Paulina and Fran

"This book comes out in the UK in January with Granta and it’s already out in the US. It blew me away. It’s about two art students—Paulina and Fran—Paulina is very caustic, very sharp-tongued, and Fran is more ethereal, more of a Kate Bush figure. They’re really drawn to each other in a way that you sense a danger in from the off. It’s a really brilliant satire in many ways, on the art world and on art school. There’s a great bit near the beginning where an artist comes to talk to the class. It says the artist put a curse on them before she left, saying, “Only one of you will make it in the art world,” which is the kind of thing you get told on creative writing classes. It’s a very scathing book, razor-sharp, and no-one really escapes. It’s a brutal exploration of female friendship. I loved it, and I loved where she goes with the characters, and she really delves when she’s exploring them. It deals with the sexuality of Paulina and Fran, not only with the men they come into contact with, and have relationships with, but in terms of what they think of each other and why they’re attracted to each other. The idea of the doppelganger is something that comes up in this book. There’s a terrifying kernel within recognising kinship with someone. While they can understand you and you can understand them there’s a beauty in that, and a loveliness in being seen for who you really are; but there’s also a terror, because if somebody knows you, then they can destroy you. Understanding combined with potential destruction is at the heart of this book. There’s sadness as well as the girls leave college and enter the disappointing adult world and everything is mediocre and there isn’t that same invigorating connection around every corner that there is when they’re at college. They have to make sacrifices of self and of longing and of desire. That resignation is a great tragedy in this book and really well-explored and the ending—I won’t give it away—will savage you. It’s so brilliant and sad, and perfect. I think Rachel B Glaser is a stylist, and I love stylists. There’s a beautiful rhythm to her sentences and real originality to her jokes and to her observations. I think it’s a bold, brazen, dark and dirty book. There’s a book called Eat My Heart Out by Zoe Pilger, which has quite a few similarities with this one. The heart of it is a friendship, in many ways, between the main character and an older feminist. It’s a satire on feminism and the same kind of almost deceitful narration that’s also very thrilling is there in both books. When you’re reading them you feel like you’re sticking your hand in a bag of snakes. You’re going to do it, you’re not going to woose out, but there’s that kind of treachery afoot in both of these books. I was thinking earlier, do I have a relationship with books like this that is like a destructive friendship? I’m compelled to keep going back. I guess because we’re generally disrespected, and our looks are commented on so much and we’re always asked where our dress is from and when we’re going to have a baby. So while those questions keep coming we’re going to have to keep ripping the piss out of such things in our writing. Rachel B Glaser writes about hair, but is completely satirising our obsession with it. She is also being 100% sincere. In the Atwood, there’s a section where the protagonist Elaine is interviewed by a journalist as to whether she’s a feminist painter, and she angrily gets around that because she feels the way she’s being questioned is really cynical. I think getting angry and being funny are the answers to this."