Sophie Madeline Dess is a writer and critic based in New York whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Drift, and more. She teaches at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. What You Make of Me, her debut novel, is a haunting exploration of sibling devotion, artistic ambition, and the cost of success. As painter Ava prepares for her first solo show, she reflects on her tangled relationship with her brother, Demetri—a bond forged in loss but frayed by betrayal and regret as his life nears its end.
Sophie and I talked on the phone about the ways we treat books as personal artifacts, the difficulty of summarizing one’s own work, and how art, history, and beauty shape her creative vision.
Debutiful: I tend to keep every galley sent to me. I can’t bear to recycle them and still don’t know the rules of loaning them to people. So, I am a book hoarder. Are you also a book hoarder?
Dess: I’m a massive book hoarder. I also let people borrow books, and I know I will not get them back. While I love to hoard, I also love to give away. I feel like if I ever lose books, it’s because they’re in the hands of the people I love. Which is the only right way to lose a book if you give someone you love. Otherwise, losing a book is just tragic. I’ve done that before. I’ve left a book on a plane and it was a crazy marked up copy of As I Lay Dying, I was like, oh my god!
Debutiful: I don’t seek treating my books poorly, but for the most part, I don’t treat my books as like holy things that can’t be destroyed. I put coffee mugs on my books without coasters, and I dog ear my placement still.
Dess: I people get people actually maybe you might chafe against this, too. But if people see me writing in my books with pen, they’re like, what are you doing? I have every single book ion my collection has notations in it, marginal notes in pen.
Debutiful: Exactly. It’s your book or whoever you let borrow your book. But yeah, I agree with you. I think books can be whatever you want them to be. You can throw them against the wall, accidentally spill coffee grounds, whatever you want.
Dess: Sweat onto them. I read on the StairMaster often and at the university gym, and I get sweat all over them. I get sweat all over my students’ papers. It’s spread all over everything. But who cares as long as you’re reading the book.
Debutiful: Exactly. I think part of my hoarding is like the art of it. My bookshelves are messy. I just throw things up there. To me, a hoarder’s bookshelf or a perfectly manicured one is art to me. It blocks a wall from being just a white wall.
Dess: It’s the easiest and most natural form of interior decoration that a reader has.
Debutiful: Your book has a place somewhere on my messy bookshelf, and I always like to know how writers introduce their books to friends or family or colleagues. What’s the quickest pitch?
Dess: Well, first of all, I try never to talk about it. I’ve been criticized for this endlessly by friends and family, but I’m not a good salesperson. I think if someone asks, what’s it about? I’m usually, thankfully, standing next to somebody else who will answer the question. If I have to say if I have to say something, I usually say it’s about a painter and her relationship with her brother. That’s mostly what I say. That’s how I pitch it. And then other people come in and fill in the gaps.
Debutiful: I’m notoriously bad at pitching books that I cover. It’s a love of, oh, it’s cool. There’s good vibes. Beautiful writing. I can’t remember what it’s about, but it made me feel good.
Debutiful: Do you feel like you’re bad at pitching? Do you feel you’re bad at pitching because you just view your book as art and not necesarrily a commodity?
Dess: I think that’s probably the first reason why I’m bad at pitching. And then the second reason is because in many ways, that book feels like it has nothing to do with me. A part of me is like, oh, I don’t want to talk about it.
It’s this really strange aversion that I’ve always had to my own writing, where it makes me want to throw up. I’m not exaggerating. It’s one of the first things I wrote about writing when I was maybe like 19. I asked why does every single thing I write make me want to vomit when I think about it and when I think about other people reading it.
Debutiful: Why write then? What makes you want to write things if you were going to vomit when you think about it?
Dess: I don’t know. It’s definitely a compulsion that I’ve always had. Not to be romantic about it, but I there’s not a day since I was a child, since the moment I could write, that I wasn’t writing. My family can attest to this; my grandfather, in particular, and my books are dedicated to him. Back then it wasn’t even fiction. It was just, I don’t know, thoughts about the day or something, just trying to make sure that reality wasn’t slipping and that I was collecting things about daily experience to try to make life real. Otherwise it wasn’t real. I think that’s where the compulsion initially came from; there would have been no reality if I hadn’t written something down.
Debutiful: When did you start taking art slash literature seriously, or do you take it seriously at all?
Dess: I take it extremely seriously. I think that you have to find the cosmic joke in everything in life, in the universe. There are some things that you take seriously even with the cosmic joke behind them. And that’s certainly art, writing, and music for me.
I was just telling my friend who interviewed me for BOMB that I’ve never taken an art history class. I have no formal art training whatsoever. So the thoughts in my novel, for example, that have to do with art come from a place of naivety and genuine curiosity. And I don’t know somewhere deep inside my character. But they’re not learned. They’re not learned questions. They come from somewhere else, but I don’t know where that place is. I don’t really want to know because otherwise I’d get bored.
Debutiful: My entire quote unquote career, I’ve never taken a creative writing class. I don’t have an MFA. I’m not a writer. I just find this art fascinating. And I’m very unlearned.
Dess: Do you feel like you’re very unique in that way?
Debutiful: When I started writing about books – I had spent years writing about television and music, but I didn’t know that writers interview writers for places like BOMB, for Electric Literature, for wherever. I’m just like a guy who faked my way into this world.
Dess: But we’re all faking our way into the world.
Debutiful: I’d like to think so. It eases my anxity knowing we’re all faking it. And with your no backgrund in art theory, what fascinates you about it? You said it was your entire life, but what about putting yourself so deeply into art, writing, and music makes you tick?
Dess: I think the main thing is that I’m obsessed with history and I’m obsessed with the long story of things. Art is always just ineluctably tied with history, with historical events, with the ways in which people were seeing things. Throughout history, its relationship to war, art’s relationship to warfare, art’s relationship to the economy, art’s relationship to religion, and to the conception of freedom that we’ve had throughout time is what fascinates me.
Then the second part of that is I’m obsessed with beauty. By beauty I mean anything from Michelangelo’s David to Wangechi Mutu. I like to be silent in front of something amazing.
Debutiful: This is a very broad question, but how does art inspire you? Literature, visual art, whatever. How do you how do you see something or hear something use it?
Dess: I could spend a thousand years answering, and yet at the same time, I don’t know how to begin. With visual art, it’s art that kind of confuses me and makes me realize I don’t know where I am. It’s art that where I lose myself. I have no idea. I have no thoughts. I can’t analyze it. It’s hard even to think about and I can’t stay away from it. There’s that addictive property to it and I can’t get at what it is. I love that feeling with looking at art.
In writing, this is such a cliche answer, but it’s when words are just electric and undeniable on the page. I love when every day sensations are rendered completely new. Or when an author like Barry Hannah writes in this realm of just total extremity, where the content he writes belongs in an extremity. Like suddenly maybe three people will die in a two-page story, and the language itself is extreme. It’s just fast, it’s pressurized, and has an undeniable rhythm and sonic percussive quality to it. That’s what I love.
At the same time, I’m love Proust, and I love indulgent, serpentine sentences. I love Henry James, who kind of does something similar. All of that inspires me. Anything that makes me feel something new, anything that adds another synapse in the brain.