Clearly, God Loves Me: The Millions Interviews Nada Alic

“Almost anyone can summon a spirit, but almost no one can summon the right spirit at the right time.” This is one of hundreds of achingly funny and profound truths in Nada Alic’s Bad Thoughts, the debut story collection well on its way to becoming a cult favorite among the lucidly spiritual and painfully online. I had the pleasure of talking with Nada about the thoughts behind Bad Thoughts, super sattva syndrome, the magic of mundanity, how to optimize purgatory, and much more.

Mila Jaroniec: Norman Mailer calls writing “the spooky art,” because it allows for soul communion in a way no other art does. You can talk to people, get inside them, without ever seeing them or talking to them personally. You and I haven’t met in person and only emailed briefly, yet after reading this collection, I feel like we’d be good friends in real life. Do you ever feel that way about books, almost like you lose the ability to engage with them critically because it feels like they pulled something out of you that you weren’t able to—or perhaps didn’t want to—express yourself? Which ones made you feel the most connected?

I love that. What else are we doing this for? The loneliest thing about being alive is that we can only experience reality through our own subjectivity. You’re stuck inside yourself, with yourself, your past, your projections, your fears and That’s why it can feel like such relief when it clicks. It’s also why you can feel so turned off, or bored, or even angry when it doesn’t. I do think certain books come into your life at the right time, as in find . I remember feeling that way with ’s I wasn’t reading a lot of contemporary fiction at that point, I was reading classics or old self-help books I found at thrift stores. It felt like the book was speaking directly to me—at the time, I thought I was the only one who knew about it. I was living in Toronto and feeling so isolated, and here was this book by a woman in Toronto who, like me, also had a best friend who was a painter. There was so much vulnerability and humor in it, it’s the kind of writing that invites you in, whereas many of the books I’d been reading felt unnecessarily complicated, as if the point was to alienate and intimidate the reader, which to me read as a sign of laziness or insecurity. After that, a whole world of contemporary female authors opened up to me: , , , , , etcetera. I knew I wanted to contribute to that canon in my own way.