Kristen Arnett Talks New Novel ‘Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One’ (Exclusive)

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, out March 18 from Riverhead Books, follows Cherry Hendricks, an Orlando-based professional clown who is financially down on her luck. When Cherry crosses paths with Margot the Magnificent, an older magician with an enticing proposition, she becomes entangled in a new partnership that has her questioning the future of her career.

“I’m always really drawn to the underdog or the outcast; something people have specific opinions on,” Arnett says. And for the author, who is also the brains behind the 2019 bestseller Mostly Dead Things, as well as 2021’s With Teeth, tackling the taboo in fiction is a speciality at this point. Mostly Dead Things focused on a family of taxidermists, while With Teeth examined the unraveling of a mother’s relationship with her young son.

Clowns just happened to be Arnett’s next obsession, and though the author has never been afraid of the circus staples — she’s a Stephen King fan, after all — it was her home state of Florida that cemented the novel’s plot.

“People have a lot to say about Florida, and some of that stuff is not true or founded in half-truths, but one of the things about [living] here is it’s never boring,” says the third-generation Floridian, who still resides there with her wife. “[I wanted to write] about what it’s like to live in a place like Orlando, where it’s a tourist destination where people come to spend money, but then think the art that you do is tacky.”

Though her writing process looks different for every book, Arnett was particularly surprised by how Stop Me came to be. For one, the author thought about the novel for an entire year before she put pen to paper, and little changed from the initial draft she submitted to her agent. Arnett was also taken with the intricacies of the clowning profession that she learned about through her research.

“If you think of clowns, you do think of [the] big, bold, caricature kind of style: the face paint, the wild colors, the oversized shoes, the nose, the flower that squirts the water at you. Those things are all outsized, but also, they’re very physically bodied,” she says. But like all art forms, she’s cognizant of the fact that people who do clowning take their work as seriously as any other.

“I didn’t want anybody to read this, who does this very specific art form, and think I was being belittling,” she says.

That’s why the novel, which explores Cherry’s unique relationship with Margot, is equally about her passion for her craft — even if she does use her jokes as a coping mechanism.

“Even when Cherry’s a mess, she’s a good time,” Arnett says. “This is somebody who’s having fun. Every day, I would sit down to write and when I’d get done, I just had a giant grin on my face.”

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And yet, Arnett is also a writer whose disarming humor balances serious topics. Stop Me is “a love letter” to Orlando, but Arnett doesn’t shy away from portraying the sometimes-challenging realities of living there, like the gentrification and shuttering of LGBTQ+ spaces in the city. One striking scene also involves protestors interrupting a Drag Story Hour, which, as a librarian herself, Arnett felt was crucial to include.

“The reality is that that stuff happens constantly,” she says. “And then you’re supposed to move into the next portion of your day. That felt really, really important to me.” Writing about the “moral center of arts and entertainment” was also poignant for the writer, who found her authorial voice through reading while growing up in an evangelical Southern Baptist household.

“I was very much told what I could and could not read or have access to,” Arnett says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to write these stories as a kind of way to escape into a world where I could look, and think, and enjoy, and dream about a lot of different kinds of things that were not my everyday life experience.’ It just evolved into me sharing this work and people were like, ‘I like this,’ or ‘I see myself in here too.’”

That’s true of the LGBTQ+ community — especially the families — that Arnett centers in her fiction. Stop Me proposed a unique dynamic for the author to explore, as Cherry and her mother Nancy, with whom she has a strained relationship, are both gay, and dealing with the death of Cherry’s brother Dwight in different ways.

“That’s the beauty of a ripe parent-child relationship where you don’t get along: you can be awkward and uncomfortable, even if you’re not together,” Arnett says. “I’m interested in the ways that, sometimes, you can have people who are biological family members, and you’re just never going to have that Gilmore Girls relationship. It’s just not how everybody’s relationship functions with a parent.”

Arnett, who is estranged from her biological family, turned to family-centered narratives in fiction as a reader first. Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm, along with contemporary writers like Bryan Washington and Jami Attenberg, are among some of her favorites, but the family unit continues to fascinate her.

“Something’s always happening inside of families, because families are living, breathing organisms with multiple people inside of them. Everybody has different brains and different experiences,” she says. “It’’s a normal part of moving through the world. Sometimes people just aren’t going to be the kind of people you want them to be.”

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And yet, at the heart of Stop Me is joy — both Cherry’s and Arnett’s. As an extrovert, the author is looking forward to her upcoming book tour, her first since the COVID-19 pandemic, and to all of the “clowny” parties where she’ll meet her readers in real life. Arnett just hopes that they’ll be welcoming to Cherry too.

“I got to be playful and funny and have this character have every single bit of her cake and eat it too,” Arnett says. “I hope that [readers] would see something more than just the grease paint. They would see the actual performance and clown below. But truly, even if a person laughs even once reading this book, I’ll feel overjoyed.”

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is now available, wherever books are sold.