The Portrait of a Mirror

An interview with novelist A. Natasha Joukovsky

This week I interviewed novelist A. Natasha Joukovsky, whose new novel The Portrait of a Mirror happened to be published—in the infinite wisdom of the literary gods—on the same day as Wanting.

Unbeknownst to both of us, the new Beauty Editor at the magazine Coveteur, Ama Kwarteng, came into possession of both books. She was familiar enough with my work by the time she read The Portrait of a Mirror to realize that it’s a novel shot through and through with mimetic desire. (As anyone who follows this Substack closely knows: once you see mimetic desire, you can’t unsee it. And Ama was apparently now rocking the X-ray glasses.) She dropped me a line to let me know about the connection she saw: non-fiction illuminating fiction; fiction illuminating non-fiction. As it should be.

So I reached out to Natasha with an “umm…ever heard of René Girard?” Not surprisingly, she had not (why his ideas have been repressed in literature departments is a topic for another day)—but it only took her a few m…