It's So Easy to Be Wrong

In Lexi Freiman’s latest novel, a writer gets canceled— and decides to lean all the way in.

- By Emma Alpern. Photograph by Raphaël Gaultier

LEXI FREIMAN’S FIRST book didn’t change her life the way she thought it might. So when she heard about a commune in Greece that taught an unconventional style of meditation, she decided to go. She and a friend arrived to find a grove that was dotted with fig and olive trees but not at all picturesque. People slept in huts or tents and sometimes left the curtain open when they showered. Cats roamed all around. On most days, Freiman woke up early for the 5 a.m. meditation, at which participants jumped up and down and screamed cathartically, then sat in silence and let the thoughts pass by. Breakfast was served in an open-air dining room swarmed by bees. In the afternoons, Freiman would write in a café down by the beach.

She ended up staying for two months. Once she made her way back to Los Angeles, where she was living at the time, she couldn’t shake her bliss. It was hard not to evangelize. On a subway escalator, she made eye contact with an intense-looking man. “I said ‘hi,’ and he said ‘hello,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Have you ever meditated?’ And he said, ‘Have you ever seen a nine-inch cock?’”

That kind of about-face—the saintly impulse, the failed execution—is all over Freiman’s writing. As her friend the novelist Steve Toltz puts it, she writes “contrarian fiction” at the intersection of “Camille Paglia and Basho and someone like Fleur Jaeggy.” This month, Freiman publishes her second novel,