Sophie Kemp

Chewing on steak and getting spat out in your twenties.

By Josh Kazali

Illustration by Iris Pope

Sophie Kemp is a writer from Brooklyn by way of Schenectady, New York. She also teaches in Columbia’s Creative Writing department, where I first met her as the intimidatingly cool professor of my fiction workshop. Kemp has reviewed albums for Pitchfork, written essays in The Paris Review, and in March of this year, she published her debut novel, Paradise Logic. 

Paradise Logic follows the misadventures of 23-year-old Reality Kahn, an actress in New Jersey waterslide commercials living in Gowanus who is on a quest to become the greatest girlfriend of all time. As she reads in the magazine Girlfriend Weekly: “This is a worthwhile cause. Young men all over the world are in need of your services.” Along the way, Reality is swept up by a crack-smoking NYU grad student of Assyrian history, the mysterious Dr. Zweig Altmann and his experimental drug ZZZZvx Ultra (XR), and a talking garden snake in sunglasses named Ungaro Ulaanbaatar. If all this sounds a bit chaotic: it is. But bound by Kemp’s inventive prose and sharp sense of humor, the story is tightly sprung and as moving as it is bewildering. Alexandra Tanner remarks for The New York Times, “Here, at last, is someone doing something new.”

As a professor, Kemp is perceptive and incisive, cutting to the heart of what makes a piece of writing work. As a novelist, these qualities remain true, but there’s also a wacky stylishness and a wicked humor which makes her writing a delight to read. After class a few weeks ago, I asked Kemp what she would do after her novel was published. She responded, “Die, probably.” Luckily, Kemp has stuck around to grace us with her wit and intelligence on books and music and young love. She also still has to grade my final. 

To borrow the phrase from Paradise Logic: “Read on, man.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue & White: Something that’s been brought up in our workshop is how often this city is written about. Was it a challenge or a treat to be able to set your novel in New York?

Sophie Kemp: I don't even know if it really felt like a choice. Like, when I started writing it, I just had this small story for a novel and I knew I needed to write it, and it just was always sort of set in New York. I think it is kind of an interesting constraint just because people do it all the time and it’s so easy for it to be corny.

B&W: What sort of things did you find to work around that? I guess specifically with Brooklyn, because it’s so Brooklyn oriented.

SK: I was really trying not to write a Brooklyn novel. I wanted it to just be a book that happened to be set in Brooklyn. I wasn't writing about Brooklyn in a way where the point is, oh, it’s about Brooklyn, like the artifice of living in Brooklyn at the end of the 2010s. I feel like it’s very easy to just write, like, bad HBO’s Girls. I went to Oberlin, so that's always in the back of my head as something I really didn’t want to do.

B&W: And Gowanus is such a good name, I was thinking about that.

SK: There is something acoustically resonant about it for sure.

B&W: Yeah. Where did this begin for you? Like, where did Paradise Logic begin?

SK: For me, there’s this small story that I had been swimming around for a while. It is loosely based off of a real thing that happened to me, which is moving to New York in my early 20s and getting kind of caught up in a small DIY punk scene and being in a relationship for the first time. But that to me was never that interesting of a story to tell. For me, Paradise Logic came back when I figured out what it was about this thing that I felt a compulsion to write about.

B&W: What was it about the DIY punk scene that you connected with?

SK: I mean, it was just an environment that was super familiar to me. I think such a contained space is super interesting because it’s often full of young people trying to assert themselves artistically for the first time and doing a really bad job. I find it to be unbelievably funny.

B&W: I remember a few weeks ago you brought up the term “picaresque” in our workshop. After I read the book, I was like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. Did you always think of the novel as a quest narrative?

SK: I think it was something that got engineered slightly later, but the picaresque was one of the oldest comic forms and one of the oldest forms that novels have taken. I just find quest narratives to just be really funny. Like, when I was a child, my favorite movie was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But then when I was older and taking literature more seriously, there was Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy. I just think that it’s really cool and you can do a lot with it.

B&W: Yeah. When I was reading it, I was thinking a lot about Lit Hum and these old narratives rather than contemporary literature. When you were writing, how wide were your influences?

SK: I mean, I don’t really read much contemporary fiction. I feel like when I was writing Paradise Logic, I was reading mostly 20th century and some 19th century fiction. I remember I read Pale Fire for the first time when I was writing, I was reading a lot of Nabokov. It was like the first time I had ever read Flaubert, I remember I read A Sentimental Education, which I felt very inspired by even though my book is nothing like that. I feel like it’s very important if you have aspirations to be a novelist to read all the time.

B&W: Especially for a novel like this, there must be inspirations that don't necessarily make it onto the page. What book do you think has the most askew influence?

SK: One book that I think was really important for this book was Kasuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I don't know if you’ve ever read that before.

B&W: Yeah, I have.

SK: The Remains of the Day is about a guy who wants to be the greatest butler of all time. And I had been kind of struggling to be like, oh, how can I make this book that’s about nothing interesting? And I was like, oh, it’s going be like that. Like, it’s going to be about a girl who wants to be the greatest girlfriend of all the time.

B&W: I’ve always liked how much that book really gets into the butlering.

SK: People think that that book is, like, sad—which it is—but I also think it’s unbelievably funny. It’s one of my favorite books.

B&W: And being the greatest girlfriend of all time is such a perfect quest: Was that always the framing?

SK: That was pretty much on the page the whole time.

B&W: What would you hope any aspiring girlfriends take away from Reality’s journey?

SK: Hopefully that they should probably not try to be the greatest girlfriend of all time and just realize that they actually have a different skill that they should pursue.  

B&W: Yeah. I also wanted to ask about Ariel, who’s such a specifically terrible boyfriend. What were you thinking about in crafting the boyfriend who Reality would be linked with?

SK: I never wanted to write a book where the point is, oh, this man has really wronged her and she’s fucked up because he’s fucked up. So I wanted him to be a slightly generic shitty Brooklyn guy that she has too much of an attachment to. She has a lot of autonomy over what's happening to her, which I think was pretty important to me.

B&W: Yeah, that’s true. I feel like some of the most gutting parts are where Ariel is more careless than intentionally harming Reality. I mean, the feeling that someone just doesn’t care as much as you, I think can be the most painful.

SK: I just think that's an experience that many people who go through in their first relationships. It’s just like you bet on the wrong horse and you love someone and they don’t love you back.

B&W: There’s also a lot of sex in the novel, and I wanted to ask, how do you approach writing about sex?

SK: There is a lot of sex in this novel and some of it was a bit reactionary of me, where I feel like people are afraid to do it. I think it’s important to write about, and there’s a lot of comic potential, because it’s something that everyone does and it has the capacity to be so gross and scary. So, I chose to write about it for maybe a slightly political reason. But also, this woman wants to be the greatest girlfriend of all time. If you are the greatest girlfriend of all time, a lot of your job is just making sure that you’re always available to have sex with this random guy that kind of hates you.

B&W: Do you think more people should be writing about sex?

SK: Definitely, yeah. I think something that really pisses me off about contemporary fiction is that a lot of it is just toothless Netflix drivel to me. The whole point of fiction is that it can do things that film and TV can never do. It has the capacity to be as extreme as you want it because you never have to worry about staging it. So why not use the medium to its fullest potential?

B&W: It’s funny, because I also hear about how sexless films are now.

SK: It's troubling to me, can't put my finger on why.

B&W: You've also talked about the importance of Reality having an artistic practice. When did you start thinking about your own writing more seriously? When did it feel real?

SK: I always wanted to be a writer and when I graduated college, I thought that I wanted to be a magazine writer and I essentially did that for a couple of years. I really quickly despised it. Then I got laid off from my last magazine job, which was as a blogger at VICE. I really hated that job so much. I was kind of relieved to be laid off from it. After I got laid off, I just was like, fuck it, I’m just going to write fiction. And that very quickly started to feel like for the first time in my life, I knew what I was supposed to be writing about.

B&W: Was that before you did your MFA here?

SK: I started writing fiction in October of 2020 and then applied to grad school like six weeks later. I was like: I’m going to be unemployed. Like I need to get health insurance. So that’s why I went to graduate school. Not something I would recommend.

B&W: You also write album reviews for Pitchfork, where you mentioned you interned. I was wondering how your approach to nonfiction writing differs or relates to your fiction writing?

SK: I started writing professionally for magazines when I was still kind of a teenager, so it definitely informed my fiction. But I actually feel once I started writing fiction pretty seriously, my fiction started informing my nonfiction.

B&W: In what way?

SK: I just felt like I suddenly understood a lot more about how writing works, because I finally felt confident in myself for the first time. I think I started to have more trust in my own opinions, because I was able to finally feel like my writing was good for the first time.

B&W: I’m glad that you feel it!

SK: Yeah, me too.

B&W: Do you get to pick the [Pitchfork] number?

SK: Can’t say.

B&W: Aw. Fair enough.

SK: I’ll get in trouble.

B&W: Do you listen to music when you write?

SK: Yeah, all the time.

B&W: What sort of music?

SK: I don’t know, everything. Like, when I was writing this book, I was listening to Mahler and the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack and pre-cancellation Kanye West and early-2000s Eminem and Joanna Newsom and Neu! and, like, every album that I’ve ever cared about.

B&W: Wow. I guess that does sort of make sense for the sonic texture of the novel. What music do you most of the time prefer?

SK: What am I listening to right now? I don’t know, I really feel like working for Pitchfork kind of ruined my relationship with music. When I was in college, I ran the radio station and was someone who was listening to every new record and every old record and was friends with a ton of DJs and people with bands. Then I kind of got spat back out in the second half of my 20s and now all I really want to do is listen to Summer Teeth by Wilco.

B&W: I also wanted to talk about your teaching approach, because I’m more familiar with you as a teacher than as a writer. Do you think teaching makes you a different writer?

SK: Yeah, I think it does in a good way. I think teaching has made me a really good editor. I’ve gotten really good at quickly figuring out the thing that's preventing a story from fully singing, and I think it's made me a lot more capable of doing that in my own writing.

B&W: You also did your MFA here—has that relationship with the department changed? Like, is it weird to be with old professors?

SK: Yeah, it mostly just makes me feel like I'm a super senior, to be honest. Like, I don’t take classes here anymore but I'm just around all the time. I’ll see Sam Lipsyte and he’ll be like, you’re still here? And I’m like, yeah, but I teach now, I’m on the writing faculty.

B&W: And has there been a change in your approach to teaching since you first started? What’s the biggest thing you've learned about teaching writing?

SK: I had never taught really anything before other than being a summer camp counselor. I was a gardening counselor, and I would do classes where I told wealthy 11-year-olds from Westchester how to walk a goat. So I really had no idea what the fuck I was doing my first semester, and was just amazed I could get the plane in the air at all. I feel like the way my approach to teaching has changed is that I understand how to teach now.

B&W: I was going to ask, because I think you were teaching on the day the book was published—

SK: The day before.

B&W: The day before. What did you do on the day it was published?

SK: I had to do a full day of book signings. Then my editor took me out for a steak and then my boyfriend took me out for Martini.

B&W: I think I had a steak after I finished my thesis.

SK: It was my third steak of the week. I guess when you write a book, people just want to give you a steak.

B&W: One of our first assignments in workshop was to bring in a favorite paragraph. What do you think makes for a really great paragraph? 

SK: That it’s really singing in a way. That all of the sentences are really in conversation with each other and are doing something that’s loud and buoyant and kinetic, I think. 

B&W: And on the topic of good writing, what have you been reading lately?

SK: Right now I’m reading a collection of plays by this woman Sarah Kane, who is a playwright in the 90s who wrote five plays when she was in her mid-20s and killed herself. They’re really, really upsetting and I’m really loving it. It’s one of the most transgressive works of writing I’ve ever read. What else have I read this semester? Can I look at my computer? I always write down every book I read, because I think it’s nice to feel like a failure. Oh, I read Bend Sinister by Nabokov, which was great. 

B&W: Finally, as someone who’s imminently going to be 23 in Brooklyn: any advice?

SK: Watch out! I think it’s gonna be great. I loved being 23 in Brooklyn. It was one of the most difficult and one of the most beautiful years of my life.