Iwas nervous to speak with Naomi Klein. For twenty-five years, she has shown an unfailing, unflagging ability to understand the invisible structures which scaffold our world and which skew it away from justice. As a writer, speaker, thinker, and organizer, she has led a struggle against greed in its many forms, but her new book casts her gaze in a new direction: into the mirror. Doppelganger is an examination of conservative populism, vaccine skepticism, “wellness” flimflam, social media wish fulfillment, antisemitism, Zionism—and Klein’s “big-haired” mirror image, the commentator Naomi Wolf. It’s also a frank, and at times vulnerable, consideration of ego. What would Klein observe in me, I wondered. What arrogance, artifice, or deception?
But when the time came and Klein picked up the phone, the conversation we had was warm, far reaching, and easy. Toward the end, I found myself contrasting our respective practices: “I’m a fiction writer, asking questions,” I said. “You’re a nonfiction writer, seeking answers.” She didn’t quite agree with the characterization. As she talked to me, patiently, about complicity and introspection, I realized: we’re both just trying to find new ways to see.
