Sarah G. Pierce's debut novel, For Human Use, imagines a world where people prefer dating corpses over living humans. In this candid interview, Pierce discusses how a lucid dream sparked her satirical masterpiece, why laughter is an "honest reflex," and how she balanced genuine romance with brilliant social commentary about our disconnected world.
Tricia Ford: What was the spark that led you to dream up a dating app that matches people with dead bodies? That's such a brilliantly disturbing premise! Was there a specific moment in modern dating culture or tech news that made you think this could actually happen?
Sarah G. Pierce: I’m a frequent lucid dreamer and I had recently moved in with a new boyfriend (now my husband). In my dream, I walked to the front door and opened it to find a neatly wrapped corpse. I knew this had to be a mistake, because I was no longer dating. In the logic of my dream, I was really stressed about the dead body getting caught in the mail sorter at the post office. Around the same time, I was taking a writing class at night and the idea sprouted into a manuscript.
How did you balance the horror, romance, and comedy without losing the satirical punch? It’s swoon-worthy and so funny, while still being genuinely unsettling. What was your process for walking that tightrope?
Laughter is such an honest reflex because it usually happens before we realize we’re not "supposed" to find something funny. I loved chasing that taboo feeling, finding the line where something is so terrible that it actually becomes hysterical.
For me, the trick was always being honest about how the story was playing out in my mind, and that often meant following characters as a conversation drifted wildly off course or watching a scene spin out of control. It’s tempting to shape the story into a more coherent genre structure, it puts the writer and the reader at ease to know what kind of world you’re in, but the real world is a mixed-genre debacle, and I wanted to channel that. This book is for people who enjoy not knowing if they should laugh or cry.
This feels scarily plausible as social commentary on tech culture and modern disconnection. Did you research actual startup funding processes or dating-app development, or were you drawing from personal experience with that world?
I was totally enthralled by Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman, two books that are just must-read for anyone interested in personality cults. They both deal with this delicious, and timeless, question: How can people with so much money and power be so stupid?
"This book is for people who enjoy not knowing if they should laugh or cry."
I found my answer to that and the parallel question of plausibility much farther back, in work like Kurt Vonnegut and J.G. Ballard, who were so brilliant at revealing the fragility of social norms and the power of social pressure. It’s a lesson from WWII absurdist literature that we’ve somehow managed to forget, and I would say we’re having a moment of rediscovering it, painfully.
Tom seems like an unlikely protagonist for a horror rom-com—a venture capitalist who's uncomfortable with people. What drew you to making him the emotional center of the story?
Tom was the heart of the story because he was uncomfortable with people, not despite it. There was something heroic and appealing about a guy who isn’t naturally warm and struggled with relationships, yet when he sees the world give up on human connection, he was willing to fight for it, not just for himself but for everyone.
The premise could easily be pure shock value, but it’s actually a deeply human love story at its core. How did you ensure the genuine romance didn't get lost in the absurdity?
At the end of the day, if people aren’t finding each other in the world’s craziness, what’s the point?
I was also drawn to a male protagonist who didn’t say the right things and who wasn’t the most sensitive, but he did know how to show up for someone. That anxious romance between flawed characters was what kept me in the story. A lot of romance works through a friends-to-lovers or enemies-to-lovers structure (I hate the word trope), but I was interested in writing something where two people are immediately drawn to each other—and can admit it to themselves—but then struggle with how to actually make it happen. Especially when they are so aware of their own liabilities.
