In Audition, the fourth novel by Pip Adam, three giants find themselves in a spaceship, headed to a mysterious location. They’ve been growing steadily, and are now so large that they barely fit in the ship, but their memories of what happened before they went to space are fuzzy. They can’t remember their families—only a strange place called “the classroom”—and share stories with each other that sound suspiciously like episodes from popular romantic comedy films. As the giants make their way further into space, Adam skips back and forth between a past in which some of the characters were in prison and the present where the restrictive systems that dictated their time on Earth are ever more distant.

Adam’s novels are hard to summarize but electrifying to read: fusing speculative elements and social commentary, they rely less on plot than on structural experiments. “I’m constantly trying to break my writing,” she told me during our Zoom conversation. “I’m trying to find ways to approach it as if I know nothing. That’s the great thing about writing: the problems that solve the last novel will not help this novel in the slightest.”

Though Adam is not well-known in America, her work has been widely praised and has won awards in her native New Zealand. Audition is her second book to be published in America, after The New Animals (Dorothy, 2023). Her writing is deeply engaged with social issues arising in her home country, and those issues—mass incarceration and transphobia in Audition, and the climate crisis in The New Animals—are just as urgent for American readers.

Though her work is experimental, Adam also reminds me that her books are deeply emotional. “I know this word isn’t popular,” she says, “but I feel [the books] are quite sentimental. They’re really interested in emotion and in loss. What I really appreciate about people is that they will say, I’ve never been in prison, but they’re able to extend themselves emotionally to meet that work. I just feel so incredibly grateful.”

Adam and I discussed fusing speculative fiction with realism, writing about prison, romantic comedies, and more.

Morgan Leigh Davies: You use speculative elements in all of your novels. What do you think that gives you as a storyteller?

Pip Adam: When I first started writing, I worshiped reality, but I quickly realized the way I write realism is not realism. People really pushed against it. People said no one had any feelings. I suddenly realized that what I was writing wasn’t realism and I started to push it further to see what it could do.

MLD: You’re writing about prison in the broad sense, but you also have a section that is set in a prison. It does feel very realistic. There are parts of this book that feel grounded in reality, while you’re also doing these bigger allegorical things.

PA: There’s a New Zealand writer named Carl Shuker who wrote a book called Anti Lebanon, which is about Beirut and Lebanon, and there are vampires in it. There’s this great thing where the horror of the vampire somehow magnifies the horror of the war. At the same time, the horror of the war amplifies the horror of the vampire. I was thinking a little bit about that book. I have written about prison before and it’s very hard not to fetishize it. It’s very hard not to do a white savior thing, you know, Oh, isn’t this terrible? I wanted to honor the experience of living in a prison and to talk about some things that are happening in this reality. I feel the two things together did something odd to each other.

This might not be true to the reading experience, but I really feel like, because of the oddness of the spacecraft and all that speculative stuff, the prison seems odd. All of a sudden, we’re questioning prisons. That’s what I always try to do with my writing. I want us to question the places I see injustice. We’ve got this idea of bigger and bigger prisons at the moment, harder and harder sentences, targeting minority groups. We’ve got a problem with unhoused people in New Zealand, and the idea is just to put more of them in prison. We get to the stage where it’s the normal rhetoric that we hear every day. But by putting speculative fiction next to it, the prison is odd as well.

MLD: Were there any specific ways that you wrote to make it feel a little bit alienating, on the level of language?

PA: That is the sort of stuff I was talking about when I was trying to write realism. I think because of the way my brain works, I have quite a flat emotional response to a lot of things. I have this desire to present things without an authorial agenda, which is impossible. But I have this idea that there’s a way of getting to it if the language can be plain enough and devoid of emotion. It’s about trying to get away from the stories we tell about prison. There’s a big thing [in New Zealand] at the moment where people who have formerly lived in prison, [are almost treated] like saints. We start bad, we go to prison, we come out and we’re amazing. Anytime I write about a real thing, I’m fighting against hundreds of years of stories about what crime is, what punishment is, what prison is. So I think that’s why I chose a more documentary style.

MLD: Reading your book, I was thinking about the narrative expectations we have about what a book should be. This is also connected to these bigger societal questions. You wrote a book that is challenging status quo ideas by challenging the form of the novel.

PA: The novel is my favorite form because I feel like it’s one of those machines that has to reinvent itself every time. It’s in the name, it’s called the “novel.” I just feel like it’s such a beautiful form to be working in. There is something beautiful about the book-length piece of fiction, because it’s constantly stretching and changing its shape to make what you want to say work.

I never want anyone to forget that they’re reading a book. I’m very into the materiality of the book and the reflection that happens when a sentence doesn’t quite work or sound right, or there’s confusion. My favorite kind of book is where I’m in the middle and I’m kind of digging myself out to try and work out what’s going on. That’s what interests me. I’m extremely lucky because there’s not a lot of expectation around my novels. People aren’t waiting for my next novel here. I very much wrote Audition not thinking it would be published, and every time I came to a decision where I found myself with a comfortable route, I’d take the uncomfortable route. I tried to go the other way, and just constantly keep myself uncomfortable in the narrative.

I’m always pushing: how far can we take this? Yet it’s still a novel and it’s still narrative? How far can we take this and it’s still plot? Oh, I sound like an edgelord.

MLD: But I could also really understand the characters in this book. Alba in particular felt so legible to me. If you are willing to commit to the book, then you do get that reward, even though the book is structured in an unusual way.

PA: I’m here with my friend Laurence Fearnley, who’s an incredible novelist, and we were just talking last night about emotion, what you leave on the page and what you give to a book. So much of the book is me working out what I do when I’ve done something wrong. What do I do when I’ve hurt someone. I have times where I just think, Why? Why and how do I make amends? I need to come to a space where this may never be right. That is kind of the quicksand that I like playing in.

MLD: In terms of structure, I wanted to go back to the first section of the novel and ask about how you use romantic comedies. The characters are trapped in this spaceship, and they’re telling each other stories that readers will probably recognize as being from nineties rom-coms, which you list at the back of the book. That struck me as the perfect form of a constructed narrative that has nothing to do with reality, but that we are inundated with all the time. Why did you choose those and use them the way you did in the novel?

PA: So full disclosure, the structure of Audition is actually a romantic comedy. I’ve got a meet-cute in there, I’ve got a problem in there…I got to the stage where it was hilarious that [the novel] had no form, but you’ve got to come part way to the reader.

I really like romantic comedies, but I find them extremely dark as well. If you think about While You Were Sleeping, it’s about a woman that makes up this idea while a guy’s in a coma. Pretty Woman especially—I watched that probably eight or nine times, for people my age it was probably the first sex worker you saw in your life apart from on Charlie’s Angels.

I was also thinking about what the religious texts of our time are. What are the texts of our time that we all know the way that maybe in the 1920s everyone knew the Bible, and it is romantic comedies. I went in thinking, Oh yeah, romantic comedies. And I left thinking, holy shit, we have been brainwashed. I’m of the age that I was brought up on Weinstein movies. My sexuality was formed watching movies that were produced by Harvey Weinstein. With these romantic comedies, I’m just like, Wow, some of these messages are not great.

MLD: One of the other things I found so interesting in the first section is the repetitive dialogue. It feels like the prison has been transported into their heads, and like language is being used as this tool of oppression.

PA: This largely comes from my background as well. I left school early. We made a mutual agreement that school was not for me. I felt alienated from language for a long time. I went back to university when I was in my twenties, and I remember one of the most harrowing moments for me was when people were talking about Nietzsche. I was like, I haven’t been reading about this guy. I must have been reading the wrong book, because that’s not how I thought that word was pronounced. I would make mistakes with pronunciation. Language felt like this very exclusionary thing for a long time. Instead of that turning me off language, it interested me.

I started life as a poet. I still write poetry, but it’s not very good. But I’m very interested in sound. I had this job where I was transcribing television interviews. I remember listening to a politician. You’d think, Oh, he said this, and then you’d listen through and that wasn’t what he said at all. He’d made the noise of agreement, but what he’d said was actually innocent. I got really interested in that. I’m also obsessed with small talk. I don’t do it, I’m not very good at it. I love watching other people involved in it. I love these noises that we make. They’re almost like noises that animals make to each other to say, I’m okay, you can trust me. So much of it is on that noise level. The repetitive nature of it is just so that noise becomes unusual again. You know that thing where you repeat the word “cat” over and over again, and then you’re like, What is a cat?

Also, one of the hugest influences on the book is, just as I was finishing it, the book Cultish came out. It breaks down the linguistics of cult language. This book is about the 1% versus the 99%. Why do we, if there are so many of us, keep behaving the way that the powerful want us to behave? Obviously, a lot of us are kept in poverty or imprisoned, but a lot of it is around the stories we get told about ourselves. We had a prime minister here who used to say, Any reasonable person would see… So the minute that you disagree, you’re not a reasonable person anymore. We’ve got a prime minister at the moment who will say things like, What New Zealanders want… You think, Oh, that’s not what I want, I mustn’t be a New Zealander. He says it with repetition, it’s become a bit of a joke here. I got really interested in how we can make the sound of something while actually doing the opposite.

Plus just the musicality. I read everything out loud and sometimes I just do things because they sound nice. One of my other favorite things is the conversations you have as the two of you are going to sleep. What I quite liked about this is that there’s that fine line between the conscious and unconscious where some conversations can be really interesting. As these giants are kind of dying, I loved the idea that where they would return to was trying to make some kind of music between the conversations. That was just the romantic in me.

MLD: We haven’t really talked about the fact that they are giants. In all of your books that I’ve read, something radical happens to the body as a reaction to a traumatic event. I’m curious about why writing about the body in these unusual ways appeals to you.

PA: I have a really problematic relationship with my body. I have a lot of trouble working out where it ends. I bump into things a lot. I really don’t understand where it is in space and time. I have a lot of trouble shopping for clothes because I don’t understand what size I am. I have a lot of trouble with my body and knowing what to do with it. It just feels like this vessel. I would be very happy if I could be a brain in a bottle.

It’s not like I feel my body any less. I feel every problematic inch of it. I’m obsessed because of all the thinking I need to do about where I’m going to place my body. I feel like the human experience sits in the body rather than the mind, especially this idea of being bigger. I think that there is a real idea about how much space we’re allowed to take up.

What I’m always trying to do in a book is work out things that confuse me. Why do those people have power, why do those people have no money, these sorts of things. Writing the weird monstrous body is realism to me. It just maps the way that I feel. It feels very natural that in moments of crisis or moments of trauma, maybe the body would rebel, the body would do something weird. And bodies are also these places of immense pleasure. They’re this really strange vehicle that we move around in.

MLD: So much of the book, as we’ve been saying, is about breaking down these narratives of oppression, and then you put us into this utopian world at the end. How do you like writing against so much of what we expect of in terms of conflicts and narrative with that utopian space?

PA: Neal Stevenson was here for an event, and he talked about how dystopia is really easy to write because you just take everything away. You just go, Right, those buildings are gone, the water coming out of the tap’s gone. Whereas utopia, you have to create. I must admit, the thing that really appealed to me about that was the clunkiness of it. It’s never gonna be right, it’s always gonna feel a bit naff. I was quite excited by that. It was a really hard section to write because I’m a natural pessimist and to try and make something generative and productive and safe and comfortable—it comes back to exactly what you’re saying about those narrative structures. It was extremely hard to write. We suddenly have to imagine comfort and imagine safety and imagine ease and imagine beauty. So much of our lives are not that, which is just really sad.

I’d always thought that writing utopias was a soft thing to do, but in writing it, I realized it’s actually quite an activist thing to do. There’s an amazing book that came out here last year by Olive Nuttall, which is called Kitten. It is just the most amazing book. It has a very utopian view, but it’s a realist novel. I’ve read quite a few younger writers recently, who are reimagining what pleasure is and reimagining what happiness is. I feel quite excited about that. All writers should write what they feel compelled to write, but it does feel like there is a political imperative to address these things in some way.

Writers like Andrea Lawlor, Jordi Rosenberg, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore—these are writers that I read and took massive inspiration from. I love the way that, at the moment, there seems to be this way of holding joy and sorrow at the same time. Not forgetting the sad things, but also making room for joy. It’s an exciting time for books.