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In The Coin, Yasmin Zaher’s novel about a young Palestinian woman doing her best to build a life that works for her in New York City, cleanliness is, indeed, close to godliness. Zaher’s narrator becomes obsessed with spotlessness and purity even as she gets sucked further and further into chaos while balancing her job teaching at a school for underprivileged boys with her side hustle, illegally reselling Birkin bags.
The Coin feels like a distinctly Palestinian novel—concerning itself, as it does, with its narrator’s statelessness and increasing sense of isolation—but as the news out of Gaza just keeps getting worse, Zaher’s book also does the vital work of reminding the reader that there is no single story to be told about any group of people in any part of the world. Zaher’s protagonist struggles under the weight of immense trauma, yes, but she’s also a fashionista, an obsessor, and an educator doing her (sometimes-flawed) best to impart wisdom. In other words, she’s a human being full of complexities and contradictions, and spending time in her world is both dizzying and delightful.
Vogue recently spoke to Zaher about drawing inspiration from Clarice Lispector, building out the world of her narrator’s preoccupation with fashion, resisting the notion of “pure” identity, and more.
Vogue: I was so taken by the narrator’s obsession with cleanliness and hygiene. What has cleanliness meant to you as a literary framework?
Yasmin Zaher: I was initially interested in cleanliness because it’s a good entry point into describing New York City. The city itself is very dirty, and while living there, I felt like my body, too, was becoming dirtier than usual. As I continued writing, I understood that cleanliness is a metaphor for morality and also for control. We can’t control the world and its chaos, but we can control our home and bodies, so we build illusions of control by keeping things clean and organized.
The fashion of this book deeply excited me. How do you go about building a fictional closet for a woman with clearly refined tastes and minimal means?
Creating the character’s wardrobe was one of the most fun parts of writing this novel. I went imaginary shopping, browsing shops and websites. I wouldn’t have written so extensively about fashion if it wasn’t something that I love—and resent, too, because I also critique its elitism and absurdity. To build the character’s wardrobe, I followed my own taste, and at the end I fact-checked it by reading Christian Dior’s The Little Dictionary of Fashion. It’s a guide that was written in the 1950s but is still enormously relevant today. About elegance, for example, he wrote that it is not dependent on money but rather on care: care in picking your clothes and care in keeping your clothes. So in the novel there is a very detailed description of how the character washes her clothes, or what she calls “the art of laundry.”
Your protagonist’s relationship with her students is so unique. How did you decide to place her in the particular world of education?
The main character is a middle school teacher in an all-boys school, and it matched well with her opinionated personality because she could lecture to her students, and she even manipulates them to follow her ideology.
What is it like to tell a distinctly Palestinian story in fiction right now, while Palestinian life feels so imperiled?
I have very mixed feelings about my novel coming out at this time. Publishing a novel is a dream come true for me, but the joy is muted by grief. Deep inside, I also know that current events are driving some of the interest in the book, and I feel very uncomfortable with that because I never considered myself as speaking in the name of my people. But I tell myself that identity is not pure, that life is messy, and, maybe most importantly, that literature is at its best when it resists the boxes. The Coin is a fun and decadent novel, it sometimes even borders on chick lit, but it’s also dark and you smell the blood in the air, so I’m satisfied with its contradictions.
Are there books that metaphorically held your hand as you prepared to release this one?
I was very inspired by The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector. It’s a book about a woman who goes into crisis after crushing a cockroach in her apartment, and it’s very, very irrational. After reading it, I wanted to try writing in wild mode, to just follow my intuition.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
