As author Rebecca Novack told Jezebel, she’s learned firsthand, while bringing Murder Bimbo to market, that plenty of people these days indulge in fantasies of assassination.
Murder Bimbo, begins with a woman on the run. The woman in question, a narrator whose name we never learn, has assassinated an increasingly popular politician and rapist known only as “Meat Neck.” In an email to a podcaster who tells stories of wronged women , she writes, “When the people who are after me get here, they’ll arrest me and put me on trial, or they’ll disappear me to some black site.
Or they won’t bother with any of that and they’ll just kill me.” All of these seem like plausible outcomes, but in the novel’s prologue, the narrator seems much more confident of her success, and less worried about how her story will be received by the public: “I am a fucking genius,” she says, “a gorgeous fucking genius, and the only thing left to do is sit down and write.” This unreliable perspective remains throughout. ’s first section, addressed to Justice Bimbo, presents one version of what’s happened; a second section, written to the narrator’s ex-girlfriend, recounts a very different series of events. In both versions, the narrator, a sex worker, is in a unique position: Because of her work, she has access to people in power that others lack, and in both cases, she takes advantage of it. The third and final section of the novel reveals something that feels a bit more like the truth. This devious novel plays on the presumed reader’s ingrained expectations about sex work and fantasies about political violence. The narrator is aware of what Justice Bimbo and her ex think about sex work, and she plays on those biases, a strategy that also implicates the reader. As Novack told Jezebel, she’s learned firsthand while bringing this novel to market, plenty of people these days indulge in fantasies of assassination, and by melding these two dynamics, Novack is probing an odd facet of society: the proximity of service workers to the ultra-powerful and the ultra-wealthy. As she explained, “There are trusted people that are close to who are there in transactional relationships” and who might plausibly, in our fantasies, take advantage of that situation. But even as Novack indulges in them, she challenges and undermines them. The novel’s timing feels like a perverse gift to book marketers: a few months after the assassination of Charlie Kirk; in the middle of ever-more revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to the political and economic elite; 18 months after two attempted assassinations on the president. While Novack couldn’t have predicted any of these specific scenarios, her novel feels unnervingly relevant. “I’ve tried to sell so many books,” she said, “and have just been like, ‘No, too many lesbians, pointlessly lesbian, why are you sending us more lesbian novels?’ Finally, times changed and editors decided they wanted lesbian novels right now.” Luckily for us, this brash and confronting novel—about lesbians, bad and stupid men in power, and the combustible intersection of the two—is out now. We talked about all that and more in a recent conversation.In terms of understanding what actually happens in this book, it’s important to know that Murder Bimbo, if we can call her that, tells different stories to different people. Did the idea for the structure come first, or the character? The inspiration came from a nightmare: In the first half of the dream, in order to survive, I had to make myself as invisible as possible, and then I realized, “Oh no—it’s the opposite. I have to make myself as visible as possible.” I woke up and was like, “That would be a good technical challenge for a book.” I’m really into puzzles and the reason I like writing books is because it gets harder and harder as you go. The book outsmarts you. As I was developing it, the form in some ways became a reaction to what the experience of reading it was going to be like. How do we deal with these issues of identity and assumption with the reader? It was both: I wanted to have a really good time, and that’s what made sense for the character. She’s obviously playing to whom she’s addressing, and then we as readers are also implicated in that. Specifically, she’s playing into these preexisting narratives and biases that people within the story are going to have about sex work, but the reader may also have those biases. How did you play peoples’ ideas about sex work, which are often very negative? You’re like, “OK, I’m gonna represent this. I wanna do a positive representation of a sex worker.” But then you’re like, “Well, is this like a true representation of a sex worker? Why does this person have to be relentlessly optimistic or empowered by her work?” In the end, the only solution that I could come up with was to write understanding and misunderstanding into those conversations and to implicate the reader. I like books that implicate myself. When I readfor the first time, I was engaged to a historian who didn’t read very much fiction. About once a year I would convince them to read a fiction book. I was a third of the way through and I was like, “You have to read this book. You have to, it’s so good.” I was nagging, nagging, like, “This is a great book. It’s a feminist book about marriage.” And then the twist happened and I was like, “Have you started it yet? Because maybe don’t start it.” For me, it is really fun to have the rug pulled out when I’m reading. I did really want to do that to other people, even though I know some people don’t like that feeling. I’m curious about writing a protagonist who is so malleable. How much does she really have a true self? MaybeThere was a lot of cutting. Initially, I wrote her family backstory, her sex work narrative story, and her relationship with X into every single section and you got the full background. I think that helped me to figure out who she was. We see her youthful and in love in part two, and then she’s at this other point where she’s jaded and sad and sort of desperate. I think those are both real; they’re real parts of her that are activated at different times. The lies we tell about ourselves are also true in their own way. That was one of the many things that this book taught me. Yeah, you might be surprised to hear this, but by the end, I also found out that I may have some issues with exes that hadn’t ever occurred to me until I finished. Conspiracy theories are the bread and butter of American life right now, and that’s a lot of what’s happening in the book. She’s creating this stuff. How much were you thinking about the creation of these myths? A lot. I was thinking about conspiracies a lot. Every single character in the book is influenced by at least some conspiracy. They’re driven by conspiracies and some of them are aware of it, some of them are not. It’s probably true of people at all times, but it certainly feels like a very contemporary American concept to me. We’ll hear something and we’re like, “That sounds true.” Because we live in an incredibly precarious, unjust country that is constantly gaslighting people at all levels, and human beings with our little brains are just trying to make sense of that. All the characters in this book are trying to make sense of the world around them, a lot of them by involving themselves in the discourse of the left or the right. Conspiracy theories absorb some of those questions or fears that we have. Like, “These guys seem bad, and we can’t really explain it, but if you told us that there was evidence that they were eating babies, I could believe it.” And it never gets dispelled. It sticks with you. Even if it’s debunked, people are like, “I know that was debunked, but I still believe it.” I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how impossible it is to write about the present moment in fiction, because things are happening so fast. So there has to be a level of allegory to anything that anyone is writing, which is the case in this book. So I’m really curious about when the writing process started, how long this took, and how much you were trying to converse with American politics today. I wrote it in 2022. The original germ of an idea was the assassination. That was it. The assassination and then how the left talks to itself, and what’s up with the young right wing. Those were the preliminary questions. It didn’t take very long. I did the first draft over four days. I went to a cabin and wrote it and then put it away and revised it. I was five months pregnant at the time. I revised it right before the child was born. And then I revised it again after my second baby was born. I shopped it when she was 3 months old and it will publish 11 months after I sold it. So it’s been an insane year. There are almost no real-life touchstones in it. It was strange to write a political book without any real touchstones, and then have all those touchstones start to come true as the book went through publication. That was weird as hell. I found the way you dealt with the assassination idea in these various narratives really interesting because the book obviously isn’t saying you should just kill people. But I think a lot of us have this fantasy, especially women, when you’re in this position of powerlessness, especially around sexual violence, when you see these public figures face no repercussions. In this book, you are imagining an assassination target who has had power in the government, which is something that we are seeing in the real world now. It’s funny, I met with nine editors, I think, who wanted the book. And almost every single one of them started the meeting by telling me their personal idea of how we could assassinate one of two different people. They were like, “Here’s what I would do. I think it should be a house cleaner, actually.” There are so many people whose approach to me about this book has been to tell me, “I have an idea.” And it is a fantasy. It gives people some kind of catharsis to have this. There’s also a general interest in true crime. And we have a fantasy of a benevolent assassin or a politically assigned assassin. There are always these moments after an assassination happens where a certain group on the left, which is large, kind of holds their breath. Like, “I hope there’s gonna be some good politics behind this one. OK, no, somehow this one’s also a Nazi.” I also really wanted to sell the book and people have no problem living in this fantasy of an assassination, even if it’s just for a short time. I lived in it for a few years. But as you can probably tell from the book, the assassination itself was not what took me the longest part to write. It’s not supposed to be like, “rah-rah, violence!” You can tell that I wrote this before Charlie Kirk was killed, because there are so many things that I would make better or more realistic if I had known about that. If I had been a little smarter, I would have chosen a different type of background for Meat Neck; in the novel, he’s a younger stand-in for an old politician. But actually, I think the future looks a little bit different.Happy Year of the Fire Horse! Baby Girls Born This Year Are Destined to Defy Societal Norms & Ruin Men
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