Happy Holidays!

For our Christmas special, I’m joined by author Zoe Dubno to talk about her book, Happiness & Love.

Vogue calls it a “wickedly funny debut novel skewering New York’s creative class,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Spike Art Magazine’s Andrew Key summarizes the story perfectly: “The book takes place over a single evening, rendered in one unbroken paragraph, as the narrator – a writer forced by her immigration status to return to New York after five years in Rome and London, working on film projects that never take off – attends a dinner party hosted by two of her old art-world friends, artist Eugene (son of a better and more famous artist) and curator Nicole (who specializes in high-budget shows of staggering mediocrity). It’s the night following the funeral of another member of Nicole and Eugene’s little clan, an actress who killed herself after falling into addiction when her career stalled.”

Zoe gives me her take on:

* Why she chose a stream-of-consciousness form

* How the novel reworks Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984)

* Balancing specificity of time and place with broader accessibility

* Why Americans insist on wearing yoga pants and sweatpants in public

* Why nepo babies (or nestbeschmutzer, as she calls it in her book) should embrace the term and move on

We also talk about the transactional romance in The Cut’s viral essay “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” how it relates to Zoe’s characters, and the self-obsessed materialism of Rachel Sennott’s HBO series I Love LA.

Huge thanks to Zoe for joining the show!If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and follow—and stay tuned for our season finale next week.

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