Australian novelist Lexi Freiman knows how to walk a literary tightrope. Her fiction is both savagely funny and strikingly empathetic, daring to satirise the hot-­button issues of identity politics and cancel culture without eliding the complex motivations that underpin them. In her 2018 debut Inappropriation, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, a trio of schoolgirls spectacularly misunderstand Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto; in 2023’s The Book of Ayn, which saw Freiman interviewed on The Daily Show in the US, a newly cancelled writer finds herself radicalised by the work of notorious iconoclast Ayn Rand. In both novels, Freiman dextrously uses satire and absurdity to illuminate the complications and contradictions of selfhood in contemporary culture.

In this conversation – a condensed and lightly edited version of a 2024 Brisbane Writers Festival session – Lexi talks to Griffith Review Editor Carody Culver about the allure of contrarianism, the necessary selfishness of creativity and the importance of a good joke.