The nameless narrator of Lara Mimosa Montes’s new book, The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), makes a plain confession. “I was over being a person, one with a social security number, a natal chart, an undecided future, and a passport.” It’s an absurd thing to desire, and completely relatable. It should seem absurd that so much of what distinguishes a person as such is fundamentally impersonal: someone’s birth time and place, a set of randomized numbers, government-issued papers—stuff that’s all too easy to forget or misplace. Yet, the stakes of having or not having these materials couldn’t be higher as people in the US are being forcibly taken from their homes, their places of work, and off the streets to be deported, detained, and subjected to dehumanizing violence.¹ What The Time of the Novel’s narrator attests to is that life as a person, vital items in tow, isn’t all that livable either.

Montes navigates this ambivalence specific to personhood with surreal and haltingly lucid prose. Readers of her two previous books, THRESHOLES (Coffeehouse Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016), will be familiar with the kind of atom-thin balance she strikes between poles like beauty and banality, sense and nonsense. I first encountered Montes and her work last winter in Portland, Oregon during PNCA’s low-residency Creative Writing program. I experienced several instances of stupefaction in Montes’s company over the 10-days in which I participated through alternating roles of event host and workshop assistant. On one tired jaunt across town to a Palestinian poetry night held at Swana Rose, I tried to make conversation by sharing an opinion—a strategy I wouldn't suggest. “Novels about writing novels are lazy and boring,” or something to that effect. I named books. Fuccboi (2022) by Sean Thor Conroe, any of Ben Lerner’s novels, and, to evidence that I read books before my time, W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo (1990). Montes was quick and kind to note the particular archive I was reading from: white, male, and American. She added that, in fact, some of her favorite novels were about writing. Those who follow along with her online book club, WRITING ON WRITING, would have known this already. She named books, many written by women in translation. I had been politely schooled, and suddenly, I found myself becoming her student.

Later in the residency, at a misleadingly named magazine store called Chess Club, Montes read alongside her co-educators, Jess Arndt, Asiya Wadud, and Jay Ponteri. She first read a piece that was more of a performance. A person, possibly from New Jersey, left numerous voice messages for an unreachable “Jeanie.” The tone grew progressively desperate, pleading. She then read from the novel. The shift in tone from one work to the other was disorienting, though not unpleasantly so. This one was more even, reserved, and observant. I wondered then which narrative “voice” of the two distinct ones, was hers. Now, the answer is clearly neither/both/and all. The question of voice, particularly the question of who it belongs to, seems beside the point. Perhaps behind the narrator of The Time of the Novel there is no authentic, self-knowledgeable “self,” but something else. Something more capable of holding the ambivalence of contemporary personhood, a task which seems to be the cause of so much personal foundering. That thing is literature. 

In a sense, The Time of the Novel is a book about writing. Rather than making a novel, its plot is propelled by the impossible effort of becoming one. This premise appeals to me as a person who chronically oscillates between not wanting to be a person in a manner that resembles suicidal ideation and ploughing through self-actualizing pursuits of wellness, online image curation, and education. This narrator experiences similar oscillations. Although, hers appear less like an inescapable spin-cycle and more like a dynamic force of co-constitution. In this interview, Montes and I talk about how fiction allows for this contradiction more than life can, or otherwise transfigures it through aesthetic abstraction. Within our discussion one can find a kernel of a taboo provocation: to stop being a person. This aspiration, though one might not expect it, turns out to be firmly oriented towards life. Real life as a person isn’t all it’s promised to be. Life as a fictional narrator, though, sounds pretty good.

The narrative voice is like the vestige of a self that has never been articulated; it can only be experienced in writing.

Early on, the narrator describes the conditions she has imposed on herself for an unknown duration of an experiment: a rented two bedroom apartment belonging to a stranger, no cell phone, no mail, lots of alone time. But social obligations as well as loneliness press in. There are art openings and public picnic tables where people inevitably are. The narrator seems to be clear in thinking that it’s not “the self” all alone that’s the problem but the world it inhabits. What’s the difference between being a person in public or private? What’s expected of the self in the world, and what burden does it impose that becoming a fictional person provides freedom from it?

Unchecked glee and Hammurabi-style politics feel like the new norm, as does rallying under the banner of homicidal ethno-nationalism: it’s a hard pass.

The appeal of becoming a fictional person is that in fiction, anything can happen. It’s like lucid dreaming. The normal rules, laws, taboos, and social order need not apply, and if the people in your fiction know that, then within that experience of freedom is the realization that many things are possible that are routinely and punitively dismissed as impossible.

Throughout The Time of the Novel, I kept thinking about Gayatri Spivak’s essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak.” In her notoriously dense post-structuralist fashion, drawing heavily from Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) to problematize political and symbolic representation, Spivak theorizes that the suicides of female colonial subjects are impossible articulations of self-determinancy. She decides that the suicide, as a text, can only ever be interpreted—but not narrated. The premise of The Time of the Novel is that the narrator sets out to become a narrator as a literal substitute for suicide. It strikes me that this experiment is narrated in the first-person. The narrator finds a “loophole in the Real” to be able to narrate one’s own suicide in a manner that Spivak’s colonial subject can’t. Was it important to you that the novel be written in the first-person? Why first-person and not some other, more detached or impersonal narrative position?

Spivak—I'm flattered. I was likely thinking of Julia Kristeva, who wrote in "Women's Time," "the symptom is there—women are writing, and the air is heavy with expectation: What will they write that is new?" Yes, I think I always knew this story would have to be told in the first-person. But there were a couple of moments before a full draft had materialized when I wondered if I might make a different choice, particularly after reading Hernan Diaz's In the Distance. I liked the way Diaz wrote loneliness and isolation. I ended up staying with the first-person because saying "I" was the most immediate way to connect with the voice I had in mind. It's not like I heard the narrator's voice as distinct from mine—I don't think I ever heard it at all, which is why I had to go searching for it in writing; it was as if in order to experience that voice, I needed to collapse the distance between me and it so as to know it better. This process involved some practiced disassociation. Something of the way I knew myself needed to be shelved. The voice: "It" is not "me" and yet "it" is somehow "in" me or "of" me. Maybe "the voice" is another way to name or express "the symptom."

It’s interesting to me that you’d call it a “voice.” It is, of course, not your voice for obvious practical reasons that have to do with genre convention. But because of the particular style, it doesn’t overtly give away the narrator’s voice either. In other words, the prose doesn’t come-off as “voice-y” in the way that I guess I’ve come to expect from first-person narrators in contemporary fiction and nonfiction alike. How would you describe this narrator’s voice? What other narrators were you reading or thinking of when this one came to you?

I hate falling back on the conventions of listening and "voice" to talk about narrative; I start to feel self-conscious because it's not like I see dead people. That is not what's going with me. The narrative voice is like the vestige of a self that has never been articulated; it can only be experienced in writing.

In reply to this other phenomenon you're referring to in contemporary fiction, I get what you're saying. In his amazing essay on Eileen Myles' Inferno—a book I love, by the way—Cedar Sigo observes of Myles that "There is very little veneer between them reading onstage and being introduced to them afterward." I know exactly what he means here, and it's wonderful. When you talk to Eileen Myles or listen to them read, it can be disarming: rhythmically, the distance between them and their narrator is undetectable. For The Time of the Novel, I guess I knew I was learning a style or affectation that felt more formal; it's not a style I am naturally given to thinking-as. I had to work at that, the illusion, the veneer. Autobiographical writing makes use of a different style of veneers, so I am not suggesting that those kinds of writings are not without skill or artifice. To answer your other question: One book I revisited was Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Tonally, it is a very bizarre book. It’s a gothic romance that becomes meta-fiction. Underread and underrated. I was also influenced by the narrative style of Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy which reads like fiction, but is apparently memoir.

It seems possible that another writer could have written this novel instead as a memoir. Why pursue becoming a more fully realized version of one’s self in fiction?

It's so interesting you should say that. For me, the novel's basic premise—that a woman quits her job as a bookseller to become literature—lends itself to fiction because from the outset 1) it seems extreme, and 2) it's impossible, or it is only possible within the realm of the parable. But by the end of the story, the questions remain: Is it impossible? Is it so extreme? I imagined the book could only be relayed as fiction because of how far-fetched and fantastical the whole thing is. If it were to circulate under the guise of memoir, I imagine readers would have a hard time suspending their sense of judgement in order to go along with what happens after. The nature of fiction is that it asks you to suspend something of the world you know to enter and accept the world of the fiction, according to whoever occupies it. I like this pact.

I like this pact too. To me, memoir seems to proclaim loudly, this is a life that was lived. The novel instead asks something like, what’s recognizable as life? If this narrator was to write a memoir, it might cauterize the generative questions it asks in favor of being legible as a life. This pact between reader and fictional world includes a kind of reciprocity. Did writing this novel give anything to you?

You frame this in such a fascinating way. I think of memoir as, this is a life as it can be remembered, while also existing as a kind of theoretical fiction that circulates publicly under the guise of non-fiction. The binary between fiction and nonfiction as it is taught in creative writing programs and reiterated in commercial marketing and publishing cultures here in the US is really heavily enforced—as far as I can tell, these conventions and distinctions between genres are not as aggressively insisted upon in other publishing cultures. That is in part why I read more literature in translation; it feels more sophisticated not because it is of the world rather than "home-grown," but because there is a more relaxed and less operationalized (Amazon-ified) approach to human experience. So yes, I am in agreement with you: fiction has much to teach us in the way of realizing new ways of living, thinking, dreaming, and perceiving.

Now as to the matter of what this novel gave me. I would like to say writing the novel restored my belief that the experience of being alive is a deeply mysterious one. I'll quote Cedar Sigo again: guard the mysteries.

The narrator’s project is one of psychic detachment from the world, but more importantly, a pursuit of a literary existence. This is exercised in language which leans formal in tone and in a delirious yet completely cogent past tense. Lines like, “I could think of no higher calling than to pass through the imagination, and eventually through the minds and hands of so many strangers like a rabbit without a body,” suggest a removed practice of being that recalibrates her ability to perceive the world apart from what contemporary life obscures, abbreviates, and dulls. The practice seems not too far-off from mindfulness or Buddhist death meditation, but the material it engages is noticeably different, noticeably literary. This seems in direct opposition to “the voice of [the narrator’s] time.” What is it about contemporary speech that thwarts the narrator’s project? How does contemporary speech characterize or enable being in the world, and in such a way that’s unbearable? 

I am teaching Honor Levy's My First Book tomorrow which feels really contemporary. It's so new it almost feels foreign. The otherness of a book like that is relative to my personal experience of the English language, and that experience is historically contingent and socially-determined. In order to reproduce that style of writing or consciousness, I imagine that ethnographically, I would need to subject myself to a lived experience that I am not willing to do. 

As a reader, I really revel in what Levy is able to accomplish via her style; the artifice of fiction allows me to enjoy what is contemporary about language at a remove. But my requirements for happiness as a writer are different from those as a reader. And yet I am both a writer and a reader. Unlike my narrator, I have to live in the world; like my narrator, I struggle with the public language of the self that passes for "self-knowledge." Contemporary speech is full of short-cuts, short-hand, trite and overused cliches, acronyms, abbreviations, and so on. It's all so horrifically expedient, occasionally entertaining, and incredibly damning. 

Oh wow—I’m really curious how you’re teaching that. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read a few of her stories. Her public persona and writing seem to blur into each other, which feels like a part of a larger interest in proliferating abstracted and aestheticized versions of the self online. This seems like maybe the antithesis to what your narrator is doing? Early on in the novel, I highlighted this phrase, “anemic spirit.” Personally, I feel soul anemia in performing self-knowledge, also in maintaining and creating public avatars. When do you feel anemic in spirit?

I am generally of the mind that a literary world in which even 4chan slang has space to manifest is better than a literary world in which it doesn't. I realize this can veer into debates of de-platforming Nazis and so on, cancel culture, etc. But I do hear what you're saying. Soul anemia, yes. I feel it at galas, fundraising events, gender reveal parties.

I wanna talk about the kitten situation. The narrator finds herself among partygoers who encounter a lone kitten in a (possible) crisis. There's a tension between what the narrator adjudicates as the world’s insufficiency, particularly the way people collectively respond to crises, and their own participation in these responses. This is met with vague probing that the answer to right action could be found in literature. Am I wrong about that? What’s possible in literature that would improve how people individually or collectively respond to crises in the world?

Again, that's an interesting takeaway. When I revisit that scene, my understanding is that the right action or answer does not exist within literature or the arts, and that conflict is what the narrator is wrestling with in that moment. What if art cannot stop war? What if all it can ever do is witness, protest, or memorialize it? I don't know if I have always held this position– it feels like an unpopular one: that art or artists will not save the world. Not in the US anyway. Artists often beseech the public to care about the arts because it is so intrinsic to saving lives, or some such argument. And while I am very much against the systematic dismantling of government funding for the arts, I also wish that within American culture we didn't rely on something resembling pro-natalist, anti-abortion rhetoric to make the case: Art matters because it saves lives. I hate having to defend art's value under that flag because that is not my flag. Art and literature can do many things: spark discourse, create sanctuary, spaces to think, dream, imagine. But I don't think artists, writers, or those who work in the arts are any more moral or intrinsically virtuous than the rest of the world. Some of us are trouble-makers, while others happily participate in and benefit from the status-quo. At the end of the day, a commitment to aesthetics or beauty isn't that rigorous or radical of a value system. Were we to reckon with that as a culture, that might prompt a seismic shift in our world and self-perception.

Though your narrator belongs to the world of art, I see her as somewhat of a fugitive. She gets away with something that’s largely agreed upon as unlawful or perverse but is actually just. And rather than adopt an alias, the narrator becomes anonymous. Whether it be getting away with not paying your phone bill or some Robin Hood like act, what do you think is the political potential in anonymity, if any?

I am curious what makes you say that the fugitivity is justified.

I read her act of suspending personhood as fugitive in the sense that everyday life under late-capitalism—in America at least—demands us to be legible to ourselves and others in order to survive, while at the same time profiting from our legibility through economies of self-improvement, and enabling death through surveillance tactics. To become a narrator then, to me, is kind of like burning a brick of blood-money.  

Incendiary! As it turns out, you can’t deport or disappear unreal people. By any other name, these kinds of imaginative leaps could be characterized as poetry. Imagine if the practice of writing fiction was culturally regarded by those who write, teach, and review it under the rubric of speculative thinking/radical world practice as opposed to craft :) I want to be clear: I think book bans and organized efforts to silence public dissent is bad. Even shallow, derisive, conceptually underrealized and reactive writing helps me know myself as much as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. But one form of possibility I habitually entertain: if something of and in this predicament will force our hand as artists here in the US; will those of us who outlive (I knowingly hesitate to use the word "survive") this situation, feel compelled to seriously reconsider our professional, creative and ethical entanglements beyond frameworks of complicity, soul-bartering, and warm wishes. Another way to frame this question: Is exodus a realizable plan, a fantasy (a fiction?) or an ongoing speculative project?

That got intense! Let’s end on a possibly reparative note. At one point, the narrator asks if they have ever been cared for or considered in ways that characters belonging to the realm of narrative are. How do people care for characters better than they do real people?

A deep question. I cannot speak for other writers, particularly those who may be keen to subject their characters to all types of misery, but while writing my book, as the writer, I did feel concerned and invested in the outcome in a way that was wholly new to me. I don't mean to say I was overly concerned about how this fiction would be received; I'm saying that I was maddened by the fact that for all my care and effort, I did not know how things were going to turn out. Caring about anything that intensely was like a curse and a godsend. While I was grateful to care about something, by the time it was done, I felt like an orange without a rind, as if something I had perceived as essential about my person or my experience of personhood had been stripped away in the process. Or like I was the peel, and the core is something I have yet to encounter.