I also really liked that tweet from late trans writer Bryn Kelly that you used as an epigraph to the last section: “Also a reminder that this is late capitalism and we all buy our genders. Some are just more expensive than others.” Why was that important to include? A] biting tale of two young queer couples who go upstate with an older lesbian couple...plenty to cringe and laugh at.”

It occurs to me, sadly, through the interactions of these characters, that lesbians can be just as catty as anyone else, and twice as competitive. In this crowd, you're only as popular as your last antics.ok switching gears slightly: in a 2020 LARB article, you wrote about your “lesbian boyfriend’s” therapist telling her to “watch out for jenny’s high femme camp antics” dykette begins with sasha overhearing jesse’s therapy session It’s through Dykette’s Sasha, an insufferably needy high femme in her mid-20s (think Girls’ Hannah Horvath if she wore vintage pink nighties and was “straight for butches”) that Davis lays out her curiosity with queer domesticity. Sasha has the hots for Jules, a tall butch news anchor clearly inspired by Rachel Maddow, and both envies and pities Jules’s longtime partner, Miranda, for being old and boring, for having settled down in comfort and style. Though her own gaze might wander, Sasha comes totally undone whenever her boyfriend isn’t looking at her in a way that makes her feel truly seen — especially if Jesse is looking at someone else, like Darcy, his best friend’s girlfriend. Attention is Sasha’s lifeblood. If a butch isn’t looking at her, is she even there at all?

Dykette makes a strong case for mixing goofiness with sexiness in contemporary fiction.” —Bustle “Dykette is a riveting and often darkly funny novel thatTotally, and I often feel like most of the things that I want to say or express have already been said and expressed so perfectly and beautifully. I'm definitely an over-quoter. There's an endlessly referential quality to my brain; everything makes me think of something that already exists, and then that makes me think of something that's already existed before that. Everything feels like it’s in a loop, referencing both itself, past things, and even present things that are going on at the same time. It feels like the queer world is constantly evolving. Maybe we're all too terminally online? But the struggle of being queer is the general outsiderness one experiences from the rest of the world. Yet at the same time, some people are just ~more~ or less gay than others, and their outsiderness exists in a different spectrum. This a major factor for Sasha, who is very feminine, versus Jesse who is masc, and other characters in the story who have had top surgery, go by they/them, etc. I've been reading a lot of very fast-paced, plotty books. For me, that's the ultimate escape and relaxation, and it's the best thing for anxiety to just get completely lost in another world. I've really been interested in the inner worlds of characters that are unacceptable in some way to readers. I think a lot of — especially women — writers have been creating characters that are despicable in some way or extremely out of touch or out of line. There’s this sort of unhinged female narrator trend, and I'm really interested in that. I never find these women despicable. I often love them, and I don't even realize that they're supposed to be crazy or terrible until other people point it out. I'm really interested in what happens when that character meets the moralizing instincts of a lot of contemporary readers. What do we do now that we've come to a place that so much of writing is deemed good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, all of these super arbitrary distinctions? There’s this sort of quiet resistance, I think, on the part of a lot of writers to make characters who are completely not adhering to social norms or moral, ethical norms that so much of our real lives are governed by. In the beginning, of the three couples at the vacation farmhouse. Sasha and Jesse are the most defined and fleshed out. Early in the novel, other than evidence of their strident posture, we don't know much about who Jules and Miranda are. Perhaps failing to grow up by the world’s limiting hetero standards only becomes a real problem when it prevents someone from working through their childhood wounds — because unless you put in real effort to process whatever might have gone wrong with your earliest human attachments, those pains can and will haunt your adult relationships.