What Are You Doing After the Orgy?

Ilya Gridneff is a writer with an eclectic résumé. Your Name Here, his first book-length publication, adds debut novelist to the list. His coauthor, Helen DeWitt, has helmed two extremely well-respected novels—New York magazine’s “book of the century” The Last Samurai (2000) and the uproarious Lightning Rods (2011)—alongside the short story collection Some Trick (2018) and the novella The English Understand Wool (2022). She’s also the author of my favorite story set at least partly at a Dunkin’ Donuts, “Scribbling,” published just last year in the New York Review of Books.

Credit indie publishers Dalkey Archive Press and Deep Vellum for getting Your Name Here into the marketplace as the full and fulsome work of literature that it is. Intertextuality is the métier; its promotional materials center Italo Calvino and Charlie Kaufman as stylistic influences, but this is also a book reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald and John Haskell, with its indubitably hilarious integration of visuals, pictures, and multifarious blurring of the traditional fiction/nonfiction lines. Varied games and ensorcellments are afoot. I spoke to Gridneff and DeWitt over email about their distinctive text and the wages of real innovation. Our discussion has been edited for clarity.

—Sean Hooks

Sean Hooks: The full publication of Your Name Here by Dalkey Archive Press is a rather long time in coming, Ilya. The version of this novel that was published online-only as well as partly—just the first chapter, I believe—in the magazine n+1, that was all in 2008. Its conception as a book project dates at least to 2006, and you met Helen at an East End pub near Victoria Park all the way back in 2003. Would you mind opening with just how differently, or not differently, you perceive the finished novel as it appears in hardcopy in late 2025 versus when it was originally written, compiled, and released online?

Ilya Gridneff: What I remember is Helen promising me I would make a million bucks. At first, I was skeptical, but after her solid rendition of “Springtime for Hitler” I was sold. Helen, who returned my first email three years later, suggested a collaboration would be a foolproof plan for fame and fortune through letters and letter writing. There was a sense this would free me from the life of chasing celebrities around the world for the National Enquirer. Now, twenty years later, that plan has coalesced. Remarkably, the book has not changed much despite various iterations, critiques, and suggestions that it was too long, too complicated, and/or not a page-turner fantasy romance that would sell millions of copies and make the promised million bucks.

More recently, I spent a fair bit of time discussing whether an image of Tom Cruise should, could, or would remain in the final version due to copyright and intellectual-property concerns—does Tom own the image of Tom?—and whether the scanned image quality could be improved. The scanned images in the book have become somewhat obsolete considering the scanning technology from the late 2000s. Could this be improved? Should it be improved? Would we find Helen’s original al-Hayat newspaper, where the image is from? Does the final image need to be simply Tom Cruise, or is it Tom Cruise in al-Hayat? Is it the image or is it the image of an image scanned in 2006? To our relief, Tom remains in the book.

Helen DeWitt: You talk about a version of Your Name Here that was published online, but strictly speaking there wasn’t an online publication. While I was trying to find an agent to get some money for the book, readers kept wanting to buy a copy. I had put a synopsis on my website in the hope of giving agents and editors some idea of what it was like, and I think had mentioned it on my blog, so readers knew about it and wanted to see it. I did not see any particular harm in this, but it was a hassle responding to emails on a case-by-case basis, attaching the PDF or sending it by DropSend, so I finally put a notice on the website, which let people buy the PDF (without images) for whatever they chose to pay. Eight dollars was suggested but not compulsory, and I said when it had a publisher, they could apply their payment to purchase of the published edition. In retrospect this may not have been a good idea, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it publication.

Ironically, though, Jenny Turner did then review Your Name Here for the London Review of Books in 2008. At the time I thought this was an amazing coup! Surely this would be helpful in finding a publisher! But for all I know, agreeing may have been a terrible mistake. In 2019, a British agent told me the favorable U.S. reviews of Some Trick, far from being an asset, were an insurmountable obstacle to publishing the collection in the UK because publishers felt it had already “used up review space.” So Turner’s early review may have exposed Your Name Here to the same prejudice. My best efforts may only have made it harder for Your Name Here to get published.

As for the novel, the original idea was to have emails from an “Ilya” interacting with an affectless, alienated, bestselling writer, Rachel Zozanian, a character shaped by Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s schizophrenic from Anti-Oedipus. Agents complained that the Zozanian character was not “fleshed out” and that they had no idea where it was going. The point was to get quick cash so Ilya could get time for his own book, so I couldn’t ignore them, though “fleshing out” was an unspeakable departure from the Remainder vibe and missed the point that “Ilya” was meant to be the joker in the pack, gloriously disruptive of narrative direction and control. I thought (tragic irony) that this could be fixed by making clear that the disruption was intentional.

If we appropriated Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler—that is, with multiple interrupted texts and a second-person narrator—but took it even further with multiple second-person narrators, and if we spelled out the debt to Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation—that is, the impossibility of imposing virtuous order, with arguments between authors a part of the narrative—then intention would be clear and all would be well. Your Name Here is possibly a more interesting text now but was fatal as a fast track to that clinking-clanking sound.

SH: Humor’s a hard thing to find in what I guess I’ll call contemporary intellectually rigorous literary fiction, aside from Percival Everett, Ottessa Moshfegh, Paul Beatty, Joshua Ferris, and a few others. I’d even say most books that win the big literary awards or get attention for their form or style evoke in me exactly zero out-loud laughs. This isn’t the case with Your Name Here and its plenitude of political satire, wordplay, fontplay, drollery, frolicsome intertextuality, nested narrators, metanarratives hypothesizing Hollywood studio movies as loci for money laundering, and an overall tone of cutting and irreverent comedic insight. Though some of the subject material includes violence in the sex work trade, suicide, American imperialism—particularly in the war on terror years— and the intersection of international foreign policy and global geopolitical corruption, I relished the novel’s wit as well as its willingness to violate taboos. Do you think we live in overly serious, cautious times, especially in the literary sphere with its attendant controversies and allegiances?

IG: Honestly, I have no idea about the literary world. It seems like any club with rules, fashions, codes, and a lot of people acting serious because, if they didn’t, the whole thing might collapse. But if you’re inside it, or part of it, I am sure it is all very serious and important and it’s all serious literature work getting done by serious people, SRSLY. Having said that, I recently got a rejection letter from a big-name agent who said my book Drinking Bleach was “ambitious” and added that he wished he were “more ambitious” so he could take it on. I thought that strange, but that’s showbiz, as a writer friend says when commiserating yet another creative death.

I do think seriousness has its place. There’s a lot of serious things going on that need addressing and rectifying. Your Name Here was written with serious intent, pre-iPhone, pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram taking over our lives, so it was composed at that moment, that stare over the edge of the abyss, before it swallowed us all. And there’s only really laughter, or humor, to cope as a sort of rupture. To misquote or paraphrase Bataille, it’s an attempt at communion for all the horror and absurdity of our existence, the impossibility of meaning, etc., etc.

As a postscript, I loved American Fiction, based on Everett’s Erasure, and Beatty’s The Sellout for how they puncture white guilt and literary anxiety. Flux Gourmet [the 2022 film directed by Peter Strickland] is a very funny skewering of the seriousness of the art world/food scene. I enjoy On Cinema at the Cinema [the comedic web series and podcast by Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington] and Conner O’Malley’s oeuvre similarly for their scathing social commentary and critique, in particular on fame, celebrity, and modern male archetypes. Funnily enough, I first met Helen back in the early 2000s while she was reading Theodor Adorno in a Hackney pub. I accosted her, as another pretentious type in this breeding ground of the “culture industry” or “cultural capital,” and I ranted away, mixing up my Adorno with my Pierre Bourdieu in an awfully unserious manner that no doubt she found seriously amusing.

HD: No opinion about the Zeitgeist, but surely comedy has often been a response to officially sanctioned brutality. Aristophanes’s The Acharnians, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

SH: Ilya, Your Name Here paints “you,” via a series of literary aliases and permutations, as a globetrotting raconteur, the brazen and undaunted embedded journalist, one willing to risk his life for a story or in pursuit of ribaldry, drugs, and other activities sometimes collated under the concept of “life in the fast lane.” It feels apropos to ask how much is drawn from your wide-flung journalistic activities. And please, I mean this not to proffer predictable queries like “How much of this novel really happened?” or “So what do you see as your journalistic identity?” but more to allow you to reflect and self-evaluate, maybe even interrogate, the evolution of Ilya Gridneff the person, the professional, and the character in this novel you’ve coauthored.

IG: It does seem like a previous life or alter ego or a schizophrenic ideation considering how different it was or is to my life now. At the time, the mid-2000s, I was working as a paparazzo, freelance, not by design but after a series of circumstances that led me to a UK agency, and I got sent to chase celebrities: Angelina Jolie in Cairo, Britney Spears across Europe, Brad Pitt in Paris, and Tom Cruise in Berlin. I was pretty broke, then overnight I was getting wired thousands of dollars via Western Union and being flown all over the world. I relished the perverse absurdity, and I fully embraced it as a relief, or hyperreal escape, from the previous years in London working for a news agency called Fleetline—or Flatline, as I preferred—that saw me spend a couple of years in London coroners courts accruing hundreds of three hundred to two thousand–word vignettes on dead Londoners.

At the time, I was reading a lot. Court is great for long periods of nothing happening or finishing early. I was reading Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, marauding through the East End art scene, having no grounding in art history but strong opinions. I really got into Deleuze and Guattari, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and Nick Land’s The Thirst for Annihilation, and it all seemed apt for the landscape, so it was a time of chasing infinite possibilities that coalesced in a belief that “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” All this, I think now, was probably a visceral reaction to coroners court that forced me to pursue being or living, a praxis, if you will, that regularly required, or saw, transgression, altered states, and becoming as the necessary mess to improve or to find the slippery notion of freedom, to escape one’s inevitable demise. All that would be lost as a distant memory if not for Your Name Here.

My journalistic identity was shaped in Papua New Guinea and nearly a decade in Africa, including a year in South Sudan covering a civil war and doing stories like diamond and gold smuggling in the Central African Republic, so the search for meaning continued, and continues, in exploring frontiers and in striving for a “crowded hour of glorious life” rather than in hipster bars, art galleries, and postmodern philosophy. All that has significantly faded, like a Thomas Bernhard character mocking the intellectual failings and arrogance of youth, and now it seems so distant, obnoxious, or contrived. Now I find myself listening to the Frozen soundtrack, reading Robert Lighthizer’s No Trade Is Free or Chris Turner’s The Patch, about Canada’s oil industry, and getting excited about the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Trade Agreement and writing about it for the Financial Times. Writing this, or rereading it, reminds me of one of my favorite Jean Baudrillard quotes, “What are you doing after the orgy?”

SH: There’s an aggressive game-like quality to Your Name Here—Arabic text and other non-English languages, maps, photos, layers of recursion and riffing, a variety of fonts, numbers where there are usually words, in-jokes, emails, lottery results, film theory, white space deployment, bricolage, quotes from video game developers, and a farrago of ventriloquizing and other postmodern techniques that would qualify this volume as ergodic literature. Now, fiction is always a game of sorts, and realistic fiction is the version of the game that tries to hide the gameyness the most, but I guess what I want to know is: Was there a game-theory-optimal or collaborative component to its construction that felt more like role-playing or some other gamified activity? Say, poker or bridge, both fascinations of Helen’s throughout her books? Or perhaps a fascination of yours I’m not aware of?

IG: You think this is a game?!

SH: You’ve worked primarily as an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent in a number of continents—all except Antarctica, is that correct?—covering everything from environmental abuses to drug trafficking and from the celebrity beat to al-Qaeda bombings to the current Trump administration’s tariffs, and you’re also a father, married to a New York Times Canadian bureau chief. You’ve worked for the British government in Somalia and more broadly covered the East African region. Are there any global political topics that you’ve engaged with that may lead to more book-length writing? Or do you perhaps already have a manuscript or manuscripts looking for a publisher?

IG: Funnily enough, earlier this year I made it to the Arctic for a story on the changing geopolitics of Canada’s northern region. Getting paid for celebrity gossip was easy money and afforded a dilettante lifestyle, that sort of bohemian bourgeois that seemed radical, or anti-capitalist, at the time in my twenties, and was fun and so meaningless it felt like a smart creative-revenue stream. But I am glad you asked about my manuscripts.

The conceptualization of Your Name Here came about through Helen’s hope, kindness, and support to land me a book deal. She was shocked I was finding out what Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had for dinner rather than holed up in a room writing books about coroners court or wild encounters in Northern Ireland or a week in an Israeli jail or nights with Turkish crack dealers in Berlin. I was talking about these experiences and mapping them out in my mind, and she wanted to leverage her considerable literature-world standing to help me.

I am forever grateful for this and at the least it makes for a good dinner party story. And I am glad you asked, as I have several books in the works, one in fact that covers that period in London’s coroners court, called Drinking Bleach. The other text is Baghdad to Britney and it may be considered, for want of a better phrase, auto-fiction, but I’d extend or blur it a bit beyond onanistic self-obsession and into an attempt to document those eras in a journalistic/historic sense, both as reportage and as fictionalized histories of time and place and self. The early 2000s seems an era not yet explored, ripe for examination considering that pre–social-media period of life shifting from analog to digital or being online. Drinking Bleach is set in London in 2003 with the Iraq War as backdrop, inspired somewhat by Gogol’s Dead Souls, while Baghdad to Britney is afterward, perhaps the prologue to Your Name Here, considering my time traipsing around Iraq and then Iran, or Pakistan, trying to make sense of it all while bankrolled by the celebrity journalism and curiosity/naivety.

SH: Your coauthor is known for her unsparing ingenuity and for the piquant acerbity of her books, and Helen’s struggles have been presented, by critics as disparate as Christian Lorentzen, Lauren Oyler, and James Wood, as an example of the limitations of the mainstream publishing industry. As much as Helen vs. The Industry might read in 2025 as an over-employed hook, she’s also got a well-earned reputation as a polymath, so I guess I’ll close by asking you to weigh in regarding the obstacles, or the best way to navigate said obstacles, that stand in the way of quality writing reaching readers.

IG: Over nearly twenty years we have bonded by sharing similar levels of disdain for modernity/postmodernity and being aggrieved by various slights and injustices pitted against us. There were coffees in a Kreuzberg café where a digital log fire on a television screen kept us warm and the occasional phone call—when I met her, Helen did not like using the phone—but it has mostly been email correspondence. Correspondence picked up during or after Covid in October 2020 when the agent Monika Woods asked to represent our book. Five years later it’s finally getting published. Jon Fosse winning the Nobel Prize [for literature] in 2023 is one of the reasons why it’s been delayed. And in terms of quality writing, I think it is out there, and Dalkey Archive is testament to that.

SH: As a closing question, Helen, I just want to ask if you have a take on any of the more technology-centric literary questions of the day, especially those which incite a lot of bathetic handwringing here in the United States—social media, Substack, online learning environments, artificial intelligence. Your paperpools blog is such a source of artfulness and recherché delight, and I’m trying to process my own thoughts on what seems like the continued hyper-niche-ification of the written word and how it reaches our readership.

HD: I miss the early days of blogs, which were much more link-happy and where anyone could show up—xkcd once left a comment on my blog! There was a time when the Freakonomics blog was written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner! Can’t get excited about Substack—subscribed to a few and then stopped because I realized how nice it was not to be getting emails. A bit depressed to see AI-enhanced Duolingo now has mistakes in the German. I think I learn more by following tiny German accounts on Twitter, the ones with a couple of hundred followers, the ones where parents refer to their kids as der Kobold (goblin) or der Alleinerbe (the sole heir).

Online translation tools are a big help for reading in other languages. I read a great book a while back, La bella confusione by Francesco Piccolo, about the year Federico Fellini made 8½ and Luchino Visconti made Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), and it was terrific to be able to look up words quickly. If I were a teacher, I’m sure I would be annoyed by students using AI to write their papers. I think AI could transform publishing for the good on the business side, though, since contracts that should take a day to turn around currently take months—they’d have to be cleaned up, but they have to be cleaned up anyway.

Oh, I did think of something that might be interesting the other day. Lee Konstantinou wrote a book about The Last Samurai that had a startling number of mistakes because he didn’t show me the text before publishing. If I could load ChatGPT onto my laptop and link it to relevant email folders, interviewers might be able to ask it questions and get answers based on a wealth of original sources. That is, this might be less intrusive than giving someone free access to my emails, and they might be willing to show me the answers for verification even if they had the common dislike for showing the subject the final text. Or think how helpful it would be if one could ask a localized ChatGPT questions about the history of Your Name Here and it could scour the thousands of emails for answers, and it would never get bored or tired.

Sorry if this is a rather dull way to end the Q&A, but I’m a bit the worse for wear. Got two letters from the Finanzamt asking for documentation relating to my tax return, and it’s going to be a real slog to put it all together.