Your Life Is Not a Plot

Nada Alic speaks with Halle Butler about social satire, writing humor, and her newest novel, “Banal Nightmare.”

By Nada AlicDecember 6, 2025

• Fiction

HALLE BUTLER IS the patron saint of millennial disillusionment. In her newest novel, Banal Nightmare (2024), she expands her comedic range beyond the depraved interiority of the alienated, office-dwelling cog (2015’s Jillian, 2019’s The New Me) to include an entire ecosystem of artists and art-adjacent careerists flailing about in a Midwestern college town. Here, we follow Moddie as she returns to her hometown post-breakup, reconnecting with childhood friends and infiltrating the college’s tenuous social hierarchy. Through Moddie's interactions with this roving cast of characters, Butler skewers every aspect of modern adulthood. No topic is spared from her biting social critique, from performative progressivism and artistic ambition to doomed relationships, sexual power dynamics, and the enduring aftermath of trauma.

Unlike a great deal of the contemporary literary world, Butler is a deeply and diabolically funny writer. Many novels in recent years have claimed this quality without so much as eliciting a knowing smirk from me—and trust me, I want to laugh! Butler is one of few whose work, a glut of deadpan observations and absurd asides, has made me laugh out loud.

We discussed Banal Nightmare, a phrase as apt for the novel’s title as it is for the times that produced it.

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NADA ALIC: Moddie has all this misplaced rage that she channels into paranoia, rumination, and elaborate, violent revenge fantasies. Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that some clients had a “floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation,” which led them to overreact to minor issues and apply excessive energy to inappropriate situations. Von Franz’s remedy was creative expression. Have you felt that to be true in your own life? What art, books, or films energize you?

HALLE BUTLER: I don’t know about art as a remedy for erratic, exaggerated, and excessive behavior. Isn’t the cliché that artists are always having emotional crises as part of their process, or they have to be totally insulated and constantly meditating just to keep from exploding? I think a really worthwhile goal for an artist could be to learn how to balance emotional well-being and creative output, but I don’t think making art necessarily leads to sanity or balance. I’m a calmer person now than I was at 24, when I started writing novels, but I attribute that to the good influence of relatively sane people in my life, not to my interest in sitting alone in a room for hours on end muttering to myself about depressing shit while I giggle. When I’m working, I basically feel like Rumpelstiltskin. Then I surface and try to level out again. I guess I’ve never really experienced art as functional, if that makes sense. I don’t think you can really use art to get at something else. I mean, people try, but art is already complete in itself. Have you seen Demolition Man? You know how they’re always laughing at Sylvester Stallone’s character for not knowing how to wipe his ass with the seashells? When people try to “use” art for something else, it’s fun to kind of laugh, like, “Oh, honey, look, they don’t know how to use the shells!”

As for what I’m into these days, I just finished reading Patricia Highsmith’s novel Deep Water, about a psychotically dysfunctional marriage. It came out before Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which I love), and it makes the latter look tame, almost sweet. I love Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue by James Purdy, about a childish, pearl-clutching mother who decides to meet up with her dead bohemian daughter’s lovers. I’m obsessed with the Sebastián Silva movie Rotting in the Sun, which is the thing I recommend to everyone—I think it’s a perfect movie, sharp and funny and misanthropic. I also love his Nasty Baby and The Maid. Everyone Else by Maren Ade (who did Toni Erdmann) is so good. Every once in a while, I get to see Ruby McCollister perform, and I think she’s an amazing writer and actress, a genius, and I’m always inspired by her. I have a kid now, so I don’t go to the museum as much as I’d like, but we’re all into these illustrated books A Tiger in the Land of Dreams and Animal Land Where There Are No People that were reprinted by 50 Watts Books. I’m also aesthetically into basic stuff like grass, water, and trees. I just watched Krush Groove, and predict a big Run-DMC phase. I love WFMU.

This book was set in 2018, at the height of the #MeToo era. Now, we’re watching the pendulum swing toward conservatism like tradwife propaganda and the rise of the hypermasculine podcast bro, and, with that, a kind of fatigue around victimhood and accountability. Men like Moddie’s ex, Nick, and his friend Alan, whom Nick sides with after Moddie accuses him of sexual assault, were already dismissive or evasive around accountability then; how much worse do you think they’d be now?

I feel like those three, since they’re in the arts, wouldn’t really become active in the conservative manosphere and married to a tradwife—I don’t think you’re suggesting that they would—but it seems likely they’d feel vindicated, even if they don’t acknowledge it directly or consistently. Maybe they’d reintroduce a little provocative sexism in their work, maybe a little gender inequality in their relationships, but I think it would be more of a lurking thing. Not overt. Since they only listened to the cultural noise and didn’t have any deep conversations with the women in their lives, from what we can tell, anyway, I doubt they evolved. That’s not the whole picture, though, because there’s also Craig, Peter, and Bobby, whom I think are all pretty decent guys, and who probably did evolve over the past seven years. I can see all of them thinking the Barbie movie was lame, especially the scene where all of the Barbies are raising the roof in Barbie Congress, but I can’t see any of them feeling secretly happy about the return of rape culture.

Your writing is deeply funny in a cutting and often brutal way. This book is a master class in the art of roasting. Do you apply this level of acerbic humor to your real-life interactions with friends, or is it strictly reserved for the page?

I wouldn’t say it’s strictly reserved for the page, but I would say that, in general, I’m a pretty affable person.

A big theme in this book is helplessness in the face of social hierarchies and forces outside of our control. Is this a uniquely millennial pathology or is it a tale as old as time?

The book does have a randomly oppressive atmosphere—I think a question for Moddie is whether or not she ever had control over her life, and if she has control over her life now. I feel like there was a lot of talk about agency at that time, and all of the characters are experimenting with “agency” to varying, sometimes farcical, degrees.

But the now-vs-then thing I got hung up on was Gilded Age–era versus millennial-era social rules. Both eras were morally and socially strict, purity was very important, and deviation from the social code of conduct resulted in being shunned. In the Gilded Age, if you were sexually assaulted by someone’s husband, you’d be shunned because you had become a symbolic representation of the libidinous carnality that the group was trying to disavow in themselves and in their husbands. I was interested in looking at Moddie as a kind of 21st-century version of Lily Bart from The House of Mirth. Moddie’s story is similar, but sort of opposite—the reveal of the assault is a kind of social currency, the reveal of the inheritance is potentially socially damaging—and it all hinges on what’s being culturally accepted and rejected at the time. Is it sexual or financial chastity we’re after? What is the group trying to deny, and what is the group trying to claim, and how does that randomly alter a character’s fate? In both cases, we have a person—a group of people, really—whose full humanity is being reduced by fluctuating social norms.

You’re one of the few contemporary fiction writers who has managed to stay relatively offline (whereas I’ve lost the ability to remember a time when my consciousness wasn’t completely enmeshed in the digital world). How do you navigate writing about characters who use social media?

My characters use social media like people who don’t use social media! I feel like Moddie uses Gmail and looks at some posts on Instagram when she specifically wants to get angry, but mostly she just rants about how it’s mind control. My relationship with social media is mostly just assumption—like, I assume that social media is responsible for everyone slumping around Brooklyn in unflattering stonewashed jeans. If I were writing a character using social media, I would have them hunched over their phone watching TikToks about stonewash jeans, then online ordering several pairs while they whisper, “If I don’t get these stonewash jeans, I’ll most certainly be cooked!”

I don’t know, man. Social media is a culture that I opted out of years ago, so I’m not the best person to ask about it. It’s definitely strange to walk around and see everyone on their phones all the time, and to be aware of existing in a slightly parallel reality to most other people. There’s something mildly thrilling about it too.

When I think of a “banal nightmare,” I think about the HR-ification of abuse and trauma (e.g., the rape and molestation questionnaire), or the dissonance between the flattening therapy-speak and people’s lived horrors. Why do we do this and how do we stop doing this?

I’m not really trying to illustrate a path out, or to point out why people do things and tell them how to stop. If anything, with Banal Nightmare, I’m maybe making observations about how it’s not always a full solution to identify and rectify the origin story of one’s own misbehavior and suffering. Your life is not a plot, and you can’t just make an edit. When Moddie starts babbling about how great it is that she’s “living her truth” now, it’s only a matter of pages before she starts monologuing about the devil. It was important for me that she inhabit all of her new identities a little uneasily. Like, when she meets Peter, it’s set up as a kind of John Hughes reward ending. I feel happy when they meet, and I love watching them flirt. But what they’re flirting about is the inherent fascism of the happy ending. It’s like, as characters, they can’t help but talk about how they know this isn’t right. A few pages later, Moddie’s newly-resolved and happy identity is further complicated—if not totally thwarted—by other external forces that have been lurking out of view for the whole book. I’m interested in the desire for narrative simplification, and I’m interested in how narrative simplifications can become oppressive, and I’m interested in the whole range of emotional angles on that spectrum—I also get a kick out of overcomplication. Many of the female characters in the book have very baroque revenge fantasies. People oscillate between oversimplification and overcomplication—people in my books, anyway!

Many of the female friendships in this book are fraught with social and sexual competition, while others are a life raft. For Moddie, opening up to her friends, Bethany and Nina, ends up being deeply cathartic and liberating, but they also enable her worst impulses by coaching her on how to get the ultimate revenge. Are they doing more harm than good?

I think Moddie experiences a complicated relief, more than a pure catharsis, with Bethany. The scene where Bethany draws out the assault disclosure from Moddie is a little Mephistophelian. Bethany is lit with creepy candlelight. Moddie feels vaguely hypnotized. It’s supposed to be a little unsettling because Bethany is offering Moddie a very clear new sense of herself. She’s completely reframing Moddie from obnoxious asshole to innocent victim—both of which are oversimplifications. I don’t mean, in any sense, that Moddie was “asking for it” and therefore shares responsibility for her assault; I mean more that the identity of the innocent victim doesn’t really suit Moddie—the identity is an oversimplification, which Moddie inhabits rather awkwardly. I think Bethany is right to suggest that Moddie should be direct with Alan, but it’s the part about the schadenfreude, and the fantasy of sadistic control over Alan’s life that should be unnerving. It’s definitely time for Moddie to start thinking directly about the aftereffects of the assault, but in a way, she’s still letting someone else define her sense of self. It’s almost too quick, too easy.

And later, when Bethany and Nina really let loose and fantasize about the total destruction of Alan’s life, that’s supposed to be funny in a “should I laugh at this?” way. It’s like Bethany starts off from a reasonable position, and everything she says about how horrible the assault was, and how proud she is of Moddie for confronting Alan, is all true, but then she keeps going and going until she’s basically tranced out thinking about how Moddie can brutally destroy Alan’s kid in a few years. That take-no-prisoners mentality is relatable on a gut level, but also completely insane. The catharsis, for me, comes from being able to laugh at that moment. So, I think they’re helping Moddie evolve and enabling her worst impulses. The Bethany path involves leveraging the assault for personal gain and vengeance. The Nick path involves repressing the assault. Neither is quite right. Moddie will need to figure this out over many years.

A few years ago, you said in The Paris Review, in response to Millie’s argument in The New Me, “that to accept the world as it is, and to become soothed by conveyor-belt, good-school-to-good-retirement-home, status-seeking consumerism would be a kind of spiritual death.” In the book, you write: “As a young person, she’d made a vow to live within the pulse of life and to avoid the death-in-life that the poets all said was worse than death itself.” Is spiritual death inevitable? Do you feel that you’ve managed to evade it?

It’s definitely not inevitable! I try my best to stay alive.

Do you have any new insights or perspectives on the book now that you’ve had some emotional distance from it, or based on how it has been received?

I’m shocked that no one has mentioned the part about the aliens.

It makes me laugh whenever I read an interview with you and you’re asked what’s next, and you say “nothing,” or “I'm going to finish watching this movie,” whereas most people would take this opportunity for self-promotion. This is very cool and punk of you and ironically, very on-brand! That said, what’s next for you?

I’m a slow writer! And I’m bad at pitching myself, so that’s an awful combination for answering this question. I feel like this last book closed something for me, which feels freeing, on one hand, but also feels like starting from scratch again, which is daunting. A few years ago, I was at an empty golf course with some friends and we were saying it was like being at Storm King [Art Center] but with no art. One of my friends was like, “Thank god we don’t have to deal with other people’s creative problems!” My brain is like that golf course right now. It’s half “thank god, let’s not even play golf,” and half “why aren’t there any creative problems here?” It’s always strange to be in between things. Believe me, if I had a movie coming out, I’d let you know!

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Halle Butler is the author of the novels Banal Nightmare (2024), Jillian (2015), and The New Me (2019). She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.