In Weeks’s manic, charming debut, Zipper Mouth, set in a mid-’90s dope-sodden party scene, a young woman enacts a passionate flirtation with an unattainable female performance artist.

In this love story there are lyrical surges of nostalgia, loneliness, desperation, and passion unrequited: did you have any works in mind while writing it?

I definitely consider myself to be working in the tradition of the beats, Burroughs in particular. Kathy Acker and Thomas Bernhard are my heroes, along with Poe and Kafka. Nerval and Mallarmé. Artaud. They provided me with a sort of map toward a territory where the unexpected, the forbidden, the contradictory, frolic about in ecstatic states of possibility. Lydia Davis was particularly inspiring to me, especially her novel The End of the Story. My head is also crammed with detective stories, sci-fi, alien abduction books, horror films, comics, you name it. I wanted to derange language, not for clever reasons, but to see if I could open a portal to something invisible but deeply felt that dies if you try to describe it directly.

Was it written in a rush of feeling, or in compressed layers?

Both. And more. I use a million strategies to trick myself into writing. I never know what’s going to happen when I sit down to write. I work intuitively, generating material to play with, arranging long sections and image fragments that seem unrelated until they rub against and infect each other in a way that produces a feeling in my solar plexus indicating that I’ve found a zone of enchantment with its own erotic narrative logic. It’s kind of like divination or alchemy.... I don’t want to question too much with my rational mind until I’m editing because that’s my shame mind, my good girl mind, my cop mind which throws me into solitary confinement for just about every thought I have.

The title is evocative of sex, expression, but also repression.

Zippers have teeth. But they can break, can be unzipped. The challenge is to do it fearlessly and creatively. Someone might say, “Zip it,” but forbidden articulation is either going to leak out or hide under the floorboards in your psyche and body and produce all kinds of mutations.

The novel takes place in New York City during the early-to-mid ’90s and involves a lot of drug taking. Did you live this story?

Well, yes and no. The situations happened, but when I’m writing scenes I goof around, insert stuff, set things in motion, and see where the images lead me. Because maybe the literal description doesn’t get at any kind of truth. Or beauty. Because I don’t know what I am, and in a way I don’t understand what happened. I want to explore consciousness and desire and what it is to be alive. I want to practice literary alchemy in order to liberate myself. I want to create spaces where the exiled or unspeakable can burst through in new and rapturous forms.