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.
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