An Interview with Halle Butler

“Can you think of experiences at work where someone’s like ‘Good job. Thank you so much,’ not in a hostile way? And you feel like you aren’t a piece of trash?”

Halle Butler’s Favorite Episodes of Forensic Files:
The Dirty Deed
All Butt Certain
Purr-fect Match
Dew Process
The Sniffing Revenge

A few days after the release of her second novel, The New Me, Halle Butler and I discovered that there are actually two restaurants in Brooklyn called the “Grand Canyon Diner.”

I had been a fan of Butler since her 2015 debut, Jillian—which led her to be named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and a National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree—and we became friends in 2018, after she moved from Chicago to New York. It wasn’t until this afternoon, however, that I realized she had a flip phone, and so no map application.

“In the canyon,” I texted.

“Me too i don’t see u” she texted back. 

We eventually found the right Grand Canyon Diner, and sat in a booth together drinking coffee so strong that, by the end, Butler felt “literally high.” We discussed how The New Me is one of those weird page-turners that, when you think about it, has little in the way of outward plot. To quote the book jacket, “Thirty-year-old Millie… spends her days working a thankless temp job and her nights alone in her apartment, fixating on all the ways she might change her situation.” She goes to work, watches Forensic Files on her laptop, and wears tights with holes in them. She covets and dreads a promotion from temp to perm. The real drama, in other words, unfolds in her mind.

And “drama” is putting it lightly. Butler has now gotten two novels out of trapping characters in dehumanizing offices, and contrasting their drudgery with the hostile thunder-and-lightning of their thoughts—what Butler calls “The Inner Scream.”

Both novels emit this scream, while steadily ramping up, a la Edvard Grieg’s orchestral piece, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,”—the gold standard of crescendoing insanity—which, at one point in The New Me, Millie recalls requesting from a violinist at the Lucca Grill in Bloomington, Illinois.

In another scene, Millie thinks of her friend, Sarah, (her only friend in the book): “The sound of her voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Like putting my hand in a garbage disposal. I feel like I might snap if she keeps talking. I can feel the beginnings of an insane, unbridled laugh stirring inside me.”

I asked Butler about her process, her flip phone, and how...