{"id":135178,"date":"2025-09-13T18:55:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T18:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/135178\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T18:55:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T18:55:07","slug":"zoe-dubno-on-happiness-and-love-her-wickedly-funny-debut-novel-skewering-new-yorks-creative-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/135178\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoe Dubno on \u2018Happiness and Love,\u2019 Her Wickedly Funny Debut Novel Skewering New York\u2019s Creative Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of Zoe Dubno<\/a>\u2019s debut novel, Happiness and Love, we find ourselves at a Downtown Manhattan dinner party. Anticipation hangs in the air as a group of young creative types waits for a buzzy young actress to arrive. The narrator, we learn, has ended up here surrounded by a group of old friends she\u2019s purposefully avoided since moving out of the city five years ago; after returning for the funeral of a friend within this same circle, she finds all her old gripes and resentments with them surfacing again, watching them perform their acts of faux modesty and subtle games of oneupmanship against each other. The narrator sits on a sofa in the corner of the room, sipping white wine, and we hear every scathing thought that passes through her head\u2014and continue to do so for the following 224 pages, over criss-crossing timelines. Inspired in part by the vitriolic stream of consciousness that makes up German novelist Thomas Bernhard\u2019s 1984 social satire Woodcutters\u2014but with the preening intellectuals of Vienna\u2019s bourgeois transposed to a Dimes Square-adjacent young arts scene in New York\u2014Dubno\u2019s novel is as lacerating as it is laugh-out-loud funny.<\/p>\n

Partly because of that, Happiness and Love has already caused a bit of a stir\u2014there\u2019s a sense of recognition anyone who has orbited a similar creative milieu (and their pretensions) will feel when reading it. It\u2019s a world that Dubno, who was raised on the Upper West Side and attended Oberlin College, is closely familiar with\u2014even if she fiercely maintains it wasn\u2019t based on any specific group of people, and certainly not a specific dinner party. (As a culture, fashion, and lifestyle journalist, Dubno has previously written for the New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue.) \u201cI\u2019ve had many people ask me, \u2018Did you really go to a dinner party like that?\u2019 No, of course not! That dinner party is a nightmare. I would never be invited to that because I\u2019m a bitch,\u201d she says, laughing. \u201cI would have spoken my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also\u2014at least at points\u2014a book about fashion, and not just in the withering takedowns of a friend who wears a \u201cridiculous black Margiela mourning costume\u201d to the funeral, or the satirical portrait of a middle-aged Marxist fashion editor who briefly takes the narrator under her wing, or how it dissects these artists and filmmakers\u2019 willingness to take money from the fashion world while simultaneously turning their noses up at it. (It helps that Dubno clearly understands this world and also cuts a stylish figure herself, appearing in the images supplied for this story wearing Grey\u2019s<\/a>, a cult New York label whose discreet, palpably luxurious clothes speak to fans of The Row and Lemaire.) It\u2019s a book that is more concerned with the bigger picture stuff that fashion so often speaks to, even if many of its haughty characters would rather die than admit it: the delicate and ever-shifting balance of conformity and individuality in how we present ourselves to the world, say; or how the internet age has flattened the cultural landscape, turning every artist, thinker, or reference from across the centuries into a kind of commodity that can be used to construct a \u201cpersonal brand.\u201d Combined with Dubno\u2019s lavish, compulsively readable prose\u2014written as one long, relentless paragraph and with a liberal use of italics to signal her disdain for this world that she can\u2019t seem to quit\u2014it makes for one of the year\u2019s most exhilarating debuts.<\/p>\n

Here, Dubno talks to Vogue about navigating the intensity of some readers\u2019 response to her book, how humor became her secret weapon when writing, and why she plans to move away from the distinctive style of Happiness and Love for her next project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the beginning of Zoe Dubno\u2019s debut novel, Happiness and Love, we find ourselves at a Downtown Manhattan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,6199,13835,56,54,55,307],"class_list":{"0":"post-135178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","11":"tag-storytypeinterview","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom","15":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}