Martha Cooley in conversation with LARB on her novel BUY ME LOVE!

This is not a spoiler, I promise it isn’t, only just consider for a moment: Say you buy a lottery ticket — have you ever? — say you do, just one time. Say the jackpot is $100 million, and you win! You’re holding a ticket worth a hundred million dollars! What would you do? How would you be? That’s the premise of Buy Me Love, a new novel from Martha Cooley—yes, yes, that Martha Cooley — acclaimed author of two previous works of fiction, The Archivist and Thirty-Three Swoons, and Guesswork, a collection of linked essays, subtitled “A Reckoning With Loss,”which figures in this time, too.