In 1996, Jenny Johnston’s life was in disarray. She was the Division Head at one of the world’s largest corporations, headquartered in Lutherville, Maryland – just outside of Baltimore. But Johnston’s coworkers did not–seemingly would not–grant her the respect she felt she deserved. So, she turned to murder and manipulation. And to writer Tim Paggi to tell her tale, which is less a straight narrative than it is a step-by-step guide on how to vanquish one’s sniveling enemies.
I spoke with Paggi about his book How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People — and what it’s like to write with Jenny Johnston, who is a construct of his bustling, mind boggling (and endlessly entertaining) brain.
I wanted to start with a simple question: Where did you come up with the idea for the book?
How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People is my take on the “normal person goes berserk” genre, where you have an extremely normal–aggressively normal–individual who loses their mind and acts out violent fantasies. The book incorporates a lot of obsessions of mine that show up in my other writings: office politics, the dynamics between cities and their surrounding suburbs, surrealism, and cosmic horror. When you put all those things in a blender, then you get the sauce that I’m serving.
That’s a great way to put it. So, is this sauce meant to be satirical? Because I read the novel as a dark comedy.
That’s exactly what it is. It’s set up like a self-help book, which is something I wanted to satirize. I hadn’t read a ton of self-help, but I read a good amount earlier this year before I started writing the book–
Wait, you wrote the book this year?
I did. I started writing the book in March 2024. I’m usually a slow writer. But with this book, I just said to myself, “Screw it. Write it. Start an imprint. Put it into people’s hands. Let’s go.” That was the motive behind this whole project.
What a corporate way to approach publication, which seems appropriate given Jenny Johnston, the protagonist, is like this prototypical corporate woman. And the normalcy she projects in the book is a sort of universal trend we’re all familiar with – the car, the husband, the big house in the suburbs, the mindset. But she’s also, well, straight up evil. Is she based on someone you know?
I always get that question. Even when I was writing as a kid, people would ask, “Who is that character based on?” Or sometimes they’d even ask, “Are you writing about me?” But I’m not writing about people I know; I think it’s kind of rude to do that. I think Jenny is just a projection of the type of person who is living an upper-middle class life outside of Baltimore only as a satirical exaggeration of that. To me, that’s what’s interesting about Jenny. She is awful, but she’s not aware of that. So, she’s so evil and exaggerated, to me, because I’m interested in the “evil of the banal.” When I’m creating a character like her, I ask myself, “How banal and how evil can I get?”
I feel like a lot of the characters in the novel are “evil and banal to the extreme,” which, in a way, informs their fates.
I think all these characters are just so empty and that they also need to fill themselves into something so badly. So, when I was working in more traditional offices, that was something that I always kind of noticed. You know, when you’re working in an office forty hours a week, oftentimes there isn’t a ton to do, and I think different people deal with that in different ways. Some people find their own things to do, some people space out, some people do a great job. And then some people dig into the minutiae really hard. So, when I’m trying to create “office horror,” I’m thinking about the weird sorts of extremes to get inside of these characters who are otherwise so empty. That’s why the characters are so obsessed with paperwork, data, or fitness. That’s what I find a little scary – these weird obsessions – and also, a little bit funny.
It works so well in the book, I think, because, like Jenny Johnston’s projections, these characters are people we’re all familiar with to an extent. Only you’ve taken these sorts of archetypes and turned them on their heads.
I like playing with expectations. The way the book starts off is kind of like a self-help book. It’s actually modeled–the first chapter–almost paragraph by paragraph from the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. People really take that book seriously. And that’s fine. But the book is garbage. I went back and read the Dale Carnegie 1920s version and it is hot garbage. The basic principles are there: be friendly, listen to people, all that. And I guess that really blew some people’s minds in the twenties. But the book also has tons of pseudo-science, and tons of “flexing,” which is a huge part of self-help books, I’ve realized. A lot of [self-help gurus] are just people sort of demonstrating how they got through problems.
Jenny Johnston does that throughout your entire book.
Yes. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to set the novel in the 1990s. I wanted it to be a reflection on today through the 90s. Because look at where we are now – we’re living in an exaggerated version of the 90s today with all the branding and self-help and self-hyping online in social media. And people just present themselves as authoritative. And others believe it.
Is that how you want others to feel reading this book – like Jenny Johnston is an expert in the art of getting what she wants through means of murder and mutilation? And, by just reading this book, you can kill friends and eviscerate people too?
It’s interesting how much people get swept up in Jenny’s story and in rooting for her. No one is going to follow her advice–lord willing–but her narrative is manipulative, and it asks the reader to think like she does
So, How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People is itself a product?
Yes.
And it can be digested by anyone, accessed by anyone, just like a really well-market product?
Exactly. That’s the point. And it’s also insane. The product is insane and deeply disturbing. In my head, the book is meant to be dark, funny, and a little confrontational. The characters themselves are products too–of their environments. So, it’s my job to tempt readers with, for example, this exaggerated character with a very nihilistic philosophy, which is a very American philosophy that we all know. Jenny Johnston is showing readers how to be cunning and to use all of their resources to destroy opponents – that’s America. And it’s all instilled into this product here. And hopefully the book works like a sort of acid that, when you pour it onto your brain, it melts away at the bad parts, the preconceived notions.
Even your metaphors are horrific. Nice.
Thank you.
Tim Paggi photo: Dawson Kramer
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