Paula Bomer, "The Stalker" (Soho Books, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network - Paula Bomer, "The Stalker" (Soho Books, 2025)

Date: November 12, 2025
Host: Chris Holmes
Guest: Paula Bomer
Episode Theme:
An in-depth conversation with author Paula Bomer about her new novel The Stalker, exploring the creation and complexity of her disturbing protagonist, the dynamics of violence against women, literary devices such as narrative voice and black humor, as well as cultural and societal contexts that enable such characters to thrive.

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Main Theme Overview

The episode delves into Paula Bomer's latest novel, The Stalker, a darkly comic and deeply unsettling portrayal of a young man, Dodie, who manipulates, stalks, and abuses women to sustain his own privilege and avoid personal hardship. The conversation explores the crafting of Dodie’s narrative voice, the implications of violence, empathy, class dynamics, the challenges and uses of dark humor, and the wider cultural systems that allow such figures—recognized disturbingly often in real life—to persist.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Novel's Narrative Voice and Character Conception

• Reading from Chapter One: Bomer reads the unsettling, intimate opening that immerses the listener in Dodie’s gaze and the toxic dynamic between privilege and manipulation.

  • [04:25] Paula Bomer:

    “Beata was coarse. She was low class, tough, which made her masculine. She had the hair of a baby or an old woman... Dodie had a plan for her. Any of the three boys at the table would have gladly fucked her. But Beata was out of reach for Stanny and Lou. Not because she was above them, she was clearly beneath them, but because fucking Beata required a plan...”

• Choosing Narrative Perspective:

  • [07:43] Chris Holmes commends how the third-person voice is "tied tightly" to Dodie, making readers feel unable to escape his interior world.
  • [08:21] Paula Bomer reflects:

    “His voice came to me and I don’t really like to write in first person that often... Third person gives you a little bit of room to kind of go in and out of point of view... but it’s very close to Dodie.”
    She explains how initially attempting to write a "victim’s" narrative, she switched perspective for greater narrative energy and flow.

• Humanizing Versus Mythologizing Dodie:

  • [10:48] Bomer initially imagined Dodie as “Satan or the devil himself,” but under her editor's guidance, humanized him:

    “It was kind of hard to keep up the Satan thing... We humanized him. I think the most human thing about him... is his background. Later he goes to Boston College, his mother’s Catholicism is emphasized, and the early good versus evil allegory was cut back.”

2. Empathy, Momentum, and the Reader’s Experience

• Empathy’s Role and Its Limits:

  • [13:41] Holmes notes the longstanding debate about whether novels generate empathy or its opposite.
  • [13:53] Bomer draws on literary precedents (e.g., American Psycho, The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist) to illustrate how compelling yet repulsive protagonists maintain momentum without soliciting sympathy:

    “No one really feels sorry for Patrick Bateman... It’s a meditation on delusion, power, corruption...”

  • [16:03] Holmes adds Lolita as another example, for the way humor and narrative try to "win us over" to despicable figures.

• On Maintaining Narrative Drive:

  • [16:46] Bomer:

    “I care about momentum... I like to figure out, okay, what can I do to make this move? I knew I wanted it to get worse... And what—you know, it does.”
    She discusses surprising herself as a writer, which translates to reader surprise.

3. Gendered and Economic Violence

• Violence Against Women—Contextualizing the Novel’s Relevance:

  • [18:37] Holmes and Bomer agree that The Stalker is centrally about violence against women.
  • [18:37] Bomer states:

    “A woman is most likely to be murdered at home... That’s where he goes, he goes into women’s homes... I did not write this book expecting Trump to be elected again, but for the first time, my book is timely... He is a convicted rapist and he’s leading our country. That just says a lot about how much we don’t care about women.”

  • [21:01] She praises the #MeToo movement but laments backlash and the generational cycle of taking progress for granted.
  • [22:47] Bomer:

    “Men like to be violent toward women. It’s just a fact.”

• Class and Economic Parasite Dynamics:

  • [23:05] Holmes draws parallels to American Psycho, noting Dodie’s reliance on women for survival as his family’s wealth disappears.
  • [23:36] Bomer:

    “His entitlement is based on his heritage... He just feels completely entitled to take advantage of anybody... Domestic labor that women provide... has not changed very much.”
    She underscores the domestic setting as a site of parasitic, psychological violence.

• Stillness as Violence:

  • [25:28] Bomer:

    “That was a real goal, was to show the violence of stillness... If someone just sits there and stays... you could be just asking for trouble, you know, it’s just a sad truth.”
    She references The Gift of Fear and classic war strategies (Art of War, Marcus Aurelius) to connect stillness and non-action to forms of exerting power and inflicting harm.

  • [27:21] Holmes calls "never doing anything" one of the most horrifying aspects.
  • [28:58] Bomer:

    "Women, just by being women, are vulnerable... Stillness, that's a war strategy. That's a strategy that is in ancient war manuals."

  • [29:36] Bomer links these tactics to domestic violence, reinforcing the overlap of ancient male-dominated power structures and contemporary abuse.

4. Black Humor and Emotional Complexity

• Humor as Narrative Strategy:
  • [29:58] Holmes notes the novel’s pain and darkness are leavened with striking black humor, much of it unintentional from Dodie.
  • [30:35] Bomer:

    “Humor and darkness are twins. They go very well together... I revise heavily... I started getting very upset. The revisions... refining it all, and I was left with a very... Yeah, I’m so... I’m excited to move on to another book... But humor and darkness go very well together.”

  • She references The Vet’s Daughter as an example of a novel that's dark yet lightless—unusually so.

5. Society and Systems: Individual and Structural Enablers

• Individual Monstrosity & Societal License:
  • [33:14] Holmes asks about the interplay between Dodie's personal evil and societal permission.
  • [33:31] Bomer:

    “He’s an individual, but he’s part of the world and the world... from my childhood, you know, boys will be boys... We’ve always let boys get away with things... Women, if they fight back, they’re considered bitches... I... noticed that boys were free and I wanted to be free like them very early on... In the home... between a husband and wife, there was no marital rape until 1992. So it’s deeply ingrained legally.”

  • [35:25] She links patriarchal and capitalist control to the exploitation of poor and women.

6. Book Recommendations & Literary Influences

• Literary Comparisons and Inspirations:
  • [13:53, 14:22] Bomer references American Psycho, The Dwarf, and The Man Who Loved Children as influential for building unsympathetic protagonists.
  • [36:34] Bomer is currently reading Chris Kraus’s new book The Four Spent the Day Together, praising its exploration of class and addiction—also elements in The Stalker.
  • [37:17] She recommends Stephanie Wambugo’s Lonely Crowds, Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter, and Michael Clune’s memoir Whiteout.
  • [38:17] Bomer:

    “It’s Baltimore in the 90s and he has a terrible heroin problem... It’s really so exquisitely painful and beautiful at the same time because unlike Dodie... you have a lot of compassion for [the memoirist].”

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Notable Quotes and Moments

• On Voice and Point of View
  • [08:21] Paula Bomer:

    “Once you find a voice, even if it’s... has that distance from third person, third person has a voice in it as well.”

• On Empathy and Antiheroes
  • [13:41] Chris Holmes:

    “Novels are often pitched by people in my world, like theorists... as generators of empathy. But the long history of antagonistic, even despicable narrators would argue that there’s something to empathy’s negation in the novel.”

• On Humor and Darkness
  • [30:35] Paula Bomer:

    “Humor and darkness are twins. They go very well together.”

• On Stillness as Violence
  • [25:28] Paula Bomer:

    “That was a real goal, was to show that the violence of stillness.”

• On Societal Structure and Male Privilege
  • [33:31] Paula Bomer:

    “He’s an individual, but he’s part of the world and the world... We’ve always let boys get away with things.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:25] Paula Bomer reads from Chapter One of The Stalker, showcasing the visceral narrative voice.
• [08:21] Discussion of narrative choice—third person close versus first person.
• [10:48] Origin of Dodie’s character—devil as metaphor, later humanized by editorial intervention.
• [13:41–16:46] Exploration of empathy, literary influences for antihero narratives.
• [18:37–23:00] Violence against women, #MeToo movement, and societal complicity.
• [23:05–28:58] Economic violence, class, neglect, and the “violence of stillness.”
• [29:58–32:14] The necessity and function of dark humor in the novel.
• [33:14–35:25] Systems and structures enabling male violence and power.
• [35:39–38:40] Paula Bomer’s book recommendations and literary influences.

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Tone and Language

The episode maintains a serious, nuanced, and deeply analytical tone, marked by Bomer’s candor, intellect, and dark wit, mirroring the novel’s style. Conversations veer between craft talk, literary history, cultural critique, and moments of wry, self-aware humor.

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Conclusion

This episode is a comprehensive, candid examination of The Stalker and its unsettling, timely themes. Paula Bomer and Chris Holmes explore how narrative voice, humor, and structure combine to create a portrait of male privilege and violence that is disturbingly familiar. Rich in literary context and laced with sharp insights into contemporary society, the conversation will interest anyone drawn to dark fiction, narrative technique, and the intersection of literature and gender politics.

Highly recommended for listeners interested in:

• Literary craft
• Dark humor
• Gender and violence in fiction
• The power of narrative perspective
• Contemporary cultural critique

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Transcript

[Chris Holmes]

Hello, everybody.

[Marshall Po]

This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Chris Holmes]

I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous [e-mail] and on Instagram and Twitter at burnedbybooks. Let's start the show. Robert Doton Savile is a man who gets what he wants. Called doty by friends and enemies, he is making his way through adolescence into adulthood by manipulating those who come into his ken. The scion of a formerly wealthy family, Dodie refuses the date declasse move and seeks to maintain his privilege by finding women he believes he can leech off of. He begins by stalking them. The Stalker, Paula Bomer's latest novel, is a frightening descent into the mind and mentality of a young man propelled only by his desire to satisfy his most immediate wants and needs. Dodie's obsession with carrying on a life of privilege that insulates him from work, hardship, or even the troubling existence of others grows darker as the novel follows him to the city where his predilections devolve from stalking to squatting in the apartments of women he manipulates, to abuse and to finally, something like murder. The Stalker's power as a novel comes both from Paula Bomer's razor wire tension that she builds, punctuating each new offense with impossibly black humor, and from our horrible sense of recognition, of seeing versions of Dodie populating the nation in places of power and authority with a narrative voice tied tight as a lariat to Dodi's interiority. The Stalker gives us no reprieve from his disturbed mania. And yet we are driven on, compelled to understand how much society will allow a parasite such as this. Paula Bomer is the author of the Stalker, which received a starred Publisher's Weekly review calling it the Dark and Twisted Fun. She is also the author of Tante Eva and Nine Months, and the story collections Inside Madeline and Baby and Other Stories, and the essay collection Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in Bomb magazine, the Mississippi Review, Fiction Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Green Mountain Review, the Cut, Volume 1, Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Her novels have been translated in Germany, Argentina, and Hungary. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and has lived for over 30 years in Brooklyn. Welcome to Burned by Books.

[Paula Bomer]

Paula Bomer thank you so much for having me, Chris.

[Chris Holmes]

I was wondering if we could start by having you read just a little bit from the very beginning of the Stalker, just so we can hear the narrative voice and how it sutures itself so tightly to Doty and how much that kind of contributes to the to the nervous energy of the novel.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes, I'll start here with Chapter One. Beata was coarse. She was low class, tough, which made her masculine. She had the hair of a baby or an old woman, fine and staticky, pulled back harshly in a black rubber hairband. Her makeup was slutty, lots of black eyeliner and singed curls for bangs. She wasn't nice to the boys. No eye contact, a scowl, an air of impatience. Dodie had a plan for her. Any of the three boys at the table will have glad would have gladly fucked her. But Beata was out of reach for Stanny and Lou. Not because she was above them, she was clearly beneath them, but because fucking Beata required a plan. Some thought, some energy, maybe a bit of cunning. Dodie had this ability his friends did not. Beata, with her name tag above one of her tiny breasts, stood by the counter, fiddled with her stiff hair, looked into her compact, applying greasy purple pink stuff to her lips. They had driven from Darien to Watertown, a small town with a diner and a hardware store that also sold cigarettes and potato chips. They did this to feel adventurous, to be in another world, A lowly world, A world of people with shitty jobs and cheap clothes. Darien girls would never be seen looking at themselves in a compact in public. They only did that in private. Dodie watched her smooth her apron and lick her teeth. It all happened in slow motion due to the weed they'd smoked, and that way it felt profoundly intimate. She hated them. This he knew. So did Stanny. He was pretty sure Lou didn't know. Lou was thick. Lou was the biggest of the three, well over six feet, and because he had grown so fast his body had parts that were larger and parts that were smaller. He was a poorly arranged looking guy. Beate walked over, check pad in hand. What can I get you? I'll have pancakes, dody said. He made eye contact, but only briefly. Her eyes were hard. She was tapping her pen on the pad. A tick impatience. She also wore, as she always did so he noted, a small cheap looking necklace with a glittering red heart at its center. Dody focused on it where it lay on her throat, a gold colored chain and rhinestones. Fake jewels. Milkshake for me? Lou said. Chocolate, she scribbled. Yeah, he said. Give me a Coke, said Stanny. She wrote it on her pad and walked away without looking up at them. After they finished and paid, leaving pennies and a nickel for a tit, they walked back to the tree lined path that led out of crappy low class Watertown up to the ivied brick building sprawling majestically above it. Stan had spent a summer at a cross country camp at Taft. He told them for the millionth time that the boarding school was equipped with its own golf course, hockey rink, and pond. They sat on some rocks and smoked a joint in the privacy of the trees where the students party that night, the ground around them littered with bottles and cans. Then they went back to Dodie's mother's station wagon and drove the hour back to Derrian from Watertown.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you so much. That was so nice to hear that it is part of the magic of the novel in general and of this, this novel, the stalker, that you can have a third person narrative voice that also inhabits and feels tied so tightly to Dodie that we feel we cannot escape him. And I wondered why you chose that particular narrative voice and where did Dodie come from? How did he climb out of some lizard part of your imagination.

[Paula Bomer]

So there's a story I want to tell and then I have to find a way to tell it and there's some process of elimination. But his voice came to me and I Don't really like to write in first person that often. I guess I would say that it's. It's actually harder. So third person gives you a little bit of room to kind of go in and out of point of view if you need to. But it's very close to Dodie throughout the novel and. But it does give you some distance, whereas first person, you know, you're completely inhabiting someone. So I would say mostly when I come to any kind of point of view, it. It is a little process of elimination and. But I, I love talking craft, so it worked. It worked nicely for me. And then I was trying to write. And regarding your second question, how, why, how and why Dodie, or how did this come to me? I had been trying to write a book. Yeah. Called Gaslit from. Yeah. An entirely different book told from the point of view of a female who had been, you know, subject to all sorts of abuse. And I could never. So that would have been first person and it would have been from the point of view of a victim. And I just never was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. And I had an aha moment. Like, aha. You know, and honestly, the first draft, while I worked very, very hard and got very nerdy about where it was set, it flowed pretty quickly once I found the voice. And I think that's kind of just true for me in general. Once you find a voice, even if it's, you know, has that distance from third person, third person has a voice in it as well. And it's, you know, it's just not. It's a little different. Yeah. And then, then it just flowed.

[Chris Holmes]

That's. It's funny to think of this voice coming and, And Dodie coming to you. He seems like the. I, I mean, you have described in other interviews that he was at one period of time, perhaps even Satan or the devil himself. And so I wonder how you decided to have a nearly inhuman, terrifying character versus an actually inhuman satanic character.

[Paula Bomer]

I. So this is my fourth book with my editor, Mark Doton. He. He's an old school editor. I mean, I like to compare him to something like Maxwell Perkins. You know, that's a good.

[Chris Holmes]

That's hard to find these days.

[Paula Bomer]

So it is, It's. It's funny. I. This is me kind of sounding like I'm trashing the industry, which. But people don't edit, you know, they really don't. They're good at taking it out to launch. They believe in you, all that stuff. But he's very nerdy. I appreciate it. And he. He made. He made Dodie in some ways more human. And as I. It was kind of hard to keep up the. Of the Satan thing, you know, as I, you know, I worked my way into thinking he was Satan pretty quickly. There's a short story, oh, it's so long ago, by. I want to say, Chris Adrian. Am I pronouncing his last name wrong?

[Chris Holmes]

I. I think it's Adrian, but I'm not positive.

[Paula Bomer]

Yeah, he wrote a short story a long time ago that was in Tin House. And there's a. I am part of a posse who is into it. And it was about this football player at an American high school who turns out to be the devil. And it's just brilliant. And I was incapable of doing that. I realized in the long run that it really wasn't, you know, but yeah, so we humanized him. I think the most human thing about him. Yeah. So, like the fact he. Later. I don't think this is telling too much, but he went to Boston College and that is a Catholic university. And I made his mother's Catholicism be bigger. And so I made it kind of more about good and evil in the beginning, and all of that gets cut. So my editor cuts things, he shapes things and he makes them better. And then. Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

Although sounds like a wonderful thing to have.

[Paula Bomer]

It is. No, I really, I. I feel like Mark Doton is. Makes me the writer that I am. So it's one of those kind of intense relationships.

[Chris Holmes]

Amazing. So the stalker is at times an upsetting read. But part of that disquiet, I think, comes from our desire to keep reading and to the drive to understand Dodie's motivations and to see the increasing perversions of his thinking. Novels are often pitched by people in my world, like theorists and critics, as generators of empathy. But the long history of antagonistic, even despicable narrators would argue that there's something to empathy's negation in the novel. So this is another kind of two part question, and I wanted to know how you balance wanting the reader to continue on while having Dodie's actions and intentions get more and more deviant. And then on the question of empathy, what does empathy or its opposite do in your conception of how the stalker works?

[Paula Bomer]

Okay. Wow, I love this. I. So I had a bunch of books in front of me. No one really feels sorry for Patrick Bateman.

[Chris Holmes]

No, that's what I was thinking of as a direct comp for this one, for sure.

[Paula Bomer]

Yeah. So I'm very, I think, somewhat typical but also, you know, in other words, but also neurotic. And that I can't really read other people's books when I'm writing. But I do have usually a pile of books that I might look at. So there was American Psycho. There's also, I think even more so was. As far as what I was trying to channel is this book called the Dwarf by Per Lagerfeld. I'm not sure if you're.

[Chris Holmes]

I, no, I don't know it.

[Paula Bomer]

Okay, so he won the Nobel in 19. I want to say 37. I can't remember. Sorry. A long time ago. I think he's Swedish. But it's a book I've read twice. It's short, it's tight. It's told from the point of view of a, A dwarf at a. Not in a castle. Well, in like a castle situation, you know, of a lord. He's, you know, the, and he's supposed to just be there for humor, but he thinks he's running the show. And he kills, you know, he kills another dwarf. He thinks he's in charge. He's completely deluded. And it's a meditation on delusion, power, corruption, because a lot of other things are going on. And, and then I don't know if another. This sounds kind of weird, but the man who Loved Children by Christina Stead is mostly from the point of view of a young girl. But her father talks a lot, and he's kind of what she's focused. He's the driver of the narrative. And he is someone who, maybe at the beginning you feel like, okay, he's a, he's a decent person. And then by the end, you realize he literally just tries to hurt people. And that makes him feel powerful and, and he's a terrible person.

[Chris Holmes]

Those sound amazing. I, I, I definitely had the American Psycho as a, as a comp for me. Also a little bit Lolita in the sort of, like, humor and, and the kind of ways in which the narrator thinks that they can win us over or at least convince us that there's something else going on. I don't know if you thought at all about Nabokov here.

[Paula Bomer]

That's a great. I know he wasn't in, that was not in my pile. But when you bring that up. Yeah, he was completely deluded in his mind. He's just a great guy, you know, who's loving somebody. And really he's just terribly abusive. Psycho. Yeah, that's, that's a great comp also. Yeah. So I was looking at slim novels. Oh, another thing Is this book was supposed to be longer. And then I got really. I was like, oh, I have to get rid of this guy. I have to figure out a way, you know, and I'm sick of him.

[Chris Holmes]

I mean, I guess that goes into that other part of the question. Do you. Were you thinking at all about how much your reader would. Would go along with you for the ride with. With Dodie?

[Paula Bomer]

I definitely. I care about momentum. And again, I. This is a more of a technical thing, like, oh, how. I don't. I've never read the a how to book and that, you know, so late in life. Maybe I should just do it for fun at this point. But I like to kind of figure out, like, how. How I didn't have the. The most, you know, very elaborate outline, but I like to figure out, like, okay, what can I do to make this move? Like, and what direction. And obviously I knew I wanted it to get worse, so. And what. You know, it does.

[Chris Holmes]

Spoiler alert. It really does.

[Paula Bomer]

Yeah. And then you have to, like, how long can you stay in one scene before you need to realize that you're flipping, you know, down in a different direction? And that kind of, you know, you. It's scene by scene for me a little bit. I definitely, you know, have to keep track of. And then I like to surprise myself. I think when you surprise yourself as a writer, it comes out on the page a little bit. That's kind of.

[Chris Holmes]

Maybe I haven't heard that before, but that seems. That rings so true. I. That's. That's a lovely way of thinking about that. Surprise yourself and your. And your readers get surprised. So. Violence against women is a continuing global catastrophe, but the United States stands out from its peers in wealthy democracies in the lethality of living in the country as a woman. It's a complicated story with overlapping Venn diagrams explaining the crises. But men like Dodie are part of that story. How does the context of this being an American novel change how you understand the violence against that Dodie stalks and abuses it.

[Paula Bomer]

Thank you for saying that. This is a book about violence against women. I know that. I know that it is, and I think that many people get it, but it. Because it's from the male point of view and stuff. I think it's just nice to say that very clearly. Our country, yes, a woman is most likely to be murdered at home. By far, like 60, at least 60% women are murdered at home. And whereas men, it's, you know, nine. So the home is a dangerous place. And that's where he goes, he goes into women's homes and honestly worldwide. I was recently reading about El Salvador where there's a huge crisis in they, you know, there's no abortion and if you miscarry, they're women who have 30 year sentences for murder it for they have no miscarrying for miscarrying or and you know, there's no late term like there's women die because this is happening in our country too. But it's really it, you know, it's, it's just the world we live in and, and then it ebbs and flows. I did not write this book, you know, expecting Trump to be elected again, but I feel like for the first time in my life my book is timely. Um, everyone is so tired and exhausted and repulsed by the things that he is doing in civil court. He is a convicted rapist and he's leading our country. So that just says a lot about how, how much we don't care about women.

[Chris Holmes]

You know the. I had a guest talk about like how difficult it is to have lived during the MeToo movement and then to witness the, the enormous backlash to that movement. And this book lives in a, in a pre Me too movement but feels more reminiscent to, to now and to our contemporary moment because of the way that Dodie believes that he could just get away endlessly and does get away endlessly with you know, worse and worse behavior towards women. And I, and I wonder if you were thinking at all about the, the fact that this, the seemingly optimistic moment of women being able to speak to this violence with some agency which now seems to have ebbed.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. I love the MeToo movement more than anything in a very long time. I think it was, you know, such an important time. I also what does, what kind of goes unmentioned is all of these laws that Biden then put into our constitution or something. I apologize. I don't. I, yeah. Into law in that there's no, all of that was, you know the NDA thing, the non disclosure agreements. Those were all ripped apart and you can no longer there any A non disclosure agreement that you signed 30, 40 years ago is does not count anymore. And so there's no longer hiding behind those things as with there's a sexual assault involved if there are any kind of sexual abuse. So that was a wonderful, wonderful move movement. I, I, you know and it had an immediate strange backlash, but it made me very happy. I think that what breaks my heart is that every generation of women and this is just how it is. We and I I'm guilty of that. We think our mothers didn't do enough. And then we take for granted all that they did because we, we lived it. We lived with what, what, you know, progress they've made. And so then there's kind of this taking everything for granted. And actually my next work, I want to write about internalized misogyny. You know, in this whole right wing women aspect. You know, we have so many white women who voted for Trump, so. But, but regardless of that, it's just, you know, men like to be violent toward women. It's just a fact.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, it's. You can't, you can't argue with the, the statistics. They're too, they're too great. And then mix it with, you know, gun ownership and, and, and that makes for a very deadly experience for a lot.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. That is one difference our country has from others is that we are fully armed.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. So I wanted to return to American Psycho again because of its, the way that it's often read as an allegory for capitalism and the violence of a market economy, and that gets personified as a serial killer. And there's a lot about class and economics in Stalker. As Dodi's family's wealth falters, he looks to women in more precarious situations than his own to take advantage of. And I'd wonder if you'd talk about economic violence in here as well.

[Paula Bomer]

Well, he definitely, he has, his entitlement is based on his heritage. And as ridiculous as that, just saying that just makes me just so, like, why is this even a thing? But it is. I mean, we, A lot of countries still have kings and queens, not just England, like, I always forget, like, oh, Denmark, Spain has it, you know, so. And, and there is this whole, like, birth thing. American Psycho was definitely also set in the banking world, so. And, but Dodie just, he just feels completely entitled to, to take advantage of anybody. And he feels everybody's really lucky that he's even taking advantage of them. And the, this is a real thing. I mean, domestic labor that women provide is, you know, it's, that's another thing, you know, that's been, that has not changed very much, including, you know, and he just expects them to do everything for him. There is, you know, his mother is a character in the book, and he treats her like garbage and just expects her to do everything. And then he, like, belittles her. So you're expected to do these things. You're expected to be, you know, a caregiver or generous or kind. These are all things that women are expected to be. And if you're not, you're like a monster. And if you are, you are belittling yourself without even being, you know, aware that that's what you're doing.

[Chris Holmes]

It is the, it is the case that he uses those domestic spaces as a kind of violence by kind of foisting himself into their apartments and homes and then just refusing to leave. It's its own kind of violence, a parasitic, you know, occupation of space. And I wonder if you could talk about like the. How he occupies these spaces and how that's its own kind of violence.

[Paula Bomer]

Absolutely. That was a real goal, was to show that the violence of stillness. And I make it, you know, the book. It's the funny part, you know, he has all these dumb things like I am a rock. But there is a lot. If someone just sits there and stays. And, and I made that, you know, or, or. And pretends that there is somehow, you know, he. In his mind or, or, or even if he's knows, let's say somewhere deep down that like this is what he's doing because. Because he can. One of the essays I wrote was called Because He Can. So once you. It's kind of like. And there, and there is the, the devil allegory. Like you open the door to some man, he sits on your couch and like that you, you're, you could be just asking for trouble, you know, it's just a sad truth. I don't know if you've heard of the book Gift, the Gift of Fear. No, that came out in the, it came out in the 90s and it's a self help book which I don't really read a lot of those, but it's also fully backed by all sorts of statistics of, of the problem of letting men into your house. It's written by a man, by the way, who, who grew up with a, A mother who was horrifically abused and then now he. Anyway, so. But the point is stillness, being a rock, just being there, holding. You're holding your ground or whatever in. And, and also. And then doing nothing for them. So not only does he come into their spaces, but he has nothing to offer and that makes them do everything for him. And so I went in with, with the power of, of stillness and just being there and not le. You know, and, and, and also the neglect. He does nothing for anybody.

[Chris Holmes]

He never does anything is one of the most horrible parts of the, of the novel.

[Paula Bomer]

So that was. So neglect is something I want to talk about. Because neglect, if you Neglect your children. You can go to jail if you. The elder abuse, you know, is just one. And that's just going to get worse as our population ages. But older people are. And I'm kind of one of them already, you know, like, we get scammed easily. We get, we get. We are isolated more. So he finds people who are a little isolated, and then he neglects them and he uses them. And a neglect for a normal adult, let's say, for the, for the women that he's dealing with, including, I guess, even his mother. You know, they're not of an age where neglect could be seen as a crime. And yet look what he does by neglect. By just neglecting them and using them. Neglecting any of their, Any of their. You know, they try. Sometimes they try to get rid of them, and then, Then he just stands. His gr. You know, stays, and then, you know. Yeah. So, I mean, you've neglected.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. You've made me think very differently about how just staying about stillness and staying there as its own. Its own kind of violence. I'm. I'm gonna probably see that everywhere now, sadly. But, yeah. And that the women that he ends up manipulating and abusing are, you know, they're outside of those ranges in which they're protected from neglect.

[Paula Bomer]

Exactly.

[Chris Holmes]

Can just neglect them.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. And so, and, and it's just, you know, I understand that, you know, there's this whole, like, well, she's a grownup. You know, she's not in any way falling into these categories of, you know, vulnerability. And yet women, just by being women, are vulnerable. I'm not, you know, and so, and regarding stillness, that's a war strategy. That's a strategy that is in ancient war manuals that. There's this book called the Art of War, and it's just about staying put is one of the biggest war strategies.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh. In Unsolved Art of War. That.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes.

[Chris Holmes]

Interesting. I didn't know that.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. And also, Marcus Aurelius talks about being a rock. I was so. And I like men.

[Chris Holmes]

Wow.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. And so men using these, like, ancient war techniques are. That's for domestic violence. Like, I truly think that that's a big part of that. That's actually a connection that they are with the women in their lives.

[Chris Holmes]

By staying put, you've got the, You've got the historical backing to, to prove that it's. It's an act of war. I mean, there is. I, I, I don't want to, like, sell this novel as, like, utterly depressing because it is very funny. Even when it's painful to be funny. And, you know, a good deal of the humor is unintentional funniness from. From Dodie and. But I. I wonder what you were thinking as you layered in all this black humor and how you wanted it to work, to reveal serious things.

[Paula Bomer]

So I went in honestly with. With the two things of, well, maybe the devil, but also like the art of war and. And other. Just, you know, trying to get men out of your house when you don't. Yeah. And then. And neglect. Just like the endless neglect, you know, not only when we talk about, what domestic labor and women, what we're also saying is that men don't do anything. So. And that was very purposeful. And regarding the dark, my first. The first draft, I was so happy to find the voice. And it. I did a reading the other night, and people were laughing so loudly, I had to. I had to constantly take breaks. I was the last reader of that night, and I never. I mean, people were just, you know, it was like someone was like, do you do stand up? Like, it is a funny. We're sitting here talking about the darkest things. But humor and darkness are twins. You know, they go very well together. But in all of, you know, I revise heavily with my editor. And then I started getting very upset. The revisions, where I'm just kind of getting into it and refining all of it, and it. Then the. The. You know, I was left with a very. Yeah, I. I'm so. I'm excited to move on to another book, let's put it that way, because it's very dark. But humor. Humor and darkness are. Go very well together. It's hard to write. I just recently read Barbara Commons, the Vet do. The Vet's Daughter was republished by New York Review of Books.

[Chris Holmes]

Hmm.

[Paula Bomer]

And that book has almost no light. It's very dark. But that's rare, I think.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, no, it's. And. And I liked the way that you talked about them as twinned, because I think that's so true. And they reveal each other, The. The. The humor and. And the horror. And so one of the questions I have, which I think is, you know, a question about the larger cultural systems that are in play that allow Dodi to do this, because it's not as though Dodi is. Is cunning. And, I mean, I guess he is in. In some ways in the sort of feral intelligence that being a man in the world, you know, gives you all these entries, but it's also the culture and the society that allows him to perpetrate these things. And so I'd be interested to hear you talk about the kind of play between an individual who is very, very nearly a Satan in his, in his perpetrations against women, but also a society that, you know, really gives him license to do these things.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes, absolutely. He's an individual, but he's part of the world and the world, yeah, from my childhood, you know, boys will be boys and that's saying isn't used anymore. But something like that doesn't really go away.

[Chris Holmes]

I think it was used with Trump in 2016. I think it was still in, still in play there.

[Paula Bomer]

It's so we've always let boys get away with things. We always, you know, we expect violence from them. And I, it's, it is definitely. And women, if they, you know, if they fight back or if they assert themselves, they're considered bitches. They're considered all, you know, on, you know, you have to play nice. And I, from an early part of my being a child, you know, I was a tomboy. I, I, I rebelled against that and I noticed that boys were free and I wanted to be free like them very early on. So it's just funny that it's, it's from childhood on, women couldn't have their own bank account in their name until like 1972 or something. And ra. In the home, you know, between a husband could not. Was not considered. There was no marital rape. It was. And that wasn't until 1992. So I was 20 something. Think about that. So it's deeply ingrained legally now, especially with women in many states not having access to birth control or abortion. So that the control over any, any aspect, it's, it's sort of capitalism. Not that I think things are much better in the former communist countries. I don't know, they def. Whatever. So I'll just speak to the US in that. The more control we have over the poor. So there's a lot of class stuff going on here in this book too. You know, the less opportunity we give the poor, the, the more we have for, you know, ourselves, the more power we have over women, the more they get to keep things to themselves and just use women as whatever they're useful for so.

[Chris Holmes]

Well, on that very optimistic note, I want to move to our final question, which is about some books that you might have in mind that you've been reading and really enjoying recently.

[Paula Bomer]

So I'm almost done with Chris Kraus's new book, the Four Spent. Hold on the Four Spent the day Together and everybody loved I love Dick. I never got Through I love Dick because had. It was one of those experimental sort of books that has a mix of. Of fiction with theory and all of that sort of stuff, which I admire, but it's not really my jam. And this book is more straightforward and talk about class. Her. This book is about class and addiction, which also in the Stalker has a. A big part of the Stalker is. Is addiction.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Paula Bomer]

Yeah. So I'm very excited that I'm finally part of the Chris Krause Club, because I wasn't. I missed. I kind of missed the boat with I Love a Dick.

[Chris Holmes]

I haven't. I haven't joined yet, so maybe I'll join with the four Spent the Day Together.

[Paula Bomer]

It's. It's. It's. She's. So it's kind of pedantic narrative, like this happens, this happened, this happens. And that I don't mind because there'. Theory, you know, then she doesn't like, quote Foucault or something. That's. I don't know why I can't handle. Yeah. And then I'm trying to put. Next on the list would be Stephanie Wambugo's book Lonely. Oh, goodness, Lonely Crowds. I'm staring right at it. Yes. And. And then I. I mentioned Barbara Commons, and I have a problem with New York Review of Books. All of their. When they reissue things, I tend to get very excited. I have way too many of their books on my shelf. Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

Because they're always amazing. Whatever they pull out of the. The archive is always amazing.

[Paula Bomer]

They do. Oh, and one other thing I read recently is Michael Clune had a. A novel come out called Pan, and I did not read that. I bought it because someone was like, you need to read his memoir. It's just been reissued by McNally Jackson. So Michael Klune wrote a. A memoir of being a heroin addict called White out, and it was brilliant. I could not put it down. It was one of those like, I'm hungry, I need to shower, but I can't put the book down.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh, my goodness.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. So that. That came out just this past year and if. Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

So that was reissued by McNally Jackson.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. I feel like they're trying to be the New York Review of Books in a good. You know, in a good way. More of. Yeah. More people reissuing things like that.

[Chris Holmes]

I love that. And I. I had heard of Pan, but I haven't heard of Whiteout, so. And your description of it means I. I kind of need to read it, I think, just for the experience.

[Paula Bomer]

Yes. He. It's Baltimore in the 90s and he has a terrible heroin problem. Yeah. And it's just really so exquisitely painful and beautiful at the same time because unlike Dodie, who you have a lot of compassion for the well, he's his own protagonist for Michael Clune.

[Chris Holmes]

Well, thank you for these wonderful recommendations and suggestions, but I really want to recommend the Stalker by Paula Bomer, which is gives you time to spend with a man that we wish wasn't so recognizable to us, but is in so many ways. But it is a funny book. It has a driving plot that just sutures us to him no matter how much we want to get away, and drives us to the wonderful and upsetting end. So, Paula Boomer, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great to talk to you.

[Paula Bomer]

Thank you so much for having me. Chris.

[Chris Holmes]

Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Paula Bomer for coming on to talk about her latest novel, the Stalker. You can find links to purchase the Stalker and all of Paula's recommended books at the website burn by books.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact as you listen. Take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books. Sam.