In her debut novel Julius Julius, Aurora Stewart de Peña creates an outsized, funhouse mirror of the advertising industry, one she knows intimately. Drawing on her career of over a decade, the novel sweeps us into the fictional sprawl of the world’s oldest and grandest ad agency: the titular Julius Julius. Divided in three parts, a trio of employees in various time periods and roles reveal the agency’s machinery: its peculiarities, injustices, and day to day toil. All the while, blonde, long haired dachshunds scamper through its halls.
The legacy of Julius Julius has been preserved with a fervor bordering on religious fanaticism, where ads that are hundreds of years old are kept under lock and key in underground caves. This is the kind of satirical wink that Stewart de Peña carries through the novel, poking fun—not unkindly—at the self-seriousness of creative labor. Like the labyrinthine halls of Lumon in Severance, the mythic, expansive agency created by Stewart de Peña affords the author a lot of room to play. Julius Julius, as a result, is a singular blend of satire and magical realism inside the most unlikely of vessels: an office workplace novel.
The novel’s scope is by no means insular or reserved for industry insiders; each of us consume advertising every day, whether consciously or not, and in that way the novel also implicates us. With a wry brevity, Stewart de Peña tugs at themes of consumption, vacuous corporate culture, and the politics of a desirable, idealized worker. Julius Julius is a subtle, compact novel that considers the void invented and filled by advertising, and its effect on consumers and creators alike.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Stewart de Peña over Zoom in June, where we got into Mad Men and the significance of the novel’s dogs. A day later, we met in person at the book’s launch, where you could find tiny pies being served, complete with dachshund-shaped crusts.
Elizabeth Polanco: One of the novel’s characters, the Creative Director, says that a person’s creative output is a map of their life. In turn, can you tell me a bit about your experience in advertising, and how it informed or generated Julius Julius?
Aurora Stewart de Peña: Julius Julius is really an expression of my feelings in advertising. Obviously not the events—there weren’t that many ghosts anywhere that I worked. I became aware, sort of midway through my career, that I would continuously bring elements of my own life, and my own emotional state, to the work that I was doing in advertising. And it became interesting, because after a while I was like, is this insightful? Am I understanding the assignment properly, or am I in a specific place in my life, and I need to communicate this to masses of people through the vehicle of like, canned soup or something?
It changed the way I perceived advertising, looking at work and thinking about what the creative team, and the strategists, and the accounts people had gone through. That’s where the impulse of that line comes from.
EP: I’m sure people talk to you about Mad Men all the time, but it makes me think of how whatever Don is going through is reflected in the work. When his personal life is in shambles, it comes through in pitches to clients.
ASDP: That observation the show makes feels really accurate to my experience. Fundamentally, advertising is an industry where you have to access a creative part of yourself, and then the business side of the work demands that you chop off the portion that is personal. But of course, that’s impossible, because it comes from the interior dark forest of the self. At least in my experience. Whenever a creative impulse makes itself known, it’s tied to some personal stuff, always.
So I appreciated that. Maybe we’re both thinking of the episode where Anna dies.
EP: I’m also curious about how you organized the novel and differentiated between the three different character’s voices, and arrived at these short little vignettes or moments or lines.
ASDP: The short answer is that the voices are kind of a monolith, because they’re all speaking on behalf of an agency. Agencies tend to streamline the way that their communications are—an agency has a voice, and so do the people in it. I wanted to represent the three different sets of experience, and maybe three different ages. You have someone who is mid-career, which is where we start the book, someone who is late career, which is the middle, and someone who is at the beginning of their career, at the end. I guess it’s funny, she’s the only one that leaves the agency.
They’re also all in different disciplines, so you have a strategist, a creative director, and an account person. That’s the skeleton crew of an ad agency—the inception of an ad before you get to a production.
The brevity, I think initially, was just an intuitive choice. The vignettes were intuitive, but they also reflect the way that advertising communicates. So I felt like it made a lot of sense.
EP: I found that structure really effective—we would move on to a new character, and I would immediately feel that I understand who this person is. I understand what they’re dissatisfied about, what they’re excited about, what they’re feeling in this agency.
I was also amazed by how elaborate and believable the brand identities and the histories were for these fictional companies, or clients of the agency. What inspirations did you take, or resources did you look for?
ASDP: Honestly, that was just a fun thing to come up with, obviously they have reference points. I do love a historical ad. I do love to read Victorian and turn of the century ad copy because it’s so weird—it’s like a cousin of what we would write today.
In the novel, there’s a campaign for wood, and in real life, I worked on a campaign to raise the minimum wage. That felt like an analogous assignment to the wood campaign, because it’s this fundamental idea you need to communicate. It’s not like you’re selling a granola bar with specific attributes. I worked for a while at an agency that had a lot of government clients, and it was often that you’re not promoting a product, you’re promoting the idea of wood, or water, or something like that.
EP: I also thought a lot about exploitation as a theme of the book—I’m thinking about how extractive these creative industries can be. Using your creativity, your imagination, and not always being rewarded for it. Exploiting people as consumers, preying on certain feelings, emotions. Was that something that you wanted to reflect or satirize?
ASDP: Absolutely. I try to get at it in so many ways, and the success of that exploitation is a bit mysterious to me. I think, particularly in creative industries, about how vulnerable and hopeful the creative part of ourselves is, and how that impulse is used in this fairly neutral tool to benefit a lot of systems that do a lot of harm.
It was on my mind all the time, I think it’s on the mind of a lot of people who work in advertising. The Senior Brand Anthropologist in the first chapter is an advertiser, but also a voracious consumer—she’s constantly decorating her house and buying homeware, which is reflective of something that I do, trying to get to the bottom of this creative part of ourselves that we harness to damage ourselves, and to extract resources from the earth, and our well-being.
EP: At their core, there’s nothing wrong with things like fashion or home goods or beauty—they’re wonderful means of expression, they are joyful and there is a creative drive behind them. But when they become so inextricably linked with capitalism—having the new object, consuming, not caring about the impact of these products on our lives—you can no longer divorce one thing from the other.
ASDP: Fashion is emblematic of that, because it does the thing that all advertising attempts to do: it creates this enticing world for you to step into: You’re working from home, you see this beautiful editorial of women on an Italian beach, living these lives where you imagine that they are actually free from the impulse you are following. And then the clothing arrives, and you open it, and you’re in your apartment in Toronto, and you’re like, “I’m going to wear this once to the convenience store, and then it becomes part of a pile.”
All of these piles on piles that we create with these objects, everything that is advertised to us, lose their gloss as soon as they step into our lives. It’s interesting, but it’s not interesting. It’s horrendous. I was thinking a lot about the hillside singing Coke commercial. I have loved that since I was a kid. I remember seeing some version of that as a child, and thinking, “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.”
The impulse and culture that it grows out of gets divorced from its context and put into the context of Coke, which is engaged in all kinds of dealings. I think the agency was McCann, and at the time, McCann had young creatives, who were probably going to protests, listening to the Mamas and the Papas—so they recreate this feeling and attach it to this entity. It has worked for decades. It is quite something.
EP: One thing I noted down was how these characters have such a vivid, emotional attachment to a product or a brand or a feeling, and everyone has something like that. We remember seeing something on TV that we wanted, some object that was so enticing for so many different reasons. It represented something to us.
There’s this viral tweet where someone’s like, “Is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this TV show my friend? Is this pop star a feminist hero?” It’s these identities and emotions that we put onto brands, and obviously it’s very beneficial for them. They get to reap the rewards of us feeling warmth and attachment towards them. It’s really interesting to see that represented in the characters who work in the agency, because they understand the impact that advertising can have on a person.
ASDP: It is inescapable. If you are ever on YouTube and you see a collection of kids’ commercials from the 90s, it is intoxicating. It taps into these innocent desire centers where you’re like, “Oh my God, if I don’t get this pony or this Barbie or this game, my life will be bleak.” It sort of fills this world in you, and it continues to work like that. As adults, we think we have so much more barrier protection—look, a beauty term—against those mechanisms, but I don’t know that we do. To your point earlier, the global fast fashion crisis is really evidence of that.
EP: Another thing I thought about a lot while reading the book was Severance. And Mickey 17 a bit too, popular media where cultivating or adhering to a very specific kind of persona or identity at work is rewarded, through a promotion, being well-liked, getting the exciting assignments. The novel really adds something to that satirical, dystopian perspective on what makes a desirable worker.
ASDP: Thank you so much for mentioning Mickey 17. I saw that a couple of months ago, and I thought about it for so long afterwards. Severance too, I actually hadn’t seen it until the book was all done and dusted. Then I watched it and was like, “Well, that’s what I was trying to do, that’s what I was going for.”
We were talking about this a bit before; in advertising, you have to access this very emotional part of yourself, and you also have to be the highest performer ever. You have to give so much, be so productive, have so much output, be so collaborative, but yet you’re asked to access the feelings that will help you make this emotionally impactful work.
I’m not comparing these two disciplines at all, but when I have worked in theatre as a playwright, I’m allowed to have emotions. I’m allowed to have a day. I can’t be abusive to the people around me, but I’m allowed to have my full spectrum of humanity.
EP: The setting of the agency is almost surreal—there are ghosts and caves and little wiener dogs roaming around. When you started writing, did you know that you wanted to build this expansive world, or did you start off a bit more limited?
ASDP: It revealed itself to me as it went along. You might not be surprised to learn that I often don’t start out with a very clear idea. I write, and these things make themselves evident. The easy answer is that they are reflections of an extremity and intensity of feeling, a reflection of the absurdity of experience. But that is the device of absurdism. Of course that’s what it is.
I was just thinking about these agencies that are over a hundred years old. You have these places that represent brands with mythologies, so it felt useful to blow those mythologies up into something that was as big as they feel.
EP: Like they’re mythic.
ASDP: Yeah. The ghosts felt like they needed to be there, because when you are working in these places, you’re often dealing with a lot of memory, a lot of history, a lot of work that came before you.
EP: Does being a playwright bleed into your work? Is that something that helps you, in writing prose? What’s the overlap there?
ASDP: You know, it’s a really different, different experience. When you’re writing a play, you’re often in conversation with a theater, you have collaborators. This was a lot of time alone. But I do think the freedom I felt in writing the novel was, oh my gosh, I can go anywhere, I can do anything. Sometimes the constraints of a play are really wonderful and useful, it’s nice to have a framework to work within, but the expansiveness of the novel…there’s so much that got cut. It was interesting to have no limit on what I can do. Some of these people don’t even have to be real. Some of the characters are dogs. You can’t do that in a play.
EP: That’s actually my last question—why, specifically, blonde wiener dogs? Is there a little sentimentality there for you, or are they just a dog you like?
ASDP: Those dogs are based on a real dog. First of all, agencies have dogs. Some agencies will recruit you as an employee by telling you that they have a great dog culture. You go to work and there will be a lot of dogs running around. This is true.
I worked at an agency called Taxi, which otherwise doesn’t make it into the novel because I had a fairly nice, boring, unproblematic time there. But there was this beautiful, silky haired little dachshund called Dougie that was everybody’s favourite dog. Dougie would bound around the agency, all low to the ground, ears flying, with a big, dog smile on her face. I just really fell in love with her. She would occasionally go under my desk and I’d feel this little breath on my ankles. Anyway, there are dogs in most agencies, and Dougie made the cut.