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Lexi Freiman’s first novel didn’t change her life the way she thought it might. So when she heard about a commune in Greece that taught an unconventional style of meditation, she decided to go. She and a friend arrived to find a grove that was dotted with fig and olive trees but not at all picturesque. People slept in huts or tents and sometimes left the curtain open when they showered. Cats roamed all around. On most days, Freiman woke up early for the 5 a.m. meditation, at which participants jumped up and down and screamed cathartically, then sat in silence and let the thoughts pass by. Breakfast was served in an open-air dining room swarmed by bees. In the afternoons, Freiman would write in a café down by the beach.
She ended up staying for two months. Once she made her way back to Los Angeles, where she was living at the time, she couldn’t shake her bliss. It was hard not to evangelize. On a subway escalator, she made eye contact with an intense-looking man. “I said ‘hi,’ and he said ‘hello,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Have you ever meditated?’ And he said, ‘Have you ever seen a nine-inch cock?’”
That kind of about-face — the saintly impulse, the failed execution — is all over Freiman’s writing. As her friend the novelist Steve Toltz put it, she writes “contrarian fiction” at the intersection of “Camille Paglia and Basho and someone like Fleur Jaeggy.” This month, Freiman publishes her second novel, The Book of Ayn, in which the protagonist finds herself at a fun-house version of that Greek commune after being lightly canceled for writing a problematic book. Anna, 39, is upset when her novel, a scatological comedy about the opioid crisis set in Appalachia, is received with hostility. Social media and critics alike accuse her of classism, narcissism, and “excessive moral nuance.” But she’s not particularly sorry. “I wasn’t trying to change the world here,” Anna thinks to herself. “I was just trying to write humorous fiction; trying to bring a little slapstick to the ongoing national tragedy.” A world of solutions for the newly canceled emerges almost immediately: Anna joins up with edge-lord New York City socialites, moves to L.A. to write a screenplay, and, most significantly, discovers the work of objectivist anti-hero Ayn Rand. When all that fails to make her happy or financially solvent, Greece beckons: “There was a meditation center where they taught you how to kill your ego” — and where the facilitators spout semi-Randian sound bites.
“Being canceled, in this character’s mind, is something to push back against — a narrative that makes sense of what might’ve just been not a very good book or bad sales,” says Freiman. “It’s not even a real cancellation. It’s sort of a half. But it becomes, literally, her identity. And that’s definitely part of the joke.”
Freiman, 40, has always appreciated a good prank. At her all-girls’ school in Sydney, she enjoyed making adults uncomfortable through minor acts of delinquency and classroom disruption. She found Anglo-Australian culture stiflingly conventional and now describes Sydney as annoyingly risk averse — the kind of city where they put “bouncy playground stuff” on the pavement outside bars “in case somebody gets into a fight,” she says. Her mother was a New Age psychotherapist from a family of Hungarian Jews, her father a gastroenterologist who would play footage of colonoscopies at the dinner table for a laugh. Freiman had long wanted to be an actress and spent part of her 20s touring with Australia’s national Shakespeare company, performing everywhere from the Sydney Opera House to small western mining towns.
Around this time, she got into French writer Michel Houellebecq, who’s known for his brazenly provocative novels. “His books are shocking and grotesque, and I find that exciting,” Freiman says. “That game he plays is a fascinating challenge to me.” Disillusioned after one too many failed acting auditions, increasingly interested in writing fiction, and “a bit obsessed with New York,” she did a writing M.F.A. at Columbia and spent five years working as a book editor. In 2018, she published her first novel: Inappropriation, a comedy about wokeness set at an Australian all-girls’ prep school. The characters are perpetually aware that they or someone around them might say the wrong thing. Arguments between Jewish high-school student Ziggy and her old-school feminist mother devolve into mutual accusations of Nazism. The book is hilariously rude about these earnest teenagers but also contains deep wells of understanding for their sometimes muddled attempts at self-actualization.
During the early days of the pandemic, Freiman — who has maintained a peripatetic lifestyle since leaving the U.S. in 2020 and now writes for Australian TV — found herself back in Australia living with her mother. She started getting curious about an author she had never read before: Ayn Rand. “I had written this satire about identity politics, and I was like, What can I do next to really seal my fate?” she says. “I thought, Oh, everybody hates Ayn Rand. I should take a look.” She found Rand’s fiction unbearably didactic and narrow in its ideas, but the stubborn defenses of personal freedom in books like The Virtue of Selfishness gave her energy; Rand’s audaciousness reminded her of what she liked about Houellebecq. “The provocative bits have a ring of truth to them,” Freiman says — what, in The Book of Ayn, Anna calls “the dizzy zing of the counterintuitive.” Freiman found Rand’s philosophy also had an unlikely affinity with the gurus and thinkers she was reading at the time, such as Alan Watts and Jiddu Krishnamurti. She sees the limitations in Rand’s thinking: Where a spiritual teacher might recommend meditation or acts of service, Rand would consider the end goal to be blunt capitalist achievement. But still, “I got into the idea that there’s a kind of individual responsibility for crafting our own happiness,” Freiman says, especially a happiness that doesn’t involve marriage or children, neither of which she is much interested in.
The Book of Ayn is a joke-a-minute satire with characters motivated mostly by vanity and defensiveness. Anna reaches for transcendence, but it’s a clumsy, half-hearted reach, and many scenes at the commune have to do with its toilet stalls and their disturbingly audible “swift ploppings of shit.” Anna ends up feeling alienated by the showy enlightenment of others, like the friend who eats salad while maintaining unbroken eye contact with her new lover, and she holds on tight to her bruised ego. When I ask whether a specific cancellation prompted the book, a look of worry passes over Freiman’s face. “Okay, this is what I’ve been dreading,” she says.
While the new novel wasn’t inspired by a particular incident, Freiman tells me she did have a brush with a famous canceled person last year. She had written an essay about Louis C.K.’s public erasure, in which she wondered how aware he was of his impact on the women who accused him; she says the essay asked how much we’re at fault when we aren’t yet conscious that something is wrong. Louis’s abrupt disappearance disturbed her. She wonders if there’s something “unhealthy about the need to punish and erase.” Freiman was unable to publish the essay — which she allows “probably didn’t have enough of an argument” — and she decided to send it to him directly. They emailed for a while, then met for lunch. Their conversation was friendly, though Louis didn’t disclose much about his state of mind. Instead, they talked about ego death and the spiritual parts of comedy.
Halfway through The Book of Ayn, Anna has a realization: “Finally, I let myself think it: Ayn Rand had no sense of humor.” Freiman treats Rand — who once scoffed in a letter that “not taking anything too seriously is the chief rule Americans adhere to” — as both the central joke and deadly serious, an object of derision and a legitimate philosopher. She bobs up as a bug-eyed woman with a prideful smirk. Anna reads her, writes a TV pilot about her, recommends her to alt-right podcasters and meditators. For someone like Anna, objectivist ideas about personal freedom are simply useful — as Freiman sees it, “Ayn Rand doesn’t like the idea of sacrificing individuals for the good of the group or some abstract idea of the collective.” At the same time, for all of her defenses of free speech, Rand did testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She “would’ve 100 percent canceled everybody and did,” Freiman says.
Freiman admits she is drawn to discomfort. Recently, she spent some time in Budapest, where her mother was born, taking a language course alongside “a bunch of young Russian men who had fled the situation there.” Her next novel, she thinks, might be about someone on a pilgrimage looking for a person who may or may not be learning Hungarian. She found the country a strange place, its politics under Viktor Orbán brutal. It wasn’t enough to keep her away. “As a writer,” she says, “I find toxicity quite compelling.”
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