Brittany Newell’s stunning sophomore novel Soft Core follows a stripper named Baby on a hallucinatory journey through San Francisco’s sexual underground. Baby’s life starts to unravel after her ex-boyfriend Dino—a ketamine dealer with a Dolly Parton fixation—goes missing. Her search for Dino takes her through dive bars and BDSM dungeons, all while her grip on reality dissolves into the San Francisco mist.
The novel's title comes from Baby's perfume—a gift from Dino she applies every night before dancing. Soft Core comes in a heart-shaped bottle and smells of licorice, orchids, leather, and borrowed cigarettes. “It was sexy in the way that a poem or sweater can be sexy.”
Over email, Brittany Newell and I discussed Bad Bunny, gay bars to K-hole in, and Mary Gaitskill fandom.
Describe Soft Core in three words. Do you believe?
What’s your book’s Zodiac sign? Amazing question! I would say a Gemini due to the doppelgangers, slight mania, lack of a filter and multiple identities shouldered by Ruth/Baby as a sex worker and a girl-in-love.
If Soft Core is adapted, who needs to play Baby? Dino? Call me crazy but I would love Bad Bunny to play Dino and Saoirse Ronan to play Baby.
Favorite bar in San Francisco? For a gay bar to K-hole in: Aunt Charlie’s Lounge; for a shadowy place to take a john, The Lone Palm; for a dive bar to wear a wig to, Edinburgh Castle; for a first date guaranteed to seal the deal, Spec’s in North Beach on a weekday night.
Do you outline or wing it or somewhere in between? With Soft Core the whole book poured out of me in a weird ecstatic gush; I like to mindlessly word-vomit first, take a break and drink some kratom, then return to the word doc and start editing in a slower, more thoughtful way, so that it kind of feels like sculpting.
What were you watching and listening to when you wrote Soft Core? Goodbye Horses by Q Lazzarus, Dirty Work by Steely Dan, Cher, Lana, Deafheaven, Cocteau Twins…call me a bad feminist but I really fucked with The Idol on HBO.
Best writing advice you’ve received? Never force it. Rest, take a walk, go to a party, swim laps, READ VORACIOUSLY…the work happens even when you’re not working. Don’t worry <3
Are there any books you feel Soft Core is “in conversation with” as they say? I will always be a Mary Gaitskill fan-girly, particularly the short story collection “Because They Wanted To”.... I also read this insanely brilliant book of theory called Counterpleasures about “literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from Christian saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to contemporary s/m practices” by Karmen MacKendrick that haunts me to this day.
If you were a literary critic, what would you say about your own writing? That it is bawdy, tender, cinematic, funny, transportive. Some Good Reads reviewers complain that Soft Core is “all vibes, no plot” but I don’t think that’s a bad thing! ;)
If you could get a drink with any fictional character, who would it be? Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
What are your most overused words or phrases? In Soft Core, soft, fizzy, mauve.
What’s a book that made you want to write? 100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell <3
What’s your relationship to self-promotion? It stresses me out and I automatically go into sex worker mode! I feel most at home being a silly bimbo rather than a stuffy pseudo-intellectual, much to my publisher’s chagrin.
What author’s (dead or alive) persona is aspirational? Honestly I have recently been seduced by the love letters of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin…. “You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.” So sexy.
Favorite recent read? An advance reader’s copy of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk (delicious!!)
What’s one word to describe what you’re working on now? Cannibalism
