Q+A with Brenda Iijima about Shelter Is Necessary for Existence

In October 2026, we are proud to be publishing Brenda Iijima's second novel, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence, a work of social satire wrapped in the patina of a psychological thriller. Narrated by the matriarch of an affluent family in Brooklyn, Sue is a corporate environmental attorney overseeing the renovation of a dilapidated brownstone that her family is planning to move into. After learning of the curious and violent fate of the previous inhabitants, and witnessing the strange behavior of the house, Sue begins to suspect that not everything is what it seems.

Darkly humorous, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is tonally akin to the work of Katie Kitamura, Han Kang, Marie NDiaye, and the films of Bong Joon-Ho and Jordan Peele. I've been describing the book as American Psycho narrated by Karen.

Paula Bomer, author of The Stalker, says "Iijima's second novel delights in minutiae that builds to combine a horror novel, a domestic nightmare, and a vicious critique of what constitutes values, both spiritual and superficial and everything in between, among the upper middle class of New York City. Dumbfounding, unique, relentless and wholly satisfying."

Following is an interview with the author about her work.

Question: Why the fixation on houses?

Brenda Iijima: A house can be a sanctuary or the site of living hell. I’m interested in houses as living containers–structures for living. There’s often so much effort (and money, time) spent in creating beautiful home environments in which families (and individuals) live, love and tear each other apart. The house records it all–it can function as a black box, a confession booth, a site of confinement and a locus of social exchange.

A dwelling is an autonomous zone–offering privacy, while also existing as part of the social fabric of a neighborhood. Energies flow in and out of houses. But something else is at play: the house itself–its history–and the history of the components of the house–its materiality–its energy, and the land on which it sits are a forcefield. And the house–the structure, its architecture is animate. When one assumes ownership or rents a place they are also assuming the energies that preexist their habitation within the structure. The houses in Prospect Heights are from the 19th and 20th century–there’s quite a residue of built-up history to take into account. How many families marched up and down the staircase in a house? Who were they? What were their lives like? What were their motivations? Their traumas, their woes? And history itself is a vibrant entity–it doesn’t die down or die off, an entire historical continuum is in our midst.

Does it matter if one ignores the residents who came before? The residents might have moved on while the legacy of a structure exists as connective tissue with the present. This history is a potency in the house. And this is true for every dwelling, every parcel of land. Undertaking a gut renovations (or demolishing a structure for that matter) doesn't eliminate the past. I became interested in the particular histories that might reside in the houses in this particular neighborhood through time that superficially I felt familiar with. 

I situated Shelter is Necessary for Existence in the neighborhood I’ve lived in since 1996–I’m compelled by the five-mile radius where I spend most of my existence. This neighborhood has experienced massive changes that are evident in that span of time. Prospect Heights was one of the most ethnically and perhaps economically diverse neighborhoods in NYC. Since the economic hardship brought on by the Great Recession of 2008 that has continued to accelerate, demographics have changed. An influx of wealthy residents able to buy properties with cash outright, private equity investments, and other factors have gentrified the neighborhood out of recognition. A house is synonymous with home but it is also a signifier of class. Many of the renovations in the neighborhood have a trophy status: supersized and luxurious. 

A staggering number of residences have changed hands. Often in exploitative fashion–real estate agents offering low-ball cash deals to unassuming owners. Long-time owners foreclosing due to mounting back taxes, loss of jobs, other insecurities. Property costs are prohibitive. Rents are prohibitive. Yet, shelter is one of the fundamentals of life. I remember learning in elementary school that food, water, sunlight and shelter were crucial for life. That string of needs was indelibly etched in my brain. The conundrum of how we, as humans navigate the need to house ourselves is always a focus for me. 

Q: The rehabilitation of the house, gentrification, and constant construction in the neighborhood is always apparent in the book. How does the non-stop construction and transformation in Brooklyn, where the story is set and where you live, impact the characters?

BI: Everything is in flux. But everything moves at a different pace. The neighborhood is in rapid transformation, the residents are also experiencing personal transformation. It was anything but sedate to write about a nuclear family in the midst of significant transition. Change can be noisy and disruptive and also quietly seismic. I think of each force as having distinct time signatures: the climate, finance, politics, real estate, the life of a human being, historical time as categorized by humans, etc. The construction seemed the most apparent form of change in the story but then that reading is supplanted perhaps by the other forces at play in the novel. 

Q: What were the seeds of inspiration for the story? 

BI: My first novel, Presence, focused on an overabundance of characters–performers in a troupe, a utopian community barely eking out their existence, a group of earth scientists–all making contact with each other at various intersections and divergent timeframes. The book is teeming with people! Earth is also fundamentally a character. One way of reading Presence is as a biography of Earth, a geologic and geographic person comprising many presences. 

For my second novel, Shelter is Necessary for Existence I focused on a nuclear family–really zooming in on their quotidian life. One of the many sparks of inspiration came from learning about and reading the Dutch writer L. Couperus’s book The Hidden Force, originally published in 1900 that Amitav Ghosh discusses in his book, The Nutmeg’s Curse. Ghosh is interested in Couperus’ inclusion of other-than-human forces within the novel–forces that cause fear and consternation to a family of Dutch colonial settlers who live in a well-appointed house in Java, Indonesia. 

“And the house, newly painted and whitewashed after the strange happenings, which were now past, the house was filled with hatred that arose everywhere like the demonical bloom of that strange secret.  A hatred around that smiling woman who was too languid to hate and only delighted in quiet teasing; a jealous hatred of the father for the son, when he saw him too often sitting beside his stepmother, begging, despite his own hatred, for something, the father did not know what; a hatred of the daughter for the mother; a hatred that wrecked the entire family.” (p. 198) 

The protagonist’s predicament is exacerbated by the fact that he can’t fathom a different way of thinking from his inherited European cultural mindset–that of an Enlightenment rationalist–who thinks he understands his orientation wherever he finds himself but actually doesn’t truly appreciate that to understand the terms of engagement in a culture different than his own would involve endeavoring to consider reality outside of the parameters of prescribed understandings–in the case of the novel-as a dominating presence in the former colony of the Dutch East Indies, now the Republic of Indonesia. A certain obliviousness and arrogance blocks him from the reality of his situation. 

I began to imagine what a well-educated urban white, middle-upper-middle class family might be preoccupied by and also what they might fail to give attention to. And what the consequences might be. What if latent history rushed to the surface? What if history itself was a presence that infused itself into domestic space? It is impossible to exaggerate the consequences of historical reality as it not only stares one head-on but begins to exert in unexpected ways. Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables engages a similar approach where historical legacy creeps up. I was thinking of a more diffuse situation, where the multiples of historical reality (as experienced in the present) act on and are acted upon. Every situation has a historical trajectory! 

It was fascinating to present the prismatic aspects of a family’s social network–how this network informs and also dissuades or enforces certain attitudes and expressions. The social milieu I focused on tends to be competent, competitive and perpetually upwardly mobile. I wanted to study motivation. Study desire. Study what’s obfuscated, or lingers below the surface level of presentation. Sue, the protagonist of the novel could be considered an anti-hero. She is distracted in her daily life. She misses vital cues. Most of the time she dissociates and low-grade narcissism–I think of it as “mehavior” means she does not always recognize troubling realities as they begin to exhibit. Horror is often conventionally depicted as other, outside, unfamiliar. Sue is up against banal horror. 

Q: Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is incredibly tonal and precise. The precision and tone made me think of the work of Marie NDiaye or Katie Kitamura, while crossed with the satirical sensibilities and suspense of a Jordan Peele film. Did you always know you’d be writing a psychological-horror-thriller? 

BI: Thank you for making the connection with Marie NDiaye, Katie Kitamura and Jordan Peele–their work is very potent and meaningful for me! They all are brilliant at taunt, subtly intensified language–relational scenes ratcheted to a tremulous frequency. Their depictions of the human condition engage sociological verity to an astounding degree not hesitating to grapple with the underbelly of unease, bringing it frontally to the surface like a jarring spike of difference; symptoms of systems, institutions–including the family, the laws that govern society, the cultural mores that lend normativity to social groups. The psychic rigor of their work causes me to become alerted to minute cues as well as lumbering monster subjects that appear larger than life and are often out of focus.

Writing a psychological-horror-thriller was, I guess, my goal. There was racial animus percolating through the culture. It is always forcefully present but I detected the tenor mutating. Simultaneously, whiteness was no longer insulated in the ways that it has been in this country for its entire trajectory. Wokeness suffered backlash. Suddenly it became controversial to describe the settler colonial trajectory of the United States. These developments felt suspenseful and daunting–the subject of an unnerving condition. Reality was becoming somewhat illegible–if not illegal. Vocabularies, excised, disappeared. The goal was to chronicle the pulse of contemporary life unfolding in realtime. To give myself some parameters I decided to focus on a nuclear family over the course of time it took them to renovate a brownstone. 

Q: Tell me more about inhabiting the point-of-view of an upper middle class matriarch named Sue, who is a very competent individual but is floundering somehow. She loses her grip on reality–or is in the tumultuous process of finding it! I feel like it is astounding how completely you inhabited Sue’s consciousness, presenting her and her husband, Luke, without reservations. It’s very funny, and also incredibly cringey at times, such as when Sue’s kids start calling her “Karen,” or during a therapy session when Luke rages about their neighbor Chantal for thinking she’s “above everything” because she’s not married to a white man. You don’t dwell on these instances, allowing the reader to pass judgement on their own. Was this hard, as a human being with empathy and opinions, to accomplish? 

BI: I hope I presented Sue with little judgement, and without malice. It was difficult. Judgment is passed so swiftly, nonchalantly–in many cases with a lack of awareness on one’s part that they are doing so. Outright dismissing a point of view is judgmental. Challenging a point of view is often ethically necessary. I toggled in my mind about how to create space for difficulty–to understand it as it circulates as atmosphere within the story. A friend commented on the restraint employed in the text. Judgement and pathological assessment were insufficient vehicles to access Sue–though they are fully human responses to problematic behavior that is injurious to others. I wasn’t engaged in an empathic depiction either, rather I aimed for a presentation that offers the reader an encounter with Sue and her family and her particular set of circumstances that will no doubt be at once familiar and also unique. Each vignette brings a tangled intimacy to bear. Criticality, indictment are held at bay. Maybe this is where the tension originates in the story in regards to ethical conduct which in many circumstances forms a hazy boundary in reallife. We recognize something is unacceptable and wrong after we’ve engaged in it. Well, that’s a generalization. The point is, we don’t always detect an ethical breach immediately. A motivation I had in writing the book was to explore where rationalizations originate and trace them to a terminus if possible.

The terms and conditions of Sue’s life–her responses–and I’m purposely using bureaucratic language here–are in the air–the zeitgeist. The conditioning by norms and mores of her social group and the society at large are her milieu. She’s also capable of assessing her circumstances, reflecting on her actions–which she does, incompletely, or passively. She is neither anti-hero nor hero. Her privilege doesn't necessarily yield gratification or peace yet it shelters her from certain forms of fallout. And that’s where the title of the book has a dual valence. I’m interested in studying what causes people to act in accordance with their conditioning and breaking from it. 

Q: There are a number of recent examples of poets successfully turning to novels, such as Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong (and probably plenty more). How did poetry affect your writing as a novelist?

There are many superb poet-novelists! John Keene, Eileen Myles, Anna Moschovakis, Laura Sims, Tom Comitta and others! 

Poetry and the novel bring forth different brainwaves. Maybe this has already been tested and studied in some neurobiology lab. The trance state I enter when I write poetry doesn’t feel the same when I’m drafting a novel–at least not at this phase for me–I’m only on novel #3 presently. The sensation of writing sentences that contribute to a semblance of narrative is still wildly new and fresh for me. I’m not quite capable of articulating what it's been like to move into the world of novel writing. In novels meanings are suspended in language differently than in poetry. It required the shapeshifting of language and meaning from one mode to another. In poetry I engage opacity to a greater degree. With the novel I’m seeking a sort of clarity that doesn’t feel similar in poetry. Gone is the dense lyricism! Friends–poets have commented, Oh you are writing poet’s novels now. No, I don’t think so. Whatever that means. That said, I’m as interested in the sonics and cadence of a novel as I am when writing poetry. Part of the effort has been to locate a baseline in language–something I hadn’t considered when writing poetry. The straightforward seemingly plain attributes of a sentence compel me when writing a novel. A simple sentence is really a flabbergasting entity, like a nucleoid. Much can be encoded in a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. In both modalities I take every word and word combo seriously as keys to terrestrial-cosmic awareness. 

Q: What did you learn from Sue while writing this book?

BI: Sue doesn’t fall from grace nor is she seeking it– she grasps she is in a grey zone and to remain there is unsustainable for her and her family. 

Writing a character is an act of durational embodiment–by which I mean a fully committed psychic involvement generative during the time of the construction of a novel. To appreciate Sue’s perceptions I had to really pay attention–tune in and quiet my own reactions, my moral compass. I thought about the various tropes of female main characters that circulate within western literature. The chagrin I feel about female characterization beckoned me to push for Sue’s self-determination–to fully engage the power of her disposition, whether it is interpreted as passive and problematic, always granting her full autonomy. At one point her daughter taunts her by calling her a Karen. But Sue isn’t a generic Karen as that caricature is portrayed by the media media. Her identity is complex even when it is tempting to sum her up or shut her down. Sue is fallible, but not incorrigible. Having no preconceived notions about Sue helped me navigate toward her and not lose sight of her as a thinking, breathing person. I’d enter into her assumptions and while channeling them, attempt to ventilate them, meanwhile pushing through my own habitual thought processes. Part of executing the book for me was to hold space for differences in many forms–from the micro and daily to the macro, cultural-societal, institutional. The differences that impact an individual, a family and ultimately society, and thus history accrue in many shapes and forms. 

A book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us written by Rachel Aviv was one source that gave me the impetus to push deeper into Sue’s depth of personhood. Aviv constructs incredibly sensitive portraits of each of the people she chronicles in the book. Strangers to Ourselves focuses on how experiences of suffering (she focuses on people with mental illnesses) are informed by social and environmental forces as well as biological and psychological ones. The interplay of forces is where meanings (diagnostic and otherwise) can be derived. Her approach to understanding personhood feels analogous to how I proceeded in trying to understand Sue and her family. Gaining insight into uncomfortable aspects of human behavior is valuable. The effort was not to sensationalize any of Sue’s encounters. My goal was to excise anything that felt gratuitous. Sue needed space and time to arrive at a reckoning or epiphany. Sue taught me that opacity and clarity can work in tandem. “Terrible and coherent”, to use a word combination I relate to from Marie NDiaye. Reality seems suddenly unbelievable even though there is a verisimilitude with the facts of life–a coherence–and terribly so–as is the case with horrendous situations, violences so terrible that they are blocked out.    

Q: Horror films are a central feature of the novel. Please tell me more about your relationship to horror films.

BI: I grew up in the heyday of blockbuster horror films that came into full force from the late 1970’s and 1980’s and onward. I watched the 1980’s movies first, because I was old enough to do so, and then dipped into the trove from the 1970’s. It was also the era of serial killers. And society was moving from civil rights legislation and openness to a much more conservative brand of government that presented a folksy indifference toward the poor, minorities, queer people, non-Christians, etc. As a kid I could recognize how there was a move underway from one unstable political era to another. The Dead Zone and The Shining were two important films for me. I was a Stephen King aficionado. His books along with titles like Flowers in the Attic and The Amityville Horror were available as cheap paperbacks on convenient swiveling book racks by the checkout counters at supermarkets. I’d slip them onto the conveyor belt checkout before my mother could object. It took me longer to tap into the maniac brilliance of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its sequels, etc. Carol J. Clover’s must-read book, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film convinced me of the value of abject horror in films. That film is like the Stations of the Cross. Redemption requires arduous circular completion. I viewed the film numerous times like a practitioner consumed by spiritual devotion and also like a sociologist one step removed from the depictions of violence flooding the scene. These films reverberate through time. In the novel several tracks are running simultaneously which feels filmic. The vignettes of each scene take on a cinematic quality.

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