INTERVIEW: Lexi Freiman by Anu Khosla
The Book of Ayn
Lexi Freiman
Catapult
Interview by
Anu Khosla
When novelist Lexi Freiman and I meet over Zoom, we can’t help but feel self-conscious about how each of our respective heads of hair look on the screen. We spend the first few moments of our chat fixing our hair and apologizing. One could almost believe a conspiracy theory that Zoom has intentionally set out to make women’s hair look more disheveled online than in person. But then again, Freiman’s hair looks great to me –– I simply don’t like the look of my own. Her hair has a fun, bouncy wholeness, not unlike her prose.
Is it problematic for me to start with her hair? Will I be canceled for focusing on the strands of keratin that pop out of her head before her ideas? If I were, it would only be fitting. Freiman’s second novel, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, November 2023), begins with a cancellation. Anna, the book’s narrator, has just been canceled after publishing a “satire of the opioid epidemic.” The New York literary scene can be a cold and unforgiving place, and Anna finds herself without a real friend in the world. That is, besides the late Ayn Rand.
What ensues is a wild romp through the Objectivist landscape of modern thought as Anna attempts to pen a new book rebranding Rand. From female genital mutilation fundraisers to Slavoj Žižek jokes to La Croix cameos, Freiman skewers just about every corner of the zeitgeist with no regard for taboo or pedantry. The result is as thought-provoking as it is hilarious.
Anu Khosla: I just could not stop thinking about how much Ayn Rand you would have had to read to write this, and not just her own books, but also biographies on her. Clearly, it was deeply researched. Did you read a lot of Rand prior to working on this book?
Lexi Freiman: I didn't know anything about Ayn Rand because, I guess, being Australian, she's sort of not a big deal in our culture. I vaguely knew about Rand, and I don't remember how I got interested, but whatever it was, I knew she was bad. I knew nobody liked her.
I got excited about reading her and looking for things I thought might be worth exploring. I read The Virtue of Selfishness first, then some other essay collections and a couple of biographies. And then, yes, I waded through the fiction. I even tried to watch some recent TV version of Atlas Shrugged.
I guess it must have come from a sort of curiosity about libertarianism. I was living in Midtown when that first came up. Her reputation was so bad that I felt like I had to understand it better. And there's all these funny things. There's an Ayn Rand dating site called the Atlasphere.
AK: Oh, my God.
LF: I went on that and studied some of the people there. They were disappointing, those people. They were what you'd expect. I wanted to explore another sort of taboo subject in the culture, which wasn't quite Libertarianism. Although, it is sort of taboo on the left, which is where I place myself. So I was just interested in what's the most unpopular version of Libertarianism and Libertarian ideas.
AK: It felt like some of this book was a commentary on how different generations interpret these ideologies. This idea of earnestness and homage being confused with satire seemed to point to that. Were you thinking about this in generational or age-based terms as you were writing?
LF: Yes, absolutely. I think there's a moment in every person's life where they start to worry that their ideas are outdated or that there's a kind of younger, more radical, more interesting group who have an ideology that they can't wrap their heads around. It makes you feel old, and it makes you feel stupid.
I never want to take an ideology from any side, but I think I had some awareness that as you get older, it's easy to sort of fall back and think, “Well, I know better because these young people don't have the wisdom of experience or whatever.” In a sense, I feel like writing my books is a little bit about me trying to imagine the other side or put myself there and really understand their arguments and sort of then perform a synthesizing of the two sides, which to me, feels closer to the truth than just one or the other.
And so, yes, I think locating the characters in their generations is important. It's not just ideologies; it's also behaviors and tendencies. In the book, Anna talks a little bit about Gen Z as “borderline” and millennials as “narcissists.” How has the behavior changed as a response to culture, as a response to phenomena like Donald Trump? If Donald Trump is such a narcissist, then does the other side have to be borderline because they feel like victims of this monstrous ego? All these things are interesting to me as part of the ideology and the way that it's expressed.
AK: Many of the characters are not named, or they are referred to with a nickname. There's one character where you never hear the character's real name until later in the book when it's a very emotional moment. I was curious about that decision: who to name, who not to name, and why? And also, the protagonist's name is Anna. I assumed that that was a reference, at least in part, to the common mispronunciation of Ayn.
LF: Exactly. That's why I called her Anna. I haven't thought about naming that consciously, but I'm pretty sure that the function of giving characters a noun or something instead of a name is to, in a way, locate them in the character's mind. It's to create some distance between herself and the person.
In a sense, these characters are a subject for her to mock or make fun of when they're referred to with a slightly condescending noun that relates to their physical appearance or their behavior or whatever. It's a distancing technique for the character to keep herself separate from these people, especially the men that she's involved with. To keep this funny, ironic distance from these men keeps her safe. Whereas if she just used their actual names, then they become real people. They become too human.
AK: The book feels like a commentary on satire, but it also is satire in and of itself, and a very effective form of satire. I'm curious what you think about the value of satire. What makes it work or not work? And why did you choose a satirical approach?
LF: Do you choose satire, or does satire choose you? I feel a bit like I don't know. I think it's just the mode I naturally write. The motivation I find for beginning a book is based on frustration. A frustration with something in the culture, and from there, it takes on its own life. But I think it begins with this little antagonism. Instead of tweeting or instead of posting something to social media, it's like, this is the way I'm going to work through my frustrations around this idea. And in a way, it's probably a safer approach –– although maybe I will be canceled, who knows? –– because you have years to think about these ideas and work them through the consciousness of a character and have them have a whole journey with the ideas. You can say things that have a feeling of truth to them, and that’s why they’re funny, even if they’re not culturally acceptable. I think there's something really pleasurable about that for everyone. Not just for me as the writer but for the reader too.
My favorite writers, or at least the books I remember reading early on that excited me, would often be books that said outrageous things that were not sanctioned culturally. But they were being said in this book by this character whose psychology I understood, so I got why they might say this horrendous thing. It was exciting to hear this taboo thing and feel safe in the hands of a mind who is aware that it's taboo and who is using the taboo to explore larger issues and take you on this journey through this consciousness. And it's not an argument. It's not an essay. It's not trying to say the outrageous offensive thing. It's saying, here's this thing that some people think, and it's out there. We all know it's out there. Let's explore what's behind that.
I feel like I'm being treated like an adult— like I can think for myself around this topic. In a sense, it's really liberating. It's exciting because I get to have my own opinion about this thing that has created a response of “This thing is so naughty.” Obviously, different writers do it better than others, but it's something that I think gives the reader their agency back. I feel like a lot of fiction at the moment is very moralizing, and it tells you how to think. I don't like being treated like a child when I'm reading. I want to be able to form my own opinions.
AK: I was going to ask if persuasion was a goal in using satire for you. And it sounds like maybe not really?
LF: No. I mean, not exactly. To be honest, at first, maybe it is. I think beginning a project, there is a sense of, “I'm going to show everyone that this thing is really stupid, and the people who think it's correct are wrong.” There is a little bit of that energy that is motivating. It's like, the tweet energy of here's my hot take. But then, as you go on, the book becomes bigger than that little thing you wanted to say. To serve the book and to serve the reader, you can't be that small-minded. They’re going to spend hundreds of pages, well, 200 pages, not that long, but they're going to spend a lot of time with your book. And you can't just be ranting about this one thing in this one way. You can't be singular.
The ideas improve as you commit to writing a book, not just a manifesto or something. In a way, I'm not sure what I wanted people to come away with. I mean, I know at certain points what I want, but yeah, I don't know. It's a little bit more mysterious than I want people to think at the end. You can't fully control it ever anyway.
AK: One of my takeaways from the book was this idea of the ambiguity of ideology. I saw that functioning effectively with the characters that do hold different ideas. Some of these ideologies kind of fold over onto each other and become each other, and that's when it does become really ambiguous. Because if you keep looking at this one ideology on the right and you fold it so many times, and it looks like this thing on the left, then what is ideology?
LF: Yes, that's definitely one of the effects that I'm interested in conveying. The stuff about Ayn Rand and the spiritual world, particularly Eastern philosophies, there's kind of this crossover there. There's a lot of criticism of Ayn Rand, but that's the moment where I feel like there might be a tiny bit of homage. If you just turn it on its axis a little bit, it actually becomes a more enlightened idea, this idea of selfishness and taking responsibility for yourself, and your happiness. But then, of course, there's the bad version, which is the self-care thing of drinking a smoothie and praying for world peace or whatever, and that's enough. I think finding the overlap is good because it diffuses some of the black-and-white antagonism of these ideologies. It's like, well, I kind of understand why that speaks to people at this deep level that is echoed in this other philosophy.
AK: I found myself feeling that about some of the way social media functions in the book. There are moments when I ask myself, is this a satire of social media, or is it an homage to social media?” Is social media functioning as an individualist practice? But then there are moments where you think, oh, is this actually a collectivist practice? I wondered, is there a purity in this influencer lifestyle sometimes? Is there a purity in the vapidity of it?
LF: Yes, I think that's the thing. This sounds so trite, but everything is both things. Everything is incredibly shallow and stupid and also profound. There's a way of looking at all these things where you can see both the light and the shadow. That's kind of why I say write a novel. Because you can explore both sides and sort of, in the journey of that, you're bringing the two things together in a way. That makes it sound really sappy and boring or moralistic or something. In a way, maybe it's sort of a moral. I could be accused of having no opinion or no moral opinion, which in many cases, I think is probably true. The things are too complex.
