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Gabrielle Korn’s first book Everyone (Else) is Perfect, a memoir about—among other things—the author’s rise from Autostraddle columnist to the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, came out three years ago during the height of the pandemic, a notoriously rough time for debut authors. Now, she’s watching her first novel Yours for the Taking, a work of dystopian fiction about a queer couple living in climate-ravaged Brooklyn in 2050, make its way into a somewhat-healed but increasingly fractured world.
At first glance, Korn’s memoir and her debut novel may not seem to share much DNA, but there’s a connecting thread of what one might call “apocalyptical girlbossery” connecting the two. Korn had to put up with plenty of it while working in women’s media, and in Yours for the Taking, it’s shrewdly presented as a faux means of salvation that only really exists to drive women further into competition with each other (even as they try to find their way into a new, climate-change-proof secret society called “The Inside Project”...listen, just read the book). Recently, Vogue spoke to Korn about civil rights amid climate disaster, picking and choosing dystopias, and dream-casting.
Vogue: How does it feel to shift from memoir to dystopian fiction?
Well, it’s funny because in a lot of ways, a lot of the themes of my memoir do pop up in the dystopian fiction because, you know, media is becoming more dystopian by the day. But I also feel like writing fiction is just a lot more vulnerable; it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and therefore it feels like there’s a lot more self-imposed pressure around it. When you write a memoir, the process is looking at all the things that have happened to you and putting together an interesting narrative based on truth. And fiction is just like, you literally make it up from the darkest corners of your brain. So I think, weirdly, it does feel more intimate to me.
If you had to live in a speculative-fiction-style dystopia, which would you choose?
Assuming that we’re not already living in one?
Ha, yes.
I might have to get back to you on that. I would be terrible in a dystopia, to be honest; I have no survival skills. Whenever I watch a zombie movie, I’m just like, I would ask to be bitten first, because I truly do not have what it takes to live a life on the run.
I was so interested in the book’s portrayal of gender, and wanted to ask: Do you feel like the rapid acceleration of climate change is affecting the way we see things like gender and sexuality?
Yeah, I think it’s all connected. In the world of the book, what I was thinking about was, if we enter this climate change doom spiral and natural disasters start happening so quickly, and in so many places at once, then social progress gets held back because all of the resources just have to be spent [on] rescue and repair. It’s like, What happens to rights for queer people and trans people? I was imagining that in in this future, the contemporary understanding of sex and gender kind of flattens out, because the immediacy of the danger kind of leaves little to no room for nuance.
I was so struck by your vision of queerness appealing to the societal elite in a way that I think we definitely see in the real world—you know, the idea that if you can just be queer in the right, palatable way, you’ll maybe be protected. How did that thread come together?
I was thinking about a particular kind of straight person who idealizes queerness as something that could solve all their problems. Like, I feel like we all know those people who are like, “I wish I could just be gay. It would be so much easier.”
Yes, unfortunately.
That was what I was thinking about for the character of Jacqueline, who doesn’t really like women very much, but she has this idea that being a lesbian is a superior category because it has some sort of gender purity to it that she really idealizes.
Final question: Who would be your dream cast for an onscreen adaptation of the book?
I’m a little bit too superstitious to fully answer this question, but I will say that I have a very specific vision of Sarah Paulson as Jacqueline.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
