A CONVERSATION WITH AVIGAYL SHARP
by HEDGIE CHOI
Avigayl Sharp’s first novel, Offseason, was published in May 2026 by Astra House (US) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK). Called “one of the sharpest and liveliest debuts of the decade” in Vulture, it was named a 2026 favorite by NPR and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her fiction has also appeared in publications including The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. Her story collection, Sickness, Health, will be published in 2027.
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Hedgie Choi: When we first met in grad school, I thought you were exclusively a short story writer. Then you wrote a great novel. What made you want to and how’d you do it?
Avigayl Sharp: This question is difficult to answer because it’s hard to narrativize change without lying. Though it is funny to think about being 24 years old, running around and screaming “I will only ever write short stories.” Panic! Disguised as self-knowledge.
For me, at least, writing a novel required a much higher tolerance of fear than short story writing. It also required more desperation, more patience, both more and less grandiosity. Short stories can reach toward perfection in a way novels can’t. I think that at some point in my 20s I became more interested in my own aesthetic bagginess, my flaws. Possibly I started to find them a little bit exciting and charming, in addition to being embarrassing. And I was interested in the novel’s shiftiness as a form, too, its relative newness, its excesses, how weird novels have been historically. Maybe I felt that by writing a novel I could kind of pin myself to history, pin myself to time, like a BUG…but now I’m guessing.
HC: Funny you say that, because a lot of people seem anxious that their writing is of a certain moment.
AS: Oh, yeah. I do not really have that anxiety; my anxieties are unfortunately much broader. They’re just about not writing well enough. I think if something appears “too topical” it’s never the topicality itself that’s the problem. We live inside of time. We live inside of history, inside of a specific economic system, with specific social relations, with specific technologies, blah blah, and these shape our consciousness. But that itself is universal. To have a consciousness that is intertwined with the material of your time.
I’m reading this wonderful novel from the early 70s now, Maiden by Cynthia Buchanan, which is being reissued by Hagfish in the fall. And it’s so embedded in a particular set of anxieties that emerge around sexual liberation at that moment, and a particular kind of consumer culture. But that makes it no less universal, no less “relevant,” as they say. And because time is pinned to itself, too, those anxieties live in us now in new and transformed ways.
HC: There’s such a suffusion of sexual imagination over all things throughout Offseason, but without any preference or desire. Or perhaps richly with preference and desire, but just as richly with revulsion and chaos. What is your interest in that conflation of desire and disgust?
AS: Well, this narrator definitely likes to hide in plain sight. To that end she absolutely blasts the reader with language. Including the language of sex; she slathers sex in language, or she slathers everything in the language of sex (grotesquely, I’d say, not erotically). But really I think she’s living in a state of constant terror and humiliation because on some level she does not know what sex is or where it is. And she does not want to be caught not knowing.
At the same time, she’s frequently enraged, because she’s like, all these liars around me! Pretending to know what sex is! But then sometimes she thinks, maybe they do know. Rage, humiliation, impotence, fear—as we’ve discussed before, Offseason’s narrator is a pretty emasculated woman. And often takes up a certain narrative mode of neurotic masculinity—Philip Roth is an influence here, as is Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man—as a way of relating to her own sort of traumatized and feminized sexuality, which horrifies her. She’s also a very naïve, innocent, childish person in some ways, with childlike dreams of omnipotence and omniscience. But I am now lying and asserting a kind of superiority to her consciousness that feels stupid. Maybe I don’t know what sex is either. Maybe none of us know. Maybe she is being completely lucid. Probably that’s closer to what I really think.
Importantly, this is a pretty prudish book. It’s maybe an obscene and disgusting book, but it’s also fundamentally and gleefully prudish. I do think I was interested in writing a book that was not empowered by sex, not liberated by sex, a book that was ruthlessly and grandly and tragicomically afraid of sex. But still respectful of sex, of sex’s chaotic power. There’s no sex act rendered on the page. If this narrator were to have sex that meant anything to her, it would be private, a secret, and she would absolutely not let you, the reader, witness it. No way.
HC: Lolita, a novel we both love, also deals with desire and disgust. But in Lolita, Humbert Humbert’s desire is withdrawn from the disgusting world and then projected with total focus onto one object. In yours, there’s no focus. There’s instead a “slathering,” as you say. And though the world is disgusting and chaotic to the narrator, she also desires it, loves it.
AS: So true; though I think that what’s being slathered in Offseason isn’t desire, exactly. There’s a lot of slippery projection and fantasy happening in the novel—there’s definitely a lot of Nabokov in there. But the narrator is also constantly trying to pull out the latent chaotic enigmatic inside of things, which always involves both desire and disgust, hate and love. At the same time, she basically thinks she’s just going to fall forever if she incorporates that kind of ambivalence, that much darkness and light, into her psyche. That’s her bind. It’s so terrible. She’s fine with darkness, actually, she knows how to live there very well. So when she returns to her childhood home in the second section of the book—to me, one of the truest, most awful moments in that section is when she says, “It’s not as if I had never been happy here.” If it had only been devastating, if it had been all bad, she feels she could tolerate it. But it’s that horrible mixture.
HC: A new thought I’ve been having about your book is that your narrator is not funny. You’re funny, but the narrator is not funny. What do you think of this assessment?
AS: No, she is not generally funny. She doesn’t find things funny; she takes everything very, very seriously, and that is part of the joke of the novel. There are a couple of moments in the novel when she giggles, and those are precious moments. She’s somewhat secretive about them.
I tend to think that when fiction is funny, it’s not usually because the characters themselves are “funny people.” Typically it’s the consciousness of the book that’s funny, not its inhabitants. Do you think that’s right? Very rarely have I read a jokey book that I like.
HC: Contemporary novels more often have “funny” narrators. I also dislike this kind of “jokey” book, but then I remembered Iris Owen’s After Claude. That narrator is funny—is trying to be and succeeding at it.
AS: You’re right. And as soon as I typed my answer, I thought of a bunch of excellent books where the narrator or protagonist is actively funny. Like Fran Ross’s Oreo. The narrator of Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, Money Breton—she’s a funny character, right? So I rescind my previous response.
Okay, wait, but about Harriet in After Claude—she is funny too, but what I particularly like about that novel is that sometimes she thinks she is being funny and she is not. She is being horrible. So the pleasure you get as a reader is that you move from laughing at her being funny, seductively funny, to feeling extremely bad and afraid and disgusted and uncomfortable and sad. But she’s still just there, being funny. And it’s too late for you! She’s already taken you to the place where you’re going to feel awful.
The first line of that novel is so good. “I left Claude, the French rat.” Rat is a great word.
HC: Yes, that’s a great point about that book and books in general—if the narrator is operating in one way, the consciousness of the book has to be doing something else. Which is another way of thinking about the first-person unreliable narrator. You’re writing in that tradition, but your narrator is exceptionally “lucid,” perhaps no less intelligent than you. Nonetheless, she’s unable to change: “I did not want to walk to the lake… I walked to the lake.”
AS: I like books that allow their characters a certain kind of dignity, that don’t just try to crack them open with a hammer and get out all the meat and expose them. Or that play with the writer’s and reader’s desire to crack them open and expose them. Nabokov’s Pnin, Muriel Spark’s The Comforters. Another book we both love that allows its narrator innocence and mystery is Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye. And that novel’s engagement with communist history and communist desire was exciting to me too; I remember it was one of the first books that made me think that perhaps I would write a novel.
I like what you say about the narrator being able to know and still not change. Maybe it’s even more than that. Maybe a narrator can both know and not know at the same time. Aren’t we doing this always? I was listening to a talk by the psychoanalytic theorist/philosopher Alenka Zupančič—I’m probably going to butcher it in my summary. (Fittingly, it was a talk about her book What Is Sex?, also about how we pretend to know what sex is.) And she said something like, you know, when we repress something, it’s not that we’re not conscious of it. It’s precisely that we’re unconscious of it. It’s not not there. It’s there in an opaque, oblique, only twistily accessible way. Things that a narrator is unconscious of can make their way onto the page in many ways, just as we can’t escape our unconscious in so-called real life. Through what we attend to, what we project, our slips, our fantasies, our desires. I do think fictional characters must have an unconscious in order to touch something true in the reader. But I, the writer, can’t “know” a character’s unconscious. I can’t even “know” my own. Unfortunately. So you just have to allow the material in.
HC: This is a book where much happens off the page, between chapters, between lines. How did you decide what happens on the page versus not?
AS: I think soon into writing it became clear that the book wanted to have large blank swathes of unaccounted-for time; it wanted lots of weird privacy. That was just the shape it asked for, probably to counteract how dense and overwhelming the narrator’s consciousness can be. On the surface, the book is full of divulging, it’s formally structured around divulging, but the divulging is generally actually a sly mode of withholding. The narrator is pouring out language but also secretly exerting crazy amounts of control. She’s at once totally porous and, like, a wall or a rock or something.
It seems to me that terrible things are sometimes withheld in novels in order to rope the reader into the big reveal. Offseason does, I think, play with the fantasy of revelation, but pretty actively doesn’t fulfill it. And something I’m fond of in the book is that some of what is happening off the page is being withheld not because it’s terrible, but because it’s too beautiful, too precious, too nice for the narrator to let you touch it. Or even to let herself describe it! Description is one of the ways she projects and controls; maybe she protects what’s precious to her by keeping it safe from her language.
I had this sense that allowing the narrator that kind of privacy could paradoxically create a more exciting mode of intimacy with the reader. That’s also a move in Bleak House. Esther Summerson, who narrates half the novel, is pretty annoyingly good, innocent, modest, sweet, shy, but you realize at a certain point that she’s keeping these secrets. The secrets aren’t dark. They’re secrets about love, about being desired. And importantly, they are also secrets about her own intellect, the actual sharpness and coolness of her mind, the logic of her attention and awareness. Secrets from the reader, secrets from herself.
I loved slapping Bleak House grandiosely into the middle of my book. That felt really good, like saying, “and this too is a novel.” Dickens was grandiose, a real ham. I visited the Dickens Museum in London last year, and the top floor is essentially childhood-trauma-themed. They have bars from the debtors’ prison where his father was imprisoned, bottles from the blacking factory where he was a child laborer. Or if not the exact bottles, representative bottles. I was so happy there.
HC: Your narrator is so in control of language and therefore at odds with it. What do you think the difference is between language that projects and controls versus language that opens up?
AS: I am very interested in language’s capacity to flatten experience. Canned language, dead language, plots, self-narrativization. I am also interested in its capacity to, as you say, open up, or allow us to encounter something real in another person, in ourselves. Something we didn’t know was there. You know that I love the writer Gwendoline Riley, one of our great novelists of dead language.
Something I am particularly drawn to is the way that language can literally remain the same but contain or evoke a different meaning. It’s a kind of form/content question. And so in Offseason there are repeated sentences or phrases or leitmotifs, and the form remains exactly the same, but the content changes. This is one thing I love about psychoanalysis, which in a way takes place entirely on the terrain of language; in analysis, you can say a true thing, make an overtly accurate interpretation. You can “know” something completely, and that can mean nothing. You can say the same thing, years later, and finally at last it means something real. Offseason’s narrator is often saying true things that are actually false. And then the movement of the novel is hopefully such that by the end she begins to say things that are true, or even if they’re not “true,” that have real meaning. Sometimes those are, in literal terms, exact repetitions of things she’s said before. But, you know, repetitions change. I very much like Freud’s paper “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” which discusses this.
I think part of the narrator’s transformation in the novel is that she starts to open herself to language in a new way, very subtly. To other people’s language. Something I noticed while editing the book is that structurally, though the third section mirrors the first, the narrator speaks much less frequently in Part III. There are longer stretches in which the reader is allowed to listen to other characters’ speech. I think the narrator’s consciousness has begun to crack open a little at this point; there’s a different kind of moral vision, a different kind of attention.
HC: Your narrator is obsessed with (1) her trauma, (2) Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and (3) Stalin. How did you come up with this combination of interests?
AS: I hadn’t thought about it explicitly until now, but these three obsessions do pretty directly map onto (1) the personal, (2) the aesthetic, and (3) the historical/political. To risk being overly literal. And the narrator’s preoccupation with each lapses into her preoccupation with the others. Like how she’s constantly trying to trauma-plot both Stalin and Dickens. You could maybe say that the entanglement of all three categories—and the knots we get into when we try to pick apart the nature of that entanglement—is the subject of the novel? Maybe.
You know, this is suddenly making me think about the fact that responses to the book often tend to zoom in on the parts of the novel that are overtly related to the personal—personal trauma, family relations, etc. Which is funny because I do think it’s rather directly also a novel about politics, history, art. Of course the book is about the personal, too. I just think that culturally, particularly in the U.S. maybe, the way we think and talk about fiction today is very oriented toward the individual, toward personal narrative. And it seems like no matter what a book is doing, at its core it must “really” be about the personal story. I think that is sort of funny in relation to Offseason, which is kind of specifically about the failures of looking at the personal alone.
HC: There’s an argument against looking at the personal at all, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
AS: I tend to believe that in order to move beyond the self, to transcend the self, you have to face the self. That the only way out is through. I have little patience for the kind of rejection of “narcissistic writing” that feels widespread now. You know, everyone hates autofiction, blah blah. I think we live in a moment where the self and the individual reign supreme, and so the fact that works of art and literature today often take the self as their ostensible subject seems right, in some way honest or true. To me, work that transforms the self into an object is fundamentally not narcissistic. Work that takes narcissism as its subject is not self-obsessed. Of course, there’s lots of narcissistic, self-aggrandizing work out there, but I never seem to think it’s the stuff people point out.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think that art that operates on the terrain of “the personal” is “less political” than art that appears overtly “political” by our contemporary standards. In fact, often it can be more politically interesting, more charged. The psyche is one place where our social, political reality lives. But narratives of the self in life are different from the mapping of narratives of the self in art. Self-narrativization tries to pin down what is fundamentally elusive; it tries to construct a story that can protect the self from the terribly frightening fact that other people exist, are real. That’s what the narrator is doing. I think it makes sense that a character like her is unable to confront the terrible and tragic failures of the 20th-century political left. I mean, to be on the left involves reckoning with a really horrific amount of failure, a horrific amount of despair and pain, and a horrific amount of violence. One way to avoid that is to retreat into fantasy, false utopia. To say that nothing was ever wrong from within, that everything bad comes from the outside. I want the novel to be alive with that danger, personally, politically, aesthetically.
