Vladimir author Julia May Jonas: “We are imprisoned by our obsessions” | imaginary

WWhen we met at a café near her Brooklyn apartment, three weeks before the TV version of her first novel, Vladimir, premiered on Netflix, Julia Mae Jonas felt the expected “mixture of terror, excitement, and dread.” The series stars Rachel Weisz as a 50-something professor obsessed with her younger colleague Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall, with executive production by Sharon Horgan. Combining exciting sex with complex issues, it’s bound to spark the kind of online discourse that a novelist should avoid for fear of being derailed by his or her next project.

“I have to be careful about putting myself too far out,” says Jonas, who was very active and funny on Twitter until mid-2022, shortly after her book came out, and that’s when she realized that dealing with the reception to her work wasn’t wise. “It’s not that I’m so enlightened. It’s just that I know that it’s never enough. If someone told me they loved my book, I would ask, ‘What part?’ Did it change your life? Is it the best book you’ve ever read? She says while laughing. “Ego can never be fulfilled!”

A critical and commercial success, Vladimir was praised for its intelligent exploration of a narrator who becomes obsessed with a colleague at a difficult time in her life. She faces severe criticism for refusing to publicly condemn her husband John when students demand his resignation over several affairs. A playwright for more than two decades, Jonas says she is drawn to “unsolvable questions” and “intractable dilemmas.” Here, marriage was open, and relationships preceded rules that explicitly prohibited relationships with students. In the narrator’s eyes, they were consensual. She seems more bothered by women than her husband. “When I was in college, the lust I felt for my professors was overwhelming,” the funny and angry inner monologue reads. “I find this post hoc insult, as a female colleague.”

The narrator is also consumed with shame about aging and great insecurity, because she believes she has lost the ability to arouse desire. Which is related to another unsolvable question: “How do you find true desire beyond staring or looking?” Jonas asks. Into this situation steps Vladimir, the portly experimental novelist, who is shown in the foreground asleep with one arm tied to a chair in the narrator’s cabin. As we read on and trace the narrator’s unraveling, we discover how he got there.

Part of the book’s impact lies in its refusal to flatten moral complexity. Jonas says she didn’t start with a thesis, but wanted to include opposing viewpoints “in relation to each other, in the way I feel like they exist in the world.” One of the main topics is #MeToo. “There’s an element of the #MeToo campaign that is fundamentally focused on: how do we punish these men, and I think that should be based on the severity of the crime, and dealt with in very specific ways,” she says. What the book seeks to explore instead is: “What do you do as a female person, as a result? How do we contextualize it for ourselves? How do we organize our thoughts about our sexuality and move forward?”

The novel also explores generational divisions in academia, a tension she experienced firsthand, having taught at Skidmore College and New York University. “I’ve faced a form of criticism like: ‘This is misogynistic, this is racist, this is heteronormative’. I often say to my students: ‘You’re depriving yourself of the benefits that this work can give you.'” Knigerek’s dismissal, she says, “isn’t that profound as a way to approach things.” Her particular influences include writers who are sometimes labeled as problematic, including John Updike. “I’ve always found it interesting: Really? This is how some men look at women? amazing. “I don’t agree with that, but I’m interested.”

COunas grew up in New Jersey and went on to study acting at New York University. She quickly realized she couldn’t handle audition rejections, so she turned to playwriting and, in 2003, launched her own small theater company. She says studying in the early 2000s gave her “old school” ideas about seeing art through the morals of the creator. “I come from the school of criticism that sees the artist as dead. But that’s not the way people look at things now. And I think that’s a good thing too. I wouldn’t talk about a pulpit either way.”

She had tried writing novels before, but didn’t have time to write in short, daily bursts until after theaters closed due to the pandemic. The book flowed quickly, in part because its seeds lay in an earlier play in which characters, including an older professor, talked about desire, Nabokov, and academics.

Some critics have described Vladimir as a modernization of Lolita, although Jonas says Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark had the strongest influence. “Lolita” is a terribly topical topic at the moment, and has been mentioned several times in the Epstein files; The sex offender reportedly kept a copy next to his bed. “It is absolutely absurd to me that there is any part of this book that anyone would consider supportive of Humbert’s actions,” Jonas says. “I can’t imagine someone being that stupid.” That reading, however, “absolutely exists, I can’t wrap my mind around it. It’s a gross misunderstanding.”

What inspires her about Nabokov is the idea of ​​”how we are imprisoned by our obsessions. Nabokov was interested in how people might be blind to the humanity of others, or destroy their lives because their obsession changes their view of reality.” Iris Murdoch was another influence, along with “the intensely focused, emotional, body-based, feeling-oriented novels of Elena Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg.”

She points out that the TV show is its own entity. Weisz added new layers to the story. She is “at least in my opinion, one of the most beautiful women in the world,” yet she plays someone full of insecurities about aging and desire. In Weisz’s performance, she says, “You see how she’s allowed herself to be overcome by this attachment to Vladimir, but she doesn’t have the confidence to go and get him. There’s a vulnerability in fragility.” Another change was the addition of Laila, who represents the unnamed complainant from the book. It was important to “hear her voice and get some of her experience.” Although the show doesn’t portray John as a monster, Layla’s presence reminds us that he “took advantage of those girls… and didn’t see her as a whole person.”

Jonas is now editing her second novel, Diana, due out in the spring of 2027, another manic tale about two actor friends, “one of whom had her career going well, and the other who had to reevaluate her life plan.” She will also be performing at Lincoln Center this summer called “A Woman Among Women,” inspired by Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.”

Outside of work, she takes care of her children, aged 12 and 4. Her husband, Adam Sternberg, is culture editor at The New York Times and writes crime novels. They do not read each other’s work until it is finished. However, she says she learned how to write a novel from watching him. “Basically: Shut your mouth. Sit down every day. Let the energy build up. And then, when you’re done, you can talk about it. That’s why things like Twitter are so bad. I see people giving their best lines. You’re an idiot! Put that in your book!”