Do You Like Me?

Madeline Howard interviews Anika Jade Levy about her debut novel, “Flat Earth.”

By Madeline HowardNovember 5, 2025

• Fiction

SINCERITY IS DEAD, but Downtown is alive and well. Everyone is concerned with looking good for the end of the world. The patrons of the arts have abandoned beauty for tech, leaving the writers and painters and independent filmmakers in the lurch. All the girls turn to sugaring so they can fund their Künstlerromane, even if they come from generational wealth. Sex work seeps into the crevices, creating fissures in heavenly firmaments. The boundaries between the internet and our living bodies dissolve entirely. We are educated at elite institutions, but we can’t pay our rent. Every day, we pass someone hungry on the street. Even so, everyone exercises starvation to stay thin. Models for gracefully aging femininity get facelifts. A triangle of the metropolis becomes provincial. All anyone really wants is attention.

To summarize? “The Lower East Side was a bad place and I was perfect,” says Avery, the narrator of Anika Jade Levy’s debut novel Flat Earth (2025). Avery lives in Downtown New York and is writing a book of cultural reports for her media studies master’s. She also has empty sex, works for a right-wing dating app, and compares herself to her best friend, Frances, who drops out of their graduate program, marries a blue-collar worker, and produces a critically acclaimed documentary about the rural South. Their friendship provides the perfect backdrop for this melancholy tale of mimetic desire, and Levy’s prose shimmers. Each chapter is preceded by Avery’s breathless reportage, which contextualizes the humor and difficulty of youth, social competence, and art-making. The novel is slim but beautiful. You’ll want to carry Flat Earth around like a prayer book.

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MADELINE HOWARD: The novel is broken up by cultural reports that Avery is working on for her media studies program. How did you conceive this structure?

ANIKA JADE LEVY: I was taking an online seminar with Sheila Heti. She gave us a prompt: “Write the scene before the first scene.” Using that prompt, I wrote the first report, which is the first page of the book. That’s the only page that hasn’t been edited. It’s exactly as I wrote it, and it demonstrates Avery’s artistic practice. Also, I wanted to borrow the grammar of social media, internet fragmentation, loops, and aphorisms, then use that to talk about faith, spectacle, and delusion.

You took a seminar with Sheila Heti? I’m jealous.

I had just read How Should a Person Be? [by Heti], which, formally, is a very different book. But I was excited by the way she used form to show the narrator’s artistic failures and successes. The premise of the book is that Sheila has been contracted by the Canadian government to write a feminist play but is failing to produce the play.

While How Should a Person Be? is certainly different from Flat Earth, I see your book as a spiritual successor. It carries on the tradition of writing about the failure to write.

For a long time, I didn’t want Avery to be a writer. I wanted her to be this nonentity. Then, it became essential to give her something to do. But I think the essential quality of her character is this porosity. She’s being penetrated by every single experience she has. Things are moving through her. So she started as this blank slate, and then in giving her this little project, I was able to humanize her just enough.

Frances’s character came to me fully formed. I had the idea that she would be working on this experimental documentary [also titled] Flat Earth, and that it would be an offensive and zoological study of the rural South. Then I had to figure out Avery in response to her, once Frances was fleshed out.

I read in an interview that you had premonitions about the United States, and that you wrote down certain events before they even occurred.

Yes. I wrote about the Adderall shortage before it happened, for example. Obviously, I don’t think I’m clairvoyant. But when we write, we’re patterning in the same way as when we dream. Sometimes an image will appear in a dream before it appears in our life. Ideally, you’re tapping into something. The reason Avery is so hollow and empty is that I wanted her to be this sort of oracle. There are ways of seeing that are only available to you when you’re an inexperienced young girl.

Avery feels like a total artistic failure throughout the book. But I think her real failure is her inability to identify what would actually make her happy.

She’s not actually as doomed as she thinks she is. She feels very downtrodden because she’s surrounded by people who either come from money or have artistic legacy in their families. But ultimately, she’s at an elite institution and she’s in New York City; there’s no reason why she couldn’t be making something viable. She has a negative delusion, whereas Frances has a positive delusion. One of the central questions of the book that I don’t even know the answer to is “Is Frances actually a great artist?” She’s made something striking and memorable, but we don’t get the answer to the question “Is she a good artist, or is she opportunistic?”

I think a lot about how people are fundamentally unknowable, even in our closest relationships.

Regarding unknowability, we’re intentionally distanced and alienated from every character in this novel except Avery. Why?

I was constrained by my ability; I wrote the only good book that I was able to write. I had the bandwidth to give some subjectivity to the women in the book, but ultimately, I knew that the men were going to be flattened archetypes. The men, other than Frances’s husband, Forrest, are two-dimensional, and only named by their professions: the Sculptor, the Law Professor, the Obituarist.

I hope that my next book will have more humanity. This book is about opportunism and transactionality. Even though Avery feels like she’s having intense romantic connections and disappointments, she’s ultimately viewing her romantic relationships in a pretty material way. She’s a creditor masquerading as a victim.

There’s a collapse of boundaries in the book between the internet and reality. You depict how, nowadays, life often involves calculating the extent to which people actually believe what they say or post, or whether they’re adopting an ironic attitude.

I tried to use irony to get at something sincere. But when you live online, the nature of contemporary life is that you don’t have access to a lot of dignity. The line between confession and content is dissolving.

On this podcast that I love, New Models, film director Eugene Kotlyarenko said that for the last however many millions of years, people could only see themselves—living their own lives—in their dreams. That was the only time you could “see” yourself, as if through a camera. Now suddenly, in the last 20 years, we have had these high-resolution avatars that we’re operating as if they’re video game characters.

While writing the book, I was thinking that a lot of contemporary life felt apocalyptic. But it was also less about the apocalypse, or whether or not the world is ending, than about how to look cool while believing that it’s ending. I was trying to treat the apocalypse less like an event than like an aesthetic. Everyone is concerned about making themselves look good on camera.

Avery resists delving into her past; she shares only a few pages about her parents. Why did you keep her background elusive?

So much of the book is about how America has so many different cultures and experiences that help define our sense of self and place in such a huge country; for example, Frances’s Southern identity is central to her self-mythology. But I was really careful not to specify Avery’s regional background. I wanted the reader to make their own assumptions. I wanted them to think: “She obviously grew up in some postindustrial, white, economically depressed small town.” Or: “She obviously has metropolitan privilege that Frances doesn’t have.” It wasn’t about making her an “everygirl,” but rather a blank slate, because that’s how she perceives herself. She literally says, “I don’t come from anywhere.”

That’s one of the best lines: “I don’t come from anywhere. […] I am talking about my mother.” In many ways, I felt like Avery was searching for someone to be her parent.

She’s also looking for someone to teach her how to be an artist. She’s getting this expensive education, and she also has access to this character, Sally, who’s one of her teachers and a writer she really admires. That’s who she should be working toward, but instead she’s focused on these men who she doesn’t even really respect. We get Avery’s evaluation of the Sculptor’s work, and she says it’s extraordinarily stupid. But she’s responding to its popularity.

With the Sculptor, I wanted to show Avery seeing the internet having a really polarizing reaction to his work, and then her immediately pursuing him. I wanted to show that she wasn’t aware of her own motivations. Her alienation is so extreme that she doesn’t have a clear sense of her own desires. She’s moving from animal impulse to animal impulse, from one need to the next.

You said that, with this book, you wanted to break the rule that stories have to be about change. Would you say that Avery hasn’t changed by the end of the book?

This book explores the refusal or the failure to change, and the way that capitalism and money infiltrate and colonize every single aspect of our social lives and our homes. There’s no possibility of desire outside of capitalism. Even Avery’s art, her flimsy little project where she’s trying to write this Susan Sontagesque book of cultural reports, she repurposes for her job at a right-wing dating app. And she’s not even good at it; she fails to market herself. She’s scared to try, because it seems potentially embarrassing to her.

Honestly, it’s the place that I was writing from; you can see my self-consciousness in the writing. I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard, but like I said earlier, I just wrote the only good book I knew how to write, which was deeply self-conscious and concerned with the reader’s attention span. I’m very aware that everyone is reading this with a phone less than one foot away from them. The whole book is this performance of “Do you like me? Will you keep reading?”

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Anika Jade Levy is a writer from Colorado. She is a founding editor of Forever Magazine and teaches in the writing program at Pratt Institute. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in Interview Magazine, Nylon, Flaunt, and elsewhere.

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Featured image: Photo of Anika Jade Levy by Lizzie Klein.