Nell Zink: ‘My hope for the planet is that we're invaded by kindly aliens'

Five years and five novels after she exploded on to the literary scene, so assured that some believed she was a hoax, Zink is taking on hipsters and the climate crisis

After Nell Zink’s mother died a few years ago, she asked her friend Tom to treat her for post-traumatic stress. Zink was having trouble sleeping, and her friend, a semi-famous German singer-songwriter, had retrained as a shaman. “I laid down and closed my eyes, Tom did this shamanistic ritual, and when I came out of this trance an hour later, he looked at me and said: ‘I am afraid I have to tell you, Nell, you have no subconscious mind.’”

Zink laughs hysterically while telling this very Zink-esque story. “He’d gone into my mind, and there is usually an empty room with doors. But in my case that room was completely full with an over-the-top, psychedelic party that was really loud and populated by these nightmarish creatures. It was complete overload and there was no escape.”

Her novels are usually set among exclusive social scenes with their own codes – birdwatchers, hippy communes, New York’s indie rock scene

Zink wrote each of her first two novels each in the space of only three weeks. Doxology took much longer

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