Kirsti MacKenzie’s debut Better to Beg (Sweet Trash Press, 2025) is a rock ’n’ roll novel set against the backdrop (and at the tail end) of the Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York indie boomlet, told in the vivid alternating voices of the Deserters—driven, determined Viv and drug-addled but transparently striving Hux—as they tumble across post-9/11 America’s cramped venues, wild house parties, and downtrodden motel rooms, forever arriving but never quite arriving. In MacKenzie’s deft hands, what emerges is not only a lean, mean, and surprisingly lyrical story of music and ambition, but also a sly exploration of the myths America sells to the world and to itself, as well as a moving defense of art’s ability to sustain us—even when it seems like the gig is already over.
In advance of Better to Beg’s release date, I exchanged emails with Kirsti to ask her about her writing process, developing her characters’ voices, and the role that music plays in her work. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Bullion: My first question (perhaps obviously) is about music and how it informs your writing process. Did you put together a playlist to situate yourself in the world of the book, or was it more utilitarian (i.e., do you work best with certain types of music in the background)?
MacKenzie: Depends on what I’m writing, I suppose. I wrote the book so long ago that my memory’s fuzzy, but it went like this: I started paying more attention to The Kills’ discography after hearing Keep on Your Mean Side. As a result, I read Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s exhaustive oral history of early aughts indie rock. I collected a bunch of songs from bands referenced in the book — bands I was passingly familiar with, but not heavily into — The Strokes, Interpol, The National, TV on the Radio, The White Stripes, and so on. Jamie and Alison fascinated me so I sort of began writing these two characters loosely based on them around the same time, so it wasn’t really a chicken or egg situation with the playlist — the more I listened, the more fascinated I became, and the more I wrote, the more I sought anything that might inform the feeling of the book. I kept a loose record of all the things I “took in” at the time — film, tv, books, albums, podcasts. I also sought things that invoked an “on the road” type feeling – Captain Beefheart, Colter Wall, Townes Van Zandt.
One thing I can’t fucking stand is when novelists try to write about music performance — the energy of it very rarely translates to the page, and it becomes self indulgent. It was very important to me to write the in-between. To capture the energy between these two that might translate to the stage. I remember very vividly hearing The Kills song “No Wow” – how dangerous and runaway it felt, how violent — and thinking, that. That exact thing. How many hours of fucking and fighting were channeled into those 3 minutes? Now make it 80,000 words.
Bullion: What drove your decision to set the novel during such a specific time period (2003) in the midst of such a specific musical scene?
MacKenzie: I guess I was thinking about scenes, and the kind of revisionist history that goes into defining them. There was a spate of debut albums around 2001-2003 that created this early aughts NY indie influence that echoed for a long time. Lizzy Goodman was the first to really create a ‘history’ of it, to label and define its impact — I’m sure the bands involved in it weren’t really aware they were creating a scene. Mostly I imagine they were just people creating art in reaction to the times they were living through. No artist should start making art to create a ‘scene’. Certainly you can respond to the energy of what’s around you, to be inspired by your environment, by your peers — but the second you label something a scene, you’re engaged in its consumption, in its perception, in molding your art to fit it. You stop innovating.
The other consideration was, quite simply, how the fuck can I relate to these characters? I’m not a musician. How can I write them in a meaningful way? I was a kid watching the towers come down on a television in my high school library. I remember what it was like to wonder, okay, what now? It was this generation-defining event that impacted so many millennials, and late Xers. The epigraph speaks to that — Who is keeping score now? You might die tomorrow. Make what you want. Forget labelling it. Possibly it matters, possibly it doesn’t. What matters is making it to survive, you know. The horrors.
Bullion: Better to Beg is a rock n’ roll novel, but (I would argue) it’s also a road novel preoccupied with destinations, not journeys. In what sense did you want to consciously portray Hix and Viv as captives of the open road, instead of being set free by it?
MacKenzie: There is a part of me that, like many other people tethered to one location for prolonged periods of time, romanticizes life on the road that musicians have. We envy them their “freedom.” Freedom, or the notion of it, comes around a lot in the book. It’s very preoccupied with notions of freedom being exploded again and again. What we miss in these rock star narratives is that road life is on a schedule, is a series of hotel rooms; it is not vacation. There is a reason people go nuts in hotel rooms, in airport bars. No sense of grounding, of normalcy. I am fascinated with liminal spaces, with travellers, with the in-between. Without anything fixed to ground our identities, who do we become? Your identity collapses a bit. So I imagined these characters as two people trying to carve their identity — as a band, and as individuals — while being constantly in motion, in flux. Both emotionally, and physically. I imagine touring is a kind of productive outlet for messy personalities, for their creative energy. You can outrun things, but only for so long. Everywhere you go, there you are.
Bullion: Voice has always been a central component of your writing, and the dual narrators’ voices are particularly vivid and also markedly distinct from one another. Was there ever any concern on your part that one narrator’s voice would overwhelm the other? And how did you decide that it needed to be Viv, not Hux, who got to have the last word?
MacKenzie: Both voices came naturally, and distinctly. Both are two sides of me at war always — the scowling, practical realist, and the sweet, hopeful clown. Viv is a lot closer to my natural voice, and Hux came completely unbidden and fully formed. That sounds like precious writer bullshit, but it’s true. Sometimes the characters just show up, and you’re along for the ride. They balanced each other perfectly, which lent itself well to my aim; to hold both sides of the creative argument without prioritizing one over the other.
In the original iteration of the book, Hux has a fucking unhinged prologue. I wrote it to hook the reader, but it was a cheap trick; it had to be cut. So Viv always had the last word. For all his guilelessness and naïveté, Hux holds the book’s thesis. Viv is the one who had to be convinced.
Bullion: Speaking of that unhinged prologue, I had the pleasure of reading an earlier version of this book and it included one of the most hilarious, shocking, and astounding first sentences I’d ever read. Imagine my surprise when I received this latest advance copy and discovered that this incredible opening line had been cut, along with around 40-50 other pages. And yet, this book is inarguably better for it. How did you locate this sleeker, leaner, meaner story in the editing process?
MacKenzie: Chopping that opening line — and the opening chapter that accompanied it — was a change I insisted on. It worked well as a hook, but it did not sit well with me. It felt like a cheap trick and I wanted it gone. So now it lives in early copies of the book. I’m grateful to anyone who has a copy and takes a chance on the new version. I like it better.
Editing with Brian Alan Ellis and Jillian Luft was an interesting process — I received edits from both, and both had different aims. Jill wanted to keep my voice intact. Brian wanted the book to be shorter, more palatable for an indie release. We came to an agreement — where it made sense to strip pretense and sharpen, I accepted all changes. Where it didn’t feel true to character voice (and subsequently, mine) I put my foot down. They respected every returned edit. It was a great experience, and the book is better for it.
Bullion: The narrative focus you take in each alternating Viv and Hux chapter is intriguing to me. Sometimes Viv/Hux is driving the action, while at other times they’re bystanders, reacting to something the other is doing. How did you decide what scenes needed to be presented from a specific narrator’s point of view?
MacKenzie: I don’t know that it was a specific decision so much as trying to put them in ridiculous situations. Dumpster diving? College parties? High on a motel floor? Line dancing? I honestly don’t know where half of it came from except to say that I wanted them to have as much fun as possible, to be as messy as possible. What I will say is that I followed story beats to keep everything moving, to keep momentum, because it is a fucking sin to have someone’s attention and then lose it. And those story beats were structured in threes. Action/decision, reaction, subsequent action/decision, so on and so forth. There were Pepe Silvia-style plot notes littering my walls when I wrote it. So that could be why it alternates.
Bullion: Better to Beg is an extremely propulsive, forward-leaning novel with a breakneck pace. And yet you manage to make room for these moments of high lyricism, such as when Hux—who throughout the novel is hilariously bad at taking drugs—gets high on ketamine in Atlanta and is assaulted by images of his previous band’s failure. Even Viv’s narration, which is relatively straightforward in comparison, makes room for lovely little detours. Why was it important to allow your two narrators to have the room to monologue, to take these flights of fancy?
MacKenzie: Oh, yikes. Here is a little secret: I thought that’s what novels were for. Space to stretch, to be interior. I wrote this originally to be a Big-Five type release (HA!), a standard 300-page novel. I am a different writer now than when I drafted the book; I wrote it prior to publishing in this microfiction environment, and present-me would not have taken those flights of fancy. Back story is important; characterization is important; being masturbatory in prose is not. Brian Alan Ellis cut a lot of the fat while retaining the book’s spirit, which was a miracle. I’m grateful for it.
Bullion: In a previous interview, you’ve talked about a trip you took to Death Valley and the Chateau Marmont, well after you’d finished an early draft of this book, and how delighted you were that you’d gotten the several key details right without ever having been to either place. I’m curious, would anything have changed if you’d gotten the details even the slightest bit wrong?
MacKenzie: Not a single thing.
Bullion: In the same interview, you candidly admitted to being very calculated about wanting to set this book in America because you knew that would make it more marketable. But in reading the finished product, it feels to me like somewhere along the way, you stumbled onto an extraordinarily profound truth about America and the myths it sells to the world, and especially the myths it sells to itself. What role do you see America, the home of (as a side character memorably puts it to Hux) “the freest motherfuckers on the planet,” playing in your future projects, if any?
MacKenzie: Incredibly embarrassing pull quote, I have no memory of writing that. I’m Canadian, and I wrote the book at a time where I was growing really irritated with CanLit. There is lots that’s good and respectable about CanLit as this sort of project to foster national identity through storytelling. There is also a lot about CanLit — and the industries and funding that surround it — that stifles innovation for Canadian writers. I found more of that innovative spirit in American indie lit spaces. I drifted into it after getting on Twitter and becoming acquainted with American writers operating in that space. No one was getting paid, and everyone was having fun. Perfect grounds for innovation, for evolution.
I could not envision a rock novel set in Canada, with a Canadian band. You’re talking the same little circuit between Southern Ontario and east coast US; boring. So America became the setting. I don’t know how much or how little it’ll factor into future writing except that America is to me, as it is to billions, an empire which is nothing if not relentlessly innovative and creative and self-destructive.
Bullion: The novel ends with this unexpectedly gorgeous, moving, and frankly kick-ass sentence that serves as a validation of the role that artistic expression and creative pursuits can and should play in our lives. I couldn’t help but wonder, to what degree is Better to Beg also about writing, and in particular, our own indie-lit scene?
MacKenzie: I guess this goes back to the question about scenes. I was present for a conversation among writers at AWP Kansas City about how to label the present literary energy we find ourselves in. How to capture it, how to express that to people. Michael Wheaton very astutely observed that it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, how we label it. He said something like, “If it becomes anything to anyone, they’ll be the ones to label it, to define what it meant. We’re not in control of that.” And he’s right.
The only thing we can do is show up, have fun, make things, share them. Do it or don’t. No one but you gives one single fuck if you do it, and that’s freeing.
The process of writing BTB was just me coaching myself through writing a novel. It was the gradual realization that you have to get up, every day, and engage in creating for its own sake. For survival, for joy. You can’t control anything about the outcome — if you get paid for it, if you get accolades, if anyone sees or hears or reads the end result. If nobody else gives a fuck about this but me, is it still worth doing? The answer has to be yes. The act itself has to matter. Some people have told me they see the end as sad; some see it as hopeful. I think their perspective speaks volumes to their outlook on creativity, and on life. I cried when I wrote that last line. I know exactly how I feel about it — where I land on sad or hopeful — but it’s not for me to decide for you. The book doesn’t belong to me anymore, and that’s a beautiful thing.