City of Sycophants

Tess Pollok interviews Zoe Dubno about her debut novel, “Happiness and Love.”

By Tess PollokSeptember 3, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Fiction

“CITIES, LIKE DREAMS,” writes Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities (tr. William Weaver, 1974), “are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” Fiction writer and essayist Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, is similarly interested in investigating the often perilous dynamics unique to cities and the clusters of artistic intelligentsia that evolve there. The narrative unfolds over the course of a single, claustrophobic evening, as our narrator is regrettably pulled back into the orbit of ex-friends she’d rather avoid. The dinner takes place at the Downtown Manhattan home of artist couple Nicole and Eugene, after the death of Rebecca, another mutual friend; yet while the narrator simmers with rage and grief, this social-clique-cum-miserable-horde celebrates the arrival of a flourishing new actress. What follows is a scorching coup d’état against decorum that underscores the fragility of our bonds with one another and how tenderness so easily intermingles with disgust and contempt.

I spoke with Dubno over Zoom, three months ahead of the book’s publication this September, to discuss the novel’s origins in the work of Thomas Bernhard, the author’s love of John Keene, and the fractal social networks that compromise any robust arts scene.

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TESS POLLOK: The novel’s afterword mentions Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters as a source of inspiration. What about Bernhard’s work felt timely to you?

ZOE DUBNO: When I first read Woodcutters, I was surprised by how timeless it felt—it could have been written right now. Reading it felt like: I know these people. I recognize these people. I understand this world.

I was also drawn in by the form. I’d never read a novel that went that hard on that kind of world and was able to do it so seamlessly, being naturalistically accurate without being essayistic. If you read Sally Rooney, for instance, it has the same sort of shape as a Jane Austen novel, or if you read Zadie Smith, she based On Beauty on the work of E. M. Forster (specifically his novel Howards End).

I was reading it thinking that it was the perfect format for a social critique of marriage and love, so I knew I wanted my book to have a similar form. I think of it as a full-frontal assault; I can tell you the entire plot [of Woodcutters] in one second. It’s a series of rants and things that pop into the narrator’s head that annoy him. My book [revolves around] a completely different series of ideas—but presented in that same format.

How did you approach writing in that format?

I wrote the first three-quarters of it really quickly. Up until the actress arrives—about four months. I was going strong with the Woodcutters format because, when a book is set up like that, you can always return to the main scene … For much of the book, it’s just, we’re at a dinner party and a friend is dead. So it’s very easy to keep going. But once the actress arrived, I was like: Oh, I’ve got to park the car. It took me longer with that portion of the book to figure out exactly what I was trying to say and how I was going to frame certain interactions—that’s the part of the book we’ve been waiting for all night, you know? That’s the shape. So, things took longer from there.

I have a rule when I’m writing: write 1,000 words a day or go to prison. You can have the weekends off if you want. But I think 1,000 words a day is a doable goal. However long it takes you is however long it takes. The thing about being a novelist is that no one cares if you do it—it’s just you—so it’s important to have self-discipline. It’s important to have very rigid rules. This is a rule of mine.

To what extent does the novel draw from your life?

Many of the narrator’s gripes with contemporary life are my own. Some of the conversations are conversations that I’ve had, but none of the characters are one-for-one someone from my life. It’s interesting to me how many people that I don’t know approach me and say, “Oh, is this character based on my friend?” I sent it to a friend of mine who was a novelist before it was published and she asked me how I knew her friends. I think if you know people who are like that, then the world [of the book] becomes instantly recognizable.

To what extent is it meant to be read as satirical?

I didn’t want to accidentally make, like, a starter pack meme of a person where the characters offer a banal critique of hipsters. I’m prouder of how the actual social relations are depicted, between the characters within the group. I was interested in what it feels like to be dependent on someone, while actually liking them, while also feeling like you’re taking something away from them, while also not wanting to feel that way. I think the illustration of those bonds is more vital to understanding the book than any specific point I made about contemporary life.

How did you balance having sympathy for these characters against the totality of how ghastly and annoying they all are?

I felt a lot of sympathy for them while writing. Even Eugene—who I think, noncontroversially, is the most hateable and quantifiably evil character—is someone you can feel sympathy for, because he’s suffering. There are a lot of people suffering in the book, and I feel bad for all of them. I don’t feel bad for them in the grand scheme of the world sense (they’re doing pretty much fine); I feel bad for them because of who they are. Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing a lot of psychoanalysis, but it was fun to experiment with their different acts of microaggressive cruelty and contempt towards one another. It was fun to play with, “Oh, you’re like that because this happened,” and so on.

I thought Rebecca’s death was a smart way of grounding these characters, of making them more earthy and real. I can relate to the experience of entering a social space where nothing real ever happens, and her death helps tether these characters to reality.

When I was coming up with the book, my professor—who is a translator named John Keene—wrote Counternarratives. He helped me considerably with the book: at the time I was writing, there were all these articles about Dimes Square and various people were getting these write-ups that were like, “This is the coolest artist right now.” So when I would see John, who’s a generation older than us, I’d rant to John about it for a long time. He pushed me into thinking that this was the book. He told me: “All of this stuff that you’re saying? This is what the book is about.” I don’t want to say that the book is about Dimes Square, but it’s more about there being a group of people that get elevated in this strange way. It was easy to use details from experience to fill out that reality.

Scene-based community can be really shallow. Have you ever read Seth Price? He wrote a great novel called Fuck Seth Price, and there’s a part in it where he writes about how you never want to be part of a scene, but you want to be aware of all the scenes and external to them. Because if you’re ever in it, everyone actually hates each other and is constantly trying to sabotage each other. But outside of that, everyone looks at you and just worships you.

That’s what I found so interesting about Fuck Seth Price: that the character’s goal was actually to get out of it. So many people have this attitude—that “so-and-so is my friend, but they’re not talented”—when it should really be the opposite. You should be friends with this person because you think they’re great and they make amazing work. The nature of [and laws governing] the group that I was trying to illustrate with Happiness and Love is one such that “we’re all friends with each other, and therefore we each think that the other is shit. But this actress is coming, and because she’s from outside of our world, she’s amazing.” I was trying to capture the parasocial entanglements involved in group dynamics.

One of the things the book captures very elegantly is how the transition from “community” to “scene” tends to gamify social relationships.

That’s something I find relatable to everyone—not just those in the art world. My brother works in tech and he’s always trying to stay one rung up so he doesn’t get replaced by AI. (He told me that it’s even worse for people younger than him, that they have to play favorites so they don’t get screwed over by the managers.) The alienation of the capitalist machine eats everything.

You live in London now. Previously, you lived in New York. Do you see the novel as distinctly representing either of these cities, or just city life in general?

I don’t think of the book as specific to New York or London—it’s much more about how the narrator feels when she’s in these towns. In New York, she feels trapped and like this group of people is totally on top of her no matter where she goes. That’s what New York is: even when you lose your context by going to a different place and start to feel like a free person, there’s always that energy and that terror. It’s significant that the narrator only lived in London for a few years before returning to New York; I think if you live somewhere long enough, you start to replicate whatever social structures you see around you—and feel oppressed by them. So, even when she goes to London, she’s not really free from what she experienced in New York. It’s very “wherever you go, there you are.”

Did writing this make you feel cynical?

No—the opposite. That’s why I really like reading Bernhard. He was dealing with these same issues, what, 50 years ago? If he can deal with it, then I can deal with it.

It helps me feel like I’m not crazy, that I belong in the world—that there are other people who agree with me. Even though he’s this famous misanthrope, his work still helps me feel good about navigating the world because I can recognize some of myself in it. That’s what I hope for with Happiness and Love—it’s my chance to make somebody else feel like another world is possible.

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Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Muumuu House, and NY Tyrant, her nonfiction in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, BOMB, and elsewhere. She lives in New York and London. Happiness and Love (2025) is her first novel.

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Featured image: Photo of Zoe Dubno by Caroline Tompkins.