Mike Williams

And this is another part of her contradiction is that she is staying on her friend's lounge, essentially couch surfing with someone she's known for a little while.

And that relationship evolves as the book progresses.

So we get the sense that she doesn't have a lot of resources.

But then at the same time, her dad is giving her money to enable this dream, months worth of rent to

to give it a go in the shopping centre.

So again, there's these sort of layers to her character and how her character evolves.

Lynn has a problem.

I mean, how does she sell this narrative of something, an experience that many people, particularly Westerners, have not experienced before?

And so she talks about – and this is something fascinating about her point of view –

is that she talks about how she can market two specific different segments and she talks about westerners specifically and how she can buy oriental looking furniture and try and sell this experience.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting reflection on the need for stuff and how stuff can fill our lives.

And, you know, it's interesting in the context of Marie Kondo and sort of the push to minimalism and then the pandemic.

It was like, actually, we needed all that stuff after all.

And also, it doesn't come up in the book, but online shopping and just...

the need to fill our lives with stuff and where the line is fulfilling ourselves spiritually.

And when that crosses over to, hey, I just want to buy it.

How can I just buy something to do this job for me?

Because it's convenient or fast or cheap.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely felt that energy too.

Yeah, there was something sort of amiss, dystopian, askew about this setting.