A Kernel on Connections

with author Charlee Dyroff

With artificial intelligence’s expansive growth, it’s impossible to ignore its impact on our lives, whether good or bad. Charlee Dyroff’s timely debut novel Loneliness & Company (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores the topic of AI with nuance, centering the conversation around human connection. 

Lee’s life is not going as she planned. Instead of getting assigned a job at a Big Five corporation after graduation, she matches with an unknown company that is less-than ideal for her top-of-class ranking. Now, Lee is compiling research to train an AI on how to be a friend. When the company reveals it’s part of a secret government project designed to combat loneliness—an emotion that had been removed from society’s lexicon—Lee is determined to do everything in her power to make it succeed.

Set in near future New York City, Loneliness & Company posits the implications of a world that relies heavily on AI while conveying what it means to be human and to nurture those relationships.

Recently, Kernel editor Shelby Newsome spoke with Dyroff over Zoom about her debut novel, genre hopping, and magical writing moments. 

[Editor’s note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.]

Shelby Newsome: Your debut novel Loneliness & Company releases soon. How are you feeling?

Charlee Dyroff: I'm feeling very excited and also very nervous. I don't think I realized, and maybe a lot of writers don't realize this, just how much goes into a book being out in the world. So many people come together to help with that, which is amazing, but it's also such a weird waiting period where you're done with the story, but it's not out yet. 

Tell me about your background. How did you get into fiction writing?

So I studied nonfiction at Columbia. I went to the MFA program there. That was the first time I really realized that you could be a writer, which is silly. I obviously read books growing up and love reading, but I didn't know any writers—in my family or in my life. The program was a pretty intense experience for someone who hadn't really known what MFAs were, what the workshop experience was like. It was really fun and intense, but I started writing fiction as almost an escape from those nonfiction workshops. 

I submitted a proposal for a class at Columbia that was called Special Projects. You could work on anything you wanted. In fact, it was encouraged to be outside of whatever genre you were studying. I got into that, and I met the poet Alan Felthensal who said you don't have to be only a nonfiction writer. You don't have to be only a fiction writer. You should explore. 

What inspired you to write this story?

This idea really spurred from a conversation I had with some coworkers a long time ago. I've worked in startups a lot for a day job. The conversation was about AI and building human-centered tech and how, in order to do that, you actually have to think about what it really means to be human first. So that idea really came to me through this conversation with people years before I actually started writing the book. It was just some coworkers grabbing a beer. And then I couldn't stop thinking about it. It just started coming out in what I was writing. But that conversation took place at least a year before I started even writing fiction. It was germinating in my brain. I became fascinated by technology, social media, AI, not just what we're creating and putting out there but how it in turn creates us. The loneliness component came in much later. It was not in any of the first drafts of the book. It was really this exploration first of: what do we create and how is it creating us?

With the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the constant controversy that's surrounding it right now, your novel feels very timely. But I also love that it's hopeful. Was it important to you to approach that conclusion?

Yes. It's an interesting time for the book to come out and I couldn't have planned it. It makes me a little nervous because I don't want people to think that I'm saying the development of tech or AI is either good or bad. I think it's way more nuanced than that. And it's important to think about how we are evolving as what we create is evolving. I do think that it was important for me to end in a hopeful place that is about human connection. I personally have a lot of hope in humanity and people. And even just through this process and meeting you, it's this random effect of us being able to connect online and that's a magical aspect of the tech world. 

I wanted to write something that got people to think about it and to feel like they can be a part of that discussion because AI is coming and it's gonna be here.

The protagonist Lee is a left-brained young professional who's responsible for compiling research to train an AI on how to be a friend. And throughout the trajectory of the story, she learns about human connection alongside the AI. I thought the parallel was very effective in highlighting Lee's growth and humanity. Did you always know that you wanted to use AI as a tool to excavate Lee's progression?

No, I don't think so. After I had gone through a few drafts—I have an accordion writing style where I write a ton and then trim it back to see what's really there—then it's like, oh, this is an interesting way to explore her internally and see what's going on with how she is processing the same way a computer might process, except it’s very different and dynamic in its own way.

In one of the very early drafts, I had written her to be very unaware of herself, and it was not well received. There were a lot of: this character is very strange, this character is not someone we can understand or penetrate; we can't get into her head. And it's weird if you're writing a first-person narrative where you can't get into their head. So it did take me a while [to get her character right] because I do see her as someone who is trying to figure it out and is not really aware of herself. So how do you keep those emotions and evolve her over time while also letting the reader in on the journey? Sometimes we don't really know what's going on inside of us. We don't always have to be able to pinpoint all of our emotions.

I really feel like folks will resonate with Lee, at least I resonated with her—and I got so much out of the story. Lee’s voice was so strong throughout it. Was it difficult for you to maintain that consistency as you wrote the novel? Or was that just something that came naturally with your accordion writing style?

Her voice is really what was there first, before any plot, before anything else. I was interested in: what is this voice, who is this, and what are we going to do here on the page? Being able to see the world through her eyes has been a very fun journey. It wasn't necessarily difficult to keep her voice on the page. What was more difficult was keeping Lee's voice out of the Janet [Lee’s boss] sections. That was harder for me because I had written Lee’s voice for so long. We had to edit some sections out of the Janet pieces that were too much from Lee's perspective. I'm really happy that I had some readers who could help me figure that out because it's really hard to switch from character to character. 

Your conversation with coworkers planted the seed of curiosity for what would turn into this novel. Did you start writing it while you were still at Columbia? And what did that process look like for you? 

Yes. I didn't know I was writing a novel and I didn't admit that I was writing a novel for a really long time. I think now it was probably a source of protection. I had a 40-minute commute to Columbia, so I would write on the Notes app on my phone. I would write in a notebook. I was teaching and I was writing and I was thinking a lot about social media, about startups, which was the world I had come from to grad school. Even in my nonfiction, I was thinking about influencers, trends, that kind of thing. 

Then I took the Special Projects class and that's where I really started working on this voice. One of the professors was Jen George. She's a master of voice. I got to work with her on the voice of who this was. So, again, I didn't know what I was writing. I didn't know that there was a plot or anything happening. In my last year of grad school, I had a teaching fellowship so I was able to do one more semester and I just started pouring ideas into this. I probably knew it was a novel in 2020 when I graduated, but I didn't know what to do with it. So I worked on it for a year. And that's when my friends that I had from grad school, who knew I was working on a secret project, were like, that's not a project, that's a book, and you should try and query an agent. It was a weird thing where I was like, if I don't call this a novel, maybe it can just be whatever it wants to be and it can develop on its own and it doesn't have to have so much pressure behind it to be something. 

What does your writing process look like? Do you have any specific routines or rituals that help you write?

I feel like sometimes I'm in denial of wanting a routine or having a routine because I want to be the kind of writer who can write anywhere anytime, which is a fallacy. But I do write in the mornings a lot. It's easier for me to put the writing first. I've tried writing after work. I always wanted to be one of those people writing in a bar at night. But once I give ideas to work or a phone call with a friend, or energy and time to different things, I have a tank of gas that gets depleted. I usually try to write in a notebook first before pulling my laptop out because then I feel like I'm a bit more free to not write linearly. I can do idea maps. I can journal if I feel like that or I can make lists or bullets. It feels less constrained if you have a page to play with versus going directly to a document where it forces you to think of what happens first, what happens second, what happens third. 

Do you have any upcoming projects on the horizon?

I would like to write some essays again to not pigeonhole myself and to rework that muscle and see how my fiction writing has affected my essay writing. I've been thinking a lot about belief systems, not necessarily religion, but more like magic and the spiritual realm, like “if you believe in something, is it real?” type of vibe. 

What kernel of advice would you have for our readers?

Keep going and trust that showing up for your story will result in something over time. I had a professor once, Wendy Walters, who told me that if you can reach one person with your writing then you've already won, and I try to keep that in mind. It's so hard to put words on a page anyway and to communicate something. So if it goes from your brain to the page to someone else's brain and elicits a feeling for them, then I think that's pretty magical. 

Also, as a writer, you're generally pretty hard on yourself. You want to do better, you want your stories out there, you want to write the next best thing or the next best thing for you. It's this continual treadmill of wanting to do better, better, better. And we don't really stop to celebrate those small moments, like, I just wrote the coolest sentence I've ever written in my entire life or, like, I just shared this with a friend who sent me a text and was blown away. 

My kernel of advice for other writers, especially writers early in their career, would be to make sure to stop and see those magical moments.

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Inspiration, Information, & Insight

• On Sunday of last week Sarah broke her brain while drafting her third short story in as many weeks. She’s now limping through revisions on final portfolios for three different classes and fantasizing about how she will start piecing her brain back together once the semester is over. She also read Olga Ravn’s The Employees and the first two books in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation and Authority) for class and enjoyed exploring their take on the weird and speculative.

• Neidy read three books this week, Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield and C. N. Crawford’s Frost and Nectar Duology, Frost and Ambrosia. 

• Natalia is still slowly working through The Crying of Lot 49 and trying to resist the distraction from all things productive that is NYC, especially with the nice weather.

• Shelby got to hear Cheryl Strayed speak this past week at the local theater in her town. Years and years ago, like many readers, Shelby voraciously devoured Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. Listening to Strayed speak about her writing and career imbibed Shelby with the creative rejuvenation and inspiration she realized she has currently been lacking. She hopes to carry the feeling with her into this new season of her creative life.