An Interview with Jessi Jezewska Stevens

“There’s been a trend recently of trying to quantify how much more empathetic fiction makes us. I think those studies can be interesting, but I question this need to justify reading by quantifying its value or usefulness. At the same time, I do think that there is something to creating spaces where you can dwell in moral ambiguity.”

Four Artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art That Jessi Jezewska Stevens Agreed to Talk About with the Interviewer but Ultimately, and for No Particular Reason, Excepting the Picasso, Did Not:
The Actor, by Pablo Picasso
Mada Primavesi, by Gustav Klimt
Cleopatra’s Needle
PixCell-Deer#2, by Kohei Nawa

Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q, follows the interiority of Percy Q, an insomniac who is haunted by a mystery which I will not try to explain here as I’ve already typed out and deleted numerous sentences that do not do justice to the novel’s central conceit. What I will say: The Exhibition of Persephone Q is an intimate and obsessive exploration of the act of seeing and the act of being seen. It’s also a metaphysical detective story, an investigation of absence and voids, and a darkly comedic treatise on the art world and living in a series of apartments and rooms in New York. Somehow, like a magic trick, a novella is tucked into the last third of the novel. The Exhibition of Persephone Q mostly reminded me of taking a walk at night alongside a brilliant companion who has a keen mind, and an eye for absurdity.

At the Met, I sat on a bench in front of the coat check room. As it turns out, I sat there for fifteen minutes because I did not know what Stevens looked like. Stevens texted me she had brown hair and was wearing a sweater. I looked around and saw many people with brown hair wearing sweaters. Hordes of them, in fact. I simply did not know who she could be! Once we found each other we talked about art, intimacy, and moral ambiguity. 

—Patty Yumi Cottrell

I. Favorites

THE BELIEVER: Hey Jessi! [Laughter]

 JESSI STEVENS: Hey! [Laughter] Glad we found each other.

 BLVR: So, you chose this painting The Actor by Picasso. What do you want to tell me about it?

 JS: I’m always a little bit suspicious of my answers to questions about favorites because I think I’m always changing my mind, but this is a painting that I’ve...