Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp.

Girlfriend Zap!

Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic is So Fucking Sexy!!!

By Georgina Brainerd

6.8.2025 

I read Paradise Logic the week after I graduated. Being at college felt like always having something right in front of my eyes: papers, deadlines, readings. Finals leading into graduation felt especially like that, always something covering my view, no possibility of looking away: early mornings, late nights, packing up my entire life into boxes. My eyes adjusted to that closeness and relative obscurity. Then, one morning, I woke up fully rested with nothing to do that day—there was nothing in front of me. I could see so far. And the sun was shining right in my eyes. That week, as I spent my first days adjusting to my summer sublet and my newly non-student, non-employed status, delirious and uprooted, I read Paradise Logic.

Sophie Kemp, the author, is tied to my college experience insofar as she teaches at the school I just graduated from. I have never met her, but we have a relatively close connection. She is a woman who wrote a book ostensibly about womanhood (girlhood?) and the haunting sexual/spiritual/psychological/physical/etc./etc. pain enacted by men—more precisely, by academic boyfriends—and I am connected to her by my boyfriend, who took creative writing classes under her and published a conversation with her in a college literary magazine. His copy of Paradise Logic is the one I read.

Reading Paradise Logic feels like being zapped in the head with a laser. Or pricked with a sharp pin somewhere inside your boob. It is a trip caused by the kind of drug you will never take unless you take bovine growth hormones or move to Brooklyn after graduating from Oberlin College. It is the story of the peregrinations of a girl named Reality Kahn who receives the profound wisdom that her quest should be to find a boyfriend and then, of course, become the greatest girlfriend of all time. The everyman of this story, or the everyboyfriend, is Ariel Kauffman, who was at one time a child piano prodigy but is now a PhD candidate in Mesopotamian history at NYU living in a shipping container in an apartment-cum-punk venue, Paradise (#221), with no shower and many male roommates who he met “in a class where you read James Joyce and say your opinions.” Sometimes, he smokes crack with his ex. The backdrop to this domestic idyll is provided by the ambient stench of the Gowanus Canal. Reality works diligently to be Ariel’s, even before he is quite able to put the label “girlfriend” onto things, and this diligent labor ends up devolving into absurd chaos as the entire system of girlfriendhood collapses to become a delirium that takes her far from Paradise (#221).

The book itself has the texture of a lumpy soup, left out and over time going rancid. There are so many little moments, turns of phrase, and characters with enough life in them to make novels of their own: a foray into Serbian research chemicals, a career in the waterslide commercial business, a roommate with a boyfriend who goes by “Lord Byron,” the growing threat of female friendship, the specter of the Atlantic Terminal Mall, a quest to a mysterious mountain, and a rare periwinkle garden snake wearing sunglasses. There are lines like, “we were in noli me tangere mode right now but that would end momentarily,” and, “then he immediately became Mr. Firehose about the whole thing” to describe ejaculation, and, “I was seriously feeling like Tobias’s dad, Tobit, sitting at the fig tree being like: Fuck, I am blind.” But the reader is given no time to ruminate. Paradise Logic is a rapid onslaught, and sometimes things get lost in the soup. It may sound a bit lolcats randomsauce—the US cover features our favorite millennial memesign, Comic Sans—but the novel is also grounded in deeply felt pain, haunting reminders of the reality of girl(friend) life, and enough highbrow literary analogies to have any smart-person Ariel-type thinking, “Ah…I understand the allusion!”

What do men want from women? What does the divinely ordained magazine, Girlfriend Weekly, and unfiltered access to the internet teach our protagonist? What do boyfriends want from Reality? Well, they want her to be viral chatroom-poster Marly, age fifteen, from Des Moines, who is looking for someone “able to pleasure my pillowy soft boob.” They want her to be a loyal dog, woof woof, and go down to the deli to get an energy drink for them as they grade papers and smoke crack. They want her to say yes, yes: yes to sex, yes to drugs, yes to a modelling gig at the new waterpark going up in Paramus, New Jersey. They want her to be a vessel. This isn’t a book about the “modern dating scene;” it may be a book about dating someone straight out of college who doesn’t reciprocate your devotion, but it is most definitely a narrative of the ways patriarchal violence engenders itself into every relationship women have with their boyfriends, fathers, bosses, high school English teachers, doctors, drug dealers, etc., etc.

What does Paradise Logic want from us? It wants us to be uncomfortable. But it also wants us to laugh, and it uses that laughter to get at the core of some of our most deeply felt aches and pains surrounding sex, desire, gender, and power. And those surrounding being twenty-three, which admittedly I am not, yet. Reality begins her quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time “because it was the era when one graduates from college and moves to New York and suddenly time is a never-ending waterslide.” My graduation saw me move out of New York, but I think I see a glint of Gowanus at twenty-three in my future, and I’m not stupid enough to ignore the fact that male violence will continue to be a part of my life. To be honest, reading Kemp’s novel as my first out of college cannot bode well for me.

I finished Paradise Logic in a park on a hot day and spent the rest of the afternoon just kind of walking around. In the evening, I waited for a friend outside a train station, staring at my phone. A man, let’s say he was forty-five years old, walked past me and said, very cockney, You look so fucking sexy, baby, so fucking sexy, and walked into a Marks & Spencer minimarket, avoiding eye contact. The visceral feeling I got when I heard that kind of targeted sexual violence, when I could hear what he wanted to do to me and how he wanted to make me uncomfortable, that feeling when my entire brain got zapped and went white and I just stood there, no one else within earshot—that is the feeling that Paradise Logic encapsulated. After the zap, when I knew he was gone, maybe buying some cocktail sausages, and I had moved my arms to cross over my midriff, I was zapped by a series of moments from Kemp’s novel, moments she writes about better than I could and somehow makes funny, moments of targeted violence where men tell Reality, You look so fucking sexy, baby, so fucking sexy.

I am grateful for the book. Obviously, dutifully, I am grateful to my boyfriend for always introducing me to such enlightening texts, just as Ariel teaches Reality about the decadence and licentiousness of the Assyrian Empire. My problem now is that I don’t know who to give this recommendation to. Paradise Logic is a weird book. It contains explicit sexual abuse and references to Milton and Don Quixote. It is not a casual birthday present nor a coworker anniversary gift nor, really, a gift for anyone over thirty. It’s the kind of thing you maybe can’t give to someone you know in real life because if they hated it you’d be soooo embarrassed. I heard every undergraduate senior in the Williams College English Department read it (they do everything together) and hated it. My recommendation might work best on the internet, which is a place of communion for weirdgirls who read widely and who have been consuming sexually violent content on Tumblr since way before they had boyfriends. What I can confidently tell even people I know in real life is that Sophie Kemp is doing something “caRazay,” and that this is only her first novel, and that they should seriously watch out.