In Gabrielle Korn’s Novel ‘Yours for the Taking,’ Dystopia Is Queer—And Already Here

Gabrielle Korn’s first book Everyone (Else) is Perfect, a memoir about—among other things—the author’s rise from Autostraddle columnist to the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, came out three years ago during the height of the pandemic, a notoriously rough time for debut authors. Now, she’s watching her first novel Yours for the Taking, a work of dystopian fiction about a queer couple living in climate-ravaged Brooklyn in 2050, make its way into a somewhat-healed but increasingly fractured world.

At first glance, Korn’s memoir and her debut novel may not seem to share much DNA, but there’s a connecting thread of what one might call “apocalyptical girlbossery” connecting the two. Korn had to put up with plenty of it while working in women’s media, and in Yours for the Taking, it’s shrewdly presented as a faux means of salvation that only really exists to drive women further into competition with each other (even as they try to find their way into a new, climate-change-proof secret society called “The Inside Project”…listen, just read the book). Recently, Vogue spoke to Korn about civil rights amid climate disaster, picking and choosing dystopias, and dream-casting.

Vogue: How does it feel to shift from memoir to dystopian fiction?

Well, it’s funny because in a lot of ways, a lot of the themes of my memoir do pop up in the dystopian fiction because, you know, media is becoming more dystopian by the day. But I also feel like writing fiction is just a lot more vulnerable; it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and therefore it feels like there’s a lot more self-imposed pressure around it. When you write a memoir, the process is looking at all the things that have happened to you and putting together an interesting narrative based on truth. And fiction is just like, you literally make it up from the darkest corners of your brain. So I think, weirdly, it does feel more intimate to me.

If you had to live in a speculative-fiction-style dystopia, which would you choose?

Assuming that we’re not already living in one?

Ha, yes.

I might have to get back to you on that. I would be terrible in a dystopia, to be honest; I have no survival skills. Whenever I watch a zombie movie, I’m just like, I would ask to be bitten first, because I truly do not have what it takes to live a life on the run.