When Dorm Life Spirals Out of Control

Kiley Reid’s sophomore novel, Come and Get It, centers around the fictional Belgrade dormitory at the University of Arkansas. Millie comes back to be a resident’s advisor for a group of transfer and scholarship students, including the problematic suite of Tyler, Peyton, and Kennedy.

Kennedy, who transferred from Iowa after a traumatic incident, seeks the friendship and attention of Tyler and Peyton. Meanwhile, Agatha, a visiting professor, secretly observes the girls’ relationships and how they spend their money after striking up a relationship with Millie. All this leads to a series of pranks, revenge, and the breakdown of stability in the fragile atmosphere of college life. 

Come and Get It is an exploration of how our culture of consumption controls us and leads to the ways that people inevitably abuse power and money. I spoke with Reid about Arkansas, dorm culture, and race.

Olivia Cheng: First, can we talk about Arkansas and the university culture perpetuating big schools in the South? How did you decide on this setting for the book?

Kiley Reid: I lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas for exactly a year from August 2016 to August 2017. I went there after a big round of rejections from MFA programs, and the plan was to just spend no money and write and try and apply to grad programs again, see what happens. It was one of those things where if this time doesn’t work, I’m done with writing.

So Fayetteville is definitely one of my favorite cities. It’s pretty walkable, it’s beautiful, it’s really hilly, it has really true seasons. It has that effect that a lot of big state schools have where it’s kind of this bubble amidst a big rural area in the South. For better and for worse, I think. And I definitely didn’t know when I was there that I wanted to write about Fayetteville, but later, I really was interested in exploring the type of strange snobbery and freedom that people have when they go to certain cities and say, “This place doesn’t count. I can do whatever I want here and this can be my experimental place, but when I go back home to wherever I’m from, that’s real but this is fake.” I thought that fake-place-ness was really interesting to write about. That’s what drew me there.

OC: Did that happen often in Fayetteville?

KR: I don’t think so. I didn’t talk to anyone. I worked at a coffee shop and wrote for a magazine, but I don’t think that I dove into relationships that deeply. But it was something that I was reading about often when I was thinking about what to write about.

OC: Did the setting come first or the characters or together? I mean, Kennedy was literally a baton twirler at Iowa. How was this book conceived?

KR: I knew that I wanted to write about young people and money. I came upon this book called Paying for the Party, How Colleges Maintain Inequality. It’s written by two sociologists, and one of them works here [at the University of Michigan]. I haven’t met her yet, but I’m going to try! It’s a book about these two sociologists who do five-year long interview studies at a midwestern university, and they interview young women in dorms about money and their trajectories and their paths. They follow them from freshman year to beyond. They all start out in the same freshmen haze and end up in varied circumstances. So I liked the book a lot, and learned a lot about how careers are advanced just by knowing certain people and how they’re held back by different circumstances that I hadn’t considered before. More than anything, I really liked the premise of very academic women interviewing young women in a dorm about their lives. So that’s where the book was born.

Of course, you’re also writing a novel, and things filter in as the years ago on.

OC: Interesting that it came out of this sociology book. Now that we’re on the topic of money, because that’s so clearly a central theme of this book—who gets it, who keeps it, how people spend it. Did you do any on-the-ground research?

KR: I did a ton. With this book, much more than my first, I had the time and finances to actually hold interviews and things. That was a precursor to the plot as well, after I read Paying with the Party. I was still living in Iowa and I interviewed maybe ten students about their experience with money and the language they have around money and how they get it and what they think about it. I continued those interviews and did about thirty to forty interviews during the first two years. I also had a research assistant this time around, and it was great to be able to say, “Hey, can you give me the salaries of RAs at ten Southern schools? Can you give me last names from these origins?” and she was wonderful. So I worked with her for two years. A lot of the research was honestly just listening to people talking about their lives and I was really fortunate to have people who were willing to share with you.

OC: I noticed that the two epigraphs for this book are about Walmart. Can you tell me a little more about that decision?

KR: Yes! So Arkansas is the state founder of Walmart. Walmart started by Sam Walton in Bentonville, which is about 45 minutes away from Fayetteville. The Walton Family definitely has a stamp on the state and it almost feels like a sticker on the bottom of everything. You see the Walton name everywhere from museums to schools to theater. The Walton name is definitely very, very pervasive.

When I was doing research, I researched a lot about Walmart and I came upon Lucy Biederman’s book of poetry which is amazing. I kept it next to my bed for a very long time, and that quote really spoke to it. And Sam Walton too was a huge game-changer for Arkansas and how they see capital and what their stores look like, really for everything. This book is in many ways about buying things, and so I wanted to start it off with the king of buying things in Arkansas: Sam Walton.

OC: That definitely makes sense. Millie’s main goal is to buy a house which feels quintessentially American.

KR: Yeah, she sees buying a house and having a job in a corporation as a marker of adulthood and success and she’s very into attaining the trappings of having made it.

OC: Also prevalent in this book is the topic of race. Why did you choose to have Millie and Peyton be the two central Black characters, and what impact did it have that Peyton didn’t seem to connect with Mille in any way, but was friends with Tyler?

KR: Peyton and Millie… I was very excited to put them in a room together. Millie has this moment where she realizes her and Peyton are very similar, but still opposites. She realizes Peyton is much more financially stable, she’s not very friendly or warm in any way. Peyton is close to her parents in a way that’s different from the way Millie is close to hers. But Millie also identifies her as the one other Black person on her floor. Millie sees her and says, oh this person kind of needs a bit of help socially, and then she very quickly feels guilty for having felt this way. She wrestles with wanting to help her and fix her in a way, but also Peyton’s not really asking for this help. Millie is also looking for accompaniment and she thinks oh, maybe the other Black girl on the floor will be something, and Peyton’s like, Absolutely not, I want nothing to do with you.

I had a friend read the book and she said, I knew a Peyton, I’ve definitely gone to school with a Peyton, and her parents would drive four hours and surprise her for lunch and then they would leave. So hopefully Peyton to recognizable to other people of someone who isn’t super warm, is a bit odd, is not, I wouldn’t say mean, but you feel like she’s mad at you all the time. I had a roommate like that. I definitely knew people like that, and I was excited to include someone like that. I also think when Black people identify other Black people and want something from them that they’re not willing to give, that’s interesting. I was excited to write about it.

OC: Peyton was fascinating for someone who wasn’t on the page that often.

KR: With all my characters, I don’t want it to be like this binary of they’re good or bad or anything like that. In some pages, she’s really charming and in others, she’s super rude.

OC: Peyton didn’t seem to care that she was the only Black undergraduate on that floor. There are implicit undertones of class within that.

KR: Peyton’s financial status, in some ways, protect her as the only Black student in the room. At the same time, she has a Black mother who is very invested in her making other high-class Black connections, but that doesn’t mean she’s always willing to do those things. But I definitely believe that Peyton’s financial situation and her upbringing causes her to think about race much differently than someone like Millie.

OC: In the suite, Tyler is such a critical character, because all the other characters have this visceral attraction to her. Even in moments of crisis, she’s so clear on who she likes and doesn’t. Do you think Tyler is let off the hook at the end? And do you think she deserves to be?

KR: I try to make my novels as close to real life as possible. I talk to my undergrads about this a lot too. I want a book to feel resolved, but that doesn’t mean the characters resolve things within themselves. Some people are mean for their whole lives and they keep on doing that and keep on failing with their attitudes. Tyler is not from a super rich family, her father’s in jail and she has challenges from that, she surprises Agatha and Millie sometimes with some of her beliefs and how she sees policy and healthcare and things like that. Do I think that Tyler is let off at the end? No. I hope that none of my characters are let off easily at the end. It doesn’t always feel complete to some readers when characters don’t learn things about themselves. But some of my characters do and some of them say no, I was right the entire time, and Tyler might be one of those.

OC: Let’s talk about Agatha and murky power relationships. What was it like to write the perspective of somebody who is toeing the lines of ethics as both a writer and professor? Both of which you also are.

KR: With Agatha, I definitely relied on a lot of the information I got from certain interviewees. I interviewed journalists and professors and sociologists and just listened to a lot of podcasts with people who had the same career trajectory that she did. I love stories about bad decisions that shouldn’t put you in jail but are still not wonderful decision for you to make. And Agatha definitely makes some of those. I was interested in having a character who has a fuck-it mentality after a breakup. Millie’s relationship to money was save, save, save, Agatha’s was spend, spend, spend, and Kennedy was someone who thought that she had no relationship to money, even though who she was deeply related to consumption. And so Agatha was definitely the spend-it-all spoke of that triangle.

OC: There is something about secrets coming into real life with the shared walls of the dorm in Come and Get It and with Alix’s secret being revealed in Such A Fun Age.

KR: There is a different tone here, for sure, but I do hope to do something different every time. I was trying different things with sentences and structure and tone with this one. But I think you can tell that I definitely have the same interests like dialogue, money, embarrassment, women, cringe. In this one, I was super interested in careerism from a different lens, adulthood in a different sense.