After breaking up with her boyfriend in Chicago, Moddie moves back to her midwestern hometown of X for a new beginning, but is disillusioned with the lack of warmth her old friends give her. Everyone seems to be working at the nearby university as a teacher or researcher, and a new visiting artist both allures and frightens her. She’s caught in the cross-fires of tense parties, individual conflicts, and navigating dating as a newly single person — a hellscape of true mundanity. Halle Butler’s third novel, Banal Nightmare, is a hilarious, honest, and wickedly relatable look at adulthood.

Our Culture chatted with Halle Butler via email about complex characters, art, and what banal nightmares entail. 

Congratulations on your new novel! How does it feel that it’s so close to being out?

Thank you. You know, I’ve already read Banal Nightmare fifty or so times, so I’m much more excited about Tracy O’Neill’s new book, Woman of Interest, which just came out. So far it’s amazing and moving and funny and weird. Sarah Gerard also has a new book, Carrie Carolyn Coco, that I’ve been wanting to read for years. Juliet Escoria’s new short story collection You Are the Snake is amazing, it just came out in June. I’m dying to see the Annie Baker movie Janet Planet. I love her plays and everyone is telling me it’s great. There’s also Maxxxine, which I want to see. I just rewatched Pearl, which I really feel was criminally underrated, incredibly smart, and definitely the most interesting movie I’ve seen about female sexual anxiety and pandemic era youth experience. Mia Goth is a genius. I have a long list of things I want to read and watch and rewatch. I’m on a big Radu Jude kick. There are so many Romanian films I’d like to see. Currently I’m rewatching the movie Dogville by Lars von Trier. I’m at the scene where they smash the Precious Moments dolls. I hope that’s not a spoiler.

Moddie is this eccentric but relatable character who always seems to say the wrong thing at parties and climbs to still be invited to events while hurrying to cement her friendships. When did her voice start to form for you?

At parties.

I think you tapped into something so real when she deals with the anxiety and FOMO she gets with other people orbiting her life. After Moddie emails someone to hang out with them, she overthinks it, and you write: “I am a normal person. It is normal for people to contact other people with whom they share interests and common acquaintances. People are not secretly plotting to humiliate and harm me.” What do you think is causing all of this fear and why did you want to explore it?

Moddie is incredibly sexually repressed, and in this line, she’s responding to emailing David, the moody visiting artist, who she finds sexually appealing. She’s trying to kind of will herself into not having sexual impulses—which are normal impulses. I think it would be totally normal for Moddie to think David is attractive, since they have a lot in common, and he’s her type, I think. But she’s not correctly identifying the normal part of her situation. She’s not saying “I’m slightly into David and that’s normal.” She’s denying that part of it because she’s worried she’ll be hurt. She’s also not saying “I’m worried I’ll be hurt and that’s normal.” So, because of all of the repressed intentions, and all of the acrobatic denial, something about emailing him does not feel normal, and does not feel safe, so she’s trying to force it to feel normal by saying, in effect, “the thing I’m pretending to do is totally normal so there’s no need to feel weird.” But then at the end of the thought, she can’t help but slip in “people are not secretly plotting to humiliate and harm me” which is deeply connected to some of her past experiences, and her fears around sex. So she’s half-aware of what she’s feeling, or maybe selectively aware, but that doesn’t really do her much good. Repression is very satisfying to write about for these reasons. Characters say things they don’t know they’re saying, do things they don’t know they’re doing, and the book gets to observe how this all works together as a whole, self-contained organism. It’s often funny, too, in a very specific way.

I’m not sure she has FOMO so much as she has a lot of social paranoia, as do many of the characters, and the paranoia comes from projecting. Sometimes their projections are accurate, though, which is what makes it exciting for me, narratively.

Speaking of, the conversations in this book are so realistic and often showcase the modern world’s absurdity so well. Did you pull from anything in real life to craft them?

When I first started writing seriously, about 16 years ago, I wrote down conversations at restaurants, on the bus, anywhere I was just passing time, because I was trying to develop my ear. For a very brief while I also transcribed an hour or two a day of public access television, so it wasn’t just natural conversation I was interested in learning—or maybe ingraining is a better word. There was something strict about it. I would also try to write down conversations I’d had when I got home, and then deviate from what had actually been said, try to add in staircase wit, and then think about if that was actually better, or if it introduced something embarrassing to the interaction, and if it did, could I go from there to develop something new. I think the important thing is to become observant of both the world and of yourself, and see what flows from there. What you want to develop is insight, and (fortunately, I think) that looks different for every author and artist.

Banal Nightmare is so different from The New Me, which focused on one person; here, we get to know several of the people surrounding Moddie. Kimberly thinks anything can be solved with a cutting, deceptively honest email, Nina seems like the only person who understands Moddie, and Bethany warms to her and eventually calms her down with solid advice. Did you create the other people around their attitudes towards Moddie, or was it something else?

I don’t know that I think any of Kimberly’s emails are cutting. Most of the characters in the book think of Kimberly as kind of a buffoon, so the emails she sends—to me—are more humiliating than anything. She’s overplaying her hand. Moddie and Nina go way back, but she’s pretty absent throughout the book, which I think is an important element of Moddie’s ambient emotional state. Bethany’s role is complex. I do think she gives some decent advice, but also some very intentionally insane advice—intentionally insane on my part, I mean. Moddie is dealing with an identity crisis, and Bethany’s role is to give her an option for a new identity. I don’t know if I would describe Moddie’s attempts at performing this new identity as calm. I think of it as uneasy, erratic, vulnerable, confused, many different things. Maybe numb, at times, or shocked, but not yet stable enough to be calm. 

The characters are all dealing with different arrangements of the same fundamental problems—am I happy? Am I doing what I want? Am I loved? How do I fit into my new understanding of the world? With more characters, I can experiment with and compare different perspectives on these ideas and see what they feel like as a whole. Moddie’s perspective is central to the book, of course.

I really liked Kimberly’s often delusional dream — or maybe itch — to become a writer. She writes this crazed outline for a personal essay which includes affirmations like “Any man who doesn’t respect Woman’s power and Dignity deserves strict and unequivocal correction.” I definitely recognized some of myself in her — was there any of your experience distilled in her?

My experience of learning how to write? Kimberly is not very good at introspection, and she’s openly anti-art, but she feels entitled to a certain intellectual status, and is very upset that people don’t recognize her superiority. She’s a clown. Have I ever been a clown? Naturally. But I am passionately opposed to Kimberly’s perspective on creativity, and as her author, it amuses me to punish her for her perspective. In the aphorisms scene, where we finally see her “work” I gave her a list of cringe-inducing nonsense to show how shabby and bizarre her thinking was (these aphorisms are not going to get her national recognition, for example). Ego is a kind of cock-block for creative flow. Even if the work you want to make uses aggression and explores revenge, you have to make yourself very open and vulnerable to the process, and you have to accept the natural inevitability of failure—it’s best if you can welcome failure, because that shifts the focus off of “finally, my mom will know how smart I am” (Kimberly) to “what creative problems are coming up from my unconscious, and how can I best open myself to this experience, regardless of measurable, external outcome?” Kimberly’s world view supports the idea that you have to have permission, in the form of external validation, accolades, whatever, to make work. I am fundamentally opposed to this idea. I think that everyone has the right to make whatever they want. Even Kimberly, who isn’t even real, has the right to her silly bullshit.

Moddie is so interesting to me because she represents the personal divide between oversharing and stifling yourself. It’s like, you want to be who you actually are in the hopes that people will get your humor or comedy, but if you say something to the wrong person, their perception of you can totally shift. Did you feel this as well?

When it comes to writing, I definitely believe in taking risks. I believe in free speech and freedom of expression, and I hope to be understood correctly, definitely. I think part of what’s going on with Moddie is a little plausible deniability. A little “Who me? Just making conversation.” She is undoubtedly being incredibly hostile during the first party scene. She has her reasons, sure, but the wonderful thing about a novel versus life is that Moddie’s bad behavior is very gratifying, rather than exhausting, because it’s just a made-up fantasy for fun.

I love the title of the novel because when you take a step back and see what Moddie (and yourself) is dealing with, it does seem a little trivial — missed calls or friendships getting stiff. But in the moment, it’s hell, and you’re stuck overthinking it. Is this what you were thinking about the title too?

Yes, that’s part of it for sure. Or, that it can become very boring to experience pain and isolation over a long period of time, or the “nightmarish” element of life is commonplace—the violence, the anger, the desire for revenge, the selfishness—all of it is pretty common, and begins to feel normal. I also like the way the two words sound together. It’s fun to say. It looks good. It makes me laugh.

There is a sharp climax in the book near the middle, where the nightmare is decidedly not banal, where Moddie shares a story from her Chicago days which explains her sudden exit and trepidation towards making new friends. What did you want to explore with this?

Cultural and individual repression. The inevitability of repercussions if something is repressed. This book is set in 2018, at the height of Me Too, during the Kavanaugh trials. The scene you’re referring to happened a decade before the opening of the book. It’s not the conscious reason for her exit. It’s something old coming to the surface now that she’s in a position to come to a new understanding of herself.

Finally, what’s next? Do you have plans for anything upcoming?

I am going to finish watching Dogville, and I would like to go to the park.

Banal Nightmare is out now.