Trans author and artist Sybil Lamb was living in George W. Bush’s version of The Hunger Games—also known as post-Katrina New Orleans—when two men beat her with an iron pipe, taking a chunk out of her skull, and then left her for dead in a rail yard. She received emergency surgery for over five hours, and the subsequent brain damage affected her balance, memory, and language abilities.

Lamb has transformed this experience and her travels around America into a new book called I’ve Got a Time Bomb. Like her survival, the book is magical—and I don’t mean charming or full of glitter. (OK, maybe a little glitter.) I mean magical, as in a logic-defying story that deeply moves the reader. Interested in learning more about Lamb’s novel, I spoke to her about her writing and survival.

VICE: I loved the book. What motivated you to write it?

Sybil Lamb: I needed to list the [reasons why] my last five relationships went bad, [to discuss] my own ongoing mild flirtations with substances, and to talk about that one time I got my head bashed open. When I woke up, I had a plastic head that was missing a lot of cognitive functions, and I’m still just a little bit brain damaged. All the stuff was in other books, from five or seven different zines or short stories from the past ten years. “How to Kill Queer Scum Properly” was the original version of the bashing with a pipe story, but [Topside Press] got me to rewrite the whole thing in third person for the readers.

How close is the story to your life?
That’s a fun question. It’s written in brain-damaged bits of punk rock, so I tried to get a sticker on the front that said 88 percent completely true. The bashing story was completely true though—100 fucking percent.

Are there any major differences between the book and your life?
The only real difference is Trifle and I never actually shot a girl in the leg. (I will totally put that out there right now: I never shot any girl in the leg.) There’s a syringe fight story that’s really cool that didn’t get in the book, but that’ll be in I’ve Got a Time Bomb Two, out in 2018. Also, I didn’t just go around the complete North America once. I went around about three times.

What’s your life like nowadays?
I am in Toronto—that’s the other difference from the book. I’m no longer a crazy, homeless, wandering wreck. Look at this awesome studio I have. The whole building is intact; it’s nuts. I’m still getting used to it. I’ve [lived in a house] for almost six years now—and I’m still freaked out—but I managed to sell all my old punk rock friends out, and I have cashed in. I got at least a steady supply of money, so I can drink and buy cheap dresses [when travelling] in Brooklyn.

At one point, the protagonist helps another character with what she calls an “important downward spiral.” What is an “important downward spiral?”
I feel like so many people need to go test the worst waters—not just test the waters but test the rapids. It’s like picking a scab; it’s like pulling out your little hairs one at a time. You can think of it as a rite of passage, but a rite of passage for whom? Why do you have to keep proving you can take so much? If you can take more, and you’re unbreakable, you’ve gotta just keep doing it—gotta keep building up your calluses until you’re the toughest pile of calloused calluses, smoothed-over warts, and raw hardtack with feet. But you can never really know beauty and intimacy and the reassuring-ness of a touch until you’ve seen horror, hatred, and how not nice a touch can feel. That’s an important downward spiral.

Forever ago in the mid ’60s, a sylph of a girl named Edie Sedgwick captivated the world—or at least Andy Warhol, and through his Factory and his films and his photos, everything and everyone else that mattered. She was the American art world’s “It Girl,” the source material for numerous plays, books, and movies, even the alleged inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Perhaps that’s part of what inspired the name of the eponymous heroine in Adele Griffin’s addictive new YA novel, The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone. In a phone interview, Griffin says the book is, in part, homage to Sedgwick, whom Griffin stumbled upon as a child when a library mis-shelved the biography Edie: American Girl in between the Nancy Drews and the Hardy Boys.

“It sounds like it could have been a kid’s book, right?” says the two-time National Book Award finalist with a sly laugh. “But … I knew it wasn’t.”

Sedgwick has haunted Griffin ever since. “There was no one in my neighborhood who lived this kind of fabulous, decadent life,” she recalls of her childhood, which she spent mostly on Army bases. “It set my mind on fire.”

That blaze of childhood adulation burst into full flame in the character of Addison Stone, a post-millennial Edie Sedgwick who is “more gorgeous, more reckless, more tragic, more talented” than the original. And this time, she’s also her own Warhol, making her own art, creating her own image. Or as Griffin puts it, Stone is “Edie as Banksy,” referring to the British graffiti and installation artist whose work routinely pushes the boundaries of what high art is and says.

Griffin’s book pushes genre boundaries as well. Conceived of as a “docu-novel,” the story is told entirely in interview segments, as an attempt to reconstruct the meteoric rise and terrible fall (both literal and figurative) of Addison Stone. Griffin is herself a character in the novel, the invisible hand on the other end of the tape recorder in all the interviews. Stone is a precocious artist who goes from lower-middle-class suburbia, to the Whitney Biennial, to her own mysterious death in just a few short years. Along the way, she manages to pick up a Victorian ghost, a wealthy patron, a sleazy agent, two not-always-good-for-her boyfriends, and a cast of trust fund friends that one could easily imagine are the Rich Kids of Instagram.

The main challenge for Griffin was to imbue this art-world story with enough energy to work as young adult fiction, where everything is bigger, brighter, and more. “I needed less of my trip to Frieze with my husband,” Griffin jokes, and more of a young girl’s fantasy life. Luckily for Griffin, that life literally walked into her kitchen one day, when a friend brought over up-and-coming model Giza Lagarce.

“She was so stunning, and so … Edie,” Griffin recalls. “I thought, ‘More of that! More of that!’”

Lagarce became the embodiment of Stone, bringing with her not just her stunning looks, but her wealth of Facebook photos, which Griffin began to “write into” in order to breath the necessary life into the novel. She cites finding Lagarce as the “major rewrite” of the process, and the resulting meld of obviously real images with supposedly real interviews helps to further shatter the line between fake and fact in her story.

But Lagarce isn’t Addison Stone’s only real world analogue. Griffin mined the portfolios of four artists to create the vast collection of images that dot the book. The particulars of the plot, Griffin says, emerged from the interplay between the Sedgwick story she imagined, and the artworks that captivated her. Sophie, a minor character, was created specifically so that Stone could use a portrait by Michelle Rawlings of a young girl with a bloody nose—a portrait she now owns, along with a few of the other “Addison Stone” pieces from the book.

Yet despite all of the photos and paintings and interviews, Stone remains an enigma—this isn’t a mystery novel with a stunning twist at the end, which may disappoint some readers. The mystery here is Stone herself, not what happened to her. But what rises unexpectedly from reading the novel is a lesson that all teenagers would do well to learn: We are all of us mysteries. As characters debate the true nature of Addison Stone, they reveal just how little they know each other and themselves, and how much they project their own beliefs, fears, and hopes onto the world. Stone might shine a little brighter, take up a little more of the oxygen in the room, but she is no more mysterious than anyone else—there are just more people asking questions.

Once, after the midnight premiere of a summer blockbuster, I got trapped on the top floor of a giant multiplex. Three packed showings let out simultaneously, and the theater, in all its infinite parsimony, had shut down everything but the bare minimum required to allow us to exit: one narrow stairwell plunging down four flights, lit mostly by dim emergency lighting.

It didn’t take long for a bottleneck to form at the top of the stairs, which quickly became an impatient crowd, all of us punchy with exhaustion and excitement. Soon people were shouting. Then shoving. The crowd began to lurch violently, as small motions rippled out into panicked attempts to break away. Thankfully, before a full-fledged riot could begin, people pulled down the stanchions and velvet ropes that blocked off the other stairs, and we exploded safely outward in a dozen different directions.

But that visceral experience of the crowd as a capricious-yet-mindless entity has stayed with me ever since. It is this feeling that Dayna Lorentz’s bestselling YA series No Safety in Numbers conjures up in its readers. It’s not just fear or panic, but that sickening moment of inversion where a familiar setting becomes dangerous, and normal people become deadly.

The third book in the series, No Dawn Without Darkness, follows an ensemble of teens quarantined in a mall after a terrorist attack releases a highly contagious, extremely deadly flu virus. The four main protagonists are Ryan, a perfect high school jock hiding a brutal home life; Shay, a beautiful young girl trying to protect her sister and grandmother; Lexi, the computer nerd whose mother, a U.S. senator, is trying to maintain some fragile order; and Marco, the loner struggling to survive in the shadows. With them are thousands of other hapless mall-goers, descending rapidly into deadly anarchy. By book three, not only are they trapped, sick, and terrified, they are starving, cut off from any outside communication, and plunged into pitch-blackness.

Thankfully, in Lorentz’s hands, the books never devolve into terrorism porn or some kind of teen-James Bond spy romp. “It’s much more about these characters,” she says, than the situation. “Terrorism gives me an opportunity to put people through an emotional experience.”

That’s not to say that you won’t find characters turning a wide variety of mall goods into incendiary devices. Indeed, Lorentz jokes that her research for the books has definitely put her on some terrorism watch lists. But the stories she tells from within the mall focus on the most basic job of all teenagers, regardless of their circumstances: surviving and becoming an adult. Lorentz shows us how these particular conditions—lack of supervision, imminent threat of death—merely serve to hasten and distort a process that all young people must go through. This is not a book about a bomb; rather, it is a book about children stumbling toward adulthood through an almost literal minefield.

“A lot of extremity you see in YA is merely attempting to capture the intensity” of being a teen, Lorentz says. “You go to high school and it’s a fight for survival to get through the day. No one is on your side.”

Some adults focus on the terrorism and violence in the series, Lorentz says, and question if it’s too much for teen readers. Teens, on the other hand, read it as a perfect metaphor for what they already experience on a daily basis. And if we’re looking at the question of violence or emotionally disturbing material, No Dawn Without Darkness is not that far removed from YA novels set in World War II, during slavery, or on the frontier.

“I’ve never heard a teenager say ‘This book was too violent for me,’” Lorentz says. Instead, most of the responses she’s gotten are from boys, who are excited to read about “football players who aren’t automatically the bad guy.”

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the story is watching the male characters struggle with the meaning of manhood. Perhaps because the YA audience is predominantly female, it’s rare to come across a series that so sensitively explores the many fraught routes that the “average” American boy can take to adulthood, and the concurrent violence they both experience and enact along the way. The title No Dawn Without Darkness might refer to the literal dark-and-dawn experienced by the denizens of the mall in this book, but it is also a reminder that light and dark live within all of us, even kids—even “good” kids. Lorentz is not afraid to explore the best and the worst in her protagonists. In an interesting twist in this age of dystopian fiction, her narrators are, in the end, able to go back home, where they face perhaps their hardest challenge yet: to reconcile who they have become with who they were, and who they want to be. It’s a challenge even teens who haven’t been trapped in a terrorist attack will understand very well.

When I was 25, I moved to Berlin with a beat-up copy of Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories tucked in my bag. Like many hobosexuals and fagabonds before me, I considered the book a lodestone, a guide to transmuting aimless searching and polymorphous desire into meaningful experiences. So when I heard that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux was releasing The Animals, a collection of the letters of Isherwood and his longtime lover, artist Don Bachardy, I knew I had to read it.

Bachardy met Isherwood when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48 (a year older than Bachardy’s own father). Despite the age difference, the couple spent the next 33 years together. Though love affairs and artistic exploits frequently sent them ricocheting around the world, they maintained a deep and unbreakable connection. They expressed this affection (and frustration) through “the Animals,” personae the two adopted in their letters. Bachardy acted as Kitty and Isherwood called himself Dobbin, Kitty’s faithful horse.

Bachardy, now 80, still lives in the house the couple shared in Santa Monica. Shaking with faggoty fan boy excitement, I called Bachardy to discuss The Animals and what it’s like dating a famous old man who was older than his dad.

VICE: How did your letters become a book?
Don Bachardy: It was my idea. I’d saved all of Chris’s letters, and after his death, I found that he’d saved all of mine. Reading through them just made me think the material was too good not to share it with others. There’s almost nothing, no letter in the book, that is missing, except one, though I can’t remember now where in the sequence it is.

Did you ever discuss publishing something like this with Chris before he died?
No, no, no. And the animals at the time would have been horrified at the suggestion that they would ever be revealed and their letters [would be] published in a book. They would have been quite shocked by such an idea.

What changed your thinking?
I came across both sets of letters and it was very strange reading them again, but interesting too. There were even some laughs in the material, our attempts to entertain each other. There were things I would have liked to have changed—would have changed if I could—but then it’s always a mistake to tamper with any mementos of the past.

How did you meet Isherwood? Had you read his books?
I’d seen a production of I Am a Camera [the play adaptation of The Berlin Stories which was later turned into the musical Cabaret]. It was the road company, here in LA, at the Biltmore Theater downtown. I’d actually already met Chris on the beach with my brother on summer weekends—he was one of the many people my brother introduced me to—but it wasn’t until February of 1953 that Chris and I started seeing a lot of each other. It hadn’t occurred to me that the “Herr Issy-voo” of I Am a Camera was actually the man I was getting to know. He had to tell me himself, and of course, I remembered the play, and eventually I got to meet Julie Harris [who played Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera] because he and Julie had become good friends because of the play.

How did people react to the age difference between the two of you when you started your relationship?
They freaked out about it at the time, all those years ago, because Chris wasn’t in the closet. He couldn’t very well pretend to be anything but queer. And everybody knew this very young looking friend he was going around with—they knew he wasn’t his son. It was considered quite shocking by people who guessed this relationship with a 30-year age difference. That was not at all usual in those days, and certainly not at all usual that neither party was hiding. No beards required! We just brazened it out. Also, we were both artists, so that made it easier. If we had nine-to-five jobs in a clerk’s office, it would have been much tougher because different standards apply.

How was your life as an artist affected by dating Isherwood?
I would never have become an artist except for Isherwood. It was he who constantly urged me to consider being an artist. When we met I showed him drawings that I was doing as an 18-year-old. They were copied from magazine pictures, mostly of movie actors. I did them freehand. Chris saw that I had a real flair for drawing and kept after me: “Why don’t you go to art school?”

Well, it took me three years before I dared to make the jump. I was frightened of failing, but his continual support and interest in the work I was doing in art school, once I got started, was invaluable to me. I could never believe in myself as an artist without his support at the time. That was essential to me.

Was it difficult to get people to take you seriously as first?
Yes, because I looked so young and presentable, and most of Chris’s friends were around his age or older, so it wasn’t so easy for me to be taken seriously by anybody—especially since I hadn’t established myself yet as an artist. That’s why being an artist was so important! I had to have an identity of my own that was more than just Chris’s boyfriend.

Did the age difference concern either of you?
No. I naturally gravitated to people older than I was. It was just instinctive. I knew I could learn so much more from them, and for some reason or another, I had few friends my own age in my school years. So I was ripe to meet an older distinguished man who could give me very, very good advice, which Chris always did.

My favorite paintings you’ve done are the portraits you did of Chris in the last six months of his life.
I was doing close-ups, these close-ups of what Chris was going through at the time. He was lying in bed, and I was hovering over him, just a few feet away. I don’t know of any other artist who has ever done close-up drawings of someone dying day after day, week after week. It seemed so appropriate to me because Chris had urged me to be an artist. And here I was with a model who I knew very well, who I’d drawn and painted through our 33 years together. And here he was dying, and it was a way of being with him intensely for much more of the day because I was drawing him. I was with him and looking at him in a way that I only looked at somebody when [I was] drawing or painting that person, so I could be with him intimately. It felt like dying was something he and I were doing together.

German seems to have a word for every screwed-up specific emotion. If I were to pick one to describe the strangely compelling, deeply unsettling fiction of Shirley Jackson, it would be unheimlich. Freud coined the term to describe the uncomfortable feeling of the familiar suddenly turned foreign. Technically, it means un-home-like, but a better English translation might be uncanny, as in the “uncanny valley,” which refers to the sudden sharp jump in creepiness that occurs when computer animation gets too close to looking human. Jackson, best known today for her short story “The Lottery,” in which a sweet, semi-rural town gathers for a harvest festival / ritual stoning, seems to live in the uncanny valley. All throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, as Americans embraced normal like it was our job, Jackson insisted on showing us the cracks at the margins of our communities, our sanity, and our very reality.

Perhaps this accounts for the ebb and flow of her popularity. While often critically acclaimed and considered a “writer’s writer,” Jackson has faded from the public eye over time. She was too strange for the ’50s, and too apolitical and classically domestic (in her own way) for the radicals of the ’60s and ’70s. In the last few decades, the ho-hum short fiction of small epiphanies—MFA stories about cancer and divorce—have reigned supreme, and Jackson’s folkloric tales of the unexplained and unexplainable have been looked at with a jaundiced eye. If I were to compare her to anyone in contemporary American fiction, it would be Joyce Carol Oates, another prolific virtuoso of the strange.

There are signs, however, that the pendulum of public reception has begun to swing the other way for Jackson. In 2007, the Shirley Jackson Awards “for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic” was created. In 2010, a musical version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre. In the last year, Penguin Classics has reissued seven of Jackson’s books in beautiful black-spine editions, while this April saw the publication of a previously unknown Jackson story in The New Yorker.

This week, Blue Rider Press releases Shirley, a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell that imagines its protagonist—a 19-year-old newlywed named Rose Nemser—living in Jackson’s chaotic Bennington, Vermont, home in the last year of Jackson’s life. Although it was just published, Shirley has already been optioned by HBO for a two-hour movie.

As the novel opens, Rose and her husband, Frank, are a young, striving couple, moving to Bennington so Frank can begin his teaching career under the tutelage of Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s husband. The couple ends up living in the Hyman-Jackson home, where Rose becomes obsessively involved with Jackson, her family, and her stories. For those new to Jackson’s work, Rose’s exploration of her writing provides a great reading list, adding a bit of extra-textual pleasure to Shirley.

Apropos to Jackson herself, Merrell’s novel walks a seemingly contradictory line. It is simultaneously a precisely accurate look at the sexual and intellectual failures that real love must allow for and survive, and a darkly fantastical meditation on magic, revenge, love, and reality. It is at turns dreamlike and hyper-realistic.

“I had this particular interest in domestic fiction, but I wasn’t interested in the fiction of domesticity,” Merrell says of the novel, which she began while at graduate school in Bennington (full disclosure: we were in the same year, though in different disciplines). “I am very much interested in this discomfort in the ways that people try to understand their own domestic lives.” This is the central question that Rose finds herself contemplating throughout Shirley: how to live happily in her own life, despite its problems. Or as Rose puts it while explaining what draws readers to Jackson’s work, how to “understand imperfection and know how to live with it and appreciate it.”

Merrell’s first novel, A Member of the Family, explored a foreign adoption gone disturbing and sad, so this fraught family territory isn’t new to her. But originally, she had started doing serious research toward publishing a Jackson biography. “When I actually went to the Library of Congress to look at her papers I wasn’t even exactly sure why,” she says, except that she was drawn to Jackson’s story. There she started reading the love letters between Jackson and Hyman, her brilliant, philandering, infuriating, and yet much-beloved husband.

Soon Merrell knew she wanted to explore the complicated dynamics of their relationship, which was a partnership-of-equals that stretched back to when they were just college kids, utterly infatuated with each other and their own stellar potential. But somewhere along the line, they’d gotten twisted up. They were often cruel and thoughtless to one another, regardless of their complete commitment to their family. Or as Rose puts it: “Despite the terrible things they did, the ways they hurt each other, they needed one another at the core.”

Shirley, at its core, is about exactly that kind of connection: the one that endures despite all else. From the outside, these relationships can look like duty or desperation or simply two people who have given up on finding real happiness in exchange for certitude. The brilliance of Jackson’s life and Merrell’s writing is that they convey the depth and beauty of this kind of connection, showing that it isn’t an endurance exercise, but rather the scarred-but-surviving tree that grows from a root of unrivaled strength: Love. Like Jackson herself, love endures. In the end, Shirley is a love story, albeit an unexpected and uncomfortable one—perhaps the only kind that could ever be told by or about Shirley Jackson.

Eight years ago on Christmas morning, my older brother John casually ruined my life.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, gesturing with his coffee mug at the piles of books we’d gotten as presents. “How many books would you say you read a week?”

“One?” I shrugged. I was too old, at 28, for original-recipe Facebook. Tweeting was still something I thought only birds did. And iPhones hadn’t yet been invented. So, despite having a more-than-full-time job, I had a lot of time to kill.

“Let’s be generous and say you have 40 years left at that pace,” offered John. “One book a week for 40 years, rounded down a little for weeks where work is crazy or you spontaneously go blind, that equals … 2000.”

My brother leaned back in his chair, savoring the moment.

“That’s it,” he said. He shook his head, as though contemplating some distant tragedy. “Two thousand books in your lifetime. That’s what you get. So every time you pick up a new book, you gotta ask yourself: is this worth it? Is this really one of the 2000 best books ever written?”

He paused for a moment, letting this sink in.

“At the bottom of your list, coming in at number 2000, we have…” He nudged the first book in my pile with his toe: Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder. I breathed a sigh of relief. “And at one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine…”

John nudged again, and Kingsolver toppled to the ground, revealing a copy of Jean Craighead George’s young-adult classic, My Side of the Mountain.

“I’m re-reading that,” I hastened to clarify.

“Re-reading?” John said, eyes-wide like I’d suggested some arcane and dangerous pastime. “Suit yourself…” he added, and left the room.

I just sat there. It’s one thing to know theoretically that you can only do so much in your life: see so many places, meet so many people, read so many books. It’s another to put an exact number on it. Where once I had been vaguely counting up – every book another brick in the foundation of my… something-or-other – now I was going the other way, and every book was just the physical manifestation of a hundred missed opportunities.

Suddenly the entire pile of books in front of me lost its luster. I eyed them like they were the last guys in a bar at closing time – were any of them worth it, or would I just feel a thick sense of shame in the morning when I rolled over?

What I didn’t know then was that 50 books a year would turn out to be a high watermark for me. Aside from a beautifully aberrant period in grad school when I read books like a motherfucker, the graph of my year-to-year reading resembles the path of a boulder flying downhill, gaining speed as it goes.

Despite my best intentions, every year I read fewer and fewer books. More magazines, blogs, podcasts, TV recaps, comics, tumblrs, epic Facebook posts and endless Twitter battles? Yes. Books? No.

For a while, this meant that I was picky about the books I actually did read. They had to be of high quality, possessing some nebulous-but-easily-conveyed cachet. They had to mean something, damn it. Give me Austen, Baldwin, hell even Malcolm Gladwell would do. Only books that you might hear somnambulantly summarized on NPR, that was my rule.

The more I stressed about reading, the harder it became to do. Books went from being an infrequent pleasure to an angst-ridden duty. Somehow, strangely, this didn’t make me read more. Compounding the stress, I felt that if I didn’t read enough, it meant that civilization was decaying and the internet had won.

(Won what? I wonder now. Fear so often looks irrational in hindsight.)

Worrying all the time was exhausting, and no fun whatsoever. I missed reading – not thinking about reading, or worrying about reading, or planning to read, but just opening a book because I wanted to.

So I decided to embrace my fate. If every book I read from now on would be entered on my Best Books of All Time list, then I would treat them that way. If I was motivated to pick up a book – those solid, stolid objects that never ring or send us push notifications – then something about it was awesome, and I needed to recognize that. I needed to stop caring about what other people thought of my book choices, even if the book in question was intended for 14-year-old girls obsessed with money, fashion and private schools. (That’s right, Private, I love you.)

I realized that the “quality” that mattered wasn’t that of the book itself so much as the quality of the experience I had reading it. Reading, for me, was primarily an act of love – and love and shame have no place together. (Thank you, 1970’s gay liberationists, for that wisdom.)

I no longer try to predict the number of books left in my life. I’ve lost enough friends unexpectedly to realize that kind of thinking is pointless. (Plus, like everyone else I know, I’m now too busy stressing out about keeping up with my DVR.) My reading or not reading is not a sign of the End of Books, and will not lead directly to some future wherein everyone is illiterate and we only communicate in emoticons. Nor is it an indicator of my worthiness as a person. Reading is simply an intensely pleasurable and very personal thing that I frequently happen to do on the subway – though never frequently enough.