Zee Carlstrom on When to Bother Your Editor, the Move-to-the-City or Do-an-MFA Debate, and How Class Rage Fueled Their Debut Novel ‘Make Sure You Die Screaming’
I met Zee Carlstrom at a mutual friend’s birthday party in July of last year. We stood in the backyard of a Clinton Hill bar holding sweating frozen drinks as they told me how they found their agent and gave me tips on polishing manuscripts before submission; nothing worse than waiting until you’re on a developmental edit deadline to squeeze everything in, they told me. (I can now confirm this is very true.)
I was thrilled to see their debut novel, Make Sure You Die Screaming (Flatiron Books, 2025), on many ‘most anticipated’ lists for the spring. Carlstrom’s novel follows an unnamed protagonist on a drunken road trip from Chicago to Arkansas where their mother has just called them home, explaining she needs help finding their dad who has gone missing. The protagonist is grappling not only with the recent death of their close friend and coworker, but also their queer identity, their relationship to their MAGA parents, and their many years of enduring corporate America, which has only fueled their anti-capitalist frustrations.
The book opens, “We rage out of Chicago around four in the morning, hurtling toward Arkansas because my mom needs help kidnapping my father,” and immediately I knew I was in for a wild ride.
I recently sat down with Zee and had one of the best conversations about the writing life and being queer in Trump’s America that I’ve ever had with a peer. We covered how to fit writing in around a nine-to-five, the city-or-MFA debate, and not feeling like a good enough liberal.
Kim Narby: I wanted to start off by talking about your own experience in corporate America. I’m curious how that influenced the book. Process-wise, how did you manage to write around your nine-to-five?
Zee Carlstrom: I only became an advertising professional because I needed to figure out a way to get paid as a writer. When I went to school my primary goal was to get a job because my parents had a really precarious financial situation. So if I was going to go to college, it was like, you need to get gainful employment. The only thing I ever wanted to do was be a writer. I was avoiding even going into a creative writing major or anything like that because it didn’t seem possible, and until very recently, it still didn’t seem possible to actually publish a book or be a writer or have time to do it.
I had a friend from high school who said to me, I’m gonna try to do this thing called copywriting. And I was like, is that like a legal profession? He explained it and I was like, oh, wow. In my head I was like, this guy’s not a writer. I’m a writer. I should be doing that. So I went after that. Advertising is kind of like this mercenary capitalist industry where you’re talking people who aspire to be billionaires into making pretty art projects that will ostensibly further their ability to become billionaires. It’s a bunch of people who really only want to be artists trying to do business with people who really only want to make money. It's this fundamentally incompatible relationship.
Over the years I had to work on a lot of different things that I didn’t feel good about selling, like financial services, or tax prep, or even just fast food, that I knew wasn’t very good for people. I love McDonald’s, I love fast food, but I don’t feel great selling it to people and manipulating them into buying it.
I never really felt morally justified in my career, aside from its function in my life to make me money, and help me survive. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer in a real sense. And I think the tension between spending all my time doing this thing that I hated for people I hated really kind of supercharged my class rage. During the pandemic, I basically had to emergency quit my job. I took two weeks off, out of nowhere, because I had just reached a breaking point.
It was too much. And I was so unhappy. And if I’m being fully honest with myself, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself because I was also trying to find at least two to three hours to write books every day. So the pressure of that on top of what was becoming a higher and higher pressure job, as I got promoted to creative director and was in charge of running pieces of the business and all these things, it was just so much. I did reach a burnout breaking point, a lot like the character in the book. And it wasn’t quite as violent, but I was, at the time, pretty estranged from my parents. I was pretty frustrated with the people I was working with. And when I quit the job, I had this moment where I really felt like I could never work again. I think it’s a symptom of burnout, you’re so depleted of energy and so existentially exhausted that to even find a new job would almost give me panic attacks to think about.
But as far as actually doing the writing, what I would do is go in early to work, to the point where there was no one at work, because advertising doesn’t start until ten o’clock. I would get there as early as possible and go to my desk and write, but it wasn’t really on company time. It just made it easier. I would get out of the house. And I didn’t have to write and then have the stress of stopping writing at home and then commuting to work and then starting work. I would get all the commuting out of the way. Get there, start writing, and then write basically until people needed things from me, or until I hit ten o’clock.
But it got really exhausting and it was frustrating. I wrote for years. I had written two full manuscripts in college. And then I took a little bit of a break, and then when I was twenty five, I was so frustrated with the job, I started writing screenplays. But then you have a screenplay and you’re like, well, now what do I do with this? You can’t really do anything.
KN: You move to LA is what you do.
ZC: Yeah, I didn’t really think that was an option. I ended up writing I think eight full books before, or this one was the eighth. I was never really comfortable sharing any of the other ones with people because I felt like I was still learning and I didn’t have an MFA, so I didn’t have that kind of institutional confidence that I think is provided. When you don't [have an MFA], it’s even more mystifying. You feel like you’re outside of it. You feel like all these other people deserve it more than you. So it took a long time before I even had the confidence to try to get an agent. But it finally all happened with this book.
KN: And had you started writing this book already when you quit your job?
ZC: Actually, no. That's what’s funny, that moment really did kind of inspire the beginning of the book. I had sent the seventh book, the book before I wrote this one, to my current agent. And he had read it and we had the agent call. I was, like, jubilant. Because I thought this was the moment. I thought I was in. Everyone says if you get the call from the agent, that’s a really good sign. So we did the call and he basically said, really politely, I really love your voice. I really like the book. I don’t think I can sell it. He was really nice about all of this. It wasn’t flippant or anything. He really took the time to tell me why, and to tell me what he thought a good first book should be. And then he was like, so if you write another one, let me know. That happened before I quit the job. But the pressure of that moment and feeling like I was onto something, but I couldn’t do it because I was so busy, and now I had to do it again—it just kind of broke me a little bit. But then I quit the job and all of a sudden had this idea for the book. I wrote the first line, I knew the father was missing. And I ended up writing the book that summer. The first call with the agent was in April, and I think I sent him a full draft of this book by August. Because I just had a real fire inside me to make sure that this happened.
KN: And were you off work for those few months so you could fully dedicate yourself to writing?
ZC: No, because, you know, I live in New York. I ended up having a friend who I went and freelanced with. I got two months of freelance work during that time. And so I was off a little bit. But I definitely had to pick up some work.
KN: This is something I’m really considering recently, after living in New Orleans for a few months, where cost of living is so much lower. I’ve started to wonder if I lived somewhere else, could I make writing more central in my life? I always thought I was a New York-or-nowhere kind of person. I had wanted to live in New York forever. But if you’re living in New York, you’re on the grind. You’re hustling until you die, essentially. And I’m trying to figure out: is living in New York worth that? Or are there other places that I can be similarly happy where I can make corporate America not the center of my world?
ZC: When I first came to New York, the reason I wanted to be here was because of film and publishing. I was like, I want to be in the place where it’s happening. I grew up in Chicago, was living in Chicago and then was living in Minneapolis, and I just felt like everything was happening somewhere else. But when I got here, that was the first time people explained to me the whole city-or-MFA debate. Do you just move to New York City and try to get into publishing or do you get the MFA?
KN: I have not heard of that debate!
ZC: It’s very Googleable. There are many articles, many think pieces. All the people who ended up opening the door for me, or explaining the process to me or helped me get to my first writing conferences and things like that, those people I all met in New York. So I think it was worth it for that reason. But then once you get to the stage that you are at—
KN: You got the agent, you have the book deal, do you still need it? Can you just go there a couple times a year?
ZC: I kind of think you can. It also depends on the type of writer you want to be. I had a really good-natured argument with a friend who does have the MFA and is super talented and is pursuing the hardcore literary route. To him, the awards are so important. And he’s so reverent of the awards. And to me, I was like, I don't know, man, I just kind of think they give them to the people they know and people they’ve heard about and books they’ve heard about. I know you can apply, but it’s still a similar level of slush pile. Maybe that’s just my pessimism.
KN: How has publishing a debut been for you? Has anything been surprising? Do you have advice for other debut authors?
ZC: It’s one of those things where the easy answer is to be like, well, it’s different for everybody. And the process is really weird and confusing. But to try to make it as tangible as possible: ask whoever is publishing your book as many questions as you can, as frequently as you can. It’s not going to be a problem to ask them questions. I was just trying not to bother them. I would recommend bothering them. Don’t be afraid to contact your editor and be like, when is this happening? Why has it not happened yet? What am I actually supposed to be doing right now?
KN: Emma Coley Eisenberg wrote this article last year about the “right” and “wrong” ways to be queer, and how it’s changing fiction. It feels like there’s a bit of a backlash amongst writers against the moral purity of the left. I really felt that your protagonist, who is drinking and driving for much of this novel, is really the definition of the wrong way to be queer in so many ways. At one point they admit that they think some of the things their dad believes might be true. They are a bit worried about fluoride in the water too. Why is that representation important? I was also really interested in the nuance that showed up in your protagonist seeing their parents, who are MAGA supporters, as human beings. It feels like things are getting even more and more polarized and it felt a bit refreshing to read a book that is so clearly coming from the left, but also is not dehumanizing the people on the right.
ZC: Well, that was my own kind of personal journey. The first version was very angry, really sort of like toxically so, and much more aggressively liberal. And just kind of angry at everyone. Angry at how we got here. Angry at politicians, extremely angry at my parents. And when I looked at what I had after writing that I sort of was startled by how unpleasant it was to live in that. I was like, I’m glad I got a lot of those feelings out, but this isn’t a productive use of time. It's like a Reddit rant. I didn't want to add to the toxicity of the discourse.
The character’s central lie is that they’re nothing like their father. And so in order to have that be fully explored, I had to have them realize that, of course you are like your father. And you’re not his son anymore, but you’re still of your father and of your parents. I wanted to get to a place of empathy and a place of really considering what it is that makes people believe those things. And, at the same time, not write a think piece. I wanted those bits of politics and social commentary to be little moments throughout the book where the arc of that is evolving without ever getting weighed down with the character. I wanted it to be more in that drunken haze of realization, where they’re realizing things that they aren’t actually realizing. Because I think that that’s how my own experience of dealing with a lot of this stuff was, just getting really drunk and angry and doing a lot of drugs over the years and just processing my queerness, processing my own politics. I’m pretty tired of the liberal habit of wishing that people were perfectly aligned with your beliefs. And if they’re not perfectly aligned, then they're wrong or they’re not fighting the right fight. I think that’s how we got here. It’s not the whole reason, but it’s part of it.
I’ve felt often throughout the last ten years that I was not a good enough liberal. And then to come out as queer—I knew I wasn’t going to be a good queer. I’m not really the type of person who immerses myself in theory in order to build my sense of self. So I was always gonna be a little bit wrong, in terms of what somebody has read. Even the idea of nonbinary versus genderqueer—there are really subtle nuances. Some people would say they’re completely different. These things are really complicated when you get into the text of them. And I didn’t want to do that in the book. I feel like if I read the wrong thing sometimes it puts artificial walls around my own identity that is not helpful for me in understanding who I am. I have to get there myself. I read a book and then all of a sudden, now I’m ashamed. Somebody had a better thought about it than I did and now I feel bad. That's not productive.
KN: Have your parents read the book?
ZC: My mom read it. It took her a little bit. She had a hard time with some of the parts. She was like, I don’t know,that made me feel bad. I got to a place with my parents after writing the book where we are speaking again. We still don’t believe in the same things, or agree on almost anything. I think everybody wants to love 100% of the people they love, but in the same way I don’t think you can be 100% perfect as a conservative or 100% perfect as a liberal, I also don’t think that’s a fair expectation. I think people really want to have a 100% reason to love their father or mother and they want them to be a perfect person and they’re never going to be. I don’t have to not talk to my dad anymore just because I disagree with 85% of who he is. There’s still a part I do really like. It’s a small part. But I cherish it and I’m glad I was able to work through these things and have him and my mom in my life still because not everybody gets that. I just want to have more empathy for everyone, and try to love all the terrible people who are doing terrible things because if I can find affection for them, maybe they can find affection for me. Or they’ll kill me and then it'll be fine. I'll die loving them.
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Zee Carlstrom is a writer from Illinois. MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING is their first novel.
