Yasmin Zaher, photographed by Willy Somma.

The glamorous protagonist of Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin is a singular force. She has a capsule wardrobe of designer clothing and a multi-step Korean skincare routine.

Yasmin Zaher's debut novel The Coin follows an unnamed narrator who arrives in New York with a wallet full of cash and an allowance from her sizable inheritance that remains inaccessible to her for vague reasons. She feels her body rotting beneath her McQueen dress, inventing elaborate rituals to cleanse herself of the city’s grime. New York is the dirtiest place she’s ever been. She’s from Palestine, which she describes as “neither a country nor the third world.” The narrator’s impressions of America are delivered in a voice that oscillates between moral judgment, cold indifference, and perverse fascination. She becomes partners in a Birkin scam with an old-world grifter she meets on the street and encourages her elementary school students to start a revolution. But as The Coin progresses, it’s unclear whether our narrator is unraveling or transcending.

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When I got on Zoom with Zaher, she had just returned to her sunny Paris apartment after her New York book launch. We discussed writing from a place of inhibition, her real-life foray into Birkin scams, and the low-grade psychopathy required to function in New York.

JULIETTE JEFFERS: So you’re in Paris right now?

YASMIN ZAHER: Yeah, I’m in Paris. Are you in New York?

JEFFERS: I am. I’m at the Interview office. You’re good to get started?

ZAHER: Mm-hmm.

JEFFERS: I absolutely loved reading The Coin. I read it in three days. The narrator’s voice is so compelling and the pace at which she moves through the world has so much energy. When I first started reading it, I felt a lot of parallels to American Psycho.

ZAHER: I was surprised that nobody until now has mentioned that.

JEFFERS: Really? They felt really connected to me. Was that a source of inspiration?

ZAHER: No, not at all. I watched the movie for the first time this year. But for years, my husband has been telling me that it reminds him of American Psycho. And then after watching it, I was like, “Yes, of course.” I’m always surprised that more people don’t make that comparison.

JEFFERS: Obviously, the narrator’s a woman and she’s not American. In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman functions as the embodiment of all of these materialistic and wealth-obsessed aspects of American culture. But for the narrator of The Coin, she’s outside of it and feeling this landscape of New York act on her as soon as she enters it. But there’s that similar obsession with routine and luxury.

ZAHER: As you said, the narrator is not American, but those aspects of American material corruption have broken through the borders of America. The elites all around the world today are influenced by this kind of culture. And not just the elites.

JEFFERS: I think you see that most clearly when she’s going to all of the different Hermès stores.

ZAHER: Yeah. Capitalism is global.

JEFFERS: Exactly. But there is also an atmosphere of psychopathy throughout the book.

ZAHER: Yeah, definitely. There’s the scene where she breaks the bottle of perfume on the ground and she fantasizes about committing mass murder in Fort Greene. And there’s definitely psychopathic exercises that she does with her students.

JEFFERS: Totally. She even has this student who has these school shooter ideations and she’s like, “I kind of get it.”

ZAHER: She’s like, “Oh, no big deal. I’m just going to tear out this page in his notebook and we’re just going to pretend all is normal.”

JEFFERS: I find her voice simultaneously terrifying and compelling and relatable. What was the process of channeling that voice like?

ZAHER: I don’t know if it was a process. It was more about suspending judgment for as long as I could during the writing so that I could stay as uninhibited as I could for as long as possible and let whatever extreme thoughts come out in the writing. I wanted the raw material to be as extreme as it could be so that I could play with where I wanted the boundaries to be.

JEFFERS: Totally. The narration has all of these interjections of the taboo, of things that we normally repress. Obviously cleanliness is a big theme in this book, but there’s a real unearthing of the dirt, not just of the subconscious, but that of the whole system. She’s like, “When Netanyahu and Trump were elected, I thought those were good days because the truth had come to light.”

ZAHER: Yeah. She’s obsessed with morality in the same way that she’s obsessed with cleanliness. She’s constantly interrogating her own morality while saying things that very

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