A Touch of Jen, written by Brooklyn College MFA alum Beth Morgan, centers Alicia and Remy, two codependent Brooklynites miserable in their coupledom but bonded by a shared infatuation with the titular Jen—a breezy influencer with freckled boobs and adult braces whose appeal is equated to that of a “hot shark.”
Jen’s existence is initially limited to the social media realm and fantastical cameos in Alicia and Remy’s sexual role play, but the obsession takes on a new dimension when they run into her IRL at an Apple store. Jen, glowing with health and unselfconsciously smelling of B.O. in a way that Remy finds “terrifying,” invites them on a surf vacation in the Hamptons. Alicia and Remy acquiesce. And, as often happens when one is faced with the living, breathing embodiment of their infatuation, all semblances of normalcy collapse in a domino-like fashion.
Arranged as a triptych, the book traverses genres, fading from contemporary hipster romance to class farce to sci-fi thriller to noirish horror story. Unlike most works of horror, though, the secondary characters and entities in this novel possess a specificity that propels the plot forward. This includes Alicia and Remy’s Pinterest-using roommate, Jake, who possesses “frat-boy calves” and uses “boink” to describe the act of sex; Jen’s super chill boyfriend, Horus, who boasts eyes “the mint color of Lady Liberty” and an expression that “is moneyed and free of pain;” and Alicia’s “spod,” a self-contained spa/pod that she builds to aid her transformation into the ultimate iteration of her best self.
Since its release this past July, A Touch of Jen has been described as a “slasher gore-fest,” “bananas good,” and “a fabulous monster” by assorted literary greats. In late December, Morgan and I chatted over Zoom about dog walking, Jake Gyllenhaal, taking mushrooms (“Oh my god, I love them,” says Morgan. “I LOVE them.”), and the perils of pursuing self-actualization.
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LA: You were walking dogs part-time before you sold A Touch of Jen. Did that job influence either the content of what you wrote or your writing process?
BM: People always say novelty is the best thing for creativity, [and] I think that that’s true for me. But dog walking is literally all about routine and walking the same streets over and over again, every single day. So in a sense that was kind of stifling—I just wanted to be thinking about anything that wasn’t dogs. A Touch of Jen has little to no dog content. And the book [that I’m currently working on] has a very small amount of dog content, but nothing around dog walking as a job. I don’t anticipate that I will ever write directly about any job that I’ve ever had because it feels too immediate to me. A big part of what I’m excited about writing is stuff that’s outside of my experience.
LA: One of my favorite scenes is the one where Jake Gyllenhaal walks into The Hungry Goat, the café where Alicia works. Was that scene inspired by a real encounter?
BM: If you live in New York, and especially if you’ve worked in Soho at any point, Jake Gyllenhaall is just the celebrity that you always see. I used to work in a vegan mattress store that I think was close to his apartment, and he would sometimes wander in and not acknowledge us at all and kind of mumble into his phone. And so I thought that that was very funny. My husband saw him chewing on his headphone mic and gave me that detail to use, and much later we actually found an article all about that exact habit! Apparently there’s all these photos of him chewing on his mic.
LA: You’ve said that you took mushrooms when you were trying to figure out the novel’s ending. Is that a vetted writing technique, or was that the first time you’ve taken mushrooms for artistic purposes?
BM: My personal feeling is that you shouldn’t take mushrooms to produce a certain result. This is what I say, but what I do, clearly, is different. It’s not like I took mushrooms and immediately thought of a good ending, but afterwards I was in a more open state of mind where I could sit down and brainstorm a ton of different ideas and be a bit more open—and then I was able to come up with something. I don’t know that it’s about necessarily taking the mushrooms themselves so much as it is about disrupting your patterns. Mushrooms are really good at disrupting cyclical or habitual thought patterns.
LA: There are so many subcultures and mini worlds that you explore in the book: the self-help community, the influencer world, surfing, skincare enthusiasts, foodservice, grief counseling. Did you already know about these niche arenas, or did writing them require research?
BM: I had to do more research for some things than for others. Grief counseling is not something I’ve ever experienced. And all of my research was really haphazard, where I was looking at various conversations on public forums. [I was] reading about different types of grief counseling services that were available. I have some experience surfing, but I have never been surfing in the Hamptons, and I’m definitely not an expert and I can’t cross-step or anything. If there’s something that interests me, then I’ll find an excuse to write about it, just so I can spend some time going all over the internet, finding things out about it.
LA: There are a lot of truths in A Touch of Jen, from bigger ones about states of denial when it comes to mourning, to much smaller, more granular day-to-day observations. I especially appreciated the moment when Remy realizes that women are always wet in ads.
BM: Oh my god, I always wonder how that line’s gonna hit in 20 years. People are going to be like, “What do you mean girls in ads are always wet?” But they ARE! They’re always wet. They look like one big lip or something.
LA: Reading it, I was like, “Wow, that is so true. How did they all get so wet?”
BM: It’s also a very now thing. In 20 years, it’s gonna be like they’re…dry. All the girls are gonna be super dry. Dry as husks! It’s gonna be mystifying why they used to be wet.
LA: In A Touch of Jen, the whole story feels very controlled, despite going to a supernatural place, because the prose style is simple and tight. Is that something you were thinking about while writing?
BM: It was definitely a stylistic choice. It’s not a natural prose style for me, but I had a lot of fun with it in the beginning when I was still playing around with different ideas for the book…And then I hit upon this tighter style and it seemed fun and right, but I didn’t know that it was going to take me to this supernatural place. I also knew that I wanted to portray these characters as much as possible with exterior signs—to treat them like performers on a stage or people that you’re watching on screen. Because so much of the way that Remy and Alicia are interacting with the world is in terms of watching other people on screens or feeling the unavailability of the interiority of other people.
LA: Limerence has always been a pervasive theme in literature, from really early works like Pygmalion and Galatea to fairy tales like Snow White. A Touch of Jen is the most of-the-moment literary depiction of obsession that I can think of, especially in the way it utilizes social media and technology. Did you set out to write about infatuation in a modern way?
BM: I had the very unserious passing thought: “Oh my God, it’s so much easier to stalk everybody now…You can take [obsession] to this next level.” Which is an extremely ordinary thought—it’s not even close to an insight. And the first part of the idea [of A Touch of Jen] was something around obsession. And because I was writing it to be a contemporary novel, I was thinking, “If these were people who I knew, how would they go about pursuing this obsession? How would it work?” And then, slowly, I realized that images were a much bigger part of this obsession than they might have been 50 years ago.
LA: Obsession definitely has different channels these days.
BM: Yeah. Sometimes people will make choices [while writing novels] not to talk too much about social media. Or not to be specific about the ways that people are interacting with each other on their phones. And I understand that choice, because it can be distracting. As soon as you start talking too much about the ways that people are interacting with their technology, then you might be an “internet novel.” [A Touch of Jen] has been called an “internet novel,” but I was just trying to write something that felt real [and] put as much texture in there as possible. So talking granularly about the ways that people interact with their technology felt like an intuitive choice for me. This is how we live now. In 10 years, we may not even think of things in terms of the internet novel or not.
LA: Technological norms are also changing so quickly. I’m thinking of the scene where Remy is in Jen’s bathroom, scrolling through old photos of her on Instagram and liking them—maybe in 10 years that won’t be a faux pas. But, right now, it’s horrifying.
BM: Yeah, maybe in 10 years it will be rude if you’re not liking people’s photos while you’re in [their] bathroom! It’s so hard to know.
LA: So many people talk about trying to improve oneself in a positive, aspirational light, but this novel functions as a warning about the narcissism inherent in the self-actualization industrial complex. What led you to want to write about its negative side effects?
BM: I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a Virgo and am therefore a very detail-oriented, plan-oriented person who is drawn to self-optimization. It’s a beguiling notion. And I feel like I’m surrounded by people who are also struggling to find some kind of meaning and financial stability in their lives, and the way that they have the most control over that is in the ways that they control themselves. So it’s easy to then think that you possess all of the answers to your own destiny.
And, maybe because I have also recognized the ways in which my own desires to optimize have warped my own sense of reality at times, I think I have been cynical about focusing on the self to the degree that you’re not thinking about the way that your actions affect others. I still feel suspicious of that. I think that the ways in which people succeed or don’t succeed are often not dependent on themselves, but on things much larger than them. Sometimes the ways to change your life require less glamorous, more time-intensive work that’s more collective. And it’s easy to lose sight of that when you are focusing so much on trying to improve yourself.
Through writing the book, I did have a little bit more sympathy than I expected for the characters who are trying to improve their lives and who are…also hungry for something spiritual. I [now have] a lot of compassion for the type of hunger that they’re experiencing, even though the ways in which the characters are feeding these particular spiritual hungers are quite flawed.
LA: Lastly, what’s the weirdest/funniest piece of feedback you’ve received post-publication?
BM: I guess the funniest—and the most gratifying—thing to me about putting this out in the world is when I’ve gotten reactions that are totally different. Because that means that the book is its own thing that people are reacting to, as opposed to a specific narrative project that spits out a predictable result in the reader. Among people who liked the book, some of them are like, “I loved how unlikable these characters were. I loved hating them. They were the absolute WORST and I LOVED every second of it.” And some people are like, “These characters were so endearing. You learned to love them over time.”