alexandra kleeman you too can have a body like mine Photo: Courtesy of Harper Collins Publishing

The saleswoman trailing author Alexandra Kleeman around the Space NK in SoHo is a touch nonplussed. Kleeman—29, pretty, pixieish, with expert cat-eye flicks—must have seemed like just another beauty junkie, right up to the moment she stopped browsing the store’s goods and started disserting on their semiotics. “Look at all these brands with ‘doctor’ in the name,” she points out. “Dr. Dennis Gross. Goldfaden MD. Colbert MD. It’s very convincing, isn’t it? Like, these products contain science.” Kleeman picks up a jar of Algenist’s Algae Brightening Mask. “What I like about this is, the packaging and everything, it all seems so technological, like this product came from the future. Or from space.” The saleswoman backs away. Kleeman unscrews the cap on the tester and takes a whiff of green paste. “I actually have a sample of this mask at home,” she admits. “I can attest: It is the very best face mask for freaking out your boyfriend.”

Freaked-out boyfriends and skincare marketing campaigns each play a role in Kleeman’s debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. The book is virtually impossible to summarize, a supersmart, semicomic treatise on identity and appetite that sweeps a good deal of plot and even more thinking into 304 taut pages. But the novel’s net effect is easy to describe: Alexandra Kleeman has written Fight Club for girls. Sure, guys can read You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, and indeed, they should. But Kleeman comes at her conceptual take on the deranging effects of contemporary consumer society from some specifically feminine angles. Best friendship, beauty rituals, romance played out on reality TV—these are just a few of the themes interlaced into the tale of A, a young woman who lives with a needy friend, B (who may or may not be trying to steal A’s identity), gets broken up with by her boyfriend, C (who may or may not be kind of a dick), and then joins a cult, The Church of the Conjoined Eaters, in which all the members dress like ghosts and subsist on hyper-processed snack cakes. As noted: Impossible to summarize.

alexandra kleeman Photo: Arturo Olmos

“I think I may be the most well-adjusted person you’d ever meet who thinks constantly about falling out of her life,” Kleeman says, over glasses of rosé at Tribeca boîte Smith & Mills. “And my life is pretty great! It’s not like I don’t know that.” She gestures at the wine, at the fine New York City afternoon, at the copy of her buzzed-about novel propped on the table. “This book,” she goes on, “is partly my attempt to understand why the idea of disappearing is so seductive to me. I mean, what am I trying to escape?”

There’s so much in this novel that resonated with me—its study of the dynamics of intimate relationships, the uncanny ads for beauty creams and snack food, your dramatization of the ways that culture maps itself onto bodies. Honestly, it’s hard for me to know where to start. So I guess maybe I’ll just ask you where you started?

I wanted to write a big American story. And in order to do that, I felt I had to write about transformation. You know, you turn on the TV and it’s all ads for products that will help you become a better version of yourself. Thinner. More beautiful. And also, better on the inside—more in touch, more fulfilled, upgraded spiritually somehow. So I was thinking about transformation, and I began to wonder—what if the person you worked so hard to transform into would have been horrifying to the person you’d been before?