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At the beginning of Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, we find ourselves at a Downtown Manhattan dinner party. Anticipation hangs in the air as a group of young creative types waits for a buzzy young actress to arrive. The narrator, we learn, has ended up here surrounded by a group of old friends she’s purposefully avoided since moving out of the city five years ago; after returning for the funeral of a friend within this same circle, she finds all her old gripes and resentments with them surfacing again, watching them perform their acts of faux modesty and subtle games of oneupmanship against each other. The narrator sits on a sofa in the corner of the room, sipping white wine, and we hear every scathing thought that passes through her head—and continue to do so for the following 224 pages, over criss-crossing timelines. Inspired in part by the vitriolic stream of consciousness that makes up German novelist Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 social satire Woodcutters—but with the preening intellectuals of Vienna’s bourgeois transposed to a Dimes Square-adjacent young arts scene in New York—Dubno’s novel is as lacerating as it is laugh-out-loud funny.
Partly because of that, Happiness and Love has already caused a bit of a stir—there’s a sense of recognition anyone who has orbited a similar creative milieu (and their pretensions) will feel when reading it. It’s a world that Dubno, who was raised on the Upper West Side and attended Oberlin College, is closely familiar with—even if she fiercely maintains it wasn’t based on any specific group of people, and certainly not a specific dinner party. (As a culture, fashion, and lifestyle journalist, Dubno has previously written for the New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue.) “I’ve had many people ask me, ‘Did you really go to a dinner party like that?’ No, of course not! That dinner party is a nightmare. I would never be invited to that because I’m a bitch,” she says, laughing. “I would have spoken my mind.”
It’s also—at least at points—a book about fashion, and not just in the withering takedowns of a friend who wears a “ridiculous black Margiela mourning costume” to the funeral, or the satirical portrait of a middle-aged Marxist fashion editor who briefly takes the narrator under her wing, or how it dissects these artists and filmmakers’ willingness to take money from the fashion world while simultaneously turning their noses up at it. (It helps that Dubno clearly understands this world and also cuts a stylish figure herself, appearing in the images supplied for this story wearing Grey’s, a cult New York label whose discreet, palpably luxurious clothes speak to fans of The Row and Lemaire.) It’s a book that is more concerned with the bigger picture stuff that fashion so often speaks to, even if many of its haughty characters would rather die than admit it: the delicate and ever-shifting balance of conformity and individuality in how we present ourselves to the world; or how the internet age has flattened the cultural landscape, turning every artist, thinker, or reference from across the centuries into a kind of commodity that can be used to construct a “personal brand.” Combined with Dubno’s lavish, compulsively readable prose—written as one long, relentless paragraph and with a liberal use of italics to signal her disdain for this world that she can’t seem to quit—it makes for one of the year’s most exhilarating literary debuts.
Here, Dubno talks to Vogue about navigating the intensity of some readers’ response to her book, how humor became her secret weapon when writing, and why she plans to move away from the distinctive style of Happiness and Love for her next project.
Vogue: Going back to the beginning, how much of the origins of the novel were rooted in Woodcutters? Was it reading it that sparked the idea, or had you already started working on the book and it served as a catalyst?
Zoe Dubno: I think I already knew I wanted to write a book that was set in that world, but I wasn’t sure of how to do it exactly. And then I read Woodcutters and I thought, “Oh, this is how you can contain all of these thoughts and opinions, while also telling a compelling story that’s full of emotional depth.” I mean, Woodcutters is a rant, but it’s also about serious human relationships. And I read Woodcutters many years before I started writing this book, but when I chose to write it, I knew that Woodcutters would be a fantastic model.
What exactly prompted you to start writing it?
Well, it was because of John Keene, who was my thesis advisor for my MFA. I had six months to write something, which could have been anything. But he was like, “Come on, you can write a full novel in six months.” And I was like, “I don t think I can.” He said, “What kind of novel could you write in six months?” We’d been talking shit a lot during our meetings, because he’s a poet who’s won the MacArthur Genius Award, but he’s also a dishy gay man. [Laughs.] And we were joking that I had to write my Woodcutters. And so, because of these conversations that we’d been having, I did write my Woodcutters. It took me about a year to write, so I didn’t finish it in time for my thesis. But honestly, I think having a very accomplished and brilliant poet and short story writer waiting for me to give him my pages every week and wanting to impress him kickstarted it... or maybe even one less than impress him: to not waste his time. Obviously you always want to write the best thing possible, but I think it’s a really good fire under your ass to be like, “This is somebody I respect so much, and I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of them.”
Because of the frenzied pace and the relentlessness of the book, it does conjure up these visions of you furiously writing it all in one go. How much of the writing process was it all pouring out of you like that, and how much of it was spent really laboring over it and fine-tuning it?
I think that the first three quarters of the book were written really fast. The first three quarters of the book I wrote in maybe four or five months. And then the rest of it… When I got to the point that the actress arrived. I was like, “Oh my God, now I have to park the car.” Driving really fast is one thing, but bringing it to a head took me a little more time, even just to figure out what I really wanted that character to be about. Using Woodcutters as a model is really easy when it comes to the characters and the fact you’re at a dinner party. But plot-wise, Woodcutters doesn’t really have very much. I couldn’t just be like, “Now she’s going to meet Prince Charming and they’re going to ride off into the sunset together.” No, now I have to have a character who shifts the entire paradigm of the evening by saying a bunch of really deep home truths to everyone that are extremely pertinent to that exact milieu. And I was like, “Well, what are those that I want to say? Why am I writing this book? What is this?” Figuring that out took a lot longer.
You spend the entire book in the head of this narrator, and yet you leave it feeling like you don’t truly know her somehow. She’s a kind of cipher. Did you intend for that to be the case?
Totally. I wanted the narrator to be somebody that anybody could feel that they were in her shoes. I almost didn’t want to have to gender her, but then I did, because I felt like it’s more annoying to not… well, not annoying, it just would have been more difficult for me not to. And some of the issues she has with these people are specifically female. When I read Woodcutters, I was relating to it as a woman so much that I actually forgot the narrator is an elderly man—the way that he’s used and abused by those characters really resonated with me. So I wanted that on purpose.
Obviously the book is about quite a specific milieu, but there’s also a timeless quality to it, in that I’m sure these kinds of snobby creative communities have existed forever. Was it hard to find that balance between the specific and the universal?
I don’t know. I don’t think I was trying to be too calculated with anything. I was trying to write from the truth of these characters and this world. I’ve had many people ask me, “Did you really go to a dinner party like that?” No, of course not! That dinner party is a nightmare. I would never be invited to that because I m a bitch. [Laughs.] I’d speak my mind. The narrator is much more quiet and willing to sit there and willing to become really close friends with those people. I could never be close with those people, because I just genuinely don’t think I can hold my tongue. I’ve had people from many different places and ages say, “Oh, I know that house in Milan. Or I know that house in Berlin. Or my grandfather knew those people back in the ’70s, and they were lawyers and they were politicians.” It’s like that social dynamic transcends specificity.
Pretty much all the characters are either toxic, or damaged, or just downright annoying. It’s a fairly common criticism these days, especially one I read online—often on Goodreads—for people to say they struggled to finish a book because they found all the characters unlikable.
Not on my Goodreads, I hope.
Not on your Goodreads, of course. But what do you make of that line of thinking?
I don’t know. People are really weird. They should watch Bridgerton. Although I like Bridgerton, actually. I don’t know. They should look at the canon of literature. People are so annoying. Read Anna Karenina—she’s a crazy-ass bitch!
Which brings us neatly to the fact that the book is also very funny. Did you think about genre at all, or whether this might be classified as a comic novel?
I think my favorite thing is stuff that can both be high and low and kind of piss everybody off, which I think eventually opens it up to more readers. I really do love avant-garde, high literary fiction. I mean, that’s what Thomas Bernhard is. I like that stuff. But I also think that those kinds of books can be more readable and more accessible than people realize. And so people don’t get to experience them, because other people have made it seem like they’re difficult to read, or like you need a very high level of education to enjoy them. That they’re up on the Mount Olympus of books in some way. I’ve read some of them, and I found Thomas Bernhard to be super funny. That’s why I liked that book in the first place, because that book is funny. So yeah, I wasn’t really thinking about genre specifically about my own book, but it’s also interesting because I do think that there are bits in the book where I talk about genre—where I talk about people censoring themselves from seeming too lowbrow, for example.
Returning to what you said earlier, I feel like the most common response from friends and colleagues who have read the book is one of: “Oh God, I’ve been to that dinner party. I’ve been around those people.” They seem to have an almost visceral reaction to it. Did you anticipate that response at all?
I didn’t anticipate it, but I think I hoped for it. For me, the best part of reading fiction is when somebody writes something, and you don’t know them, or maybe they’re from 300 years ago, but you go, “Oh my God, these are my thoughts. I never knew that anybody but me felt that way.” It’s like they’re almost reaching from out of the book, from out of the past, and grabbing you. And I mean, my book isn’t set in the past, of course, but I hope that it resonates with people in a similar way. So it’s good to hear that it hit them that hard.
I read you describe the common thread between the characters in another interview being that they’re all lonely. Why was that idea of exploring loneliness in particular interesting to you?
I mean, I definitely think it is something to do with the current moment where we’re all tending to our attention fiefdoms on our phones. It’s a very solitary thing actually, to be like, “How much attention am I getting? How much attention is my thing getting?” And it’s something that I’m acutely aware of, basically for the first time ever. “Is my little book getting attention?” Living in my own special world a bit. That’s deeply lonely, because you’re like a one-person corporation. I think that my characters are also lonely because they don’t trust anybody, because they’re all in such transactional relationships with everybody that they don’t feel like anybody’s actually interested in them. They’re just interested in their stuff, or their accomplishments, or their money. And they can’t divorce that from the possibility that maybe they have some worth outside of those things.
Fashion plays a surprisingly big role in the book. How intentional were you about what the characters were wearing, and what they were trying to signal by what they were wearing?
I love reading about fashion in fiction. In The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, she has a character that is pretty much a dead ringer for Elsa Schiaparelli. And she’s always describing the way that her clothes look—that’s my favorite. And she also talks about getting dressed and packing for a trip to meet a hot guy she s into, what specific jacket she’s going to wear and what specific skirt she’s going to wear. In the art world, the culture world, people are obsessed with clothes. But people also want to pretend they re not because they’re intellectual. But fashion is part of self-presentation, which is what those people s entire lives are about. So, I definitely wanted that to feature strongly in the book.
Have there been any other responses that have surprised you while embarking on the book tour and hearing readers’ reactions?
It surprised me how much the book has resonated with much older people. Well, it didn’t actually surprise me, because my grandpa kept saying it to me. [Laughs.] He was like, “This book is being marketed all wrong. This book has nothing to do with the art world. This book is for everybody.” And so that has been nice, actually. I’ve done a bunch of events where a woman in her 70s will tell me how much it resonated with her, and I’ve really liked that. Also, one of my favorite moments of all this, to be honest, was meeting the artist who did the painting on the front of the book. It’s such a beautiful painting, and she was just such a lovely person. I loved talking to her about it and getting to see her excitement at seeing her painting in the windows of bookstores. When you write a book, you don’t really think about that part.
Happiness and Love has such a distinctive style and tone. Have you started thinking about what your next book might look like, and do you think you’d write it in a more traditional or conventional way?
Yeah, I think it’s going to be very different. I’ve started working on something, but I don’t want to talk about it just yet, because I’m not sure if I m going to stick with that exact thing. I do enjoy the Bernhardian single paragraph way of writing, but I’m pretty sure of what I’m writing next, and I think it lends itself better to a classic novelistic form.
And what about the italics? It’s such an effective device. Are you going to be sad to leave that behind?
I love the italics. I’m addicted to the italics. In my non-fiction or journalistic writing, I’m constantly using the italics, and sometimes going to war with editors where they’re like, “Why have you italicized it?” And I’m like, “Because I have to!” Bernhard has got into my brain and taken over my mind. And I mean, his mind was jacked by Diderot, so there’s a long history of getting your brain hijacked here. But yeah, I love those italics. I’m not letting go of the italics.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
