Australian novelist Lexi Freiman knows how to walk a literary tightrope. Her fiction is both savagely funny and strikingly empathetic, daring to satirise the hot-­button issues of identity politics and cancel culture without eliding the complex motivations that underpin them. In her 2018 debut Inappropriation, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, a trio of schoolgirls spectacularly misunderstand Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto; in 2023’s The Book of Ayn, which saw Freiman interviewed on The Daily Show in the US, a newly cancelled writer finds herself radicalised by the work of notorious iconoclast Ayn Rand. In both novels, Freiman dextrously uses satire and absurdity to illuminate the complications and contradictions of selfhood in contemporary culture.

In this conversation – a condensed and lightly edited version of a 2024 Brisbane Writers Festival session – Lexi talks to Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver about the allure of contrarianism, the necessary selfishness of creativity and the importance of a good joke.

CARODY CULVER: I’m really interested in the broad ideas and inspirations that seem to underpin both of your novels: there’s a skewering of a particular cultural phenomenon (identity politics, then cancel culture), and there’s the work of a famous thinker or ideologue (Donna Haraway, Ayn Rand). How does your fiction emerge from this ferment? Do you begin with the idea or phenomenon and build the character or situation around it?

LEXI FREIMAN: I can’t exactly remember with Inappropriation – I think I went to an event where someone was talking about Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and I started reading it. What I found fun about it is that it’s this very complicated literary manifesto – it’s very easy to get confused by it…and I
guess it spoke to this idea I had at the time around identity politics, where I felt like a lot of things were being conflated, and I thought it would be fun to play with these ideas around identity and intersectionality. So I put these ideas into the heads of three young girls who are trying to figure out what their identities are in the context of a private girls’ school where they feel excluded already. [They have] an outsider mentality and they’re looking for ways to belong, looking for ways to matter, looking for ways to be powerful, because I think we can never separate identity politics from power. The book is full of these conflations and the ways in which these ideas get confused – at one point, Ziggy, the main character, decides that transgenderism and transhumanism are kind of the same thing, so she starts wearing a GoPro on her head. (Amazingly, I have never been cancelled for this book.) But it’s a way of showing how this need to belong is so powerful for this character. I think I’m often looking for an ideology or a set of ideas that’s easily misunderstood or misinterpreted, or that has many ways of being interpreted.

With Ayn Rand, I was interested in someone who is so despised on the left and blamed for every problem on Earth, at least in Western society. I thought it would be really fun to try to find a way not to redeem her but to look for the places in her philosophy where I think there’s a grain of truth, and to try to find the places on the left where Randian philosophy rears its head. I thought it would be an interesting challenge and a way to write satire, which is what I do, to find some of the paradoxes in this culture that I’m a part of, as someone who’s writing about the left and who feels they are of the left. (I don’t know how you write about the right, it’s too crazy.)

CC: When we meet Anna, the protagonist of The Book of Ayn, she’s already been cancelled: she’s written her opioid-­crisis satire while living rent free in a wealthy friend’s New York apartment, and now The New York Times has called her a classist. She explains in the novel’s opening paragraph that she’s always been a contrarian, and this idea of contrarianism is really central to the book. It’s how Anna deals with the world – it’s the engine of her personality, and at one stage she thinks, ‘That was my power: turning people into jokes.’ But it’s also a source of anxiety for her – why is this?

LF: She’s excluded as a result of these contrarian kinds of positions, but it’s a sort of self-­fulfilling prophecy – she needs to be excluded, or needs to feel like an outsider, in order to really work through these ideas. In a sense, she doesn’t want to belong – Ziggy wants to belong, but for Anna…it would be embarrassing to be the same as everyone else. [I wanted to explore] what it is to be an artist and all the contradictions inherent in these ideas of selfishness and altruism as they pertain to artists. I feel like artists, and specifically writers, are pretty selfish people who are doing a thing that requires a lot of ambition and self-­focus, and yet, at least at the moment or in the last decade or so, we’re tasked with being people whose job it is to change and fix the world. I wanted to play with that idea of the artist as this altruistic figure when I don’t think that’s the temperament.

Contrarianism is part of Anna’s psychological make-­up; it started very early, when [as a three-­year-­old] she painted the walls of her parents’ bedroom with her own shit. This was her first contrarian joke, which nobody found funny. But the reason she did it was because her baby brother had just died, and the atmosphere in the house was so dark, Anna [wanted] to lighten the mood. This was obviously a terrible thing to do to grieving parents, so the shame of [this act] is with her forever. And ever since then she’s had this complicated relationship with shame and telling jokes and using jokes as a way to get out of any difficult feelings or taking a stance or really caring about anything – [she believes] jokes should be protected because in a way they protect her. So I feel like contrarianism is all wrapped up in her identity as an artist and as a comic writer – it’s her talent and it’s the thing that’s making her life hell.

CC: I’m interested in your research into Rand and how this fed into your characterisation of Anna. Obviously Rand is very easy to hate – she extolled selfishness, she loved laissez-­faire capitalism, her novels are these stodgily written ideological manifestos. But did your feelings towards her and her ideas shift as you were writing the novel? Did you come across anything surprising?

LF: I read a couple of biographies, one of which was written by Rand’s lover – she had this lover who was also her student and was twenty-­five years younger than her. His wife wrote one of her biographies, so that’s a fun book. I found her life story very compelling because it’s full of these funny contradictions around her philosophy. She came from an upper-­middle-­class family in Russia and watched her father’s pharmacy be stolen from him by the Bolsheviks, and so that was her deep wound. She watched patriarchy and capitalism crumble to its knees, and so for her whole life she was furious about socialism and thought it was the most evil thing in the world. She then moved to the US and thought she had arrived in paradise, and then of course she was totally rejected by the literary world, which has always been very socialist leaning. She struggled her whole life with this feeling of being excluded from everything, but that also fed her.

[In my novel], Anna rebels against this idea that every narrative has to be a trauma narrative, and part of that is Rand’s idea – you know, we’re all self-­made, forget the past, forget history, none of that stuff matters. But then Rand obviously had this kind of trauma about her dad. So there are all these contradictions, and then there’s the crazy, basically open relationship she was in for about a decade when she was in her late fifties and into her sixties: she was basically sharing (which is not Randian) her boyfriend, and then he cheated on her and it all fell apart and she was furious at him and wrote him out of their shared book (they had shared publications). Her whole idea of selfishness kind of unravelled in her later years and she never wrote another book after that – it kind of destroyed her. 

CC: To begin with it seems like Anna’s path might mirror Rand’s – Rand went to LA to write for the movies and Anna also heads west to write a TV show about her hero. She ends up moving into a house full of content-­creators for a platform that she thinks might be called Jizz. Why did you choose to bring the micro-­content industry, the attention economy, into the narrative?

LF: As a novelist I rail against all that stuff – these people who just make a stupid video in an afternoon and get five million views, while you labour over a novel for five years and 2,000 people buy your book. It’s so infuriating, and I have a special hatred for these people. But there’s something very Randian about the whole attention economy – it’s this totally free-­market thing where whatever works best is what’s going to make the most money. And in a sense it’s egalitarian – you don’t need to have gone to an Ivy League school, you don’t need to come from money, to make a funny video about driving a car with two drum sticks or whatever. (I actually have an ex-­boyfriend who had a lot of success making a video like that.) In a weird way it’s laissez-­faire…it is fair, kind of, that anyone can get famous on the internet, but you usually get famous for stupid garbage, and I wanted to tease out all the nuances of that without calling it stupid garbage. And to have Anna in a sense be embraced by that world: she becomes friends with some content creators, they love her Ayn Rand TV work, and she’s toying with this idea of ‘is this fair? I guess I’m going to succeed this way’, and then of course she doesn’t.

CC: There’s that brilliant bit where Anna briefly goes viral as ‘Ayn Ram’ after one of the content creators films a clip of her talking about Ayn’s ideas with a sheep’s head filter over her face…

LF: One of my best jokes.

CC: The moment in the novel when Anna starts to lose faith in her new Randian worldview is an amazing scene involving Adderall-­induced diarrhoea and a toilet that won’t flush. As Anna experiences this brown tidal wave of shame and effluent, she has this realisation about what she thinks Rand’s ideas have let loose into the world – everything from Big Pharma to the emptiness of modern life – but the most important realisation is this line: ‘Finally, I let myself think it: Ayn Rand had no sense of humour.’ Why is this a turning point for Anna?

LF: She’s kind of understood something about capitalism because she’s forced to be a dog walker in LA and can’t believe how difficult and horrible it is, [and that makes her aware] that she still has a safety net. And then there’s Adderall. But I think the realisation that Ayn Rand isn’t funny is devastating…because jokes are so important to Anna. And it’s a bit of a justification, but it is what she believes: jokes are this place where you can hold two ideas in your mind at once, and usually the best, most transgressive jokes deal in paradox, and Anna thinks that’s the closest we can ever hope to get to truth. So the fact that Ayn Rand hated humour and paradox makes Anna realise that Rand was a simple creature – intellectually, emotionally, she couldn’t stomach anything complex – and that’s what’s most upsetting to her.

CC: The narrative shifts gear in the second half of the novel, when Anna decides to take what seems to be the opposite path to Randianism: she goes to a tiny Greek island to take part in an ego-­death workshop. She thinks to herself at one stage, ‘Did I even still want to be a writer? Being one seemed counterintuitive to the eradication of the ego.’ Could you talk a little bit about what you wanted to explore here and what Anna discovers about the role ego plays in the creation of art?

LF: To make it personal, I went to a place that’s similar – an ego death-type commune in Greece. I was trying to kill my ego through meditation. This place was a mix of Western and Eastern philosophy, and I found myself thinking about Ayn Rand while I was meditating, which was pretty demoralising. But that was because I was trying to think of the way I was having this experience, which felt so good for a book – and for this book that I was already writing about Ayn Rand – and I was in this constant struggle over what was more valuable to me: trying to get enlightened, trying to lose my ego, or trying to write a good book and have a career and be successful and do all the things that we all strive to do in a capitalist society. The book won – I’m not enlightened (surprise, surprise).

CC: I’m very pleased the book won.

LF: Thanks. But I just think that if you’re enlightened, you don’t care about writing books. I don’t think you care about anything, which is the whole point. You don’t care about anything in a good way – it’s not apathy, it’s something else.

CC: Another central idea here in relation to how ego works in the creation of art is selfishness, or selfishness versus altruism. For Rand it seems like selfishness was a form of care – she wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness and believed that altruism either led to meaningless self-­sacrifice or meant that you never had a strong enough self to achieve any kind of fulfilment. So much of Anna’s arc is about figuring out how to reconcile the self, how to exist in the world in relation to others as an artist and as a person. What did you want to explore here about that selfishness–altruism spectrum?

LF: I guess it ties into cancel culture and Anna [being] a writer and someone who’s dealing with the pressures of being an artist in the current climate, where it feels to me like we’re supposed to be collectivist, communitarian, humanitarian, very much concerned with changing the world, fixing the world, solving all the world’s problems. And I don’t think that’s completely honest when it comes to writers and artists – I don’t think it’s honest when it even comes to the left, when it comes to progressivism, which…comes from Enlightenment thinking and the rights of the individual and how important it is to protect the individual. It felt like something I wanted to explore, particularly as an artist who’s been told to write a certain kind of book or to be a certain kind of artist – that feels dishonest.

I had this conversation with some writers last night – [two of us] were saying that we don’t feel it’s the writer’s job to save the world through their books, and another writer disagreed. She said she used to feel that way [but] now, with climate change, [she thinks] it’s our job to create awareness. I think it’s the writer’s job to transcend ideology, to transcend morality and to put us in touch with our being rather than the ‘right’ ideas. And once we’re in touch with our humanity…we can potentially make better choices, or not. But I think all that literature should be tasked with doing is taking us to that other place where we feel human again. The rest is not literature’s problem. 

CC: You mentioned cancel culture, and I think shame is a huge part of that; shame also plays a very significant role in The Book of Ayn (at one stage Anna describes shame as ‘that sadistic welder of my personality and art’). You could say that cancellation is both a form of ego death and a kind of public shaming. How do you see the role of shame in the culture today, particularly in relation to our obsession with virtue and with creating art that should reflect this virtue?

LF: I think there’s something religious about it – shaming is like an original sin kind of idea, where you shame someone and then you can punish them, you can exile them from the culture. But the thing with most religions is that there’s a salvation element, whereas with cancel culture there isn’t, so I feel like people are getting ripped off. We’re secular, contemporary people who pledge allegiance to an ideology that lacks all the good things about religion, like a real sense of community and belonging, things that transcend ideas. The sublime. So I think it’s a religious instinct to link shame and virtue; it’s a way to silence people. It’s very hard to speak when you’ve been shamed.

CC: There’s a strong connection between virtue and shame and comedy, too, and the novel explores the possibilities and the purpose of comedy in such fascinating ways. Early on in the narrative, an old friend accuses Anna of always turning everything into a joke – she tells Anna, ‘You don’t have a stance. You don’t actually care about anything.’ But Anna thinks to herself later on, ‘Jokes cared, just in a different way.’ Could you talk about the role of comedy in the book and about why you think it’s important to be able to joke about difficult issues?

LF: I think we have to be able to. [That’s the] way comedy works…it’s this amazing testing ground for the places where moral or established ideas have a little bit of [give] – there might be holes or weaknesses or pressure points, and those are what a great comedian looks for. They’re looking for the places in this thing that we all think is the right idea, but actually, if you just put a little bit of pressure on it, it can be totally inverted and everyone will laugh because it’s kind of true and that’s why it’s funny. Comedy can find those places in what are otherwise very rigid ideas. I mean, all ideas are rigid – that’s why I like exploring them through novels, because a novel is so spacious, there’s so much room, there are characters who are complex and deep and flawed and have so many different angles from which they see things. So anything that can loosen or soften some of that rigidity around ideas is so important for us to maintain. I think jokes are about transgression, and we have to have these sacred art forms or spaces where it’s okay to test the bounds of what’s acceptable and what’s not.

CC: Another thing comedy does in this novel is reveal the ways in which these seemingly opposing states or concepts are maybe not that different when you take a closer look. There are some running gags about whether particular jokes can be classified as homage or satire, whether particular acts can be considered sadism or masochism; there are also interesting similarities between Rand’s philosophy and some of the ideas being espoused at the ego-­death retreat. I wondered if you were making a kind of horseshoe theory point here about what happens to any ideology if it’s taken to extremes or if a person invests in it too unquestioningly?

LF: Definitely. What’s interesting to me about playing with these ideas is seeing how, when you take an idea to its most extreme place, everyone becomes a fascist. People can get obsessed with their enemy or with an opposing idea, and in a sense…it then defines who they are – like Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment, where you define yourself in terms of the thing that you lack or that you despise. There’s this weird symbiotic relationship when you’re so obsessed with your opposite or your enemy that you start to take on some of its qualities, and I feel like that’s happening in the book, where I’m interested in how these two sides [of an issue] are two sides of the same coin.

CC: I think we see that with Ayn Rand as well – she testified for the House Un-­American Activities Committee, which you could say was a kind of prototype for cancel culture, even though I’m sure Rand would have felt that cancel culture was a terrible notion.

I think you pulled off something so difficult in this novel – even though it’s cutting satire, it’s also very compassionate, and even though you’re tackling these culture-­wars issues, you’re not being reactionary, you’re not trolling; you’re being thoughtful and nuanced and crafting these very trenchant jokes on every page. How did you achieve that balance of the satirical and the humane?

LF: I think it’s just [about] really trying to put yourself in the pain of the person you disagree with most. I think that’s the trick. If you put yourself in that place where you really understand why they think the way they think and why they behave the way they behave, that it comes from this pain they have – once you put yourself there and you start writing jokes, you have a different kind of freedom, and I think that comes from compassion. It’s like you’re not working on a superficial level anymore, even with jokes, and I think that’s what the best comedy does. It goes to a deeper than surface-­level mockery, and [in this book] it really is about finding Anna’s pain. She’s very honest about her bad ideas, her provocative ideas, but she’s also honest about her self-­loathing and insecurity and the ugliest parts of herself. So if all of that’s in there, she’s a complex person and we understand why she might be reactive. It’s about making the character really complex and trying to understand all the ideas you’re interrogating and trying to invert. And it’s about understanding why those ideas are held so deeply for some people – you may have a totally different life experience to them, so you may not understand them fully, but you have to try. And then you can make fun of them! Just kidding.

Image by Marjorie Kaufman, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons