Deep Voices 131: Sophie Kemp

An interview with and playlist from the Paradise Logic novelist

Deep Voices 131: Sophie Kemp (YouTube only)
Photo by Daniel Arnold

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This edition of Deep Voices is an interview with the writer Sophie Kemp. Her debut novel, Paradise Logic, was recently published by Simon and Schuster. The above playlist, “Reality's World 420,” is compiled by Kemp. If you enjoy this interview, please consider a paid subscription to Deep Voices to keep this project going. Thank you!

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I’ll start here with a necessary disclosure: For about a year, Sophie Kemp and I worked together at Pitchfork. What I learned about her as a writer during our time as colleagues was that she has the enviable and rare ability to conceive of extremely far-out ideas and then execute them with total precision. It is not often true freaks hit their deadlines.

It’s Sophie’s desire to create something bold and fresh, and her corresponding ability to follow through on that impulse that makes her debut novel Paradise Logic such a special book. It’s the story of Reality Kahn, a young water park spokesmodel on a quest to be the world’s greatest girlfriend. Paradise Logic also happens to be set in the Brooklyn’s DIY punk scene, one Sophie both participated in and critiqued as a music journalist. The book’s prose is extremely trippy, occasionally meta, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and often very funny, even when addressing the horrors large and small Reality suffers at the hands of men. There is a talking snake who wears sunglasses, but there is also an incisive depiction of how our misogynistic society infiltrates even the most liberal of spaces. A high degree of difficulty that Sophie executes with exactitude. As the New York Times put it, “Here, at last, is someone doing something new.”

I loved the book and wanted to talk to Sophie about her own experience in the music scene, as well as how her music writing influenced her fiction writing. She also made a YouTube playlist for Deep Voices, featuring Brazilian Girls, Meredith Monk, Annette Peacock, and more. We discuss her music criticism, her book, and the playlist at Mike’s Coffee Shop on the book’s release day two weeks ago, or, as Sophie would say, the day Paradise Logic was bornth.

How did you first get into music?

I grew up in a really small town where I felt incredibly alienated and music became something that was unbelievably important to me. When I was a teenager it was the Rookie Mag era of media and so I was really obsessed with that and all of those girls listened to Bikini Kill and Hole and Huggy Bear, so I was like listening to all of those bands.

How did you start writing?

When I was like a toddler, I would sit on a rock in front of my parents house and talk to myself and make up little stories. As soon as I was able to write I was relieved that I had a way to deal with that. When I got to college I was immediately in a DIY music scene. I was like, Oh I want to be a writer. How do you do that? What is a job that you can get as a writer? And I was like, Music journalist, definitely! That’s a classic job that you can have that is really lucrative. I was an intern for Bob Boilen at NPR Music when I was 20 years old, which was really crazy. I wrote this cover letter to get the job that was about me interviewing Meredith Graves from the band Perfect Pussy for college radio, where she just yelled at me the whole time and told me I was a bad interview. It was in a way where she was clearly on tour and pissed off to have to be talking to a random 19 year old. I wrote about the experience because I came away from it feeling shell-shocked, but finding it to be unbelievably funny. I just feel like I had a series of formative experiences writing about music that shaped my whole identity as a writer.

Can you tell me what one or two of those formative experiences were?

I wrote this essay for NPR when I was 20 or 21 about Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s album Fever to Tell and why that was such an important record to me as a teenager. It was the first time I had ever had an editor take me really seriously and basically be like, “Yeah, like, this is actually bad. But you’re onto something.”

In your book, you have a women’s magazine called Girlfriend Weekly. How was that influenced by your time working at two fashion magazines, Vogue and Garage?

When I left working in media, I was like, I’m never doing this again. The people I worked with at Garage were great but I just was like, I hate doing this. I was responsible for writing two random blog posts every week, and they could be about whatever I wanted, but I quickly got so burnt out from doing it, and was like, This is not how a person should write. But I did anthropologically learn a lot about women’s media or whatever, which I think has been really influential to the way that I approach fiction. I think a lot about how things are marketed towards women and girls. The girlfriend magazine in the book is just a hyper-satirical version of women’s magazines. Some of them are really good, but some of them are completely ridiculous.

Where did the character Reality come from?

I was making all these zines during the pandemic, and a friend was like, “It seems like you’re writing a novel.” And I was like, Word. I knew that, in the back of my head, I wanted to write this novel that was based on all these scenes that I had made in 2020 when I was 23 or 24-ish, around the age of the narrator in the book. Then, eventually, I read the right combination of books that I feel like Reality emerged through. I read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heiti in the same week. One of those books is an auto-fiction novel about sex and female friendship in Toronto, and then the other one is about a guy who wants to be the greatest butler of all time. The other way that Reality happened was that I knew I wanted to write this book about how you can be really naive in relationships when you’re really young and I spent a really long time trying to figure out the perfect kind of person to talk about that, which ended up being her.

Does your experience in the DIY music scene mimic Reality’s?

Yeah, definitely. When I came to New York, it was the end of the Silent Barn era of DIY. So I was going to shows there and eventually got absorbed into the music scene there. I feel like it was very democratic compared to other scenes in New York. There was a lot of gender equity and racial equity which felt really special to me. And then I got caught up in a scene that was basically all men after that, which is pretty parallel to what happens in the book.

How did that happen?

It was through someone I was dating at the time who was involved in the DIY scene. We were spending a lot of time together. It was really fun, honestly. But I also was rolling deep in a crew of boys all the time. At a certain point it started to feel ridiculous.

Do you think Reality had a worse experience in that scene than you did?

Yeah, definitely. There are definitely parts of the novel that pull from my own life, but it’s not autobiographical, and Reality is a lot different from me. I purposefully made things a lot worse for her.

Why?

The kind of story that I wanted to tell involved me having to manipulate things a bit for her. She does not have an easy story. I felt like it was necessary for me to make things as difficult for her as possible.

Do you hope people will learn something from your book?

I hope they like it, but I don’t really know if there’s a lesson in my book. I think [the book is about] a thing that happens to women, and this is a hyper-stylized way of explaining what that thing is.

Do you think setting it in a theoretically more egalitarian underground scene helped highlight that experience as being universal?

Yeah, definitely. Even if you’re into peace and free love or whatever, there’s bad actors everywhere.

Let’s talk about your playlist. You called it Reality’s World. Is this music you think she would like?

It’s definitely music that I like. But also, I was like, What is a weird playlist that Reality would have? I feel like I wrote a book that has a lot to do with sex and sexuality, and I was like, these are her quirked-up-shawty strip club slow jams.

How did you pull the songs together?

I thought about when I was younger and I would make my boyfriends these really elaborate mixes. I stopped doing that, but I should do it again; I think that my current boyfriend would find it funny. I would make these mixes for my boyfriends in this really elaborate way where the beginning would all be super-mainstream, commercial, bad ’60s pop and country music. And then it would go into all this weird esoterica, and then it’s gonna be, like, Rihanna, and then it’s gonna go more esoterica, and then a Brian Eno song, and then the last song would be Elliott Smith or something.

Do you feel like that’s reflective of your own journey as a music fan?

I like bargain bin, bad ’60s AM pop. I also love pop music a lot. I love library music and lounge pop, really weird stuff that sounds so bad that it’s good.

A lot of these songs seem to use technology that was advanced at the time and now seems very outdated.

That’s basically what my aesthetic is. I love that early ’80s period of being like, “We’re doing technology music!”

That reminds me that, in the book, Reality’s boyfriend Ariel’s band is called Computer. Why?

I thought it was funny. All these characters have such a weird relationship with the internet.

Towards the end of the book, there’s the page of Reality thinking about Ariel filled with her saying “I love you,” and at the same time Ariel is thinking about his band. That broke my heart.

He doesn’t really care if she lives or dies.

I think there are definitely some people who don’t care about anything other than their band.

Yeah, especially narcissistic guys in their early 20s.

Is it weird to like music by narcissistic guys in their early 20s and then not like narcissistic guys in their early 20s?

Yeah, but I think that’s just like what a lot of music is.

Narcissistic guys in their early 20s?

Yeah, like the Beatles.

I love that you included a very long Annette Peacock song where it almost sounds like she’s rapping.

I love her. If I made music I’d want it to sound like that.

Describe what that means to you.

She’s working with jazz musicians, and then she’s freestyling and saying crazy shit over it. The first time I listened to Annette Peacock I felt so excited. It felt so ecstatic for me, just because it was so weird and beautiful. It’s really deliberate. She knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s not random.

That sounds like you’re talking about your writing.

That’s what I would hope.