I met Cintra Wilson one evening in May 2010 at the West Village restaurant called Pasita, where she hosts a regular monthly salon. She greeted me under the mistaken impression that I had come from a local television station to conduct a brief and frivolous interview on some topic that now escapes me. It was to her considerable relief that I came only with sound-recording equipment, and that the state of her attire and makeup were therefore not at issue. And it was to my own considerable relief that the person with whom I found myself conversing was warm, generous, and eager to please: in short, that she shared with her authorial persona only the sharp critical intelligence and the intense colloquial wittiness, not the somewhat terrifying edge often brandished in the columns for which Wilson is perhaps best known.

These include “The Dregulator” and “The C-Word,” and, until recently, her regular contributions to the New York Times under the rubric “Critical Shopper.” It was in the “Critical Shopper” column on JCPenney’s new Manhattan outpost that Wilson leveled a cheerful sarcasm at the company’s strategy of drawing customers from Macy’s by offering clothing for people of all sizes. (Penney’s, she observed, “has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It’s like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of ‘Roseanne.’”) This remark drew down upon the author the ire of what seemed at the time like the whole of the internet. Subsequent apologies posted by Wilson on her website were taken to be sarcastic rather than genuine, and the episode spiraled into a nightmare of public scourging that Wilson herself has likened to Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Wilson is also the author of a remarkable and underrated satirical novel, Colors Insulting to Nature (2004), and several indescribable but undoubtedly brilliant works of nonfiction, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations (2000) and Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny (2008). She is a cultural critic and political commentator of Swiftian inventiveness and force; her next book is Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling America’s Fashion Destiny (forthcoming from Norton).

—Jenny Davidson

I. FROZEN FACE

JENNY DAVIDSON: I’ve been a big fan of your writing ever since I read Colors Insulting to Nature, which I feel should be known as the great novel of the last decade, right?

CINTRA WILSON: Oh my God!

JD: It’s the best book! I just re-read it and it lives up to my earlier estimation. So I thought that...