![]() Some people would say that’s not a good thing, but I think if it has a purpose, and even when it’s disorienting, that can be really interesting. LaCava: Yeah, it’s this kind of thing where it could have started at the end. There weren’t always distinct styles that made them easy to tell apart rather, there was more overlap, as if they were interchangeable. When I first read it as a PDF there were no page numbers, so I would get confused about which narrator was speaking. Hadland: I think the first section and last section are untitled, whereas others are titled with the name of the narrator for that section, as if to suggest the central character could be any of them. Mathilde is stuck in a system trying to find her way out, haunted not only by her mother but by a legacy of storytelling that punishes women like her. This kind of Oulipian restraint fell away, but it’s still there in this idea of repeating our parents and reliving the same patterns. It would have been almost as if you could turn the book over and read it the opposite way or open it to any section and read the narrative in any order. I started off wanting to plot the story in the form of an anagram, so that you could fold it onto itself. ![]() Hoffman’s “The Sandman.” I knew I wanted to tell a fictional narrative that tackled questions of desire and the unconscious hidden in a creepily familiar superficial world. Stephanie LaCava: I started research for the book seven years ago with texts around Freud’s “Uncanny,” like E. What prompted you to write this story in this way? Had it taken on any other forms before the structure of a novel? What was important for you to be getting at in this book? The book is told through multiple characters perspectives and timelines are constantly shifting and overlapping. ![]() Gracie Hadland: The Superrationals is the story of a young woman, Mathilde de Saint-Evans, trying to identify herself, her desires, and her ambitions in and around the New York and European art worlds of the 2010s. ![]()
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