The Loneliness of Being Seen: Hallie Newton on Agnes, Women, and Performing a Life
Newton, who was born in Mississippi and lives between New York and the Deep South, brings readers into the mind of Agnes Maurer, a fading New York socialite determined to find someone willing to kill her before her next SoulCycle class. The event offers a chance to meet the author and hear from her about the novel’s strange mixture of privilege, sexuality, performance, and existential despair.
In the book, Agnes believes that understanding men will help her understand the world. What makes them comfortable? What makes them uncomfortable? What interests them? What earns their approval? If she can learn the rules, perhaps she can navigate life successfully.
But there is a contradiction at the center of Agnes Lives: Is studying men a form of power, or is it evidence that Agnes has learned to understand herself primarily through men’s eyes?
Newton didn’t begin the novel with a grand theory about women. She began with something more intimate: a desire to experiment with the way people actually think—the competing narrations running through our heads while we drive, clean, shop, and move through ordinary life.
It started with a woman shopping. Then Newton gave her a strange desire: Agnes wants someone to kill her.
Newton said it wasn’t until the second or third draft that Agnes truly began to come alive. As Newton revised, she found herself confronting larger questions about the character—and about the worth of a woman like Agnes.
“That’s when she started to really show herself to me, you know,” Newton said. “And I’m happy now that there can be a conversation around it, because I think that for a character like Agnes, they are all intermingled.”
From there, Agnes Lives became an exploration of the workings of a woman’s mind—and, eventually, of a much larger question: What makes a woman valuable?
Agnes’s boyfriend, for instance, attempts to explain her accomplishments through the successful men she has dated, her professional achievement, intellectual status, and sexual history into a single judgment of her worth.
But Newton sees another layer in Agnes’s character. She isn’t simply performing for the men in her past. She is also performing happiness.
“Not just performing for these men in her past, but also performing or pretending at the very least that she’s happy. Because I think there’s a difference between pretending and performing,” Newton said.
That distinction becomes especially revealing when Agnes moves onto social media. Her audience is no longer limited to the men she has dated or the people immediately around her. She can construct an image of herself for anyone willing to look.
“She posts on Instagram to show people an aspect of herself, the aspect of herself,” Newton said.
But what is the difference between pretending to be happy and performing happiness?
It could be argued that pretending suggests that a private reality is being concealed, while performing suggests something more complicated—a version of ourselves that may be constructed for an audience but is not necessarily entirely false.
In Agnes’s case, the performance seems to become part of the way she understands herself. She knows how she appears. She knows what other people might think. She knows which version of herself is most presentable to the people around her. But knowing how to present yourself is not necessarily the same thing as knowing who you are.
And that tension—between merely being seen and actually being known—may be at the heart of Agnes Lives.
Newton is reluctant to make Agnes too easy to sympathize with. Agnes is privileged, educated and surrounded by opportunities that many people never have. She can be selfish. She can be judgmental. She can be difficult to like. But for Newton, that doesn’t make Agnes’s loneliness any less real.
“If I heard about her through gossip,” Newton said, “if I were like sitting in a bar and my friend were telling me about this person named Agnes and what happened, [I’d] be like, ‘God, why can’t you just get it together?’.”
But the question remains: Why can’t she?
Newton sees Agnes’s isolation as part of a larger contradiction in contemporary women’s lives: the expectation that women should be independent, socially connected, sexually liberated, and endlessly capable, while navigating a culture that encourages them to measure themselves against one another.
Newton recalled a line from the scientist Roger Revelle that helped shape her understanding of Agnes. Writing about modern American life, Revelle argued that mechanized society had unintentionally produced women who were among the “loneliest, hardest working, most isolated” people to have ever lived.
Newton sees a strange continuity between that world and Agnes’s. The vacuum cleaner and washing machine may have reduced some of the physical labor of domestic life, but they also made it possible for women to remain isolated inside their homes. Decades later, social media has added to that experience of isolation by creating connection without proximity.
“Now we’ve got Instagram,” Newton said.
Agnes lives in New York City, perhaps the most densely populated and socially stimulating setting imaginable. She can walk almost anywhere. She is surrounded by restaurants, shops, strangers, acquaintances and potential lovers. Yet she struggles to reach the people she actually wants to reach.
She can’t get in touch with her best friend, Moon Hour. She seeks connection through Craigslist and Instagram. She moves through a city full of people and still can’t seem to find anyone who will really stop and listen to her.
“She is really isolated despite being in the busiest city in America,” Newton said.
Perhaps that is what makes Agnes more recognizable than sympathetic. Her loneliness does not erase her privilege or her flaws, but it reveals something beneath them.
“I think that there is something about the female experience that is really unifying about the experience of being a woman,” Newton said.
Agnes may be unusually difficult. But her loneliness is not unusual.
Hallie Elizabeth Newton was born in Mississippi and received the Goldwater Fellowship in Creative Writing from New York University in 2016. She received her first screenplay credit for At Any Price, and her short story “Man Made” won first prize in Columbia Journal’s 2020 fiction contest. Agnes Lives! is her debut novel.
Hallie Elizabeth Newton will discuss and sign her debut novel, Agnes Lives!, at 5:30 pm Tuesday, August 25 at Off Square Books.
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