When we meet in a cafe near her Brooklyn apartment, three weeks before the TV adaptation of her debut novel Vladimir hits Netflix, Julia May Jonas is feeling an anticipatory “mix of terror, excitement and dread”. The series stars Rachel Weisz as a professor in her 50s obsessed with a younger colleague, Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall, with Sharon Horgan executive producing. Combining hot sex and complex issues, it is bound to spark the kind of online discourse a novelist must avoid lest they be derailed from their next project.

“I do have to be cautious with putting myself too far out there,” says Jonas, who was active, and very funny, on Twitter until mid-2022, soon after her book came out, at which point she realised that engaging with the reception to her work wasn’t wise. “It’s not like I’m so enlightened. It’s just that I know it’s never enough. If someone tells me they love my book, I’m going to ask: ‘What part? Did it change your life? Is it the best book you’ve ever read?’” she says, laughing. “The ego can never be fulfilled!”

A critical and commercial success, Vladimir was praised for its witty exploration of a narrator who becomes obsessed with a colleague at a difficult time in her life. She faces heat for refusing to publicly condemn her husband, John, when students call for his resignation over several affairs. Jonas, a playwright for more than two decades, says she is drawn to “unresolvable questions” and “intractable dilemmas”. Here, the marriage was open, the affairs predated rules explicitly banning relationships with students. They were, in the narrator’s view, consensual; she seems more annoyed with the women than with her husband. “When I was in college, the lust I felt for my professors was overwhelming,” reads the funny, furious inner monologue. “I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.”

Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall in Vladimir. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix © 2026

The narrator is also consumed by shame about ageing and great insecurity, because she believes she has lost the ability to provoke desire. Which connects to another unsolvable question: “How do you find an authentic desire outside of being gazed at or looked at?” Jonas asks. Into this situation strides Vladimir, a beefy experimental novelist who appears, in the prologue, asleep, with one of his arms shackled to a chair in the narrator’s cabin. As we read on, and track the narrator’s unravelling, we find out how he got there.

Part of the book’s impact lies in its refusal to flatten moral complexity. Jonas says she didn’t set out with a thesis, but wanted to include opposing perspectives “in relation to each other, in the way that I feel like they exist in the world”. One central theme is #MeToo. “There is an element of #MeToo that is primarily fixated on: how do we punish these men, and I think that should be based on severity and crime and handled in very cut-and-dried ways,” she says. What the book seeks to explore instead is: “what do you do as a female person, coming out of that? How do we contextualise it for ourselves? How do we organise our thoughts around our own sexuality and move forward?”

double quotation markKneejerk dismissal of problematic texts, she argues, ‘is not that deep as a way of engaging with things’

The novel also explores generational divides in academia – a tension she has first-hand experience of, having taught at Skidmore College and New York University. “I encountered a form of criticism that was like, ‘this is misogynist, this is racist, this is heteronormative’. I would often say to my students: ‘You’re cutting yourself off from the benefits this work could give you.’” Kneejerk dismissal, she argues, “is not that deep as a way of engaging with things”. Her own influences include writers sometimes labelled problematic, including John Updike. “I always found it interesting: really? That’s how some men look at women? Fascinating. I’m not agreeing with it, but I’m interested.”

Jonas grew up in New Jersey and went on to study acting at New York University. Quickly realising that she couldn’t handle the rejection of auditions, she switched to playwriting and, in 2003, launched her own small theatre company. Studying in the early 2000s, she says, has given her “old school” ideas about viewing art through the morality of the creator. “I come from the school of criticism where the artist is dead. But that’s not the way that people look at things now. And I think that’s also OK. I’m not gonna get on a soapbox either way about it.”

She had tried writing novels before, but it wasn’t until theatres shut down in the pandemic that she had sustained time to write, in short daily bursts while caring for her daughter. The book flowed quickly, partly because its seed lay in an earlier play in which characters, including an older professor, “talked about desire and Nabokov and academia”.

double quotation markNabokov was interested in how people might ruin their lives because their fixation alters their view of reality

Some critics have called Vladimir a Lolita update, though Jonas says Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark was the stronger influence. Lolita is horribly topical at the moment, mentioned several times in the Epstein files; the sex offender reportedly kept a copy beside his bed. “It is totally absurd to me that there’s any part of that book that a person would take as being in support of Humbert’s actions,” says Jonas. “I just 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’re imprisoned by our own obsessions. Nabokov was interested in how people might be blinded to the humanity of others, or ruin their own lives because their fixation alters their view of reality.” Iris Murdoch was another influence, along with the “very focused, passionate, located-in-the-body, feeling-oriented novels” of Elena Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg.

The TV show is, she points out, 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,” and yet plays someone riddled with insecurity about ageing and desirability. In Weisz’s performance, she says, “you see how she has let herself become overcome by this fixation with Vladimir, but she doesn’t have the confidence to just go and get him. There’s an underbelly of fragility.” A further change was the addition of Lila, representing the unnamed complainant from the book. It was important, “to hear her voice and get some of her experience.” Though the show doesn’t portray John as a monster, Lila’s presence reminds us that “he took advantage of those girls … he didn’t look at her as a whole person”.

Jonas is now editing her second novel, Diana, due in spring 2027, another obsession story about two friends who are actors, “one whose career is going quite well, and one who has had to reevaluate her life plan”. She is also staging a play at the Lincoln Center this summer titled A Woman Among Women, inspired by Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

Away from work, she looks after her children, who are aged 12 and four. Her husband, Adam Sternbergh, is culture editor at the New York Times and writes crime fiction. They don’t read each other’s work until it’s finished. Still, she says she learned how to write a novel from watching him. “Basically: shut your mouth. Sit down every day. Let the energy build. And then when it’s done, you can talk about it. Which is why things like Twitter are so bad. I see people giving out all of their best lines. You’re a fool! Put that into your book!”

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.