HTML Giant has been conducting a week-long interview with Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan (one of the books featured in Roxane Gay’s piece this week). Today, Stein answered questions about the novel’s jokes, and her experience writing poetry.
“She’s making jokes in her head to cover up how bad it feels to be treated like her problems don’t really matter, when to her they feel as significant as a brain tumor. Throughout the book, Esther jokes about her desire to become disabled…some people have read this as insanely self-absorbed, but for a depressed person: there’s no outward expression of how bad it feels inside.”
