Is anybody safe from the pen of Lexi Freiman?
She skewers cancel culture and identity politics and got advice from cancelled comedian Louis CK when writing her latest novel. Is it any wonder local publishers found her too hot to handle?
A satire about a cancelled writer trying to kill her ego at a meditation cult on a Greek island might not sound like your summer beach read, but Australian author Lexi Freiman’s contrarian voice has coincided with a cultural turning point – and there’s no question she’s having a moment in the sun.
Freiman’s second novel, The Book of Ayn, follows protagonist Anna, who is also an author and one whose debut novel (a satire of the American opioid epidemic set in Appalachia) gets her cancelled by the New York literary set.
“I was just trying to bring a little slapstick to the ongoing national tragedy,” the character laments after being labelled a narcissist by The New York Times and thrown out of social and professional circles. In the depths of an identity crisis Anna stumbles upon an Ayn Rand-themed tour of Manhattan, and is fascinated by Rand’s self-first objectivist philosophy.
The character moves to Los Angeles, where she becomes consumed by her new housemate’s perverse habit of leaving a lone turd in the toilet for her to see every morning. An exchange between Anna and a friend:
“I think he might be borderline.”
“Oh the whole culture is borderline.”
“I thought the culture was narcissistic?”
“No, that was the Boomers …”
And so it goes, nailing some of the touchstones and sacred cows of Anglosphere culture.
It’s not a stretch to wonder if Freiman’s lampooning of therapy, and her scatological humour, stems from her upbringing in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, where she was raised by a Hungarian-born psychotherapist mother and gastroenterologist father. “I got a lot of free therapy and got very comfortable talking about shit,“ she says, with characteristic dry humour.
Freiman went to an elite private girls’ school in Sydney, but her debut novel, Inappropriation, also set in an exclusive Australian girls’ school, suggests she saw herself as more of an outsider. “At primary school I felt bullied by the popular girls, so in high school I acted out,” she says over coffee on Surry Hills’ Crown Street.
She has a slight, colourful presence, and her bright and chatty mien sits in contrast to the subdued inner-city cafe surroundings.
She confesses that her attention-seeking classroom antics – “pranks and stupid shit like building obstacle courses with the chairs” – might have traumatised her teachers and muses that “sometimes my behaviour in class was so weird that it became a type of bullying”.
Acting out in school led to a spell as an actor with Bell Shakespeare. She performed at the Opera House and on regional Australian stages before turning her focus exclusively to writing fiction and scripts for television and film. “I stopped acting in my mid-twenties because I was sick of waiting for other people to decide when I would work,” Freiman says. “But I had always written plays and stories so I continued doing that, just without any acting.”
In 2010 Freiman moved to New York to embark on a Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University. After graduating, she worked as an editor for a small publishing house. If it sounds like a virtuous literary circle, it was. “Some of my friends from Columbia were getting book deals at that time and they were good writers so I found that inspiring and motivating. My experience editing books definitely made me a better writer.”
Inappropriation was published by Allen &Unwin in 2018. While The New York Times’ Book Review celebrated her wit and feel for the Zeitgeist, it also appeared to warn that her satire would be misunderstood by opponents of identity politics – “there’s a difference between laughing with people, and laughing at them,” it stated. The Wall Street Journal called the novel “irreverent” and characterised her comic voice more warmly as “a loving, sisterly type of ridicule”. The Australian described the book as “Mean Girls meets Kathy Acker with a dash of Seinfeld.”
And yet this cursory glance from the mainstream didn’t lead to commercial success. Furthermore, while Inappropriation was shortlisted for the New Australian Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, Freiman’s second book does not as yet have an Australian publisher. The Book Of Ayn is published only in America by Catapult Books.
“People didn’t really want to give [Inappropriation]attention because it was a satire of identity politics,” she says plainly. “In Australia they were afraid to say it was a satire of identity politics, so they just said ‘Oh, it’s about private girls’ schools’ because they were afraid of cancel culture, ironically.“
Anna’s quest for “ego death”, and the realisation that destroying her ego won’t help create great work, was in part inspired by Freiman’s encounter with comedian Louis CK, who was cancelled – his shows dropped by networks and streamers – for sexually inappropriate behaviour.
After writing an essay on CK’s cancellation, and failing to find a publisher, she sent the essay to the comedian. She was surprised when he replied and invited her to discuss it over lunch. “He told me that as painful as it was to have an ego, he wouldn’t give it up, because it’s part of what you need as an artist to make great work.” She describes CK as “respectful, somewhat guarded, and gracious in conversation”.
In The Book of Ayn, Freiman’s protagonist Anna comes to the same conclusion and, for better or worse, doubles down on her own story. Anna, too, sees her cancellation as an opportunity for “ego death”. She opposes and then flirts with the status quo, and tries to vindicate her views amid the snap moral judgments of the cultural aristocracy, ANTIFA anarchists and the dominant, if superficial, influencer culture. Anna gets kicked out of a film premiere after she offends the cast of an LGBTQI reboot of Seinfeld, and ends up grappling with her ego in a meditation cult on the island of Lesbos. Trying to get to the bottom of her rebellious nature in Greece, she is finally marooned in a yurt, sickened by the smell of her own farts.
“There’s a lot of self-loathing going on. Has she killed her ego enough to hate her own farts?” Freiman laughs. “Narcissists enjoy the smell of their own farts … She’s trying to convince herself that she isn’t a narcissist.”
The Book Of Ayn has drawn positive reviews and plenty of buzz for Freiman. Comedy giant Jim Carrey and Pulitzer Prize winning author Joshua Cohen praised her, with Cohen calling her “the funniest writer of a generation that has forgotten to laugh”. The New York Times wrote a broadly positive if mildly confusing summation of The Book of Ayn, which it described as “a gamy picaresque for the age of the Notes-app apology.” In reader reviews online, some celebrated the novel’s timing, sense of humour and unusual female anti-hero, while others lost the narrative thread during the final third amid the heroine’s neurotic introspection.
A few weeks ago Freiman appeared on The Daily Show, the popular US late-night talk show and satirical news program. Host Jordan Klepper gushed the book was “funny and searing”. Freiman, after riffing on Ayn Rand’s late-life polyamory, which proved destructive, told Klepper that “What being cancelled affords you the opportunity to do is kill your ego, and not give a shit anymore about what people think.”
Freiman attributes her success this time around to shifting social politics. “I don’t feel like I played a game,” she says. “I just have one publisher who was really interested, and didn’t shy away from what the book was. They called it what it was. I think the culture has shifted from 2018, in the middle of Trump’s presidency, where people were much more sensitive around these issues and afraid to touch them.”
Freiman’s books aren’t genre novels, more heretical think-pieces woven into a broader narrative. “Well, I’m not writing nonfiction, so it’s not about having a worldview that is clearly defined,” she explains. “It’s a series of propositions about the established consensus of what the world is.”
One thing is for certain: the response to The Book of Ayn positions Freiman as a social satirist, a comic intellectual, and a breath of fresh air in what has been a stifling cultural climate.
Her most recent work, writing for television and film, brought her back to Australia, where she wrote an episode of the television series Strife, an eight-part comedy series inspired by Mia Freedman’s book Work Strife Balance. Freiman’s contribution is a memorable episode in the series, especially the scene in which intergenerational feminists clash on a televised panel, evoking Mia Freedman’s fraught encounter with Germaine Greer on Q&A.
“It was a great experience to write Australian characters and jokes again,” she says. “I’d missed some of our funny expressions.”
These days Freiman rarely stays in one place. Her peripatetic lifestyle has led her most recently to Budapest, where she is working on her third novel. “I went on a date with a Hungarian man, who tried to break my ego,” she says. “I enjoyed it until I didn’t. It was interesting to experience the Hungarian version of self-righteousness. I’m working on a new novel set in Europe and Australia. It’s got a bit of a climate change theme but it’s still (hopefully) funny. I’m doing more TV writing, too.”
After years of not quite fitting in and questioning everything, it seems Freiman has found her rhythm, and it’s a bright, staccato beat with boundless energy. “I like the balance of doing writers’ rooms with writing novels,” she says. “I can save my most diabolical ideas for the books. And in writers’ rooms I don’t have to make my own lunch.”
Lexi Freiman appears at Brisbane Writers Festival on June 2. The Book Of Ayn is out now, published by Catapult Books
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