<p>Lisa Borders, author of three novels, talks with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about her newest book. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://bookshop.org/a/20181/9781646036448"><em>Last Night at the Disco</em></a> (Regal House Publishing, 2025) is a fictitious memoir framed as a letter to the former editor of <em>Rolling Stone</em>, Jann Wenner. That context gives the audience their first clue about the book’s narrator, Lynda Boyle.</p><p>The introduction to the letter also gives us a few other vague references to crimes, the loss of a teaching position, and a “coke-fueled disco queen” that help fill in a few blanks while raising many more questions.</p><p>Although humor had always been a part of Lisa’s personality and writing, for a time she leaned away from it. Her first two books, <em>Cloud Cuckoo Land</em> and <em>The Fifty-First State</em>, reflected this shift, but starting around 2016—as she developed the tone for what would become <em>Last Night at the Disco</em>—she started focusing on humor, including writing a submission for McSweeney's Internet Tendency over the course of a year. That piece was accepted and published as “<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/signs-that-you-are-a-gen-xer-going-through-menopause">Signs That You Are a Gen-Xer Going Through Menopause</a>,” which went viral.</p><p>In this interview the two discuss narrator Lynda Boyle, satirizing avant-garde poets, and her need to make art as the world falls apart.</p>