Author Yasmin Zaher on Patrick Bateman, Birkin Scams, and Her Debut Novel The Coin

The glamorous protagonist of Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin is a singular force. She has a capsule wardrobe of designer clothing and a multi-step Korean skincare routine. She arrives in New York with nothing but a wallet full of cash, an allowance from her sizable inheritance that remains inaccessible to her for vague reasons. American culture, with its “wedding dresses and obesity,” scares her. But above all, she is obsessed with cleanliness. She feels her body rotting beneath her McQueen dress, inventing elaborate rituals to cleanse herself of the city’s grime. New York is the dirtiest place she’s ever been, though she’s never been to a third-world country. She’s from Palestine, which she describes as “neither a country nor the third world.” In this way, her existence in New York is precarious; he’s not quite able to buy into the American dream, the illusion of which is obvious to her, but a sense of home remains equally inaccessible, no matter how hard she tries to reconstruct it within the walls of her Fort Greene apartment. 

The narrator’s impressions of America are delivered in a voice that oscillates between moral judgment, cold indifference, and perverse fascination. She becomes partners in a Birkin scam with an old-world grifter she meets on the street and encourages her elementary school students to start a revolution. But as The Coin progresses, it’s unclear whether our unnamed narrator is unraveling or transcending. When I got on Zoom with Zaher, she had just returned to her sunny Paris apartment after her New York book launch. We discussed writing from a place of inhibition, her real-life foray into Birkin scams, and the low-grade psychopathy required to function in New York.

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JULIETTE JEFFERS: So you’re in Paris right now?

YASMIN ZAHER: Yeah, I’m in Paris. Are you in New York?

JEFFERS: I am. I’m at the Interview office. You’re good to get started?

ZAHER: Mm-hmm.

JEFFERS: I absolutely loved reading The Coin. I read it in three days. The narrator’s voice is so compelling and the pace at which she moves through the world has so much energy. When I first started reading it, I felt a lot of parallels to American Psycho.

ZAHER: I was surprised that nobody until now has mentioned that.

JEFFERS: Really? They felt really connected to me. Was that a source of inspiration?

ZAHER: No, not at all. I watched the movie for the first time this year. But for years, my husband has been telling me that it reminds him of American Psycho. And then after watching it, I was like, “Yes, of course.” I’m always surprised that more people don’t make that comparison.

JEFFERS: Obviously, the narrator’s a woman and she’s not American. In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman functions as the embodiment of all of these materialistic and wealth-obsessed aspects of American culture. But for the narrator of The Coin, she’s outside of it and feeling this landscape of New York act on her as soon as she enters it. But there’s that similar obsession with routine and luxury.

ZAHER: As you said, the narrator is not American, but those aspects of American material corruption have broken through the borders of America. The elites all around the world today are influenced by this kind of culture. And not just the elites.

JEFFERS: I think you see that most clearly when she’s going to all of the different Hermès stores.

ZAHER: Yeah. Capitalism is global.

JEFFERS: Exactly. But there is also an atmosphere of psychopathy throughout the book.

ZAHER: Yeah, definitely. There’s the scene where she breaks the bottle of perfume on the ground and she fantasizes about committing mass murder in Fort Greene. And there’s definitely psychopathic exercises that she does with her students.

JEFFERS: Totally. She even has this student who has these school shooter ideations and she’s like, “I kind of get it.”

ZAHER: She’s like, “Oh, no big deal. I’m just going to tear out this page in his notebook and we’re just going to pretend all is normal.”

JEFFERS: I find her voice simultaneously terrifying and compelling and relatable. What was the process of channeling that voice like?

ZAHER: I don’t know if it was a process. It was more about suspending judgment for as long as I could during the writing so that I could stay as uninhibited as I could for as long as possible and let whatever extreme thoughts come out in the writing. I wanted the raw material to be as extreme as it could be so that I could play with where I wanted the boundaries to be.

JEFFERS: Totally. The narration has all of these interjections of the taboo, of things that we normally repress. Obviously cleanliness is a big theme in this book, but there’s a real unearthing of the dirt, not just of the subconscious, but that of the whole system. She’s like, “When Netanyahu and Trump were elected, I thought those were good days because the truth had come to light.”

ZAHER: Yeah. She’s obsessed with morality in the same way that she’s obsessed with cleanliness. She’s constantly interrogating her own morality while saying things that very obviously should not be said. So many characters in contemporary American fiction are very good. They’re good people who are on the right side of politics. There’s this liberal outpouring in the literature, and it was interesting to write something different and also to be in touch with the parts of my own personality that are not good.

JEFFERS: Also, it’s a whole thing in itself to have a novel with a very wealthy narrator, And obviously, the title is literally The Coin.

ZAHER: Exactly.

JEFFERS: The way that money moves in this book is frightening for the average person in some ways. Things are destroyed. She loses her wallet with thousands of dollars in it. There’s ways in which she is wildly irresponsible with money, too. Her students steal from her and she’s like, “I don’t really care.” From the beginning, she’s like, “I have enough money that I don’t need to care. I care about experience.” 

ZAHER: Yeah.

JEFFERS: Wealthy people tend to say that all the time.

ZAHER: I think there’s an interrogation of the value of money. Obviously, it’s worth very different things to different people. I think it was part of the characterization. We can characterize people by their clothes or by their behaviors or what they eat, but we can also characterize them by, “What does a hundred dollars mean to this person?” One of the things that I was struggling with in the editing was whether or not I should keep the price of everything, because I list the price of the Birkins, I list the price of the dinner that they’re having. I list the exact number of her inheritance. And there was this moment where I knew that if I did that, it would, first of all, date the book. By the time I finished it, the price of the Birkin had gone up a lot and I had to adjust it. But in general, I knew that it was going to place the novel in a certain range of five years. It’s like when you’re reading books from the early 20th century and things cost like, five pennies.

JEFFERS: Exactly. You don’t end up thinking about the value of that thing. You’re just like, “Wow, that’s cheap.”

ZAHER: But because she pays so much attention to money, I thought, “Okay, I should also pay attention to money and be very precise about the numbers.” I did remove some prices of things, but I kept the essence.

JEFFERS: Particularly at the end, when she sort of builds that Garden of Eden within her apartment, you start to feel the commodities become more and more absurd.

ZAHER: And even when she’s trying to do something natural, which is supposed to be the opposite of the other commodities, she’s exercising an enormous purchase. It’s an enormous shopping list when she’s trying to create her natural world.

JEFFERS: The environment she creates is not some generic Garden of Eden. It’s connected directly to her homeland and her grandmother’s garden. And in this bizarre space, she basically starts to hear god.

ZAHER: That’s true.

JEFFERS: Do you want to talk about that conversation with god?

ZAHER: You think she’s talking to god in the book?

JEFFERS: That’s how I interpreted it. Was that what you had in mind?

ZAHER: No, it’s not what I had in mind, but I don’t want to say what I had in mind because every reader really thinks she’s talking to someone else and I like hearing what different people think.

JEFFERS: What have other people said?

ZAHER: Some people think she’s talking to a student. Some people think she’s talking to Sasha. Some people think she’s talking to her parents. Some people think she’s talking to “The Coin.” One of the things that I like about this book is that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

JEFFERS: For me, it felt like this bizarre extended prayer. There’s this moment of transcendence at the end where she’s like, “I don’t feel at war with my body anymore. I’ve accepted this.”

ZAHER: Yeah. It’s a very spiritual book. For a book about money, it’s very spiritual.

JEFFERS: She’s almost trying to figure out what to worship.

ZAHER: Yeah. That is a very contemporary question. Most of us don’t believe in god anymore. Most of us worship money, in fact. A lot of people are searching for meaning, and she definitely is as well.

JEFFERS: There are different things that you throw out there as potential items of worship, including the Birkin. Where did the idea of this Birkin scam come from?

ZAHER: The Birkin only entered the book in the second draft. The first draft looked more like the first third of the book and the last third of the book without Paris. Honestly, I was in Paris. I was doing this writing residency and I was looking for how you can make interesting money in Paris if you have no papers to work. I came across these firms that hire young women like me or you and send them to the Hermès shop. They gave me an enormous stack of cash in a fake Prada bag. They made an appointment for me and just sent me to try to buy one.

JEFFERS: And you went to the appointment?

ZAHER: I did, but I couldn’t get a bag. It’s really hard. But these firms really do this, which means sometimes some people do get it and that it’s worth it for them to try. It was such an absurd and humiliating experience, by the way. A very psychologically bizarre and tormenting position to be in because you’re cosplaying ultra-rich, but you’re being humiliated. So it’s like, this weird paradox.

JEFFERS: And then when you’re doing it, you have to mask even that humiliation. You’re like, “How would this ultra-rich person react to being humiliated?”

ZAHER: Yeah, exactly. Do you get angry? Do you get indignant? Do you just accept it and say that you’ll come back next week? I have no idea. I thought it was awful, but I guess it stirred enough things in me that I thought, “Wow, this is a very interesting setting to discuss a lot of things in contemporary culture.” Now, when I see a woman carrying a Birkin, I think it’s trashy.

JEFFERS: There’s this moment where Trenchcoat basically asks her, “What’s the most hideous, nouveau riche brand?” Then he takes her to Hermès.

ZAHER: Yeah. He asks her, “What is a brand that is worn by both the rich and poor?” And it must be so interesting for these brands, they’re trying to preserve the prestige of the brand, but you’re constantly playing with the very top and the very bottom.

JEFFERS: And the narrator describes her own relationship to her Birkin, which was her mother’s, and says “I come from a place where a bag could never have power—only violence spoke.” And then she’s entering into this world where—

ZAHER: Where everything is symbolic.

JEFFERS: I liked her descriptions of the clientele in each store and the micro-differentiations between them, but they’re all sort of part of this class seeking a Birkin. She enters into this Birkin scam as this way to work through something with this man known as Trenchcoat, who she designates as a sort of pseudo-father figure.

ZAHER: Yeah. Like a guru. I think Trenchcoat is the one who convinces her that she can get what she wants in life by pretending. For him, what he wants is money. He’s pretending to have money so that he can have more money. But what we learn from the story is that attitude doesn’t work for her.

JEFFERS: She doesn’t have that fake-it-till-you-make-it entrepreneurial spirit. She does not care.

ZAHER: I think that’s why New York and America is the right setting for the book, because it’s where people go to reinvent themselves. It’s where people go to chase the American dream, but she’s not cut out for it.

JEFFERS: She’s not. She already knows who she is.

ZAHER: You live in New York, right? Are you from New York?

JEFFERS: I was born here, but I grew up in New Jersey. Reading this book was so interesting because I lived in Portugal for two years, and when I moved back here, I felt a lot of the feelings that she felt. I felt like everything was so dirty. I felt overwhelmed by the extremes of the environment, but then suddenly I got used to them.

ZAHER: I was in New York last week for the launch and the first two days I was in total shock. And by the last day I was like, “Okay, I can just ignore it all.” We have a huge capacity to adapt and to ignore. “Yeah, there’s an unmoving person on the ground. No problem.”

JEFFERS: There’s a section where she’s on the subway, and that was just a really accurate description of what it’s like to ride a New York City subway. She’s watching this baby that’s eating food, just completely oblivious to the suffering and the normalization of it. She’s like, “That baby’s going to grow up to be a psychopath.”

ZAHER: Maybe he’s going to grow up to be an American Psycho.

JEFFERS: Exactly. 

ZAHER: New York is a place where people go because they make a bet. The stakes are very, very high. It’s a city where the very bottom just falls out. There’s no safety net for people. But there’s no ceiling, either.

JEFFERS: My last question is about the narrator’s relationship with her students. She’s trying so hard, in some ways, to teach them in a way that is counter to the way that they would normally be taught within a mainstream American school. In the end, she feels like she fails. Where did that idea of her being a teacher come from? 

ZAHER: Yeah, it feels very surprising. I definitely had to try to make sense out of it. Why would a woman like that become a teacher? But what made sense to me was that somebody like her, who’s very opinionated and unafraid to assert herself, would be very interesting in a position of authority, basically. You can give her power, and it’s interesting to see what she does with it because she sees herself as such a moral person. She doesn’t really do anything. She’s not Patrick Bateman, but she does do damage in her own little world, and she fails to raise the kids that she wants to raise them.

JEFFERS: She sort of gives them these grand ideals of beauty and justice and this kind of uniform of dignity, but then it kind of all comes crumbling down and they end up burning down the school.

ZAHER: Basically, she just corrupts them. Or it’s the environment that corrupts them.

JEFFERS: She essentially pities them for the culture that they’re being raised in.

ZAHER: She has tenderness towards them and she has love for them, as you said, and it made sense because she doesn’t really have love or tenderness for any other character in the book. She doesn’t care about her boyfriend. She doesn’t care for Trenchcoat in that deep way. She has no girlfriends. She has no friends. School is where you see her tender side, and I can see now that it balances the sharper sides of her personality.

JEFFERS: Do you live full time in Paris?

ZAHER: Yeah, now I do. My husband’s French, so we moved here a year ago after living in New York for some time. I guess you read my true feelings about that city.

JEFFERS: Yeah.

ZAHER: I wonder sometimes, is it a love-hate letter to New York, or is it just mostly hate? I don’t know. I have a lot of love for New York as well.