Olivia Cheng Hk

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Rashawn Devegowda

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:08:29 PM8/3/24

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In 2016, I had just finished grad school and was living in a studio in the West Village that was 200 square feet. Teeny, tiny. Not even big enough for a full bed. I had a daybed that had a trundle bed underneath it. My sibling was in college and was coming from New York to do a six-month internship. And they had student housing arranged. But when they got there, there was mold in the unit, and they were breaking out in hives, and they said they had to come and stay with me. There was nowhere else for them to go! So they stayed with me, and slept on my trundle bed for six months, and we were stepping all over each other. It was a nightmare. Very difficult and very fun at times.

A few years ago, like 2019, I was thinking about how that time was so much fun. That was my favorite part of living as a student in Manhattan. And I wanted to write about it. And I thought I could either write a really caustic 98-page novella about that specific incident or I could do something bigger with it and see what it would be like to have those feelings of being trapped with someone in close quarters over a longer period of time, fitting in the bigger themes of ennui and the Internet and problems with work and your family. That was the original seed of the idea.

There is so much sisterly affection and resentment in this story. Early in the book, I began to sympathize more with Poppy than Jules, who is the narrator. How did you think about this shift as you were writing and was this always the intention from the conception of the story?

I definitely wanted it to feel like the Internet. I had wanted to do a book a while back that was just transcribing things I did on the Internet, like a huge unwieldy 1000-page book, of what I was texting and looking at and posting. But through a novel, I could balance those interests with enough real-world stuff.

Wow, that ending. Without spoiling anything, did you always see this as the ending for the novel or were there different drafts? And do you think the ending acts as some type of redemption for Jules?

Olivia Cheng is an MFA student in prose at Michigan. Her fiction can be found in The Threepenny Review, The Boston Review, and The Georgia Review. Her other work has appeared in Electric Literature and Witness. She is currently working on a novel about mediocrity and belonging. She is @northamricnscum on Twitter and Instagram, and her website is oliviachengtofu.com.