Stephanie LaCava’s latest novel comes with a merch line that includes a box of matches. If you don’t like the book, she reasons, you can burn it. That wicked humour is something you can guarantee from LaCava, whose work performs surgery on pain, desire and youth as they play out within the culture industries – often as commodities. At the heart of her narratives you’ll typically find a jeune fille; a young woman who is in desperate search of herself, but ultimately remains caught in a neverending swirl of withholding lovers, absent parents, and psycho-sexual tendencies as mapped onto her by others.

In the case of LaCava’s first book, 2020’s The Superrationals, the protagonist is Mathilde – a gallery worker who follows her best friend to Paris, where she processes losing both of her parents as a teenager while critically surveying the high-end art world that reveres – and then exploits – her blank slate beauty. In I Fear My Pain Interests You, out next month via Verso, our lead is Margot – the young daughter of two famous musicians who, she discovers after crashing her bike and being rushed to hospital by a man known only as “Graves”, cannot feel physical pain. In both cases, the young girl is a product and a vessel. And though so much hinges on flesh-and-blood, veering into Cronenbergian body horror in some instances, in the end, LaCava’s concern is more often with fantasy and projection – things that aren’t there.

On the same note, Margot and Graves become “a thing” and mostly spend their time fucking and watching films, particularly the features that would have been shown at the 1968 edition of Cannes, which was cancelled amid controversy surrounding the Langlois Affair against a backdrop of general discontent in France. The presence of pop culture in IFMPIY in general gestures towards many of LaCava’s own touchstones, which include French 60s writers like Françoise Sagan and Marguerite Duras, whose protagonists reconcile their desires for freedom with the supposed rules of convention. While a familiar streak runs through LaCava’s work, it comes from a place of personal affinity. When LaCava was a child her family was expatriated from Boston to France through her father’s job, and she grew up in Le Vésinet – a small, quiet town about an hour outside Paris, near the Palais Rose. “It wasn’t exactly a place where you imagine meeting young other friends in the street, for example, let alone if you’re American,” she tells me. “So it was very lonely.”

Unable to be out in the world, books became LaCava’s building blocks. “You have no control over anything as a child, not even the bedspread,” she says. “You’re in someone else’s world, both emotionally and physically – except when you’re reading.” This tendency towards imagination and escape has shaped her writing, which often aestheticises its surroundings, plays fast and loose with time and place, and presents reality as something other than what’s happening directly in front of you. All these forces underpin I Fear My Pain Interests You, which uses the ‘poor little rich girl’ not as a well for sympathetic indulgence, but as a mirror for the darkness and violence around her.

The themes of the book – pain, relationships, family – are very loaded when you consider them outside of a fictional context, but in I Fear My Pain… they become almost numb on the surface. Pain is defined by its absence, and the same goes for her ex-boyfriends and family members. There’s a disconnect between physicality and feeling throughout. Could you tell me a bit about the genesis of the idea for the book? Was emotional pain, and how to present it, a big part of your thinking at the time?

Stephanie LaCava: The original seed was a clipping from a study about congenital analgesia, the disorder of not feeling pain, that was done at the Salk Institute nearly ten years ago. I printed it out and kept it folded in my bag. It has to be somewhere in my notebooks. I can still see the image of the featured girl.

So that was the initial [spark], but I don’t think it’s very me to be direct. My work is always about what’s not there. I’m at the point where I want to disown my first book now, but there was one critique about it that stood out to me. Someone said ‘the most remarkable thing about this ‘memoir’ is that it contains so little of Stephanie herself’ – and I feel like that twisted absence is something that goes through all my writing.

The way you write is interesting. You don’t dance around things at all, but you do create this gap for people to project their own feelings into.

Stephanie LaCava: I would love to claim that it’s intentional, but it’s mostly intuitive. I also think it happens because so much of my writing is about the psychology of what goes on within relationships, and between people. Projection and fantasy. Often the events that inform our choices are things we don’t actually witness or see, which is an interesting thing to think about.

“The world at large is full of landmines. Living, being, existing: it sucks. So, why not make it pretty to look at? I’m joking but… ” – Stephanie LaCava

There's a lot in your writing that reminds me of French 60s novels too. There’s a lot about youth, beauty, pleasure and subjugation. Françoise Sagan’s female protagonists are always getting themselves in doomed romantic entanglements but at the same time they have such romantic notions of their own lives – everything should be fun! an adventure! – that you rarely see them lament anything too deeply. I feel like Margot has a slightly more bitter, millennial take on that. Could you talk a bit about the role of irreverence in your own work?

Stephanie LaCava: People have said that to me before, about Françoise Sagan. These [protagonists] are young women, and there is an adolescent naivete about the way they inhabit the world – which I think I have too, even though I probably shouldn’t. 

I think it also speaks to my interest in circling the idea of the young woman being used to sell things – even her angst is part of [her marketability]. We have a whole school of singers now who play on that ‘sad girl’ style, for example. Or I think of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need, I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It.

Maybe it’s a survival mechanism for teenage confusion too – this honing of an aesthetic, a kind of control of one’s surroundings before you are totally independent. Cut to the mythic first book mentioned above. The world at large is full of landmines. Living, being, existing: it sucks. So, why not make it pretty to look at? I’m joking but…

That’s where it starts to overlap with the ‘dissociative feminism’ trend, maybe.

Stephanie LaCava: I don’t want to be a part of that trend, but I do have to say – and people have told me this – that in all of my writing the characters seem to be disassociating to some degree. There’s a level of distance, maybe, is a better word. Again, it’s not intentional, it’s intuitive, and it’s probably because it’s the opposite of how I live my life. Instead, I try to do that within the characters: keep a distance and remain aloof outside the story.

Margot is basically a ‘nepo baby’ in the most unfortunate way, in that she’s inherited her parents’ dysfunctions as opposed to their fame. The ‘poor little rich girl’ trope rears its head a little here and there, but how did you find trying to weave that into Margot’s character without leaning into it too much? Was that trope something you were wary of avoiding?

Stephanie LaCava: It’s a topic that really interests me based on things I’ve observed and worlds I’ve passed through, and relates to the answer to the question just above.

I was interested in exploring ‘the daughter-of’ idea and how that informs romantic entanglements. Do some men and women date the child of who they want to be, so to speak? For sure. Maybe a part of it is wanting access to their connections. Maybe a part of it is wanting to have this fusion with the physical becoming of the thing the person created. It’s dark no matter which way you look at it.

But the point of me doing that was not because I was like ‘here’s another book about the ‘pretty little rich girl’. Again, there’s nothing more dangerous or sale-able than a young woman, and it plays out in lots of different ways. Someone once said to me that my last book was kind of like ‘having the ‘muse’ speak and lay bare the transactional mechanics of the culture scene’. This one too, but we moved from art to film and music [laughs]. I hope it’s seen more as that inversion than a gratuitous use of privilege and petty drama. There are a lot of things I want to expose and turn around.

With Margot, what were the things you were most interested in exploring through her position?

Stephanie LaCava: I was very curious about this idea of coolness and success in subcultures, and how or if they can be maintained if [someone] reaches ‘success’ in terms of mass appeal. It links back to the daughter-of idea and hitching oneself to a certain legacy in either direction. These are ideas I wanted to look at through Margot’s parents, and then through her.

By contrast, ‘Graves’ has no identity at all really.

Stephanie LaCava: And neither does The Director and that was on purpose. It’s a bit allegorical, too – putting this blanket name to the thing you do.

This kind of nomenclature also spills into gossip. How often do you hear someone referred to by their Instagram handle, for example. Sometimes fake names are used whether it’s because you want to keep a secret or can’t keep track of who everyone is dating, so they become ‘the banker’ or whatever. That, to me, is interesting.

Also this idea of Margot wanting to be an Actor. I feel like you’d be hard pressed to find a young woman of a certain generation who at one point didn’t think they wanted to become an actress. There’s a lot of cultural reasons for that. It serves to look at the privileges surrounding certain sectors of the culture industry, and what it means to have ‘access’…

“A theme that comes up in my work is that it sometimes makes people uncomfortable for various reasons – physically even. Someone said to me, ‘you know how they have feel-good books? You write feel-bad books – but that doesn’t make you not want to read them’” – Stephanie LaCava

It feels like a very modern phenomenon to be confronted with that kind of subject matter and immediately interpret it as an endorsement, just by virtue of putting it in front of people. 

Stephanie LaCava: I’m not setting out to check all the boxes of things that should be written about. I’m interested in highlighting the contradictions, and spotlighting an inability to take distance – to see these things accurately. To look at it at a surface level is completely missing the point. These [frameworks] are there for a reason. Even that it’s bothersome that they are endorsed is worthy of writing about.

A theme that comes up in my work is that it sometimes makes people uncomfortable for various reasons – physically even. Someone said to me, ‘you know how they have feel-good books? You write feel-bad books – but that doesn’t make you not want to read them.’

But even when I sit in a room, my goal isn’t to make people feel comfortable, which, of course, has its pitfalls. It’s hard for me to be chill, and you can feel that in the in-between of the cold writing.

It feels like a refreshing antidote to the dominant ‘relatability’ narrative of the last decade.

Stephanie LaCava: Oh my god, there’s definitely none of that! I mean, I’ll make you laugh – but I’ll also make you vomit. 

The presence of pop culture in the book is interesting – Margot and Graves watch 60s films together, her parents’ musical legacy follows her everywhere. Rather than being something new, pop culture is always something from the past reaching forward. It makes the book quite hard to place in a particular time, but it also feels like a very current phenomenon – to be haunted by the past, both personally and culturally. How would you describe Margot’s relationship to pop culture?

Stephanie LaCava: Setting a book without signifiers has always been a big thing for me, but it’s funny I didn’t think about the nostalgia aspect until now. I think this book is a small exploration of culture industries across decades and generations, maybe.

Was there something about the themes of French 60s cinema specifically that you felt mirrored the power dynamic between Margot and Graves?

Stephanie LaCava: I was more interested in the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival of 1968. I was interested in the festival being shut down in solidarity with what was happening in Paris. And – typical – [laughs] the films that weren't shown! Back to what you were saying before, I was like, let’s write about what wasn’t shown. Also, the politics of the book were important to me to get in sideways through that. There are little fun things in it, like [anarchist political activist and writer] Emma Goldman’s address is the address where Margot lives in New York. There are all kinds of jokes and nods to things that I care about or want to think about throughout the book.

Could you talk a bit more about the role of dark humour in the book?

Stephanie LaCava: Dark humour and play is very important in all my work. The crazy thing about this book is it’s about pain, yes, but really about no pain, as you said. I love the simple and complex absurdity of that. The name Graves is this, as well. In French, it means severe, violent, serious. Margot meets this man in a graveyard. Graves is the name she puts in her phone, because she never gets an answer as to what his real name is.

Irreverence is a coping mechanism for me. Why blow something up bit by bit when you can set it on fire? I’m not self-serious. Yes, I care about these anarchical leanings, and I really wanted to highlight the emphasis on individualism in creating culture nowadays.

But, I also want there to be a kind of levity to it all, because we need levity.

“This book is very violent. There’s a lot of body fluids. It is, to some degree, body horror, but silently so” – Stephanie LaCava

The book made me think a lot about voyeurism, and our cultural fascination with women in pain in the first place – especially when their narratives are romanticised or aestheticised. What do you think it is about these kinds of stories that appeals to people from a reader’s perspective?

Stephanie LaCava: Writing it to create a kind of haptic response for somebody is initiating a kind of voyeurism. It’s leaving a reader to a place he or she would never get to otherwise, within someone else. I think that’s where writing on the page of a book is different to filmmaking. I can explain these things without you watching them, and the voyeurism of that is inside out rather than outside in. This book is very violent. There’s a lot of body fluids. It is, to some degree, body horror, but silently so.

Yes, there’s a strangeness to the nature of this book that feels very Cronenberg, very erotic.

Stephanie LaCava: Totally. Eroticism is the mystery, the unseen, the un-filled in, which is all the things that my books are about. Hopefully, the erotic view from way up above where you can’t even read the words, something about them on page is actively erotic, because so little is given.

Do you see fiction as an art form where pain can be examined and understood in ways that aren’t possible through memoir or autofiction?

Stephanie LaCava: Part of my processing of the world has always been very evidence-based. Like, I don’t necessarily believe a) that I am going to be OK and b) that what I am seeing is accurate. I guess some people do, but it’s not like that for me. I look for validation probably in all the wrong ways, as well.

It’s like when someone sends you a text and it says something affirming, you screenshot it, because you’re like ‘I am OK – look, there’s evidence!’ It’s on paper or it’s typed out, so now I know.

It’s a very human thing I’m interested in. Through fiction and storytelling you can incite empathy and recognition, and I think that’s important. Whatever can be done to make us look closer at care.

I Fear My Pain Interests You will be released through Verso on 27 September. You can pre-order it here