Hallie Elizabeth Newton‘s Agnes Lives! is as stylish as it is unsettling, following a young woman over the course of a single day as she searches for someone willing to kill her. Set in a vividly rendered 2014 New York City, the novel blends biting humor with profound despair, using Agnes’s wandering consciousness to examine privilege, performance, mental illness, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. It’s a formally daring debut that refuses easy answers while remaining compulsively readable.
I caught up with Newton to discuss writing a novel from the inside out, how screenwriting shaped her approach to fiction, capturing a specific moment in New York’s cultural history, and why embracing life’s messiness became the book’s guiding principle.
You received your MFA nearly a decade before publishing your debut. Looking back, do you recognize this as the novel you were always working toward, or is it something you couldn’t have written until now?
NYU gave me the freedom to experiment. To every class, I brought different ideas. Short stories, character studies. This novel was born from trying to write a character with several thoughts running at once, as our minds do in real life. For example, we may be driving, humming a top 40 song, recognizing that GPS maps may deteriorate our hippocampus, worrying about our brother, and judging the driver ahead of us based on a bumper sticker. I wanted to see if I could emulate that. The first part of this novel that I wrote was a version of the Barneys shopping chapter. Deciding to write only one-sided dialogue was another challenge I gave myself at graduate school.
You grew up in Mississippi, earned your MFA in New York, and now split your time between the two. Those are places with very different ideas about class, identity, and performance. Do you think moving between those worlds changed the way you wrote Agnes?
AGNES LIVES! is a New York novel. I’m not sure that me moving consciously changed the way I wrote the character or the book. The character Agnes has probably never visited Apalachicola, Florida or Schlitterbahn Waterpark. I love the South, but it wouldn’t have benefitted Agnes if I downloaded those experiences onto her.
Before publishing fiction, you were credited on a screenplay. Did working in film change the way you approached pacing or structure, especially in a novel that’s so propulsive despite spending almost all of its time inside one person’s head?
Oh, yes. Screenplays taught me to write economically. Movies have a time limit and a budget. Books don’t. Books have a sort of free jazz quality about them. Once the story is set and the reader knows the ride, the writer can turn a dinner scene into thirty pages or three sentences. Books can move time.
Even in art films, the shadow of Joseph Campbell looms, asking, “what was the character’s transformation?” This book has a clock (it takes place in 24 hours), and a sort of return home, but the structure is not standard. Agnes says and does things –she “sets up” actions –that do not necessarily have narrative payoff. This seems messy, maybe, but I was trying to mimic real life.
New York has a special way of absorbing everyone’s actions into the fabric of the day with very little positive or negative repercussion. Here, it’s perfectly natural to walk the dog in your underwear, join a protest, shoplift, eat French pastries, pee in an alley, and be invited to a picnic in Central Park. Short of climbing the Empire State Building, no one will stop you from doing exactly what you want. Everyone is too busy! Sometimes the city is great, and sometimes it is incredibly cruel. On the particular day of this book, it’s a gift that Agnes has been trained to seize. She was born in New York. It belongs to her.
My editor was so skillful at reminding me not to doctor the scenes too much. To let them be exactly as Agnes would think or act, just as if this were a real day. I’m very lucky to have this book published. I’m so fortunate that the people surrounding this project didn’t try to shoehorn it into a typical story structure. I’m grateful that my first novel was able to be a culmination of experimentation. The result is that, at its heart, AGNES LIVES! is more realistic than people would like to imagine. In film, stories are tied up with a bow. I think this book shows that life is messy.
Agnes is looking for someone to kill her, but the novel never shows any interest in becoming a traditional thriller. It feels much more invested in asking why someone like Agnes would arrive at this point. At what point did you realize the book wasn’t really about the murder at all?
Thank you for that observation. I never thought the book was going to be a thriller or about the murder. I am really lucky that I didn’t feel the pressure to make this book a page-turning top ten list kind of book. I really was writing it for myself; with very limited expectations it would get published. Is there a difference between feeling possessed and feeling free when someone writes? I don’t know. I did want to show a privileged woman who, as you say, arrived at this point. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.
The novel takes place over a single day, but it somehow captures an entire era of New York, including SoulCycle, Uber, Craigslist, magazine culture, and millennial ambition. Did you always know it had to be set in 2014, or did that become clearer as you started writing?
So much changes in the world, and so fast.
I think I made the date 2014 by the end of my second draft.
Oh look, a slant rhyme.
The book is very funny, but the pain underneath it is real. How did you think about tone while writing Agnes, especially making sure the reader could laugh without the book ever winking at her despair?
I’m so happy you think it is funny. I didn’t try to make a comedy, but I do keep Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For The Next Millenium in mind, especially his chapter on lightness. Lightness is a necessity in one’s worldview and work. Life is hard. Heavy. Lightness balances it out. True, winged lightness comes in many forms, from tenderness to comedy.