Tanaïs’s debut novel, Stellar Smoke, is now available from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The book follows a human musician who confronts her estranged, recently deceased mother, a machine consciousness, and explores the blurred line between human and artificial intelligence.
In a recent interview, Tanaïs explained that she writes during the day from 9 to 5 and then again from midnight to dawn. She prefers to write by candlelight, with her computer dimmed to dusk tones, and often writes by hand without glasses to stay close to her words. The early stages of the novel are handwritten, after which she transcribes the scrawl into legible text.
She credits Kiese Laymon, whom she will launch the book with at The Center for Fiction, as a pivotal influence. While a sophomore at Vassar, Tanaïs wrote and directed a play about four South Asian femme friends dealing with a suicide. Laymon, then a young teacher, praised her work and helped her believe in herself as a writer.
Tanaïs also shared that her novel’s origin traces back to the 1980s, when her mother would sit her in front of cartoons like Jem and the Holograms. The show’s premise—a woman transforming into a rock star through a purple‑hued AI—seeded the idea of a machine mother that later evolved into the book’s central conflict.
She noted that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a non‑literary influence she cannot imagine living without, citing its mystery, sexuality, and surreal beauty as key inspirations for her storytelling.