You might recognize Olivia Gatwood from her slam poetry days, where her performances—touching on topics like girlhood, intimacy, and sexual violence—blended raw emotionality with vivid, tactile description. In her debut novel, Whoever You Are, Honey (Dial Press, 2024), through care and grace, she takes on an unlikely friendship with the spectre of tech at the center.
Whoever You Are, Honey follows Mitty, a young woman living in a Santa Cruz beach home, as she slowly befriends her new neighbor, Lena, the girlfriend of tech mogul Sebastian. As Mitty and Lena grow closer, the two bond over their shared frustrations, having both felt powerless in their own lives prior to meeting each other. Yet, as the novel progresses, both Mitty and Lena begin to suspect that Lena may not even be human—that, instead, she was constructed as a sentient, artificially intelligent model by Sebastian. Though the concept of artificial intelligence may no longer feel novel in 2024, Gatwood has nonetheless managed to craft a tender, affecting story that deftly explores age-old themes of why women feel the need to sacrifice their autonomy for those around them and the personhood they end up losing as a result.
Gatwood got her start in poetry with the 2016 chapbook New American Best Friend and her 2019 poetry collection Life of the Party. Her poetry consistently blends stark feminist statements with effervescent, sensorial language that dances with a charged rhythm, creating an effect that’s at once dreamlike yet grounded, mesmerizing yet forceful. During the past five years, she has co-hosted the podcast Say More with fellow slam-poet-turned-novelist Melissa Lozada-Oliva, a collaboration that continues to this day.
I was thrilled to speak with Gatwood over the phone, where we discussed topics like Santa Cruz, technology’s relationship to gender, and why she dislikes the presence of smartphones in fiction.
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The Rumpus: This novel has been in the works for quite some time, and I know it’s faced a couple of pushbacks prior to publication. Besides the transition from poetry to writing a novel, what led to this book requiring such an extended period of focus?
Olivia Gatwood: You know, I think that writing a novel is already so much work, and there’s really no way to predict how long it’s going to take you. A big thing that maybe people forget is that you change as a person [while writing a novel]: you get smarter, you become a better writer, you’re exposed to more. Things happen in your life—world-shifting events, both personal and otherwise—that can alter the course of your story. I experienced a lot of personal change in that time.
I also think that I got to know my characters differently. Whoever You Are, Honey started out as a concept, not so much as a full-fledged story. I knew I wanted to write about AI. I knew I wanted to write about women’s experiences with AI. I knew I wanted to write a fembot story that embodied more of a feminine perspective, but I didn’t yet really know who those characters were. As I got to know the characters, what started out as a story that was more focused on genre and more plot-heavy turned into more of a character study. I had to check that at times. I had to check how much I was empathizing with my characters and how that was sacrificing my ability to execute certain storylines. I had to do a lot of working out the kinks. A story doesn’t make sense until it does, and there are a lot of moving pieces. When you change one thing, it’s sort of like a game of Jenga—you pull out one block, and the whole thing falls. There were whole different characters in the first draft that no longer exist because they stopped contributing to what I was trying to say.
And then, also, the whole world around AI changed. When I came up with this idea, I felt a little like a conspiracy theorist. I felt like, “This is obviously fictional.” As time passed, it became less and less that way, and what I was navigating was no longer a world of “What if?” It was reality. I think it became a more philosophical book. I think it became a more existential book. It became a more internal book. That was the journey I was on.
Rumpus: Santa Cruz has such a vivid, evocative place in the novel. I felt like I could feel that coastal humidity in some of the scenes. I know you chose to set this novel in Santa Cruz due to its role in the tech sphere, but when you were coming up with the idea, what role did Santa Cruz play? Did you want to set the story in Santa Cruz first and then build the tech world around it? Or did you come up with the tech sphere and decide that Santa Cruz was the obvious place to set it?
Gatwood: Santa Cruz came first. Santa Cruz is what sparked the idea. Santa Cruz was one remaining factor that just never changed—it’s such a Santa Cruz story. The idea came to me because of my time living in Santa Cruz. My mom is from Santa Cruz [and] grew up there, so I grew up hearing her stories about Santa Cruz. I’ve always felt a really keen awareness of how Santa Cruz is this sleepy, quiet beachside town that has also been the site of so much historical change. You know, when we think about the political activism that has happened in Santa Cruz—the faculty at UCSC, Angela Davis—Santa Cruz is this really, really notable location, even though it’s also simultaneously this small, quiet, used-to-be-working-class town.
What I also found in stories that my mother told me, and things that I saw for myself, is that Santa Cruz is kind of always at odds with itself. Because it’s such a site for change, the old is always fighting the new. When my mom was growing up, what that looked like was farmers and people who lived in Santa Cruz fighting the influx of academics that were bringing a new kind of wealth into the town. I talk about this in the book: that resulted in various kinds of violence. Around that time—this was in the seventies—there were also a lot of active serial killers in Santa Cruz. The serial killers were kind of capitalizing on a culture. There was a lot of hitchhiking, it was kind of the hippie era. There was a lot going on at that time, and a lot of it was the old fighting the new. And then, when I lived there, it was the same exact thing: people who lived in Santa Cruz resenting and protesting the influx of tech people who had moved from San Francisco. It was just interesting to see that same pattern repeated in a totally different era. I really liked that tension. I’ve always liked that tension.
I think Santa Cruz is a really, really special place. It’s so ripe for story—there’s so many stories that happened in Santa Cruz. Even with cornerstones of the outdoors world, so much of it started in Santa Cruz: the wetsuit was invented by Jack O’Neill, who was a Santa Cruz local. So many of these crucial parts of how we experience the outdoors began in Northern California. I really love Santa Cruz’s relationship to the natural world. I like its relationship to the social world. Tech very much feels in conversation with both of those things when we consider tech’s relationship to environmentalism. Santa Cruz was always an inarguable part of this story. I don’t really think it could take place anywhere else.
Rumpus: In regard to the tech aspect, both Mitty and Lena seem to live almost analog lives that are sort of unstuck in time. Mitty has this house filled with old decor and memorabilia, and Lena, despite the AI question, seems more at home reading or listening to records than she does, say, watching TV or interacting with computers. Why did you choose to give these characters such odd lives despite their presence adjacent to the tech bubble?
Gatwood: There’s a couple reasons. The first is that I wanted Mitty and Lena’s environments to represent both sides of the spectrum. Lena lives in—whether she interacts with it or not—this hyper-modern environment obsessed with efficiency, minimalism, and obedience. There’s a lot of technology in her home. Mitty is on the other side of the spectrum, which is this staunch loyalty to nostalgia and the past. The thing they share, unexpectedly, is that both of them live in this nowhere space. Lena, despite living in this modern home, doesn’t interact a ton with technology, and Mitty also doesn’t. What that gives them is an immediate thing to connect over—these two women from seemingly opposite ends of the world find home in one another. That’s the crux of the story.
On a craft level, on a storytelling level, I really, really hate the presence of technology in stories. I write about technology in part because I don’t love it, and I want to process that. I want to process how it changes my human experience. In the format of a novel, the thing that phones or the internet do is remove so much tension from a story. Emma Cline talked once in an interview about how there are no questions if you have a phone. A character can never get lost because they would have GPS. A character can never wonder why they haven’t heard from someone, because they could just reach out to that person. A character never doesn’t know anything.
So much of the mystery of our lives is removed because of tech. That brings us comfort in a day-to-day life. That can be very convenient. I tried having a flip phone, and I got rid of it because I didn’t feel safe not knowing where I was. I like the safety of knowing I can call an Uber. I like knowing that I can look something up when I need to. But what that immediacy also does is remove tension, and novels thrive off of tension, novels thrive off of mystery. I don’t want my characters to be able text one another whenever they want to hear from each other, I want them to run into each other. That’s a far more interesting way for two people to interact.
Rumpus: This novel is written in a very close third-person perspective that focuses on both Mitty and Lena’s inner lives. We’ve seen plenty of movies that struggle to convey a plausible degree of interiority to the concept of sentient AI just through dialogue alone. What was your process like for writing Lena in such a way that gave her a sense of perspective, but was still able to convey the ambiguity of her origin story?
Gatwood: I loved writing Lena so much. Her sections actually didn’t come until much later. She used to not have much of a perspective in the book. Once that plotline arrived, it just made the book so much more dynamic. It was just fun to experiment with how to give a person whose humanity is ambiguous an interiority. The way I did that, first and foremost, was to have her actually question her own humanity. She’s not hiding anything from the reader, she’s being open with the reader—she, too, is confused about who she is, what she is, and where she comes from. I played with her perspective as, let’s say, “She’s an AI. She knows that, we don’t know that.” That began to feel like there were walls up between her and the reader. What I liked more was her sharing this perspective, her sharing this confusion. I came to realize that so much of what makes a human a human is memory, having a past, having a context for your life. Having lessons that you’ve learned over time, people who you no longer speak to, but who played an influential role in your life. An AI doesn’t have any of that. An AI comes to exist.
I wanted to play with that idea, a woman who begins to feel as though she was born yesterday, who struggles to have access to her past and her memories, and how that is the first point of reference. She has to say, “Maybe I’m not real, maybe I’m not a human being.” With Mitty, these two characters are always existing both alongside one another and in contradiction to one another. Mitty’s past is this thing she’s trying to forget, this thing she wants to get away from. Mitty, in many ways, wishes that she didn’t have a past—she resents her humanity. Writing Lena was a matter of allowing a character to be really, really confused, and leaning into the writing of confusion. I think confusion is actually a really great place to write interiority because there are so many questions. You’re entertaining so many hypotheses, there are endless things to write. I actually wish I’d written more of Lena. I feel like I didn’t spend enough time with her, but I loved writing her character.
Rumpus: Speaking of that contrast, Mitty and Lena bond over their shared sense of lacking an identity—or living for other people—throughout this novel. That fascinated me because your work in poetry has such a strong sense of personal conviction. Why did you choose to pivot to this theme when writing your first novel?
Gatwood: It’s a part of me that I don’t think I ever really showed in my poetry, to be honest. I never quite felt I showed my real confusion, a feeling of being lost. I remember I was doing a poetry show, and a girl said to me, “You must have such good comebacks every time a man catcalls you.” And I thought, “What? No, I don’t have any comebacks.” I don’t say anything at all. I just keep walking. I would never yell at someone, I’d be too scared. It was just interesting to realize that this girl’s perception of me was this really upstanding, sure-of-herself woman with so much conviction. I often don’t feel that way. I often feel very confused. I often feel really insecure. I’ve dealt with so much shame, like all of us have.
A novel is a really fun place to write about those themes because you have a lot of time, and you’re getting to write about a different character other than yourself. That distance can make processing it a little easier. Mitty just came to me very clearly, and she’s very different from me. There are times when I actually feel a lot more like Lena than I do like Mitty. I wanted to write about a woman who was dealing with shame in a way that felt really familiar, whose complicated feelings around gender—and other women—were potentially problematic, potentially unlikable things that I, too, have dealt with. Getting to play with them in the body of another person gave me a certain creative freedom that I don’t think I always had in more autobiographical writing.
Rumpus: So much of fiction that has dealt with this idea of the fembot tends to place the bulk of its social critique on living in a patriarchal society and the ills that produces. That spirit is very much present in this novel, too, but the focus has shifted toward the ethical dilemmas that are lurking in the tech sphere. Why was that shift important to you?
Gatwood: I think they go hand-in-hand. I really want to bridge those two ideas with this story. There are so many ways that tech can be unethical: it can put human beings out of their jobs, there’s a lot of weird privacy stuff, there are invasive privacy laws. I think that those same ethics, or lack of ethics, are at play when we think about tech’s relationship to gender. This obsession with perfection, obedience, and efficiency really affects the way that we perceive women. It affects women in a really obvious way with things like Facetune [a photo editing app]. When we think of how the internet has become a place where people’s beauty is highly, highly edited, and we can’t tell, it creates a beauty standard that is not only unreachable but is actually not real in the tangible world, which creates a constant—and impossible to resolve—cycle of self-hatred.
When we think of at-home assistants like Siri or Alexa, these are all voices of women. That’s not a coincidence. We are most comfortable receiving help and assistance from women. We’re most comfortable when we think of women as our caretakers. The voices of women are immediately familiar to us as people who can answer questions, who can do our chores, who can do our caretaking, who can do all the things we don’t want to do. Tech perpetuates ideas we’ve already had about women, but it just blows them out of proportion to kind of impossible degrees. I wanted to write about that impact. I think that we’ve already seen the impact that, specifically, AI’s presence in social media has had on beauty and the body, but I think it touches every element of our identities.
I hope that people read this novel and have callbacks to non-explicitly tech or sci-fi related material because, again, this is a human story. Feeling like your boyfriend has constructed your identity is a feeling that predates technology. Feeling like you’re in a relationship where you have no autonomy, where all your actions are being monitored, that is something that is pre-technology. Of course, technology makes these things even stronger, because technology is, in many ways, all-powerful, but these are things that have existed long before, right? Women have been controlled and constructed long before AI existed.
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Author photograph courtesy of Olivia Gatwood
