Waist Deep, the kaleidoscopic novel heralded as the book of the summer

It’s a strange time to be a young person. Half of your friends may be homeowners, married and with 1.25 kids, while the other half are still figuring out what they want to do when they grow up. Having learned to question the merits of milestones such as marriage and parenthood – or else accepted them as out of reach, as with home ownership – many of us now find ourselves facing up to adulthood with no clear blueprint. Those old models are still standing, even if they’ve been shaken. Meanwhile the new ones, like communal living and ethical non-monogamy, feel more like hashtags than reality. Everyone says they want to live on the same street as all their friends – but who will make the first move? Or is it all just talk?

These tensions simmer beneath the surface of Waist Deep, the debut novel by Danish journalist Linea Maja Ernst. It follows a group of old university friends reuniting for a week at a lakeside cabin. Their paths have diverged dramatically in the 12 years since they met, and their anticipation for their holiday is tempered by questions of what they have in common anymore. in

Dreamy, drifting Sylvia is settled with her girlfriend Charlie, but feels smothered by Charlie’s staid desires for monogamy, children and a dog. She’s also still nursing a long-standing crush on her friend Esben. Sure, he’s been with Karen for years – and now they’re getting married. But couldn’t they still work something out? For Quince, this week at the cabin is a chance to reintroduce himself: he has a new name and a new body, as a ‘recent settler’ to masculinity, finding his way with the help of Reddit.com/AskMen. But his desire to rave, play and explore chafe against the domestic tone set by earth mother-of-two Gry and Adam, her normie husband. Sylvia, too, sees Adam as symbolic of the conformity that they were meant to be throwing out in favour of new and ‘more fluid’ ways of living: ‘Weren’t they true radicals, just a second ago?’

An instant bestseller in Scandinavia and translated into ten languages, Waist Deep has struck a nerve with a generation on the brink of adulthood. Now it’s being marked as the book of the British summer, with an English translation by Booker-nominated Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg. Below, Ernst speaks to Dazed in her first-ever English interview.

Waist Deep is a very Millennial novel, but it’s also playful and sensual, with an ensemble cast – far from the somewhat solipsistic, bloodless ‘sad Millennial woman’ who’s become so defining of contemporary fiction.

Linea Maja Ernst: I think there’s something inherently lonely about main characters. Often there’s a sort of tragic, nihilistic, sometimes cynical narrator, who has to carry the whole perspective. I just wanted to write a novel of the collective. If you grew up Millennial, you grew up with sitcoms. I know that it’s only pop culture, but some of my fundamental expectations of life were formed on the couch, watching Friends and Seinfeld, like that meme: ‘Adults having breakfast at a friend’s apartment before heading off to work is the biggest lie television ever told me’. Really, now, my actual friend group is my colleagues – not your ‘chosen family’, but relationships that came out of the office.

Your characters are very different from each other – there are straights, queers, parents, careerists, radicals, normies – but you write from all their perspectives. Who do you identify with most?

Linea Maja Ernst: Sylvia and Quince, obviously! Initially, their norm-critical perspectives got all the airtime. Once I’d played out that rage, I could try on the other, more conventional perspectives. I had some really interesting conversations with my friends – they took offense at other things than you’d think! It was a good practice of empathy. It’s easy to assume that other people suffer from false consciousness, that they’ve been brought up to think that this is happiness, but I think that’s very condescending. I wanted to force myself to understand: how is this actually happiness to you?

We’re still working with outlines of our parents’ ideas of the good life. There’s hesitation about trying to articulate any alternatives, and what else could be possible

Those traditional milestones – home ownership, marriage, kids – loom large over the characters, though they’re split on their pull. Sylvia’s butch girlfriend Charlie is one of the keenest, being ‘tired of everything needing to be alternative and radical’. Did you set out to subvert expectations?

Linea Maja Ernst: Yes! It was so fun to put people in a diagram, like an interactive sociopolitical compass: what if I go to this corner, visit this perspective? Like Adam – a classic straight man, and such an object of projection. You’d assume there’s not much there, because he goes through life so easily – he’s like a computer without internet. Then he says something like ‘I also read Virginia Woolf. And I found her overrated!’ [laughs]. Sometimes I think we can approach literature like it’s a painting in a museum: just contemplating it, and hoping that you’re understanding it correctly – there’s a sort of distance. I’ve loved hearing that readers are talking about the book, and taking ownership of the characters, using them as a shorthand for themselves, their friends and their frustrations.

I’ve been pressing Waist Deep onto my friends, too. It’s a credit to your characters – everyone’s relatable, but distinct, like on Girls or Sex and the City. Are you more Carrie or Charlotte or Quince?

Linea Maja Ernst: I was rewatching Girls while finishing the novel, and so happy to reconnect with Hannah. Viewers were so unfair to her – like I think readers are being unfair to Sylvia now [laughs]. I should stop reading my Goodreads reviews, but I can’t. Many say ‘These characters are so unlikeable, and so mean!’ But everyone sometimes has uncharitable thoughts about people they love. I saw some online discourse that put it this way: ‘The price of community is being irritated’ – but I love that! It would be easier if our energies were the same, and we were completely congruent – that’s why people are starting to use ChatGPT as a therapist – but the tension is more interesting.

You send up typical Millennial tropes – sourdough bread, competitive brunch-cooking, calling yourself a communist without having read any theory – without disdaining your characters for being so basic.

Linea Maja Ernst: A milder term than satire would be comedy of manners. You poke fun at the things people do, and these emblematic objects of desire like sourdough bread, but when you dive into the characters’ heads, you see they are conflicted or self-conscious. There are so many myths about Millennials. Even when they’re true, they function as myths because we keep perpetuating them as the social story of who we are: the ways in which we are damned, or spoiled, or the last generation to ‘have it all’. I wanted the novel to be a comedy: critical but also warm.

One of the big divisions within friendship groups can be parents and non-parents. In Waist Deep, you show both camps with compassion, without denying there’s a divide. Gry, for example, relishes being a mother and has a natural aptitude for it, but feels that she has to conceal that to remain credible in the eyes of her childfree, careerist and/or queer friends.

Linea Maja Ernst: I was the first person in my friend group to have a kid; I have two now, and I’m married. But at that time I felt very alone: ‘Nobody understands!’ I was also a single mum, and the only queer person. Then all my Gry-esque friends had babies at the exact same time, like this surge of statistical urgency: ‘Now we are 31-and-a-half, and we have to have our first baby’. Then, suddenly, they understood. It’s meant I can see both sides. When you do things a little out of step with others, you become very keenly aware of norms and collective shifts, especially in Denmark, where everything’s so homogeneous.

You’re a staff writer at the newspaper Weekendavisen, and often comment on Millennial culture. How does it manifest in Denmark?

Linea Maja Ernst: It’s a blessing and a curse to live in a utopian welfare state. There’s such a strong sense of ‘This state has a place for me; I am included and supported’. You don’t have to feel like a minority, find community, or carve your own place in the world. You can go to university, and read radical theory, and enjoy radical art, but it’s on the condition that nothing ever fundamentally changes. A reader of Waist Deep, the cultural critic Macon Holt, made this point on Instagram: that the characters’ anguish emanates from having ‘radical educations and the resources to live comfortably’ but no power to challenge the status quo. I don’t think Denmark is any closer to creating different ways of living than other countries. Everybody is quite tolerant, and you’re allowed to do whatever you want – but nobody does.

It reflects the paralysis of choice, maybe. We’re not obliged now to marry, have kids, stay in our hometown or even accept the body in which we were born – but those possibilities can come with their own kind of pressure.

Linea Maja Ernst: There’s also the painful realisation that you don’t want to do it alone. You don’t want to be the first one to dive in, then find everybody else changes their mind. There’s a lot to be said about financial security, home ownership, family; I don’t know if these pillars need to be thrown out. But I think we’re still working with outlines of our parents’ ideas of the good life. There’s hesitation about trying to articulate any alternatives, and what else could be possible. That’s why I wanted Waist Deep to be a very sensual, horny book, because the path forward is connection. When you yearn for somebody, there’s direction and energy; you’re flustered, thrown out of yourself a little bit. It’s wild what can happen, when you fall in love.

When you yearn for somebody, there’s direction and energy; you’re flustered, thrown out of yourself a little bit. It’s wild what can happen, when you fall in love

Waist Deep isn’t prescriptive about this new form of the ‘good life’, but if there is a takeaway message, it’s a warning against languishing, allowing yourself to be paralysed by possibility. Sylvia invokes the classic fig tree scene from The Bell Jar, where Esther can’t decide which fruit to pick before they all wither and die.

Linea Maja Ernst: Sylvia is so wrapped up in her yearning, she goes through life like it’s a movie. She identifies with Plath, Woolf, Ophelia. She believes that if everyone could just see things as she does, there’d be paradise. But really, she needs to stop treating people like plot devices, or gateways to another life. She thinks Esben will unlock her potential while Charlie makes her feel safe. She ties her sense of self to other people, and analyses everything but is terrified of doing anything in practice. Adam admonishes her – ‘Action is all that counts’ – and I think that’s true. It’s something that I have to remind myself of, as an overthinker.

There’s a lot of sex in the novel, and it’s very bodily, rooted in the physical, fleeting sensations and natural phenomena. Often characters are surprised by what turns them on. Is this a comment on how cerebral and in-our-heads we’ve become about sex?

Linea Maja Ernst: It’s good to think about sex, theorise about identity and find language to describe yourself. But that conversation can also feel a bit stationary: you find yourself, and your pronouns – then it’s fixed. I was interested in sexuality in practice, not theory. Sex has become almost suspicious now, because we’re so conscious of it: what happens when your desire runs away from you? My embarrassing secret is that I used to read a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction. Yes, it’s complicated now [laughs], but it taught me that smut could be character-driven. It’s not problematic or tragic when your desires take you aback – it’s a rupture, producing erotic energy. You can create something from that.

Though he shares the bulk of the storytelling with Sylvia, Quince eventually emerges as the hero of the novel, capable of being in the moment but also acting on his desires.

Linea Maja Ernst: He was the hero all along, I think. I just wanted him to have everything! It was really important to me to not make him the ‘tragic trans character’, or the wise sage: he gets to be confused and fallible, too. I had so much fun writing his autoerotic fantasy: he wants something free and risky and norm-pushing, then it turns into this tender, domestic scene with orange juice. He’s like: ‘What?!’ Quince shares Sylvia’s revolutionary, critical energy, but his is much more playful, like ‘Anything could happen.’ He has this sort of jester quality; he can make people laugh about themselves. If you want to change minds, it’s easier with comedy than whatever Sylvia’s doing. That’s why I wanted to end the novel on an ironic, happy-sad note: when she finally looks up, there’s the miracle she’s been agonising over. 

I won’t give the ending away here – you wouldn’t necessarily call it a twist, but it’s unexpected and memorable. Did you intend it as wish fulfilment, or to convey a real possibility?

Linea Maja Ernst: I wanted Quince’s attitude to life to pay off, so I gave him the prize. I wanted the ending to feel kind of miraculous as well: maybe this is a once-in-a-lifetime possibility, but Quince still had to act. He thinks, ‘I’d like to be kissed’, then realises: ‘If anything is going to happen, I have to do it’. If you want to go about romance, or partnership, or family in another way, it entails a lot of people, a lot of conversation and choices. I chose the lighter, fun route of representing that in a novel – where it’s driven by desire, not those worthy but sometimes dreary discussions like ‘it takes a village’.

Waist Deep is published on May 8.