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Katherine Faw Morris: It’s been going great. I didn’t really expect anyone to read Young God, but I got Amazon’s Best Book of May, which is amazing. I think a lot of the customers are mad about it still, like, “What is this?” I’ve been doing a lot of press; I haven’t really done any readings. I just had the book launch last night with this rapper, Deniro Farrar, who’s from Charlotte. So that was great, 'cause there are very few rappers from North Carolina.
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No, I went to one of his shows. My husband’s the creative director of The Source, a big hip-hop magazine, so I reached out to him. It was great to have those two worlds come together, because they never really overlap. I think it was good for everyone. He did a little performance and some a cappella rapping.Is writing your full-time job right now?
Yeah, I just write. I do some proofreading on the side, but luckily my husband has a full-time job. I’m really lucky. And I live in the cheap apartment I’ve lived in forever. This city is crazy, crazy expensive and getting more so every year.Would you ever leave?
No, I never want to leave. I will try to figure out how to stay here, always. There’s nowhere else I’d—well, I like New Orleans a lot, but the whole hurricane thing is an issue. Otherwise, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d live. Because I hate driving.Driving is what I miss most when I’m living in the city.
When I have to do it, which is whenever I go home, it’s a nightmare. People should stay away from me when I’m on the road. I drive like once a year, and it’s really bad.I’ve just been thinking a lot about how Young God is the perfect title for the novel. There’s the word “young,” with all the vulnerability and innocence involved in that, followed by “God,” which obviously has the connotation of power and control. It feels important that Nikki is a young character. Why did you end up settling on the age of 13?
I think 13, at least for me, is the age when everything changes. It’s puberty. It’s when you first become a teenager. It’s interesting because you’re in that in-between world where you’re still kind of a child but now you’re a sexual being who’s able to… I mean, you could have babies—not that you should—but you’ve entered the world of womanhood, basically. You’re this feral creature. I think all 13-year-olds are feral creatures. They’re just trying to figure things out. So I thought that was really fertile territory to write from. I wanted to write a book where the girl is not a victim, and I thought it would hammer that home if she were also incredibly young. Then it’s like, What is happening here? Nikki is such an animal.
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It’s not autobiographical. I was not a 13-year-old drug dealer. I never murdered anyone or pimped out any of my friends. It is psychologically very honest and true to me. I think anytime you write anything it’s almost impossible to take yourself out of it. No character is one-to-one, based on anyone I knew. But a lot of them are based on combinations of people I knew. I never knew a Nikki, though.Kind of a bummer, though.
I know, right? I hope she exists somewhere. She’s mainly me, but she’s also not me. It’s a hard thing to get across. I mean, I grew up in this town where a lot of this was happening, and I hung out with drug addicts and drug dealers, and I was doing a lot of drugs myself when I was a teenager, so I was always around that world. But I was sort of one-foot-in, one-foot-out because I came from a pretty middle-class family and I knew I wanted to come to New York. So I never got caught up in it the way other people did, but it was seductive.I heard you were at NYU studying film at one point. When I learned that, I wasn’t surprised, because Young God feels so cinematic. How much was film, or thinking about film, an influence on your writing process?
Yeah, I did one full year at Tisch, the film school, and I realized pretty quickly that I hated collaborating with anyone. I love movies, though. I watch a ridiculous amount of them. One movie that really inspired Nikki, whose physical imagery I always had in the back of my mind, was Christiane F., which is this weird, cult German movie.
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Well, you should totally try to see it. It’s not on Netflix or anything, I don’t know how you’d see it, but you totally should. It’s a true story about a 13-year-old prostitute junky in the 70s, in the Berlin subway system. It was made into this movie; it was very realistic. David Bowie did the soundtrack. It’s pretty awesome. And she has pink hair throughout the movie, so Nikki’s hair was an homage to that.Everyone always makes the Winter’s Bone comparison when talking about Young God, but I know you list Joy Williams as an influence. I started reading her and found that she made much more sense as a comparison for me. You two write about women in the same way—where they’re both vulnerable and also very not at the same time.
I love Joy Williams, especially her early ones. She has this story called “The Train” that I’m obsessed with. It’s about these two 11-year-old girls on this Amtrak train, just being really cruel to each other. I’m really interested in the friendship between girls, and how crazy and complicated that is, especially when you’re a teenager. And the way Joy Williams writes, her sharpness, I see myself more influenced by her than the genre of…Southern Gothic?
Right.Or whatever you’re getting referred to as.
“Country noir” is what I’ve heard recently.I was also intrigued by the character of Levi, who exists as this pair of eyes always watching Nikki but never present with her until that final, terrible scene. I’m curious what you wanted his role to be in the novel, and his own status as a “young god” in the sense that he’s always observing Nikki from afar.
I wanted him to be an innocent character that was unsullied by what was going on. And he’s someone Nikki is incredibly jealous of, whose life to us doesn’t seem that great, but to her it’s a stable home; there’s food in the kitchen.
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Yeah, I wanted him to be the glimpse of the life she could have had. But she can’t deal with that; she has to corrupt him because it’s overwhelmingly not OK with her. So in the end she has to pull him into her life. That to me is the most heartbreaking part of it. He willingly goes; he looks up to her. Nikki is glamorous, like her father was. That’s a psychological part of the book where you look back, you didn’t even see it when you were writing it, all the parallels to your own life, and you’re like, Fuck. I had a lot of empathy for Levi as a character. And Angel, actually.I think Renee’s section is one of the hardest parts in the book to read. She makes the accusation that Coy Hawkins raped her, and then… Well, I mean, it’s a full stop in the book because you’re reading it, and then this happens, and then suddenly everything changes. There’s an ongoing strain of violence against women throughout the novel. Was that something you went into the book wanting to talk about?
Not super consciously, but I think that was part of the victimization. Nikki sees all the women around her are pretty victimized, and she wants a different path, so she does something that’s very male, because that’s all she sees. She sees girls pimped out or being treated poorly. It’s obviously a very exaggerated look at what can happen to you as a teenage girl. You’re so vulnerable in a way that boys just aren’t. I read somewhere that the biggest threat to a teenage boy is people who don’t like him, people who want to get in a fight with him. But the biggest threat to a teenage girl is the people who love her.
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Yeah, totally. The problem is, you think you know what you’re doing and you don’t. And you’re overpowered physically. I think sex is a very powerful thing, and I think women do and should use it to their advantage. But especially when you’re an older girl hanging out with older men—you think you have this figured out, but at any moment it could flip over and really fuck you up. It’s a very precarious situation where like, yes, you’re getting free drugs but this guy is 35, you know what I mean?You’ve said that you’ve used every drug Nikki takes in the novel. Is that still something you’re doing?
You know, I had a wild period when I was a teenager, and I went to rehab. I worked to try to be a different person. I’ve been a good girl for a long time now. I still do party a little bit, but not like I used to. It’s hard when I go home too, because they’re all still doing it. It’s like, “Welcome home!” It’s hard.

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it’s in Spanish. “She left me when I was a baby,” Nikki says. She doesn’t know why she just said that. She smells something like burning ketchup. “You smell that?” The little girl says nothing. Nikki looks at the bed sheet. “What is it?” “Papi,” the little girl says. Nikki stands up and the girl cuts her eyes from the TV. For a second they stare at each other. The little girl is not going to be as pretty as her. If she touched the little girl she would be gooey, Nikki thinks. Nikki sits down again. When the bed sheet opens Coy Hawkins is carrying a different grocery bag than the one he came in with. He snaps his fingers at Nikki. “My daughter,” Coy Hawkins says. The man looks at her briefly.***“How much did you get for it?”“Half a ki of heroin,” Coy Hawkins says.Nikki’s eyes dart to the bag between her feet.“What?”On the way home they stop and buy party balloons.