The things people wear and the things they put in their homes are performative because they're meant to signal, “This is me, this is who I am, this is what I care about, this is what I can afford, this is what I think looks really good.” It’s sort of like an aesthetic statement, but also, I think in a lot of cases, deeply real. That was something I was really fascinated by: how can this super defined and hyper realized material world not feel shallow and materialistic, how can that feel deeply lived-in and important? someone else pointed out that it’s like anti-diminutive (as -ette usually is) but instead maximalist, exponentially femme, super accessorized I'm probably one of the readers who went into this book knowing what would await me. I've been around this kind of white femme my whole adult life. Some of them are wonderful. Others are like Sasha, Dykette’s main character.

Dykette is full of Sasha thinking about other texts, movies, books. What media was on your mind as you wrote the novel ?I also thought about this book in terms of materials and materialism. How do you think of objects as a performance of nonconformity and normativity? so everyone i know growing up in the 90s/early 2000s was titillated and traumatized by the girl with the green ribbon story for children

The bathroom was flooded with the soft light of a custom-made feat of industrial lamp design. Gays hated overhead lighting; Jules, their host and the house’s owner, had let the original ceiling fixture dust over, taped down the light switches. It was certainly possible that under fluorescent bulbs, the green of Sasha’s fur would not have shimmered so. Sasha, for all her baggage, does understand more than she gets credit for. She has a keen intuitive sense for real vulnerability, and the kind of gender fluidity reserved for those one really trusts. The trouble is, none of these characters are all that trustworthy.

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Another thing I was really interested in was the extent to which other people will always be opaque to us, like maybe we can clear away certain things and maybe people come out in their full, naked desires, but how even the expression of those things can feel really superficial. I guess a big dynamic is exploring how can people be at once absolutely performative and absolutely sincere at the same time? Dykette is a riveting and often darkly funny novel that accurately examines New York queer culture with an insider's authenticity.” and i think sasha’s obsession also stems from darcy’s sense of entitlement — to say and do whatever she wants, to express herself, to be as interested or uninterested as she pleases while reading darcy, described as “artsy-elite, slavic-vibes internet fame” and an icon of the “dirtbag left,” i kept thinking of dasha nekrasova from red scare the LARB article also discusses your inventing game called “come inside” while recovering from an infected cyst, an experience sasha recounts in dykette