The Magical and the Mundane: The Millions Interviews Alanna Schubach
Alanna Schubach’s debut novel The Nobodies, out June 21 from Blackstone, tells the story of Jess and Nina, two best friends with a secret: by touching their heads together, they can swap bodies. This supernatural power allows them to inhabit each other’s lives; self-conscious Nina can enjoy Jess’s bold and assertive persona, while Jess revels in the safety of Nina’s stable family. But the ability to body-swap also brings to the fore questions of intimacy, trust, and betrayal and puts the mechanics of female friendship under a microscope.
Schubach’s short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. We caught up with her ahead of the publication of The Nobodies to chat about composite characters, the drafting process, Elena Ferrante, how to juxtapose the magical and the mundane, and much more.
The Millions: This is your debut novel, so I’d love first to start by asking you about your path to its publication. What was the novel’s genesis, and how did it come into being?
The novel began as a short story, specifically the section that takes place when the main characters, Nina and Jess, are in high school. The story began at a point when they’d already been using this secret power to swap bodies and building up a lot of baggage around that for some time, and ended with a rupture between
