Before Kristen Arnett was one of my favorite writers and long before they were my friend, I knew of them as “the funny gay librarian from Twitter.” Humor has always been a core part of Kristen’s voice and persona. They’re funny in a way that combines dad jokes with the idiosyncrasies of gay alt comedy. While their previous two novels — Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth — are funny in their own right, their latest, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, makes humor its very subject. It’s about a clown after all.
In anticipation of the book’s release next week, I spoke with Kristen about the science of comedy, clown/magician rivalry, and how they’re influenced by Stephen King.
Drew: I wanted to start by talking about comedy. All of your books are filled with humor and you’re famous on the internet for being funny, but this book is interested in comedy in a way that’s almost scientific. What do you feel like you learned about comedy through the writing of this book?
Kristen: The shape this book took is each portion is working out its own bit. Each chapter, each joke, was an act of honing in and refining what I thought that the character would find funny. It was a different way of writing than my previous two books. And that’s always how it is for me. Every book is its own process. But for comedy in this way— Oh! Somebody’s dog is in my yard.
Drew: I want to see!
Kristen: The neighbor’s dog just appeared. Hey bud.
Drew: Awww. Hello!
Kristen: Unanticipated.
Drew: Speaking of bits…
Kristen: Like dropping a dog in a scene.
Drew: What’s the dog’s name?
Kristen: Little Dog.
Drew: That dog’s name is Little Dog? Okay, that’s funny.
Kristen: Anyway. I’ve been thinking about what aspects of me as a creative and creator are inside of this book. The process of digging into what makes something funny is maybe the most me that’s in this. I wanted to see if I could figure out what might make something funny to somebody. And that’s the process of clowning, right? You’re trying to figure out what makes the audience laugh.
I did a lot of research work on clowns, but also into the idea of comedy in general. What makes a joke funny to one person? Is it about timing? Is it about having one person be funny and one person be the straight man? Is it about broaching the absurd? Is it about taking things in a direction that will be bothersome to some people? Also it changes based on how someone was raised, and what they grew up with, culturally, generationally. How would a clown use all of these things? It was a distillation process working out on the page when something is funny and when something is not funny. That plays out in one specific chapter where Cherry moves through the scene noting what is funny and what is not funny. That’s a lot of the process. Obviously I don’t do standup—
Drew: Yet. Life is so long.
Kristen: Jesus Christ. I literally can’t imagine. But there’s got to be a refinement process, right? People workshop. You might think something will be funny, but playing to an audience is different. It might be funnier in theory than in practice. Maybe a story can be funny but you need to figure out what things to omit and what to add, what beats to take, what tone to have. And this all needs to fit inside the story as well. It was less doing heavy research work and more just trying stuff out and seeing what stuck.
Drew: Did you read portions of this book at readings before you’d finished it to get that audience reaction?
Kristen: Yes. I read the opening before the book had even been bought. Which is a bold move! I’ve never done that before. It just felt like I wanted to read it. It’s a strong opening, I think.
Drew: It sure is.
Kristen: It’s sex and it’s a joke and it’s very physical. So I was like I’m going to try this out for an audience to see if the joke lands. By the fifth time I did it, I felt like I knew how it needed to sound. And this is a book that I read aloud a lot to myself while writing it.
Drew: Did that impact the syntax and grammar?
Kristen: It did. It also really helped me with the dialogue. I like writing place, I like writing scene setting, but I knew this book had to have a lot of physical movement. I needed to show Cherry’s body when she clowns and when she fucks and when she’s hitting on a woman at her job. Everything is kind of a bit to her. So it helped me a lot with dialogue between characters within that movement.
This really helped in capturing the friendship of Cherry and Darcy. I wanted them to feel like real friends in that way where they don’t have to say everything out loud. They have code for things. I wanted it to sound more like two people who know each other really well talking in real life. Especially because they’re the kind of friends who give each other a hard time. So I did a lot of those things out loud and I could hear when they sounded stupid and not the way people talk. And that would allow me to make fun of myself a little bit which helped me get into their voices better because they’re the kind of people who would make fun of me and show love by giving each other a hard time.
Drew: Beyond the craft, the book is also very much about the business of art. First of all, where were you in the process of releasing Mostly Dead Things when you wrote With Teeth?
Kristen: I’d already started writing some of With Teeth when I was in the early promotional stages of Mostly Dead Things. Publishing is a monster. I had to start doing Mostly Dead Things press like a solid year before that book came out. The cover gets released and maybe if you’re lucky you have people asking you to write essays or interviews or lists. And that’s all stuff that has to happen several months in advance. I was doing all that stuff but then I also needed to write fiction. I’ll be depressed and feel like my brain isn’t working right and it’s because I haven’t been working. I need to go into my little shell and write fiction. It fixes my brain. And it gets to be its own little secret which is fun. I love cheating on something I’m supposed to be working on with work I’m not supposed to be doing. That’s my favorite way to write.
Drew: So that would make this the first book you’ve written and released since, you know, becoming a New York Times bestselling author and just being more entrenched in that publishing world monster. How do you think that changed your writing process and how did it impact this book?
Kristen: It harmed my process. There was a bigger gap than I wanted between With Teeth and my next novel. I had been working on a totally different project and I actually have a messy draft of something that is not this book and will never be released.
I’m slated to have a short fiction collection come out and they were like let’s see if you can do another novel first to beef up your audience. And in theory that was right, but trying to push out a novel that quickly meant I had to think about it in terms of saleability and that’s not a good way for me to write. A lot of things happened with that draft where if I’d had time to myself where I was working things out on the page, alone, or talking about it with someone in terms of the writing, it would’ve turned into what it should’ve been. But instead I had to scrape the project. It was like I was Frankenstein-ing things together to try to make a book that people would want to buy and that’s not how I want to approach art. So that was deeply frustrating. I don’t want to say I wasted time working on that, but I spent several years working on that project and it will never see the light of day. But there were good things that came from that. I learned I don’t ever want to sit down to a project and bring that kind of baggage because it’ll fuck it up. I learned I can’t give art that’s important to me before I’m ready to give it.
For this project I thought about it for a whole year before I worked on it at all. I talked to [my wife] Kayla about it, but I decided not to sit down and write until I was ready. And I was a little trigger shy because of what happened with the last project. When I was finally ready to sit down and write, I had such a joyful experience of working on this. It’s the most joy I’ve ever had while writing something. Part of it is that I got to be very playful in this book. Any of the things that cropped up were fun surprises for me. I just got to be pleasantly surprised by the weird shit this book decided to do and have that just for me or for whoever I chose to share it with. I let Kayla read some chapters and when I had a working draft done I let my friend Jami read it. But that felt like the good kind of sharing. Look at this thing I made! What do you think? Do you think it’s funny? That’s different than giving it to an editor and asking if people will want to buy it.
I learned a hard lesson having those books come out and then trying to write as a product rather than writing for art or myself. But I have this book because that happened. And I love this book.
Drew: Also it’s quite explicitly in this book. Cherry is having an existential crisis about how she wants to approach her art and the business of art. It’s one of the main conflicts in the book.
Kristen: Yes.
Drew: This is obviously a clown novel. But it’s also a magician novel. What contrasts did you find between those two art forms?
Kristen: I have several writer friends in my life who either are amateur magicians or are obsessed with magicians. T Kira Madden who can do magic and has gone to many a magic show and knows a lot of things. And Elissa Washuta who I’m pretty sure did a bunch of research for like one sentence inside of an essay and got super into magic. So I know all of these writers who are into magicians — not in a sexy way, or maybe it’s a sexy way, I’m not judging — and I was interested in thinking of that comparatively with the idea of the clown.
As much as people shit on magicians — usually a specific type of straight dude magician — the reality is that inside of this performance community magicians get way more respect and credit than somebody doing clown work. That became really interesting to me. There are tiers. Oh you’re a clown? I’m a magician! Oh wow okay. But then you’re talking to anybody else and they’d be like um you’re a magician? It makes me think of that Arrested Development moment when Gob Bluth is with the Magicians Guild and is like, “We demand to be taken seriously.” All of it is pretty silly. So I got to find a lot of humor in this pairing between the two of them.
I also liked the idea that Margot would sometimes get the joke and choose not to engage with the joke. She’s self-serious. And that confidence in her art is very attractive. What would it be like to be this goofy, bumbling clown who wants to be taken seriously and then have this very magnetic woman who is doing magician work? And we see that work through the eyes of Cherry as this intense, erotic spectacle. It also allowed me to write in the magician chapter in the middle of the book. I wrote that section so fast. I knew immediately what it needed to be. It allowed me to play with shape. And that was inspired by research I did. What are the laws of magician— Oo a ladybug! There’s a lot of wildlife. Don’t go in the coffee, friend.
But yeah it was fun to compare the two because both have an element of what you need to show and what you need to hide to produce the result that you want from your audience. Also both are very physical and have to do with the body.
Drew: Right, are you sticking a sword in yourself to get people to laugh or to get people to gasp?
Kristen: Yeah these things have overlap. And that makes it even more interesting that one is way more respected inside of a community than the other. Although I do think people who clown might say it is deeply respected.
Drew: I think because I come from actor communities, I would have thought it was the opposite. I know clowning as like a serious art form that’s taught at Juilliard.
Kristen: I also think there’s a hierarchy within clowning where people take certain clowns more seriously.
Drew: Totally.
Kristen: I had this bizarre interaction at a book festival where this woman asked what I was working on and I said I had a book that had just been picked up about a clown. She immediately got very serious and very intense. And I was like oh no maybe she’s really afraid of clowns because a lot of people have that phobia. But then she was like well, what do you know about clowns? She started interrogating me. And it turned out her husband’s cousin went to the premiere clown school in Paris. She was like all of the real clowns come from there. I thought that was hilarious. It’s present in all kinds of art where people are like you do this but I do it better because I have xyz or I went to this school. I have an MFA in clowning. There’s a self-importance when the reality is we’re all just trying to make art.
Drew: Your writing is so fun in a way that really doesn’t have that self-importance or self-seriousness to it. I think because I like your writing so much I hadn’t really considered that. But now I’m seeing a new parallel between you and Cherry. Of course there’s literature we both love that’s a challenge to read, but that’s not you. You write books that are as fun to read as they are accomplished..
Kristen: Thank you. And with this one too I think the joy I was feeling while working on it became imbued into the text. I felt very light even writing about death and grief. It was different than writing Mostly Dead Things. That was a book where I was dealing with grief in a way that was — to use a pun — sewn in. It was in the fabric of that to the point where the characters blocked themselves from finding joy. I was interested in making this character someone who, no matter what was going on, could find joy in whatever she was doing. Even when clowning isn’t going well for Cherry, it feels so good for her. It makes her introspective and philosophical and question and that’s the most exciting way to be as a person. To constantly be learning.
I’m also interested in what causes her art to stop giving her satisfaction. When she’s not making it for herself or when she’s doing something only because she’s done it for so long. With art, with performance, with comedy, to do something to death is the death knell of joy. If she’s a clown, she’ll want to reinvent and constantly search out something new. It was very refreshing to work on a character like this who is deeply messy and makes bad choices but is ultimately wanting to make creative choices that will put her into new places even if it’s still self-destructive.
Drew: Getting into some of the grief and family aspects, most queer parental strife narratives are about homophobia. I love that by making Cherry and her mom queer, the issue becomes something else. Can you talk about crafting that relationship?
Kristen: That was one of the fun surprises I had working on the book. I didn’t know who Cherry’s mom was going to be until I wrote into the scene when she’s reflecting on her brother and they don’t share the same dad because they were both selected by their gay mom. I was like, oh fun! I wrote that sentence in and was like that’s exactly what that is. How would it feel to have a queer parent? There’s the feeling that you should understand each other, but maybe that makes it even harder? I love writing queer people, but everybody is fucking different. I think Cherry’s mom makes her feel homophobic.
Drew: (laughs)
Kristen: If this is what gay is, then I hate it. It’s interesting to me for your parent to be gay and still feel like a buzzkill who doesn’t understand a single thing about you. My last book was about gay moms. And I loved writing those gay moms. They were so messy and fun and unreliable and exasperating for people to read. This is another type of gay mom. And like in Mostly Dead Things, it’s from a daughter’s perspective. What is she even allowing herself to see of her parent? What realistically are we getting from Cherry looking at her mom? She’s unable to see her mom as a fully actualized person outside of herself.
It allowed me to dig into the things I’m always interested in exploring within families especially between mothers and daughters. There’s so much that can run under the surface between mothers and daughters that doesn’t get discussed upfront. It sits inside there and both people know what the issue is attached to but it’s not something that’s getting spoken about or worked on. I loved writing them in scene together. I kept trying to get them in scene more often but realistically these two wouldn’t spend a lot of time together. The person who made things a little smoother is this person who is gone but the ghost still sits in there which is worse. It was so fun to write in scene, like the awkward dinner. I love an awkward dinner party. That is maybe what their relationship is. A series of awkward dinners. And that’s some people’s relationship with their parents. It’s a series of awkward dinners until one of you isn’t there anymore.
Drew: Your first book was about a young woman and your second book was about a young mom. I know you so I know, while personal, neither book is autobiographical. But this book is so obviously not about you because it’s about someone in her 20s. Was there a freedom to that?
Kristen: Writing somebody that young was its own kind of freedom. Every person I’ve ever encountered has some shit going on in their lives no matter their age. But writing messy characters who are at a certain place in their life — especially women — you get pushback. They should know better. They should have figured this out by now. And I’m like, well have you?
Drew: (laughs)
Kristen: So there’s a lot more freedom in writing someone younger. And when I first started writing it, that wasn’t the plan. It just naturally worked out that she is the age she is because I was figuring out where she was at in her career and her life goals and late twenties made the most sense.
Drew: It’s a Saturn return novel.
Kristen: Yeah! It let me be a lot more playful. I would do this anyway and I never want to write based on possible reader perception. But in the back of my mind it was nice to know if someone asked why she was being a dumbass the reason would be that she’s in her twenties. It also allowed me to have her make certain discoveries in real time. And I wanted her friendships to be the most important relationships in her life and I think a lot of the time those life-defining friendships happen in your twenties. Cherry and Darcy has the weight of the most important relationship in the book I think. Their lives are entwined. They have the intimacy present in deep friendships at the age where you’re settling into being an adult.
And also I didn’t get to have that experience in my twenties! (laughs) It was fun to think about what it would be like to not have a child and not really have a full time job and just be working on your art constantly. That sounds so great.
Drew: That perspective results in a portrait of a messy twenty-something that’s much more interested and grounded in economic reality than a lot of the work we often see. Because a lot of that is created by people who had real free reign to be messy without worrying about money. That’s something I really appreciated about the book.
Kristen: I wanted that to be very present throughout. I did that in Mostly Dead Things too. What would it be like to try and keep a family business together? Here it’s what would it be like to be a young, struggling artist who needs to have jobs to support the life you want to have but never make enough to do the kind of art and have the kind of time to do the kind of things you want to do so what is the point of all of this? How do you find time to make art when all of your time is spent trying to have enough money to actually pay for anything? That was something that was always a reality for me in my twenties. I wanted to make work, but I had to have a job and I had to pay for things. And then you’re just exhausted. It’s not just physically exhausting either. It’s spiritually exhausting. And that can result in people just giving up art because it feels like too much. It’s very sad. But it just crushes you little by little.
These economic realities make it so you don’t have the time and space to make work. It’s deeply sad and people give up creativity in their lives for these very real reasons. I want any project I work on to have some aspect of discussing finance and how money works. It’s a question I ask when I’m watching something or reading something. How does this person live this way? What are the logistics behind this? But sometimes people don’t like to talk about money. I’m someone who always wants to talk about it. And Cherry is someone who has to think things down to the dollar. I’m going to have her on the phone with the bank. I’m going to have her overdraft. Because this is the reality. And are you talking to a real person? Can they actually do anything for you? Having 100 extra dollars makes a big difference for a lot of people. The financial realities of being an artist and trying to work at the same time are at the heart of this book for me and I wanted to make sure they got explored in ways that felt realistic.
Drew: You’re obviously known as a Florida author, but the portrait of Florida here feels very different than your other work. What did you want to capture in this book about central Florida and the ways that central Florida is changing?
Kristen: I wanted this to feel like a deeply Orlando book. The Orlando that exists for locals. I purposefully included stuff that I know only people who live in Orlando will understand which to me felt like little easter eggs for friends.
With Mostly Dead Things, I had it central Florida based but I was diligent about not putting any identifiers in there. I wanted it to be any little place in central Florida. There’s no mention of parks. I don’t say Orlando even one time. Because I knew someone would pick up the book, see Orlando, and immediately think Mickey Mouse. And that’s not what I wanted to happen before someone even got into the book. That’s such a different lived experience of Florida. A small business run around outside the St. Johns river is a different kind of Florida. And then With Teeth was about a specific suburb experience. Going suburb to suburb as many moms have to do in their minivans from point A to point B to point C back to point A. Florida seen outside your blurry car window, that’s the only time spent out of your neighborhood.
But this is a twenty-something bopping around and I wanted her to see the place she grew up and see how it’s gentrifying and what people having money coming in means for people who aren’t making more money even as costs are going up. What does it mean to have places that are deeply important to you and one day they just close and you have no say in how those things happen or when? I wanted there to be moments of enjoyment. That little bar they go to in the house feels like an amalgam of bars that I spent a lot of time going to where you just show up one day and it’s closed. So many spaces where I had lasting important memories with friends just don’t exist anymore.
And the women Cherry is interested in having sex with live in these suburban areas that are taking up all of the real estate and making things cost more. How does that shift her relationship to these women who she wants? It’s funny sometimes the ways we self-sabotage ourselves. But I wanted it to feel like the Orlando people can get to see here that isn’t just theme park stuff while still making sure theme parks were included. I wasn’t going to have someone going to Disney World and getting on a ride, but the theme parks are here. They’re tangential to people’s lives and livelihoods. It’s part of things, but in a very different way than a lot of people consider Orlando.
Drew: You mentioned people being afraid of clowns. Stephen King’s It and the first adaptation played quite a large role in shaping the cultural perception of clowns, in addition to John Wayne Gacy Jr.
Kristen: Oh sure. (laughs)
Drew: (laughs) I know you’re a huge Stephen King fan. Which other source of terror from his work could you see yourself someday writing a book that’s an affectionate look at that subject?
Kristen: I think I almost did already if we think of Mostly Dead Things and Pet Sematary being in conversation.
Drew: That’s really true. So what you’re actually saying is every one of your books is a response to Stephen King. I’m trying to think of one for With Teeth.
Kristen: Maybe With Teeth is The Shining.
Drew: Woah okay. Galaxy brain.
Kristen: I mean, Stephen King is such an important touchstone for me as a lifelong reader that I don’t know how his work wouldn’t have embedded itself in me. But, honestly, I’m just such a huge fan of the craft that he works into his books. Aside from these plot choices, I know I’ve pulled so much from the voicey way he wants a character to talk or the pop culture he includes or the regionalism. How he writes about Maine is in me and influences how I think about characters and voices and Florida. Even writing an entire scene inside an Olive Garden in this book. Because to me that’s also an economic reality. These are real people in Florida who are like we’re going to have a long lunch at Olive Garden. How many scenes have had people work something out at a diner? Can’t that happen at an Olive Garden? Doesn’t that happen at an Olive Garden? That’s something Stephen King would do.
Drew: I love that answer. Because I do think inspiration often goes deeper than the surface level comparisons we tend to focus on.
Okay last question: Do you have a favorite joke?
Kristen: Oooo. My favorite standard joke, like the joke that really made me laugh as a child is, what do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese.
Drew: Classic!
Kristen: I loved that joke as a child and then a few years ago there was a video where an illustrator recorded a video of his wife drunk telling him that joke. He made a cartoon out of it and it was so great and it made me fall in love with the joke all over again. This woman was so drunk and so tickled with herself telling this joke and she’s just snorting laughing telling this drunk joke to her husband who already knows it I’m sure. And the love between them when it was illustrated. That’s maybe how I think about comedy. Yeah that’s a stupid joke I heard a million years ago but here’s how it gets repackaged again and is still funny and made even funnier.
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is available for preorder now and purchase next Tuesday, March 18.
the stephen king comps!!!!!
also i love my wiiiiiife