Danya Kukafka’s literary career started young. Sally Rooney young, but younger still, not yet 30 and she’s already onto her second novel. Her first, written when she was 19 and an NYU student, was acclaimed and award-nominated; her follow-up is tipped for greater things. By rights, she should be obnoxious. In fact, she is warm and charming when I videocall her at her Seattle home, her dog Remy popping up in the background.
She smiles when I bring up her age. “It’s so funny, I published my first book when I was 24, and almost every review mentioned it. It felt both a little bit condescending and also like they were trying to praise me in some way for being young, which felt kind of irrelevant, I was just the age I was.”
She thinks “there’s something to be said for a younger generation’s perspective,” but suggests she isn’t “even that young anymore. I’m 29, Sally Rooney is around there, and there are other 24-year-olds out there doing really cool work.”
It helps that, unlike Rooney, Kukafka isn’t writing about her generation’s travails, True, her debut, Girl in Snow, featured adolescents, but its focus was the aftershocks of a murder, not modern sexual politics. The new novel, Notes on an Execution, is an altogether more ambitious book. Told from multiple perspectives, it traces the final hours of a man on death row and looks at the women whose lives have intersected his. It’s not a straightforward mystery — we know Ansel is guilty all along —but each story races along.
A true crime obsessive, Kukafka grew up in Colorado watching procedurals like CSI and Law and Order with her mother, but was struck by the narrow lens of such stories. “You open on the dead body, the detectives go on the hunt, they find the killer and justice is served,” she says. “I was tired of hearing and seeing this story, and this, combined with my love of true crime, I was asking myself questions for so many years about bad men, about violent crime, about how we think about murder, why we love it so much.” Thus, Notes on an Execution was born.
Her debut was marketed with praise from Paula Hawkins of Girl on the Train fame; arguably the book that launched a decade of copycat heroines dealing with violent crime. Kukafka is no critic of that formula – “that’s what Girl in Snow is, it opens on a dead body and it’s a whodunnit” — but she wanted to go further.
Notes on an Execution explores the thorny question of whether murderers —particularly serial killers — are given too much publicity. Yet in writing a book set partly from the perspective of one, Kukafka risked doing exactly that. In fact, while writing it she remembers watching “yet another Ted Bundy documentary” and thinking “why do people like this so much, why are we so interested in it?”
A few early readers suggested taking Ansel out entirely, but she opted not to “for the sake of showing how uninteresting he is”. “He has all these senses of grandiosity, he believes he’s different, not just another bad guy. But in the end he really is, and I felt that was an important aspect.”
Without giving too much away, the crime Ansel is initially charged with is a more run-of-the-mill one than the murders he is guilty of. Kukafka wanted to show there is nothing special about serial killers — at least, not necessarily. “Men kill women because they feel like it, there’s no deeper interesting psychology,” she says. “By putting this label ‘serial killer’ we elevate them to something special.”
The book starts from his beginning, delving into Ansel’s traumatic early life by introducing us to his mother, Lavender. Kukafka didn’t do this to absolve him of his crime; in fact, one of the other protaganists, Saffy, has “very similar traumas and tragedies” and does not go on to be a murderer. “So you can’t blame it all on nurture,” she stresses. “I found it really satisfying to write about and examine how the choices we make become the story of our lives.”
Having started her career in publishing, Kukafka now moonlights as a literary agent, fitting her writing into an hour or so each morning. However she took time off to complete Notes on an Execution, spending an entire summer writing one of the female leads. This exactitude may be why she writes so convincingly in the voice of women with very different life experiences, often who are much older. “You sit with a person, fictional or real, for long enough, you just get to know them better,” she says.
She also ensured she was writing accurately about the reality of life on death row, interviewing former correctional officers, lawyers and judges. “The prison I wrote about is a real prison, it’s where a third of America’s executions take place,” she says. “The details are as close to real as I could find.”
Having penned a book about the death penalty, Kukafka is no supporter of this form of justice. In fact, she doesn’t really see it as justice at all, even for a man like Ansel, undoubtedly guilty of the worst crimes.
“I think it’s wrong, and I hope that comes through,” she says. “What really strikes me is the sheer pointlessness of adding more hurt to an already incredibly painful situation.” In the book, a character considers that “real punishment would look different… like a lonely, epic nothing… the years rotting as they passed”.
Kukafka believes the death penalty plays into the hands of serial killers. “You get the media that comes with it, you get the microphone and this title which kind of glorifies you, and honestly could be kind of a gift to a man who believes in his own grandeur,” she says. “What I wanted to highlight was the backward pointlessness of it. We’re trying to get a sense of revenge but oftentimes it kind of backfires. Something that is ostensibly for the families of the victims so rarely helps them in any real way.”
Religion doesn’t get a mention in her books, but it’s a key part of the author’s identity. The great-granddaughter of a respected Ohio rabbi (her step-grandfather is also a rabbi), her family “in every corner” is Jewish.
“I’m not as an adult particularly religious, but I identify as very culturally Jewish, because that’s how I grew up,” she says. “My parents put in a lot of effort to make sure I was very connected to my Jewish identity and it’s really important to me. I think it affects a lot of how I see the world.”
In fact, her experience as one of very few Jews in a school of 2,000 helped form her understanding of being an outsider, something she drew on when writing Girl in Snow’s misfit characters. “There were maybe 15 Jewish people and we all knew each other,” she says. “And this was back when referring to someone as ‘the Jew’ was not nearly as offensive as it is now.”
With relatives on Long Island, the lure of a place “with the bagels and lox and the pickle barrels, all the Jewish things we never had in Colorado” was strong and she moved to New York as a student. “It was so jarring,” she says of arriving in a city where she was one of many Jews. Her fiancé, himself not Jewish, grew up in the New York suburb of Westchester “where in his worldview 60 percentof the world is Jewish, he’s almost more familiar with the culture than I am, so that’s been pretty funny.”
The couple, who marry in May, moved to Seattle a few years ago and Kukafka is much happier with a slower pace of life. Indeed, having placed significant pressure on herself with Notes on an Execution, next time round she wants to take it a little easier. “I’m fine with putting a couple more years into it.”
Will the next book have a lighter subject matter? Not a chance.
“No light comedy or romance, that’s for sure, it’s going to be very dark, if I know anything about myself,” she says. The exact focus shifts daily, although she’s hoping to address questions about climate change.
What it won’t do is draw on her early writing. In keeping with her literary wunderkind status, she was sending her first book to agents at just 15 and wrote three novels as a teenager. Will we ever get to read them?
“Oh no,” she says. “None will ever see the light of day.”
Notes on an Execution is published by Phoenix on February 3, 2022.
