Exclusive Interview: “The Distractions” Author Liza Monroy

 

In fiction, it’s easy to portray the future as a utopia or a dystopia.

But in Liza Monroy’s science fiction novel The Distractions (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), she presents a society that is both at the same time. And it’s a balance she employs in other aspects of the story as well.

In the following email interview, Monroy discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.

To start, what is The Distractions about, and when and where does it take place?

In The Distractions, the society is sort of a utopian dystopia. Everyone’s basic needs are covered, but they’re going crazy trying to find emotional outlets and meaningful ways to fill their time. In this world, algorithms do everything for us, from being friends to personal assistants and life coaches.

My protagonist, a lonely tech developer named Mischa Osborn, has lived, like many, a life of general solitude: avoiding love, intimate encounters, or really even friendship or any connection deeper than the one she might have with her virtual personal trainer. Mischa has a deep fear of attachment, ambiguity, all the stuff of human emotions.

So in spite of, or perhaps because of, this reluctance to have relationships with other people, Mischa creates an AI that’s capable of actual love. Not just any general love, either, but the type of love the individual using it needs, even if they don’t know exactly what kind of love that is.

The novel takes place across future landscapes of Las Vegas, New York City, Los Angeles, and Paris. Climate change plays heavily into the backdrop, too.

As much as this sounds like science fiction, it also seems like The Distractions takes inspiration from what’s going on in the real world.

That’s exactly the case. I drew heavily from my own experience with social media, being able to continue following the lives of people I’d fallen out of touch with, reflecting on how strange it is to be able to see moments of these lives play out as if they were highlight reels or clips from a show.

Before the Internet, it wasn’t possible to so casually see what had happened to someone, no interaction required. How their career or relationships turned out, whether they married and had kids or didn’t — unless you got back into contact with them, it would all be left to wondering.

Everything in our present times is amplified in the world of The Distractions. Though I wrote about an AI becoming capable of genuine affection before these kinds of chatbots artificial intelligences existed, that ended up being an aspect that connects the narrative to our present times, too, for better or worse.

Stalking also plays a part in The Distractions, and in this story, you have a woman stalking a man. Statistically speaking, though, stalker incidents usually involve a man stalking a woman. 78% of stalking victims are female, while 87% of stalkers are male. Did you have the stalker be a woman stalking a man for any specific reason? Like, did you want to run counter to the norm, or was it not about the stats and normality?

You’re onto something in that for this particular novel’s world, I wanted to see what would happen if all focus on gender roles, expectations, or norms were removed.

Everyone has gender neutral pronouns for the sake of decentering ideas of what somebody is. I would imagine in this world it’s more 50 / 50 when it comes to stalking, too.

While I wouldn’t say I’ve stalked somebody, I experienced a lot of the emotions that Mischa feels in the novel, even extending to online lurking to try to figure out why someone I was super into romantically had ghosted me. I did find out, but knowing the reason didn’t help, an idea I also played with in the novel.

As I said earlier, The Distractions is a science fiction story. But it sounds, more specifically, like a dystopian sci-fi story.

It’s funny, I didn’t set out to write any particular genre, I just wanted to reflect the intense experience of obsession and how time online can amplify it and make it worse. So during the writing process I didn’t ascribe by any genre conventions, only the writerly convention of banging my head against the wall as I abandoned draft after draft, doing it all over again until it got to a version of itself I felt could entertain and reach readers, while tapping into some of our feelings about contemporary, “very online” life.

It took a long time for me to get the rules of the world down, the social and political background and context, the kinds of things I would need to understand about this future society even if they never appeared blatantly on the page.

The Distractions is your second novel after Mexican High. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on The Distractions but not on anything else you’ve written, and especially not Mexican High?

Mexican High is a coming of age novel and The Distractions is more of a midlife crisis story, told by a person in a position in life when one has lived long enough to have regrets, and to look back and wonder what might have happened if something had played out differently. The characters have experienced long careers, failures, parenthood, marriages, and disappointment in what were formerly dreams.

For The Distractions, I was inspired by [Claire Messud’s] The Woman Upstairs, as that’s another obsession-with-other-lives story. I also really appreciated [Kazuo Ishiguro’s] Klara And The Sun, which humanizes a robot character so beautifully.

My two novels have little in common, other than that I hope they can both engage readers and get them to see the world a little bit differently than before.

What about non-literary influences? Was The Distractions influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?

Black Mirror was my biggest non-literary influence, three episodes in particular: “Nosedive,” which features a world in which everyone is ranked; “Be Right Back,” which shows an eerie view of cloning I also had in mind for my influencer character, Ari, who needs to replace their neurodivergent son with a more “normal” kid for their social media followers’ sake; and finally, “The Entire History Of You,” in which one’s entire life and experiences are recorded by a brain implant.

In The Distractions, though, there are no technological implants; I thought it was really important to retain that most people think it’s creepy to have tech-alterations to body and mind, so I went instead in the direction of tiny drones that follow you around and record everything.

I know for sure I would not want any foreign implants — especially technological ones — in my brain or body.

One interesting thing about The Distractions is that a portion of the sales will be going to The Center For Humane Technology. What does that organization do?

I love this nonprofit as they encourage the tech industry to be accountable for the products they design, to respect users’ attention. I have a recurring phrase in the novel about tech being like a drug company creating a disease in order to manufacture the cure; redesigning the technology to lessen its addictiveness is a noble goal, but if profits rely on people using the products as much as possible, what’s the incentive? I appreciate the way The Center For Humane Technology addresses and gets us to think about the issue.

And why did you not only want to donate some of the money from The Distractions to some organization, but also specifically to the Center For Humane Technology?

Regalo Press, my publisher, donates a portion for every book they publish to a nonprofit of the author’s choice. I thought that was really cool.

I selected The Center For Humane Technology because I’d known of their work prior to finishing the novel, and had read extensively about it as well as interviews with the founder Tristan Harris, who had gone from developing these addictive products to speaking out about tech’s responsibility to humans’ attention spans. I used Harris’ TED talks and profiles in a class I taught at UC Santa Cruz called “The Distractions,” a writing class on these issues that turned out to be a lab of sorts for developing the novel.

Now, sci-fi novels are sometimes stand-alone stories, and sometimes they’re part of a larger sagas. What is The Distractions?

This is a stand-alone novel. All my books are. I don’t have the attention span for a series. The novel I’m working on now is completely different, a magical realism story about moms who meet for a surf-and-childcare exchange. On a quest for ultimate freedom, they begin morphing into ocean animals, only to discover that systems of interconnection dominate everything, even wildlife.

Earlier I asked if The Distractions was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think The Distractions could work as a movie, a TV show, or a game?

I think it would be a fun movie or show.

And if someone wanted to make a movie or TV show based on The Distractions, who would you want them to cast as Mischa, Nic, the voice of Tory, and the other main characters?

It’s an interesting question, to think about casting, as I tend to think about my characters for the book and then release all ownership if a work of mine gets adapted.

That said, I love the idea of Anne Hathaway as Mischa as I know she can play obsessive really well. I loved her in WeCrashed. For Ari, I could see Jessica Alba [Good Luck Chuck], Kirsten Dunst [Civil War], or Kristen Bell [Bad Moms] as a neurotic momfluencer struggling to retain an appearance of perfection. I would want America Ferrera to be in it too; I think she’d be a great Mire as she can give convincing speeches, as we saw in the Barbie movie. For Nic, I’m enamored of Gael Garcia Bernal [Old]. He’s got that absolute gorgeousness that would be easy for viewers to see Mischa becoming relentlessly obsessed with.

So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about The Distractions?

I hope readers have fun with the way I played with language for the novel.

When I first started the project, there were many words that didn’t exist at that time, like Reel, which are now part of everyday lexicon. It’s weird to me looking at the novel now how much of it I thought was odd and novel and highly fictional at the time is now a part of daily reality: sentience in AI and online friends-for-hire, productivity coaches, screen fatigue, remote work, and so much more.

Finally, if someone enjoys The Distractions, what sci-fi novel or novella of someone else’s would you suggest they check out and why that?

I am absolutely loving a novel that is coming out in March of 2025 entitled Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn. I was sent an advance copy and I’m obsessed with it. The dystopia in this novel is not the future but the 2020 pandemic. The protagonist develops an app to be the “perfect person” for herself in the wake of her divorce. I can’t put it down. I love the way the theme of AI becoming capable of loving us in the way we want to be loved is aligned. It’s creepy and somehow oddly beautiful at the same time.