So, I’ve heard the buzz that Simon & Schuster is about to become the A24 of publishing, whatever that means. I haven’t had much faith in the word indie since, well, ever, but the imprint’s new publisher, Sean Manning, has a noble enough goal: to get more people, younger people, doing more reading. He’s clear about his approach: “The persona of the author can be very marketable, right?” he tells Cat Zhang for The Cut. One of these personas he’s employing (or exploiting) for a new video content series Bookstore Blitz: 28-year-old Brooklyn writer Sophie Kemp, who just published her debut novel, Paradise Logic, with S&S on March 25, 2025.
Kemp’s Paradise Logic refracts through the travails of 23-year-old Reality Kahn living in Gowanus after graduating college. Her problem: she really needs a hobby (outside of making zines and having sex with her friend Emil). Her solution: she is going to find herself a boyfriend and she is going to become the most perfect girlfriend who has ever lived. Other things we know about Reality: she’s a “punk rock chick,” her semblance of a career is acting in waterslide commercials for New Jersey water parks, she has a “low quantitative IQ,” her given name is Valerie; Reality was first the name of her family dog.
Reality’s quest to become the perfect girlfriend has been divined since the moment she was, as Kemp writes, bornth. A comment on the inevitability of violence as ordained by being born into the position of woman or justification for the novel’s Miltonic underpinnings? Probably both. She doesn’t schlep it through the desert and follow the advice of a talking snake for nothing. But shit doesn’t get really weird until Reality enrolls in a psychopharmaceutical study for a drug called ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) (a name that is mentioned only ever in full, twenty-three times through the 250-page novel). ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) is advertised simply: BE THE GIRLFRIEND OF HIS DREAMS.
Immediately, it becomes clear that Kemp’s prose is obviously and intentionally affected. She soars through a particular type of reference that I can only characterize, reductively, as a Faulknerian-stream-of-consciousness-meets-speaking-in-tweets: “I took my house keys and dug them into my wrists. I’ll show Soo-jin who is home all the time when she has to call 911 because I’ve slit my wrists!!! Ha ha ha. Oh goodness. I was really being this really specific kind of violent girl today.” Like her name would suggest, Reality Kahn is mediated by layers of performance, both formal and textual. Paradise Logic is filled with extradiegetic meditations—it is framed by a narrator (not Reality) who simultaneously portends and moralizes Reality’s choices, urging the readers to “read on, man.” Some interludes take us into the voice of ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) advertisements and Reality’s childhood alike. Kemp includes messy pen drawings, multiple-page chapter titles. The breaks between paragraphs are first smiley faces (☺) and later sad faces (☹). Sometimes random strings of heart emojis (♥︎♥︎♥︎♥︎) will appear, seemingly at random, in the text.
While she may be a new novelist, Kemp is an adept, masterful critic: incisive, lucid and arrestingly direct. Paradise Logic is a masterclass in absurdism, yes, and an exercise in persona writing. Its core question is a compelling one: desire is not—and cannot be—logical. What would it mean for someone to treat it as if it were? Through a ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR)-induced trip—one that leads Reality out of Gowanus and into Lynchian, egg-shaped medical halls and fantastical deserts with talking snakes—Kemp demonstrates what every flirtation with absurdism requires: pushing something to its furthest logical extreme, and not being afraid to get freaky with it. Kemp certainly gets freaky with it, but sometimes at the cost of getting real with it. Paradise Logic has substance; it just prefers style. And it is simultaneously bolstered and undercut by that choice.
It is not lost on me that Paradise Logic’s target audience is a group to which I belong; I am in my early 20s, and what’s more, I have lived in New York for my entire life. On a good day, I consider myself a writer. On every day, I consider myself a very Online person. In an interview with critic Greta Rainbow for The Creative Independent, Kemp said, “My taste was and is geared towards writers like Kafka or Donald Barthelme or Kathy Acker. How can I make my stupid story about being a young woman in New York more exciting?” Mine too!—but this doesn’t mean I always enjoyed being pandered to. I find it difficult to make myself interested in conversations about types of girls, perhaps because I’ve had enough of them myself. At best, Paradise Logic’s prose is something of a mirror—at least for the “really famous girls… And early-twenties nympho sluts” Kemp imagines as its readers. At worst, it’s more than a little tiresome.
Though Reality tells us her story as it happens, she’s intentionally obscured, always performing a version of herself. The Reality Kahn who constructs all of her dialogue with exaggerated formality (she’s buying Ariel an energy drink from the deli—“This would be my greatest pleasure! I will now go to the deli to obtain nourishment for your hard work”), is performing something entirely different than the Reality that narrates her story to us. Her voice remains to flippant, half-jejune as ever, even as she reaches the devastating revelations of her past traumas: “Ugh. I tried to not let Soo-jin’s comments bother me, because it was so clear that she was jealous, but I felt sad. Me and Soo-jin had been through a lot together. Each time I got raped in college she was always so nice to me after.” In a more conventional narrative voice, this revelation would hurt. In Kemp’s, it is absolutely gutting. This is the payoff of Kemp’s affectation.
We can’t write Reality off as crazy, illogical, or deluded as easily as we may want to. Not only do we get lambent glimmers of her experiences with a masculinist world that has been violent to her, but we also see the new world that she enters—as Ariel’s girlfriend (spoiler alert!)—consistently affirming the stakes of her quest. Reality applies her logic of desire to her female friendships: girlfriends are a selective group to which a girl can belong as soon as she does the noble work of finding herself a boyfriend. “When you see girlfriends,” she says, “it’s important to consider your approach. You don’t want to surprise or disturb them, for example. You want to appear natural, cucumber-cool. As if you’ve always been there. You have to prove you’re just like them.” She rehearses possible conversation topics. And yet, when Reality meets the girlfriends in question, they behave exactly as she predicted. They say things like, “Hey, lady! You look like one of us,” and “One day you’ll be soft all around like us. The ideal girlfriend has a body that says, You can put a baby in me whenever. Do you want to be like this?” The crux of the satire is that it follows the script. Reality’s feeling of belonging is palpable, honest—perhaps a bit on-the-nose—but Kemp commits to it.
Yet through all the levels of performance and mediation, we lose something about Reality. For all of Paradise Logic’s jokes, it is clear that Kemp is in on them. It’s less clear where Reality falls. Kemp reminds us more than once that she has a “low quantitative IQ,” but she also went to college, where she shaved her head and listened to Radiohead. She is utterly deluded—but with a lucid set of references and, at times, an accidentally poetic grasp of her own feelings. It becomes difficult, though, to believe that the same woman who describes a television commercial as one“where a lawyer tells you how to get money for various workplace injuries. It was starring a woman wearing a construction hat who reveals she has gotten a boo-boo from a bulldozer, and thanks to the lawyer who goes by the name of Mazotti Esq., she is now flushed with funds,” is the same girl who can describe herself as “A Sabine to be claimed by a Roman youth,” or call the music she hears as “krautrock-inspired” due to the “proggy drones,” or reflect after sex, “When I touched my face I noticed that I had become a giant wound.” Reading, I feel like I’m entering a game with Kemp: she has every right to withhold and disclose parts of Reality at will. I don’t have to know the whole truth—but I do need to believe that Kemp does. The stakes are high in a book so hellbent on its own style; choices that read as misjudgments rather than intentions carry a higher cost. At times, it seems that Paradise Logic’s set of referents is more Kemp’s than her character’s.
In stumbling for their own set of referents, critics have aligned Paradise Logic with the picaresque tradition. I’ll take it—Kemp calls Reality’s story a quest, plot, while overarching, takes a backseat to episodes and interludes. Reality is roguish more than once, and the society surrounding her is certainly hostile, even if she doesn’t always register it. I’d say it reads more like a horror story—a ghost story, of sorts. It would be reductive to say that Reality’s problem is a simple case of haunting or possession, though the divined voice in her head—singing things like “It is not Ariel who will be the boyfriend.” and “It is a place called Mount Nothing that you are meant to go”—does gesture towards a phantasmic force beyond her. But that’s just Society, I guess.
What I’m talking about is something more embedded. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House comes to mind, not just for its staging of femininity under pressure, rotting from the inside out, but for Jackson’s rendering of Eleanor’s all-consuming desire to be wanted. She enters the titular Hill House—a dank, horrifying place—and for the first time she can remember, she feels truly happy. She is needed, claimed, by the force of the place and by its residents. Reality insists, time and time again, how happy she is—happy to be accepted by the other girlfriends, happy to be in Ariel’s presence even when he treats her terribly, happy that ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR) is working so beautifully, happy that the meaning she’s been searching for has finally arrived. Happy happy happy, happier than she ever imagined she could be.
I have not forgotten how The Haunting of Hill House ends. Eleanor, exiled from the house for her irrational behavior, swerves her car into a tree at the end of the driveway and ends her own life. While Kemp’s novel doesn’t stage demise in quite as imminent a way, it still offers Reality little in the way of escape from the gendered violence surrounding her. Does her relationship with Ariel end?—of course it does. But just as being a girlfriend couldn’t save Reality, neither can ceasing to be one.
The conceit that Kemp sets up is something of a Catch-22: she’s created a nearly unreadable text that is, on all counts, worth reading. Yet if the text were to sacrifice the qualities that make it unreadable, it would likely lose much of what makes it worthwhile, what makes it hers. Maybe it’s too speculative to say that is the point, and maybe it would give too much credit to Kemp to suggest she’s deliberately crafted an impossible situation for her first novel. But it doesn’t quell the despair that she has embedded into the pages. The truth is that Paradise has no logic, and desire doesn’t follow a script—not one imposed by the conventions of heterosexuality, and not one printed in the pages of Girlfriend Weekly.
Paradise Logic is defter than I imagined, eschewing most criticism as little more than a simple misalignment of sensibilities. Most of what feels tiring and affected about the book turns out to be intentional, meticulous, and generative, producing the tensions that were most stirring. Writing from a persona is always a balancing act; Kemp proves that affection doesn’t foreclose affect.
Sarah Moroz at Jezebel asks Kemp if she’s worried that the humor might be lost on readers who are unfamiliar with her style. Kemp replies, “I just don’t really care. I don’t write to make things more accessible for people.” Sure—but there’s a critical elision we keep making: just because Kemp doesn’t care, doesn’t mean that we can’t. Paradise Logic is a messy and particular debut effort from a writer who has found her voice, even if she’s still figuring out how to use it. And yet it also stumbles upon something singularly honest. It’s the story of a 23-year-old girl giving everything to her desires.
I’ll be 23 in a year—I buy it! Perhaps a more honest review of Paradise Logic would begin as follows: There’s a boy I know who kind of writes like Sophie Kemp. I’ll tell you about him. Read on, man.
Madelyn Dawson is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Herald for the 2024-25 school year. Previously, she was a Features desk editor, a Culture desk editor, a copy editor, and a senior writer.
