. I don’t know why I do it.

BLVR: Wait, I just remembered that I did keep a diary as a teenager. I actually had this after-school­-special tragedy when a boyfriend read my diary. I’d left him alone in my room and he read it. He read about something I’d done.

KZ: Was it traumatic?

BLVR: We broke up! He had been my boyfriend for two whole years. It was a mutual betrayal, I guess.

KZ: I did an event recently and someone asked me about privacy concerning my children. She quoted Sharon Olds as saying she has to betray her family to stay true to her other family—the family of literature or whatever. And I said, Well, I don’t think I’ve ever betrayed my family. And I then told her, My mother was institutionalized at the end of her life, at the age of fifty-five. This is why I’m a writer. She never told me anything of her interiority, which for most of us is the deep sadness of having mothers, because mothers aren’t supposed to have interior lives. And I said, When the death cult of capitalism takes me early, which it might, at least my children will have my notebooks. And my books. They’ll know what I was thinking and feeling. At least I won’t be a mystery to my children.

That’s why the conceptual experiments of Bernadette Mayer are so important to The Light Room: these daily poetic notebook experiments inspired by Midwinter Day, especially, and Mayer’s multiple notebooks. I get so thrilled when she writes about her young daughters. They are these ephemeral moments, these moments that, throughout all of history, have been kept purposefully private, and are now actually revealed.

V. “It’s nonwork, but I have to do it”

BLVR: In the last few years, you’ve had several books come out.

KZ: I don’t think that’s true.

BLVR: [Laughs] There’s the reissue of Heroines this year.

KZ: That doesn’t count.

BLVR: In 2021 there was To Write as if Already Dead, and in 2023 there was The Light Room. Then Tone, the book you cowrote with Sofia—

KZ: That’s not my book, though.

BLVR: Well, I’m going to count it.

KZ: I’m just being difficult.

BLVR: I know. I think you’re sensitive about being called “prolific,” and I’m sensitive about this in the opposite way. Someone just wrote about my new book and they were like, “It’s her first book in nearly a decade.” I’m slow. In my mind, though, you’re someone who’s always working on multiple book projects.

KZ: That’s true.

BLVR: Are you working on a particular book or books right now?

KZ: The reality of my life is that I write very little. But then I’ve found myself with a few books under contract that, through kind of impossible circumstances—often postpartum, with young children and while in the adjunct loop—I have managed to finish. And finishing those was mostly financially motivated, even if it was only $2,500, like with the Guibert book. But I was like, I need that money for summer camp for my kids so I can try to be a writer. I remember for Tone I needed the second $2,500 advance because my oldest had a dental crisis.

I’m now in what I hope will be a transformative period for my work. But I am also in a situation in which I am doing the adjunct loop so intensely, and my partner has gone back to work full-time, and I have the children so often—and I worry: What if I’m not actually going to have any time? And what happens if books go away?

But I’m finishing my zoo pieces. I’m writing at least one book that deals with the housing crisis, specifically the extremely catalyzing moment when my child was lead poisoned because of our landlord’s brutal negligence, which exposed many intersecting precarities. The lead book is called Inspection. It’s inspired in tone and address by Édouard Levé’s Suicide and Édouard Louis’s Who Killed My Father. It’s an investigation.

BLVR: The investigation is about the lead poisoning?

KZ: Yes. And it documents our rent strike as well as all the daily encounters with city agencies we had during that period. But it’s also thinking through this ten-year relationship with our landlord as a narrative of abuse. I’ve realized there are almost no books about landlords. Anne Boyer has this line about how only property owners can write memoirs, which I’m thinking about a lot. Like, what am I writing if I don’t have the stability of a home, the security of tenured work, the resources in which to be a writer full-time? I guess I’m writing fictions. So there’s one book, Realisms, on capitalist realisms and the conditions of being a guest. And then there’s also a small book that I’m writing now, called Foam. I ask: How can a work be composed of these forms that feel like foams?

BLVR: What are foams?

KZ: Foams are instabilities. I’m inspired by Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy. And my investigations around soft sculpture. It’s like spooky fictions and art essays together.

BLVR: There’s a review of the Guibert book that I wanted to ask you about. It’s positive, but there’s a line that says something like, Kate Zambreno is as prolific as Guibert was but not yet as famous as he was when he died. Do you read what people write about your work?

KZ: Yeah.

BLVR: How do you feel about being called prolific? Or having your famousness compared to someone else’s when they died?

KZ: You know, Guibert’s process of writing at the end of his life was so close to how I think about writing. As he felt his body breaking down, he had this awareness of his mortality, and then the documents had to come out, out of absolute necessity. The books, the documents, are a conceptual project. It was the same with Thomas Bernhard.

I do think that I could die at any time. As I said, my mother died at fifty-five. I just turned forty-six. You know, to this day, I don’t really have recognition from my family in any way. I’ve been productive in this adjunct trap in New York, but this also creates a sense of feeling like a radiant zero, as I write in Drifts. So for me, there’s always a sense of not existing except in the work. When I feel the most ghostly, I’m often the most productive. Because it’s like it doesn’t matter. It’s almost nonwork. That’s an Eva Hesse concept. It’s nonwork, but I have to do it.

The other real work I do right now is mothering, organizing, having friendships, and being in conversation with others. Some of this goes into these books, which are all in a minor key, regardless of how they’ve been published separately from one another. And I think this links to the question of fame. I think it’s been helpful—this sounds perverse, almost like I love my own debasement—but I think it’s been helpful for me to be such a nothing in New York. As you know, I was just passed over for permanent jobs at both the schools I’ve been teaching at for ten years, and not even considered seriously. There’s such a sense of me being an absolute zero in the New York economy. The Light Room is not going into paperback, because it didn’t sell. I know I’m not famous. Or I’m critical of what that means—that exposure, the expected visibility and labor from it, and how it doesn’t do anything to change the material conditions of my life right now. Actually, Sofia and I got into a little bit of a squabble a couple of weeks ago when she said, “You’re a cult writer. That’s great.” I was like, “All that means is they don’t pay you.”