Jenny Fran Davis is always thinking in references. Her brain is “endlessly referential,” processing what’s going on in her life through books and movies, which she says always seem to have already expressed whatever she’s feeling more eloquently. “Everything makes me think of something that already exists, and then that makes me think of something that's already existed before that,” she tells NYLON. “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.” A blast of defiant frivolity, Dykette is so perceptive it hurts and as fun and decadent as wearing Gaultier in a bubble bath.” There’s the question of, is the book serious? Are the characters serious? Does Sasha really think “faking it” is easy and fun? Is she just trying to be funny? Is she “faking it”? Am I serious as the writer of the book? Then there’s the bigger question of: Is it a serious work of literature? Is it a serious work of fiction? What I hope is that the book is taken seriously, or semi seriously, in its celebration of joy and humor and gossip. I hope its anti-seriousness is taken a little bit seriously. Or maybe instead of taken seriously, it can have an impact: change something in the reader or mean something to someone. I think those feel like better alternatives to the question of: Is it serious or unserious? I hope it’s impactful. That's such a good question, and definitely something I thought a ton about. Objects feel so central to the ways that we think about ourselves and other people, and in that way they actually don't seem inanimate at all. They seem very full of life, meaning, and personality. I think that the materialism of the characters at first glance might seem shallow or superficial, but objects carry a ton of meaning and association for the characters. They're often a really good shorthand for emotion. It's almost like not looking directly at the way a character is feeling but imbuing an object with the rage or jealousy or infatuation that a character might be feeling. I think the tweet also runs counter to this idea that femininity is shameful. Or that a feminist is someone who rejects the desire for and display of femininity.

Sasha was born out of Davis’s essay, which went viral, with Davis recalling one tweet calling it an “apologia for lesbian abuse” and other readers lauding it as a true investigation into the weird unpredictability of lesbian femme logic. Though I’d be hesitant to call myself a dykette (out of fear I’m not femme enough, which Davis says “is so dykette” of me), I felt extraordinarily seen by the notions of lesbianism laid bare in Dykette. The things people wear and the things they put in their homes are performative because they're meant to signal, “This is me, this is who I am, this is what I care about, this is what I can afford, this is what I think looks really good.” It’s sort of like an aesthetic statement, but also, I think in a lot of cases, deeply real. That was something I was really fascinated by: how can this super defined and hyper realized material world not feel shallow and materialistic, how can that feel deeply lived-in and important?Named one of the Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 by Vogue • Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan • Named a Best Book of Spring 2023 by Esquire • Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2023 by Buzzfeed, Electric Lit, and Them

Vanity Fair: So much of queer fiction seems to be acutely sincere, or only about oppression and hardship. It’s as if we believe that unless we’re peddling our suffering, we don’t have literary value, or won’t be taken seriously. There’s a place for all types of queer literature but I’m very excited that you aren’t doing that, and that you wrote a fun, funny lesbian book. Sasha is high femme, she's in her mid 20s, has exclusively dated butches, and enjoys performing "traditional gender roles" with her partners. She's been dating Jesse for a year now. Jesse goes by he/him and she/her, and Sasha refers to her both as her "boyfriend" and her "girlfriend". and i think sasha’s obsession also stems from darcy’s sense of entitlement — to say and do whatever she wants, to express herself, to be as interested or uninterested as she pleasesand i had fun slightly fictionalizing the real-life response to the essay and getting to do a bit of reparative work there hahaha