People lost their political orientation, and none of that made sense. Throughout his life, Klein had analyzed dominant power as oligarchic: ruthless, determined, liberated from above. She was used to connecting dots, to mapping cause and effect in the capitalist system – from Hurricane Katrina to the growing charter schools; September 11 to the “homeland security industry.” But it became increasingly difficult for her to map what she saw, let alone map it to the old left-right axis. Here was a grassroots movement that demanded not egalitarianism but nativism; not solidarity, but division. Klein was trapped in a hall of mirrors, trying to find a way out.
Before you write about it her doppelgänger, Klein felt trapped. “For me, it’s very hard to separate writer’s block from depression,” she told me, recalling the “sense of futility” she felt as the pandemic continued. “I think my crash happened in the early months of the Biden administration and realized there was going to be an effort to get back to the same old, same old.” Social media also seemed to be getting more and more toxic. Her friend V, the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler, recommended that Klein talk to fiction writer Harriet Clark, who also teaches creative writing. Klein told her what she was going through: “I filled notebooks, you know, everywhere I went. Now I just don’t feel surprised.”
Clark prescribed lectures, such as “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion, to encourage Klein to consider new ways of writing and noticing. At the time, Klein was arranging a move from New Jersey, where she had taught at Rutgers University, to British Columbia, where she had resided since the early days of the pandemic and where her parents and brother live. Covid was still raging and all planning had to be done remotely. As an exercise, she wrote a personal essay about choosing what to keep and what to leave behind. Klein, who is 53, laughed as she remembered the artifacts from her past life. “Who was that person who had so many high heels and tights? Like pantyhose?” she joked. The germ of the book was already there, she realized now, even though she hadn’t recognized it then. “It was about how many selves we have in our lives, and how changeable it is.”
Compared to the determination of her earlier work, Klein has brought out some of these “selves” in ‘Doppelganger’. Much of the book is funny and playful, laced with references to fiction and movies, including an extensive (and attentive) reading of the novel “Operation Shylock,” in which Philip Roth encounters a double who calls himself Philip Roth. An unintentional comedy emerges from Wolf’s baffling tweets about “nanoparticle vaccines that allow you to travel back in time” and the need to protect “general sewers/waterways” from “the urine/faeces of vaccinated people.”
And then there’s the absurdity of the mix between Klein and Wolf. Yes, the two women are Jewish; both have brown-blonde hair; both have written books of big ideas; both have spoken candidly about the abuse of political power in times of crisis. But their body of work is distinctive, and the association between them became increasingly troubling to Klein when Wolf began tweeting “pulpy theories” about 5G, about strange clouds. The confusion was widespread enough to be remembered a viral poem:
if the Naomi is Klein
you’re fine
If the Naomi is Wolf
Oh friend. Oooooof.
As much as Klein flinched at what Wolf said, she also felt the pang of recognition. Klein recalls the eerie spectacle of seeing a systems-level version of her thesis in “The Shock Doctrine” — that elites will take advantage of a crisis to impose their will — twisted by the likes of Wolf, who has described Covid as “ a common problem’. -hyped medical crisis” that “has assumed the role of being used as a pretext to rob us all of our fundamental freedoms.” Klein became both obsessed and repulsed, fascinated and horrified: “I felt like she’d taken my ideas, put them in a crazy blender, and then shared the mash with Tucker Carlson, who nodded vigorously.” She always knew when Other Naomi had said something truly mind-boggling, because her—Klein’s—Twitter mentions would fill up. (In an email, Wolf declined to comment on “Doppelganger,” explaining she hadn’t read the book yet, but said some of her tweets were “poorly worded and deleted.”)