Kiki O’Keeffe Paid Me To Write A Profile About Her
By Matt Levy
At the end of every interview, I ask my subject, “Anything you want the reader to know about you that I didn’t ask?” There’s usually a pause, a thoughtful glance into the distance and a quizzical expression on their mug. What else could they possibly say that they hadn’t already spilled? They’ve bared their soul for hours, and now I want something more?
Well, the astrologer, humorist and wit Kiki O’Keeffe looked me straight in the face and said, “Tell them my boobs are perfect. Thank you for not asking that.” She took a sip of her oat matcha and smiled like she was satisfied with herself.
There was no next question. Just all the ones that had come before.
There was no oat matcha either, although she told me later, as we edited this together, that that’s what she likes to drink. This interview happened virtually, but it felt as alive as any conversation I’ve ever had in person.
Nothing about Kiki’s answers to my 27.5 questions felt typical. She said she didn’t exactly take the interview seriously, but it wasn’t a joke either.
Instead, she bounced around from question to question revealing snippets of a personality that was more open, raw and generous than one might expect in a typical career-driven vanity piece. She shared more, but in a cryptic way usually reserved for $50 street psychics.
How did she get started doing what she does? She fell in love with performing while singing on her grandmother’s knee as a young girl. That’s how she got started doing anything she does now.
I could have asked her to expand, but no. That would fuss it all up.
Kiki said she was happiest as an infant, because she needed so much, and all her needs were met. As a baby, her mom called her a lemon, as in, something that’s broken or doesn’t work, because baby Kiki would cry if she wasn’t being held at all times. Nothing has changed; she still wants to be held at all times. And she has no desire to grow or evolve.
“If anything,” she said, “I want to be weaker. Completely dependent on my environment. And I want my environment to immediately give me everything I need.” She sighed — I assume — and said, “I think life in a womb sounds perfect, and I’d like to get back to that someday.”
Kiki is not in a womb right now. She’s divorced. She loves her ex-husband very much, and the two of them broke each other’s hearts wide open. Now, all the love she used to give him is bleeding out to her friends, work, lovers, family. She frowned — probably — and said she hates the idea that she has less to give other people because she distributes her love more widely. She likened it to giving blood — usually, she said, she eats a cookie afterward, and her body makes more blood. She said she’ll be fine once she has more cookies.
She said her hobby is “going through phases.” Blazers. Stripes. Alice’s Tea Cup. Oat milk (often in the form of a matcha latte, which I would later find out). Various men. Getting up really early. The book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh.
There are more. There always are. Kiki loves getting fixated on something, loving it intensely, making it her whole personality for a few weeks, then casually moving on as interest wanes. She’s like the moon. Or maybe, she said, she’s more like Mercury, because she’s so mercurial.
So many things make her smile. Raspberries. Small, colorful hummingbirds. Pictures of women she wished she looked like. Justice. When people tell the truth about things that others usually lie about. When people do things and you’re like, is that brave or just foolish? Conversational writing.
She writes now, but only a little bit. Kiki said she hopes to do nothing this quarantine. If she happens to be creative, she said, then let her be nourished directly by its fruits without having to package and sell it for money.
“That’s what jobs are for.”
Kiki’s work has seen the light of day in such venues as the New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture, Cosmopolitan, Man Repeller and others. She also writes an extremely infrequent newsletter on astrology called I don’t believe in astrology.
She confided to me that, actually, she is writing an article right now, and that she will indeed be paid for it. But she can at least enjoy the posture of her principles.
In five years, Kiki said she sees herself a little more silver-haired, a little softer, five years further from the womb. She hopes her teeth and boobs are still good, because, as she said earlier, they are “currently fantastic.” She may even continue to post nude selfies on the internet.
I asked her what made her work unique. “Nothing,” she said. “Everything I do is pure mimicry.” And yet I don’t know anyone who sounds like her.
This is the end. That’s a lot of what she said, and still more that was cut. But if you take away one thing from this piece, remember that Kiki mentioned her boobs twice without prompt.
Follow Kiki’s very good Twitter, her sexy and gently experimental Instagram and her oft-attended but thoughtful Medium, if you appreciate quality.
