When Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was fifteen and growing up in New York, she called the restaurant where her father worked as a deliveryman and pretended to be a beat reporter at a city paper to get an abusive manager fired. In 2010, after she wrote an anonymous essay about being undocumented and a student at Harvard, she received her first offers to publish a memoir, which she rejected. But she is not, as she tells us in The Undocumented Americans, a journalist. “Journalists are not allowed to get involved” the way she gets involved, nor to “try to change the outcome of their stories as crudely as I do.”

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Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends is about many things, but one that comes up when I meet with Rooney in Manchester is learning the limits of disavowal. Frances, the novel’s 21-year-old protagonist, is an ambivalent surveyor of the adult world she is poised to inhabit. She doesn’t fear practical responsibilities so much as emotional ones: accepting human interdependence; acknowledging a very ordinary susceptibility to pain; figuring out how to live when one’s values, but not one’s desires, have divested from global capitalism.

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Ottessa Moshfegh’s first two books are, as she tells me, very different from one another. But despite the contrast between MCGLUE (2014) and EILEEN (2015), she acknowledges that ‘they come from the same imagination’. For one, both protagonists are New England misfits. Moshfegh herself grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, where her parents immigrated after meeting in Belgium. She descends from Croatian partisans on her mother’s side and a dispossessed Iranian billionaire on her father’s. Newton is a town she has described as being the safest in America and possessing the highest number per capita of psychiatrists. She now splits her time between Los Angeles and the California desert.

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[Index]

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Yen Pham