2 Girls 1 Book: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

a Palestinian heiress, a Birkin bag pyramid scheme and the American dream

Welcome to the first edition of 2 Girls 1 Book, a monthly cross-post between Books+Bits and As Seen On, where literary concubines Ochuko and Pandora chat about a new book via Google docs. We planned to make this a paywalled perk, but after much head-scratching, it transpires that Substack lacks the technical function for us to do this (which is why this is dropping a week late—future editions will go out on the 3rd Saturday of every month) so y’all get to enjoy this new book club for free.

For our inaugural edition, we’re discussing The Coin by Yasmin Zaher. We’ve avoided spoilers as much as possible—whilst remaining mindful that we want this to be a full and frank discussion! As ever, we’d love to hear from you in the Comments.

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The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed to achieve: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, befriends a homeless swindler with whom she participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, and obsessively cleanses her body from the inside out. Eventually, her body and mind go to war, and as her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, she unravels spectacularly.

Pandora! This is fun. I’ve been trying to get a hint on how you feel about this book for the last few days but you've been pretty strict about things. So I’m dying to know. Did you like The Coin ? Let's start there.

Honestly, I don’t know if I liked it. I thought it was provocative and at times, especially for a debut novel, it was executed very well. It’s about trauma, money, fashion, sex, racism. And of course, America. Our unnamed protagonist is trying to eviscerate herself: with all the cleaning, all the sex. Why? And back at you: did you like it?

I feel similarly to you, actually. I didn’t enjoy reading this book, but I’m glad I did. It's one I had to sit with and carefully consider. What’s hard about this book was how slippery the main character—her psyche—felt to me. All those showers she took! All that slathering of this and that! You get an image of this young woman living a terribly lonely and off-kilter life.

You have these short chapters, glimpses into her past, that at first appear to be simple stories but are actually stories of grief and loss. But she doesn't seem to dwell on them. She moves right past them, and I, as the reader, also struggle to process them. It literally felt like the perfect depiction of repressed trauma. Emphasis on the repressed! Was that your experience too?

You feel like she is having an epiphany, or a breakdown, possibly both. I also wondered if there was an element of the purity myth in there—the idea that the perfect woman is someone who is cleansed from the inside out. The cold, flat tone—the nihilism and consumerism of it all (the lists of clothes she wore, what she bought at CVS) I kept thinking of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is also set in NYC. The other thing it brought to mind, for me, maybe because I have just watched it, was Anora. Have you seen Anora?

I haven’t watched Anora, but everything and everyone is telling me I have to, so I’ll pin it for later. Something that helped me understand this book was realizing that our protagonist had recently arrived in New York. Another thing to note is that we have no picture of what her immediate life before that looked like. We get glimpses into her childhood in Palestine but not much of her adulthood or teenage years. What this does is make it very difficult to contextualize her actions. How much of how she’s acting is a first response to being uprooted in this way, and how much is just who she is? That’s a question that’s been playing on my mind.

I see her obsession with her appearance as a way of grappling for control. Beauty standards may differ from culture to culture, but it turns out that these brands, this expensive clothing, is a language we all speak. Beauty is powerful, money is power—back home and here. Here’s a quote: “I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke… And suddenly I had something that others wanted to possess, I was a woman who others wanted to embody.” I see her obsession with material things and her appearance as a desire to grasp for control and power where she otherwise had none. It’s maybe the only language she can speak in common with her new surroundings. And yes, this reminded me a lot of My Year of Rest and Relaxation! Rich, beautiful, traumatized heiresses in New York coming undone.

That’s such a good point: she’s literally just arrived. How much of this is a first response to her dislocation? And actually she even says, at one point, “this is a story of survival”. Her parents have died, she has a weird relationship with her brother, who controls the purse strings, she mentions that she suspects her inheritance was used to pay for her uncle’s lavish wedding.

So we don’t know the exact situation back in Palestine, but as you say, we know it contains a lot of trauma. There’s a particularly powerful, devastating childhood memory, where she realises that her young Jewish friend lives in a house that belongs to a Palestinian family who fled during The Nabka. It’s a powerful, prescient thing to be reading.

What’s so strange about the pace and tone of this book is how it drops in these really traumatic moments in such a dry, matter-of-fact way, and then gives no indication of how our main character felt about them. So, you can only use context clues to understand how it affects her actions today. The day her parents died in the car accident is the day she swallowed that coin.

Of course, the coin! The actual coin in her body was not that interesting to me, poetic as its existence is (she’s obsessed with money; the money is inside her). Anyway—go on.

Her inheritance warps her family dynamic—with her uncles and also with her brother. I think there’s also a story of an older relative trying to get her to sign something when she was younger. Then there’s the story about her neighbour. There’s money in that story too—money and a future another family had to leave behind, which this Jewish family will now inherit. It’s harrowing, the implications.

These flippant asides about her trauma were so casually deployed, as you say, sandwiched between paragraphs on what she is wearing. “My resting face was terrible, that had always been the case, my childhood was too difficult.” Which is where I wonder if the obsession with performance—how things look—becomes a sort of survival mechanism. Like Anora (which yes, I’d recommend watching), The Coin also has that obsession with performance, the transactional nature of sex.

I recently read Entitlement by Rumaan Alam. The main character is a Black woman, and she is just really awful—pretty nasty, selfish, and deluded. I loved it. The protagonist in that book wasn't traumatized; she was quite privileged but also obsessed with appearance. She was cold, calculating, and transactional with sex. Interestingly, she also wanted to help a school for Black children, though with dubious motivations.

Yeah you loved that book, didn’t you. I didn’t think it was terribly good.

I loved it because I very much enjoy nastiness in my main characters. I see it as a challenge to our immediate reaction to sympathy that forces us to explore what we mean by power. Who deserves our sympathy? Does our empathy for refugees only apply to the extent that they are “good”? Are we good?

You writing that makes me reconsider a line I found facile, reading The Coin, and now I wonder if it is deliberately facile—that the narrator is reminding the reader that those political ideas of who is good and who is bad are insane. This is the line: “Is it really true that the poor are good and the rich are evil”?

Oh wow, I didn’t even remember that quote, but I think it proves my point. There’s this temptation to say, Oh, she’s only acting like this because she’s traumatized. Well, maybe, probably, but maybe she’s also kind of nasty. A traumatized woman who would have been nasty anyway. I find that far more compelling.

That’s a good point about her lack of emotion: are we falling into a trap assuming that it’s because of her traumatic childhood. So—at the risk of falling into this very trap!—do you think she really is a cold queen, or is part of her deliberately denying herself care? She values the man who won’t be intimate with her and steals from her, over the one who loves her and provides for her. What do you make of that perversity? It is because she values performance above everything? (And this man with who she enters the Birkin scheme with, Trenchcoat, is the ultimate performer—she doesn’t even know his name!) Or is it just that cannot allow herself to receive genuine care? That anything below the glossy surface level feels more dangerous?

Looking at the glimpses of her past she shares, it seems like her life doesn’t appear to be shaped by care. She is an heiress without protection—an heiress, yet also part of an oppressed people. That’s a striking juxtaposition. She doesn’t seem to have found a way to reconcile these contradictions. In many of her interpersonal relationships, she doesn’t appear powerless. But when she holds power over others—because they care for her—she reacts poorly. As you pointed out, with the people she allows into her life, like Trenchcoat and her students, there’s always a veneer of pretense. Her interactions with them feel almost like make-believe, with clearly defined power dynamics.

Yes! You put that so well. I was also really interested by the narcissism—again, very Moshfegh—in The Coin. There’s also some good satirical commentary on the beauty industry, the pressures on women: “Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face”. And—perhaps strangely—I love this quote. “I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire”

She empties her bowels so much! It's hilarious.

It’s so scatalogical. I think it’s important, because it’s part of the performance of emptying herself, of keeping things surface-level, of maintaining this idea of a vacant vessel to be admired.

Can we talk about the character, Curls? I don’t know how to read her, except that she’s the only other Palestinian in the book’s present timeline, in America. I assume their interaction is meant to be a proxy for something, but I’m not sure what.

I wonder if it’s again, her challenging the reader? Like, Oh you expect me to become trauma buddies with this woman?

Yes, my mind was going there as well. It completely flips the whole trauma-bonding playbook on its head, and that I can relate to. Some people do not like seeing their own struggles embodied in another, especially when that person carries it in a way they don’t approve of.

You know what I found intriguing? Is that the book’s official synopsis, the Birkin scam—whereby her and this homeless man, Trenchcoat, buy Birkins and re-sell them for a higher price—and the coin of the title, are the less interesting themes of the book.

I agree, I was less interested in the Birkin storyline. And the coin! Pandora, I’m sure it symbolized something important, but whatever it was went right over my head.

I’m guessing it symbolised her obsession with money, that the wealth was inside her? Perhaps the reason she half-heartedly enters the Birkin scam? On the Birkins, I didn’t realise that Hermes makes its customers spend a ton of money in their stores (up to $50,000!) before they are even allowed to buy a Birkin. A kind of bag dowry! Spending money to be able to spend money, is…. delightfully mad. I came across this news story of last year, about two Californian women suing Hermes for ‘unlawful tying’. The funniest part is that no-one else wanted to join their lawsuit, even if they’d spend a gazillion pounds on unlawful tying, because they didn’t want to get blacklisted by Hermes and miss out on that all important Birky!

And this morning, I saw an article about how Hermès sales were up 18% in the last quarter, despite the overall downturn in the luxury industry. What was that amazing quote she had? “Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases.”

Yes! Fascinating. Not even that nice a bag imho. Question for you: if they are so hard to buy, if Hermes is so snooty about who someone is, why do the Kardashians have so many?

Oh, they probably use “agents” to make the purchases, so the accounts are under different names, but it all funnels back to them. Now, about the money—help me out here because I could never quite figure it out. We know she’s rich rich, and that her brother doles out her inheritance in monthly checks. But I could never gauge how large those checks were. Is she broke broke? Or just heiress broke?

I don’t think she’s broke. She buys super expensive clothes, doesn’t she? Prada, Loewe, etc. Although… Maybe it’s all a front. She mentions that she could have taught in Palestine but didn’t because she likes wearing high heels to teach and she couldn’t wear heels on a dirty floor (!) Perhaps her reasons for leaving were financial.

It’s not 100% clear how or why she came here. Her teaching is so interesting—the care she shows her students is the only real empathy we see from her throughout the book. It could be that she took the job because money isn’t an issue for her and it was the easiest option. I believe she had some connection that helped her land the role.

I don’t get why she is a teacher either, but I also agree that she seems like a good one. A little too involved. So let’s come back to where we started, about whether or not we enjoyed it… As a reader, I just never felt like I was “in” it. Even when the book is compelling, or devastating—when she really starts to unravel - I still felt distant from it. Perhaps that’s intentional. But I find that when I read like that, it makes it harder for me to care. I was reading it at the same time as I was reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s new short story collection, and I was so in those stories, compared to The Coin. How did you feel reading the book?

I didn’t find this book fun to read, but I’m also just over these manic stream-of-consciousness narratives, to be honest. I read too many similar books last year and got lost in the sauce. But that coldness you describe—I feel it was important to this narrative and to the character. It’s who she is, so of course that’s how she tells this story. Also, remember that the whole book is framed as a recount of her time in America, presumably short-lived. She comes from a long line of women who have come to America and then returned home.

I actually didn’t even think about her time being here as temporary. Let’s not give away what happens at the end….

I'm going to read it again—slower this time. I'm sure there's a lot I missed; it's that kind of book.

I won’t be re-reading. But I’m not sorry you chose it. I suspect we’ve read it exactly as the author intended: moved, compelled, irritated, baffled, impressed! Thanks Ochuko, it’s been fun.

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For anyone who wants to get a jump on next month’s edition of 2 Girls 1 Book, we will be talking about Dream Count, the much hyped new novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.