The Coin: A Conversation with Yasmin Zader

The unnamed narrator of Yasmin Zader’s astonishing debut, The Coin, is fierce, mercurial, dismissive, and unwittingly funny.

Yasmin Zader’s debut novel, The Coin, follows an unnamed narrator as she grapples with her identity, relationships, and experiences in New York City and Paris. The novel explores themes of belonging, self-discovery, and the complexities of navigating different cultures. In an interview with Jezebel, Zader discusses the development of her protagonist, the role of Palestine in the story, and the secrets she keeps as a writer.

Jezebel: Tell me about developing this very compelling main character. She’s haughty and manipulative, but also tender with her students. How did you layer this complex person?

Yasmin Zader: I started by writing without inhibitions. The first layer was probably the chaotic layer—where things don’t really make sense, the strange connections between things that are based on very loose logic, the impulsive side of her, the improper side of her. As the story developed, I started to understand that Palestine is also a part of it, which wasn’t clear to me in the first few weeks or months of writing it. I started to round out the character in other places, maybe bring a little bit more compassion. But the first and most important layer for me was a character who was a little bit irrational.

I had tried writing two novels before, and it was too structured and boring. This novel I wrote just to see what I had inside. The way I wrote you could classify as binge writing: I wrote for 10 hours straight once a week. It took only a couple of months to finish the first draft. But then the first draft was so all-over-the-place that it took me six years to edit something that somebody would want to publish.

There’s an incredible pivot between the character’s “CVS retreats”—an extreme exhibition of control—to this complete deregulation at the end. How did that shift unspool?

I think the trigger for the letting go at the end was when she goes upstate, and she has this experience with nature. The climax of the book, the ending of the book, is really about refining the connection with nature, or looking for a connection with the animal self, something that is very forgotten in our era, especially when you live in a big city. When I was writing it, I had been living in New York for around two years. I was walking on the street one day in Greenwich Village and I stumbled; to keep myself from falling, I held onto a tree. I realized that I hadn’t touched a tree in months, if not in years. It was a very disturbing moment.

I love the narrator’s criticisms of America. One of my favorite lines is, “I was scared of American culture. When I say that, I don’t mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity.”

I knew you were going to pick that!

Then there’s the plot of selling Hermès bags to Americans because they are too vulgar to access them directly—the narrator can “sell them at a premium to the trashy and unworthy.” There’s a lot of side eyeing.

Yeah, that’s my outsider look into America. It’s the things that I saw that American friends didn’t necessarily see, because they were just so used to them. I landed in New York two days ago, and driving from Newark into the city, there are huge billboards, one after the other, and it’s all for plastic surgery and lawyers. Crazy! I had a tough time, culturally, living here in New York, and in the end I left for that reason. There was no click. Probably to the great disappointment of generations of my family who tried to move here, or wanted to move here…

The reality of Palestine adds a devastating political layer. There’s this part where the narrator fights with this guy she’s seeing, Trenchcoat, and he says, why don’t you go back to where you came from? And there’s nowhere to go, which is upsetting to her, and is also upsetting for the reader. Her frustrations with New York can’t lead back towards any path tied to her roots. Did that political angle feel urgent to you?

That came in much later stages. I started to see connections, I started to understand my own work, and only then did I understand: Oh, OK, this is a person who is dispossessed. I didn’t know that at first. I don’t even know if I know that I’m a dispossessed person—I’m not sure I would even admit that.

My background and Palestine kept interfering into the book. There was a moment in the editing where I was like, “I could just remove Palestine from this entire book; it wouldn’t cut so much out.” You know, not have to pay my dues. But it was impossible. It was such a backbone of the book that it would not exist without it.

While