AR: I wanted to touch on I Love Dick briefly, which has had quite a revival in the past few years. It’s been written about by Tavi Gevinson and cited by a number of the women in n+1’s recent pamphlet No Regrets as required reading. What’s your own relationship to the book like?

CK: Distant of course — it’s been fourteen years since I wrote it! But I’m proud of it and I’d never recant.

AR: Does it surprise you that it’s become such an influential text for young women? Any thoughts on why it’s regaining popularity now?

CK: I think the desire among women to depict ourselves and the world in a less compromised way has just reached a critical mass. There are so many excellent writers working along the same lines. The hypocrisy of a heterosexual “sexual freedom” completely defined by male desires and needs has really been called. 

AR: In an essay called “Manic Impositions,” Anna Watkins Fisher calls I Love Dick and Sophie Calle’s The Address Book acts of “performative parasitism.” She writes that you “feed on and destabilize patriarchal forms by seizing upon the gendered analogy of the ‘correspondence’ between the feminized parasite and her masculinized host.” What do you think about that reading?

CK: I’ve read her work, and while I don’t agree with everything Fisher says, I think it is great. Certainly the parasite/host metaphor is apt, but I wonder if it’s an exclusively gender-based thing? It could describe institutional or economic relations as well. In a sense, we’re all parasites feeding off a host.