Kristen Arnett’s earliest experience as a writer came during church. “I grew up very evangelical,” she says. “Southern Baptist. So, I was in church with my family most days of the week. They’d hand out these church bulletins with a space where you could write down notes on the sermon. I would act like I was very diligently taking notes, but I was actually writing stories where I inserted myself into the Baby-Sitters Club.”
Arnett, a 44-year-old lover of “dad jokes,” tells this story over Zoom from her overgrown backyard in Orlando, Fla. She looks relaxed in a cozy blue and white flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her long brown hair hanging loose around her smiling face. A New York Times bestseller, she’s the author of the novels With Teeth (Riverhead, 2021) and Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019), both of which were finalists for Lambda Literary Awards. Now Arnett’s gearing up for the publication of her third novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, a tragicomic künstlerroman about a down-and-out gay Floridian clown, coming from Riverhead in March.
Despite her mainstream success, Arnett’s road from church pew fanfic to the bestseller list was, as she puts it, “nontraditional.”
Arnett had a son at 18 and dropped out of college to raise him. As a single mother, newly estranged from her conservative family, she started working full-time at local libraries to make ends meet and went back to school at night to earn her BA in literature and eventually her master’s in library science. “I was always writing,” she says. “But I would just think of it as, like, Kristen’s hobby time.”
Then, in 2012, a professor encouraged her to apply for an internship with Rollins College’s Winter with the Writers festival. Though she initially resisted—“I didn’t want to take up space from a real writer who deserved to be there,” she says—the internship offered her a first taste of the workshop environment. Through sharing her work with peers and visiting artists—including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who took all the interns out for drinks—she realized, “Oh, no, I am a writer. This is being a writer.”
From there, Arnett went on to Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, where she found community and began to determine where she fit into the larger literary landscape. “We all learn to write by reading and emulating the writers we like,” she says. “When I first started out, I thought I was going to be the queer Flannery O’Connor. It was all very serious, very grotesque. But then people would read my stories, and they’d be like, Oh, you’re so funny, though. I thought your writing would be funnier.”
Arnett’s reputation for comedy was bolstered by posts on Twitter, where she’s attracted an audience of 71,000 followers through running gags about punny pet names (“gonna get a pet fish and name it Tuna Thurman”) and what foods could technically be considered ravioli—Pop-Tarts, pizza rolls, and hot dogs all make the cut. “Twitter is one of the things that first got me thinking about clowning,” she says. “It feels like performing, becoming a clown for somebody.”
Still, the pressure to carry that performance over into her more formal writing was great. “Eventually I just thought, Oh, you want me to be funny?” she says, riffing on one of Joe Pesci’s lines from Goodfellas. “I amuse you?”
The other spark of inspiration for Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One came during a panel on humor writing that Arnett participated in at AWP in 2020. “There were five of us on this panel,” she recalls, “and I just slowly realized that we all had completely different ideas about what was funny and how we would present those things on the page.”
A birthday party clown, a persona that Arnett conceives of as “all id,” seemed like the perfect lens through which to explore the concept of performance, artistic hierarchies, and her personal theory of humor. Though her heroine, Cherry, is stuck working underpaying birthday parties and demeaning haunted house gigs, she thinks of herself as an artist devoted to perfecting her craft, often waxing philosophical on why certain jokes land while others don’t.
Once Arnett hit upon this concept, she says her “librarian brain” kicked into high gear and she entered research mode. She spent a full year reading up on the history of clowning and watching performances on YouTube before even beginning to write. “Luckily,” she says, “I live in Orlando, which is a place for performers. You could throw a rock and hit a clown here.”
Born in 1980 and raised in Orlando, Arnett expresses great affection for the city both in conversation and in her forthcoming novel. Though she established her reputation as a central Florida writer from her first long-form publication—the 2017 story collection Felt in the Jaw, for which she held a book launch at her local 7-Eleven—this is her first book explicitly set in Orlando, and a large chunk of the narrative is devoted to Cherry meditating on what it means to love a city that seems increasingly not to love her back.
Like her heroine, Arnett is quick to bemoan gentrification and local politics, but she also rhapsodizes over Orlando’s resilient queer community and immense natural beauty. “Everything here feels alive,” she says. “Everything feels connected and very green and very special.” As if on cue, while she talks the sun comes out from behind a cloud and bathes her face in a golden light.
“Anyway, I was like clown central for a solid year,” she says, then adds with a laugh, “It had to be so annoying for my wife.” Arnett dedicates Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One to “anyone who’s ever been called funny as an insult,” and she counts herself among that number. “I’m someone who is on all of the time. I know that about myself. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea.”
Arnett attributes her sense of humor largely to her “very funny” father. “My dad and I are estranged,” she says. “But I say all the time that I think the reason I am the way I am is that I’ve patterned my
mannerisms after him. He was the guy who would show up somewhere and people would be like, Hey, this guy’s here! I think, subconsciously, for a long time, and especially when I first came out, I was like, That’s the kind of funny I want to be. But the thing is, that’s just a persona, right? Someone can be really funny and also a total dick.”
Here she pauses. “Sorry. This has turned into a real therapy session.”
Humor as a way to feel close to someone who’s gone is a central theme of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One as well. Cherry’s late brother was always considered the funny one in the family. Her clowning is, at least partially, an attempt to step into his shoes.
“I asked myself how much of clowning or making jokes is an attempt to deal with trauma or loss,” Arnett says, “versus a way of not having to deal with it at all. Like, I’ll give you a show and a performance instead of actually having to sit and think about this thing that’s too hard to touch. I was really interested in the ways in which performance can be a way to move through and process grief.”
Despite this heavier strain, Arnett still asserts that this book was “the most fun” she’s ever had writing, including those early days in the church pews. “It was like a honking clown nose of joy for me,” she says.
